[Pg 146]
\'I shall have to throw those old books of yours into the fire,\' Mouret said to him angrily. \'You\'ll end by making yourself ill and having to take to your bed.\'
The young man was, indeed, of such a nervous temperament, that the slightest imprudence made him poorly, as though he were a young girl, and thus he was frequently confined to his room for two or three days together. At these times Rose inundated him with herb tea, and whenever Mouret went upstairs to shake him up a little, as he called it, the cook, if she happened to be there, would turn her master out of the room, crying out at him:
\'Leave the poor dear alone! Can\'t you see that you are killing him with your rough ways? It isn\'t after you that he takes: he is the very image of his mother; and you\'ll never be able to understand either the one or the other of them.\'
Serge smiled. After he had left college his father, seeing him so delicate, had hesitated to send him to Paris to read for the bar there. He would not hear, however, of a provincial faculty; Paris, he felt sure, was necessary for a young man who wanted to climb to a high position. He tried, indeed, to instil ambitious ideas into the lad, telling him that many with much weaker wits than his own, his cousins, the Rougons, for instance, had attained to great distinction. Every time that the young man seemed to grow more robust, his father settled that he should leave home early the following month; but his trunk was never packed, for Serge was always catching a fresh cold, and then his departure would be again postponed.
On each of these occasions Marthe contented herself with saying in her gentle, indifferent way:
\'He isn\'t twenty yet. It\'s really not prudent to send so young a lad to Paris; and, besides, he isn\'t wasting his time here; you even think that he studies too much.\'
Serge used to accompany his mother to mass. He was very piously minded, very gentle and grave. Doctor Porquier had recommended him to take a good deal of exercise, and he had become enthusiastically fond of botany, going off on long rambles to collect specimens which he spent his afternoons in drying, mounting, classifying and naming. It was about this time that he struck up a great friendship with Abbé Faujas. The Abbé himself had botanised in earlier days, and he gave Serge much practical advice for which the young man was very grateful. They also lent each other books, and one day[Pg 147] they went off together to try to discover a certain plant which the priest said he thought would be found in the neighbourhood. When Serge was ill, his neighbour came to see him every morning, and sat and talked for a long while at his bedside. At other times, when the young man was well, it was he who went and knocked at Abbé Faujas\'s door, as soon as he heard him stirring in his room. They were only separated by a narrow landing, and they ended by almost living together.
In spite of Marthe\'s unruffled tranquillity and Rose\'s angry glances, Mouret still often indulged in bursts of anger.
\'What can the young scamp be after up there?\' he would growl. \'Whole days pass without my catching more than a glimpse of him. He never seems to stir from the Abbé; they are always talking together in some corner or other. He shall be off to Paris at once. He\'s as strong as a Turk. All those ailments of his are mere shams, excuses to get himself petted and coddled. You needn\'t both of you look at me in that way; I don\'t mean to let the priest make a hypocrite of the boy.\'
Then he began to keep a watch over his son, and when he thought that he was in Faujas\'s room he called for him angrily.
\'I would rather he went to the bad!\' he cried one day in a fit of rage.
\'Oh, sir!\' said Rose, \'it is abominable to say such things.\'
\'Well, indeed I would! And I\'ll put him in the way myself one of these days, if you irritate me much more with these parsons of yours!\'
Serge naturally joined the Young Men\'s Club, though he went there but little, preferring the solitude of his own room. If it had not been for Abbé Faujas, whom he sometimes met there, he would probably never have set foot in the place. The Abbé taught him to play chess in the reading-room. Mouret, on learning that the lad met the priest at the café, swore that he would pack him off by the train on the following Monday. His luggage was indeed got ready, and quite seriously this time, but Serge, who had gone out to spend a last day in the open country, returned home drenched to the skin by a sudden downpour of rain. He was obliged to go to bed, shivering with fever. For three weeks he hung between life and death; and then his convalescence lasted for two[Pg 148] long months. At the beginning of it he was so weak that he lay with his head on the pillow and his arms stretched over the sheets, as motionless as if he were simply a wax figure.
\'It is your fault, sir!\' cried the cook to Mouret. \'You will have it on your conscience if the boy dies.\'
While his son continued in danger, Mouret wandered silently about the house, plunged in gloomy melancholy, his eyes red with crying. He seldom went upstairs, but paced up and down the passage to intercept the doctor as he went away. When he was told that Serge was at length out of danger, he glided quietly into the lad\'s room and offered his help. But Rose turned him away. They had no occasion for him, she said, and the boy was not yet strong enough to bear his roughness. He had much better go and attend to his business instead of getting in the way there. Mouret then remained in complete loneliness downstairs, more melancholy and unoccupied than ever. He felt no inclination for anything, said he. As he went along the passage, he often heard on the second floor the voice of Abbé Faujas, who spent whole afternoons by Serge\'s bedside, now that he was growing better.
\'How is he to-day, Monsieur l\'Abbé?\' Mouret asked the priest timidly, as he met the latter going down into the garden.
\'Oh, fairly well; but it will be a long convalescence, and very great care will be required.\'
The priest tranquilly read his breviary, while the father, with a pair of shears in his hand, followed him up and down the garden walks, trying to renew the conversation and to get more detailed information about his boy. As his son\'s convalescence progressed, he remarked that the priest scarcely ever left Serge\'s room. He had gone upstairs several times in the women\'s absence, and he had always found the Abbé at the young man\'s bedside, talking softly to him, and rendering him all kinds of little services, sweetening his drink, straightening his bed-clothes, or getting him anything he happened to want. There was a hushed murmur throughout the house, a solemn calm which gave quite a conventual character to the second floor. Mouret seemed to smell incense, and could almost fancy sometimes, as he heard a muttering of voices, that they were saying mass upstairs.
\'What can they be doing?\' he wondered. \'The youngster is out of danger now; they can\'t be giving him extreme unction.\'
[Pg 149]
Serge himself caused him much disquiet. He looked like a girl as he lay in bed in his white night-dress. His eyes seemed to have grown larger; there was a soft ecstatic smile upon his lips, which still played there even amidst his keenest pangs of suffering. Mouret no longer ventured to say anything about Paris; his dear sick boy seemed too girlish and tender for such a journey.
One afternoon he went upstairs, carefully hushing the sound of his steps. The door was ajar, and he saw Serge sitting in an easy chair in the sunshine. The young fellow was weeping with his eyes turned upward, and his mother stood sobbing in front of him. They both turned as they heard the door open, but they did not wipe away their tears. As soon as Mouret entered the room, the invalid said to him in his feeble voice:
\'I have a favour to ask you, father. Mother says that you will be angry and will refuse me permission, though it would fill me with joy—I want to enter the Seminary.\'
He clasped his hands together with a sort of feverish devotion.
\'You! you!\' exclaimed Mouret.
He looked at Marthe, who turned away her head. Then saying nothing further, he walked to the window, returned, and sat down mechanically by the bedside, as though overwhelmed by the blow.
\'Father,\' resumed Serge, after a long silence, \'in my nearness to death I have seen God, and I have sworn to be His. I assure you that all my happiness is centred in that. Believe me that it is so, and do not cause me grief.\'
Mouret, looking very mournful, with his eyes lowered, still kept silence. At last, with an expression of utter hopelessness, he murmured:
\'If I had the least particle of courage, I should wrap a couple of shirts in a handkerchief and go away.\'
Then he rose from his seat, went to the window and drummed on the panes with his fingers; and when Serge again began to implore him, he said very quietly:
\'Very well, my boy; be a priest.\'
Immediately afterwards he left the room.
The next day, without the least warning to anyone, he set off for Marseilles, where he spent a week with his son Octave. But he came back looking careworn and aged. Octave had afforded him very little consolation. He had[Pg 150] found the young man leading a fast life, overwhelmed with debts and in all sorts of scrapes. However, Mouret did not say a word about these matters. He began to lead a perfectly sedentary existence, and no longer made any of those good strokes of business, those fortunate purchases of standing crops, in which he had formerly taken such pride. Rose noticed that he maintained almost unbroken silence, and that he even avoided saluting Abbé Faujas.
\'Do you know that you are not very polite?\' she boldly said to him one day. \'His reverence the Curé has just gone past, and you turned your back upon him. If you behave in this way because of the boy, you are under a great mistake. The Curé was quite against his going to the Seminary, and I often heard him talking to him against it. This house is getting a very cheerful place, indeed, now! You never speak a word, even to madame, and when you have your meals, anyone would think that it was a funeral that was going on. For my part, sir, I\'m beginning to feel that I\'ve had quite enough of it.\'
Mouret went out of the room, but the cook followed him into the garden.
\'Haven\'t you every reason to be happy, now that your son is on his feet again? He ate a cutlet yesterday, the darling, and with such a good appetite too. But you care nothing about that, do you? What you want is to make a pagan of him like yourself. Ah! you stand in great need of some one to pray for you. But God Almighty wishes to save us all. If I were you I should weep with joy, to think that that poor little dear was going to pray for me. But you are made of stone, sir! And how sweet he will look too, the darling, in his cassock!\'
Mouret thereupon went up to the first floor, and shut himself up in a room which he called his study, a big bare room, furnished only with a table and a couple of chairs. This room became his refuge whenever the cook worried him. When he grew weary of staying there, he went down again into the garden, upon which he expended greater care than ever. Marthe no longer seemed to be conscious of her husband\'s displeasure. Sometimes he kept silent for a week, but she was in no way disquieted or distressed by it. Every day she withdrew more and more from her surroundings, and she even began to fancy, now that the house seemed so quiet and peaceable and she had ceased to hear Mouret scolding,[Pg 151] that he had grown more reasonable and had discovered for himself, as she had done, some little nook of happiness. This thought tranquillised her and induced her to plunge more deeply into her dreamy life. When her husband looked at her with his blurred eyes, scarcely recognising in her the wife of other days, she only smiled at him and did not notice the tears which were welling beneath his eyelids.
On the day when Serge, now completely restored to health, entered the Seminary, Mouret remained at home alone with Désirée. He now frequently looked after her; for this big \'innocent\' girl, who was nearly sixteen, might have fallen into the basin of the fountain or have set the house on fire with matches just like a child of six. When Marthe returned home, she found the doors open and the rooms empty. The house seemed quite deserted. She went on to the terrace, and there, at the end of one of the walks, she saw her husband playing with his daughter. He was sitting on the gravel, and with a little wooden scoop was gravely filling a cart which Désirée was pulling along with a piece of string.
\'Gee up! gee up!\' cried the girl.
\'Wait a little,\' said her father patiently, \'it is not full yet. As you are the horse, you must wait till the cart is full.\'
Then she stamped her feet like an impatient horse, and, at last, not being able to stand still any longer, she set off with a loud burst of laughter. The cart fell over and lost its load. When she had dragged it round the garden, she came back to her father crying:
\'Fill it again! Fill it again!\'
Mouret loaded it again with the little scoop. For a moment Marthe remained upon the terrace watching them, full of uneasy emotion. The open doors, the sight of the man playing with the child, the empty deserted house all touched her with sadness, though she was not clearly conscious of the feelings at work in her. She went upstairs to take off her things, on hearing Rose, who also had just returned, exclaim from the terrace steps:
\'Good gracious! how silly the master is!\'
His friends, the retired traders with whom he took a turn or two every day on the promenade in the Cours Sauvaire, declared that he was a little \'touched.\' During the last few months his hair had grizzled, he had begun to get shaky on his legs, and was no longer the biting jeerer, feared by the[Pg 152] whole town. For a little time it was thought that he had been venturing upon some risky speculations and had been overcome by a heavy loss of money.
Madame Paloque, as she leaned over the window-rail of her dining-room which overlooked the Rue Balande, said every time she saw him, that he was certainly going to the bad. And if, a few moments later, she happened to catch sight of Abbé Faujas passing along the street, she took a delight in exclaiming—the more especially if she had visitors with her:
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