The Debacle - Emile Zola [274]
‘I say, did you shut the street door behind you?’
But she was shattered, and merely nodded an affirmative. Then, as she came over and gave him both her hands, in need of affection and help, he went on:
‘You know, I’m the one who’s killed him.’
She did not understand or believe him. He felt her two hands still quite calm in his.
‘I’ve killed him… Yes, on a barricade somewhere… He was on one side and I was on the other.’
The little hands began trembling.
‘We were all like drunken men, we didn’t know what we were doing… I’ve killed him.’
Then Henriette withdrew her hands, shuddering, white and staring at him with horrified eyes. So this was the end of it all, and nothing would survive in her broken heart? Oh, Jean, she had been thinking about him that very evening and been so happy in the faint hope of seeing him again! And he had done this unspeakable thing, and yet he had saved Maurice once again, for he had brought him back here through so many dangers! She could not give him her hands again without a revulsion in her whole being. Yet she uttered a cry into which she put the last hope of her divided heart.
‘Oh, I’ll make him better – I must, now!’
Her long watches at the hospital at Remilly had made her very skilful at nursing and dressing wounds. She insisted on examining her brother’s wound at once, and undressed him, but that did not revive him. Yet as she undid the emergency dressing Jean had improvised he did move, made a little noise, then opened wide, feverish eyes. He recognized her at once and smiled.
‘So you are here. Oh, how glad I am to see you before I die!’
She silenced him with a gesture of confidence.
‘Die! But I won’t have it! I mean you to live… Stop talking and leave it to me.’
But when she examined the gashed arm and punctured ribs she went very serious and her eyes looked worried. She quickly took the room over, managed to find a little oil, tore up some old shirts for bandages, while Jean went downstairs for a jug of water. He never opened his mouth, but watched her washing the wounds and skilfully bandaging them, but he was powerless to help her, for since she had been there he had been utterly exhausted. Yet when she had finished and he saw how worried she was he did offer to go and look for a doctor. But she kept all her clearheadedness—oh no, not the first doctor he could find, who might denounce her brother! It must be somebody safe, and they could wait a few hours. Finally when Jean talked of going back to his regiment it was understood that as soon as he could get away he would come back and try to bring a surgeon with him.
But still he did not go, and seemed unable to make up his mind to leave this room, where everything spoke of the evil he had done. The window, which had been shut for a little while, had just been opened again. And from his bed, with his head propped up, the wounded man was looking out. And the others, too, let their eyes wander into the distance, in the oppressive silence that had fallen on them.
From this high position on the Butte des Moulins quite half of Paris stretched out below them, first the central area from the Faubourg Saint-Honoré as far as the Bastille, then the whole course of the Seine with the distant busy life of the left bank, a sea of roofs, treetops, steeples, domes and towers. It was getting much lighter, and that unspeakable night, one of the most terrible in history, was over. But in the pure light of the rising sun, under the rose-pink sky, the fires went on burning. Straight opposite them the Tuileries was still burning, and the flames, and those of the Orsay barracks, the palaces of the Conseil d’Etat and the Legion of Honour, scarcely visible in the strong light, made the air quiver. Even beyond the