Free The Scapegoat by Daphne du Maurier

Oddly, this shocked me more than anything that she herself had said.
    ‘Then you brought me the little present you promised?’ Her eyes went small, her body stiff with expectation. The atmosphere suddenly became taut and strange. I did not know how to answer her.
    ‘Did I promise you a present?’ I asked.
    Her great mouth sagged. Her eyes pleaded with a tense, frightened look I would not have believed possible a moment ago.
    ‘You didn’t forget?’ she said.
    I was spared the impossibility of replying by the reappearance of Blanche. A change of expression came like a mask over the mother’s face. She bent to the terriers on her lap and began to pet them. ‘There, there, Jou-Jou, stop biting your tail, will you, and behave. Give him some room, Fifi, you take up the whole of my lap. Here, go to your uncle.’ She forced the dog, which I did not want, into my hands, and it wriggled and squirmed until it was free, and then ran and hid under herchair. ‘What is the matter with Fifi?’ she said, astonished. ‘She has never run away from you before. Has she gone mad?’
    ‘Let her alone,’ I said. ‘She smells the train on me.’
    The animal was not deceived. The point was interesting. In what did my physical difference from Jean de Gué lie? His mother had sunk back in her chair, and was staring morosely at her daughter. Blanche stood stiff and straight, her hands resting on the back of a chair, her eyes fixed upon her mother.
    ‘Am I to understand there will be two trays here for dinner?’ she asked.
    ‘Yes,’ rapped the mother. ‘It is more amusing for Jean to dine upstairs with me.’
    ‘Don’t you think you have had enough excitement as it is?’
    ‘I am not excited. I am perfectly calm, as you can see for yourself. You only say that because you want to spoil our fun.’
    ‘I don’t wish to spoil anything. I’m thinking of your good. If you become too excited you won’t sleep, and then you will have one of your bad days tomorrow.’
    ‘I shall have a worse day, and a worse night, if Jean does not stay with me now.’
    ‘Very well.’ The acceptance was calm, the matter shelved. The daughter proceeded to tidy books and papers about the room, and I was struck by the complete tonelessness and absence of emotion in her voice, and by the fact that she never looked in my direction. I might not have been there, for all the notice that she took of me. I guessed her age to be about forty-two or three, yet she could have been older or younger. The cross and chain which she wore over the dark jumper and skirt were her only concession to adornment. She brought a table beside her mother’s chair in preparation for dinner.
    ‘Has Charlotte given you your medicine?’ she asked.
    ‘Yes,’ replied her mother.
    The daughter sat down some distance from the roaring stove and took up knitting from a table. I could see a missal on the table, leather-bound prayer-books, and a Bible.
    ‘Why don’t you leave us?’ said her mother in sudden savagery.
    ‘I am waiting until Charlotte brings the trays,’ was the reply.
    The passage of words between them had the immediate effect of making me a partisan of the mother. Why, I could not tell. Her manner was deplorable, and yet I found her sympathetic and the daughter the reverse. I wondered if I was drawn to the mother merely because of her likeness to myself.
    ‘Marie-Noel has been seeing visions again,’ said the comtesse.
    Marie-Noel … Someone below had talked of Marie-Noel having a fever. Was she another religious sister? I felt some comment was required of me.
    ‘It’s probably due to her fever,’ I said.
    ‘She hasn’t a fever. There’s nothing wrong with her,’ said the comtesse. ‘She likes everyone to notice her, that’s all. What did you say to her before you went to Paris that upset her?’
    ‘I didn’t say anything,’ I answered.
    ‘You must have done. She kept telling Françoise and Renée that you were not coming back. It was not only you who