Part III
I
What inexpressible happiness it is to be married! To be always near the beloved one, safe from the prying eyes of the fatuous world. It is as if one had regained the home of one’s childhood with its sheltering love, a safe port after the storm, a nest which awaits the little ones.
Surrounded by nothing but objects which belonged to her, mementoes and relics of her parents’ house, I felt as if I were a shoot grafted on her trunk; the oil paintings of her ancestors deluded me into thinking that I had been adopted by her family, because her ancestors will also be the ancestors of my children. I received everything from her hand; she made me wear her father’s watch and chain; my dinner was served on her mother’s china; she poured on me a continuous stream of trifling presents, relics of old times, which had belonged to famous warriors celebrated by the poets of her country, a fact which impressed me not a little. She was the benefactress, the generous giver of all these gifts, and I entirely forgot that it was I who had reclaimed her, lifted her out of the mire, made her the wife of a man with brilliant prospects; forgot that she had been an unknown actress, a divorced wife condemned by her sisters, a woman whom very probably I had saved from the worst.
What a happy life we led! We realised the dream of freedom in marriage. No double-bed, no common bed-room, room, no common dressing-room; nothing unseemly degraded the sanctity of our union. Marriage as we understood and realised it was a splendid institution. The tender good-nights, repeated again and again; the joy of wishing each other good-morning, of asking how we had slept, were they not due to the fact that we occupied separate rooms? How delightful were the stolen visits to each other, the courtesy and tenderness which we never forgot! How different compared with the brazen boldness, the more or less graciously endured brutalities which are as a rule inseparable from matrimony.
I got through an amazing amount of work, staying at home by the side of my beloved wife who was sewing tiny garments for the expected baby. What a lot of time I had wasted in rendezvous and idleness in the days gone by!
After a month of the closest companionship Marie was laid up with a premature confinement. We had a tiny daughter, hardly able to draw breath. Without a moment’s delay the baby was taken charge of by a nurse whom we knew to be a decent woman, and two days later it passed away as it had come, without pain, from sheer want of vitality, just after it had received private baptism.
The mother received the news with regret, but it was regret not unmingled with relief. A burden of infinite cares and worries had fallen off her shoulders, for well she knew that social prejudice would not have permitted her to keep the prematurely-born infant under our own roof.
After this incident we firmly made up our minds to one thing: No more children! We dreamed of a life together, a life of perfect comradeship, of a man and a woman, loving and supplementing each other, but living their own lives, restlessly straining every nerve to realise their individual ambitions.
Now that every obstacle had been removed, every threatening danger overcome, we began to breathe freely and reconsider our position. I was ostracised by my relations, no meddlesome member of my family threatened the peace of our home, and since the only relative of my wife’s who lived on the spot was her aunt, we were spared the frequent calls and visits which so often give rise to serious troubles and trials in a young ménage.