Abbe Mouret's Transgression: Chapter 2

Chapter 2

The fine weather broke up on the morrow, and it rained heavily. Serge's
fever returned, and he spent a day of suffering, with his eyes
despairingly fixed upon the curtains through which the light now fell
dim and ashy grey as in a cellar. He could no longer see a trace of
sunshine, and he looked in vain for the shadow that had scared him, the
shadow of that lofty bough which had disappeared amid the mist and the
pouring rain, and seemed to have carried away with it the whole forest.
Towards evening he became slightly delirious and cried out to Albine
that the sun was dead, that he could hear all the sky, all the country
bewailing the death of the sun. She had to soothe him like a child,
promising him the sun, telling him that it would come back again, that
she would give it to him. But he also grieved for the plants. The seeds,
he said, must be suffering underground, waiting for the return of light;
they had nightmares, they also dreamed that they were crawling along an
underground passage, hindered by mounds of ruins, struggling madly to
reach the sunshine. And he began to weep and sob out in low tones that
winter was a disease of the earth, and that he should die with the
earth, unless the springtide healed them both.

For three days more the weather was truly frightful. The downpour burst
over the trees with the awful clamour of an overflowing river. Gusts of
wind rolled by and beat against the windows with the violence of
enormous waves. Serge had insisted on Albine closing the shutters. By
lamplight he was no longer troubled by the gloom of the pallid curtains,
he no longer felt the greyness of the sky glide in through the smallest
chinks, and flow up to him like a cloud of dust intent on burying him.
However, increasing apathy crept upon him as he lay there with shrunken
arms and pallid features; his weakness augmented as the earth grew more
ailing. At times, when the clouds were inky black, when the bending
trees cracked, and the grass lay limp beneath the downpour like the hair
of a drowned woman, he all but ceased to breathe, and seemed to be
passing away, shattered by the hurricane. But at the first gleam of
light, at the tiniest speck of blue between two clouds, he breathed once
more and drank in the soothing calm of the drying leaves, the whitening
paths, the fields quaffing their last draught of water. Albine now also
longed for the sun; twenty times a day would she go to the window on the
landing to scan the sky, delighted at the smallest scrap of white that
she espied, but perturbed when she perceived any dusky, copper-tinted,
hail-laden masses, and ever dreading lest some sable cloud should kill
her dear patient. She talked of sending for Doctor Pascal, but Serge
would not have it.

'To-morrow there will be sunlight on the curtains,' he said, 'and then I
shall be well again.'

One evening when his condition was most alarming, Albine again gave him
her hand to rest his cheek upon. But when she saw that it brought him no
relief she wept to find herself powerless. Since he had fallen into the
lethargy of winter she had felt too weak to drag him unaided from the
nightmare in which he was struggling. She needed the assistance of
spring. She herself was fading away, her arms grew cold, her breath
scant; she no longer knew how to breathe life into him. For hours
together she would roam about the spacious dismal room, and as she
passed before the mirror and saw herself darkening in it, she thought
she had become hideous.

One morning, however, as she raised his pillows, not daring to try again
the broken spell of her hands, she fancied that she once more caught the
first day's smile on Serge's lips.

'Open the shutters,' he said faintly.

She thought him still delirious, for only an hour previously she had
seen but a gloomy sky on looking out from the landing.

'Hush, go to sleep,' she answered sadly; 'I have promised to wake you at
the very first ray---- Sleep on, there's no sun out yet.'

'Yes, I can feel it, its light is there. . . . Open the shutters.'

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