Madame Francine turned the handle of the library door and paused, listening. Then she went in.
“Dinner is ready, my child.”
“Don’t wait for me. I’m not hungry.”
“You are never hungry.”
Her eyes went round the room. The fire was bright and warm: she had made it up herself. He sat at his desk, with a table lamp throwing down a circle of light upon the half-filled sheet of paper under his hand. Beyond, the windows were bare, uncurtained, and misted over by the heat within and the frost outside.
She moved across the room to pull the heavy worn velvet into place, then turned to him again, with the same remorseless persistence.
“Dinner is ready.”
His pencil dropped from a listless hand.
“You must make an effort, Henri. You eat nothing. You do nothing. Every day it’s the same thing.”
“I work.”
“You work. You say that, but nothing goes out to the publisher. Not even to the Press.”
“The work is not finished.”
“But you began … It is now February. You began—before Christmas.”
“I began the day after Miriam’s funeral.”
She made a gesture of repudiation with both hands, pushing them out from her strong body as if she were trying to hold off some great weight that threatened to crush her.
“I do not want to remember that time,” she said, breathing hard.
Henry got up and stood with his back to the fire.
“Why not? It was no grief to you when she died. It was what you had desired for years, and planned, and finally accomplished.”
Madame Francine turned away.
“Dinner is ready,” she said. “You must come or it will be spoilt.”
“No!”
She stopped moving, checked by the fury in his voice, attacking her ponderous obstinacy in the same tones as his father had sometimes used. But she did not turn round.
“Do you know what I am writing? What I have been writing for three months? It is an account of how you murdered my wife.”
That brought her round to face him. As he went on speaking, she grew pale, her eyes narrowed, her mouth closed into a thin line of resistance. She was not afraid, and she let him run on, because she must know how much he had found out, and what the danger amounted to.
“You ruled Penguerrec too long. It went to your head. Madame Francine, chief of the maquis. Oh, I know it was necessary to suppress your real name when the Germans arrived, Madame Davenport, the wife of an Englishman, would have been interned at once. So Madame Davenport had left her husband years before, whereabouts unknown, and Madame Francine was housekeeper at the château. The children of Penguerrec forgot they had ever called her by another name. Newcomers never heard any other. Her wartime successes, her wartime murders.”
“It was war!” cried Madame Francine, stung into speech at last. “It is not murder to kill an enemy.”
“There is a distinction,” answered Henry, with a bitter smile, “between a personal enemy and an enemy of the country. There is a difference between suffering for one’s own acts against the enemy, and allowing the innocent to suffer.”
“You speak like a fool! If I had not preserved my own liberty and life, who would have organised the resistance here in Penguerrec?”
“No one is indispensable. Penguerrec is one small village, not the whole of France.”
“We need not quarrel over the part I played. Others thought more highly of it than you, my own son. But you were corrupted by your father.”
“And you by your wicked prejudice. So that in the end, you murdered your own daughter.”
“Ah, that, no! Now you prove you are mad, quite mad! Miriam, my daughter! Never! Never!”
Henry pointed an accusing finger at her, his face twisted with pain. “That was the beginning of your crime. Why could you not accept her? She was beautiful, she was my wife, I loved her. If you had made her welcome, if you had become her mother, she would have been different. Her own mother had left her when she was a child. She needed a mother, to help her to grow up. She would have been happy. She would have had children—your grandchildren. We could all have been happy …”
“Stop! You are inventing a picture that could never have developed. She was incapable of change. Her character was bad, fundamentally bad. She was a …”
Henry moved to strike the foul words from her mouth, but she caught his arm and held him, until his feeble strength ebbed and he sank back again into his chair, his head on his arms.
“You accuse me of the crime of not making her welcome,” said Madame Francine, in a terrible voice. “But I warned you I would not receive any Englishwoman here as my daughter-in-law. I warned you that if you brought her I must be housekeeper and nothing else, until you took her away again. But you stayed for eight years. Why? Why did you ever come?”
Henry answered, with bitter shame in his voice, “Because she thought the place was mine. She married me to be a grand lady living in a château. Childish? Of course. She was a child. A beautiful child. I loved her and I could not lose her for want of a little deception, that I hoped to resolve in time.”
“You should have known your mother better.”
“I should have known you better.”
A long silence, dragged between them. It was broken by Francine.
“You have no proof.”
“I have enough. Some of my friends were approached by Louis. He was always your chief lieutenant, or accomplice. He set the traps. He paid the men who tampered with the yacht.”
“It was to drive them away. To frighten them into taking her. You would not take her away, yourself.”
“How could I? Without money?”
“There was no need to spend everything you had on her.”
“My illness? My doctor’s bills?”
“She took the money. You know it. She was insatiable. I did what I did to save you. I wanted to frighten her away before she destroyed you.”
“You succeeded. She was mad with fear.”
“She tried to murder you.”
“Because she blamed me. You allowed that to happen. She might have killed me, because you would not give up your purpose. You were ready to sacrifice your only son to this purpose of saving him. I think it is you that is mad.”
Even her obstinacy was shaken a little by this.
“Why did she not go?” she wailed. “Why were those English so indifferent, so stupid, so cold?”
“Why do you repeat these out-worn platitudes, like an old parrot? You know nothing about English people. I cannot imagine why you married my father. Or why he married you.”
She was silent, then, but not for long.
“You have no proof! At the end, it was her own doing.”
“I have enough. You wore my boots to go down to the stage; to take away the rope; to dig out the foot of the ladder. Oh, yes, Louis says he did it all, as a first step in preparing to mend the ladder. He had no idea that anyone would want to use it that day. He actually showed Renaud all this.”
“You see. Nobody would believe your story. You have no proof.”
“I know, and Marie and Lucette know, that Louis did not go down through the woods that afternoon. And I did not go; I was with the sergeant of police. But I know, and Giles Armitage knows, that my boots were used. The mud on them was fresh.”
“You had come ashore across the mud.”
“I was carried ashore,” said Henry, “and Inspector Renaud was watching.”
Madame Francine stiffened. But she did not give in.
“Has the Englishman, Armitage, spoken?”
“I have not been accused. So I imagine, not.”
“In your account, you accuse me?”
“In my account, I describe your crime, and confess my own suspicions of it and my cowardly inaction.”
“When will it be finished?”
“Very soon. Unless you kill me first.”
A little pitying smile appeared at the corners of her mouth.
“And if I destroy the papers, instead?”
“I will write it again. And again, if necessary. In the end, it will be finished. You will not be safe until I die.”
“Are you asking me to kill you, my son?”
“I want to be with Miriam, my wife, my love. You will not be safe or happy until I am dead.”
“Happy!”
That broke her at last. She found her way to the door and went out, and shut it behind her, leaning against it with her forehead pressed to the wood, in an agony of despair. Her defeat was total, her myth of herself broken and withered. She was alone: she who had never been alone in Penguerrec, but always commanded a faithful following, as far back into childhood as she could remember. She had lost their support by her own actions. They had approved the hunting of Miriam, but the kill had shocked them. They had grown soft. They condemned her. They turned from her. In the village no one would speak to her. That was bad, but at home it was worse. She had fought to possess her son, and she had lost him for ever. Nothing remained. No hope. No future.
After a time the old woman pulled herself away from the door and went into the dining-room, where the soup lay waiting, cold and congealed in the bowl. She sat down in her place at the head of the table, and taking up the carving-knife bared her left wrist. There was nothing left now in her life. It was time to go.
But she paused, the big knife swaying in the air. It was not that she lacked courage: excess of it had brought her to her present predicament. But a thought had come to her, compelling attention from her shrewd, deeply superstitious mind. Miriam had confessed her sins, repented, died in grace. She would have a long purgatory, but in the end, in the far future, she would be joined with Henry in paradise. But for herself, a suicide, damned eternally, there would be no such reunion. She had lost the battle on earth; or rather, had gained an empty victory; she would not be trapped into losing it, finally and forever, in the world to come.
She laid down the carving-knife, and rising from her chair, took up the tureen of soup and carried it away to the kitchen to heat it again for the meal.
In the library, Henry gathered the sheets of his writing together, tore them across, as he had done so many times already, and carrying them to the fire, dropped the pieces into the flames one by one. When the whole surface of the fire was darkened by twisted brittle screws of burned paper, he took the poker and beat them into dust, and threw on another log and waited for new golden flames to spring out of it. Then he went back to his desk, drew out a fresh sheet of paper, and began to write.
THE END