Read Ebook: To Tell You the Truth by Merrick Leonard

Font size: 10 px 15 px 20 px 25 px 30 px 35 px

Background color: BlackWhiteGrayLight GrayDark GrayDim Gray

Text color: BlackWhiteGrayLight GrayDark GrayDim Gray

Apply/Save settings

Ebook has 1248 lines and 67096 words, and 25 pages

Hitherto the acknowledgments from Amiens had varied but slightly: "The remittance had come; the baby was well," or "the baby had had some infantile ailment, and was better." Now, a partially illegible letter informed her suddenly that the little business was to be given up. Circumstances compelled the woman to take a situation again, and she could not keep the orphan in her care. It was explained that "Mademoiselle should arrange to remove him in a month's time."

Already stricken, she was stupefied by this news. It seemed to her the last blow that could be dealt. What was to be done? She marvelled that she had not contemplated the contingency. She had not contemplated it--at most, she had given it a passing glance. She had questioned, agonised, whether she could manage to maintain the payments regularly; she had asked herself what lay before her when the child was older and his needs increased; she had wondered, conscience-racked, how she was to bear her life; but for this new responsibility, hurled on her when she was broken, she had been unprepared.

"Remove him?" To what? She wasn't remaining in Paris; was she blindly to answer some advertisement before she left and leave a baby behind her here, helpless in hands that might misuse him? She shuddered. No; now that he would be at the mercy of a stranger, the place must be near enough for her to visit it--often and unexpectedly. She must find a place near Chauville.

But could she do it? However secretly she arranged, wasn't it sure to be known? What was she to say? It was a misfortune that she had written to madame Herbelin too fully to be able to assert now that she had married. What was she to say? And who would credit what she said?

Hourly, the craven in her faltered that there were hundreds of honest homes in Paris where he would be gently treated, where he would be as safe as he had been in Amiens. And always her better self cried out: "But you'd desert him without knowing that the home you had found was one of them!"

For three weeks she cowered at the crossways. She did not love the little child that she had wronged, as she bore him back with her to Chauville. The journey was long, and he clung to her, whimpering, and she caressed him, white-faced and abject; but there was no love for him in her heart. The dusk, when they arrived, was welcome. She led him down the station steps, her head sunk low. In the street he cried to be carried, and she picked him up--submissive to her burden. She had had to sacrifice her reputation, or the child--and mademoiselle Lamande returned to her native town with a baby in her arms.

She had booked to the Gare du March?, the station in the poorest quarter. A porter followed, trundling the luggage over the cobbles. In a narrow bed, under a skylight, the child and anxiety allowed her little sleep.

Before she could begin her search for work, it was imperative that she should find someone to shelter him, if only during the day; and in the morning she questioned a servant who was sweeping the stairs. The girl looked as if she had been picked from a dust-bin, and clothed from a rag-bag, but, compared with English girls of her class, she had brilliant intelligence. She thought it probable that the woman at the ?picerie across the road might be accommodating.

The woman at the ?picerie was unable to arrange, but she suggested a concierge of her acquaintance "l? bas." "L? bas" proved to be remote. Chauville had not changed. As of old, the door of the ?glise Ste. Clothilde was lost in its vast frame of funeral black; as of old, the insistent bell was dinning for the dead. The population was still concealed, except where a cortege of priests, and acolytes, and mourners wound their slow way with another coffin to the cemetery, Chauville's most animated spot.

As a makeshift, the concierge sufficed.

To gain an interview with madame Herbelin strained patience. But after the applicant had sat for a long while, with her feet on the sawdust of the salle d'attente, where an officer, and a marquise drooped resignedly, madame la Directrice told her: "It is a sad pity that you left the town." Marie could not remember that the busy woman said anything more valuable.

There was, however, another occasion. This time the lady said: "Mademoiselle, I knew you when you were a little girl, and I knew your parents, and I have regretted, more than you may suppose, that it was not in my power to offer you an appointment at the Lyc?e, in your emergency. But I have recently heard something about you that is very grave--something that I trust is not true."

Madame Herbelin did not speak.

"Where is she now, this madame Gaillard?" inquired the Directrice coldly.

"I do not know," said Marie. And then, recognising the lameness of the reply, she burst forth into a torrent of details to corroborate the story.

Her voice, more than the details, carried conviction to the listener. After a long pause she said:

"Mademoiselle, I believe you have done a generous thing." The thief winced. "But it was an imprudent thing, a thing that you could not afford to do. I do not speak of your intention to maintain the child--may le bon Dieu aid you in the endeavour! But you did wrong to bring it to Chauville. You should not expose yourself to calumny. I counsel you most earnestly to place the child somewhere else without delay."

"Madame, it is my duty to have him under my own eyes," she urged. "Apart from me, he might be starved, beaten, corrupted--my friend's boy might be reared as an apache. How could I know? I should risk it all. It would be inhuman of me."

A permanent home for him, not far from the rue Lecomte, was found at a bonneterie, whose humble little window contained Communion caps, and the announcement "Piqures ? la Machine."

To have had him in her lodging would have cost her less. But this child that dishonoured her must be covert from the jeunes filles that she hoped would come there; and if she had to give lessons out, she could not leave him there alone.

She did have to give lessons out. It was a descent for her here to go to the pupils' houses, but she was compelled to do it. And something bitterer--she was compelled to accept a lowered fee, and affect to be unconscious why a reduction was proposed. To obtain the services of a "belle musicienne" for a trifle, there were a few mothers who engaged her, and replied to questioning relatives that she was a "slandered woman." But to her they did not say that she was slandered, and their hard eyes were an insult.

She gave a lesson twice a week for twenty francs a month now, mademoiselle Marie Lamande, who had advertised recitals in Paris, and she went short of food, to meet the charges at the bonneterie. The boy seemed to be amply nourished, and the remembrance sustained her on the days when she was dinnerless.

God! for a chance to get away, to be free of this place, where it was an ordeal to tread the streets. When she could afford to buy a postage stamp she applied for salaried work in some distant school. Once it looked as if the child were not to live; and as she sat, obeying orders, through one endless night, she knew, before she fainted from exhaustion, that if he died, her own escape from Chauville would be made by the same road.

But he recovered--thanks partially to her--and her duty still had to be done.

He recovered, and, as time passed, began to talk like other children on the doorsteps. She recalled the refinement of his mother, and the little child in a black blouse, shrilling kitchen French, avenged himself unknowingly. "As often as we ever meet, when the boy I robbed is a poor, big, common man," she thought, "every note of his voice will be a chastisement!"

Before she accomplished her release, she bore in Chauville-le-Vieux a three-years' martyrdom.

Madame Herbelin had consented to testify to her abilities, and she went far away, to a school at Ivry-St.-Hilaire. She had pleaded that, in the letter of recommendation, she might be referred to as "madame" Lamande, but this entreaty the Directrice would not grant.

"Mademoiselle," she said, "I cannot do it for you; and if you are wise, there is no need. Remember what I told you when you returned, and be guided by me this time. Do not repeat there the blunder that you made here. Leave the child where he is; you have tested the person and you know she is honest. Occasionally, once a year, you can afford to come and see him. If you take him with you, you will not gain much by your removal. Of course, at Ivry-St.-Hilaire your parentage is unknown and there is nothing to hinder you from inventing a relationship; but it isn't worth the trouble--believe me, you would be suspected just the same. Make the most of this opportunity; go unencumbered--do not live your whole life in shadow for the sake of an ideal."

But her conscience would not allow her to see him only once a year, nor to leave him to play on the doorstep, and attend the ?cole Communale. In view of a constant salary, she already foresaw herself alleviating his plight. She was resigned to live her life in shadow, that she might yield a little sunshine to him.

So, when she had sacrificed herself again, madame la Directrice thought: "She is strangely devoted to the child. I wonder if I was wrong to befriend her--perhaps she is a bad woman, after all!"

She did not venture to take the boy with her, however. She was more than three months at Ivry before her furtive arrangements for him were concluded. Then she placed him with priests twenty miles distant from her, in the Etablissement des Fr?res Eudoxie at Maison-Verte. Small as the annual charges were, they were vast in relation to her salary. Till she succeeded, by slow degrees, in obtaining a few private pupils, her self-denial was severe.

After that, he called her always "Mademoiselle ma m?re"; and, divining something of the little wistful heart, mademoiselle did not reprove him.

At Ivry-St.-Hilaire a thing strange and bewildering happened. For the first time in her life a man sought her society; for the first time in her life she was happier for talking to a man. Two moments were prodigious to her--a moment after she had heard herself laughing merrily; a moment when she realised why she had just plucked out a grey hair.

When they were alone together one day the man said to her:

"Now that I have made a practice in the town at last, I am rooted here--and Ivry isn't amusing. If a woman were to marry me she would have to live here always. I tell you this because I love you."

It was as if God had wrought another miracle. "I can't understand it," she whispered truly.

Then the man laughed and took her in his arms, and it seemed to her that she had never known what it was to be tired.

When he let her go and she came back to the world, her sin was staring at her. And now the voice that decoyed her before was clamouring: "If you degrade yourself in his sight you'll lose him."

Her lover appeared to her no less a hero because, under his imposing presence, he was a cur, and the thing that she feared would revolt him was her dishonesty.

Not on that day, nor on the next, but after many resolutions to do right had melted into terrors, she forced him to listen; and it seemed to her that she was dying while she spoke.

"I stole," she moaned, her face covered.

"Pauvrette!" he exclaimed tenderly.

When she dared to look, he was smiling. The relief and gratitude in her soul were so infinite that she wanted to kneel at his feet.

But when she sobbed out the story of her later struggles and told him how she was devoting her life to the child, his brow grew dark.

"That, of course, would have to be changed," he said.

"Changed?" she stammered.

"But," she broke in, frightened, "you don't understand. It is not a mere question of my going to Maison-Verte; he will not be there always--he will grow up, and his future will be my care. My responsibility goes on. Oh, I know--you need not tell me--that you have thoroughly the right to refuse, but--but I have no right to alter. Since I have seen that I could never hope to give back what I took, I have seen that he was my charge for life."

"Mon Dieu!" he said, "you exaggerate quixotically. To give back what you took? Remember what you have already done!"

"Counted in francs," she pleaded, "I have done very little. It has been difficult to do, that's all."

Presently, when he perceived that, on this one point, the little weak woman was inflexible, the man made a beautiful speech, declaring that she was worth more than the opinion of Ivry-St.-Hilaire, and of all France. He said that nothing mattered to him but their "divine love." He looked more heroic still, and his eyes were moist with the nobility of the sentiments that he was delivering.

It would have been kinder to her not to leave her in a fool's paradise; she was to suffer more intensely because of that.

Share on: WhatsApp @Hash Facebook Tweet