A Fitting Outcome

“It’s you I like, Gloria. Because you are you.”

Your heart made me glad.

And yet his heart could never wholly become mine, and at the same time I had never once thought of it as mine.

“You have something to say to me, I think.”

Was it that he wanted to hear me say the child was not mine? It would not have been so difficult a thing to say.

Because I am not Gloria. I am Marienne.

Now was the moment to tell the truth. And yet, for the life of me, the courage would not come.

When you come to know the whole of the truth, how will you look at me then, I wonder.

He would be bewildered, certainly. He might well come to loathe me for having deceived him all this while. And one thing, at least, was beyond doubt. The moment my true identity came to light, I could no longer covet Herman’s heart. Without even the borrowed skin of ‘Gloria’ to wear, he and I would be nothing at all to one another.

And so the only words I could bring myself to say to him were…

“…Do you mean to cast the child out?”
“What?”
“That child, Franz — he isn’t your child, is he.”

That was the very most I could manage. I could not say the one thing truly in me, that I wanted by whatever means to stay at his side, and so I was reduced to asking what was to become of the child, and nothing more.

With an effort I lifted my head and looked at Herman. Something almost desperate showed in his deep gaze, as though he were silently demanding I explain how any of this had come about.

But I had no excuse to offer. Whatever I said here would only be one more lie.

“So you would have me cast the child out.”

A long while passed before he spoke again, slowly.

“Then what of you.”
“…”
“Do you wish to be driven out along with that child yourself?”

No. I want to stay at your side.

That simple truth of my heart I could not confess; my lips only worked, soundlessly.

Even brazenness must have a limit, and I have surely passed it.

To want to stay at Herman’s side even at a moment like this. It was too absurd even to laugh at. What husband could ever forgive a wife who had betrayed him?

Even if it was not I who did the deed…

Even in that moment I was wishing he would take me into his arms once more, vast as the sea, the way he had always wrapped me round and kept me safe, anywhere and everywhere. Truly, it was a selfish greed.

“I’m sorry. I have not one word to say for myself — not if I had ten mouths to say it with.”
“And so?”

Herman asked.

“If that is your will, then I shall gladly accept it.”

The world before my eyes blurred and swam, more and more.

“I went through a great deal during the war, and I came to understand. How precious a thing it is to have a place to return to, and a family. You’ll likely never know what I felt when I heard that the wife I’d assumed had long since remarried was, in fact, waiting for me.”

He was a man who prized a family as dearly as that. How deeply this must have wounded him I could not begin to measure. Nothing could be taken back now. With a bastard child come to light, I was nothing more than the wife who had betrayed him.

“Damn it all.”

Herman ground the curse out low between his teeth.

“To the very last, not one word to me…”

Unable to hold it in, he raked a rough hand back through his hair, then let out a breath, slow and deep. His gaze, his movements, the turn of his hand, his breathing. Every small thing that came off him was hollow past all measuring.

“Yes. It seems it was my own greed after all.”

I could carry the conversation no further, and Herman, in the end, made no attempt to hide his hollow despair from me.

If I told him even now that I am Marienne, would Herman believe me?

Things having come to such a pass, I might well confess the truth to Herman and lay Gloria’s outrages bare before all the world. Unlike at the beginning, he might even believe me now. But.

And what if he reproaches me — you had chance upon chance to speak all this while, so why did you say nothing?

Against a reproach of that kind I could have offered no excuse at all. That I had gone on deceiving him ever since the ball was, undeniably, a fault of my own. It was selfish of me, but I would sooner be hated as ‘Gloria.’ I had not the courage, not for anything on earth, to take Herman’s contempt upon myself as ‘Marienne.’

“I’ll ask you one last time. Have you truly nothing to say to me?”

Through damp eyes I looked at Herman’s shoulders, trembling ever so faintly. Or no; perhaps it was only my tears, warping the light, that made them seem so.

“…No. I have nothing.”

I had never been able to understand those people in operas and novels who make the wrong choice for the sake of love. Such idiocy, I had always thought, was nothing but literary invention, a bit of staging with a dash of exaggeration thrown in. But now I know. It was a depiction dreadfully true to life.

How is it that this thing called the heart can make a person so wretchedly foolish.

I turned my head aside and gave him nothing but my cheek to look at.

I never once imagined it would end this way.

And yet I knew it by instinct. This was the end of us. I could not covet him and I could not speak the truth. Nothing at all was left me to do now.

“What on earth am I to you?”

Herman asked. Desperately, or perhaps piteously. But I could answer nothing at all.

When I cannot so much as define my own existence — how should such a creature as I dare to define you…

Nor did Herman seem to have asked in any expectation of an answer. With those words he passed straight by me and went out of the drawing room.

It never even occurred to me to wipe away the tears running down my face; I only curled my hands into fists until the skin of them went white.

All I ever coveted was you. You alone.

In the end I had failed to keep hold of any of it, neither my name nor love. It was as though someone were sneering close beside my ear, saying that this, surely, was a punishment I had no right to refuse.

A punishment earned for having thought it an easy thing to live a life I had stolen. A punishment earned for having harboured in my heart a man I ought never to have let myself care for.

It’s all right… It’s all right…

Because I had wanted to covet Herman, if only for a moment, and had sworn to myself I would gladly pay whatever price came of it.

Perhaps this was a fitting outcome.

I shut myself in the bedchamber and wept without ceasing until the sky burned red with the sunset. Wrung dry from so much weeping, I sat down in a chair and looked up at that red sky.

“Well, then — why did you go and say you’d cut off the money for his keep, all of a sudden, when you’d been paying it so handsomely? If only you’d kept the money coming, I’d have hidden this child away and raised him till the day I died.”

The old woman herself, by the look of her, had been thrown by how the situation had changed from before.

I let my guard down. I never spared a thought for clearing up the mess I made at the ball.

The morning after the ball, Gloria would have woken to find her dress swapped for another.

How was it that I never once thought Gloria might strike back?

In an instant the days since the ball went racing through my head.

…No wonder at all.

For the whole of that time my mind had been taken up entirely with Herman, who never once stopped telling me what he felt.

What in the world am I to do from here?

Not one way out of it came to me. My head was heavy, and my body was worn out.

I reproached myself for the foolish choice I had made at the ball. I could not forgive myself for having failed to be rational. And yet, on the other hand, I did not entirely regret that choice. Which only made it harder, and more bewildering still.

And then, in that very moment, a click. The bedchamber door opened without a knock, and through the narrow crack of it I saw a hand like a white daisy.

“In you go.”

Tess’s voice, coming from beyond the door, was cold as ice. As though she could not so much as bear the sight of my face, she kept herself pressed close behind the door and pushed it open a little further.

“Go on in, I said.”

At a second urging, fierce as fire, a small child came shuffling hesitantly into the room. Bang. The door was pulled hastily shut.

I looked at the child a while, then buried my face in my knees again. My head, dulled from weeping too long, could not take in the situation properly.

A child…

Every single day, I had prayed. That if only I were granted a child, I would do anything. That if only I were granted a child, I would give anything.

How I had longed for a child these past few years. Under my mother-in-law’s badgering and my husband’s utter want of responsibility, I had wished, and wished, and wished for one. Perhaps that desperate prayer had only now been answered. In a way I could never once have imagined.

“Hah.”

A twisted laugh burst out of me.

And what use is that to me now.

I no longer knew anything. I simply wanted to think of nothing at all.

How many hours went by after that, I wonder. The sun slipped away behind the ridge of the mountains, and the room turned pitch dark in an instant. Around then, a small, even sound reached my ears.

When I raised my head I saw the child crouched down beside the wardrobe, dozing. Only then did my reason begin, little by little, to come back to me.

He’ll be uncomfortable, sleeping like that.

And it struck me suddenly. What fault of the child’s was any of this? In all this deranged business, the one flawless and blameless victim was the child himself. A frail child, wounded worst of all by the greed and the sins of grown-ups.

On instinct I rose from my chair and went over to him. His small face was stained with tears, though when he had wept them I could not say, and the sight of it was nothing but pitiful.

What was his name again.

Ah. That’s it.

“Franz.”

I made to gather the child up carefully. First of all, it seemed, I ought to lay him down on the bed.

“Mnn.”

But perhaps because I was not used to holding a child, he went on fretting and whimpering. Hastily I stroked his back.

“It’s all right. Sleep a little longer.”

I laid him down on the bed and drew the covers over him. Patting the small chest as it rose and fell, I looked down at him for a while. Once more the room filled up with the soft purr of his breathing, and somehow that faint sound of breath seemed to be comforting me.

“…”

In the child’s face I could see Gloria, and in the same breath I could see my own.

I cannot bring myself to hate him.

He was the one thing left to me, who had lost everything. All that night through I patted him gently. Perhaps it was thanks to that small warmth of his that I was able to endure the night at all.

That night, as was only to be expected, Herman did not come to the bedchamber.