The cab went slowly along the streets, and every moment Helen said to
herself: "Shall I see him again?" She was now facing the irresistible
thought, the mere appearance of which had hurried her to the immediate
quest of Armand when she had barely emerged from her horrible delirium.
She must be able to cry to this man that he had ruined her. Yes, she
must do this, and he must at last believe her and understand the infamy
of his behaviour. She would say to her former lover:
"I am Monsieur de Varades's mistress, and you are the cause of it--you,
your injustice, and your desertion." And how could the man help
believing her when she went on to say to him: "Before knowing you I was
pure."
This indisputable proof of the genuineness of her love, this proof which
she had so greatly desired, she now held fast, and she would not let it
go. Would not her present sincerity be a guarantee of her past
sincerity? If she acknowledged the guilt of to-day, what motive of
modesty, hypocrisy or interest could prompt her to deny that of
yesterday? This strange reasoning appeared to her to carry with it a
sort of obviousness from which Armand could not escape. He would believe
her, and this should be her revenge. "But how will he receive me? Yet,
what does it matter? I will spit my misery and my shame, and his
responsibility for them, into his face."
Her distempered soul found relief in the audacity of this plan. She
hated Armand now, she trembled lest he should be absent, lest he should
escape her. "Faster," she said several times to the driver. Would she
ever arrive soon enough? She recognised the smallest details of the
road--the road traversed with such lightness of heart the last time that
she had visited him! And the scene which she had been obliged to go
through showed in her mind still more terrible and clear. During that
scene she had been choked with indignation. She had been unable to make
any reply. He could not have believed her then, but he should believe
her now. She would show him what had been the drama of her existence for
months past. She would at last lay bare all her heart's hidden wounds.
She would make him touch with his finger the work of death that he had
wrought, and she would depart, leaving him, if he had any honour left,
at least this hideous remorse, this poisoned arrow in his conscience.
Then she thought: "In what condition shall I find him. What has he been
doing since our rupture?"
At last the vehicle stopped at the corner of the Rue Lincoln and the
Champs-Élysées. In two minutes Helen had gained the door of Armand's
house. How her voice shook as she asked the porter: "Is Monsieur de
Querne at home?" How completely the affirmative reply upset her. She
hesitated for a second in spite of the resolve she had taken; then she
climbed the staircase with deliberate foot. Her hand pressed the bell
without hesitation. A servant's footstep became audible. The door
opened. It was no longer possible to draw back.
What had Armand been doing during that period in which she had been in
the throes of despair? Had she known, even when in front of the open
door, disgust would perhaps have restrained her and drawn her back. She
would have fled in horror from the threshold of the abode to which she
had come in order to defend, not her person, not her happiness, but the
truth of her former love, as we defend the memory of the dead.
The young man had spoken the truth in his note to Chazel. A ten days'
journey had brought him to an estate which he possessed close to
Nantes--the De Querne family came from this town--and he had stayed
there to arrange some business respecting farm rents. Then he had
returned to Paris, persuaded that the rupture was a final one, seeing
that during those ten days Helen had not hazarded any attempt at
reconciliation.
By a contradiction in his nature, too usual with him to cause him
astonishment, these early moments had been melancholy ones. He was one
of those men who are moved by memories after having remained nearly
indifferent to the reality, who become enamoured of the women whom they
cast off, just as they regret the places of which they tired when living
in them--a restless race, who know nothing of the present but its
weariness, and for whom the past assumes a unique and affecting charm
from the mere fact that it is the past.
Armand had never loved poor Helen; he applauded himself for breaking
with her as for an action that was most reasonable, regard being had to
his own interests, and withal exceedingly meritorious, seeing that he
had responded to Alfred's generosity with similar generosity; but
neither the grounds of interest nor those of merit could prevent him
from thinking with painful emotions of the sweet and dainty mistress who
after all had never deceived him except for the purpose of pleasing him
the more. To be sure he doubted less than ever that she had had that
first intrigue with De Varades at Bourges, of which Lucien Rieume had
spoken to him. What more evident token could there have been of this
than the manner in which she had received the accusation? Immediately
she had bowed her head, and had, as it were, collapsed beneath the
insult.
But even though he had had two, three, four predecessors, by what right
had he been indignant against her? Had she not displayed during their
connexion all the loyalty of which such amours are capable? Had she ever
manifested so much as a trace of coquetry towards any one? Had she made
him jealous for but a single hour, with jealousy such as women of the
world, more abandoned in this than abandoned women themselves, do not
hesitate to inflict upon a lover, in order to gratify the pettiest
impulse of vanity, to please a man who has some claim or other to
celebrity or who has merely been noticed by another woman. No, Helen had
been perfect towards him. The consciousness of this pleased and at the
same time tormented him, for, if she flattered his pride, she also
rendered more present to him the faded charm of a love which he had not
been able to enjoy at the time when he dreaded its obligations.
But what he regretted in Helen, even more than her gracious tenderness,
was her physical person. From the time that he had become her lover he
had, contrary to all his principles, remained entirely faithful to her,
and this fidelity increased in him the exactitude of the memory of the
senses. He could again see in thought the room in the Rue de Stockholm,
and on the pillow that refined head, its eyes laden with mysterious
voluptuousness. Slight and scarcely observed details recurred to him: a
certain fashion that she had of leaning her pretty face over him, the
aroma which hung about her kisses and their special flavour.
A yearning then seized him, against which he employed the infallible
remedy to which he was accustomed. He felt that he must place between
Helen and himself bodily shapes that might afford his senses a pasture
of beauty, bosoms fit to serve for the modelling of cups, sinking
shoulders worthy of statues, supple hips, slender legs, and skilful
caresses. Such instruments of forgetfulness abound in first-class houses
of pleasure. The young man used them on this occasion, as on others,
even to excess, so that when Helen rang at the door in the Rue Lincoln,
she had come to be almost as great a stranger to him as though he had
never known her.
He was turning over the leaves of a book, lying rather than sitting in
an easy-chair, and waiting until it should be time to dress in order to
rejoin some dinner companions at the club. He was in that condition of
pleasing weariness which heartless pleasure always brings to men who are
wise enough to ask nothing of women but the enjoyment of palpable
beauty. Helen and the intrigue of the previous months were, so far as he
was concerned, shrinking into a background that each day made more
inaccessible than before. It was another chapter to be added to the
others in the mournful romance of gallantry in the course of which his
feelings had been exhausted without being expended.
Already, as he thought about it, he had ceased to feel anything more
than a sick spot in his heart. He was sorry for having so greatly
misunderstood Chazel, but a satisfied conscience softened this sorrow.
Had he not unhesitatingly sacrified to his friend's confidence all the
pleasure that his intrigue might still have brought him? Accordingly, he
experienced the most disagreeable of surprises when, after being
informed by his servant that a lady wished to speak to him, he saw
Helen. She had not taken the trouble to put on a veil. He perceived at a
glance her wasted countenance, her discoloured eyes, her bright and
steady gaze, her bitter lips. Mechanically, he pushed an arm-chair
towards her, which she declined.
"It is not worth while," she said, "what I have to say to you will not
take long. I shall not take up much of your time."
"Well," he thought to himself, "another scene. It shall be the last."
The complete absence of physical desire resulting from his recent
debauches, made him singularly dry and hard. He reflected that it had
been very stupid on his part not to close his door against her, and he
forthwith determined to enter into no explanations, and to keep her at a
distance by the employment of the most commonplace politeness.
"I feel quite put out," he said to her, just as though there had never
been anything but the most official relations between them; "I ought to
have called on you after my return, and then a dozen wretched trifles
prevented me. You know how it is when one is on the point of going away.
I expect to be in London towards the end of the month."
"Do not trouble yourself to make excuses," Helen interrupted, shrugging
her shoulders; "what is the use? Why should you have come? To avoid
compromising me? I will dispense with such delicacy on your part. To
tell me again that you do not love me, and have never loved me, and to
see me suffer? You are not a monster. All that you had to tell me you
told me. Do not be afraid," she added with a nerveless smile, "it is not
to resume our former conversation that I am here."
She paused as though the words that she was about to utter were already
burning her lips, the lips parched by so many feverish nights. She had
spoken in so bitter and withal so grave a voice that the young man felt
a pang. On seeing her again he had expected a pleading scene, the eager
appeal of a forsaken mistress who entreats for but a day of the old
happiness, and the solemnity of Helen's accents heralded a prayerless,
hopeless revelation, tidings such as to her appeared of tragic
importance. Was she going to tell him that she was pregnant? Or had she
in an hour of wildness confessed everything to her husband? She remained
silent, and it was his turn to be impatient.
"Speak," he said, "I am listening to you."
"In that last conversation, which once more I have no wish to resume,"
she went on, "you told me that you were acquainted with my life. You
even entered into particulars by mentioning a name, the name of Monsieur
de Varades. You asserted that this man had been my lover."
"I told you what had been told to me," he said with emphasis.
"And that you believed it?" she questioned.
"As people do believe such things," he returned; "you misunderstood me,
or else I expressed myself badly, very badly." And he thought: "She is
going to produce some letter or other from her pocket, witnessing to De
Varades's deep respect for her." He recollected having written similar
letters to former mistresses, to be shown to one having special
privileges. "A foolish discussion," he sighed to himself, "but how is it
to be avoided?"
"Well," she retorted with strange energy, "if you are told that now, you
may believe it, and reply that you have it from a sure source." And
looking at him with an air at once of triumph and of despair, she added:
"I am Monsieur de Varades's mistress, do you hear?" And she repeated: "I
am Monsieur de Varades's mistress."
Armand listened to her repetition of these words by which she was
inflicting dishonour upon herself, and his feeling was one rather of
pain than of sorrow. It appeared to him as well piteous as insane that,
impelled by some sickly appetite for drama and emotion, she should thus
come and tell him of the renewal of her amour with her former lover. On
the other hand, he had not, at the period of his first suspicions, been
in possession of an absolute, indisputable assurance respecting the
guilty nature of the relations between Helen and De Varades, and now she
had come to denounce herself to him in so brutal a fashion that he could
not help feeling a spasm of base jealousy; and he replied with
involuntary abruptness:
"You are perfectly free; how do you think that concerns me? Unless," he
added, cruelly, "I can be of use to you?"
"Don't play the wit," she went on more violently still. "You owe it to
me to listen to me; the least a man can do is to listen to the woman he
has ruined. For you have ruined me; yes, you, and I wish you to know it.
Ah! you thought that I was lying, that I was showing off to please you,
when I told you that I had never had a lover before yourself; will you
believe me now when I tell you in the same breath that I am to-day
Monsieur de Varades's mistress, and that I was not so before? I have met
him again, and I have given myself to him. Do not ask me why, but it is
a fact. You see that I am not seeking to play a part, that I am not
afraid of your contempt, that I have not come to renew relations with
you; but it is equally true that I have degraded and polluted all that
is in me. And when I gave myself to you I was so pure! I had nothing,
nothing on my conscience! I had kept myself for you alone, as though I
had known that I was one day to meet you. Ah! that is what I want you to
know. A woman who accuses herself as I am doing now has nothing left to
be careful about, has she? Why should I lie to you now? Tell me, why?
You will be forced to believe me, and you will say to yourself: 'I was
her first love; she did not deny herself because she loved me. She loved
me as man dreams of being loved, with her whole heart, her whole being,
and not in the present merely, but in the past. And see what I have made
of the woman who loved me thus--a creature who has ceased to believe in
anything or respect anything, who has taken a fresh lover in caprice,
who will take a second and a third--a ruined woman.' Yes, once more, it
is you who have ruined me, and I want, I want you to know it, and it
will be my revenge that you will never more be able to doubt it. Ruined!
Ruined! You have ruined me--you! you! you!"
She had hurled forth these words in a panting voice, drawing closer to
Armand as she went on in a convulsion of frenzy, and in the tone of her
voice, in her looks, in the whole of her agitated person, there was that
levelling power of truth against which doubt in vain tries to stand. The
kind of frightful, dishonouring proof of her former purity resting upon
the cynical avowal of her present infamy became irrefutable through the
evident exaltation which possessed her and which did not suffer her to
conceal anything in her thoughts. But what rendered this reasoning still
more decisive to the man listening to the miserable confession with a
blending of astonishment and terror, was the sudden crisis of emotion
wrought in her after she had spoken. Passion, sated by this frantic
utterance, suddenly gave way to despair. All at once she looked at
Armand with eyes in which the flush of indignation was drowned in tears,
and uttering a shriek she sank upon the floor.
There, stretched at length, she began to moan. It was a slow, continuous
sob, the dull, uniform wail of a dying creature. It came up, up to
Armand, and this supreme wail gathered into itself the echoes of all the
wails that she had stifled, of all the sighs that had been checked on
the margin of her heart. It was the throes of many days breathed forth
in a last appeal. If on coming into contact with Alfred's distress,
Armand had experienced an irresistible feeling of sorrowful humanity,
how much the more and with how much greater power was he visited with
this feeling now, on coming into contact with the distress of the woman
lying thus on the ground? The frail and potent tie which had united him
to this vanquished being, the unconquerable tie of mutual
voluptuousness, suddenly bound him to her anew. He believed that he had
forgotten her, and here, beneath the two-fold influence of unconscious
jealousy and physical pity, he was again finding within himself feelings
of which he had deemed himself no longer capable. A passionate impulse
prompted him to fling himself upon his knees, and he strove to raise her
as though she had been his mistress still.
"Helen," he said, "recover yourself. In pity to me do not weep in this
way. Stand up."
She obeyed, and slowly turned towards him her swimming eyes and parted
lips. An expression of unspeakable gratitude passed across her mournful
countenance. He seated her in an arm-chair, placing himself at her feet
to wipe away her tears. Then she was able to speak again.
"Ah!" she said, "all is over--over! Ah! never again--! You do not know,
Armand, how I loved you, how I love you. Ah! why have I done what I did?
You see, I was like a madwoman. I could do nothing, I could do nothing
but love you. You were my whole life, my whole faith, all that to me was
noble and good. And then, suddenly, it all failed me! I have suffered so
greatly! I could always hear you saying those frightful words to me. It
was like a knife turning every moment in my heart. I wanted to forget
you, to forget myself, to destroy everything, unhappy woman! What have I
done? Why did I not come to entreat you to take me back again, to
believe in me? I should have found words to convince you. Now, all is
over. Do not touch me; I loathe myself."
And she freed herself, and repulsed him. He perceived that she had just
seen the other, her new lover. Then she went on passionately:
"No! tormentor! tormentor! 'Tis your fault. Yes, 'tis you who flung me
there. Had you any right to treat me so? Answer. What wrong had I done
you? When had I deceived you? Why did you doubt me? No, my love. 'Tis
you who are so good, so kind, whom I love so much. Forgive me! Forgive
me! Grief is killing me!"
Thus she lamented, revealing by the reciprocation of her alternately
reviling and loving utterances the incoherence of the feelings whose
tempest was shaking her. Then came relief from this frenzy, and she
said:
"Let me weep a little. It eases me. Do not speak to me. Presently."
And he left her side. How powerless he felt in presence of this outbreak
of despair. He began to pace backwards and forwards in the room, which
was being invaded by the melancholy of the twilight; and Helen's sobbing
had grown quite humble now, quite low, almost like that of a little
girl. Instead of the frantic rebellion that there had been at first,
there was a long sigh, ceaselessly broken and ceaselessly resumed, which
completed the young man's perturbation. He no longer tried to comfort
her, and he tried no more to contest the cruel evidence that had become
fixed within him, never more to leave him. Pity for such agony,
shivering horror at such irretrievable pollution, and the sight of the
cruel injustice which he had committed, blended together to torture him.
But what more than all beside overwhelmed him, and laid upon his heart a
weight which he could feel would thenceforward be irremovable, was the
feeling of his own terrible responsibility for the ruin of this woman.
What! it was through knowing him and loving him that the unhappy woman
had sunk so low! Helen's instinct had not deceived her; he could doubt
no longer. He believed her, and in all respects. He believed that she
had really loved him. He believed that before meeting him she had been
pure. He believed that frenzy at an iniquitous desertion had led her so
far astray as to throw her into the arms of another, and that he,
Armand, was the cause, the sole cause of it all. He continued to walk up
and down, and every time that he turned to retrace his steps he could
see between the dismally lighted windows that sunken form, that face
standing out so pale against the background of shadow! What had become
of his indifference before Helen's entrance? And his power of negation,
what had he done with it? People do not dispute with a death-rattle, and
he had been present at the death of a soul. It was too true that she
asked for nothing and wished for nothing, unless that he should see her
heart laid bare; he had seen it, he saw it still and the blood that
flowed from the wound inflicted by himself. How long did they continue
thus without speaking, he still walking, and she still weeping? In the
end he went up to her, took her hand with a shudder at feeling this
soft, damp, cold hand, raised it to his lips, and let fall upon it the
first tears that he had shed for years. In the depths of the abyss of
despair in which she was lying, she could still find pity for her
tormentor's tears. "Do not weep," she said to him, and drawing him to
her, she passionately covered his face with kisses. He could feel
burning lips traverse his eyes, his brow, his mouth. Then she disengaged
herself from him. She rose. Once again had she just seen the other.
"Ah," she exclaimed, in anguish, "I cannot even comfort you now.
Good-bye, good-bye," she repeated, "and this time it is good-bye for
ever."
She passed her hands over the young man's hair, and over his face, as
though to convince herself of the real existence of the countenance she
had loved so dearly, and then she broke away, hastening towards the
door.
"Where are you going?" he asked her.
"I am flying from you," she said wildly, and already she was out of the
room.
The outer door had closed after her and he had not found energy enough
to follow her. He remained standing on the spot where she had left him,
as though he had been smitten with a stroke of paralysis. A terrible
dread suddenly sent an icy shiver through his whole body. What if Helen
in the frenzy of her despair had fled from his house in order to kill
herself? For a moment he had before his eyes a horrible
hallucination--the shadow of a quay, the great, dim, moving sheet of
river, and a woman's body rolled along in the icy water. In his turn he
rushed away. He descended the staircase four steps at a time. On the
footpath there was a woman going in the direction of the Champs
Élysées. He hurried after her. It was not she. He reached the Avenue,
which was filled with a swarm of passengers and vehicles. How could he
find her in such a crowd? How guess in what direction the unhappy woman
had fled. A drizzling rain was falling. He hailed several cabs in vain,
and not until he had reached the crossways could he stop one. He gave
the driver the address in the Rue de La Rochefoucauld, and on the way
he, too, knew an anguish driven to the point of madness. But he was
already at the foot of the street and in front of the little house. It
was with a trembling of his entire heart that he drew the bell at the
door, and asked the servant whether Madame Chazel had come in. On
hearing the man's affirmative reply he nearly fell to the ground in the
excess of his emotion. And forthwith--for the play of the passions
constantly causes us to conflict with these countless trifles of
existence--he felt like a fool in presence of the man, who stood aside
to let him pass. How could he endure Helen's presence at that moment,
or, more than all, Alfred's? He stammered out a sentence alleging that
he had forgotten a piece of business, and saying that he would return in
the evening. He threw himself again into his cab.
"The thought of her son has saved her!" he said to himself. "I am at
least not a murderer!"