Pierre and Jean - Guy de Maupassant (top ten ebook reader .txt) 📗

How time flies! He was a good-looking man, too, in those days, and with such a pleasant manner⁠—was not he, Louise?”

As his wife made no answer he went on:

“And what an even temper! I never saw him put out. And now it is all at an end⁠—nothing left of him⁠—but what he bequeathed to Jean. Well, at any rate you may take your oath that that man was a good and faithful friend to the last. Even on his deathbed he did not forget us.”

Jean, in his turn, held out his hand for the picture. He gazed at it for a few minutes and then said regretfully:

“I do not recognise it at all. I only remember him with white hair.”

He returned the miniature to his mother. She cast a hasty glance at it, looking away as if she were frightened; then in her usual voice she said:

“It belongs to you now, my little Jean, as you are his heir. We will take it to your new rooms.” And when they went into the drawing-room she placed the picture on the chimney-shelf by the clock, where it had formerly stood.

Roland filled his pipe; Pierre and Jean lighted cigarettes. They commonly smoked them, Pierre while he paced the room, Jean, sunk in a deep armchair, with his legs crossed. Their father always sat astride a chair and spat from afar into the fireplace.

Mme. Roland, on a low seat by a little table on which the lamp stood, embroidered, or knitted, or marked linen.

This evening she was beginning a piece of worsted work, intended for Jean’s lodgings. It was a difficult and complicated pattern, and required all her attention. Still, now and again, her eye, which was counting the stitches, glanced up swiftly and furtively at the little portrait of the dead as it leaned against the clock. And the doctor, who was striding to and fro across the little room in four or five steps, met his mother’s look at each turn.

It was as though they were spying on each other; and acute uneasiness, intolerable to be borne, clutched at Pierre’s heart. He was saying to himself⁠—at once tortured and glad:

“She must be in misery at this moment if she knows that I guess!” And each time he reached the fireplace he stopped for a few seconds to look at Maréchal’s fair hair, and show quite plainly that he was haunted by a fixed idea. So that this little portrait, smaller than an opened palm, was like a living being, malignant and threatening, suddenly brought into this house and this family.

Presently the street-door bell rang. Mme. Roland, always so self-possessed, started violently, betraying to her doctor son the anguish of her nerves. Then she said: “It must be Mme. Rosémilly;” and her eye again anxiously turned to the mantel-shelf.

Pierre understood, or thought he understood, her fears and misery. A woman’s eye is keen, a woman’s wit is nimble, and her instincts suspicious. When this woman who was coming in should see the miniature of a man she did not know, she might perhaps at the first glance discover the likeness between this face and Jean. Then she would know and understand everything.

He was seized with dread, a sudden and horrible dread of this shame being unveiled, and, turning about just as the door opened, he took the little painting and slipped it under the clock without being seen by his father and brother.

When he met his mother’s eyes again they seemed to him altered, dim, and haggard.

“Good evening,” said Mme. Rosémilly. “I have come to ask you for a cup of tea.”

But while they were bustling about her and asking after her health, Pierre made off, the door having been left open.

When his absence was perceived they were all surprised. Jean, annoyed for the young widow, who, he thought, would be hurt, muttered: “What a bear!”

Mme. Roland replied: “You must not be vexed with him; he is not very well today and tired with his excursion to Trouville.”

“Never mind,” said Roland, “that is no reason for taking himself off like a savage.”

Mme. Rosémilly tried to smooth matters by saying: “Not at all, not at all. 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 à l’Anglaise, and my brother has done nothing else for some time past.”

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 mealtimes.

His father having asked him one evening: “Why the deuce do you always come 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, everyone seems unhappy. It is as though some accident had befallen us, as if we were in mourning for someone.”

“I am in mourning for someone,” said Pierre.

“You are? For whom?”

“For someone 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