Book: Jacqueline, Complete

T >> Th. Bentzon (Mme. Blanc) >> Jacqueline, Complete




"I see! you threaten me with a domiciliary visit without warning. Well!
certainly, if that would give you any amusement. But my house contains
nothing wonderful. I tell you that beforehand."

"One likes to know how one's friends look at home--in their own setting,
and I have only seen you here at work in your atelier."

"The best point of view, believe me. But I am ready to do your bidding.
Do you wish to see where I eat my dinner?" asked Marien, as he took her
down the staircase leading to his dining-room.

Fraulein Schult would have liked to go with them--it was, besides, her
duty. But she had not been asked to fulfil it. She hesitated a moment,
and in that moment Jacqueline had disappeared. After consideration, the
'promeneuse' went on with her crochet, with a shrug of her shoulders
which meant: "She can't come to much harm."

Seated in the studio, she heard the sound of their voices on the floor
below. Jacqueline was lingering in the fencing-room where Marien was in
the habit of counteracting by athletic exercises the effects of a too
sedentary life. She was amusing herself by fingering the dumb-bells and
the foils; she lingered long before some precious suits of armor. Then
she was taken up into a small room, communicating with the atelier, where
there was a fine collection of drawings by the old masters. "My only
luxury," said Marien.

Mademoiselle Schult, getting impatient, began to roll up yards and yards
of crochet, and coughed, by way of a signal, but remembering how
disagreeable it would have been to herself to be interrupted in a
tete-a-tete with her apothecary, she thought it not worth while to
disturb them in these last moments. M. de Nailles's orders had been that
she was to sit in the atelier. So she continued to sit there, doing what
she had been told to do without any qualms of conscience.

When Marien had shown Jacqueline all his drawings he asked her: "Are you
satisfied?"

But Jacqueline's hand was already on the portiere which separated the
little room from Marien's bedchamber.

"Oh! I beg pardon," she exclaimed, pausing on the threshold.

"One would think you would like to see me asleep," said Marien with some
little embarrassment.

"I never should have thought your bedroom would have been so pretty. Why,
it is as elegant as a lady's chamber," said Jacqueline, slipping into it
as she spoke, with an exciting consciousness of doing something she ought
not to do.

"What an insult, when I thought all my tastes were simple and severe," he
replied; but he had not followed her into the chamber, withheld by an
impulse of modesty men sometimes feel, when innocence is led into
audacity through ignorance.

"What lovely flowers you have!" said Jacqueline, from within. "Don't they
make your head ache?"

"I take them out at night."

"I did not know that men liked, as we do, to be surrounded by flowers.
Won't you give me one?"

"All, if you like."

"Oh! one pink will be enough for me."

"Then take it," said Marien; her curiosity alarmed him, and he was
anxious to get her away.

"Would it not be nicer if you gave it me yourself?" she replied, with
reproach in her tones.

"Here is one, Mademoiselle. And now I must tell you that I want to dress.
I have to go out immediately."

She pinned the pink into her bodice so high that she could inhale its
perfume.

"I beg your pardon. Thank you, and good-by," she said, extending her hand
to him with a sigh.

"Au revoir."

"Yes--'au revoir' at home--but that will not be like here."

As she stood there before him there came into her eyes a strange
expression, to which, without exactly knowing why, he replied by pressing
his lips fervently on the little hand he was still holding in his own.

Very often since her infancy he had kissed her before witnesses, but this
time she gave a little cry, and turned as white as the flower whose
petals were touching her cheek.

Marien started back alarmed.

"Good-by," he said in a tone that he endeavored to make careless--but in
vain.

Though she was much agitated herself she failed not to remark his
emotion, and on the threshold of the atelier, she blew a kiss back to him
from the tips of her gloved fingers, without speaking or smiling. Then
she went back to Fraulein Schult, who was still sitting in the place
where she had left her, and said: "Let us go."

The next time Madame de Nailles saw her stepdaughter she was dazzled by a
radiant look in her young face.

"What has happened to you?" she asked, "you look triumphant."

"Yes--I have good reason to triumph," said Jacqueline. "I think that I
have won a victory."

"How so? Over yourself?"

"No, indeed--victories over one's self give us the comfort of a good
conscience, but they do not make us gay--as I am."

"Then tell me--"

"No-no! I can not tell you yet. I must be silent two days more," said
Jacqueline, throwing herself into her mother's arms.

Madame de Nailles asked no more questions, but she looked at her
stepdaughter with an air of great surprise. For some weeks past she had
had no pleasure in looking at Jacqueline. She began to be aware that near
her, at her side, an exquisite butterfly was about for the first time to
spread its wings--wings of a radiant loveliness, which, when they
fluttered in the air, would turn all eyes away from other butterflies,
which had lost some of their freshness during the summer.

A difficult task was before her. How could she keep this too precocious
insect in its chrysalis state? How could she shut it up in its dark
cocoon and retard its transformation?

"Jacqueline," she said, and the tones of her voice were less soft than
those in which she usually addressed her, "it seems to me that you are
wasting your time a great deal. You hardly practise at all; you do almost
nothing at the 'cours'. I don't know what can be distracting your
attention from your lessons, but I have received complaints which should
make a great girl like you ashamed of herself. Do you know what I am
beginning to think?--That Madame de Monredon's system of education has
done better than mine."

"Oh! mamma, you can't be thinking of sending me to a convent!" cried
Jacqueline, in tones of comic despair.

"I did not say that--but I really think it might be good for you to make
a retreat where your cousin Giselle is, instead of plunging into follies
which interrupt your progress."

"Do you call Madame d'Etaples's 'bal blanc' a folly?"

"You certainly will not go to it--that is settled," said the young
stepmother, dryly.




CHAPTER V

SURPRISES

In all other ways Madame de Nailles did her best to assist in the success
of the surprise. On the second of June, the eve of Ste.-Clotilde's day,
she went out, leaving every opportunity for the grand plot to mature. Had
she not absented herself in like manner the year before at the same
date--thus enabling an upholsterer to drape artistically her little salon
with beautiful thick silk tapestries which had just been imported from
the East? Her idea was that this year she might find a certain lacquered
screen which she coveted. The Baroness belonged to her period; she liked
Japanese things. But, alas! the charming object that awaited her, with a
curtain hung over it to prolong the suspense, had nothing Japanese about
it whatever. Madame de Nailles received the good wishes of her family,
responded to them with all proper cordiality, and then was dragged up
joyously to a picture hanging on the wall of her room, but still
concealed under the cloth that covered it.

"How good of you!" she said, with all confidence to her husband.

"It is a picture by Marien!--A portrait by Marien! A likeness of
Jacqueline!"

And he uncovered the masterpiece of the great artist, expecting to be
joyous in the joy with which she would receive it. But something strange
occurred. Madame de Nailles sprang back a step or two, stretching out her
arms as if repelling an apparition, her face was distorted, her head was
turned away; then she dropped into the nearest seat and burst into tears.

"Mamma!--dear little mamma!--what is it?" cried Jacqueline, springing
forward to kiss her.

Madame de Nailles disengaged herself angrily from her embrace.

"Let me alone!" she cried, "let me alone!--How dared you?"

And impetuously, hardly restraining a gesture of horror and hate, she
rushed into her own chamber. Thither her husband followed her, anxious
and bewildered, and there he witnessed a nervous attack which ended in a
torrent of reproaches:

Was it possible that he had, not seen the impropriety of those sittings
to Marien? Oh, yes! No doubt he was an old friend of the family, but that
did not prevent all these deceptions, all these disguises, and all the
other follies which he had sanctioned--he--Jacqueline's father!--from
being very improper. Did he wish to take from her all authority over his
child?--a girl who was already too much disposed to emancipate herself.
Her own efforts had all been directed to curb this alarming
propensity--yes, alarming--alarming for the future. And all in vain!
There was no use in saying more. 'Mon Dieu'! had he no trust in her
devotion to his child, in her prudence and her foresight, that he must
thwart her thus? And she had always imagined that for ten years she had
faithfully fulfilled a mother's duties! What ingratitude from every one!
Mademoiselle Schult should be sent away at once. Jacqueline should go to
a convent. They would break off all intercourse with Marien. They had
conspired against her--every one.

And then she wept more bitterly than ever--tears of rage, salt tears
which rubbed the powder off her cheeks and disfigured the face that had
remained beautiful by her power of will and self-control. But now the
disorder of her nerves got the better of precautions. The blonde angel,
whose beauty was on the wane, was transformed into a fury. Her
six-and-thirty years were fully apparent, her complexion appeared
slightly blotched, all her defects were obtrusive in contrast with the
precocious development of beauty in Jacqueline. She was firmly resolved
that her stepdaughter's obtrusive womanhood should remain in obscurity a
very much longer time, under pretence that Jacqueline was still a child.
She was a child, at any rate! The portrait was a lie! an imposture! an
affront! an outrage!

Meantime M. de Nailles, almost beside himself, fancied at first that his
wife was going mad, but in the midst of her sobs and reproaches he
managed to discover that he had somehow done her wrong, and when, with a
broken voice, she cried, "You no longer love me!" he did not know what to
do to prove how bitterly he repented having grieved her. He stammered, he
made excuses, he owned that he had been to blame, that he had been very
stupid, and he begged her pardon. As to the portrait, it should be taken
from the salon, where, if seen, it might become a pretext for foolish
compliments to Jacqueline. Why not send it at once to Grandchaux? In
short, he would do anything she wished, provided she would leave off
crying.

But Madame de Nailles continued to weep. Her husband was forced at last
to leave her and to return to Jacqueline, who stood petrified in the
salon.

"Yes," he said, "your mamma is right. We have made a deplorable mistake
in what we have done. Besides, you must know that this unlucky picture is
not in the least like you. Marien has made some use of your features to
paint a fancy portrait--so we will let nobody see it. They might laugh at
you."

In this way he hoped to repair the evil he had done in flattering his
daughter's vanity, and promoting that dangerous spirit of independence,
denounced to him a few minutes before, but of which, up to that time, he
had never heard.

Jacqueline, in her turn, began to sob.

Mademoiselle Schult had cause, too, to wipe her eyes, pretending a more
or less sincere repentance for her share in the deception. Vigorously
cross-questioned by Madame de Nailles, who called upon her to tell all
she knew, under pain of being dismissed immediately, she saw but one way
of retaining her situation, which was to deliver up Jacqueline, bound
hand and foot, to the anger of her stepmother, by telling all she knew of
the childish romance of which she had been the confidante. As a reward
she was permitted (as she had foreseen) to retain her place in the
character of a spy.

It was a sad Ste.-Clotilde's day that year. Marien, who came in the
evening, heard with surprise that the Baroness was indisposed and could
see no one. For twelve days after this he continued in disgrace, being
refused admittance when he called. Those twelve days were days of anguish
for Jacqueline. To see Marien no longer, to be treated with coldness by
her father, to see in the blue eyes of her stepmother--eyes so soft and
tender when they looked upon her hitherto--only a harsh, mistrustful
glare, almost a look of hatred, was a punishment greater than she could
bear. What had she done to deserve punishment? Of what was she accused?
She spoke of her wretchedness to Fraulein Schult, who, perfidiously, day
after day, drew from her something to report to Madame de Nailles. That
lady was somewhat consoled, while suffering tortures of jealousy, to know
that the girl to whom these sufferings were due was paying dearly for her
fault and was very unhappy.

On the twelfth day something occurred which, though it made no noise in
the household, had very serious consequences. The effect it produced on
Jacqueline was decisive and deplorable. The poor child, after going
through all the states of mind endured by those who suffer under
unmerited disgrace--revolt, indignation, sulkiness, silent
obstinacy--felt unable to bear it longer. She resolved to humble herself,
hoping that by so doing the wall of ice that had arisen between her
stepmother and herself might be cast down. By this time she cared less to
know of what fault she was supposed to be guilty than to be taken back
into favor as before. What must she do to obtain forgiveness?
Explanations are usually worthless; besides, none might be granted her.
She remembered that when she was a small child she had obtained immediate
oblivion of any fault by throwing herself impulsively into the arms of
her little mamma, and asking her to forget whatever she had done to
displease her, for she had not done it on purpose. She would do the same
thing now. Putting aside all pride and obstinacy, she would go to this
mamma, who, for some days, had seemed so different. She would smother her
in kisses. She might possibly be repelled at first. She would not mind
it. She was sure that in the end she would be forgiven.

No sooner was this resolution formed than she hastened to put it into
execution. It was the time of day when Madame de Nailles was usually
alone. Jacqueline went to her bedchamber, but she was not there, and a
moment after she stood on the threshold of the little salon. There she
stopped short, not quite certain how she should proceed, asking herself
what would be her reception.

"How shall I do it?" she thought. "How had I better do it?"

"Bah!" she answered these doubts. "It will be very easy. I will go in on
tiptoe, so that she can't hear me. I will slip behind her chair, and I
will hug her suddenly, so tight, so tenderly, and kiss her till she tells
me that all has been forgiven."

As she thought thus Jacqueline noiselessly opened the door of the salon,
over which, on the inner side, hung a thick plush 'portiere'. But as she
was about to lift it, the sound of a voice within made her stand
motionless. She recognized the tones of Marien. He was pleading,
imploring, interrupted now and then by the sharp and still angry voice of
her mamma. They were not speaking above their breath, but if she listened
she could hear them, and, without any scruples of conscience, she did
listen intently, anxious to see her way through the dark fog in which,
for twelve days, she had wandered.

"I do not go quite so far as that," said Madame de Nailles, dryly. "It is
enough for me that she produced an illusion of such beauty upon you. Now
I know what to expect--"

"That is nonsense," replied Marien--"mere foolishness. You jealous!
jealous of a baby whom I knew when she wore white pinafores, who has
grown up under my very eyes? But, so far as I am concerned, she exists no
longer. She is not, she never will be in my eyes, a woman. I shall think
of her as playing with her doll, eating sugar-plums, and so on."

Jacqueline grew faint. She shivered and leaned against the door-post.

"One would not suppose so, to judge by the picture with which she has
inspired you. You may say what you like, but I know that in all this
there was a set purpose to insult me."

"Clotilde!"

"In the first place, on no pretext ought you to have been induced to
paint her portrait."

"Do you think so? Consider, had I refused, the danger of awakening
suspicion? I accepted the commission most unwillingly, much put out by
it, as you may suppose. But you are making too much of an imaginary
fault. Consign the wretched picture to the barn, if you like. We will
never say another word about so foolish a matter. You promise me to
forget it, won't you?... Dear! you will promise me?" he added, after a
pause.

Madame de Nailles sighed and replied: "If not she it will be some one
else. I am very unhappy.... I am weak and contemptible...."

"Clotilde!" replied Marien, in an accent that went to Jacqueline's heart
like a knife.

She fancied that after this she heard the sound of a kiss, and, with her
cheeks aflame and her head burning, she rushed away. She understood
little of what she had overheard. She only realized that he had given her
up, that he had turned her into ridicule, that he had said "Clotilde!" to
her mother, that he had called her dear--she!--the woman she had so
adored, so venerated, her best friend, her father's wife, her mother by
adoption! Everything in this world seemed to be giving way under her
feet. The world was full of falsehood and of treason, and life, so bad,
so cruel, was no longer what she had supposed it to be. It had broken its
promise to herself, it had made her bad--bad forever. She loved no one,
she believed in no one. She wished she were dead.

How she reached her own room in this state Jacqueline never knew. She was
aware at last of being on her knees beside her bed, with her face hidden
in the bed-clothes. She was biting them to stifle her desire to scream.
Her hands were clenched convulsively.

"Mamma!" she cried, "mamma!"

Was this a reproach addressed to her she had so long called by that name?
Or was it an appeal, vibrating with remorse, to her real mother, so long
forgotten in favor of this false idol, her rival, her enemy?

Undoubtedly, Jacqueline was too innocent, too ignorant to guess the real
truth from what she had overheard. But she had learned enough to be no
longer the pure-minded young girl of a few hours before. It seemed to her
as if a fetid swamp now lay before her, barring her entrance into life.
Vague as her perceptions were, this swamp before her seemed more deep,
more dark, more dreadful from uncertainty, and Jacqueline felt that
thenceforward she could make no step in life without risk of falling into
it. To whom now could she open her heart in confidence--that heart
bleeding and bruised as if it had been trampled one as if some one had
crushed it? The thing that she now knew was not like her own little
personal secrets, such as she had imprudently confided to Fraulein
Schult. The words that she had overheard she could repeat to no one. She
must carry them in her heart, like the barb of an arrow in a secret
wound, where they would fester and grow more painful day by day.

"But, above all," she said at length, rising from her knees, "let me show
proper pride."

She bathed her fevered face in cold water, then she walked up to her
mirror. As she gazed at herself with a strange interest, trying to see
whether the entire change so suddenly accomplished in herself had left
its visible traces on her features, she seemed to see something in her
eyes that spoke of the clairvoyance of despair. She smiled at herself, to
see whether the new Jacqueline could play the part, which--whether she
would or not--was now assigned to her. What a sad smile it was!

"I have lost everything," she said, "I have lost everything!" And she
remembered, as one remembers something in the far-off long ago, how that
very morning, when she awoke, her first thought had been "Shall I see him
to-day?" Each day she passed without seeing him had seemed to her a lost
day, and she had accustomed herself to go to sleep thinking of him,
remembering all he had said to her, and how he had looked at her. Of
course, sometimes she had been unhappy, but what a difference it seemed
between such vague unhappiness and what she now experienced? And then,
when she was sad, she could always find a refuge in that dear mamma--in
that Clotilde whom she vowed she would never kiss again, except with such
kisses as might be necessary to avoid suspicion. Kisses of that kind were
worth nothing. Quite the contrary! Could she kiss her father now without
a pang? Her father! He had gone wholly over to the side of that other in
this affair. She had seen him in one moment turn against herself. No!--no
one was left her!... If she could only lay her head in Modeste's lap and
be soothed while she crooned her old songs as in the nursery! But,
whatever Marien or any one else might choose to say, she was no longer a
baby. The bitter sense of her isolation arose in her. She could hardly
breathe. Suddenly she pressed her lips upon the glass which reflected her
own image, so sad, so pale, so desolate. She put the pity for herself
into a long, long, fervent kiss, which seemed to say: "Yes, I am all
alone--alone forever." Then, in a spirit of revenge, she opened what
seemed a safety-valve, preventing her from giving way to any other
emotion.

She rushed for a little box which she had converted into a sort of
reliquary. She took out of it the half-burned cigarette, the old glove,
the withered violets, and a visiting-card with his name, on which three
unimportant lines had been written. She insulted these keepsakes, she
tore them with her nails, she trampled them underfoot, she reduced them
to fragments; she left nothing whatever of them, except a pile of shreds,
which at last she set fire to. She had a feeling as if she were employed
in executing two great culprits, who deserved cruel tortures at her
hands; and, with them, she slew now and forever the foolish fancy she had
called her love. By a strange association of ideas, the famous
composition, so praised by M. Regis, came back to her memory, and she
cried:

"Je ne veux me souvenir.... me souvenir de rien!"

"If I remember, I shall be more unhappy. All has been a dream. His look
was a dream, his pressure of my hand, his kiss on the last day,
all--all--were dreams. He was making a fool of me when he gave me that
pink which is now in this pile of ashes. He was laughing when he told me
I was more beautiful than was natural. Never have I been--never shall I
be in his eyes--more than the baby he remembers playing with her doll."

And unconsciously, as Jacqueline said these words, she imitated the
careless accent with which she had heard them fall from the lips of the
artist. And she would have again to meet him! If she had had thunder and
lightning at her command, as she had had the match with which she had set
fire to the memorials of her juvenile folly, Marien would have been
annihilated on the spot. She was at that moment a murderess at heart. But
the dinner-bell rang. The young fury gave a last glance at the adornments
of her pretty bedchamber, so elegant, so original--all blue and pink,
with a couch covered with silk embroidered with flowers. She seemed to
say to them all: "Keep my secret. It is a sad one. Be careful: keep it
safely." The cupids on the clock, the little book-rest on a velvet stand,
the picture of the Virgin that hung over her bed, with rosaries and palms
entwined about it, the photographs of her girl-friends standing on her
writing table in pretty frames of old-fashioned silk-all seemed to see
her depart with a look of sympathy.

She went down to the dining-room, resolved to prove that she would not
submit to punishment. The best way to brave Madame de Nailles was, she
thought, to affect great calmness and indifference, aye, even, if she
could, some gayety. But the task before her was more difficult than she
had expected. Apparently, as a proof of reconciliation, Marien had been
kept to dinner. To see him so soon again after his words of outrage was
more than she could bear. For one moment the earth seemed to sink under
her feet; she roused her pride by an heroic effort, and that sustained
her. She exchanged with the artist, as she always did, a friendly
"Good-evening!" and ate her dinner, though it nearly choked her.

Madame de Nailles had red eyes; and Jacqueline made the reflection that
women who are thirty-five should never weep. She knew that her face had
not been made ugly by her tears, and this gave her a perverse
satisfaction in the midst of her misery. Of Marien she thought: "He sits
there as if he had been put 'en penitence'." No doubt he could not endure
scenes, and the one he had just passed through must have given him the
downcast look which Jacqueline noticed with contempt.

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