On leaving Sir Ralph, Madame Delmare had locked herself into her room,
and a thousand tempestuous thoughts had invaded her mind. It was not the
first time that a vague suspicion had cast its ominous light upon the
fragile edifice of her happiness. Monsieur Delmare had previously let
slip in conversation some of those indelicate jests which pass for
compliments. He had complimented Raymon on his knightly triumphs in a
way to give the cue to ears that knew naught of the incident. Every time
that Madame Delmare had spoken to the gardener, Noun's name had been
injected, as if by an unavoidable necessity, into the most trivial
details, and then Monsieur de Ramière's had always glided in by virtue
of some mysterious junction of ideas which seemed to have taken
possession of the man's brain and to beset him in spite of himself.
Madame Delmare had been struck by his strange and bungling questions. He
became confused in his speech on the slightest pretext; he seemed to be
oppressed by a burden of remorse which he betrayed while struggling to
conceal it. At other times Indiana had found in Raymon's own confusion
those indications which she did not seek, but which forced themselves
upon her. One circumstance in particular would have enlightened her
further, if she had not closed her mind to all distrust. They had found
on Noun's finger a very handsome ring which Madame Delmare had noticed
some time before her death and which the girl claimed to have found.
Since her death Madame Delmare had always worn that pledge of sorrow,
and she had often noticed that Raymon changed color when he took her
hand to put it to his lips. Once he had begged her never to mention Noun
to him because he looked upon himself as the cause of her death; and
when she sought to banish that painful thought by taking all the blame
to herself, he had replied:
"No, my poor Indiana, do not accuse yourself; you have no idea how
guilty I am."
Those words, uttered in a bitter, gloomy tone, had alarmed Madame
Delmare. She had not dared to insist, and, now that she was beginning to
understand all these fragments of discoveries, she had not the courage
to fix her thoughts upon them and put them together.
She opened her window, and, as she looked out upon the calm night, upon
the moon so pale and lovely behind the silvery vapors on the horizon, as
she remembered that Raymon was coming, that he was perhaps in the park
even now, and thought of all the joy she had anticipated in that hour of
love and mystery, she cursed Ralph who with a word had poisoned her hope
and destroyed her repose forever. She even felt that she hated him, the
unhappy man who had been a father to her and who had sacrificed his
future for her; for his future was Indiana's friendship; that was his
only treasure, and he resigned himself to the certainty of forfeiting it
in order to save her.
Indiana could not read in the depths of his heart, nor had she been able
to fathom Raymon's. She was unjust, not from ingratitude, but from
ignorance. Being under the influence of a strong passion she could not
but feel strongly the blow that had been dealt her. For an instant she
laid the whole crime upon Ralph, preferring to accuse him rather than to
suspect Raymon.
And then she had so little time to collect her thoughts, and make up her
mind: Raymon was coming. Perhaps it was he whom she had seen for some
minutes wandering about the little bridge. How much more intense would
her aversion for Ralph have been at that moment, if she could have
recognized him in that vague figure, which constantly appeared and
disappeared in the mist, and which, like a spirit stationed at the gate
of the Elysian Fields, sought to keep the guilty man from entering!
Suddenly there came to her mind one of those strange, half-formed ideas,
which only restless and unhappy persons are capable of conceiving. She
risked her whole destiny upon a strange and delicate test against which
Raymon could not be on his guard. She had hardly completed her
mysterious preparations when she heard Raymon's footsteps on the secret
stairway. She ran and unlocked the door, then returned to her chair, so
agitated that she felt that she was on the point of falling; but, as in
all the great crises of her life, she retained a remarkable clearness of
perception and great strength of mind.
Raymon was still pale and breathless when he opened the door; impatient
to see the light, to grasp reality once more. Indiana's back was turned
to him, she was wrapped in a fur-lined pelisse. By a strange chance it
was the same that Noun wore when she went to meet him in the park at
their last rendezvous. I do not know if you remember that at that time
Raymon had had for an instant the untenable idea that that woman
shrouded in her cloak was Madame Delmare. Now, when he saw once more the
same apparition sitting inert in a chair, with her head on her breast,
by the light of a pale, flickering lamp, on the same spot where so many
memories awaited him, in that room which he had not entered since the
darkest night in his life and which was full to overflowing of his
remorse, he involuntarily recoiled and remained in the doorway, his
terrified gaze fixed upon that motionless figure, and trembling like a
coward, lest, when it turned, it should display the livid features of a
drowned woman.
Madame Delmare had no suspicion of the effect she produced upon Raymon.
She had wound about her head a handkerchief of India silk, tied
carelessly in true creole style; it was Noun's usual head-dress. Raymon,
fairly overcome by terror, nearly fell backward, thinking that his
superstitious fancies were realized. But, recognizing the woman he had
come to seduce, he forgot the one whom he had seduced and walked toward
her. Her face wore a grave, meditative expression: she gazed earnestly
at him, but with close attention rather than affection, and did not make
a motion to draw him to her side more quickly.
Raymon, surprised by this reception, attributed it to some scruple of
chastity, to some girlish impulse of delicacy or constraint. He knelt at
her feet, saying:
"Are you afraid of me, my beloved?" But at that moment he noticed that
Madame Delmare held something in her hands to which she seemed to direct
his attention with a playful affectation of gravity. He looked more
closely and saw a mass of black hair, of varying lengths, which seemed
to have been cut in haste, and which Indiana was smoothing with her
hand.
"Do you recognize it?" she asked, fastening upon him her limpid eyes, in
which there was a peculiar, penetrating gleam.
Raymon hesitated, looked again at the handkerchief about her head, and
thought that he understood.
"Naughty girl!" he said, taking the hair in his hand, "why did you cut
it off? It was so beautiful, and I loved it so dearly!"
"You asked me yesterday," she said with the shadow of a smile, "if I
would sacrifice it to you."
"O Indiana!" cried Raymon, "you know well that you will be lovelier than
ever to me henceforth. Give it to me. I do not choose to regret the
absence from your head of that glorious hair which I admired every day,
and which now I can kiss every day without restraint. Give it to me, so
that it may never leave me."
But as he gathered up in his hand that luxuriant mass of which some
locks reached to the floor, Raymon fancied that it had a dry, rough
feeling which his fingers had never noticed in the silken tresses over
Indiana's forehead. He was conscious, also, of an indefinable nervous
thrill, it felt so cold and dead, as if it had been cut a long time, and
seemed to have lost its perfumed moisture and vital warmth. Then he
looked at it again, and sought in vain the blue gleam which made
Indiana's hair resemble the blue-black wing of the crow; this was of an
Ethiopian black, of an Indian texture, of a lifeless heaviness.
Indiana's bright piercing eyes followed Raymon's. He turned them
involuntarily upon an open ebony casket from which several locks of the
same hair protruded.
"This is not yours," he said, untying the kerchief which concealed
Madame Delmare's hair.
It was untouched, and fell over her shoulders in all its splendor. But
she made a gesture as if to push him away and said, still pointing to
the hair:
"Don't you recognize this? Did you never admire, never caress it? Has
the damp night air robbed it of all its fragrance? Have you not a
thought, a tear for her who wore this ring?"
Raymon sank upon a chair; Noun's locks fell from his trembling hand. So
much painful excitement had exhausted him. He was a man of choleric
temper, whose blood flowed rapidly, whose nerves were easily and deeply
irritated. He shivered from head to foot and fell in a swoon on the
floor.
When he came to himself, Madame Delmare was on her knees beside him,
weeping copiously and asking his forgiveness; but Raymon no longer loved
her.
"You have inflicted a horrible wound on me," he said; "a wound which it
is not in your power to cure. You will never restore the confidence I
had in your heart; that is evident to me. You have shown me how
vindictive and cruel your heart can be. Poor Noun! poor unhappy girl! It
was she whom I treated badly, not you; it was she who had the right to
avenge herself, and she did not. She took her own life in order to leave
me the future. She sacrificed herself to my repose. You are not the
woman to have done as much, madame! Give me her hair; it is mine--it
belongs to me; it is all that remains to me of the only woman who ever
loved me truly. Unhappy Noun! you were worthy of a better love! And you,
madame, dare to reproach me with her death; you, whom I loved so well
that I forgot her--that I defied the ghastly torture of remorse; you
who, on the faith of a kiss, have led me across that river--across that
bridge--alone, with terror at my side, pursued by the infernal illusions
of my crime! And when you discover with what a frantic passion I love
you, you bury your woman's nails in my heart, seeking there another drop
of blood which may still be made to flow for you! Ah! when I spurned so
devoted a love to take up with so savage a passion as yours, I was no
less mad than guilty."
Madame Delmare did not reply. Pale and motionless, with dishevelled hair
and staring eyes, she moved Raymon to pity. He took her hand.
"And yet," he said, "this love I feel for you is so blind that, in spite
of myself, I can still forget the past and the present--the sin that
blasted my life and the crime you have just committed. So love me, and I
will forgive you."
Madame Delmare's despair rekindled desire and pride in her lover's
heart. When he saw how dismayed she was at the thought of losing his
love--how humble before him, how resigned to accept his decrees for the
future by way of atonement for the past--he remembered what his
intentions had been when he eluded Ralph's vigilance, and he realized
all the advantages of his position. He pretended to be absorbed in a
melancholy, sombre reverie for some moments; he hardly responded to
Indiana's tears and caresses. He waited until her heart should break and
overflow in sobs, until she should realize all the horrors of
desertion--until she should have exhausted all her strength in
heart-rending emotion; and then, when he saw her at his feet, fainting,
utterly worn out, awaiting death at a word from him, he seized her in
his arms with convulsive passion and strained her to his heart. She
yielded like a weak child; she abandoned her lips to him unresistingly.
She was almost dead.
But suddenly, as if waking from a dream, she snatched herself away from
his burning caresses, rushed to the end of the room where Sir Ralph's
portrait hung on the panel; and, as if she would place herself under the
protection of that grave personage with the unruffled brow and tranquil
lips, she shrank back against the portrait, wild-eyed, quivering from
head to foot, in the clutches of a strange fear. It was this that made
Raymon think that she had been deeply moved in his arms--that she was
afraid of herself--that she was his. He ran to her; drew her by force
from her retreat, and told her that he had come with the purpose of
keeping his promises, but that her cruel treatment of him had absolved
him from his oath.
"I am no longer either your slave or your ally," he said. "I am simply
the man who loves you madly and who has you in his arms, a wicked,
capricious, cruel, mad creature, but lovely and adored. With sweet,
confiding words you might have cooled my blood. Had you been as calm and
generous as yesterday, you would have made me mild and submissive as
usual. But you have kindled all my passions, overturned all my ideas.
You have made me unhappy, cowardly, ill, frantic, desperate, one after
another. You must make me happy now, or I feel that I can no longer
believe in you--that I can no longer love you or bless you. Forgive me,
Indiana, forgive me! If I frighten you it is your own fault; you have
made me suffer so that I have lost my reason!"
Indiana trembled in every limb. She knew so little of life that she
believed resistance to be impossible; she was ready to concede from fear
what she would refuse from love; but, as she struggled feebly in
Raymon's arms, she said, in desperation:
"So you are capable of using force with me?"
Raymon paused, impressed with this moral resistance, which survived
physical resistance. He hastily pushed her away.
"Never!" he cried: "I would rather die than possess you except by your
own will!"
He threw himself on his knees, and all that the mind can supply in place
of the heart, all the poesy that the imagination can impart to the ardor
of the blood, he expressed in a fervent and dangerous entreaty. And when
he saw that she did not surrender, he yielded to necessity and
reproached her with not loving him; a commonplace expedient which he
despised and which made him smile, with a feeling of something like
shame at having to do with a woman so innocent as not to smile at it
herself.
That reproach went to Indiana's heart more swiftly than all the
exclamations with which Raymon had embellished his discourse.
But suddenly she remembered.
"Raymon," she said, "the other, who loved you so dearly--of whom we were
speaking just now--she refused you nothing, I suppose?"
"Nothing!" exclaimed Raymon, annoyed by this inopportune reminder.
"Instead of reminding me of her so continually, you would do well to
make me forget how dearly she loved me!"
"Listen!" rejoined Indiana, thoughtfully and gravely; "have a little
courage, for I must say something more. Perhaps you have not been as
guilty towards me as I thought. It would be sweet to me to be able to
forgive you for what I considered a mortal insult. Tell me then--when I
surprised you here--for whom did you come? for her or for me?"
Raymon hesitated; then, as he thought that the truth would soon be known
to Madame Delmare, that perhaps she knew it already, he answered:
"For her."
"Well, I prefer it so," she said sadly; "I prefer an infidelity to an
insult. Be frank to the end, Raymon. How long had you been in my room
when I came? Remember that Ralph knows all, and that, if I chose to
question him----"
"There is no need of Sir Ralph's testimony, madame. I had been here
since the night before."
"And you had passed the night in this room. Your silence is a sufficient
answer."
They both remained silent for some moments; then Indiana rose and was
about to continue, when a sharp knock at the door checked the flow of
the blood in her veins. Neither she nor Raymon dared to breathe.
A paper was slipped under the door. It was a leaf from a note-book on
which these words were scrawled in pencil, almost illegibly:
"Your husband is here.
"RALPH."