Bertrande replied in a barely audible voice:
“If you had been Martin Guerre you would perhaps have struck me just now.”
He answered with gentle surprise:
“But because I struck you on the day we were married, is that a reason I should strike you now? Listen to me, my dearest. Am I who speak to you now more different from the young man who left you, than that young man was different from the child you married?”
“When you left me,” said Bertrande, “you resembled your father in flesh and spirit. Now you resemble him only in the flesh.”
“My child,” said her husband, ever more gravely, “my father was arrogant and severe. Just, also, and loving, but his severity sent from home his only son. For eight years I have traveled among many sorts and conditions of men. I have been many times in danger of death. If I return to you with a greater wisdom than that which I knew when I departed, would you have me dismiss it, in order again to resemble my father? God knows, my child, and the priest will so instruct you, that a man of evil ways may by an act of will so alter all his actions and his habits that he becomes a man of good. Are you satisfied?”
“And then,” said Bertrande, in a still smaller voice, marshaling her last argument, “Martin Guerre at twenty had not the gift of the tongue. His father, also, was a silent man.”
At this her husband, hitherto so grave, burst into a laugh which made the Chamber echo, and still laughing, with his broad hand he wiped the tears from her wet face.
“My darling, how funny you are,” he said. “Weep no more. Every Gascon has the gift of the tongue. Some employ it, some do not. Since I am become no longer arrogant and severe, I choose to employ my gift.” Then, more gently, he continued. “Madame, you are demented. It happens sometimes to women who are with child. Pay no attention to it. It will pass, and when your time is over, you will look back to this with astonishment.”
“Perhaps that is it,” said Bertrande in acquiescence. “For God knows I do not wish you to be otherwise than my true husband. When I went to visit my aunt in Rieux, being in a strange town, I became confused as to the directions, and not until I left that house did it seem to me, when I was within doors, that the east was not the west. So it must be with me now. For when I look at you it seems to me that I see the flesh and bone of Martin Guerre, but in them I see dwelling the spirit of another man.”
“When I was in Brittany,” said her husband, “I heard a strange story of a man who was also a wolf, and there may also have been times when the soul of one man inhabited the body of another. But it is also notorious that men who have been great sinners have become saints. What would become of us all if we had no power to turn from evil toward good?”
And so he led her on to talk of other matters, of foreign lands and battles in Flanders until she was again calm. She put her fear away, or rather, she regarded it as a delusion, and she gave herself over to the happy anticipation of her second child. In her affection for her husband was now mingled a profound gratitude, for he had delivered her, at least for the present, from the terror of sin. When, upon a certain day she asked him if he remembered such and such a little incident, and he responded, smiling, “No, and do you remember when I told you that your eyes are speckled like the back of a mountain trout?” she only smiled in return, full of confidence and ease.
“You did not say such things when you were twenty,” she replied.
It was the time of year when the grapes were being harvested, and the odor of ripe muscats was in the air. When the wine was made and the leaves on the vine stocks had turned scarlet, Bertrande rode out among valleys that dipped in fire toward Luchon between the irregular advances of the woods, saw the conical haystacks burning with dull gold beside the stone walls of farm buildings, felt, as she rode in the sunshine, the cold invigorating sweep of wind from the higher mountains, lifted her eyes and saw how the white clouds piled high above the rich green of the pine woods and how the sky was intensely blue beyond, blue as a dream of the Mediterranean or of the Gulf of Gascony. And returning, toward evening to her own house, as the blue haze of evening began to intercept and transmute the shapes of things, she smelled the wood smoke from her own hearth fire and thought it as sweet as the incense which was burned in the church at Artigues. Or she saw at the far end of a field, a man wearing a scarlet jerkin working in a group of men uniformly clothed in brown, a small dot of scarlet moving about on long brown legs against the golden surface of the earth, and these things, intensely perceived as never before since she could remember, filled her with a piercing joy. The cold metallic gleam of halberds moving forward under a steely sky against the background of the russet woods, as a band of soldiers passed her by; the very feel and pattern of the frost upon the threshold early in the morning as the season advanced; the motion and songs of birds, until their numbers diminished; and then the iron sound of the church bell ringing in somber majesty across the cold valleys—all these she noticed and enjoyed as never before. And even, when winter had closed around them, one night from a far-off hillside, the crying of wolves had filled her with a pleasure enhanced with dread, for the doors were safely closed and all the animals safe within walls, and a good fire roared in the great fireplace, spreading shifting constellations of gold against the black throat of the chimney, so that the dread was a luxury, and her enjoyment of the strange distant voices all the greater. And all this vividness of feeling, this new awareness of the life around her, was because of her love for this new Martin Guerre, and because of the delight and health of her life-giving body. Yet even this love was intensified, like her pleasure in the cry of the wolves, by the persistent illusion, or suspicion, that this man was not Martin.
The illusion, if such it was, did not pass away at the termination of her pregnancy, as he had prophesied it would do, but she had grown used to it. It lent a strange savor to her passion for him. Her happiness, and the happiness of her children, especially that of the newly born, the son of the new Martin, shone the more brightly, was the more greatly to be treasured because of the shadow of sin and danger which accompanied it. She wrapped the little body in swaddling bands, sheltering the little bald head from the chill spring air with her softest woolen cloth, and walked out into the fields along paths still wet from melting snow, where the earliest spring blossoms had already pricked the dead leaves. The winter wheat showed its point of new sharp green, and the air alternately misted, showered, and shone in confusing variability.
In June the wheat was harvested and the brook of the valley was turned loose by irrigating ditches upon the stubble fields, which had already begun to parch and burn in the midsummer heat. The steep fields, being so flooded, were like a series of cascades and terraces, running and shining; yet the water also sank deep into the rich earth and before long the fields were bright, some with flowers and grass, some with the new crop of buckwheat. And still the happiness of Bertrande continued, accompanied always by the shadow of her suspicion, and she could no longer say:
“It will pass when I am delivered of the child.”
Through the summer, little by little the shadow increased in the mind of Bertrande. In vain did she contend with it. In a thousand small ways her suspicion was strengthened, in ways so small that she was ashamed to mention them. She thought of speaking of the matter in confession, but checked herself, saying:
“The priest will think me mad.” She did not say, “Or worse, he will find a way to prove that which I only suspect.”
But this was in her mind, and day after day she turned aside, she doubled her tracks, like a pursued creature, trying to avoid the realization which she knew was waiting for her. But as time went on she found herself more and more surely faced with the obligation of admitting herself to be hopelessly insane or of confessing that she was consciously accepting as her husband a man whom she believed to be an impostor. If the choice had lain within her power she would undoubtedly have chosen to be mad. For days and weeks she turned aside, as in a fever, from what she felt to be the truth, declaring to her distracted soul that she was defending the safety of her children, of her household, from Uncle Pierre down to the smallest shepherd, and then at last, one morning as she was seated alone, spinning, the truth presented itself finally, coldly, inescapably.