XIV
Jean’s bed had been moved down to one of the ground floor rooms that looked on to the garden; when he had difficulty in breathing they pushed it out upon the veranda, and he could watch the wind swaying green branches against a blue sky. An ice machine stood near by, for almost the only thing he could swallow except cold milk was a little faintly flavoured water-ice. M. Jêrome came to see him, but stood smiling at a safe distance. Jean would no doubt have preferred to hide his sufferings in the bedroom upstairs, but he had chosen to die in the garden so that Noémi might run the smallest possible risk of contagion. Injections of morphine made him drowsy. Rest! Rest after those hideous afternoons spent at the bedside of Robert Pieuchon, in agonies of despair at having to abandon his life: lurid evenings at Bordeaux; dancing to the music of barrel-organs in little suburban cafés; cycle rides in the country, with dusty legs and delicious fatigue afterwards; and best of all: amorous adventures with young women.
The Cazenaves were spreading the gossip that M. Jêrome’s stinginess was depriving Jean of the benefit of a milder climate and a higher altitude. But Jean was the sort of person who preferred to die at home, and Doctor Pieuchon professed that there was no climate for consumptives like the forests of Les Landes. He hung the walls of the sick room with young pines as though for Corpus Christi day, and placed jars overflowing with resin by the bed. When he could think of nothing more to do, he called in his young colleague, certain that Jean was now incapable of taking iodine in heavy doses. Noémi’s indifference when she received the handsome youth was not complete enough to prevent her from noticing that he paled slightly when their eyes met and their hands touched. After each visit the pleasant realization came to her that nothing in the world mattered but her husband lying there in the bed. Possibly, well hidden at the back of her mind, there was the feeling that she had this young male securely caught, and her calmness may have been due to the knowledge that she would one day land him, alive and quivering.
Jean had forbidden Noémi to kiss him, but he gratefully accepted the coolness of her hand upon his forehead. He must have thought that she loved him, for he murmured: “I bless Thee forever, O God, for giving me a woman’s love before I die.” And, as in the days of his solitary wanderings, he turned the same line over and over again in his mind. Noémi was counting his pulse, and, tired of his rosary, he repeated Pauline’s cry in a low voice: Mon Polyeucte touche à son heure dernière. Then he smiled. He did not consider himself a martyr: people had always called him: “Poor fellow,” and he had believed they were right. Backward glances over the grey waters of his life had always fed his self-contempt. What stagnation! But now, under the leaden surface, there was a secret welling up of vividly clear water, and for him who had known little more of life than a corpse the gates of death would open upon a new existence.
One evening Noémi found Doctor Pieuchon and the priest talking in the hall, and she asked bitterly of them the reasons for their silence: why hadn’t they told her of Jean’s daily visits at the bedside of the consumptive? The doctor bowed his head, pleading ignorance of Jean’s condition. He was a man of unbounded kindness himself; why should he have been surprised at devotion like his own in another, and devotion to his own son? The priest defended himself more vigorously: Jean had insisted upon silence, and the rôle of spiritual director necessitated scrupulous discretion. “But it was you, Father, who were determined upon that fatal journey to Paris.” “Was it I alone, Noémi?” She leaned against the wall, digging with one of her fingers at a little hole in the marbled plaster. Jean’s coughing sounded through the bedroom door, and Cadette’s dragging footsteps could be heard in the kitchen. The priest spoke again: “I prayed for guidance, Noémi; we must praise the ways of God.” He put on his coat and departed, his mind full of conflicting emotions; in hours of sleeplessness he wept over Jean Péloueyre. To no purpose did he repeat to himself that Jean had made his will in favour of Noémi, and that it was M. Jêrome’s intention, after his son’s death, to give the house and as much as possible of his property to his daughter-in-law—providing she did not re-marry. The priest, though perhaps too apt to interfere in the lives of others, was a conscientious man, and he questioned himself searchingly. He had never thought that the marriage could be anything but happy—and, sub specie aeterni, could anyone help wondering at the success of it? What profit was there for him in the affair? He was a good shepherd whose one concern was the welfare of his flock. Whenever he indulged in self-judgement he invariably absolved himself, but his absolution was never final. The dread of losing the power to discriminate between justice and injustice was ever with him, and hesitation preceded all his actions. As his humility increased, he pontificated less; he no longer let fall the train of his cassock, and he gave up wearing the three-cornered hat that distinguished him from his brother priests. He gradually freed himself from all his pettiness, and was quite indifferent when the news came that, though he was not a senior priest, the bishop had granted him the right to wear a hooded cloak over his surplice. How could he have cared for these trifles, he, a keeper of souls? The only thing for him to do now was to extricate himself from this drama. Had he been the humble instrument of God, or had a poor country priest been trying to take his Creator’s place?
Meanwhile, every evening, the young doctor drove away in his gig over the frozen roads. The moonlight flooded through the interlacing branches of the pines and their dark round tops hovered in the sky like an immovable flock of huge birds. On several occasions the shadowy form of a wild boar crossed the road a few hundred paces ahead of the house. The line of pines widened suddenly and skirted a meadow hidden by low-hanging mist; then the road sank between two high banks and one felt the icy breath of a stream. Wrapped in his goat-skin coat, and enveloped in a thick cloud of mist and tobacco smoke, the young man did not know that the stars were shining above the tree-tops. He was thinking of his kitchen fire at which he would soon be drying himself, and the soup that he would pour some wine into; and when his thoughts wandered from food and warmth they clung about the figure of Noémi, so close to his hand every day, but scarcely ever touched by him. “Still,” the sportsman said to himself, “I haven’t missed her; she’s winged.” He knew instinctively when the feminine quarry had been run down and was imploring mercy; it was as though Noémi had cried out. Many women had been his, and they were the wives of men, not of poor broken things like Jean Péloueyre. Caught and more defenceless than any of these, would Noémi prove after all the only one not to give in? Naturally, during her husband’s illness, common decency was keeping her straight, but, before that, what had prevented him from entirely fascinating his prey? What stronger influence had kept her just out of his reach? Another love, perhaps? He did not believe she was very devout; he imagined he knew that sort when he saw it, for he had already measured his strength with the priest’s over the conquest of a sheep from the fold. Pious women enjoyed the game, allowed themselves to be kissed, fluttered close to the flame, even singed their wings; but at the last moment they slipped through one’s fingers, back to the confessional as though drawn by an invisible wire. He laid his plans for the day of Jean Péloueyre’s death, saying to himself, “I’ll get her,” and he laughed, for he had the patience of the sportsmen of Les Landes who lie in wait for their prey.
About that time, the pious people of the town who went to church in the middle of the day, and believed themselves to be alone there, were startled by the sound of sighing that came from the choir. The priest spent almost all his spare moments there before his Judge. In no other place could he find peace; not the peace that is afforded by the stillness of country churches, thick with shadows, like caves under the sea, but the peace that the world cannot give. He understood that the wretched little Jean, who had scarcely been able to polish the crystals of the chandeliers before high festivals or to gather moss for the ladies to make into garlands, that poor hunter of magpies, was a vastly different person from the man who was now offering his life for the salvation of others. The priest was overwhelmed in the presence of Him who possessed the power to make slaves equal unto Himself.