CHAPTER VII
AFTER THE WEDDING
Mathilde and Surdon came hurrying into the room and were not less terrified than I was to discover Cordélia in this statue-like condition. The only thing which we could be certain about was that she was not dead. I cannot remember all that we attempted, Mathilde and I, to “bring her back to her senses,” while Surdon went to fetch the nearest doctor.
We carried Cordélia in her state of insensibility on to the balcony. We brought her back again. We tried the effects of cold and heat in turn. We placed hot bricks to her feet and cold compresses to her forehead. What alarmed us more than anything else was the complete rigidity in which she lay in our arms, and nothing that we could do succeeded in relaxing the tension.
I employed a phrase just now with the full meaning of which I was unacquainted. I said that Cordélia fell on my shoulder in a cataleptic-like sleep. That was true, but I more or less learned for the first time the meaning of catalepsy from the village doctor whom Surdon brought back.
And even then I failed to grasp the significance of what he was saying except that Cordélia was suffering from a nervous malady which had reached the critical point, and must have been brought about by great mental and physical strain and the unwonted excitement of a wedding day. He did not tell us anything new from this point of view, for it was in this sense that we regarded her illness. To what other cause could we, in our ignorance, attribute it save to excitement and fatigue?
Unfortunately this blockhead of a doctor proved his inability to awaken Cordélia. After blowing on her eyes without effect he seemed greatly perplexed. He knew more about it than we did, perhaps, but he was as powerless as we were. To our stormings and complaints he could but reply: “She will wake up of her own accord just as she fell asleep.” And he counseled me to have patience.
Have patience!... He was the limit!... I asked him in a voice strained with anxiety, how long this torpor could last. His only answer was to shake his head. He exasperated me.
“But, look here, will it last one hour—two hours?”
“One can never tell.... One can never tell.”
“Still it can’t go on for a couple of days, I suppose?” I cried, incensed.
“Well, there have been such cases, but generally speaking....”
I could have struck him. And yet he was a worthy man who strove to comfort me, to persuade me that the case was not very serious, to lead me to hope that we were confronted with a phenomenon which, if due precautions were taken, might not recur, and, moreover, would yield to treatment. And at the finish he recommended me to consult a specialist in nervous diseases. Having said so much, he gave me the slip.
I at once sent Surdon in the car to Rouen, whence he was to bring back Dr. Thurel, celebrated in the district for certain unusual cures which bordered on the miraculous.
I turned Mathilde out of the room, for since the doctor’s remedies and her own nostrums were of no avail, she imagined that we were the victims of the devil, and she wearied me with her lamentations and exorcisms. I had the utmost difficulty in preventing her from going for the priest. What a honeymoon!
Left alone before the sofa on which Cordélia’s statue-like form lay, I felt less affected by the pitiable spectacle of my beloved than by a sort of almost childish frenzy against the fate which had played this trick upon me. Heaven knows I deserved to be pitied! To have waited so long for this day and to pass it with a woman who had been turned to stone! By what fatality had Cordélia fallen asleep at the very moment when she was in my arms? It was indeed, to use my uncle’s words, “utterly silly.”
In my intense selfishness, knowing now that Cordélia’s life was in no danger, I mourned rather for myself than for her. I was, so I thought, the victim.... Thus many men when they are balked of something on which they have set their hearts, or when the object of their desire escapes them, act like brutes. I am ashamed when I think of myself cursing Heaven in this room in which Cordélia and I were “at last alone.” I am bound to say, however, in my own favor, that by degrees this blind resentment which arose in me against things in general, gave way to a feeling of great compassion and sorrow for the beloved being who still slept.
As the hours slipped away I was oppressed by an ever-increasing anguish. Now I kept watch over Cordélia as though she were dead, and I bowed in wonder before this great mystery, which was not less terrifying than the mystery of death itself. Poor, poor, poor Cordélia!