# The Eyes of Innocence/VIII

VIII
THE APPOINTMENT
"Gilberte:
"I must not see you again. When you read these lines, I shall have left Domfront. You are rich and I am poor: you need look for no other explanation of my departure and of my conduct in the past. I loved you from the first; and from the first I swore that I would shun you and for ever conceal the feeling with which you inspire me.
"Do you now understand why I behaved so coldly to you from the beginning, though my heart throbbed at the mere sound of your voice; why I was so hard to my mother, whose plans were obvious to all and drove me to exasperation: I was afraid lest you should think that I was privy to them; why I kept in the background, hiding among ​those rocks, looking at you from a distance as at a goal which I knew was, and wished it to be, inaccessible?
"But you came to me, Gilberte: that is all my excuse. You came to me out of kindness to my mother, perhaps also prompted by that instinct which makes us conscious of love where it lies deepest. What could I do against your fascination? I did not even struggle. I closed my eyes to all that was not you, you and your beauty and your smile and your charming grace and the colour of your hair and the freshness of your cheeks and the rhythm of your footsteps; and, with not a further thought of my oath or the inevitable consequences of my weakness, I accepted the infinite joy that came to me. Oh, Gilberte, those few weeks! ... But there was something which I had never imagined in my boldest dreams: you loved me, you also loved me.
"You love me, which means that happiness is within my reach to-morrow, the next ​day, every day. It is there, I have but to take it; a word from me and you are my wife. For I know you, my beloved: the gift of your heart is the gift of your entire life.
"And so I must go, if I would not be overcome by temptation ...
"Oh, Gilberte, you do not know what I am feeling and suffering, you who do not know what you are, you who are all that is most human and most divine, most noble and most simple, a miracle of harmony, attractiveness and light. But you know nothing of yourself and will never know anything. One could tell you and your mirror could teach you all the perfections of your face and form; and yet you would not know them. Were you a child of ten, wearing the white frock of your first communion, I should proclaim my admiration with the same frankness and with no greater fear of hurting your modesty. The whole world might be at your feet, chanting your praises; and you would be none the less humble. ​That is the marvel of your ingenuous nature. All is merged in your purity, as in a great, limpid sea in which every impurity would vanish. It is impossible to think of you without evoking images of whiteness, of transparency, of crystal water. By what mystery has it come that the trials of life, the realities of marriage have not soiled the freshness of your innocent eyes?
"And so I shall never see your eyes again: your eyes of the dawn, your eyes fresh as the dew, your kind, ignorant, gentle eyes, so fond, so gay, so sad ..."
She lowered her head, overcome with emotion. Mme. de la Vaudraye, who had brought her this letter from her son and who waited for her to finish reading it, said, rather aggressively:
"I should be glad of a word of explanation, Gilberte. Yesterday, my son fights a duel without any adequate cause. To-day, he leaves me, without giving me any reason. ​Have these two incidents anything to do with you? You must admit their seriousness to a mother."
Gilberte handed her the letter. Mme. de la Vaudraye read it and shrugged her shoulders:
"Are you so very rich?"
The girl gave her another letter, received that morning, in which the Dieppe solicitor furnished her with her quarterly statement. Mme. de la Vaudraye started:
"Impossible! Oh, my child, you must never let Guillaume know!"
"How can I? He has gone away!"
"And you sit there and say that so quietly! Doesn't his going distress you? Don't you love him?"
"Yes, I love him."
"Then write to him."
"Write to him?"
"Yes, tell him to come back ... tell him that his position makes no difference to you ..."
​She spoke with a certain embarrassment: and this made Gilberte feel awkward. However, she said:
"I can't write. Guillaume alone can solve the question that lies between him and his conscience."
Mme. de la Vaudraye gave an impatient gesture and cried:
"You can't write! What a ridiculous scruple! Is it any worse to write to a young man than to go walking about the country with him, as I hear you did yesterday? What! My son fights a duel because of you, he leaves me because of you; and, when I, his mother, ask you ...! Well, what's the matter? What are you looking at me like that for?"
A chair suddenly pushed aside, an overturned flower-vase bore evidence to Mme. de la Vaudraye's burst of irritation. She flew out again:
"Oh, yes, it's all very well, but one can't stand that eternal gentleness of yours! ​Here am I, telling you how wrong you are, and you listen in such a queer way that I end by putting myself in the wrong. One always feels with you as though one were in front of an indulgent judge, who graciously forgives one's faults. And yet it's you who are at fault!"
"Why, of course!" said Gilberte, all confusion.
"Then why do I look like a prisoner being judged?"
"Oh, but you don't!"
"Yes, I do. It's all very well for you to bend your head and all very well for me to rave and yell: any one would think that I was to blame and that you were making allowances. You must admit, it is enough to make one lose all patience."
Presumably, Mme. de la Vaudraye was afraid of growing still more impatient, for she went away without another word.
Gilberte called on her, next day, and kissed her affectionately. There was not a ​word said about their difference of the day before.
They saw each other every day. According to the weather, they walked in the town or walked about the neighbourhood, leaning on each other's arm and heedless of any but themselves. But they invariably returned at the same hour.
"Ah, it's five o'clock: here are the ladies coming back!" people said.
This regularity was due to Gilberte. As soon as she was free, she went to the ruined summer-house and sat there until dinner-time.
"But why this hurry?" asked Mme. de la Vaudraye. "You never give me a minute over."
"And what about my daily appointment?" said Gilberte, laughing.
"Your appointment?"
"Why, yes, with your son: what would he think of me if I were not punctual?"
In the course of a longer excursion than ​usual, Mme. de la Vaudraye, who was fond of turning the conversation on her past greatness, pointed out the limits of the property once possessed by her ancestors. They extended along both banks of the Varenne, as far as the spot where it joined the Andainette.
"To say nothing of what we owned on the forest side: the Revolution robbed us of that. Why, on the death of my father, the whole of the valley still belonged to us! My marriage-portion included everything down to the Bas-Moulin. And you should have seen the Logis in those days! Such furniture! Such works of art!"
Gilberte, to humour her, asked:
"And how did you lose it?"
"Oh, it's a long story, a heap of mysterious business-schemes in which my poor husband, a decent man, if ever there was one, allowed himself to be robbed by a company-promoter called Despriol. You remember that empty house, near ​Notre-Dame-sur-l'Eau, which took your fancy yesterday, I don't quite know why? Well, that's where Despriol and his wife lived, up to fifteen years ago. Henriette Despriol was a charming woman; she and I were great friends; and she used to come to the Logis when she liked ... so did her husband, for M. de la Vaudraye was never happy out of his sight; and I did not dream of suspecting him, for he struck me as a good-natured, honest man and M. de la Vaudraye was careful to hide from me the dangerous speculations into which his evil genius was dragging him. Everything was discovered in an hour. Despriol took to flight, after losing, or rather stealing, all that remained to us. We were ruined."
She paused and then continued:
"There's worse than that. On the same evening, my dear friend Henriette came and flung herself on her knees before me and implored me to give her money to join her husband, who was in concealment in the ​neighbourhood, and to enable them to leave the country and retrieve their fortunes. It was a piece of brazen impudence; and I showed her the door. Unfortunately, I left her alone, for a moment, in my bedroom. An hour after, I saw that a box containing all my jewels had disappeared. We rushed to her house: she was gone."
"Did you prosecute them?"
"We notified the police, but they were never found. Five years ago, I received a letter from Henriette in which she said, 'The ten thousand francs which my husband sent you this morning represent the value of the jewels. It is the first money which we have been able to put by. I am longing for the day when we shall be in a position to settle with you altogether and when I shall have the right to beg your forgiveness for all the harm that we have done you. Until that day comes there will be no rest for your repentant friend."
"And since then ...?"
​"Since then, I have received another letter, a few months ago, in which she told me that her husband was dead and that she was on her way to me with all the money she owed me."
"Well?"
"Nothing but lies! Nobody came. Do people like that come and pay back the money they have stolen! No, they were a couple of thieves. You ask anybody at Domfront about M. and Mme. Despriol: a nice reputation they left behind them! If either of them thought of coming back here, they'd be stoned in the streets! Henriette indeed! Why, I should spit in her face, that I would, the sneak, the hypocrite! ..."
She uttered those words with an accent of implacable hatred charged with all the rancour of those fifteen years of poverty and privation. Gilberte shuddered. The evil expression on that face filled her with a sort of repugnance. Nevertheless, she took ​Mme. de la Vaudraye's hand and, raising it to her lips, murmured:
"You poor dear!"
And she did this not designedly, because it was Guillaume's mother whom she was conciliating, but from an undefined and all-powerful instinct that compelled her to be kind to this humiliated and disappointed woman.
It was the same instinct which had guided her hitherto and which made her still more attentive and affectionate in the days that followed, notwithstanding a certain sense of constraint which she felt in Mme. de la Vaudraye's presence. She knew no greater pleasure than to smooth the wrinkles from those sullen features at the moment when they were most firmly set; and to do this she employed all sorts of childish rogueries:
"Come, try hard and laugh. ... There, you have laughed!"
Mme. de la Vaudraye was touched by all ​this charm of manner. It made her neglect the artificial plan of conduct which she had arranged to captivate the girl: she forgot to conceal her faults, she even became natural and spontaneous.
One day, after something that Gilberte had said, with a sudden movement she drew the girl to her:
"Oh, my darling, what a treasure of a wife you would make!"
Gilberte smiled:
"Indeed! How do I know that you would have me for a daughter! ... However, we shall soon see ... perhaps to-morrow ..."
"To-morrow?"
"Why, of course! Isn't this the day when Guillaume is coming to the trysting-place where I wait for him every day?"
"Guillaume? I had a letter from him this morning from Paris. Besides, I know him; when he has made up his mind ..."
Gilberte looked at her watch:
"Five o'clock. Suppose he were there ​now! ... Ah, I have a feeling that he is there to-day, that I shall see him! ... Good-bye till to-morrow."
She hastened away swiftly, leaving her companion speechless. Hope filled her breast, a hope each time disappointed, but never discouraged.
"Mme. Armand is coming back alone this afternoon," said the people at Domfront. "What a hurry she's in!"
She crossed the threshold of the Logis without stopping and went straight to the summer-house. Her eyes longed to pierce the screen of foliage that hid the hill from sight. She had not a doubt that he was there; and, at the same time, she felt the madness of her certainty.
She arrived. Her glance at once swept the rocks. He was there.
She was on the point of throwing him handfuls of kisses, or else of kneeling down and stretching out her arms to him across space, but she saw him running down the ​slope and she herself started running towards him, as fast as she could.
She arrived all out of breath at the bottom of the garden, broke down the little wooden gate, which was slow in opening, and sprang into the road at the moment when Guillaume crossed the bridge:
"Gilberte!"
"Guillaume!"
They assured themselves with a glance that nothing was changed in either of them and then silently followed the road that skirts the Varenne. They dared not speak, overcome with the importance of the words which they were about to pronounce. Besides, excitement gripped them by the throat.
Thus they arrived at Notre-Dame-sur-l'Eau, the old Norman chapel which is so prettily situated on the river-bank.
Leaning on the balustrade above the water flowing through the arches of the bridge, they revelled in the delight of ​dreaming side by side. Then Guillaume said: "It was more than I could bear. I wanted to see you, if only for a few minutes ... and to gather fresh courage ..."
She asked, in a voice that did not sound like her own:
"Then ... you are going back? ..."
"I intended to ... but I can't now ... I can't now ..."
He continued, almost in a whisper:
"It's not weakness. But I am seeing you; and to see you is to see things and ideas as they are. You flood them with the light which is in you and which springs from you. Yes, I tried to escape the temptation and I had a wild desire to work in solitude, so as to achieve the wealth and fame that would have permitted me to marry you. And now ... and now I see that it is all madness. Why suffer uselessly? Let us struggle together, Gilberte. I can do nothing without you ... I am too much in love with you."
​"And your scruples?" she asked, maliciously.
"What do wealth and poverty matter? They are words to which I was able to attach a certain value when away from you in writing to you. But, when I am near you, it seems to me that they mean nothing. A man has no right to order his life by such empty phrases. ... Oh, Gilberte, you put everything in its right proportion, you are truth itself, your love gives certainty and peace! Such as I am, I am worthy of you, because you love me ..."
She gave him her hand. He asked:
"You are not angry with me?"
"For going away, Guillaume? No, I was so sure that you would come back!"