LV
Dunoisse, with a deadly sickness at the heart, drew out the little lying letter and re-read it, and turned a bleak sharp face upon the nervous servant, and asked, with a glance of the black eyes that made him wince and flush:
“Madame went out—yesterday evening—alone?”
Shame pierced him. To be reduced to questioning aservant was abominable. But he waited for the answer. It came:
“Madame was summoned, a few hours after Monsieur the Colonel’s departure.... A carriage was sent to fetch her. The carriage came from the Élysée.”
The words fell upon Dunoisse with the cold, heavy shock of a douche of salt water, literally taking away his breath. Could it be? Had she left home upon the eve of Monseigneur’s masterstroke? Was it possible that a night, and a day, and yet another night, had passed, and found her still absent? He told himself, poor wretch, all conscious of his self-deceit, that there had been some mistake ... that one of the little girls at Bagnéres must have been taken ill ... that the mother had been sent for.... Knowing in his soul that the Henriettes never risk their beauty in the neighborhood of possible infection, he pretended to believe this lie.
He turned from the servant, and went through the empty, close-blinded reception-rooms, stumbling at the pattern of garlands on the carpet as though they had been thorny ropes set to trip him up. And he went into the gray boudoir where he had fallen captive to that luring beauty, and the stately portrait of the beautiful wicked Abbess, daughter of the evil Regent, seemed to smile at him in jeering triumph from its station on the wall.
He drew up a blind, and there were the familiar gardens bathing in the clear, cold December sunshine. He threw up a sash, letting in fresh air, and the smell of thawing earth, and the chaste, pungent fragrance of the chrysanthemums. As he leaned against the carved and painted shutter the Abbaye clock struck eight, and all the other clocks in Paris responded, one after the other, and then—his heart leaped, for there came the opening and shutting of the hall-door, and the sound of silken draperies sweeping over velvet carpets. A light footstep crossed the threshold.... He wheeled, and was face to face with Henriette....
She was in all the splendor of full dinner-dress, and her lovely person blazed and scintillated with magnificent jewels. Many of the costly gems she wore had been given her by Dunoisse, but others, costlier still, were new to him.... Her rich black hair hung in dishevelled curls—the pitiless sunlight showed her beautiful eyes deep sunk inviolet caves of weariness. Thebertheof costly lace that edged her corsage was torn, revealing charms that even Fashion decrees should be hidden.... There was a fierce red mark upon her rounded throat, and another on one white breast....
The picture was burned in upon the brain of the man who saw, as a corrosive acid might have bitten it on copper. He opened his dry mouth to speak, but no words issued thence. She said, dropping her sable-lined mantle upon the floor, dragging at one of her bracelets that obstinately refused to be unfastened:
“So—you have returned!... Then you have not been to the Rue du Bac?”
“I went,” he said, showing her the little treacherous sheet—“and found your letter there....”
A rush of angry blood changed her from white to crimson. The mark on her throat vanished, and then, as the fierce tide receded, stood out once more in burning, guilty red. She tore off the bracelet, and tossed it down, and said, lifting her white arms to release her little head from the weight of the diamond coronet:
“The Prince-President sent!... It was a command. How could I disobey?”
Dunoisse answered her in tones she had never before heard from him:
“The Prince-President should know that thedroit du seigneurwent out with the Monarchy. It is not an institution that the Republic of France will wish to see revived during His Highness’s tenure of the Dictatorship.... I will explain this to His Highness without delay!”
Her beautiful eyes blazed rebellion, and her bosom tossed the red mark up and down tumultuously. She cried:
“Are you mad? What right have you to demand explanations, or to give them, pray?”
“What right?” Dunoisse echoed, looking at her incredulously. “Do you ask by what right I say that you shall not be degraded by the contact of persons who are infamous—used as a bait to lure golden fish into the net of Presidential intrigue?—poisoned and contaminated by the atmosphere in which nothing that is pure can exist, and everything that is vile——”
“Ah, ah!” she said, interrupting him; “you talk inriddles and parables. Be plain with me, I beg of you! Or—permit me to be so with you!”
She sank down upon a divan with her knees apart, and said, thrusting her clasped hands down between them, joined together at the wrists as though they were fettered:
“Listen to me!... You are not my husband!... I advise you to remember it!... It will save trouble in the long-run—it will be better for yourself and for me if you will do this!”
Dunoisse returned, in tones that cut like ice-splinters:
“I have not the honor to be your husband, it is true! But as long as the relations which have hitherto existed between us continue, I forbid you to go alone to the suppers at the Élysée! As for that accursed banquet of the night before last——”
He broke off, for something in her face appalled him. She stamped her little foot and cried:
“Great Heavens! Am I a young girl, all blushes and book-muslin? And you—what are you? A soldier? Not a bit of it! My dear old fellow, you are a prude!”
She rose up, with eyes that shot lightnings, though her mouth was smiling, and pointed to the baleful picture that hung above the fireplace, that was full of dead ashes, like her unhappy victim’s heart.
“Look at Madame there!... Does not she seem as though she laughed at you? You, who would drive Propriety and pleasure in double harness—who expect a woman like me—who have drunk with you the bowl of Life—who have given you myself, with all my secrets and pleasures—to behave as a young girl who goes into Society, with her eyes bandaged, and her ears stopped up with cotton-wool. You are not very reasonable, Monsieur!”
She had taken the diamond circlet from her hair, and dropped it on the divan. Now she thrust her white fingers into the heavy masses of her curls, and lifted them up from either temple. Her long eyes gleamed like green topaz from between the narrowed eyelids. And to the man who was the bondslave of her body she seemed like some fair, malignant spirit of the storm, about to rise and fly, borne on those silken, sable wings....
“I ...” he began stammeringly. “You——”
He broke off. For it rushed upon him suddenly in blinding, scorching certainty that she, and no other, was thenight-haired, ivory-white wanton who had kissed de Moulny on the mouth and bidden him stay. The impulse to leap upon her and wring from her confession, and with it full revelation of all that had passed, and in what secret bower of lust and luxury the intervening time had been spent, nearly overcame him. But he fought it back. For full knowledge must mean severance, and——“O God!” the poor wretch cried in the depths of his tortured heart; “I cannot live without her, however vile she prove!”
It was strangely, horribly true. He had never been so completely dominated by Henriette in the days when he still believed the angel’s wing to be folded beneath her draperies. He drank her beauty in with thirsty eyes, and thirsted the more he drank; and was, to his unutterable shame and degradation, stung to yet sharper torments of desire, because of those red marks made by a rival’s furious kisses—and did not dare, poor, pusillanimous, miserable wretch! to say: “You have betrayed me! Who is the man whose brand you bear upon your bosom. You shall tell me!—even though I know!...”
As she went on talking, spreading out her hair, pressing the points of her fingers into the velvety, supple skin above her temples:
“You idiot! can one drive Propriety and Pleasure in double harness? Your mother could answer that question—that Carmelite coquette who deserted her convent for the world, and went back to the convent when she was weary of the racket. Not that I wish to insult your mother. Quite the contrary. She did as it pleased her, and I also.... Ouf! ... how my head aches!... What an hour you have chosen for a scene of reproaches and recriminations!... Still, an explanation clears the air.... Now I am going to bed, for I am ‘regularly done up,’ as the Prince says.” She phrased the English words with exaggerated elaboration, rolling the gutturals, and making a distracting mouth over them. “But for the future we shall understand each other better, shall we not, Monsieur?”
“I thought,” he faltered—“I believed!...” and could go no further. She retorted, stretching as gracefully as a leopardess, smiling with a touch of roguery, her rosy tongue peeping from between her teeth of pearl:
“You thought me an angel, who am nothing but a woman. What! would an angel have fired that shot atthe Foreign Ministry?” She shrugged her white shoulders. “What! and let you bear the whole affair upon your shoulders for fear lest the Red Republicans should take a stiletto-vengeance? And pay you in kisses and the rest as I have done?”
“It was no mere sordid bargain!... You loved me!” Dunoisse cried out in misery. “You gave me yourself for love, not for fear or gain!”
“Oh! as for that,” said Henriette, with a cynical inflection, “I loved you, and I love you uncommonly well to-day. But your love is not to deprive me of my liberty—that must be understood!... There, there, my poor dear boy!...”
He had sunk down upon the gray velvet divan, looking so wan and haggard, and yet so handsome in his despair and wretchedness, that her shallow heart was stirred to pity, and she went swiftly to his side. He threw an arm about her, drew her to him, and said, looking up at her with wistful entreaty, and speaking in tones that had suddenly become pitiful and childlike:
“Dearest Henriette, I will do everything you ask me—everything!... You shall not have one single wish ungratified! Only do not go to the Palace without me, I beg of you, Henriette!”
He told himself that she was yielding, pressed her to him, and hid his burning forehead and aching eyes against her. It was a symbolical action, that willful blinding, presaging what was to come.... She knelt down before him, wound her soft white arms about him, and drew his head to rest upon her bosom, so that his cheek rested on the flaming mark that so short a time back had said to him in red letters, “She is false to you!” She said, holding him closer, blinding and drugging him with her breath, her contact, her voice:
“Well, then, very well! Henriette is never unkind or cruel.... It shall be as you choose. Only do not thwart me or upbraid me, Hector dearest. I am of Spanish blood—you should remember it!... How hot your forehead is! Have you, too, a headache? That is from traveling all night. How I hate those jolting railway-carriages!Fais dodo, poor boy!”
She rocked him upon her breast, smiling to see the rigid lines of mental anguish relax and smooth out under hercaresses. And as she rocked, she sang in a velvety cooing voice a little witch-rhyme of Catalonia, meaning everything or nothing, just as the hearer happened to be a Catholic or a Calvinist ... a horrible little rhyme, dealing with a cat and the cupboard of the Archbishop, set to a soothing lullaby....
Hushaby!—Honor, and Principle, and Religion. Sleep, sleep well! rocked on the bosom of Desire.
If Ada Merling had seen Dunoisse at that moment, shorn of his strength, willfully blind to his degradation, lying in the arms that had already bound and delivered him to the Philistine, she would have blessed the hour that brought her disillusion; instead of looking back upon it sorrowfully, and writing, in the locked journal of her thoughts and impressions, that was kept in a secret of her writing-table:
“There is no teacher like Experience. By suffering and humiliation we gain sympathy for the sore and despised; and acquire insight through our own short-sightedness. How often in the old home-days at Wraye, when one of the village women has wound up some sorrowful story of human passion and human error with: ‘She fell in love wi’ him at sight, d’ye see?have I not interjected, quite seriously and sincerely: ‘Oh! but why?’ And found myself smiling when the answer would be: ‘Nay, now, Miss Ada, however can I tell, when her didn’t know herself, poor soul?’”
“Oh me!... I shall never laugh again over such stories. Is that my gain or my loss?”
A space, a blotted line, and then came, in the flowing, finely-pointed handwriting:
“It must be to my gain.... That I, who am habitually reserved, who have been reared in refinement and exclusiveness, should have known a weakness such as this, shall be of use to me and for the help of others. When I am tempted to approve my own judgment as sounder, esteem my own standards of morality and conduct as purer and loftier than those of my sister-women, let me for my soul’s health—let me remember that the man to whom, in the first moment of our meeting, my heart went out—and whose name, indifferent to me as he must have been, I could never, for long afterwards, hear without emotion—isworldly, cynical, sensual, and dishonorable; deeply entangled in a shameful intrigue; bound to the interests of the Power that is the plague-sore and the curse and the ruin of his adopted country; perhaps involved in its plots—stained with its guilt of treachery and bloodshed....”
At the bottom of the page came:
“Perhaps I wrong him?... It may be that I judge him unjustly, that he has been shamefully slandered—and that he is—really is—what once he seemed. Grant it, Thou God! Who hast the knowledge of all hearts, and by Thy grace canst purify the unclean and make the evil good, and change base things to noble! And if it be Thy Will that I am never to know the sweetness of earthly love, give me to know what love may be in Heaven!”