The evening which succeeded to this day of fever, agony, and bliss, was
spent by Helen in torturing and delicious yearning. Is not the
regretting of one's happiness the thinking of it again? Why had she
asked her lover not to come to the Rue de la Rochefoucauld that evening?
When yonder, beside him, she had thought that to meet him again in her
own home after an interval of so few hours, would be distressing to her.
Now she said to herself, while working after dinner at her crochet in
the little drawing-room, and seated in the arm-chair which Armand
usually occupied--yes, she said to herself with melancholy that it would
be very sweet if she had him there, close beside her.
She would touch her lover's hand sometimes with her own. She would
breathe the faint aroma of the scent which she had asked him to use and
which was the same as hers. In imagination she grasped that enjoyment at
once severe and soothing to a woman's soul--the enjoyment of hearing the
lips that have told you "I love you" between two kisses in the
afternoon, employ "Madame" and similar formalities to you, so that the
most insignificant phrase brings home the charm of the mystery that
links you together. And Helen's delicate fingers continued their agile
handling of the tortoise-shell crochet hook, while Alfred turned over
the leaves of a book without speaking.
On her return, she had experienced a bitter moment when, meeting her son
again, she had been forced to allow little Henry to give her
kisses--which she had not returned. She had contented herself with
embracing him, with resting the child's cheek against her own, and then
she had felt that she loved him even more than before. All these
different kinds of emotion had left their traces in her face, which,
usually rosy, was on this evening strangely pale, but of that toned and
shrouded paleness that succeeds to complete voluptuousness.
A halo of lassitude hovered about her eyes, a softness about her smile,
an air of suppleness and languor about her entire person, and this
lover-like appearance lent her such seductiveness as would have
frightened her had she taken the trouble to watch Alfred. The latter
never turned his eyes from her as she bent her tenderly wearied head
over her work. Dressed in white, as was her custom, the faint brown tint
of her eyelids was the better seen since she kept them downcast,
apparently upon her wool, in reality upon the visions which were
rekindling her soul. Alfred reflected with rapture that she was his
wife--his wife.
He was more in love with her than ever. Only, ever since their
settlement at Paris had brought with it a separation of rooms, he had
felt himself seized, whenever he longed for her caresses, by an emotion
which he could with difficulty subdue. He must ask his Helen to allow
him to remain with her, or else enter her room when she was in bed. This
need of acting, united to the torment of physical desire, is so painful
to certain men, that timid youths experience an almost unbearable
throbbing of the heart on merely crossing the threshold of those houses
in which pleasure is sold ready-made. During the whole of this evening,
Alfred, although he was satisfied of Helen's submission, endured that
emotion which is not without sweetness, since it renders still more
perceptible the keenness of desire. He looked at her, and the words
which he was preparing beforehand to say to her, caused him a sinking of
the heart. He kept silence with such persistency that the poor woman had
almost forgotten his existence when she rose to go to her room and held
out her forehead to him, with the words:
"Till to-morrow."
"Eh! what! till to-morrow?" he replied, trying to bring his kiss down to
her eyes, and lower still. She shuddered, repulsed him abruptly, and
looked at him. In the depths of her husband's eyes there was the same
gleam of desire the reflection of which she had that morning surprised
in her looking-glass, while combing her hair to surrender it to the
hands of the other.
It was an abrupt awakening from the dreams of that whole evening. The
palpable sensation of physical partition was present in all its
hideousness, and as Alfred approached her with a smile, and the words,
"My little Helen," she passed quickly to the other side of an
easy-chair, and, separated from him, replied:
"Do you not see that I am quite ill this evening?"
She was so pale, and had such a ring of weariness about her eyes, that
Alfred was moved by the sight.
"It is the last of my headache," she continued, touching her temple; "a
good night's rest, and it will disappear. So, till to-morrow."
She smiled, made a graceful gesture with her hand, and left the
drawing-room. Alfred, when alone, could hear her going and coming in the
adjoining apartment, which was her own room. He himself occupied a room
on the floor above, opening into his study.
"How delicate her health is," he thought tenderly to himself.
"No; never, never!" said Helen, speaking aloud to herself, when her maid
had left her; and, leaping out of bed, she turned the key in both doors.
Alfred, who was still in the drawing-room, seated before the fire, heard
the sound of the key turning in the lock.
"She is afraid of me, then?" he asked himself with singular sadness; and
meanwhile Helen, stretched in bed, was repeating half aloud:
"Never, never again will I give myself to that man."
The reality of the situation had just been impressed upon her with
frightful clearness. She could foresee the daily strife, the dispute for
her person night by night and hour by hour. If high life, as it is
called, with its nightly engagements, its facilities for isolation in an
immense house, and its social pleasures and duties, enables a husband
and wife, not on good terms with each other, to live both side by side
and yet apart, it is not so with those of the comfortable middle class.
Conjugal interviews in private are there the rule, social engagements
the exception, and husband and wife meet every moment, and in every
detail of existence.
"Heavens, what can I do?" said Helen to herself. Then courageously: "I
will find means. It will be so sweet to struggle for him."
Her soul became exalted by the impress of this thought, and suddenly she
could again taste Armand's kisses upon her lips. All the circumstances
of their interview showed themselves, from the anguish of arrival to
that of departure. Ah, what a farewell! What a caress was that given on
the threshold of the door before entering again upon life! Then, what a
walk through the streets with its brutal tumult of passengers, vehicles,
trains! Armand had remained alone in the little home. What had been his
thoughts in presence of the bed which, with strange modesty, she had
wished to remake herself?
"I am going to be grateful to my step-mother for making me wait on
myself when I was small," she said, with her tender gracefulness.
She knew by hearsay that men usually despise women when they have
nothing more to obtain from them. But her Armand was not like the rest,
since he had lavished upon her his most caressing kisses after their
common ecstacy. "I was there," she reflected; "it was when I had left
that he judged me. Judged?--and how? I deceived for his sake, but still
I deceived." Then once more she saw him, full of such tender passion,
that she fell asleep with a smile at his image, and at the thought:
"I shall see him to-morrow."
It was at the Théâtre des Variétés that they were to spend together
that second evening whose hours were to Helen sweet of the sweet--the
only truly rapturous ones of those sad loves. As soon as she awoke, she
had written her lover an interminable letter, and just as she was about
to send it, she had received from the young man, who for once was
faithless to his principles, an almost coaxing note. The nervous emotion
of the night before had lost its keenness in her, leaving behind it an
acuter susceptibility of heart with which to enjoy desired things with
more of inward thrilling. Chance willed it that Alfred should breakfast
away from home, and thanks to his absence the cruel impressions of the
previous evening were not renewed. Thus, when she arrived at the door of
the little stage-box in the theatre, she was in that delicious state of
soul in which there is, as it were, an inward voice that sings. At such
moments everything soothes, just as at others everything wounds.
It was nine o'clock. Helen was standing then in the passage, and while
the attendant was relieving her of her cloak she did not venture to ask
whether there was anyone already in the box. The door was opened, her
heart throbbed, and she perceived Armand rising to greet her. How she
loved him for having got there before herself and her husband. Once
seated, she at last ventured, after a few minutes, to look at him. He
appeared to her to be rather pale, and she felt some anxiety about it;
but he had such eyes as on his good days, those which rekindled all her
soul, and not those others whose mystery terrified her. What piece were
they playing on the stage? She could hear the music of the orchestra,
the voices of the actors, the applause; but the interest of the play
turned with her upon knowing whether Alfred would leave the box at the
next interval. The curtain fell. Her happy destiny willed it
that there should be a family of their acquaintance in the house.
Her husband went off to speak to these ladies. She was alone with her
beloved--alone!--and turning towards him she asked:
"Are you in love with me to-day?"
Armand did not reply, but under pretence of picking up his opera-glass,
which had fallen to the ground, he bent down and took her foot in his
hand. Through the silk she could feel a clasp which caused her to blush
and cast down her eyelids, as though she were incapable of supporting
the emotion that took possession of her. With a rapid gesture she seized
a bouquet composed of a spray of fern and a little lily-of-the-valley,
which the young baron wore in his button-hole, and slipped her larceny
into her bosom.
Alfred returned, the curtain rose again, scene succeeded to scene, and
act to act, but she was aware of nothing save of the fact that she was
almost too happy; and when, on the conclusion of the play, Armand gave
her his arm to lead her back to a carriage, she leaned upon this arm
with that absolute blending of motion, which is a surer token of love
than any other. How gladly she would have had him to take his place
beside her! But already he was departing, and she followed him with a
prolonged gaze through the crowd. Then the carriage extricated itself
from the confusion in the neighbourhood of the theatre. "Good-bye, my
love," she said in thought, while her husband took her hand, and said
aloud to her:
"You are better this evening?"
"Yes," she said, freeing her fingers, "but it is the excitement of the
play. I need rest so much. I have not slept for the last five nights."
Chazel understood only too well what this reply meant. He remained
silent in a corner of the carriage. Helen also refrained from speaking.
But a plan had already ripened in her head. The very next day, brought
by Alfred himself, she would visit their physician, whose consulting day
it was. She would enter the doctor's room alone, and relate to him some
symptoms or other; then she would say that the physician forbade all
intimate relations with her husband until further notice. She was too
well acquainted with the species of timid modesty which ruled Alfred not
to know that he would pity her without seeking to divine the mystery of
suffering with which she would shroud herself. Supported by this
plan--which would have been very repugnant to her had it not been
calculated to assure the security of her happiness--with what delight
did she suffer herself to be overpowered by sleep, by such a sleep as
that wherein we appear to sleep with clearness in our dreams! We sleep,
and something wakes within us--a happy portion of our spirit--which
ceases not to be sensible of the happiness that we shall find again
to-morrow on our pillow. Do we not know that we shall learn this
happiness anew by merely opening our eyes?
But neither on that following morning, nor on the mornings which came
after it during those few weeks of first intoxication through which she
passed, did Helen open her eyes immediately upon awaking. For several
minutes she kept her eyelids closed, that Armand's image might return to
her perfectly clear and complete before any other impression. If the day
about to be spent was an ordinary one, that is to say, without an
appointed visit to the Rue de Stockholm, she rose indolently. The
thought of her appointment was not present to make her feverish, and she
could think about her lover without anxiety.
On the previous evening, before going to bed, she had begun a letter to
him, which she concluded as soon as she had risen, so that "good-night"
and "good morning" might meet upon the same scrap of paper--a visible
symbol of the continuity of her love. Sometimes she found means to send
this letter, sometimes she kept it about her, folded in two in her
bosom, in order to deliver it herself. From Armand she expected no
reply. He had explained to her the prudential reasons on account of
which he did not write, and in this prudence she had not perceived the
lack of impulse and politic calculation of a man of gallantry, who
foresees approaching ruptures, and does not wish to leave any weapon in
the hands of his future enemy.
She used to close her letter with a seal, on which she had had engraved
a serpent in the shape of the letter S, because with an S began the name
of the street which had been the asylum of her happiest moments. The
laughter with which Armand had greeted this childishness, had indeed
pained her somewhat, but she had said to herself: "Men have not the same
way of loving as we have." Then, her dear task concluded, she addressed
herself to all the cares of her household, cheerful, and finding no duty
irksome. She was accompanied throughout her work by a phrase which she
used to repeat in a whisper: "He loves me, he loves me." Especially did
she occupy herself with her son, whom she now could kiss without
remorse. "No, dear child, I have taken nothing from you," she said to
him in her heart, and thanks to that power of sophistry characteristic
of happy love, she came to think in like manner respecting her husband.
She had never done anything but esteem him, and she continued to esteem
him as before. Since the pretence of the doctor's order had freed her
from all hateful advances on Alfred's part, she ingenuously extended to
him the joy with which her heart was filled. She no longer made him any
of those bitter replies which, in connection with the pettiest details,
betray the unconscious animosity of a woman against the man to whom she
belongs, and who has not been able to win her love. Did he at table
utter, as he used to do, an idea that was not her own; did he allow an
awkward gesture or a clumsy question to escape him, she had no capacity
within her for becoming angry, all her faculties being employed in
calculating the hour at which Armand would be with her, and in depicting
to herself the happiness that his presence would bring her. The hour
struck, and Armand was there. She felt so fully satisfied that she no
longer thought of watching him. He told her that he loved her; he proved
it to her by sacrificing his life in society, the theatres, his club,
and spending as many as two or three evenings in the week with her. What
interest would he have in deceiving her, and how could she do otherwise
than surrender herself to this divine felicity?
When the morning of a day selected for one of their secret meetings
arrived, she had not the strength to superintend her household. The
expectation of happiness was so keen that it bordered upon pain. On
these mornings, as on the first of them, she was absorbed, feverish and
prostrate by the fireside, in prolonged reflection, and in her excess of
feeling experienced an anguish that relaxed to delight when she had
reached the little suite of rooms in the Rue de Stockholm. These were
still the same; for having been obliged at their third meeting to take
other rooms in the same house, she had entreated Armand to return to the
former ones, to those which had witnessed her first intoxication.
To do this it had been necessary to take the lodgings no longer by the
day, but by the month. Armand had at first declined to do this,
affirming that he had good reasons, but in reality because he knew by
experience how greatly a movable place of meeting that is changed on
each occasion facilitates ruptures, and then--although he was generous
and rich he felt, without fully acknowledging it to himself, that there
was rather too great a difference between the twenty-five francs that
Madame Palmyre demanded for an afternoon, and the four hundred
represented by a monthly hiring. He had yielded nevertheless, just
because a small money question was involved, and because he thought
himself shabby for having so much as thought about it.
"It will only last six months after all," he had said to himself.
But how delighted the confiding Helen had been by this concession! What
quick work it had been with her to transform the commonplace rooms into
a personal domain to which she brought all kinds of dainty feminine
objects, slippers into which to slip her naked feet, a lace shawl to
throw over her quivering shoulders, a few pieces of material for draping
the table and the backs of the easy chairs, a frame in which to place a
photograph of Armand. She had not suspected that each of these little
attentions had had the double effect of disquieting De Querne with
respect to the difficulty of future separations, and of proving to him
that he had to deal with a lady of experience. Like all romantic women,
Helen was occupied with the subtleties of the voluptuousness common to
herself and to her lover, as though with an anxiety suggested by
sentiment. What renders a woman of this kind perfectly unintelligible to
a libertine is that he, on his part, has accustomed himself to separate
the things of pleasure from the things of the heart, and to taste this
pleasure amid degrading conditions; whereas a woman who is romantic and
in love, having known pleasure only as associated with the noblest
exaltation, transfers to her enjoyments the reverence which she has for
her moral emotions.
Helen approached with amorous piety, almost with mystic idolatry, the
world of mad caresses and embracings. This piety was centred upon the
man who had taught her to love, as upon a being above the range of all
discussion. It went for nothing that Armand, after the first days of a
self-abandonment produced by the novelty of physical possession,
multiplied the tokens of his egotism; his mistress found the means of
loving him the more for them. If he came late to their interview in the
Rue de Stockholm, she was so proud of having worsted him in the intimate
joust of love that she was almost grateful to him for doing so. If at
the last moment, and merely to suit his own convenience, he altered the
hour of their meeting, the gentle woman experienced a further pleasure
in feeling herself treated by her worshipped master as a slave, as a
thing which belonged to him, and which he disposed of according to his
fancy.
Was this paying too dear for the ecstasy which she felt in ascending the
staircase of the house (ah, how little she cared whether she were looked
at now!) in hearing the creaking of the key (her own key, for she had
now one of her own) in the lock, in walking through the three rooms
wherein abode the whole of her passionate life, and above all in holding
Armand beside her, close beside her? Evening was falling, the objects
about them were growing dim in outline, and she lay in his arms,
listening to the distant roar of the town, the noise of the neighbouring
railway, and, beneath their windows, the circles of little girls
singing: "Il était une bergère." Then she would give her lover kisses
so tender that he would ask her almost with anxiety:
"What have you got to trouble you?"
"Why, I have got you," she would reply.
Ah! why, why is passion not contagious? And what a monstrous thing it is
that of two lovers one should be able to feel so much and the other so
little!
So little! And yet the young man in these crafty interviews allowed
himself to speak to his mistress as though he were madly in love with
her. Was it in order to beguile with talk the real dryness of his heart?
Was it that the vibration of his troubled nerves was completed in
phrases as full of tenderness as he was lacking in it himself? If he had
had less power of analysis, he would have believed himself in love with
Helen, for when beside her he was seized with fits of the most violent
desire. But he knew that once out of her presence he would experience
nothing but a moral aching, an infinite weariness, a sense of the
uselessness of things, and, to sum up, a renewal of that torpor of soul
which the fever of the senses galvanised without dissipating. As for
Helen, she drank in every word coming at such moments from Armand's
lips, like a liquid that would enable her to traverse with intoxication
the space separating her from the next meeting.
It was, nevertheless, in the course of one of these talkings on the
pillow, he leaning on his elbow, and she lying against his breast and
watching him, that the first words of disenchantment were
pronounced--words after which she began to see her Armand no longer
through the mirage of her dreams, but such as he was, with the
frightful, deathly aridity of his soul.
"Ah, how I should like to have a child by you!" she had murmured to him
in the middle of one of these contemplations--"a child who had these
eyes," and she raised her hand to touch her lover's eyelids; "who had
these lips," and she brushed them with her fingers. "How I should love
him!"
"I do not wish for it," replied Armand. "I should feel too sad to see
him kissing as his father another than myself."
"But that would not be!" she exclaimed.
"It could not be avoided," he replied.
"I would go away with you," she said, "and I should be forced to do so.
How could Alfred keep me, now that I never give myself to him?"
While she was uttering these words, he looked at her, thinking to
himself:
"She, too! What strange desire is it that impels them all to give out
that they have ceased to belong to their husbands?"
And, in spite of himself, he smiled his evil smile, the smile with which
he had greeted other analogous confidences made by other lips, and this
smile had always been sufficient to prevent the women who had drawn it
upon themselves from returning to the subject. They have such facility
in changing a falsehood! But Helen, who did not speak falsely, could
endure neither the smile nor the look which accompanied it. Was it not
in order that she might never see them again that she had given herself
to her lover? It was the first time since then that she had encountered
the distrust which caused her so much pain at the beginning of her
connection with Armand, and loyal as she was, brave and straightforward,
she persisted:
"You do not believe me capable of belonging to two men at the same time?
Say no, my dear love; say that you have not such an opinion of me. From
the day on which I became your mistress, I ceased to be Alfred's wife."
"I am not jealous," said the young man; "I know that you love me."
"Say that you are not jealous, because you are sure that I am only
yours."
"If you wish it, I will say so," he replied, rendered somewhat impatient
by her persistence, and being especially but little anxious about the
prospects of paternity, flight, and drama which Helen's sudden words had
just opened up before him; and such irony was impressed upon his words
that the unhappy woman became silent.
"He does not believe me," she thought; "he does not believe me!"
On returning home that evening, Helen felt sad, even to death. She
withdrew to her own room, and, under pretence of a headache, went to bed
instead of coming down to dinner. She wept much. She could see dimly
through her grief what a difference there existed between Armand's love
and her own. "Ah!" she said to herself, "of what has he judged me
capable? He does not love me." And, seized again by the terrible dread
from which she had suffered on the very evening of the day when she had
given herself to him, she said again to herself:
"He is right. What I am doing is so wicked. But he ought to understand
that it is for his sake, and so excuse me." And she pressed her forehead
upon her pillows, falling suddenly, as very impassioned souls do, from
extreme felicity into extreme anguish.
This first perception was a very keen one, but it did not last. Upon
reflection, Helen compared her grief with the reason which had provoked
it. The sight of the disproportion between cause and effect sufficed to
calm her, the more so that Armand's eyes, when they met again, expressed
that ardour of desire in the fire of which her heart ever expanded. The
young man had quite understood the pain caused to his mistress by his
doubt, and had said to himself:
"Why torment her? She lies to me in order to please me the more, and I
am angry with her for the lie. 'Tis too unjust!"
This reasoning, which was a secret flattery to his pride, had the result
of making him more tender towards Helen. But when the period of lucidity
has begun in the case of a heart that loves, it does not close so
rapidly, and a few days after this first shock Helen was to endure a
second.
This time her lover and she had met, as they sometimes did, to walk
together in one of the avenues in the Jardin des Plantes. Helen was very
fond of the peaceful, country-like park, with its fine trees reminding
her of those in the grounds of the Archbishop at Bourges. She was
especially fond of the place where she had been waiting for Armand, the
long slender terrace the parapet of which runs along the side of the Rue
Geoffroy-Saint-Hilaire. She sat down on a bench, from which she could
follow the hands of a large clock placed against one of the inner
buildings of the Hôpital de la Pitié. The melancholy courtyard of this
house of griefs, with its pruned and leafless trees, the gloomy bars on
the windows, and the old and dilapidated colouring of the walls, pleased
her as a contrast to the young and happy intimacy of the dear romance of
her love. She was sensible of a delightful lethargy in bringing back her
thoughts to herself, while the great omnibuses went heavily down the low
street almost beneath her feet. Some children were playing in the grove
of the labyrinth, and their shouts reached her, causing her to renew
far-off impressions obliterated by the years.
At last she perceived Armand at the end of the terrace, and she rose to
meet him, prettier than usual, as she knew from her lover's glance,
thanks to the contrast between her toilet and the humble
landscape--between her pink complexion and the dark leafage of the
cedars. Then they walked in the quiet portion of the gardens, that
portion which is set aside for plants--near trees two hundred years old,
whose aged trunks, plastered like walls, rested on supports of iron.
Whether the winter sky were bluish or veiled with mist, there was always
sunshine so far as she was concerned, when Armand was there.
They were wandering, then, side by side, in one of the avenues of this
vast garden on a dull afternoon early in February, and Helen was telling
her lover the story of the wife of one of Alfred's colleagues who had
just been cast off by her husband, on his discovering that she had two
lovers at once.
"The rest," said the young man, with his evil smile, "have them in
succession. The difference is a slight one."
"The rest?" said Helen, who suddenly felt again the melancholy emotion
of the previous week; "you do not believe that of all women?"
"Nay, I have no bad opinion of them," he replied. "I believe that they
are weak, and that men are deceivers. They find many men to swear that
they love them, and they believe one out of every ten. That makes a
pretty fair reckoning in the end."
"Then you think that there is no woman in existence who has had only one
love?"
"Few," said Armand. "But what does it matter?" he added gaily; "at each
fresh intrigue they fancy that they have never loved before, and it is
half true, like all truths--they have not loved altogether in the same
manner."
A question rose to Helen's lips. She wished to ask: "And I? What do you
think me? Do you believe that I have loved before you? Do you believe
that I shall love after you?" She dared not. Once more she was cruelly
impressed by the unknown element in her lover's character. No, it was
not she whom he doubted--not she, more than another. The man did not
believe in any woman. But how is love possible without belief? Is there
any sort of tenderness possible without trust? She did not answer
herself on these too painful topics, but she prolonged an involuntary
analysis of her relations with Armand, and suddenly light was thrown
within her upon many of the details which she had not interpreted.
Reflecting upon the distrustful characteristics which alarmed her in
this man, she in a retrospective fashion understood the silence with
which on certain occasions he had greeted her outpourings. She
remembered him listening to her while she spoke of her country life, and
of her moral solitude. "I was keeping myself for you beforehand, without
knowing you," she had said. He had made no reply. He had not believed
her. Another time she had talked to him of the future, and of the joy
that she felt in thinking that they were both young and so had many
years in which to love each other. He had made no reply. He had not
believed her. When she told him that, but for her son, she would have
gone far, very far away, that she might consecrate her entire life to
him alone, he kept silence; he had not believed her. Ah! his
incredulity, his horrible incredulity! She encountered it now even in a
quite recent past, but where she had not suspected it! Or no, was she
deceiving herself? Was it that Armand had believed in her so long as he
loved her, and was beginning to believe in her no longer now that he
loved her less?
Did he love her less? She did not admit for a moment that he had not
loved her at the beginning of their connection. He was an honourable
man, not a love criminal. He would not have asked her to be his had he
not been drawn to do so by all the forces of passion. Then, to explain
Armand's incredulity, she reverted to the young man's past, to the
mysterious deceptions of which her husband had formerly spoken to her.
"A woman has spoiled his heart," she said to herself.
At the thought of this she was pained by a different pain. She pitied
Armand more, and she was jealous with a dim, vague jealousy. Then she
asked herself:
"Will my love ever have power to restore to him the faith that he has
lost?"
Absorbed as she was in these thoughts, nothing of which she expressed to
the man who was their object, she no longer studied the impression which
she herself produced upon her lover. When Armand came to dine in the Rue
de La Rochefoucauld, and all three of them--he, Alfred, and
herself--remained to spend the evening in the little drawing-room, she
lapsed into abysmal silence. Alfred delighted, as a mathematician, in
abstract discussions, and set forth social, political, and economic
theories to the young baron, who listened to him with visible weariness
depicted upon his features. Then a moment would come when Helen,
emerging from her reflections, looked at him. She saw this expression of
weariness, and failed to comprehend its immediate and trifling cause.
"He is not happy with me," she would say to herself, and immediately
afterwards, with even greater simplicity, "He is not happy." So she
reflected, she who had given herself to him to obliterate a wrinkle of
melancholy upon his brow, she whose thoughts and feelings had but a
single aim: his happiness!
At other times, Armand would come, and at the first glance she discerned
that while away from herself he had passed through periods of sadness.
Then she felt quite paralysed. She trembled to speak to him, to utter a
word that, coming from her lips, would displease him. An indefinable
uneasiness took possession of her, a fear of showing her soul to the man
she loved, that was all the more painful, for the fact that she had at
first surrendered herself with such deep delight to the charm of feeling
aloud in his presence, and this uneasiness with her now went even to
their interviews in the Rue de Stockholm.
It was not that in the little home she would find her lover less
distracted with her beauty, less passionate than in the days which had
followed upon the complete surrender. But his kisses, and the sort of
frenzy with which he embraced her now, made her afraid. She dreaded to
feel the contrast between the ecstasy caused to her lover by physical
possession, and the evident weariness of soul which he displayed in
their almost daily interviews. It seemed as though the young man were
striving to electrify his heart with the desire for her person. When
Helen perceived this cruel truth, the enchantment of the hours of
meeting suddenly ceased. Sometimes she longed for these meetings with
the gloomiest ardour, that she might at least hear her lover's voice
lavishing upon her those phrases of intoxication which, at the beginning
of their intercourse, had been the adorable music that had exalted her.
Then she dreaded these same interviews, and their caresses into which
the senses perhaps entered more than the heart.
"Ah! my Armand," she had ventured to say to him, "you love my person
more than you love myself."
"Nay, do you not give yourself to me in giving me your person?" he had
replied.
Heavens! how gladly would she have asked him: "And you, do you give
yourself entirely to me?"
She had paused upon this question. Why interrogate him? Did she not know
that he would coax her with these soft blandishments of speech which do
not reveal the depths of the heart? Would she succeed in deciphering the
meaning this living enigma of a man's character, set thus before her for
weal or woe? Cruel heart! would it never yield her its secret? Kisses,
however, may be more tender than he who gives them, soft looks may
conceal a soul like a veil--and she was so thirsty for truth!
But whence came all this moral anxiety that preyed upon her? Nothing had
to all appearance occurred between them, and already she was alternately
asking herself:
"Does he love me as much as at first? Does he love me? Has he ever loved
me? Can he love me?"
And every minute she struck upon some trifling fact that heightened her
doubt. She ceaselessly encountered that mistrust which degraded her,
that irony which bruised her, that dryness of heart which reduced her to
despair. Some of their friends from Bourges would arrive in Paris, and
Alfred would say to De Querne:
"Do not come to-morrow evening; you would be too much bored. We are
having some acquaintances from the country."
"When I am going to be in your way," the young man would say to Helen
next day, "why do you not give me notice yourself, instead of doing it
through your husband?"
"To be in my way?" she would ask.
"Oh! why deceive me? You have had some flirtations over there for which
you blush here. You do not want me to verify your familiarity with this
man or the other. But what can that signify to me since you did not know
me? What does signify is to see you deceiving me."
Deceiving! always deceiving! This word recurred in Armand's
conversations--indefatigably; she read it in his eyes, his gestures, his
thoughts. Did she find herself obliged at the last moment to fail at one
of their meetings in the Rue de Stockholm, she knew that he would not
believe in her excuse. But a man of that kind--no, such a man cannot
love.
"Ah, love me, love me!" she would murmur feverishly as she drew closer
to him after passing through one of those crisis of anguish in which she
had felt how little her lover's heart belonged to her.
"Why, I do love you," he would reply, without understanding the agony of
which this agony was a last sigh. _She_ understood that the word had not
the same signification to him as to her, and the whole of the inward
tragedy whereof she was the silent, grief-stricken heroine, burst forth
one frightful day. Like a captive who, during his sleep, has been bound
by his conquerors to a corpse, and awakes to discover himself chained to
this horrible companion, she found herself, a living heart, a heart
susceptible to love, and happiness, and life, fastened to a corpse-like
heart, icy, moveless--slain!
When the reality of this came before her, she quickly flung herself
back. All that she had believed genuine was deceptive, all that she had
believed full was empty; but she would not acknowledge this to herself.
She treated as chimeras those almost indefinable tokens which enable a
tormented soul to penetrate another to its remotest depths. She loved
Armand, and she wished to love him. Was not her entire life staked now
on this card? It was only four months since she had become his mistress.
What! four such short months! It is a horrible thing that in so short a
time one can pass, without any visible shame, from the sublimest
hope--that of making amends for all the injustice in a man's destiny--to
the bitterest conviction of impotence. Scarcely four months, and he was
not happy, nor was she. Would she never again ascend the incline down
which she felt herself falling?
She caught glimpses of the future with unconquerable anguish. Ah, if it
were true that he could not love, what would become of her. She now
existed only through him; she could not exist otherwise. And he seemed
to have no suspicion of the crisis of sorrow through which she was
passing. It was her own fault; why did she not show him all her soul?
That again she was unable to do. Would she ever be able? And when her
grief caused her excessive suffering she murmured: "Strange being, why
have I loved you? And nevertheless I cannot regret that I have done so."