LITMIR.BIZ

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in need of caresses. When she raised her eyes towards him, she looked at him with tender humility, and with tearful smiles. She was becoming docile and coquettish; she appeared to be seeking for the young man’s love like a poor shy woman. Fatigue, the deliciousness of the shade, the awakening of the youthful feeling, the wild place she was passing through, all imparted to her being an emotion of love — one of those languors of the senses which make the proudest woman fall into the arms of a man.

      William and Madeleine were slowly ascending. At times the young woman’s foot slipped, on a stone and she checked herself by clinging to her companion’s arm. This clinging was a caress; neither of them attempted to disguise it. They had ceased to talk, they were satisfied with exchanging smiles. This language was sufficient to give expression to the only feeling which was filling their hearts. Madeleine’s face was charming under the sunshade; it had a tender paleness with shadows of silvery grey; round the mouth played rosy gleams, and at’ the corner of the lips, on William’s side, there was a little network of bluish veins of such delicacy, that he felt one of those wild longings to imprint a kiss on this very spot. He was shy, and hesitated till they were at the top of the steep. Here, as they came suddenly on the plain extended before them, it seemed to the young couple that they were no longer concealed. Although the country was deserted, they were afraid of this broad expanse. They separated, uncomfortable, embarrassed again.

      The road follows the edge of the high ground. To the left are strawberry-patches, and immense open fields of com planted with a few scattered trees and losing themselves at the horizon. In the distance the Verrières wood traces a black line, which seems to border the sky with a mourning band.

      To the right are slopes, displaying to view several miles of country; first come dark and brown tracts of land, and enormous masses of foliage; then the tints and lines become more indistinct, the landscape is lost to view in a bluish atmosphere, terminated by low hills whose pale violet hue mingles with the soft yellow of the sky.

      It is an immensity, a veritable sea of hills and valleys, relieved here and there by the white reflection of a house and the sombre ray of a cluster of poplars.

      Madeleine stopped, serious and thoughtful, before this immensity. Warm gusts of air were blowing, a storm was slowly rising from the bottom of the valley. The sun had just disappeared behind a thick mass of vapour, and heavy clouds of coppery grey were gathering from every point of the horizon. She had again assumed her stem, taciturn expression: she seemed to have forgotten her companion, and was looking at the country with curious attention, as though it was an old acquaintance. Then she fixed her eyes on the dark clouds and seemed to indulge in painful recollections.

      William, who stood a few paces off, watched her uneasily. He felt that a gulf was increasing every moment between them. What could she be thinking of like that? he could not bear the idea of not being all-in-all to this woman. He kept saying to himself, with secret terror, that she had lived twenty years without him. These twenty years seemed to him a terrible blank.

      Certainly, she knew the country, perhaps she had been here before with a lover. William was dying with the wish to question her, but he did not dare to do so openly he dreaded getting an answer which might blight his love. He could not, however, resist saying hesitatingly:

      “You used to come here sometimes then, Madeleine?”

      “Yes,” she replied shortly, “often — Let us hurry on, it might rain.”

      They started again, at a short distance from one another, both absorbed in their own thoughts. In this way they came to the open road. Here, on the edge of the wood, is the inn to which Madeleine led her companion. It is an ugly square building, all cracked and blackened by the rain; at the back, on the side of the wood, a kind of yard planted with stunted trees is enclosed hay a quickset hedge. Against this hedge lean five or six arbours covered with hop-plants. They are the private rooms belonging to the inn: tables and benches of rough wood are placed along them fixed in the ground: the bottoms of the glasses have left red rings on the table tops.

      The landlady, a big, coarse woman, uttered a cry of surprise as she saw Madeleine.

      “Well! really!” she exclaimed, “I thought you were dead: I’ve not seen you for more than three months — And how are you — “

      Just then she perceived William and refrained from putting another question which she had on her lips. She even seemed taken aback by the presence of this young man whom she did not know. The latter saw her astonishment and said to himself that she was doubtless expecting to see another face.

      “Well, well,” she went on, adopting a less familiar tone, “you want some dinner, don’t you? You shall have a table laid in one of the arbours.”

      Madeleine bad received the landlady’s marks of friendship very calmly. She took off her shawl and bonnet and went to put them in a room on the ground floor, which was let at night to belated Parisians. She seemed quite at home.

      William had gone into the yard. He walked up and down, not knowing quite what to do with himself. Nobody paid any attention to him, while the scullerymaid and the dog even were giving a warm welcome to Madeleine.

      When she came back, she was smiling again. She stopped for a second on the threshold; her hair, free and uncovered, shone in the last rays of sunlight, giving a marble whiteness to her skin: her chest and shoulders, no longer covered with her shawl, had a powerful breadth and exquisite suppleness. The young man cast a look, full of uneasy admiration, on this lovely creature vibrating with life. Another had doubtless seen her thus, smiling on the threshold of this door. In the distress which this thought caused him, he felt a violent wish to take Madeleine in his arms, to press her to his bosom that she might forget this house, this yard, and these arbours, and think only of him.

      “Let us have dinner, quick!” she exclaimed joyously. Now then, Marie, gather a big dish of strawberries — I’m hungry.”

      She was forgetting William. She looked into every arbour, trying to find the one where the cloth was laid. At last she found it.

      “I declare, I won’t sit on that seat,” she said, “I remember it is full of big nails which tore my dress. Set the table here, Marie.”

      She placed herself in front of the white cloth, on which the servant had not yet had time to put the plates. Then she bethought herself of William, and saw him standing a few paces off.

      “Well,” said she to him, “are you not coming to sit down? You stand there like a taper.”

      Then she burst out laughing. The storm which was coming on made her feel nervously gay. Her gestures were without animation, her words short. The gloomy weather, on the contrary, filled William with dejection; he dropped on to his chair with listless limbs and answered only in monosyllables. The dinner lasted for more than an hour. The young couple were alone in the yard: for, during the week, the country inns are generally empty. Madeleine talked the whole time: she talked about her younger days, about her stay in a Ternes boarding-school, relating with A thousand details the silly tricks of the governesses and the pranks of the scholars: on this subject she was inexhaustible, continually finding among her recollections some good story which made her laugh before she began. She told all this with childish smiles, and in a young girl’s tone of voice. Several times, William tried to bring her to a less remote subject; like those wretches who are suffering and who are always itching to put their hands to their wound, he would have liked to hear her speak of her immediate past, of her grown-up life: he skilfully changed the conversation so as to get her to tell how she had come to tear her dress in one of these arbours. But Madeleine eluded his questions, and rushed off, with a sort of infatuation, into the naive stories of her early days. This seemed to soothe her, to relieve her high-strung feelings, and to make her accept more naturally her tête-à-tête with a young fellow whom she had scarcely known a week. When William looked at her with a gaze full of longing desire, when he put out his hand to stroke hers, she would take a strange pleasure in keeping her eyes raised and beginning a tale with: “I was five years old then — “

      Towards the end of dinner, as they were at dessert, big drops of rain wet the cloth. The day had suddenly come to a close. The thunder was rumbling in the distance

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