For nearly six months now, Julie had been constantly indulging in malicious remarks and criticisms of her mistress. She was perpetually condemning her, declaring twenty times a day: “If I were Monsieur, I wouldn’t let myself be led by the nose like that. Well, well … there it is … everyone according to his own nature.”
One day she had even insulted Henriette to her face, who had been contented with saying to her husband that night: “You know, the first sharp word I get from that woman, out she goes.” She seemed, however, to be afraid of the old servant, though she feared nothing else; and Parent attributed this meekness to her esteem for the nurse who had brought him up and had closed his mother’s eyes.
But this was the end; things could not go on any longer, and he was terrified at the thought of what would happen. What was he to do? To dismiss Julie seemed to him a decision so formidable that he dared not let his thoughts dwell upon it. It was equally impossible to admit her right and his wife wrong; and before another month had gone by, the situation between the two of them would become insupportable.
He sat there, his arms hanging down, vaguely searching his mind for a method of complete conciliation, and finding none. “Luckily I have Georges,” he murmured. “Without him I should be utterly wretched.”
Then the idea came to him to ask Limousin for his advice; he decided to do so, but immediately the remembrance of the enmity between his servant and his friend made him fear that his friend would suggest her dismissal; and he fell once more into an agony of indecision.
The clock struck seven. He started. Seven o’clock, and he had not yet changed his shirt! Scared and panting, he undressed, washed, put on a white shirt, and hurriedly dressed again, as though he were being awaited in the next room on a matter of urgent importance.
Then he went into the drawing room, happy to feel that he needn’t be afraid of anything now.
He glanced at the newspaper, went and looked into the street, and came back and sat down on the sofa; but a door opened and his son came in, washed, his hair combed, and smiling. Parent took him in his arms and kissed him with passionate emotion. He kissed him first on the hair, then on the eyes, then on the cheeks, then on the mouth, and then on the hands. Then he made him jump up in the air, lifting him up to the ceiling, at the full stretch of his arms. Then he sat down again, tired by these exertions, and, taking Georges on his knee, he made him play “ride a-cockhorse.”
The child laughed with delight, waved his arms, and uttered shrieks of joy, and his father laughed as well, and shrieked with pleasure, shaking his great paunch, enjoying himself even more than the little boy.
This poor, weak, resigned, bullied man loved the child with all his kind heart. He loved him with wild transports of affection, with violent, unrestrained caresses, with all the shamefaced tenderness hidden in the secret places of his heart that had never been able to come into the light and grow, not even in the first few hours of his married life; for his wife had always been cold and reserved in her behaviour.
Julie appeared in the doorway, her face pale and her eyes gleaming, and announced, in a voice trembling with exasperation:
“It is half past seven, Monsieur.”
Parent threw an anxious and submissive glance at the clock, and murmured:
“Yes, it certainly is half past seven.”
“Well, dinner’s ready now.”
Seeing the storm imminent, he tried to dispel it:
“But didn’t you tell me, when I came in, that you would only have dinner ready at eight?”
“At eight! … Why, you can’t be thinking what it means! You don’t want to give the child his dinner at eight! One says eight, but, Lord, that’s only a manner of speaking. Why, it would ruin the child’s stomach to make him eat at eight. Oh, if it were only his mother that was concerned! She takes good care of her child! Oh, yes, talk of mothers, she’s a mother, she is! It’s down right pitiful to see a mother like that!”
Parent, positively quivering with anguish, felt that he must cut short this threatening scene.
“Julie,” he said, “I will not have you speak of your mistress like that. You hear, don’t you? Don’t forget for the future.”
The old servant, breathless with astonishment, turned on her heel and went out, pulling the door to with such violence that all the crystals on the chandelier jingled. For a few seconds a sound like the soft murmurous ringing of little invisible bells fluttered in the silent air of the drawing room.
Georges, surprised at first, began to clap his hands with pleasure, and, puffing out his cheeks, uttered a loud Boom with all the strength of his lungs, in imitation of the noise of the door.
Then his father began to tell him stories; but his mind was so preoccupied that again and again he lost the thread of his narrative, and the child, no longer understanding, opened his eyes wide in amazement.
Parent’s eyes never left the clock. He fancied he could see the hand moving. He would have liked to stop the clock, to make time stand still until his
