ISABELLE
In the middle of the front tier of boxes at the Club Theatre at
Aix-les-Bains Madame de Marthenay and Madame Landeau displayed their
beauty, one shyly, the other with the utmost composure, to the eyes and
opera-glasses of the audience. They were a good foil for each other.
Isabelle wore a soft silk dress, of buttercup yellow, whose V-shaped
opening revealed the curve of her breast; and round her slender neck,
to set off its whiteness, was a black velvet ribbon in which flashed
a diamond of extraordinary coloring. The gentle Alice was dressed in
black lace, without a jewel. She had chosen this sombre color the
better to efface herself, but it suited her fair complexion admirably.
Behind the women were seated Count de Marthenay, M. Landeau, and
Captain Jean Berlier. That evening Gluck’s “Iphigenia in Tauris” was
being sung. As the first swelling notes of the orchestra called for
silence and attention throughout the house, the ex-lieutenant of
dragoons silently opened the door and glided out of the box. He made
at once for the gaming room. His wife turned round a moment later and
noticed his flight. Alone in her sorrow, she was mourning as she saw
Marcel’s friend once more; mourning for what might have been and was
not. Isabelle was radiant. She was experiencing the joyous sensations
of the cat who has made sure of her prey and gloatingly prolongs her
anticipations, imagining she felt the breath of the young man behind
her on her neck, just below her dark hair. M. Landeau was divided
between desire for this beautiful, cruel creature and anxiety to run
off to the reading-room to see the latest reports from the Stock
Exchange, the scene of his unending battles.
Jean alone was listening to the divine simplicity of the music, as
gracious as the lines of a Greek temple. Iphigenia was addressing to
the chaste goddess her touching prayer for the boon of death in her
exile on the savage coasts of Tauris. The singer, in the youthful glory
of her body draped in harmonious folds of white, in the majesty of her
attitude, in the purity of her face, recalled, though with the added
grace of living flesh, those ancient marbles whose motionless charm
appeals so strongly to all souls that love beauty and whose empire
grows the greater by their defiance of the flight of ages. Only half
aware of the inspiration of the art to which they were listening, the
audience applauded enthusiastically.
Isabelle, leaning back, saw with surprise the joy in Jean’s eyes. His
glance passed over her and was centred on the stage. She addressed a
question to him in a low voice to compel him to draw nearer to her and
to inhale the perfume of her body.
After the first act Madame de Marthenay wished to ask Jean to take
her to the gambling-room and to call her husband. She burned to put a
question to him. Yet she dared not and was obliged to take M. Landeau’s
arm. Favoured by this double departure Isabelle signed to Jean to sit
down beside her.
“Do you know,” said she, “that I have mourned your death?”
“My death? That was rather premature.”
“They announced Commander Guibert’s. You were with him at Timmimun.
Could I guess whether you had shared his fate or not?”
“These lovely eyes have really wept for me?”
“For a whole evening.”
“They shine so bright that they ought to dry up all tears!”
“They are so happy to see you again, Jean.”
She certainly was doing her best to devour him with them. At once she
re-established that atmosphere of guilty pleasure that had existed
between them before. Seeing that his hand was bare she took off her
gloves and laid her own, heavily be-ringed, on her old friend’s.
“You love jewels,” said he, looking at this slender white hand with its
pink nails.
“Yes,” she answered. “I think I am wearing all the treasures of the
world in miniature.”
He smiled sceptically.
“The world is too huge for you to hold in your hand.”
“Look at the green of this emerald, Jean.”
“I prefer the green of the meadows.”
“And the bright blue of this sapphire.”
“It will not compare with the blue of the sky.”
“Look at these rubies.”
“I prefer blood.”
“And these pearls.”
“I would rather see tears.”
“Well, be content--for I shed them for you.”
Amused with their sentimental sword-play they exchanged smiles as two
fencers exchange salutes. Isabelle inhaled life greedily as if it
were a bouquet of tuberoses. Her bosom rose and fell under her bodice
of soft silk, which gave a hint of the firm contours. Jean could
follow the fine blue veins which ran over the white skin and lost
themselves under the silk. He pictured through the cunning draperies
that faultless body, fit pendant to her head with the queenly profile,
crowned by jet black hair. He had only to stoop to pluck this human
flower, this rare orchid in the flesh. In the stem which bent towards
him, in the unfolding of the petals, in the quivering from head to foot
as before the warm evening breeze, he saw her offer of herself. Why
should he not pluck? Did he not know the value of beauty, the value of
youth, which enhances joy so much? But had he not known this he would
not have worn that expression of fervent melancholy in the presence of
joy.
“How long I have been waiting for you!” she cried in a different voice,
in which the accent of desire was plain to his ears.
“You were really waiting for me?”
He could scarcely misunderstand her when she replied:
“I am still waiting for you.”
The orchestra was playing the prelude to the second act. Madame de
Marthenay came back into the box with M. de Lavernay, to whom M.
Landeau had given up his place. The latter, to get away from this
serious music, which differed so much from light opera, and to direct
in peace from the reading-room his dealings on the Stock Exchange,
dispatched to his wife a second admirer, whom he destined in his mind
to be a check on the other. By her coldness to him, which he refused
like so many husbands to attribute to his own shortcomings, Isabelle
infatuated him and made sure of her dominion. She had the art of
mastering this coarse, full-blooded adorer, who growled to show himself
off, like a wild animal before his tamer. He satisfied all her fancies,
all her whims, inspired as much by his own vanity as by the passion to
which he surrendered himself so whole-heartedly. And if he hated her
flirtations, he paid no more attention to them than one would pay to
the tiresome noise of bells on a show horse’s neck.
The old story of Iphigenia unfolded itself slowly. But Jean was beyond
the musician’s power. Before him, between the black velvet ribbon and
the dress, he saw Isabelle’s fair flesh and imagined the silky softness
of it. Half turned towards him, she showed her face in profile. He
followed the proud, slightly curved line of her nose, and stopped to
dwell on those red lips, those lonely lips of an Eastern slave. Had she
not said: “I am still waiting for you?” What was he waiting for? Had
the countless seductions of life suddenly lost their charm for him,
summed up for him as they were in this lovely woman, as a drop of scent
in a Persian bottle contains the attar of a thousand roses? Had the
African sun frozen his blood instead of infusing fire into it? Young
and free, how could he use his youth and freedom in a better way? The
head of whose every movement his thoughts were so filled turned, and
now that the profile was lost to him, his glance had to content itself
with the heavy mass of her hair, with the neck and the line of her
shoulders, so sensuous in their appeal. Giddy, he closed his eyes for a
moment and swore in a passionate fury that he would bring to fruition
the mad desire which overwhelmed him.
At this moment of his abandonment he was swept by the chords of a deep
and sustained harmony, which even in the stress of the sorrow which
they were depicting never lost their grave serenity. His overstrung
nerves were all a-quiver. His soul, its sensitiveness increased tenfold
by the expectation of pleasure, drank in the divine music as a dried-up
flower drinks in the dew.
On the stage Orestes and Pylades were disputing as to who should have
the joy of dying for the other. They had reached the dark shores of
Tauris. The idol of the barbarians had demanded the sacrifice of one of
them. The high priestess, none other than the unhappy Iphigenia, had
indicated Pylades, and Orestes claimed the pain for himself--a quarrel
whose pathos can never grow old, where friendship, inspired by the
intoxication of generosity, surpasses love itself in its transports.
Jean strove to shut out the troubling influence of those sounds which
were so at war with the turmoil of his senses. But his deadened
will-power could not defend him long. He loved life in all its
manifestations of beauty too much not to understand and admire such
perfect art, whose holy inspiration tore from the heart, as one tears
up weeds from a garden, all evil desires, all hatreds and light
thoughts.
He was no longer absorbed by the exclusive worship of a woman. A wild
longing to live several lives at one and the same time seized upon him.
Voluptuous and heroic thoughts came and went quickly, and gained the
mastery over him in turn. Swiftly his mind reviewed his experiences
of the past. He lived again through his friendship with Marcel, and
that crossing of the desert, where perhaps, in solitude and danger, in
intense hardship and struggle, he had learnt the supreme lesson as he
realised the meaning of courage and unfaltering will. And the thought
of the brother brought him to that of the sister. From the beginning of
the evening he had put thoughts of Paule away from him. A few minutes
ago he had succeeded in forgetting her entirely. Why had she come into
his mind now, and why had this exalted music so untoward an effect? He
tried to banish her image rudely, though not without regret.
“Oh,” he thought, “if only she were as lovely as Isabelle.”
And again his eyes followed the line of the neck and shoulders whose
almost luminous surface magnetised him. He gave no thought to the
injustice and impropriety of the comparison. And yet he admitted with a
secret joy:
“_She_ has finer hair. Those black waves of hers must reach to her
knees.”
Isabelle turned to smile at him.
“_She_ has finer eyes,” he said to himself again. But those
eyes of which he thought looked reproachfully at him and he clearly
interpreted their expression.
“Why do you treat me with so little respect?” the faraway Paule seemed
to murmur. “Have I tried to lead you on by flirting with you as she
does? Have I ever forgotten my dignity or modesty in your presence?
If you do not love me, leave me in my lonely peace. Do not degrade
my pure youth by making a mere pleasure of my memory. But if you do
love me,--yes, if you love me,--why do you not find strength in your
love to resist temptations which, for all you know, may ruin the whole
course of your life. Come to me unfettered and proud. May I never read
degradation in your eyes! I do not know if I am the more beautiful, but
I love you, with a love that this woman can never know....”
Jean Berlier was no longer one of those men who go through life with
blinders on their eyes, unable to see the broad fields of man’s daily
labor which border the narrow path of their own passions. Once he had
looked only to his own immediate desires. Now he saw his life fully
and saw it whole, and from its source and its development he read the
presage of its future. Thus considered, love took on a new aspect. In
the place of mere gratification of the senses he put the charm of minds
that think together and that inward strength which springs from peace
at heart and the quiet life of home; in the place of the brief, violent
transports of passion, he put the instinct of the continuity of the
race.
Since his return to Savoy three weeks ago, Jean had often gone to Le
Maupas. He did not go there solely to comfort two poor sorrowing women.
Paule attracted him immensely--by her pride, by her serious depth
of feeling, by the youth which he knew her to be holding in check.
He noticed with surprise at each of his visits, that this reserved,
sensible girl, had a bright, lively spirit, ready to taste joy without
timidity as she had tasted sorrow without flinching. With that touching
trait of lovers, who try to magnify their love by imagining its
extension back into the past, he connected with his present fascination
little memories of long ago, of the times when he played with a
laughing child Pauline. Forgetful of his own forgetfulness, he imagined
an ancient fondness which had survived from childhood. But, still
more, with instinctive clearness of vision he felt that his future
achievement and the rounding of his life, so that it would not be spent
in vain, would depend on her, and on no one else. So he loved her as a
man loves at thirty, confidently and tenderly. Her gracious influence
filled his heart with a new peace.
Isabelle Orlandi’s passion had thrown itself meantime across his path.
Since her marriage for money she had dedicated to her former admirer
all the unsatisfied ardor of her senses, all the fury of her tortured
heart. She had been much more faithful to her friend Jean than to M.
Landeau. She had waited for his return. When she saw him again she
was even more fascinated by his serious and thoughtful face than she
had been before by his careless good temper, and she promised herself
she would wait no longer. For his benefit she displayed the full
fascination of her loveliness.
In the box at the theatre, she had indeed triumphed for a few wild
moments, though she did not know it. During the whole of the act she
had doubted her power to charm because of the hesitations of this
Adonis whose spoken words were so ambiguous. When the curtain went
down, her only wish was to take up the interrupted conversation again.
Devoured by anxiety she turned round immediately and leaning over with
practised art, so as to display all the beauties of her throat and
bosom, asked:
“What were you thinking of? I felt you were not listening to the music.”
Jean smiled and said frankly:
“I was thinking about two charming women.”
“That is one too many.”
With arrow-like glances she tried to pierce the impenetrable mask.
M. de Lavernay was keeping his eyes on the pair, while mixing up all
his classical knowledge in his conversation with Madame de Marthenay.
Isabelle grew impatient and, eager to make sure of her happiness, rose
from her seat.
“It is stifling here. Will you take me into the hall, Captain Berlier?”
With a stare she passed by her discomfited guardian and went out on
Jean’s arm. In the promenade and on the steps of the big staircase
she leant on his arm with all the weight of her languishing body. As
he remained silent, waiting for her to speak, she asked him with a
timidity which had come over her all unforeseen:
“Am I no longer beautiful, Jean? Tell me.”
“Look round you, Madame, and judge for yourself.”
Certainly the pair provoked the glances of the well-dressed crowd which
was streaming out of the auditorium into the big hall. And the eyes
of the _demi-mondaines_ who passed Madame Landeau fastened on her
dress as though to estimate its price and its cut and to guess how her
beauty would look when stripped of it.
She gave her escort a light tap across his fingers.
“You, you, I mean. _You_ are the only person here who has any
interest for me.”
“What about the old gentleman in the box?”
“He does my shopping for me!”
Strengthened by the thought of Paule, he strove to elude his temptress,
whose soft arm he felt--not without a flutter of the heart--hang so
heavily on his. Her burning, eager face under its mantling blush wore a
look of discouragement.
“Do you remember, Jean, the wood at La Chênaie?”
“Oh, yes,” he said, remembering that it was there that Marcel’s fate
had been settled.
“I should love to go back there with you. Did you like me better when I
was a young girl? Be candid.”
“You are more beautiful now and yet different. I always see your
husband behind you.”
She turned round.
“Your jokes are in bad taste, Jean,” she murmured after having made
sure of M. Landeau’s absence.
“You are afraid of him,” she added.
“Oh, no, I am not.”
“You don’t like him?”
“No.”
“So that, before you would consent to--flirt, it would be necessary for
him to please you?”
He began to laugh. “Exactly,” he said.
“That is very strange.”
“You are his wife.”
She laughed in her turn, and half hiding her face behind her fan she
replied:
“So little--and so badly.”
“But quite enough.”
She imitated the little plaintive voice of children caught in the act.
“I won’t do it again.”
He looked long at her. He noticed the quivering movement of her
eyelids, the yearning of her whole body for him. Why should he resist
any longer the appeal of pleasure when it came to him in such lovely
guise?
“Isabelle,” he whispered softly.
She gazed at him in her turn and radiantly slipped her soft hand into
his.
“Jean, dear Jean,” she cried. For an instant they both had a foretaste
of happiness. Then the bell rang to announce the next act. Full of
their joy, they slowly returned to the hall of the theatre, without
speaking. At the head of the marble staircase they stopped to take
breath. Upon the balcony they stood alone above the gay crowd of
spectators hurrying back, but they did not see them.
“Do you know, Jean, you made me tremble. I thought it was true what
they told me.”
Vaguely uneasy and already tortured at heart, he repeated:
“What they told you?”
“Yes, that you were in love with Paule Guibert.”
He let fall the arm that was leaning on his and asked in a changed
voice:
“Who told you that?”
Pale and speechless she uttered an inarticulate sound, as if she saw
the ruined fragments of her happiness lying at her feet.
She was beaten by the magic of a single name and that name, in a mad
aberration, she must needs have uttered herself! It was enough to see
Jean’s face to understand the extent of her defeat, and in a rage at
the shattering of her dream she made her error worse.
“That haughty little creature knew how to fascinate you, with her
airs of a foreign princess. I had my doubts about her. She has been
arranging this affair for a long time, I wager. She is mad, like all
old maids in search of a husband. Go to her. She will know how to
manage you!”
Restored as he was to his right mind by his temptress herself, Jean
looked at her sadly because of her grace, mercifully because of her
passionate heart. And it was in a gentle voice that he answered her
insults.
“Isabelle, forgive me. It lay with you in those old days to share my
life. And you saw this evening how weak I was and how powerful you
were. It is not worthy of you to speak as you did. In the name of our
dead love, Isabelle, be generous.”
With all the thoughtfulness of lovers, he asked for a woman’s sympathy
while telling her he loved her no longer.
But she protested no further. The heaving of her bosom revealed her
inward distress, she accepted defeat and abandoned herself to it. Her
failure had found her unprepared. Too long she had anticipated the joy
of victory. Her girlish flirtation had changed into a deep, sensual
passion, more prone to the extremes of hope and despair than skilled in
the subtleties of sentimental diplomacy.
They were alone on the balcony. The crowd had passed into the theatre,
where Iphigenia, the priestess, veiled in red draperies, was making
ready to perform the blood-sacrifice.
Isabelle looked down on the foyer, whose size seemed immeasurably
enlarged by its emptiness. She put her two hands to her throat as if
she were choking and at last lifted her eyes towards Jean, who was
looking sadly at the distress on her lovely face. She was suffering so
intensely that no base or wicked thoughts stirred him any longer.
“Jean,” she sighed in a faint, hardly audible voice, “you are right. No
woman is more worthy of your love. You will be happy, and I shall be
most unhappy.”
She could say no more, but bending down took the young man’s hand and
pressed it to her lips. He felt a tear upon it, and as she drew herself
up he saw that her face was streaming. But she had already partially
recovered herself and she smiled faintly.
“Are those pearls, Jean?”
“Your tears are a thousand times more precious.”
Taking her in his arms, he kissed her eyes. After this indiscreet
farewell embrace they both felt faint. How many couples have been bound
together for ever by as few moments of weakness! But a door opening
suddenly saved them, and they went back to their box.
“I have wasted my whole life,” said Isabelle, while the attendant came
up, key in hand.
All the rest of the evening, with a strange oblivion of her powers, she
felt wretched. She hated her clothes and her jewels, and exalted the
magnificent poverty of true love above them all. For the rest of the
evening, Jean, for all his victory, felt weaker and more humiliated
than if he had lost. Yet he was enchanted at the sight of this beauty
that he would never possess. His desire still smouldered ere it died
away for ever. Before resolutely treading the narrow path of his
destiny, he turned again to look at pleasure, not without a touch of
sadness.
At the exit, he helped Isabelle to put on the white silk cloak which
covered the brilliant bareness of her neck and shoulders. Not till then
was he able to rejoice that he had remained his own master and turn his
thoughts freely to the pure, proud maiden who claimed the allegiance of
his heart, at once so strong and so weak.
Madame de Marthenay had scarcely said a word to Jean Berlier. He
thought she was taken up with her husband, who according to public
report was losing heavily at the Club and at the Villa des Fleurs and
besides was making himself conspicuous with one of those many startling
_demi-mondaines_ who infest Aix-les-Bains. She endured her sad
life uncomplainingly, her submissive soul resigned beforehand to the
worst. What did her fortune and the unfaithfulness of an unworthy
husband matter to her? She had no hopes of any joy to come. Her
over-refined and sensitive nature could not console itself with worldly
pleasures for her deserted home and the emptiness of her heart.
Her little girl alone kept her from despair. On her she lavished an
excessive affection, heedless of the ills which she thereby laid up for
her in the future.
But that evening the sight of Jean had brought back to her with a
bitter pang the scene in the wood at La Chênaie, when she had not had
the strength to grasp her happiness, though it would have cost her
but a slight effort and a promise that she would wait patiently. She
wanted to question the young man about Marcel Guibert’s last days. The
questions never passed her lips. Would she not betray her duty if she
asked them? By the scruples of her conscience she heaped a new burden
on her widowed heart.
Thus she never knew that Marcel was carrying, when he died, the picture
of a child with candid eyes, who was the cause of his proud scorn of
death.