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 a servant 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 in
violet caves of weariness. The _berthe_ of 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 the _droit du seigneur_ went
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 in riddles 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 the night-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 at the 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 her caresses. 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--is worldly, 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!”