The Scapegoat by Daphne du Maurier Page A

if you hadn’t come home, then it would have been another matter. I shouldn’t have held on. I should have jumped out, and died. And then I should have burnt in hell. But I would rather burn in hell than live in this world without you.’
    I looked at her again: the small oval face, the close-cropped hair, the burning eyes. The passionate avowal was disturbing, shocking, something to be expected from a fanatic, not a child. I thought hard to find the right thing to say.
    ‘How old are you?’ I asked.
    ‘You know quite well I shall be eleven next birthday,’ she said.
    ‘Very well, then. You have the whole of life before you. You have your mother, aunts, grandmother, all the people here at home who love you, and yet you talk wild nonsense about throwing yourself from a window if I wasn’t here.’
    ‘But I don’t love them, Papa. I only love you.’
    So that was that. I wanted a cigarette. Unconsciously I fumbled in my pockets, and seeing this she jumped from the bed, ran to a small desk near the window, took out a box of matches from a pigeon-hole, and in a flash was back by my side with a lighted match held ready.
    ‘Tell me,’ she said, ‘is it true that measles can be bad for unborn babies?’
    The switch of mood was beyond me. ‘I don’t know,’ I said.
    ‘Maman told me that if I catch it and pass it to her, and she passes it to the little brother, then he will be born blind.’
    ‘I can’t tell you. I don’t understand those things.’
    ‘If my little brother was blind, would you like him?’
    She was not solemn any more. She began to pirouette about the room on her toes, first on one foot, then on the other. I did not know how to answer her. She kept looking at me as she danced.
    ‘It would be very sad for a baby to be born blind,’ I said uselessly.
    ‘Would he have to be put in an institution?’ she said.
    ‘No. He would be taken care of here at home. In any case it won’t happen.’
    ‘It might. I may have measles, and if I have, I am sure to have passed them on to Maman.’
    I felt I had caught her out, and the slip was too good to miss.
    ‘You told me just now that you had a fever because you were afraid I wouldn’t come home,’ I said swiftly. ‘You didn’t say anything about measles then.’
    ‘My fever came because I was visited by the Sainte Vierge. It is a sign of Grace,’ she answered.
    She stopped pirouetting, and got into bed, and covered her face with the sheet. I dropped my cigarette ash into a doll’s saucer and glanced around the room. It was an odd mixture of nursery and cell. There was a second slit in the wall as well as the window where she had stood to throw chestnuts on myhead, and immediately beneath this slit she had improvised a prie-dieu, made out of a packing-case, with a piece of old brocade across the top. Above this was a crucifix, adorned with a rosary, and between two candles on the top of her prie-dieu was a statue of the Madonna. Close by, on the wall, were pictures of the Holy Family, the head of St Thérèse of Lisieux, and incongruously, perched lop-sided on a stool, a doll with paint-splodges over its naked stuffed body, pierced through the heart with a pen-holder. Round its neck was a card with the words ‘The Martyrdom of St Sebastian’. Toys, more suited to her age than the prie-dieu, lay about the floor; and by her bed was a photograph of Jean de Gué in uniform, taken, judging by the youthful appearance, before she was born.
    I stubbed out my cigarette and got up. The figure under the blanket did not move.
    ‘Marie-Noel, promise something.’
    Still no movement. I supposed she was foxing sleep. It did not matter.
    ‘Promise you won’t climb on the window-sill again,’ I said.
    Nothing happened, and then there was an odd scratching sound, which began faintly, stopped, and continued more loudly. I realized that she was scratching the wall beside her bed in imitation of a mouse or rat. This was followed by a squeak, then a kick under the