During the three months that elapsed between the despatch of this letter
and its arrival at Ile Bourbon, Madame Delmare's situation had become
almost intolerable, as the result of a domestic incident of the greatest
importance to her. She had adopted the depressing habit of writing down
every evening a narrative of the sorrowful thoughts of the day. This
journal of her sufferings was addressed to Raymon, and, although she had
no intention of sending it to him, she talked with him, sometimes
passionately, sometimes bitterly, of the misery of her life and of the
sentiments which she could not overcome. These papers fell into
Delmare's hands, that is to say, he broke open the box which contained
them as well as Raymon's letters, and devoured them with a jealous,
frenzied eye. In the first outbreak of his wrath he lost the power to
restrain himself and went outside, with fast-beating heart and clenched
fists, to await her return from her walk. Perhaps, if she had been a few
minutes later, the unhappy man would have had time to recover himself;
but their evil star decreed that she should appear before him almost
immediately. Thereupon, unable to utter a word, he seized her by the
hair, threw her down and stamped on her forehead with his heel.
He had no sooner made that bloody mark of his brutal nature upon a poor,
weak creature, than he was horrified at what he had done. He fled in
dire dismay, and locked himself in his room, where he cocked his pistol
preparatory to blowing out his brains; but as he was about to pull the
trigger he looked out on the veranda and saw that Indiana had risen and,
with a calm, self-possessed air, was wiping away the blood that covered
her face. As he thought that he had killed her, his first feeling was of
joy when he saw her on her feet; then his wrath blazed up anew.
"It is only a scratch," he cried, "and you deserve a thousand deaths!
No, I will not kill myself; for then you would go and rejoice over it in
your lover's arms. I do not propose to assure the happiness of both of
you; I propose to live to make you suffer, to see you die by inches of
deathly ennui, to dishonor the infamous creature who has made a fool of
me!"
He was battling with the tortures of jealous rage, when Ralph entered
the veranda by another door and found Indiana in the dishevelled
condition in which that horrible scene had left her. But she had not
manifested the slightest alarm, she had not uttered a cry, she had not
raised her hand to ask for mercy. Weary of life as she was, it seemed
that she had been desirous to give Delmare time to commit murder by
refraining from calling for help. It is certain that when the assault
took place Ralph was within twenty yards, and that he had not heard the
slightest sound.
"Indiana!" he cried, recoiling in horror and surprise; "who has wounded
you thus?"
"Do you ask?" she replied with a bitter smile; "what other than _your
friend_ has the _right_ and the inclination?"
Ralph dropped the cane he held; he needed no other weapons than his
great hands to strangle Delmare. He reached his door in two leaps and
burst it open with his fist. But he found Delmare lying on the floor,
with purple cheeks and swollen throat, struggling in the noiseless
convulsions of apoplexy.
He seized the papers that were scattered over the floor. When he
recognized Raymon's handwriting and saw the ruins of the letter-box, he
understood what had happened; and, carefully collecting the accusing
documents, he hastened to hand them to Madame Delmare and urged her to
burn them at once. Delmare had probably not taken time to read them all.
Then he begged her to go to her room while he summoned the slaves to
look after the colonel; but she would neither burn the papers nor hide
the wound.
"No," she said haughtily, "I will not do it! That man did not scruple to
tell Madame de Carvajal of my flight long ago; he made haste to publish
what he called my dishonor. I propose to show to everybody this token of
his own dishonor which he has taken pains to stamp on my face. It is a
strange sort of justice that requires one to keep secret another's
crimes, when that other assumes the right to brand one without mercy!"
When Ralph found the colonel was in a condition to listen to him, he
heaped reproaches upon him with more energy and severity than one would
have thought him capable of exhibiting. Thereupon Delmare, who certainly
was not an evil-minded man, wept like a child over what he had done; but
he wept without dignity, as a man can do when he abandons himself to the
sensation of the moment, without reasoning as to its causes and effects.
Prompt to jump to the opposite extreme, he would have called his wife
and solicited her pardon; but Ralph objected and tried to make him
understand that such a puerile reconciliation would impair the authority
of one without wiping out the injury done to the other. He was well
aware that there are injuries which are never forgiven and miseries
which one can never forget.
From that moment, the husband's personality became hateful in the wife's
eyes. All that he did to atone for his treatment of her deprived him of
the slight consideration he had retained thus far. He had in very truth
made a tremendous mistake; the man who does not feel strong enough to be
cold and implacable in his vengeance should abjure all thought of
impatience or resentment. There is no possible rôle between that of the
Christian who forgives and that of the man of the world who spurns. But
Delmare had his share of selfishness too; he felt that he was growing
old, that his wife's care was becoming more necessary to him every day.
He was terribly afraid of solitude, and if, in the paroxysm of his
wounded pride, he recurred to his habits as a soldier and maltreated
her, reflection soon led him back to the characteristic weakness of old
men, whom the thought of desertion terrifies. Too enfeebled by age and
hardships to aspire to become a father, he had remained an old bachelor
in his home, and had taken a wife as he would have taken a housekeeper.
It was not from affection for her, therefore, that he forgave her for
not loving him, but from regard for his own comfort: and if he grieved
at his failure to command her affections, it was because he was afraid
that he should be less carefully tended in his old age.
When Madame Delmare, for her part, being deeply aggrieved by the
operation of the laws of society, summoned all her strength of mind to
hate and despise them, there was a wholly personal feeling at the bottom
of her thoughts. But it may be that this craving for happiness which
consumes us, this hatred of injustice, this thirst for liberty which
ends only with life, are the constituent elements of _egotism_, a name
by which the English designate love of self, considered as one of the
privileges of mankind and not as a vice. It seems to me that the
individual who is selected out of all the rest to suffer from the
working of institutions that are advantageous to his fellowmen ought, if
he has the least energy in his soul, to struggle against this arbitrary
yoke. I also think that the greater and more noble his soul is, the more
it should rankle and fester under the blows of injustice. If he has ever
dreamed that happiness was to be the reward of virtue, into what ghastly
doubts, what desperate perplexity must he be cast by the disappointments
which experience brings!
Thus all Indiana's reflections, all her acts, all her sorrows were a
part of this great and terrible struggle between nature and
civilization. If the desert mountains of the island could have concealed
her long, she would assuredly have taken refuge among them on the day of
the assault upon her; but Bourbon was not of sufficient extent to afford
her a secure hiding-place, and she determined to place the sea and
uncertainty as to her place of refuge between her tyrant and herself.
When she had formed this resolution, she felt more at ease and was
almost gay and unconcerned at home. Delmare was so surprised and
delighted that he indulged apart in this brutal reasoning: that it was a
good thing to make women feel the law of the strongest now and then.
Thereafter she thought of nothing but flight, solitude and independence;
she considered in her tortured, grief-stricken brain innumerable plans
of a romantic establishment in the deserts of India or Africa. At night
she followed the flight of the birds to their resting-place at Ile
Rodrigue. That deserted island promised her all the pleasures of
solitude, the first craving of a broken heart. But the same reasons that
prevented her from flying to the interior of Bourbon caused her to
abandon the idea of seeking refuge in the small islands near by. She
often met at the house tradesmen from Madagascar, who had business
relations with her husband; dull, vulgar, copper-colored fellows who had
no tact or shrewdness except in forwarding their business interests.
Their stories attracted Madame Delmare's attention, none the less; she
enjoyed questioning them concerning the marvelous products of that
island, and what they told her of the prodigies performed by nature
there intensified more and more the desire that she felt to go and hide
herself away there. The size of the island and the fact that Europeans
occupied so small a portion of it led her to hope that she would never
be discovered. She decided upon that place, therefore, and fed her idle
mind upon dreams of a future which she proposed to create for herself,
unassisted. She was already building her solitary cabin under the shade
of a primeval forest, on the bank of a nameless river; she fancied
herself taking refuge under the protection of those savage tribes whom
the yoke of our laws and our prejudices has not debased. Ignorant
creature that she was, she hoped to find there the virtues that are
banished from our hemisphere, and to live in peace, unvexed by any
social constitution; she imagined that she could avoid the dangers of
isolation, escape the malignant diseases of the climate. A weak woman,
who could not endure the anger of one man, but flattered herself that
she could defy the hardships of uncivilized life!
Amid these romantic thoughts and extravagant plans she forgot her
present ills; she made for herself a world apart, which consoled her for
that in which she was compelled to live; she accustomed herself to think
less of Raymon, who was soon to cease to be a part of her solitary and
philosophical existence. She was so busily occupied in constructing for
herself a future according to her fancy that she let the past rest a
little; and already, as she felt that her heart was freer and braver,
she imagined that she was reaping in advance the fruits of her solitary
life. But Raymon's letter arrived, and that edifice of chimeras vanished
like a breath. She felt, or fancied that she felt, that she loved him
more than before. For my part, I like to think that she never loved him
with all the strength of her soul. It seems to me that misplaced
affection is as different from requited affection as an error from the
truth. It seems to me that, although the excitement and ardor of our
sentiments abuse us to the point of believing that that is love in all
its power, we learn later, when we taste the delights of a true love,
how entirely we deceived ourselves.
But Raymon's situation, as he described it, rekindled in Indiana's heart
that generous flame which was a necessity of her nature. Fancying him
alone and unhappy, she considered it her duty to forget the past and not
to anticipate the future. A few hours earlier, she intended to leave her
husband under the spur of hatred and resentment; now, she regretted that
she did not esteem him so that she might make a real sacrifice for
Raymon's sake. So great was her enthusiasm that she feared that she was
doing too little for him in fleeing from an irascible master at the
peril of her life, and subjecting herself to the miseries of a four
months' voyage. She would have given her life, with the idea that it was
too small a price to pay for a smile from Raymon. Women are made that
way.
Thus it was simply a question of leaving the island. It was very
difficult to elude Delmare's distrust and Ralph's clear-sightedness. But
those were not the principal obstacles; it was necessary to avoid giving
the notice of her proposed departure, which, according to law, every
passenger is compelled to give through the newspapers.
Among the few vessels lying in the dangerous roadstead of Bourbon was
the ship _Eugène_, soon to sail for Europe. For a long while Indiana
sought an opportunity to speak with the captain without her husband's
knowledge, but whenever she expressed a wish to walk down to the port,
he ostentatiously placed her in Ralph's charge, and followed them with
his own eyes with maddening persistence. However, by dint of picking up
with the greatest care every scrap of information favorable to her plan,
Indiana learned that the captain of the vessel bound for France had a
kinswoman at the village of Saline in the interior of the island, and
that he often returned from her house on foot, to sleep on board. From
that moment she hardly left the cliff that served as her post of
observation. To avert suspicion, she went thither by roundabout paths,
and returned in the same way at night when she had failed to discover
the person in whom she was interested on the road to the mountains.
She had but two days of hope remaining, for the land-wind had already
begun to blow. The anchorage threatened to become untenable, and Captain
Random was impatient to be at sea.
However, she prayed earnestly to the God of the weak and oppressed, and
went and stationed herself on the very road to Saline, disregarding the
danger of being seen, and risking her last hope. She had not been
waiting an hour when Captain Random came down the path. He was a genuine
sailor, always rough-spoken and cynical, whether he was in good or bad
humor; his expression froze Indiana's blood with terror. Nevertheless,
she mustered all her courage and walked to meet him with a dignified and
resolute air.
"Monsieur," she said, "I place my honor and my life in your hands. I
wish to leave the colony and return to France. If, instead of granting
me your protection, you betray the secret I confide to you, there is
nothing left for me to do but throw myself into the sea."
The captain replied with an oath that the sea would refuse to sink such
a pretty lugger, and that, as she had come of her own accord and hove to
under his lee, he would promise to tow her to the end of the world.
"You consent then, monsieur?" said Madame Delmare anxiously. "In that
case here is the pay for my passage in advance."
And she handed him a casket containing the jewels Madame de Carvajal had
given her long before; they were the only fortune that she still
possessed. But the sailor had different ideas, and he returned the
casket with words that brought the blood to her cheeks.
"I am very unfortunate, monsieur," she replied, restraining the tears of
wrath that glistened behind her long lashes; "the proposition I am
making to you justifies you in insulting me; and yet, if you knew how
odious my life in this country is to me, you would have more pity than
contempt for me."
Indiana's noble and touching countenance imposed respect on Captain
Random. Those who do not wear out their natural delicacy by over-use
sometimes find it healthy and unimpaired in an emergency. He recalled
Colonel Delmare's unattractive features and the sensation that his
attack on his wife had caused in the colonies. While ogling with a
lustful eye that fragile, pretty creature, he was struck by her air of
innocence and sincerity. He was especially moved when he noticed on her
forehead a white mark which the deep flush on her face brought out in
bold relief. He had had some business relations with Delmare which had
left him ill-disposed toward him; he was so close-fisted and unyielding
in business matters.
"Damnation!" he cried, "I have nothing but contempt for a man who is
capable of kicking such a pretty woman in the face! Delmare's a pirate,
and I am not sorry to play this trick on him; but be prudent, madame,
and remember that I am compromising my good name. You must make your
escape quietly when the moon has set, and fly like a poor petrel from
the foot of some sombre reef."
"I know, monsieur," she replied, "that you cannot do me this very great
favor without transgressing the law; you may perhaps have to pay a fine;
that is why I offer you this casket, the contents of which are worth at
least twice the price of a passage."
The captain took the casket with a smile.
"This is not the time to settle our account," he said; "I am willing to
take charge of your little fortune. Under the circumstances I suppose
you won't have very much luggage; on the night we are to sail, hide
among the rocks at the _Anse aux Lataniers_; between one and two o'clock
in the morning a boat will come ashore pulled by two stout rowers, and
bring you aboard."