"We must put an end to it and break with each other, and that immediately," he said aloud.
He sat down at his table to write to Helen, but a note asking merely for an appointment, for to break with her by letter and leave such a weapon in her hands would be madness. Why not withdraw without seeing her again as he had done in the case of more than one mistress? It was impossible under the circumstances; it would be necessary also to renounce ever seeing Alfred again. He must therefore resign himself to a rupture by means of a scene.
The most important point was the choice of a locality. At her own house? And what if she had hysterics and some one came in? In the Rue de Stockholm? But what if she threw herself into his arms and the fever of the senses led him to take her once more, only to leave her afterwards like a clown, after possessing her? Once more, no.
"This is the best place after all," he said to himself. "The fact that the servant is at the door will be enough to restrain me from yielding to her. And if she has an hysterical attack, I have my little travelling medicine chest." And he scribbled a note absolutely correct in form. Had Alfred intercepted the missive he would have found in it nothing but an offer very natural, considering their somewhat exceptional degree of intimacy, to show Helen some albums for the choice of a costume for a fancy dress ball. In order to justify the meeting at his own house, he alleged the size of the albums and the difficulty of transporting them.
When he had sent this letter, melancholy took possession of him. A sudden vision showed him in anticipation the gladness that Helen would feel on the receipt of this note. The two occasions on which she had visited the rooms in the Rue Lincoln had been holidays of the heart to her. What a deception was there awaiting her on the morrow!
"Come, come," said Armand with energy. "In one short month I shall be in London for the season. On my return they will be spending their holidays away from Paris. This ugly story will have a better ending than many others. Poor Alfred! There is still time to act as an honourable man."
He said this to himself, and our miserable hearts are so ingenious in duping themselves, that while he said it he believed it.
It was a little after two o'clock in the afternoon of the following day, when Helen Chazel entered this same drawing-room in the Rue Lincoln where the day before her husband had spoken, and her lover reflected, in a manner that would have prostrated her soul with despair had she been able to know their words and thoughts; but she was aware of but one thing—her deep joy at seeing her lover again after so long a time. The past forty-eight hours had seemed endless to her. When passing in front of the servant she had experienced a slight impulse of nervous emotion, although she had her veil over her face, and the man would probably never know her name. Joy at this meeting prevailed—joy and also anxiety. Since she had lost the intoxicated certainty of the early days of their love, she never parted from Armand without asking herself:
"How shall I find him next time?"
And now again, while he was relieving her of her muff and cloak, she was at once enraptured and uneasy. She took off her veil and then merely said to him: "How do you do!" laying her head upon the young man's shoulder and looking at him. This look was sufficient to enable her to discern on his countenance the premonitory tokens of the impending conversation. He had said nothing to her, and already she knew that he had not brought her to show her albums, that the excuse of the preceding day for not seeing her was a false one, that an important event had come to pass.
But what event? On the occasion of their walk in the Jardin des Plantes, just two days before, he had been more coaxing, more loving, less reserved than was his wont. She had almost ventured to feel aloud in his presence. A sudden transition had again ruffled the intimacy between them. What was he going to say? He had forced her to sit down without giving her any other caress than the stroking of her hair with his hand, and he began to speak to her, relating Alfred's visit of the previous day, the result of their explanations, and the meeting in the Jardin des Plantes.
"You reproached me for being over-prudent. You see now whether I was wrong in telling you that he was growing jealous. What did he say to you in the evening?"
"Nothing," she replied.
Although this birth of jealousy on Alfred's part, and the evidence of his deception towards herself were facts of weighty importance to her security, what chiefly concerned her at that moment was to ascertain how her lover had defended his love—their love—and she asked him:
"What did you say to him yourself?"
"If I alone had been involved," returned Armand, "you can understand that I should not have resorted to subterfuge in the presence of such loyalty. In short, I have wronged him, he has a right to every reparation, and I should have felt it a great relief to offer him such; but you were implicated, and I gave him my word that there had never been anything but the relations of friendship between us."
He paused for a moment, and then went on with visible irritation.
"As it has never been our custom, neither his nor mine, to have two such words, one true and the other false, he believed me, and for the moment he is quieted."
She listened to him and looked at him, while he himself looked at the fire, his elbows upon his knees, and his chin on his hands. She was asking herself:
"If we were driven to such an extremity would he love me sufficiently to go away with me, to give me all his life and to accept mine?"
She was silent, absorbed in the expectation of that which was to follow, and which she could not yet foresee. On his part, he employed his last phrase in continuation.
"He is quieted—for the moment," he repeated, and he emphasized the last three words. "But our relations will be rendered very difficult ones. You see, when a man is not suspicious, everything that should serve as a proof against, serves as a proof for. When a man is suspicious, the contrary happens. Am I right?"
He was embarrassed by the silence in which she continued to look at him. Leaning back in her easy-chair, her hands extended on the two arms of it, her lips parted, she watched, panting as it were, for a gleam of tender emotion on her lover's face. She read on it nothing but the dry reflectiveness with which men set forth the data of a piece of business. His voice especially—that voice whose slightest tones she knew, the voice which always made its way into the remotest chambers of her heart—ah! that voice had a cruel, almost metallic harshness. Well! 'twas another episode to join to the tale of her prolonged martyrdom, the torture of a living creature chained to a dead soul wherein that which caused her to writhe in anguish did not awake so much as a vibration. Nevertheless, to this question, "Am I right," she replied in a voice choking with anxiety:
"It is possible; you are a better judge of such matters than I am." Then with an effort: "And what conclusion do you draw?"
"First promise me," replied Armand, "that you will not take ill what I am going to say to you. Be persuaded that I shall never have any object in view but your own interest. You do not doubt this?"
Why did Helen bow her head at these simple words as though she had plainly read the fatal words of rupture on his lips? Why was she on the point of crying out like the woman condemned during the Terror:
"Sir executioner, a moment longer."
Ah! why does the heart that loves possess this second sight which increases misfortune by the anticipation of them?
"We must endure a separation for a short time," the young man resumed, "until Alfred's suspicions have been set at rest—four or five months, perhaps six, but not more. I will make all easy for you by leaving Paris myself, although it is very inconvenient for me to do so just now. But your peace is the first thing to be considered, is it not?"
He continued speaking, but she had ceased to listen to him. It was not danger that she perceived before her. What was danger to her? Only one misfortune existed for her, that of seeing Armand no more. He spoke of separation for four or five months, perhaps six, just as he would have spoken of the beauty of the day, of a new play, of the paying of a visit. To him it appeared a very simple matter to be absent from the town in which she lived, to lay aside the sweet custom of their daily interviews! No, no, the man did not love her.
"And you announce this news to me calmly like that," she said; "and if you were to love me no longer after this absence, what would become of me? What would be left to me."
"I entreat you," replied Armand impatiently, for he felt that the lead in the conversation was slipping from him, "not to let us confuse the questions at issue. Just now we have to deal with your husband's jealousy and your own safety. Is an absence necessary? Yes or no? Everything turns on that."
"But what if I suggest another plan to you," she asked. "My husband is jealous—be it so. My safety is compromised—be it so. Then, take me away with you. I would rather lose everything and keep you."
And she devoured him with her eyes as she uttered these words. He was obliged to show the bottom of his heart this time. She was in one of these crises in which one stakes all to win all, to learn—yes to learn the truth, to hold it, clasp it, feel it as though it were a body, should death be the consequence!
"You know better than I," he replied, "that I cannot do that, and the reason why I cannot. You were forgetting your child. A wife may be taken from a husband, but never a mother from a son!"
"Ah!" she exclaimed, "why do you not tell me that you have ceased to love me? Why these phrases and this circumspection? Do you think that I am not brave enough to look reality in the face, whatever it may be? I swear to you, Armand, that it would be less cruel on your part to tell me everything at once. Armand, say that you have ceased to love me; I will not be angry with you, and will go away quite alone with my grief. A grief that you have caused will still be something of yourself; but do not leave me in this horrible uncertainty, do not speak so coldly of going far away from me if you love me. Heavens! what I am enduring!"
Her mouth was distorted with emotion, her breath came short, and tears started from her eyes, big, heavy tears that flowed down her cheek one after another, leaving what looked like furrows behind them.
"It is just as I expected," said Armand to himself, and these tears, instead of softening him, enervated him even to anger. He did not sympathise with this grief as he had sympathised with Alfred's, perhaps owing to that difference between the sexes which brings it to pass that a woman's grief is not always as intelligible to us as that of a fellow-man; at times, also, the feeling of cowardice that we feel when giving pain to a mistress so provokes us, by lowering us in our own eyes, as to exclude tenderness. He had risen, and was walking about the room, thinking to himself:
"Why not put an end to the whole thing at once?"
Then he added aloud:
"I really do not know what it is that makes you cry. In what I have said to you there was nothing that did not breathe the deepest affection for you."
How could she have failed to notice that already he no longer made use of the word "love."
"But since you require me to speak frankly to you, I will obey you. No; it is not only on your own account that I request this separation, but also on my own. There is now a barrier between us, Helen, that a man of honour cannot cross."
"What is it?" replied Helen, finding strength enough to raise her pale, tear-stained face.
"The unqualified trust of another man," he answered brusquely. "When Alfred came here, to this very spot, he did not speak to me of his jealousy only, he displayed such esteem and friendship towards me as I forbear from describing to you. He suspected me, and he came to me with open heart. There is no bitterness, no bitter sentiment in that heart, but beauty of feeling, straightforwardness and sincerity of friendship. No, Helen, I can deceive that man no longer. I should despise myself too much if I did."
"Well! and what of me?" she cried, rising in her turn. This praise of her husband by her lover completed her distraction, and anger was overtaking her. "Did I not trample upon all that, in order to come to you? Do you think that I was born for treachery and falsehood? Did you hesitate for one moment about asking me to deceive this honest man, this confiding friend, when you wished to have me? Ah! you are not ashamed of it on my account and you are on your own! I forbid you to speak of honour, and perjured faith, and betrayed friendship. You have no right to do so, seeing that it is upon yourself, upon yourself, understand, that it all recoils. Did you entreat me to be yours? Answer in your turn, yes or no?"
"Pardon me," returned Armand. "Let us go back to the facts. We loved each other. You were not a young girl so far as I know. I was not a youth. We were not making our first entry upon life—we were both persons of experience. Is that not so? We knew where we were going. I owed it to you not to compromise you. Did I speak of you to any living soul? I owed it to you not to disturb your peace? I am disturbing it and I withdraw. As to my conscience, permit me to be the sole judge of what it enjoins and what it forbids."
"And in six months," replied Helen, "will your conscience be more accommodating? Come, be logical and frank. It is not a momentary separation that you want but a rupture. Let me at least hear you say as much since you desire people to esteem you."
"Yes," replied the young man brutally, exasperated by the revolt of a woman usually so gentle and submissive.
"So you thought that you were free from all duty towards me?" she continued. "You were leaving me all alone in that way. You were going away. You would have written me five or six letters, and then that would have been the end. You would have uttered these fine phrases to yourself: 'We knew where we were going.' 'She was not a young girl.' 'We were both persons of experience.' I should be curious to know," she added with that mournful irony which is imparted by rising frenzy, "just what you understand by that."
"What would be the use?" he said.
"I want to know," she returned vehemently. "I have a good right to know at least what you think of me."
"Do you believe that I am not acquainted with your life?"
"With my life," Helen questioned, crushed by a kind of stupor, which the young man took for terror at this sudden revelation.
"Do you wish for facts?" he returned harshly. "Well, you shall have them. Have you forgotten your intrigue with Monsieur de Varades!"
"Ah!" she cried, "nay, that is infamous. Monsieur de Varades!" And she passed her hands wildly across her forehead. "Tell me that you did not believe that, I entreat you. My love, tell me that you did not think that of me. Oh! tell me, tell me, tell me!"
"I did believe it," he replied, his heart closed to the wail of his mistress by that keen, insidious jealousy of the past which, by a strange anomaly of his nature, had always caused him some pain when by her side, although he did not love her.
"Then," said Helen, frozen now by this reply, "if you believed it, why did you never speak of it to me? If the thought of it governed you when you asked me to be yours, if you considered that you had less responsibility towards me by reason of it, why did you entertain no doubt about it? Were you sure of it? Had you seen it? Was there not a chance against it being true—a chance, a single chance? Why, are you not aware that it is a crime to take all a woman's heart, and to keep thoughts of that kind in one's own?"
"Tut!" he replied, shrugging his shoulders; "you would have thought me perfectly ridiculous if I had not been your lover. Your past belonged to you alone, and I had no right to call you to account for it any more than for your future. As to the present, I know you well enough to be sure that you are not a woman who would take two lovers at the same time."
"'Tis a great honour," she replied in an almost stifled voice. She was pale as death. The egotism and insensibility of the man she loved paralysed her with such horror that her tears would no longer come. She felt but one desire: to leave this man, to see no longer those eyes and those lips—those lips that she had loved so well, and which had always lied so to her, since from the very first day he had believed this without proof! Mechanically she resumed her cloak and muff, and fastened her veil.
"Good-bye," she said. It would have been impossible for her to continue the conversation just then, so choked was she with indignation.
He did not try to detain her, and also said:
"Good-bye."
She left the room, and he accompanied her, without a word being spoken on either side, to the outer door. The latter once closed, he returned to the drawing-room, where no trace of the tragic scene enacted in it remained but the disarrangement of the easy chair that had been pushed aside by Helen as she rose.
"All has passed off better than I expected," he said to himself. "How easy it is to pin them to the wall with a little fact! Well! it is over."
"It is over," he repeated aloud with that strange feeling both of relief and of distress which accompanies the interruption of love. "She was very pretty," he reflected to himself. "Now we must be on the look out for revenge. But what revenge? She has not a note in which I speak familiarly to her. I shall have the trouble of taking away all those trifles of hers at Madame Palmyre's. I will have them returned to her later on, when we have reached the stage at which she can say to me 'You gave me great pain,' with the letter of my successor in her bosom, between the chemisette and her skin."
He sat down again in front of the fire, from which he drew a few sparks.
"Ah!" he continued, "the after-taste of life is too bitter!"
REVENGE! Such was scarcely the subject of Helen's reflections while returning from the Rue Lincoln. The sudden blow which she had just received had been too heavy a one to leave room within her for any other feeling but that of the most continuous and crushing grief. At the dinner table, during the evening, then during the night when alone in her own room with every light extinguished, and sleepless, then during the day that succeeded to that night, and during the other nights and days that ensued for a fortnight afterwards, what she perceived unremittingly and with the same cruel, uninterrupted clearness was the brutal fact that had at last been grasped in its indisputable reality, the fact that her lover had never loved her!
Not for a moment? No, not for a moment, seeing that when he had possessed her for the first time, he had believed himself in the possession of the former mistress of Monsieur de Varades, and perhaps of others. The smiles and reticences and unresponsiveness and mistrust on the part of Armand were now clearly accounted for, and her whole being rebelled against the murderous injustice, as she compared what she had given with what she had received. What! the tender refinements of her dreams, the noble madness of her dear love, the idolatry of her ecstasies, the sincerity of the sacrifices made without regret or remorse to give happiness to the man she loved, all this wasted upon a lie, upon a void, as vainly as the leaves driven by the wind along the walks of the old garden in which they had walked together, as uselessly as the motes dancing in a sunbeam on the edge of the window in the little room during those afternoons devoted to their loves.
Devoted to their loves? Yes, she had loved deeply, madly, and alas! for nothing—to find herself looked upon as a woman that passed from one intrigue to another, as one that had loosed her robe for this man and for that, as one that collected sensations, just as others collect fans or trinkets. Ah! she could not endure the injustice of it. To be deprived of the sight of Armand—for on the day following the explanation that had proved so tragical to her, Alfred had received a line from his friend announcing a temporary absence necessitated by business of importance—yes, to be deprived of the sight of Armand was an anguish to her, but she possessed a weapon against this anguish: the contempt with which she had been inspired by her lover's poverty of heart, by the implacable egotism of the man that the last conversation had revealed.
How should she ever accustom her heart to the iniquity of this same being whom she had so greatly loved. He had parted from her abruptly, and unworthily, but the recognition of the extent of her love for him would not have caused her so much suffering as she had endured. The martyrdom, the intolerable martyrdom consisted in the impotence of her love, not to command a return, but to make itself merely understood. She was like one under sentence of death who is willing indeed to die, but whose worst agony is the powerlessness to exclaim before death: "I am innocent."
How keenly he had made her feel the arrogant outrage inflicted by his honour as a man, for it was in the name of this honour that he had sacrificed her. Ah! had he loved her, how lightly he would have held this honour, just as she had lightly held her own; but how could he have loved her since from the very first he had believed her guilty of deception? She used to come and say to him: "I have kept myself for you," and he used to say to himself: "After Monsieur de Varades!" All the proofs of her affection—and how she had lavished them upon him!—had been shattered against this invincible conviction, and yet, heavens! her affection was real, as real as the life which had begun only on the day when she had come to know him. And she could hear his voice saying:
"We were both persons of experience. Do you believe that I was not acquainted with your life?"
Oh! what injustice, what hideous injustice! She sobbed her heart out at the thought of it. She came and went, a prey to continual fever, finding no more rest for her poor burning head than for her poor bleeding heart, and inwardly given over to a medley of emotions—despair for happiness that was lost for ever, keen regret for her absent lover, frenzy at having been misunderstood in the noblest and most genuine of her feelings. To repent of having belonged to this cruel Armand before the hour of her supreme deception, was what she could not do. Love, sublime love had impelled her to the act, as sublime as itself. Sublime love! "No," she now exclaimed, "blind, insensate love!"
And she walked to and fro, at random, in her room like a caged animal, and ever, as against an irrefragable wall, she struck against this thought:
"What was the use of having loved like that? What was the use? Ah! the lying, lying, lying!—"
What served to complete her provocation in the mortal crisis through which she was passing was the tender and untimely solicitude of her husband. As he had no suspicion of the drama that was being enacted in this distempered soul, he would chance to say to her, in the belief that he was holding out an agreeable prospect: "We will make a trip as soon as I am free. Perhaps Armand will come with us." Or perhaps: "I am surprised at not having heard from Armand. Has he not written to you?"
"No," she would reply.
Alfred now reproached himself for the explanation that he had had with his friend, feeling persuaded that the latter had gone to travel only in order to spare his jealousy. He thought about his wife's melancholy, he found it ever more inexplicable, and he told himself that he had deprived her of one of her few relaxations. She, on the other hand, was profoundly sensible of angered pride on thus encountering her husband's trust, which contrasted too sharply with the distrust of her lover. And then these plans of travelling together, which Alfred called up, were they not the very ones that she had herself formerly cherished? They showed her with only too great precision what might have been—those summer months whose intimate holiday-making she had imagined beforehand. They would have lived together by the seashore in one of the villages of Normandy, where the trees grow green to the very margin of the blue waves. Perhaps they would have seen together one of those Italian towns whose mere names seem to shroud a promise of happiness with light. And then there came nothing but freezing solitude, nothing but desertion! He had not written her a note since their rupture, not a line of pity. But why should he have pitied her? Doubtless he believed her already comforted, perhaps in the arms of another. Why not? He had deemed her capable of having Varades before himself. Two lovers, three, ten, what matters the total if there be more than one?
From day to day the keen pain of this injustice became more keen within her, and the pain resulted in a mad and morbid thought, yet the only one that could satisfy somewhat the despair that raged in her heart. Yes, in those hours of anguish she conceived the criminal thought of indeed committing frightful actions, since she had been deemed capable of them, of being like the image that Armand had formed of her, like that fast and facile woman whom he had believed himself to possess.
Moral life, like physical life, has its suicidal fevers, its damning frenzies. There are moments when we are driven at all costs to renounce our inner personality, to assassinate it, to become another being. It is especially injustice that produces these crises, mysterious yet so necessary, and so natural that even children, like animals, are subject to them. Are not the best rendered the worst by being beaten without having deserved it? The more Helen was sensible of having been irredeemably misunderstood, the more a frightful attraction impelled her to become just the opposite of what she had formerly been. A vertigo seized her, and, as it were, a delirious longing for degradation. "'Tis too foolish," she said to herself, "to have any heart."
This appetite for destruction which works in all creatures simultaneously with the sense of love, recoiled upon herself. She set herself to attack her own inner nature systematically, as some men intoxicate themselves, in analogous circumstances, glass by glass, in spite of disgust and, so to speak, from a sense of duty. She began to exhibit strange phenomena of nervous gaiety in the ordinary affairs of life. She, who hitherto had detested light conversation, affected to fill her talk with the most direct allusions to the things of love. She sent for those works which, during the last few years, she had heard spoken of as being the most audacious, in order to have them upon her table. She was seized with a sort of frenzy for pleasure, and every evening there would be a party at the theatre to which she brought Alfred, and she would speak of her intentions of going again into society, and interest herself with surprising activity in the disguise that she was to wear at a fancy ball given by the Malhoures, a ball for which Armand was to have chosen her costume. Her voice seemed to be of a higher pitch. She laughed a more sonorous laugh, and at all the demonstrations of this painful merriment Alfred, in spite of himself, felt affected by an indefinable anxiety, so completely were her eyes characterised by that extraordinary brightness, her gestures by those nervous jerkings, and her words by that abruptness which occasion a dread lest a woman capable of looking, gesticulating, and talking in this way should suddenly be seized by a fit of insanity, and should commit some extravagant and irretrievable action.
She was stranger still on the morning of the day on which she was to go to the Malhoures' ball. It was the first time since her quarrel with Armand that she was going out for the evening. She did not come down to breakfast. Alfred, seated at the square table with his wife's cover laid opposite to him, and with his son on his right, ate without speaking, a prey to the increasing distress inflicted upon him by the mournful oddness of Helen's behaviour. She no longer seemed to be aware of the little boy's existence. "Good morning, dear," "Good night, dear," and that was nearly all. She, a mother usually so loving, seemed to have the maternal instinct paralysed within her, and for the moment such was indeed the case.
A settled idea produces upon the heart the same effect as is produced by a bright and motionless point upon our eyes; it hypnotises the being which it sways, and limits its susceptibility to a tiny circle of sensations. It was impossible for the unhappy woman to have any feeling whatever in respect of her son, because in her condition of lucid aberration it was impossible for her to be sensible of his existence.
The little boy was raised on a high chair, and had that morning on his face the sad, and at the same time perplexed expression of a child that grieves without knowing why. A depth of undefined sorrow was in his eyes; his father was aware, merely by observing the way in which he ate with the tips of his teeth, that a hidden trouble was tormenting this curly head.
"Have you not been good this morning," he said to him, "that you are so sad?"
"Yes, I have been good," Henry replied, and was again silent; then suddenly he said: "Papa, what does 'to prejudice' mean?"
"It is a wrong done to a person unjustly. But why do you ask me that?"
"Because Miette said the other day that someone had prejudiced her uncle against her cousin." This expression, heard for the first time, and only half understood, had struck his childish imagination, and he went on: "Could anyone prejudice you or mamma against me?"
"What notions are you taking into your head?" replied the father.
He had just become sensible that his son was himself perceiving the change in his mother's disposition. He looked at him, and felt that inclination to weep which comes upon a widower at the sight of his orphan child—a poor little thing who has lost the greatest of earthly blessings, who does not suspect this, but who nevertheless forebodes and guesses irretrievable misfortune. Father and son preserved silence, when through the dining-room door, which had been left open, was heard a voice, Helen's voice, completing an order to a workwoman. "For nine o'clock then, punctually." She was engaged about her ball-dress. She was not there where her glance, her smile, would have cast such a ray of joy, and Alfred reflected upon the incomprehensible, and at the same time unconquerable disaster which had brought them all there, himself, his son, and his wife—especially his wife. Heavens! what was the matter with her?
He was still thinking of this many hours later, in the brougham that was taking them both in the direction of the Rue du Bac, where the Malhoures lived. She was in the corner of the carriage, with powdered hair and two patches at the corner of her thin, pale cheek. The powder, and the patches, and the dark touches that she had put round her eyes, in which the flame of fever was burning, imparted to her beauty something dangerous, and disquieting, and more inaccessible than ever to the man who was sitting by her side, and looking at her without venturing to speak.
Her neck, mobile and graceful, issued from the furs which hid her disguise as a flower-girl of the time of Louis XV. She wore pink silk stockings, pink satin shoes, a flowered skirt, and in her soul was the mortal blending of frenzy and despair of a woman who would ruin herself with delight, for nothing—for the sake of being ruined and ruined for ever! Through the brougham windows, the glass of which she had let down in order to inhale something of the keen night air, she watched the houses filing past, and the picture presented by Paris after the toils of the day. The shops were flaming on the ground floor; the cafés were opening their doors to customers; the wind was sending a quiver through the gas flames that outlined the notices of the theatres. Along the Boulevards, as in the Avenue de l'Opéra and in the Rue des Tuileries, there was a moving crowd.
Of what was this crowd in quest? Of pleasure, and of nothing but pleasure.Shehad pursued an ideal which had proved most false! It was time to live like the rest. A woman's amusement consists of coquetry, of intrigue. She would be a coquette. She would have lovers—yes, lovers. She repeated these words, in thought, with strange passion, for the face of the man she had loved had just appeared again before her recollection, and with it the unbearable palpitation of the heart had begun again. Ah! between that face and herself, between that memory and her heart, she would put other faces, other memories!
Yet, how he had mocked her! She now at certain moments felt a genuine hatred towards him. By a sort of backward crystallisation, she multiplied reasons for animosity round the thought of Armand that she bore in her mind, and she calumniated him fiercely on her own behalf. Did not his whole behaviour towards her bear the stamp of abominable and daily calculation? When he had entreated her to be his under the pretence that he would not believe in her love without this proof, was it not that he would not fail where another had succeeded? Was it true even that Alfred was jealous? This was doubtless a pretext devised for the purpose of bringing about a rupture. And how carefully he had kept the name of Varades to himself, to throw it into his mistress's teeth only at the last moment, without giving her time to justify herself! She ought to have spoken, to have looked for old letters, to have found some testimony. But why? Would he have believed her for an instant? And bruising herself afresh against the poisoned point of injustice, she detested all men in this man, she envied those who mock the hateful race, the jades who take the initiative in this duel of distrust and are the first to betray. How glad she would be to have been one of them, to have really had a dozen intrigues before that one with Armand, and to be able to tell him so, and to degrade herself and him, and to pollute everything within her and about her, her soul and her body, with a pollution such as no water could wash away.
She was enduring, while in this carriage, one of those tempests of passion which she had to pass through several times in the day, and especially at night, for she had not slept two hours out of the twenty-four during the past three weeks. It was as though a tide of bitterness were rising within her, and the whirling of her thoughts became so rapid that all idea of ambient things was blotted out from her consciousness; and she did not emerge from her dream until some inevitable detail compelled her to action, such as Alfred's hand shaking her arm as the brougham stopped, and his voice saying to her: "We have arrived." The stupor of an awakening from sleep showed in her eyes, and she recognised the Malhoures' gate.
The house stood at the back of a courtyard and was one of those old mansions such as are still found in that part of the Faubourg Saint-Germain, with views behind over vast stretches of garden, while in front there is the narrow, populous, noisy street. The house was let in floors, and the Malhoures occupied the second. The lofty windows were gleaming, and the shadows of the various couples were thrown in black, moving silhouettes upon the luminous glass. Old Malhoure, as he was familiarly called, was a professor in the École Polytechnique, a member of the Institute, and tolerably rich by inheritance from his father, the celebrated inventor. He had three marriageable daughters, and received every Wednesday. Twice a year he gave a fancy dress dance. On these evenings a general clearance was made. All the rooms, even thesavant'sstudy, were in requisition for the entertainment, and although they were large and lofty apartments, they scarcely sufficed for the number of the guests.
People used to visit the Malhoures a great deal. Their house was in the first place a centre of reunion for the great professor's former pupils who were separated by their modes of life; intrigue also went on behind the doors with important personages of the Academy of Sciences; finally people were amused by the youthfulness of the three young ladies and the good nature of their father, whose appearance—a legendary one in the École—was in itself an element of mirth. He was huge and short, with eyes hidden behind blue spectacles, a beard collar of greenish-white, clothes of extraordinary cut, and a continual nodding of the head. Though he presented this figure, it was pretended that the old man had once been a lady's man, a gay dog, as the students used to say facetiously to one another. At twenty-two, he had discovered a theorem, which bore his name, and since then he had multiplied treatises after treatises. When, wearied by fourteen hours of work, he went out in the evening, he used to follow the young workwomen in the Quartier de l'Observatoire, where he then lived. He used to heap up engaging offers to entice them, but he was so ugly—so ugly—that they laughed impudently in his face. The savant used to look round him to make sure he was not heard, and then murmur as a supreme argument:
"I am Malhoure, the inventor of the theorem!"
After his marriage he had grown somewhat religious, but he had remained very cheerful, especially when he had discovered some particularly elegant formula during the day. Such was doubtless the case that evening, for he was standing on the threshold receiving the guests with his most cordial smile, although he did not recognise one person out of ten; he had no memory for faces. By his side, and grumbling, was his intimate friend, Professor Moreau, a calculator long and lean, and as great a pessimist as Malhoure was an optimist. Just as Madame Chazel reached the landing, and while she was leaving her furs in the care of the servant, the two professors were speaking of a lady who had just passed, wearing a dress as outrageously low as she herself was faded, and old Malhoure was saying to his friend:
"Well, geometry does not grow old. The square of the hypotenuse is always young."
"For my own part," replied Moreau, "I can see whether a woman is hump-backed or blind of an eye, whether she walks straight or is lame. But what difference there is between ugliness and beauty I have never been able to conceive."
The piano was playing a quadrille, the din of the dance filled the rooms, and Malhoure clasped both of Chazel's hands, taking him for some one else, and calling him "My dear, my very dear Arthur." Helen was looking, with strange feeling of envy, at the professors, whose conversation she had just overheard. They at least would never know that continuous, settled torture which brings with it incapacity for a thought foreign to itself, for study, for reading, for conversation!
But she was already in the hands of Madame Malhoure and her three daughters, all four being equally unreasonable, and having no object save that of amusing themselves. The mother was dressed as Catherine de Médicis, and the three daughters as a gipsy, a milk-woman, and a Cauchois peasant. Their costumes savoured of work done at home, and fashioned with chance materials after the engravings of the illustrated papers, and the same held good of the toilets worn by these ladies' friends. The men, on their side, seemed uncomfortable in their black coats; several looked like people who had to get up early in the morning, and were computing that every call from the piano robbed them of a little of their sleep.
The talk that was flying about in the warm atmosphere was astonishing by contrast. Fragments of frivolous phrases alternated with thoughtful conversation.
"Don't talk to me of these new theories about space that has more than three dimensions—"
"Have you danced much this winter, mademoiselle?—"
"Ah! what a genius Cauchy had, what power of analysis!—"
"Mamma, will you allow me to stay for the cotillon?—"
Alfred Chazel had lighted upon one of his old companions, and was communicating to him a long-cherished project of a new algebra—that, namely, of order—and Helen, assailed by the effusiveness of the Malhoure ladies, was telling herself that it had been scarcely worth while to take trouble about her dress. Thanks to the education received from her step-mother, and also to her talks with Monsieur de Querne, she had acquired tolerably accurate ideas concerning society. She comprehended the distinction that separates true assemblies of the world from middle-class carnivals such as she was now present at. Nevertheless, as she was charming in her pale blue and bright pink costume, and could read the triumph of her beauty in the envious glances of many women, and the admiring gaze of the men, she gave herself up of set purpose to that sensation of success so intoxicating to feminine pride, even when it is a success that is despised; and she proceeded to dance every dance that she might exhaust the inward torture by physical activity, and she desisted only to visit the refreshment room and drink a little champagne. The wine sent a trifle of light and sparkling froth to her head that was so wearied by excessive thought.
She was standing thus beside the table in the refreshment room, fanning herself with one hand, and holding in the other the cup containing the last golden drops of the drink whose vague enervation was pleasant to her; her partner, an insignificant and sufficiently correct young man, who was quite proud of having promenaded with her on his arm, was trying to talk; he was speaking of the new play, a middle-class comedy which Monsieur de Querne had cruelly ridiculed one evening, and Helen was replying with praise of a work which hitherto on her lover's authority she had considered detestable. At the mere mention of the actors' names and the title of the play, she could see herself in a box beside him, and a flame coursed through her blood as she suddenly heard close to her a voice that completed her emotion—that voice?—no, but the voice of Monsieur de Varades, of the man who had exercised so fatal an influence upon the destiny of her love, the voice of him whose name Armand had flung in insult into her teeth during the scene of their rupture. By what cruel mystery of fate was the officer here, almost within two steps of her, and talking without appearing to see her?
Had she been able to reflect for a moment she would have deemed the presence of old Malhoure's former pupil as natural as her own. Was she not at this ball as the wife of an old fellow-student of De Varades? She would also have reflected that living for months and months, as she had done, apart from the society frequented by her husband, she was ignorant of the movements of Alfred's companions. But in her present state of morbid over-excitement, this sudden meeting struck her with a sort of almost terror-stricken stupor, which was immediately replaced by a fresh sweep of her secret grief, of that maddening grief which made her long to cryFire!andMurder!
Without paying any further attention to what her partner was saying, she looked with devouring curiosity at De Varades as though she had not met him for years. He was a handsome fellow, slenderly built, and muscular all over. The contrast in colour between his hair, which had become nearly white, and his moustache, which had remained very dark, gave a singular aspect to his refined head. A low forehead, a hooked nose, eyes that were somewhat too small and close together, and a flashing glance, in which bravery and temerity could alike be read, caused his countenance to be vaguely suggestive of the profile of a bird of prey. The stiffness, as of a uniform, assumed by the officer's evening coat, which he wore in a military style, was all that was further required to single him out and render him remarkable in an assembly wherein the wearied race of the men of desk and study was predominant. Since the audacious attempt at Bourges, Helen had never seen this disquieting individual coming towards her without feeling dimly uncomfortable, so sensible was she that in him she had an enemy capable of anything. And now, a prey to a maddening ulceration, she would on the contrary have liked him to approach her, to pay her attentions as he did formerly.
Yes, to pay her attentions, and she would not be childish and silly as she had been before. In her misery and madness, she went so far as to regret her former behaviour! She had been a loyal wife, and what had this done for her? Only brought her to an hour when nothing in the world remained to her save an incurable wound in the most sensitive portion of her heart. She drank a few more drops of champagne in order to relieve her thoughts, and De Varades, off whom she never took her eyes, turned in her direction. Did he see her for the first time, or had he perhaps affected not to notice her? He bowed and came to greet her, with the expression at once ironical, respectful, and freezing, with which he used to accost her at Bourges; and instead of replying to it, as she did then, with equal coldness, she had a light in her eyes and a smile on her lips. She held out her hand to him, and after the first polite formulas, immediately asked:
"Are you passing through Paris?"
"No, madame, I am living here," he replied; "I was appointed professor at the School of War four months ago."
"Four months, and you have not come to see us?" she said in a coquettishly reproachful tone of voice.
"No, but I heard about you," replied the young man, and to himself: "How Paris has changed her!" He detested her deeply, first because she had wounded his pride, and then by reason of the infamous conduct of which he had been guilty towards her. He had boasted of having been her lover, giving details in proof; it was not true, and he could not forgive her for the irreparable wrong that he had done her. Ah! if the calumny had only been like those others that are stated aloud and that it is possible to grasp! But no, it passes from ear to ear and from lip to lip until it reaches a man who might have loved this woman, and whose heart is stayed, suddenly paralysed by the terrible uncertainty concerning the answer to the question: "Has she that in her past?"
To the young officer's credit it must be said that he had not seen so far. He had yielded to the hideous spite of masculine vanity, and it was again this vanity which, on Helen's unexpected reception of him, prompted him to murmur an interrogative "Eh?" and immediately to begin again the love-comedy that had formerly been played. A waltz was sounding—the waltz ofFaust, for the second of the young Malhoure ladies was at the piano, and she, the artist of the family, liked people to dance to classical subjects, whereas the eldest and the youngest, who prided themselves upon being regular Parisians, doted on popular music, and airs from the operettas and musical cafés.
"May I have the honour of this waltz, madame?" asked De Varades of Helen.
"Was I engaged or was I not?" said the latter. "So much the worse! I restore you your liberty," she added, addressing the young man who had accompanied her to the refreshment room, but who through timidity did not venture to remind her of the promise she had given of dancing with himself; and immediately she was whirling round in the ball-room in the arms of De Varades.
She was whirling round, prettier than ever with the feverish pink that coloured her cheeks and imparted to them a tint similar to that of her stockings, her skirt, and her corsage. The two patches at the corner of her cheek, her black eyes, and her powdered hair, clothed her with a sovereign grace that, apart from feelings of pride, stirred old longings in the young man's heart. He was speaking to her while they danced. She listened to him with—strange contrast!—Armand's image before her thoughts. "If he could see me," she said to herself, "he would have doubts no longer, he would triumph. Well! what does that matter to me?"
This strange inclination to act exactly contrary to her inmost nature, which, when light and artificial is called spite, was exalted in this distempered soul to the pitch of aberration, and she listened with a pleased smile to what De Varades said to her. The latter, clever enough to discern that something extraordinary was going on in Madame Chazel's mind, and too desirous of requital not to take advantage of the opportunity, had again begun to speak to her of his feelings. In passionate terms he depicted to her his despair at Bourges when he had displeased her, his vain attempts at self-consolation, his resolve never to marry for her sake; he gave her to understand that she was the only woman he had ever loved, and that he had sought an appointment at Paris solely that he might meet her again. Never had he dared to tell her so much at the period of their early relationships, and before his brutal assault. But to all these falsehoods, repeated over and over again during this first waltz, then in the square dances which followed, and then in the quietude of the cotillon which they danced together, she responded by such slight interjections of doubt as encourage avowals. She seemed to be delirious for coquetry; she spent upon this flirtation of an evening the fever that was preying upon her. Thus, a few hours later, the officer, on his return to his small abode in the Rue Saint-Dominique—a suite of apartments of which only two were furnished, the others being filled with uniforms, weapons, and big boots—swore inwardly as he undressed that he would carry this affair through with a high hand. From his grandfather, who had served under the Emperor, De Varades inherited the maxim that everything, in all circumstances, should be ventured with women. And so, when he laid his head upon his pillow before going to sleep, he had resolved to essay the possession of Madame Chazel, no matter where, even were it on the couch in her drawing-room, at the risk of a servant's entrance. "And this time she shall not escape. She told me she was always at home between two and four. Till to-morrow," he added, and closed his eyes on the sweet hope of repairing his former wrong.
Poor Helen! While this man, anticipating the temerity with which frenzy for injustice endured had inspired her, was falling asleep over his dangerous plan, she herself was watching, a prey to those memories each one of which was hurrying her to some act of madness. Her husband had been unlucky enough to say to her on their return to the Rue de la Rochefoucauld after the party at the Malhoures':
"I thought you had quite an antipathy to Varades, and you danced with scarcely anybody else."
"Does that make you jealous?" she had asked him abruptly.
"No," he had replied, "but how is it possible to change one's disposition towards people in this way?"
"I am what it pleases me to be," she had replied.
She might at that moment have been forbidden to throw herself into the water, and in her rage for contradiction, and to relieve her nerves, she would have hastened to the Seine. On entering her room again, she felt so unhappy that she did not even undress. She walked about in her ball costume until morning, and the champagne she had drunk, the bewilderment of the party, the fund of despair upon which her soul had been living for so many hours, all united to confuse her understanding.
"Yes," she said to herself at certain moments, "'tis he that I must have and no other—for the time being," she added with such implacability in the imagining of ill as at dark moments relieves the heart somewhat, "and when I have done it, when I am low and in the mire, then perhaps I shall forget, and then all this will be over, over, over."
And when her soul recoiled at the wildness of this monstrous plan, then, that she might resume her inclination for the shame to which she was being dizzily impelled, she pictured Armand to herself, she saw him with his eyes and his smile, she heard his voice:
"Do you believe that I was not acquainted with your life?"
"Ah!" she would then exclaim like a wounded creature uttering a cry, and she would stretch herself upon her bed with that whirl in her sick brow which was intolerable to her.
In the morning she had an hour's heavy sleep, visited with nightmare. At about nine o'clock she rose to attend to household affairs, as was her habit, indolently and with soul roaming elsewhere. Extreme fatigue and, as it were, a dying languor had taken possession of her. After breakfast she went up to her room again, and, in spite of herself, her hands opened the box containing Armand's letters. There were not fifteen—she counted them—and the longest of them had but two pages. She read them again, as she did nearly every day, and their aridity showed to her even worse than on former occasions. Every phrase in these notes might have been quoted without compromising her to whom the notes were addressed; and so there was not one that might have been traced in a moment of self-surrender, or to give passage to the overflowing of a heart. She had believed formerly that he used to write to her in this way out of regard for her peace, and she had been grateful to him for it.
Fool! Fool! He wrote to her thus because he did not love her, because he had never loved her, and why should he have loved her, judging of her as he did? In his eyes, what was she? A woman like all the rest! Of what did he not believe her capable? Of making use, perhaps, of his letters against him? Her soul was bleeding again at every pore. Ah! what remedy was there, what remedy?—and as she was asking herself this question for the hundredth time the servant entered and inquired whether she would see Monsieur de Varades. The officer had kept his word, and had not lost a day in taking advantage of the permission to come and see her which she had granted him.
"Show him into the drawing-room," she said; suddenly the memory of Armand's injustice awoke keener than before, and the crisis of sorrow through which she had just been passing resulted in one of those rushes of frenzy in which she really no longer knew what she was doing. She went into her dressing-room. With a little water she removed the traces of her tears, for at the times when she renewed, one by one, the details of her wretchedness, she used to weep, almost without perceiving it, and mad, as it were, through grief, she went down to the little drawing-room.
"How kind of you to come to keep me company!" she said, holding out her hand to the young man. Voluntarily she made him sit down in the arm-chair in front of her, the one in which Monsieur de Querne used generally to sit. How he had lied to her in that place! How he had misunderstood her! It seemed to her that she was taking vengeance upon him at that moment by this profanation of their common memories. She herself took a seat on the couch which stood obliquely against the fireplace, in which the remnant of a fire was burning. She looked at De Varades with eyes that did not see him, but he, as he began to talk, watched her with much attention. The obvious wildness that she displayed, the almost incoherent rapidity of her speech, the element of nervelessness that was manifested in her laughter, in her gestures, in the movements of her head, all evidenced a woman that was half beside herself.
The evening before De Varades had inwardly said in explanation of her coquetry at the Malhoures' ball: "She wants to make some one jealous." Then he had not discovered any one wearing towards her the countenance of a wounded lover. In the twilight in the little drawing-room he said to himself: "'Tis she who is jealous, and wishes to be revenged." Insensibly he caused the conversation to glide upon the same slope as on the previous evening; he spoke to her again of his despairing and melancholy feelings. She listened to him almost without reply, with the thought of the indignation that Armand would feel after all, if he could see her at that moment. De Varades meanwhile was reasoning thus to himself:
"What do I risk? Being shown the door once again as at Bourges?"
He made up his mind to take advantage of the disquiet which, as he could see, possessed her, and he rose and seated himself on the couch by her side, saying to her:
"Ah! I loved you dearly!"
She turned towards him with a delirious expression which he took for the frenzy of spite, and he seized her in his arms. Was it that kind of momentary aberration which at certain moments prompts us to the performance of actions in which later on we fail to recognise ourselves? Was it the domination of a distempered will by a will that was cold and steady? To what extent did that frenzy for degradation, that madness for her own ruin which had haunted this hapless soul the evening before, enter into her weakness? The fact remains that she did not defend herself against the young man's embrace. He grew more bold, and she was completely his. Yes, in that very drawing-room where formerly she had shrunk in horror from giving herself to the man she loved, she suffered herself, alas! to be taken by a man whom she did not love, and the latter was stupefied both by the ease of his victory and by the corpse-like insensibility encountered in this unlooked-for mistress, of whom he had not even been thinking twenty-four hours before.
De Varades had been gone for a long time, and evening was falling. Helen had remained in the same place, seated in the same corner of the couch, as though dead. The enormity of the event that had just come to pass had suddenly dispersed the hallucination in which grief had been causing her to live during the past few weeks. What! she was the mistress of Monsieur de Varades—she, Helen Chazel! No, it was not true, seeing that she loved Armand. Where was she? What had she done? Impelled by what madness?
And through the supreme horror by which she was possessed on finding that she was alive, and that all was true, a sudden idea rose in her mind, the idea of seeing Armand. Why? She could not have told exactly, but the desire had swooped upon her, irresistible; she felt that it must be done, and not on the morrow, not that evening, but immediately. She must speak to him, were she to fly from her home in order to find him wherever he might be. At all costs she would see him. Had he returned to Paris? She would ascertain. In ten minutes she had put on a fashionable dress and a bonnet, had called a cab, and shivering with fever in a corner of it—how great a change from the day on which a similar vehicle was conveying her to the meeting with her lover!—was proceeding to the Rue Lincoln.
The cab went slowly along the streets, and every moment Helen said to herself: "Shall I see him again?" She was now facing the irresistible thought, the mere appearance of which had hurried her to the immediate quest of Armand when she had barely emerged from her horrible delirium. She must be able to cry to this man that he had ruined her. Yes, she must do this, and he must at last believe her and understand the infamy of his behaviour. She would say to her former lover:
"I am Monsieur de Varades's mistress, and you are the cause of it—you, your injustice, and your desertion." And how could the man help believing her when she went on to say to him: "Before knowing you I was pure."
This indisputable proof of the genuineness of her love, this proof which she had so greatly desired, she now held fast, and she would not let it go. Would not her present sincerity be a guarantee of her past sincerity? If she acknowledged the guilt of to-day, what motive of modesty, hypocrisy or interest could prompt her to deny that of yesterday? This strange reasoning appeared to her to carry with it a sort of obviousness from which Armand could not escape. He would believe her, and this should be her revenge. "But how will he receive me? Yet, what does it matter? I will spit my misery and my shame, and his responsibility for them, into his face."
Her distempered soul found relief in the audacity of this plan. She hated Armand now, she trembled lest he should be absent, lest he should escape her. "Faster," she said several times to the driver. Would she ever arrive soon enough? She recognised the smallest details of the road—the road traversed with such lightness of heart the last time that she had visited him! And the scene which she had been obliged to go through showed in her mind still more terrible and clear. During that scene she had been choked with indignation. She had been unable to make any reply. He could not have believed her then, but he should believe her now. She would show him what had been the drama of her existence for months past. She would at last lay bare all her heart's hidden wounds. She would make him touch with his finger the work of death that he had wrought, and she would depart, leaving him, if he had any honour left, at least this hideous remorse, this poisoned arrow in his conscience. Then she thought: "In what condition shall I find him. What has he been doing since our rupture?"
At last the vehicle stopped at the corner of the Rue Lincoln and the Champs-Élysées. In two minutes Helen had gained the door of Armand's house. How her voice shook as she asked the porter: "Is Monsieur de Querne at home?" How completely the affirmative reply upset her. She hesitated for a second in spite of the resolve she had taken; then she climbed the staircase with deliberate foot. Her hand pressed the bell without hesitation. A servant's footstep became audible. The door opened. It was no longer possible to draw back.
What had Armand been doing during that period in which she had been in the throes of despair? Had she known, even when in front of the open door, disgust would perhaps have restrained her and drawn her back. She would have fled in horror from the threshold of the abode to which she had come in order to defend, not her person, not her happiness, but the truth of her former love, as we defend the memory of the dead.
The young man had spoken the truth in his note to Chazel. A ten days' journey had brought him to an estate which he possessed close to Nantes—the De Querne family came from this town—and he had stayed there to arrange some business respecting farm rents. Then he had returned to Paris, persuaded that the rupture was a final one, seeing that during those ten days Helen had not hazarded any attempt at reconciliation.
By a contradiction in his nature, too usual with him to cause him astonishment, these early moments had been melancholy ones. He was one of those men who are moved by memories after having remained nearly indifferent to the reality, who become enamoured of the women whom they cast off, just as they regret the places of which they tired when living in them—a restless race, who know nothing of the present but its weariness, and for whom the past assumes a unique and affecting charm from the mere fact that it is the past.
Armand had never loved poor Helen; he applauded himself for breaking with her as for an action that was most reasonable, regard being had to his own interests, and withal exceedingly meritorious, seeing that he had responded to Alfred's generosity with similar generosity; but neither the grounds of interest nor those of merit could prevent him from thinking with painful emotions of the sweet and dainty mistress who after all had never deceived him except for the purpose of pleasing him the more. To be sure he doubted less than ever that she had had that first intrigue with De Varades at Bourges, of which Lucien Rieume had spoken to him. What more evident token could there have been of this than the manner in which she had received the accusation? Immediately she had bowed her head, and had, as it were, collapsed beneath the insult.
But even though he had had two, three, four predecessors, by what right had he been indignant against her? Had she not displayed during their connexion all the loyalty of which such amours are capable? Had she ever manifested so much as a trace of coquetry towards any one? Had she made him jealous for but a single hour, with jealousy such as women of the world, more abandoned in this than abandoned women themselves, do not hesitate to inflict upon a lover, in order to gratify the pettiest impulse of vanity, to please a man who has some claim or other to celebrity or who has merely been noticed by another woman. No, Helen had been perfect towards him. The consciousness of this pleased and at the same time tormented him, for, if she flattered his pride, she also rendered more present to him the faded charm of a love which he had not been able to enjoy at the time when he dreaded its obligations.
But what he regretted in Helen, even more than her gracious tenderness, was her physical person. From the time that he had become her lover he had, contrary to all his principles, remained entirely faithful to her, and this fidelity increased in him the exactitude of the memory of the senses. He could again see in thought the room in the Rue de Stockholm, and on the pillow that refined head, its eyes laden with mysterious voluptuousness. Slight and scarcely observed details recurred to him: a certain fashion that she had of leaning her pretty face over him, the aroma which hung about her kisses and their special flavour.
A yearning then seized him, against which he employed the infallible remedy to which he was accustomed. He felt that he must place between Helen and himself bodily shapes that might afford his senses a pasture of beauty, bosoms fit to serve for the modelling of cups, sinking shoulders worthy of statues, supple hips, slender legs, and skilful caresses. Such instruments of forgetfulness abound in first-class houses of pleasure. The young man used them on this occasion, as on others, even to excess, so that when Helen rang at the door in the Rue Lincoln, she had come to be almost as great a stranger to him as though he had never known her.
He was turning over the leaves of a book, lying rather than sitting in an easy-chair, and waiting until it should be time to dress in order to rejoin some dinner companions at the club. He was in that condition of pleasing weariness which heartless pleasure always brings to men who are wise enough to ask nothing of women but the enjoyment of palpable beauty. Helen and the intrigue of the previous months were, so far as he was concerned, shrinking into a background that each day made more inaccessible than before. It was another chapter to be added to the others in the mournful romance of gallantry in the course of which his feelings had been exhausted without being expended.
Already, as he thought about it, he had ceased to feel anything more than a sick spot in his heart. He was sorry for having so greatly misunderstood Chazel, but a satisfied conscience softened this sorrow. Had he not unhesitatingly sacrified to his friend's confidence all the pleasure that his intrigue might still have brought him? Accordingly, he experienced the most disagreeable of surprises when, after being informed by his servant that a lady wished to speak to him, he saw Helen. She had not taken the trouble to put on a veil. He perceived at a glance her wasted countenance, her discoloured eyes, her bright and steady gaze, her bitter lips. Mechanically, he pushed an arm-chair towards her, which she declined.
"It is not worth while," she said, "what I have to say to you will not take long. I shall not take up much of your time."
"Well," he thought to himself, "another scene. It shall be the last."
The complete absence of physical desire resulting from his recent debauches, made him singularly dry and hard. He reflected that it had been very stupid on his part not to close his door against her, and he forthwith determined to enter into no explanations, and to keep her at a distance by the employment of the most commonplace politeness.
"I feel quite put out," he said to her, just as though there had never been anything but the most official relations between them; "I ought to have called on you after my return, and then a dozen wretched trifles prevented me. You know how it is when one is on the point of going away. I expect to be in London towards the end of the month."
"Do not trouble yourself to make excuses," Helen interrupted, shrugging her shoulders; "what is the use? Why should you have come? To avoid compromising me? I will dispense with such delicacy on your part. To tell me again that you do not love me, and have never loved me, and to see me suffer? You are not a monster. All that you had to tell me you told me. Do not be afraid," she added with a nerveless smile, "it is not to resume our former conversation that I am here."
She paused as though the words that she was about to utter were already burning her lips, the lips parched by so many feverish nights. She had spoken in so bitter and withal so grave a voice that the young man felt a pang. On seeing her again he had expected a pleading scene, the eager appeal of a forsaken mistress who entreats for but a day of the old happiness, and the solemnity of Helen's accents heralded a prayerless, hopeless revelation, tidings such as to her appeared of tragic importance. Was she going to tell him that she was pregnant? Or had she in an hour of wildness confessed everything to her husband? She remained silent, and it was his turn to be impatient.
"Speak," he said, "I am listening to you."
"In that last conversation, which once more I have no wish to resume," she went on, "you told me that you were acquainted with my life. You even entered into particulars by mentioning a name, the name of Monsieur de Varades. You asserted that this man had been my lover."
"I told you what had been told to me," he said with emphasis.
"And that you believed it?" she questioned.
"As people do believe such things," he returned; "you misunderstood me, or else I expressed myself badly, very badly." And he thought: "She is going to produce some letter or other from her pocket, witnessing to De Varades's deep respect for her." He recollected having written similar letters to former mistresses, to be shown to one having special privileges. "A foolish discussion," he sighed to himself, "but how is it to be avoided?"
"Well," she retorted with strange energy, "if you are told that now, you may believe it, and reply that you have it from a sure source." And looking at him with an air at once of triumph and of despair, she added: "I am Monsieur de Varades's mistress, do you hear?" And she repeated: "I am Monsieur de Varades's mistress."
Armand listened to her repetition of these words by which she was inflicting dishonour upon herself, and his feeling was one rather of pain than of sorrow. It appeared to him as well piteous as insane that, impelled by some sickly appetite for drama and emotion, she should thus come and tell him of the renewal of her amour with her former lover. On the other hand, he had not, at the period of his first suspicions, been in possession of an absolute, indisputable assurance respecting the guilty nature of the relations between Helen and De Varades, and now she had come to denounce herself to him in so brutal a fashion that he could not help feeling a spasm of base jealousy; and he replied with involuntary abruptness:
"You are perfectly free; how do you think that concerns me? Unless," he added, cruelly, "I can be of use to you?"
"Don't play the wit," she went on more violently still. "You owe it to me to listen to me; the least a man can do is to listen to the woman he has ruined. For you have ruined me; yes, you, and I wish you to know it. Ah! you thought that I was lying, that I was showing off to please you, when I told you that I had never had a lover before yourself; will you believe me now when I tell you in the same breath that I am to-day Monsieur de Varades's mistress, and that I was not so before? I have met him again, and I have given myself to him. Do not ask me why, but it is a fact. You see that I am not seeking to play a part, that I am not afraid of your contempt, that I have not come to renew relations with you; but it is equally true that I have degraded and polluted all that is in me. And when I gave myself to you I was so pure! I had nothing, nothing on my conscience! I had kept myself for you alone, as though I had known that I was one day to meet you. Ah! that is what I want you to know. A woman who accuses herself as I am doing now has nothing left to be careful about, has she? Why should I lie to you now? Tell me, why? You will be forced to believe me, and you will say to yourself: 'I was her first love; she did not deny herself because she loved me. She loved me as man dreams of being loved, with her whole heart, her whole being, and not in the present merely, but in the past. And see what I have made of the woman who loved me thus—a creature who has ceased to believe in anything or respect anything, who has taken a fresh lover in caprice, who will take a second and a third—a ruined woman.' Yes, once more, it is you who have ruined me, and I want, I want you to know it, and it will be my revenge that you will never more be able to doubt it. Ruined! Ruined! You have ruined me—you! you! you!"