How many times, in the last forty years, she had longed to go away to see him, to kiss him! She did not think of him as grown up. She dreamed always of that scrap of humanity she had held for one day in her arms, clasped to her tortured body.
How many times she had said to her lover: “I can hold out no longer; I must see him; I am going!”
Always he had restrained her, held her back. She would not know how to contain herself, how to master her emotion. The man would guess, and would exploit the secret. She would be ruined.
“How is he?” she said.
“I don’t know. I’ve never seen him again either.”
“Is it possible? To have a son and not know him! To be afraid of him, to have cast him away as a disgrace!”
It was horrible.
They were still walking up the long road, oppressed by the blazing sun, still mounting the interminable hillside.
“It’s like a judgment, isn’t it?” she continued. “I’ve never had another child. I could not fight any longer my desire to see him; it’s haunted me for forty years. A man couldn’t understand these things. Remember that I am very near death. And I shall not have seen him again … never again; is it possible? How can I have waited so long? I’ve thought of him all my life, and what a terrible existence the thought has made it! Not once have I awakened, not once, do you hear, without my first thought being for him, for my child! How is he? Oh, how guilty I feel before him! Ought one to fear the world in such a case? I should have left all and followed him, brought him up, loved him. I should have been happier then, surely. But I did not dare. I was a coward. How I have suffered! Oh, those poor abandoned creatures, how they must hate their mothers!”
She stopped abruptly, choked with sobs. The whole valley was deserted and silent in the overpowering blaze of sunlight. Only the crickets uttered their harsh, ceaseless croak in the thin brown grass at the roadside.
“Sit down for a little,” he said.
She let him lead her to the edge of the ditch, and sank down upon the grass, burying her face in her hands. Her white hair, falling in curls on each side of her face, became dishevelled, and she wept, torn by her bitter grief.
He remained standing in front of her, uneasy, not knowing what to say to her.
“Come … be brave,” he murmured.
“I will be,” she said, rising to her feet. She dried her eyes and walked on with the shaky steps of an old woman.
A little further on the road ran under a group of trees which hid several houses. They could now hear the regular vibrant shock of a blacksmith’s hammer on the anvil. Soon they saw, on the right, a cart halted before a kind of low house, and, in a shed, two men shoeing a horse.
Monsieur d’Apreval went up to them.
“Pierre Bénédict’s farm?” he asked.
“Take the road on the left,” answered one, “right by the little inn, and go straight on; it’s the third after Poret’s. You can’t miss it.”
They turned to the left. She was going very slowly now, her legs flagging, her heart thudding so violently that it snatched her breath away. At every step she muttered, as though it were a prayer:
“My God! Oh, my God!”
A violent access of emotion contracted her throat, making her totter on her feet as though she had been hamstrung.
Monsieur d’Apreval, nervous and rather pale, said sharply:
“If you can’t control yourself better, you’ll betray us at once. Try to master your feelings.”
“How can I?” she faltered. “My child! When I think that I’m about to see my child!”
They followed one of those little lanes that run between one farmyard and another, shut in between a double row of beeches along the roadside.
Suddenly they found themselves in front of a wooden gate shaded by a young pine-tree.
“Here it is,” he said.
She stopped short and looked round.
The yard, which was planted with apple trees, was large, stretching right up to the little thatched farmhouse. Facing it were the stables, the barn, the cow-house, and the chicken-run. Under a slate-roofed shed stood the farm vehicles, a two-wheeled cart, a wagon, and a gig. Four calves cropped the grass, beautifully green in the shade of the trees. The black hens wandered into every corner of the enclosure.
There was no sound to be heard; the door of the house was open, but no one was in view.
They entered the yard. At once a black dog leapt out of an old barrel at the foot of a large pear-tree and began to bark furiously.
Against the wall of the house, on the way to the door, four beehives stood upon a plank, the straw domes in a neat line.
Halting in front of the house, Monsieur d’Apreval shouted:
“Is anyone in?”
A child appeared, a little girl of about ten, dressed in a bodice and woollen petticoat, with bare and dirty legs. She looked timid and sullen, and stood still in the doorway, as though to defend the entry.
“What d’you want?” she said.
“Is your father in?”
“No.”
“Where is he?”
“I dunno.”
“And your mother?”
“She’s with the cows.”
“Will she be back soon?”
“I dunno.”
The old woman cried out abruptly in a hurried voice, as though fearing to be forcibly dragged away:
“I won’t go without seeing him.”
“We’ll wait, my dear.”
As they turned round, they caught sight of a peasant woman coming towards the house, carrying two heavy-looking tin pails on which the sun from time to time flashed with
