“Come. …”
At last he made up his mind and rang the bell. Already she was at the door, and she opened it. His eyes looked at her like the eyes of a faithful dog, who is afraid of being beaten. He said:
“I came. … Forgive me. …”
She said:
“Thank you.”
Then she confessed how she had expected him. Christophe helped her to nurse the boy, whose condition was growing worse. His heart was in the task. The boy treated him with irritable animosity: he took no pains now to conceal it: he said many malicious things to him. Christophe put it all down to his illness. He was extraordinarily patient. He passed many painful days by the boy’s bedside, until the critical night, on passing through which, Lionello, whom they had given up for lost, was saved. And they felt then such pure happiness—watching hand in hand over the little invalid—that suddenly she got up, took her cloak and hood, and led Christophe out of doors, along the road, in the snow, the silence and the night, under the cold stars. Leaning on his arm, excitedly breathing in the frozen peace of the world, they hardly spoke at all. They made no allusion to their love. Only when they returned, on the threshold, she said: “My dear, dear friend! …”
And her eyes were lit up by the happiness of having saved her child. That was all. But they felt that the bond between them had become sacred.
On her return to Paris after Lionello’s long convalescence, she took a little house at Passy, and did not worry anymore about “avoiding scandal”: she felt brave enough to dare opinion for her friend’s sake. Their life henceforth was so intimately linked that it would have seemed cowardly to her to conceal the friendship which united them at the—inevitable—risk of having it slandered. She received Christophe at all hours of the day, and was seen with him out walking and at the theater: she spoke familiarly to him in company. Colette thought they were making themselves too conspicuous. Grazia would stop her hints with a smile, and quietly go her way.
And yet she had given Christophe no new right over her. They were nothing more than friends: he always addressed her with the same affectionate respect. But they hid nothing from each other: they consulted each other about everything: and insensibly Christophe assumed a sort of paternal authority in the house: Grazia listened to and followed his advice. She was no longer the same woman since the winter she had spent in the sanatorium; the anxiety and fatigue had seriously tried her health, which, till then, had been sturdy. Her soul was affected by it. In spite of an occasional lapse into her old caprices, she had become mysteriously more serious, more reflective, and was more constantly desirous of being kind, of learning and not hurting anyone. Every day saw her more softened by Christophe’s affection, his disinterestedness, and the purity of his heart: and she was thinking of one day giving him the great happiness of which he no longer dared to dream, that of becoming his wife.
He had never broached the subject again after her first refusal, for he thought he had no right to do so. But regretfully he clung to his impossible hope. Though he respected what his friend had said, he was not convinced by her disillusioned attitude towards marriage: he persisted in believing that the union of two people who love each other, profoundly and devotedly, is the height of human happiness.—His regrets were revived by coming in contact once more with the Arnauds.
Madame Arnaud was more than fifty. Her husband was sixty-five or sixty-six. Both seemed to be older. He had grown stout: she was very thin and rather shrunken: spare though she had been in the old days, she was now just a wisp of a woman. After Arnaud’s retirement they had gone to live in a house in the country. They had no link with the life of the time save the newspaper, which in the torpor of their little town and their drowsy life brought them the tardy echo of the voice of the world. Once they saw Christophe’s name. Madame Arnaud wrote him a few affectionate, rather ceremonious words, to tell him how glad they were of his fame. He took the train at once without letting them know.
He found them in the garden, dozing under the round canopy of an ash, on a warm summer afternoon. They were like Boecklin’s old couple, sleeping hand in hand, in an arbor. Sun, sleep, old age overwhelm them: they are falling, they are already half-buried in the eternal dream. And, as the last gleam of their life, their tenderness persists to the end. The clasp of their hands, the dying warmth of their bodies. … —They were delighted to see Christophe, for the sake of all the memories of the past he brought with him. They talked of the old days, which at that distance seemed brilliant and full of light.
Arnaud loved talking, but he had lost his memory for names. Madame Arnaud whispered them to him. She liked saying nothing and preferred listening to talking: but the image of the old times had been kept alive and clear in her silent heart: in glimmers they would appear sharply before her like shining
