LITMIR.BIZ

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an adder, from the further end of this grotto with its walls covered with climbing plants and oozing with moisture. William and Madeleine would sit here, listening to the drops as they fell one by one in regular cadence from the roof; there was in this sound an endless lullaby, a vague sensation of sleep and eternity which harmonised with their happy love. Gradually, they ceased to talk, overcome by the monotony of the continual music of the drops of water, fancying that they could hear the beating of their hearts, dreaming and smiling, hand in hand.

      Madeleine always brought some fruit. She would forget her musing, and eat her supplies with hearty appetite, giving her lover a bite of her peaches and pears. William was enraptured to see her by him; each day, her beauty seemed more dazzling; he watched, with admiring surprise, the development of health and strength which the fresh air was imparting to her. The country was really making her another woman. She even seemed to have grown. Full of health and vigour and endowed with strong limbs, she had become a powerful woman, with a broad chest and a clear laugh. Her skin, though slightly tanned, had not lost its transparency. Her gold-red hair, carelessly tied up, fell on her neck in a thick glowing coil. Her whole body gave evidence of superb vigour.

      William never grew tired of gazing at this healthy being, whose calm lusty kisses soothed his own feverishness. He felt that a supreme serenity was reigning in her; she had recovered her strength of will, she lived without agitation, obeying the native simplicity of her being; these surroundings of solitude and bright sunshine suited her, under their influence she was unfolding in grace and strength, becoming what she always would have been had her need for esteem and tranquillity been satisfied. During the long hours that they spent at the Spring, the name they had given to their retreat, William would gaze on Madeleine as she lay stretched on the ground, her neck all red with the reflection of her hair; he would trace, beneath her light dress, the firm lines of her limbs, and at times he would raise himself up to take her in his arms in a clasping embrace, with a sudden pride of possession. Still there was nothing of the animal in his love; it was calm and chaste.

      On the days that the lovers did not visit the spring, they would drive out a few miles in a carriage, then leave their conveyance at some inn and tramp the country wherever the roads took them. They only chose the narrowest lanes, those that would lead them to the unknown. When they had walked for hours, between two hedges of apple-trees, without meeting a living soul, they were as happy as marauders who had escaped the eye of the keeper. These broad Norman plains, rich and monotonous, seemed to them the image of their tranquil affection; they never grew tired of the same horizons of meadows and cornfields. They would often ramble in the fields or visit the farms. Madeleine loved domestic animals; a brood of chickens pecking round their mother as she clucked and spread out her wings, would amuse her for a whole afternoon; she would go into cattle-sheds to stroke the cows; the young skipping kids filled her with delight; all the little denizens of a poultry yard held her charmed and filled with a longing desire to have at her own home hens, ducks, pigeons, and geese; and had not William’s smile checked her, she would never have returned to Véteuil without carrying back some little animal or other in her skirts. She had another passion too, a passion for children; when she saw one rolling in a farm yard, on a midden, among the poultry, she would gaze at him in silence, somewhat pensively, with a softened smile; then, as if drawn to him, she would go up and take the little urchin in her arms, regardless of his face all smeared with dirt and jam. She would ask for milk, keeping hold of the child until she was served, making him skip and calling her lover to admire the dear creature’s large eyes. When she had drank her milk, she would withdraw regretfully, turning round and casting a last glance on the child.

      Autumn came. Dark clouds crossed the leaden sky driven on by icy winds; the fields were going to repose. The lovers wished to pay one last visit to the spring. They found their retreat very desolate. A shower of yellow leaves lay strewn on the grass; the walls of verdure were falling down; the amphitheatre, exposed to all beholders, was now only formed by the slender trunks of the trees whose branches stood out in rueful nakedness against the grey sky. The little lake and the spring itself were muddy, troubled by the last storm. William could see that winter was approaching, and that their walks would have to cease. He mused sadly on this death of summer as he looked at Madeleine. The young woman, seated in front of him, full of thought, was breaking the bits of dead branches with which the turf was strewn.

      Since the previous night William had been thinking of proposing to his mistress to marry her. This idea of immediate marriage had occurred to him in a farm, as he had seen Madeleine fondling one of those little darlings that she adored. He had thought that if she should ever become enceinte, he would have a bastard for his son. The memories of his childhood always frightened him at this word bastard.

      Besides, everything was tending without gainsay to marriage. As he used to say in the old days to James, he was fated to love one woman only, the first he met; he was fated to love her with his whole being, and to cling to this love, out of hatred of change, out of terror for the unknown. He had been lulled to rest in Madeleine’s affection: now that he was warm, now that he was comfortable in this affection, he intended to stay there for ever. His inert mind and his gentle nature delighted in thinking. “I have a resting-place where I have taken refuge for life.” Marriage would simply legalise an union which he already looked upon as eternal.

      The thought that he might have a son only made him desirous of hastening an end that he had foreseen. Then, winter was coming, he would be cold, all alone in his big deserted château; he would no longer spend his days in the warm breath of his loved one. During these long cold months, he would have to run in the rain as he went to knock at Madeleine’s door. What a happy warmth, on the contrary, if they lived in the same house! They would spend the days of bad weather in the chimney corner; they would pass their chilly honeymoon in a warm recess, which they would only leave in the following spring, to return to the sunlight. And there was too, in his resolution, the desire to love Madeleine openly, and to confer on her a mark of esteem which should touch her heart. He thought he could foresee that they would suffer no more from their intimacy, that they would no longer hurt each other’s feelings, when there was a binding bond between them.

      Yet at the bottom of the project which William fondly indulged in, there lay a vague feeling of dread which kept him uneasy, and hesitating. During the months of forgetfulness that they had just passed, he had never been a prey to the terrors about the future which the suicide of his father had awakened in him; events no longer crushed him; his love, after so many rebuffs, seemed to him a sovereign repose, a balm for his sufferings and fears. The fact was, he was living in the present, in the hours that glided by, bringing each its pleasure. But since he had begun to think of the future, the unknown in this future filled him with secret uneasiness. Perhaps he was trembling unconsciously on the brink of an eternal engagement with a woman whose history he did not know. Anyhow, he was full of conflicting thoughts, for his hesitations did not assume a definite form, while his heart urged him on to his project.

      He had come to the spring, fully determined to speak. But the trees were so bare, the sky so gloomy, that be did not venture to open his lips, shivering at the first breath of winter. Madeleine was cold too; a kerchief on her neck, her feet well under her skirts, she was continuing to break the bits of dead branches on the turf, unconscious of what she was doing, gazing with a melancholy air at the clouds charged with rain that were silently drifting across the sky. At last, when it was time to return, William told her his project; his voice trembled a little and he seemed to be asking for a favour. Madeleine looked at him with a surprised, almost terrified air. When he had finished she said:

      “Why not stay as we are? I don’t complain, I am happy. We should not be any fonder of each other if we were married. Perhaps that would even spoil our happiness.”

      And as he was opening his lips to insist, she added in a brief tone: “No, indeed. It makes me quite afraid.”

      And she began to laugh, in order to tone down the hardness and strangeness of her words. Even she herself was surprised at having uttered them and with such stress. The truth was that William’s proposal caused her a singular feeling of revolt; it seemed to her that he was asking for something impossible, as if she were not her own mistress and already in the possession of another man. Her voice and gesture had been like that of a married woman requested by a lover to live with him as his wife.

      The

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