The Debacle - Emile Zola [83]
She stammered out almost inaudibly:
‘Oh God, I don’t know, I swear I don’t even know myself… But you see, it would be wrong to tell a lie, and I can’t find excuses! No, I can’t say he used force… You had gone, I was out of my mind, and the thing happened, I don’t know, I don’t know how!’
She could not go on for crying, and he, deathly pale and on the point of tears too, waited a minute. And yet the thought that she could not lie to him gave him some comfort. Then he went on questioning her, for his mind was tormented by all sorts of things he could not yet understand.
‘So Father has kept you on here?’
She did not even look up, but became quieter and resumed her air of brave resignation.
‘I do my job. I have never cost much for my keep, and as there is an extra mouth besides me he has taken advantage of it to cut my wages… Now it is clear that whatever he orders I’ve got to do.’
‘But what about yourself? Why have you stayed?’
That surprised her so much that she looked him in the eyes.
‘But where do you expect me to go? At any rate my little boy and I can eat here and we are left alone.’
They fell silent again but now each was looking into the other’s eyes, while in the distance down in the dark valley the noises of the crowd swelled up as the rumbling of the guns over the pontoon bridge went on and on. The darkness was rent by a loud cry, some cry of a man or beast, and infinitely sad.
‘Listen, Silvine,’ he went on slowly, ‘you sent me a letter which gave me great joy… I wouldn’t ever have come back here. But that letter, I’ve read it again this evening, and it says things that couldn’t be said better.’
At first she went white when she heard him refer to that. Perhaps he was vexed that she had dared to write, like some brazen hussy. But then as he went on explaining she blushed very red.
‘I know that you don’t believe in lying, and that’s why I believe what is on the paper…. Yes, now I quite believe it… You were right to think that if I had died in the war without seeing you again it would have been a great sorrow to me to pass away like that thinking you didn’t love me… And so, as you do still love me, as you have never loved anyone else…’
He got tongue-tied and could not find the right words, trembling with overwhelming emotion.
‘Listen, Silvine my dearest, if those Prussian swine don’t kill me, I still want you – yes, we’ll get married as soon as I’m back home.’
She jumped up, and with a cry fell into the young man’s arms. She could not speak, and all the blood in her veins seemed to be in her face. He sat down on the chair and took her on his knee.
‘I’ve thought it over a lot, and that was what I had to come here and tell you… If Father won’t consent, well, we’ll go away, the world is a big place… And your child, well, we can’t do him in, can we? There’ll be lots more as well, and I shall end up by not being able to pick him out of the crowd.’
It was forgiveness. She still fought against this immense happiness and murmured at long last:
‘No, it isn’t possible, it’s too much. You might live to regret it some day… But how good you are, Honoré! And how I love you!’
He silenced her with a kiss. Already she had given up trying, unable to reject the happiness coming to her, the whole blissful life she thought had gone for ever. With an instinctive, irresistible urge she threw both her arms round him and clasped him to her, kissing him in her turn with all the strength a woman can find, like a lost treasure regained and hers alone, that nobody would take away from her any more. He was hers again, this man she had lost, and she would die rather than let him be taken from her yet again.
But at that moment there rose from below a noise like a great reveille, peopling the thick darkness. Orders were shouted, bugles sounded and a host of shadows were rising out of the bare ground, an indistinct, moving sea already flooding down towards the road. Below, the fires on each bank were nearly out, and all that could be seen was vague, trampling masses, neither was it clear whether they were still crossing