The Essential Guy de Maupassant Collection. Guy de Maupassant
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He has gone away in the English fashion; people always disappear in that way in fashionable circles if they want to leave early."
"Oh, in fashionable circles, I dare say," replied Jean. "But a man does not treat his family _a l'Anglaise_, and my brother has done nothing else for some time past."
CHAPTER VI
For a week or two nothing occurred. The father went fishing; Jean, with his mother's help, was furnishing and settling himself; Pierre, very gloomy, never was seen excepting at meal-times.
His father having asked him one evening: "Why the deuce do you always com in with a face as cheerful as a funeral? This is not the first time I have remarked it."
The doctor replied: "The fact is I am terribly conscious of the burden of life."
The old man did not have a notion what he meant, and with an aggrieved look he went on: "It really is too bad. Ever since we had the good luck to come into this legacy, every one seems unhappy. It is as though some accident had befallen us, as if we were in mourning for some one."
"I am in mourning for some one," said Pierre.
"You are? For whom?"
"For some one you never knew, and of whom I was too fond."
Roland imagined that his son alluded to some girl with whom he had had some love passages, and he said:
"A woman, I suppose."
"Yes, a woman."
"Dead?"
"No. Worse. Ruined!"
"Ah!"
Though he was startled by this unexpected confidence, in his wife's presence too, and by his son's strange tone about it, the old man made no further inquiries, for in his opinion such affairs did not concern a third person.
Mme. Roland affected not to hear; she seemed ill and was very pale. Several times already her husband, surprised to see her sit down as if she were dropping into her chair, and to hear her gasp as if she could not draw her breath, had said:
"Really, Louise, you look very ill; you tire yourself too much with helping Jean. Give yourself a little rest. Sacristi! The rascal is in no hurry, as he is a rich man."
She shook her head without a word.
But to-day her pallor was so great that Roland remarked on it again.
"Come, come," said he, "this will not do at all, my dear old woman. You must take care of yourself." Then, addressing his son, "You surely must see that your mother is ill. Have you questioned her, at any rate?"
Pierre replied: "No; I had not noticed that there was anything the matter with her."
At this Roland was angry.
"But it stares you in the face, confound you! What on earth is the good of your being a doctor if you cannot even see that your mother is out of sorts? Why, look at her, just look at her. Really, a man might die under his very eyes and this doctor would never think there was anything the matter!"
Mme. Roland was panting for breath, and so white that her husband exclaimed:
"She is going to faint."
"No, no, it is nothing--I shall get better directly--it is nothing."
Pierre had gone up to her and was looking at her steadily.
"What ails you?" he said. And she repeated in an undertone:
"Nothing, nothing--I assure you, nothing."
Roland had gone to fetch some vinegar; he now returned, and handing the bottle to his son he said:
"Here--do something to ease her. Have you felt her heart?"
As Pierre bent over her to feel her pulse she pulled away her hand so vehemently that she struck it against a chair which was standing by.
"Come," said he in icy tones, "let me see what I can do for you, as you are ill."
Then she raised her arm and held it out to him. Her skin was burning, the blood throbbing in short irregular leaps.
"You are certainly ill," he murmured. "You must take something to quiet you. I will write you a prescription." And as he wrote, stooping over the paper, a low sound of choked sighs, smothered, quick breathing and suppressed sobs made him suddenly look round at her. She was weeping, her hands covering her face.
Roland, quite distracted, asked her:
"Louise, Louise, what is the mater with you? What on earth ails you?"
She did not answer, but seemed racked by some deep and dreadful grief. Her husband tried to take her hands from her face, but she resisted him, repeating:
"No, no, no."
He appealed to his son.
"But what is the matter with her? I never saw her like this."
"It is nothing," said Pierre, "she is a little hysterical."
And he felt as if it were a comfort to him to see her suffering thus, as if this anguish mitigated his resentment and diminished his mother's load of opprobrium. He looked at her as a judge satisfied with his day's work.
Suddenly she rose, rushed to the door with such a swift impulse that it was impossible to forestall or to stop her, and ran off to lock herself into her room.
Roland and the doctor were left face to face.
"Can you make head or tail of it?" said the father.
"Oh, yes," said the other. "It is a little nervous disturbance, not alarming or surprising; such attacks may very likely recur from time to time."
They did in fact recur, almost every day; and Pierre seemed to bring them on with a word, as if he had the clew to her strange and new disorder. He would discern in her face a lucid interval of peace and with the willingness of a torturer would, with a word, revive the anguish that had been lulled for a moment.
But he, too, was suffering as cruelly as she. It was dreadful pain to him that he could no longer love her nor respect her, that he must put her on the rack. When he had laid bare the bleeding wound which he had opened in her woman's, her mother's heart, when he felt how wretched and desperate she was, he would go out alone, wander about the town, so torn by remorse, so broken by pity, so grieved to have thus hammered her with his scorn as her son, that he longed to fling himself into the sea and put an end to it all by drowning himself.
Ah! How gladly now would he have forgiven her. But he could not, for he was incapable of forgetting. If only he could have desisted from making her suffer; but this again he could not, suffering as he did himself. He went home to his meals, full of relenting resolutions; then, as soon as he saw her, as soon as he met her eye--formerly so clear and frank, now so evasive, frightened, and bewildered--he struck at her in spite of himself, unable to suppress the treacherous words which would rise to his lips.
This disgraceful secret, known to them alone, goaded him up against her. It was as a poison flowing in his veins and giving him an impulse to bite like a mad dog.
And there was no one in the way now to hinder his reading her; Jean lived almost entirely in his new apartments, and only came home to dinner and to sleep every night at his father's.
He frequently observed his brother's bitterness and violence, and attributed them to jealousy. He promised himself that some day he would teach him his place and give him a lesson, for life at home was becoming very painful as a result of these constant scenes. But as he now lived apart he suffered less from this brutal conduct, and his love of peace prompted him to patience. His good fortune, too, had turned his head, and he scarcely paused to think of anything which had no direct interest for himself. He would come in full of fresh little anxieties, full of the cut of a morning-coat, of the