most of their acquaintance. For such as these high rank, high office,
illustrious birth, a certain veneer of politeness, and considerable
reserve of manner, or the _prestige_ of great fortunes, are but so many
sentinels to turn back critics who would penetrate to the presence
of the real man. Such men are like kings, in that their real figure,
character, and life can never be known nor justly appreciated, because
they are always seen from too near or too far. Factitious merit has a
way of asking questions and saying little; and understands the art of
putting others forward to save the necessity of posing before them;
then, with a happy knack of its own, it draws and attaches others by
the thread of the ruling passion of self-interest, keeping men of far
greater abilities to play like puppets, and despising those whom it has
brought down to its own level. The petty fixed idea naturally prevails;
it has the advantage of persistence over the plasticity of great
thoughts.
The observer who should seek to estimate and appraise the negative
values of these empty heads needs subtlety rather than superior wit for
the task; patience is a more necessary part of his judicial outfit
than great mental grasp, cunning and tact rather than any elevation or
greatness of ideas. Yet skilfully as such usurpers can cover and
defend their weak points, it is difficult to delude wife and mother
and children and the house-friend of the family; fortunately for them,
however, these persons almost always keep a secret which in a manner
touches the honor of all, and not unfrequently go so far as to help to
foist the imposture upon the public. And if, thanks to such domestic
conspiracy, many a noodle passes current for a man of ability, on the
other hand many another who has real ability is taken for a noodle to
redress the balance, and the total average of this kind of false coin in
circulation in the state is a pretty constant quantity.
Bethink yourself now of the part to be played by a clever woman quick to
think and feel, mated with a husband of this kind, and can you not see
a vision of lives full of sorrow and self-sacrifice? Nothing upon
earth can repay such hearts so full of love and tender tact. Put a
strong-willed woman in this wretched situation, and she will force a
way out of it for herself by a crime, like Catherine II., whom men
nevertheless style “the Great.” But these women are not all seated upon
thrones, they are for the most part doomed to domestic unhappiness none
the less terrible because obscure.
Those who seek consolation in this present world for their woes often
effect nothing but a change of ills if they remain faithful to their
duties; or they commit a sin if they break the laws for their pleasure.
All these reflections are applicable to Julie’s domestic life.
Before the fall of Napoleon nobody was jealous of d’Aiglemont. He was
one colonel among many, an efficient orderly staff-officer, as good a
man as you could find for a dangerous mission, as unfit as well could
be for an important command. D’Aiglemont was looked upon as a dashing
soldier such as the Emperor liked, the kind of man whom his mess usually
calls “a good fellow.” The Restoration gave him back his title of
Marquis, and did not find him ungrateful; he followed the Bourbons into
exile at Ghent, a piece of logical loyalty which falsified the horoscope
drawn for him by his late father-in-law, who predicted that Victor would
remain a colonel all his life. After the Hundred Days he received the
appointment of Lieutenant-General, and for the second time became a
marquis; but it was M. d’Aiglemont’s ambition to be a peer of France. He
adopted, therefore, the maxims and the politics of the _Conservateur_,
cloaked himself in dissimulation which hid nothing (there being nothing
to hide), cultivated gravity of countenance and the art of asking
questions and saying little, and was taken for a man of profound wisdom.
Nothing drew him from his intrenchments behind the forms of politeness;
he laid in a provision of formulas, and made lavish use of his stock of
the catch-words coined at need in Paris to give fools the small change
for the ore of great ideas and events. Among men of the world he was
reputed a man of taste and discernment; and as a bigoted upholder of
aristocratic opinions he was held up for a noble character. If by chance
he slipped now and again into his old light-heartedness or levity,
others were ready to discover an undercurrent of diplomatic intention
beneath his inanity and silliness. “Oh! he only says exactly as much as
he means to say,” thought these excellent people.
So d’Aiglemont’s defects and good qualities stood him alike in good
stead. He did nothing to forfeit a high military reputation gained by
his dashing courage, for he had never been a commander-in-chief. Great
thoughts surely were engraven upon that manly aristocratic countenance,
which imposed upon every one but his own wife. And when everybody else
believed in the Marquis d’Aiglemont’s imaginary talents, the Marquis
persuaded himself before he had done that he was one of the most
remarkable men at Court, where, thanks to his purely external
qualifications, he was in favor and taken at his own valuation.
At home, however, M. d’Aiglemont was modest. Instinctively he felt
that his wife, young though she was, was his superior; and out of this
involuntary respect there grew an occult power which the Marquise was
obliged to wield in spite of all her efforts to shake off the burden.
She became her husband’s adviser, the director of his actions and his
fortunes. It was an unnatural position; she felt it as something of a
humiliation, a source of pain to be buried in the depths of her heart.
From the first her delicately feminine instinct told her that it is a
far better thing to obey a man of talent than to lead a fool; and that
a young wife compelled to act and think like a man is neither man nor
woman, but a being who lays aside all the charms of her womanhood along
with its misfortunes, yet acquires none of the privileges which our
laws give to the stronger sex. Beneath the surface her life was a bitter
mockery. Was she not compelled to protect her protector, to worship a
hollow idol, a poor creature who flung her the love of a selfish husband
as the wages of her continual self-sacrifice; who saw nothing in her but
the woman; and who either did not think it worth while, or (wrong quite
as deep) did not think at all of troubling himself about her pleasures,
of inquiring into the cause of her low spirits and dwindling health? And
the Marquis, like most men who chafe under a wife’s superiority,
saved his self-love by arguing from Julie’s physical feebleness a
corresponding lack of mental power, for which he was pleased to pity
her; and he would cry out upon fate which had given him a sickly girl
for a wife. The executioner posed, in fact, as the victim.
All the burdens of this dreary lot fell upon the Marquise, who still
must smile upon her foolish lord, and deck a house of mourning with
flowers, and make a parade of happiness in a countenance wan with secret
torture. And with this sense of responsibility for the honor of
both, with the magnificent immolation of self, the young Marquise
unconsciously acquired a wifely dignity, a consciousness of virtue which
became her safeguard amid many dangers.
Perhaps, if her heart were sounded to the very depths, this intimate
closely hidden wretchedness, following upon her unthinking, girlish
first love, had roused in her an abhorrence of passion; possibly she had
no conception of its rapture, nor of the forbidden but frenzied bliss
for which some women will renounce all the laws of prudence and the
principles of conduct upon which society is based. She put from her like
a dream the thought of bliss and tender harmony of love promised by Mme.
de Listomère-Landon’s mature experience, and waited resignedly for the
end of her troubles with a hope that she might die young.
Her health had declined daily since her return from Touraine; her
life seemed to be measured to her in suffering; yet her ill-health was
graceful, her malady seemed little more than languor, and might well be
taken by careless eyes for a fine lady’s whim of invalidism.
Her doctors had condemned her to keep to the sofa, and there among
her flowers lay the Marquise, fading as they faded. She was not strong
enough to walk, nor to bear the open air, and only went out in a closed
carriage. Yet with all the marvels of modern luxury and invention about
her, she looked more like an indolent queen than an invalid. A few of
her friends, half in love perhaps with her sad plight and her fragile
look, sure of finding her at home, and speculating no doubt upon her
future restoration to health, would come to bring her the news of the
day, and kept her informed of the thousand and one small events which
fill life in Paris with variety. Her melancholy, deep and real though it
was, was still the melancholy of a woman rich in many ways. The Marquise
d’Aiglemont was like a flower, with a dark insect gnawing at its root.
Occasionally she went into society, not to please herself, but in
obedience to the exigencies of the position which her husband aspired to
take. In society her beautiful voice and the perfection of her singing
could always gain the social success so gratifying to a young woman; but
what was social success to her, who drew nothing from it for her heart
or her hopes? Her husband did not care for music. And, moreover, she
seldom felt at her ease in salons, where her beauty attracted homage not
wholly disinterested. Her position excited a sort of cruel compassion,
a morbid curiosity. She was suffering from an inflammatory complaint not
infrequently fatal, for which our nosology as yet has found no name, a
complaint spoken of among women in confidential whispers. In spite of
the silence in which her life was spent, the cause of her ill-health
was no secret. She was still but a girl in spite of her marriage; the
slightest glance threw her into confusion. In her endeavor not to blush,
she was always laughing, always apparently in high spirits; she would
never admit that she was not perfectly well, and anticipated questions
as to her health by shame-stricken subterfuges.
In 1817, however, an event took place which did much to alleviate
Julie’s hitherto deplorable existence. A daughter was born to her, and
she determined to nurse her child herself. For two years motherhood,
its all-absorbing multiplicity of cares and anxious joys, made life
less hard for her. She and her husband lived necessarily apart. Her
physicians predicted improved health, but the Marquise herself put no
faith in these auguries based on theory. Perhaps, like many a one for
whom life has lost its sweetness, she looked forward to death as a happy
termination of the drama.
But with the beginning of the year 1819 life grew harder than ever. Even
while she congratulated herself upon the negative happiness which she
had contrived to win, she caught a terrifying glimpse of yawning depths
below it. She had passed by degrees out of her husband’s life. Her fine
tact and her prudence told her that misfortune must come, and that not
singly, of this cooling of an affection already lukewarm and wholly
selfish. Sure though she was of her ascendency over Victor, and certain
as she felt of his unalterable esteem, she dreaded the influence of
unbridled passions upon a head so empty, so full of rash self-conceit.
Julie’s friends often found her absorbed in prolonged musings; the less
clairvoyant among them would jestingly ask her what she was thinking
about, as if a young wife would think of nothing but frivolity, as
if there were not almost always a depth of seriousness in a mother’s
thoughts. Unhappiness, like great happiness, induces dreaming. Sometimes
as Julie played with her little Helene, she would gaze darkly at her,
giving no reply to the childish questions in which a mother delights,
questioning the present and the future as to the destiny of this little
one. Then some sudden recollection would bring back the scene of the
review at the Tuileries and fill her eyes with tears. Her father’s
prophetic warnings rang in her ears, and conscience reproached her that
she had not recognized its wisdom. Her troubles had all come of her
own wayward folly, and often she knew not which among so many were the
hardest to bear. The sweet treasures of her soul were unheeded, and not
only so, she could never succeed in making her husband understand
her, even in the commonest everyday things. Just as the power to love
developed and grew strong and active, a legitimate channel for
the affections of her nature was denied her, and wedded love was
extinguished in grave physical and mental sufferings. Add to this that
she now felt for her husband that pity closely bordering upon contempt,
which withers all affection at last. Even if she had not learned from
conversations with some of her friends, from examples in life, from
sundry occurrences in the great world, that love can bring ineffable
bliss, her own wounds would have taught her to divine the pure and deep
happiness which binds two kindred souls each to each.
In the picture which her memory traced of the past, Arthur’s frank face
stood out daily nobler and purer; it was but a flash, for upon that
recollection she dared not dwell. The young Englishman’s shy, silent
love for her was the one event since her marriage which had left a
lingering sweetness in her darkened and lonely heart. It may be that all
the blighted hopes, all the frustrated longings which gradually clouded
Julie’s mind, gathered, by a not unnatural trick of imagination, about
this man--whose manners, sentiments, and character seemed to have so
much in common with her own. This idea still presented itself to her
mind fitfully and vaguely, like a dream; yet from that dream, which
always ended in a sigh, Julie awoke to greater wretchedness, to keener
consciousness of the latent anguish brooding beneath her imaginary
bliss.
Occasionally her self-pity took wilder and more daring flights. She
determined to have happiness at any cost; but still more often she lay a
helpless victim of an indescribable numbing stupor, the words she heard
had no meaning to her, or the thoughts which arose in her mind were so
vague and indistinct that she could not find language to express them.
Balked of the wishes of her heart, realities jarred harshly upon her
girlish dreams of life, but she was obliged to devour her tears. To
whom could she make complaint? Of whom be understood? She possessed,
moreover, that highest degree of woman’s sensitive pride, the exquisite
delicacy of feeling which silences useless complainings and declines to
use an advantage to gain a triumph which can only humiliate both victor
and vanquished.
Julie tried to endow M. d’Aiglemont with her own abilities and virtues,
flattering herself that thus she might enjoy the happiness lacking in
her lot. All her woman’s ingenuity and tact was employed in making the
best of the situation; pure waste of pains unsuspected by him, whom
she thus strengthened in his despotism. There were moments when misery
became an intoxication, expelling all ideas, all self-control; but,
fortunately, sincere piety always brought her back to one supreme hope;
she found a refuge in the belief in a future life, a wonderful thought
which enabled her to take up her painful task afresh. No elation of
victory followed those terrible inward battles and throes of anguish;
no one knew of those long hours of sadness; her haggard glances met
no response from human eyes, and during the brief moments snatched by
chance for weeping, her bitter tears fell unheeded and in solitude.
One evening in January 1820, the Marquise became aware of the full
gravity of the crisis, gradually brought on by force of circumstances.
When a husband and wife know each other thoroughly, and their relation
has long been a matter of use and wont, when the wife has learned to
interpret every slightest sign, when her quick insight discerns thoughts
and facts which her husband keeps from her, a chance word, or a remark
so carelessly let fall in the first instance, seems, upon subsequent
reflection, like the swift breaking out of light. A wife not seldom
suddenly awakes upon the brink of a precipice or in the depths of the
abyss; and thus it was with the Marquise. She was feeling glad to have
been left to herself for some days, when the real reason of her solitude
flashed upon her. Her husband, whether fickle and tired of her, or
generous and full of pity for her, was hers no longer.
In the moment of that discovery she forgot herself, her sacrifices, all
that she had passed through, she remembered only that she was a mother.
Looking forward, she thought of her daughter’s fortune, of the future
welfare of the one creature through whom some gleams of happiness came
to her, of her Helene, the only possession which bound her to life.
Then Julie wished to live to save her child from a stepmother’s terrible
thraldom, which might crush her darling’s life. Upon this new vision of
threatened possibilities followed one of those paroxysms of thought at
fever-heat which consume whole years of life.
Henceforward husband and wife were doomed to be separated by a whole
world of thought, and all the weight of that world she must bear alone.
Hitherto she had felt sure that Victor loved her, in so far as he could
be said to love; she had been the slave of pleasures which she did
not share; to-day the satisfaction of knowing that she purchased his
contentment with her tears was hers no longer. She was alone in the
world, nothing was left to her now but a choice of evils. In the calm
stillness of the night her despondency drained her of all her strength.
She rose from her sofa beside the dying fire, and stood in the lamplight
gazing, dry-eyed, at her child, when M. d’Aiglemont came in. He was in
high spirits. Julie called to him to admire Helene as she lay asleep,
but he met his wife’s enthusiasm with a commonplace:
“All children are nice at that age.”
He closed the curtains about the cot after a careless kiss on the
child’s forehead. Then he turned his eyes on Julie, took her hand and
drew her to sit beside him on the sofa, where she had been sitting with
such dark thoughts surging up in her mind.
“You are looking very handsome to-night, Mme. d’Aiglemont,” he
exclaimed, with the gaiety intolerable to the Marquise, who knew its
emptiness so well.
“Where have you spent the evening?” she asked, with a pretence of
complete indifference.
“At Mme. de Sérizy’s.”
He had taken up a fire-screen, and was looking intently at the gauze. He
had not noticed the traces of tears on his wife’s face. Julie shuddered.
Words could not express the overflowing torrent of thoughts which must
be forced down into inner depths.
“Mme. de Sérizy is giving a concert on Monday, and is dying for you to
go. You have not been anywhere for some time past, and that is enough
to set her longing to see you at her house. She is a good-natured
woman, and very fond of you. I should be glad if you would go; I all but
promised that you should----”
“I will go.”
There was something so penetrating, so significant in the tones of
Julie’s voice, in her accent, in the glance that went with the words,
that Victor, startled out of his indifference, stared at his wife in
astonishment.
That was all, Julie had guessed that it was Mme. de Sérizy who had
stolen her husband’s heart from her. Her brooding despair benumbed her.
She appeared to be deeply interested in the fire. Victor meanwhile still
played with the fire-screen. He looked bored, like a man who has enjoyed
himself elsewhere, and brought home the consequent lassitude. He yawned
once or twice, then he took up a candle in one hand, and with the
other languidly sought his wife’s neck for the usual embrace; but Julie
stooped and received the good-night kiss upon her forehead; the formal,
loveless grimace seemed hateful to her at that moment.
As soon as the door closed upon Victor, his wife sank into a seat. Her
limbs tottered beneath her, she burst into tears. None but those who
have endured the torture of some such scene can fully understand the
anguish that it means, or divine the horror of the long-drawn tragedy
arising out of it.
Those simple, foolish words, the silence that followed between the
husband and wife, the Marquis’ gesture and expression, the way in which
he sat before the fire, his attitude as he made that futile attempt to
put a kiss on his wife’s throat,--all these things made up a dark hour
for Julie, and the catastrophe of the drama of her sad and lonely life.
In her madness she knelt down before the sofa, burying her face in it
to shut out everything from sight, and prayed to Heaven, putting a new
significance into the words of the evening prayer, till it became a cry
from the depths of her own soul, which would have gone to her husband’s
heart if he had heard it.
The following week she spent in deep thought for her future, utterly
overwhelmed by this new trouble. She made a study of it, trying to
discover a way to regain her ascendency over the Marquis, scheming how
to live long enough to watch over her daughter’s happiness, yet to live
true to her own heart. Then she made up her mind. She would struggle
with her rival. She would shine once more in society. She would feign
the love which she could no longer feel, she would captivate her
husband’s fancy; and when she had lured him into her power, she
would coquet with him like a capricious mistress who takes delight in
tormenting a lover. This hateful strategy was the only possible way out
of her troubles. In this way she would become mistress of the situation;
she would prescribe her own sufferings at her good pleasure, and reduce
them by enslaving her husband, and bringing him under a tyrannous yoke.
She felt not the slightest remorse for the hard life which he should
lead. At a bound she reached cold, calculating indifference--for her
daughter’s sake. She had gained a sudden insight into the treacherous,
lying arts of degraded women; the wiles of coquetry, the revolting
cunning which arouses such profound hatred in men at the mere suspicion
of innate corruption in a woman.
Julie’s feminine vanity, her interests, and a vague desire to inflict
punishment, all wrought unconsciously with the mother’s love within
her to force her into a path where new sufferings awaited her. But her
nature was too noble, her mind too fastidious, and, above all things,
too open, to be the accomplice of these frauds for very long. Accustomed
as she was to self-scrutiny, at the first step in vice--for vice it
was--the cry of conscience must inevitably drown the clamor of the
passions and of selfishness. Indeed, in a young wife whose heart is
still pure, whose love has never been mated, the very sentiment of
motherhood is overpowered by modesty. Modesty; is not all womanhood
summed up in that? But just now Julie would not see any danger, anything
wrong, in her life.
She went to Mme. de Sérizy’s concert. Her rival had expected to see a
pallid, drooping woman. The Marquise wore rouge, and appeared in all the
splendor of a toilet which enhanced her beauty.
Mme. de Sérizy was one of those women who claim to exercise a sort of
sway over fashions and society in Paris; she issued her decrees, saw
them received in her own circle, and it seemed to her that all the world
obeyed them. She aspired to epigram, she set up for an authority in
matters of taste. Literature, politics, men and women, all alike were
submitted to her censorship, and the lady herself appeared to defy the
censorship of others. Her house was in every respect a model of good
taste.
Julie triumphed over the Countess in her own salon, filled as it was
with beautiful women and women of fashion. Julie’s liveliness and
sparkling wit gathered all the most distinguished men in the rooms about
her. Her costume was faultless, for the despair of the women, who one
and all envied her the fashion of her dress, and attributed the moulded
outline of her bodice to the genius of some unknown dressmaker, for
women would rather believe in miracles worked by the science of chiffons
than in the grace and perfection of the form beneath.
When Julie went to the piano to sing Desdemona’s song, the men in the
rooms flocked about her to hear the celebrated voice so long mute, and
there was a deep silence. The Marquise saw the heads clustered thickly
in the doorways, saw all eyes turned upon her, and a sharp thrill of
excitement quivered through her. She looked for her husband, gave him
a coquettish side-glance, and it pleased her to see that his vanity was
gratified to no small degree. In the joy of triumph she sang the first
part of _Al piu salice_. Her audience was enraptured. Never had Malibran
nor Pasta sung with expression and intonation so perfect. But at the
beginning of the second part she glanced over the glistening groups
and saw--Arthur. He never took his eyes from her face. A quick shudder
thrilled through her, and her voice faltered. Up hurried Mme. de Sérizy
from her place.
“What is it, dear? Oh! poor little thing! she is in such weak health; I
was so afraid when I saw her begin a piece so far beyond her strength.”
The song was interrupted. Julie was vexed. She had not courage to sing
any longer, and submitted to her rival’s treacherous sympathy. There was
a whisper among the women. The incident led to discussions; they guessed
that the struggle had begun between the Marquise and Mme. de Sérizy, and
their tongues did not spare the latter.
Julie’s strange, perturbing presentiments were suddenly realized.
Through her preoccupation with Arthur she had loved to imagine that with
that gentle, refined face he must remain faithful to his first love.
There were times when she felt proud that this ideal, pure, and
passionate young love should have been hers; the passion of the young
lover whose thoughts are all for her to whom he dedicates every moment
of his life, who blushes as a woman blushes, thinks as a woman might
think, forgetting ambition, fame, and fortune in devotion to his
love,--she need never fear a rival. All these things she had fondly and
idly dreamed of Arthur; now all at once it seemed to her that her dream
had come true. In the young Englishman’s half-feminine face she read
the same deep thoughts, the same pensive melancholy, the same passive
acquiescence in a painful lot, and an endurance like her own. She saw
herself in him. Trouble and sadness are the most eloquent of love’s
interpreters, and response is marvelously swift between two suffering
creatures, for in them the powers of intuition and of assimilation of
facts and ideas are well-nigh unerring and perfect. So with the violence
of the shock the Marquise’s eyes were opened to the whole extent of
the future danger. She was only too glad to find a pretext for her
nervousness in her chronic ill-health, and willingly submitted to be
overwhelmed by Mme. de Sérizy’s insidious compassion.
That incident of the song caused talk and discussion which differed with
the various groups. Some pitied Julie’s fate, and regretted that such a
remarkable woman was lost to society; others fell to wondering what the
cause of her ill-health and seclusion could be.
“Well, now, my dear Ronquerolles,” said the Marquis, addressing Mme. de
Sérizy’s brother, “you used to envy me my good fortune, and you used to
blame me for my infidelities. Pshaw, you would not find much to envy in
my lot, if, like me, you had a pretty wife so fragile that for the past
two years you might not so much as kiss her hand for fear of damaging
her. Do not you encumber yourself with one of those fragile ornaments,
only fit to put in a glass case, so brittle and so costly that you are
always obliged to be careful of them. They tell me that you are afraid
of snow or wet for that fine horse of yours; how often do you ride him?
That is just my own case. It is true that my wife gives me no ground for
jealousy, but my marriage is purely ornamental business; if you think
that I am a married man, you are grossly mistaken. So there is some
excuse for my unfaithfulness. I should dearly like to know what you
gentlemen who laugh at me would do in my place. Not many men would be so
considerate as I am. I am sure,” (here he lowered his voice) “that Mme.
d’Aiglemont suspects nothing. And then, of course, I have no right to
complain at all; I am very well off. Only there is nothing more trying
for a man who feels things than the sight of suffering in a poor
creature to whom you are attached----”
“You must have a very sensitive nature, then,” said M. de Ronquerolles,
“for you are not often at home.”
Laughter followed on the friendly epigram; but Arthur, who made one of
the group, maintained a frigid imperturbability in his quality of an
English gentleman who takes gravity for the very basis of his being.
D’Aiglemont’s eccentric confidence, no doubt, had kindled some kind of
hope in Arthur, for he stood patiently awaiting an opportunity of a word
with the Marquis. He had not to wait long.
“My Lord Marquis,” he said, “I am unspeakably pained to see the state of
Mme. d’Aiglemont’s health. I do not think that you would talk jestingly
about it if you knew that unless she adopts a certain course of
treatment she must die miserably. If I use this language to you, it is
because I am in a manner justified in using it, for I am quite certain
that I can save Mme. d’Aiglemont’s life and restore her to health
and happiness. It is odd, no doubt, that a man of my rank should be
a physician, yet nevertheless chance determined that I should study
medicine. I find life dull enough here,” he continued, affecting a cold
selfishness to gain his ends, “it makes no difference to me whether I
spend my time and travel for the benefit of a suffering fellow-creature,
or waste it in Paris on some nonsense or other. It is very, very seldom
that a cure is completed in these complaints, for they require constant
care, time, and patience, and, above all things, money. Travel is
needed, and a punctilious following out of prescriptions, by no means
unpleasant, and varied daily. Two _gentlemen_” (laying a stress on
the word in its English sense) “can understand each other. I give you
warning that if you accept my proposal, you shall be a judge of my
conduct at every moment. I will do nothing without consulting you,
without your superintendence, and I will answer for the success of my
method if you will consent to follow it. Yes, unless you wish to be Mme.
d’Aiglemont’s husband no longer, and that before long,” he added in the
Marquis’ ear.
The Marquis laughed. “One thing is certain--that only an Englishman
could make me such an extraordinary proposal,” he said. “Permit me to
leave it unaccepted and unrejected. I will think it over; and my wife
must be consulted first in any case.”
Julie had returned to the piano. This time she sang a song from
_Semiramide, Son regina, son guerriera_, and the whole room applauded, a
stifled outburst of wellbred acclamation which proved that the Faubourg
Saint-Germain had been roused to enthusiasm by her singing.
The evening was over. D’Aiglemont brought his wife home, and Julie
saw with uneasy satisfaction that her first attempt had at once been
successful. Her husband had been roused out of indifference by the part
which she had played, and now he meant to honor her with such a passing
fancy as he might bestow upon some opera nymph. It amused Julie that
she, a virtuous married woman, should be treated thus. She tried to play
with her power, but at the outset her kindness broke down once more, and
she received the most terrible of all the lessons held in store for her
by fate.
Between two and three o’clock in the morning Julie sat up, sombre and
moody, beside her sleeping husband, in the room dimly lighted by the
flickering lamp. Deep silence prevailed. Her agony of remorse had lasted
near an hour; how bitter her tears had been none perhaps can realize
save women who have known such an experience as hers. Only such natures
as Julie’s can feel her loathing for a calculated caress, the horror
of a loveless kiss, of the heart’s apostasy followed by dolorous
prostitution. She despised herself; she cursed marriage. She could have
longed for death; perhaps if it had not been for a cry from her child,
she would have sprung from the window and dashed herself upon the
pavement. M. d’Aiglemont slept on peacefully at her side; his wife’s hot
dropping tears did not waken him.
But next morning Julie could be gay. She made a great effort to look
happy, to hide, not her melancholy, as heretofore, but an insuperable
loathing. From that day she no longer regarded herself as a blameless
wife. Had she not been false to herself? Why should she not play a
double part in the future, and display astounding depths of cunning in
deceiving her husband? In her there lay a hitherto undiscovered latent
depravity, lacking only opportunity, and her marriage was the cause.
Even now she had asked herself why she should struggle with love, when,
with her heart and her whole nature in revolt, she gave herself to the
husband whom she loved no longer. Perhaps, who knows? some piece of
fallacious reasoning, some bit of special pleading, lies at the root of
all sins, of all crimes. How shall society exist unless every
individual of which it is composed will make the necessary sacrifices
of inclination demanded by its laws? If you accept the benefits of
civilized society, do you not by implication engage to observe the
conditions, the conditions of its very existence? And yet, starving
wretches, compelled to respect the laws of property, are not less to be
pitied than women whose natural instincts and sensitiveness are turned
to so many avenues of pain.
A few days after that scene of which the secret lay buried in the
midnight couch, d’Aiglemont introduced Lord Grenville. Julie gave the
guest a stiffly polite reception, which did credit to her powers of
dissimulation. Resolutely she silenced her heart, veiled her eyes,
steadied her voice, and she kept her future in her own hands. Then, when
by these devices, this innate woman-craft, as it may be called, she
had discovered the full extent of the love which she inspired, Mme.
d’Aiglemont welcomed the hope of a speedy cure, and no longer opposed
her husband, who pressed her to accept the young doctor’s offer. Yet she
declined to trust herself with Lord Grenville until after some further
study of his words and manner, she could feel certain that he had
sufficient generosity to endure his pain in silence. She had absolute
power over him, and she had begun to abuse that power already. Was she
not a woman?
Montcontour is an old manor-house build upon the sandy cliffs above the
Loire, not far from the bridge where Julie’s journey was interrupted in
1814. It is a picturesque, white chateau, with turrets covered with
fine stone carving like Mechlin lace; a chateau such as you often see
in Touraine, spick and span, ivy clad, standing among its groves
of mulberry trees and vineyards, with its hollow walks, its stone
balustrades, and cellars mined in the rock escarpments mirrored in the
Loire. The roofs of Montcontour gleam in the sun; the whole land glows
in the burning heat. Traces of the romantic charm of Spain and the south
hover about the enchanting spot. The breeze brings the scent of bell
flowers and golden broom, the air is soft, all about you lies a sunny
land, a land which casts its dreamy spell over your soul, a land of
languor and of soft desire, a fair, sweet-scented country, where pain is
lulled to sleep and passion wakes. No heart is cold for long beneath its
clear sky, beside its sparkling waters. One ambition dies after another,
and you sink into serene content and repose, as the sun sinks at the end
of the day swathed about with purple and azure.
One warm August evening in 1821 two people were climbing the paths cut
in the crags above the chateau, doubtless for the sake of the view from
the heights above. The two were Julie and Lord Grenville, but this Julie
seemed to be a new creature. The unmistakable color of health glowed in
her face. Overflowing vitality had brought a light into her eyes, which
sparkled through a moist film with that liquid brightness which gives
such irresistible charm to the eyes of children. She was radiant with
smiles; she felt the joy of living and all the possibilities of life.
From the very way in which she lifted her little feet, it was easy to
see that no suffering trammeled her lightest movements; there was no
heaviness nor languor in her eyes, her voice, as heretofore. Under the
white silk sunshade which screened her from the hot sunlight, she looked
like some young bride beneath her veil, or a maiden waiting to yield to
the magical enchantments of Love.
Arthur led her with a lover’s care, helping her up the pathway as if she
had been a child, finding the smoothest ways, avoiding the stones for
her, bidding her see glimpses of distance, or some flower beside the
path, always with the unfailing goodness, the same delicate design in
all that he did; the intuitive sense of this woman’s wellbeing seemed to
be innate in him, and as much, nay, perhaps more, a part of his being as
the pulse of his own life.
The patient and her doctor went step for step. There was nothing strange
for them in a sympathy which seemed to have existed since the day when
they first walked together. One will swayed them both; they stopped as
their senses received the same impression; every word and every glance
told of the same thought in either mind. They had climbed up through the
vineyards, and now they turned to sit on one of the long white stones,
quarried out of the caves in the hillside; but Julie stood awhile gazing
out over the landscape.
“What a beautiful country!” she cried. “Let us put up a tent and live
here. Victor, Victor, do come up here!”
M. d’Aiglemont answered by a halloo from below. He did not, however,
hurry himself, merely giving his wife a glance from time to time when
the windings of the path gave him a glimpse of her. Julie breathed
the air with delight. She looked up at Arthur, giving him one of those
subtle glances in which a clever woman can put the whole of her thought.
“Ah, I should like to live here always,” she said. “Would it be possible
to tire of this beautiful valley?--What is the picturesque river called,
do you know?”
“That is the Cise.”
“The Cise,” she repeated. “And all this country below, before us?”
“Those are the low hills above the Cher.”
“And away to the right? Ah, that is Tours. Only see how fine the
cathedral towers look in the distance.”
She was silent, and let fall the hand which she had stretched out
towards the view upon Arthur’s. Both admired the wide landscape made up
of so much blended beauty. Neither of them spoke. The murmuring voice of
the river, the pure air, and the cloudless heaven were all in tune with
their thronging thoughts and their youth and the love in their hearts.
“Oh! _mon Dieu_, how I love this country!” Julie continued, with growing
and ingenuous enthusiasm. “You lived here for a long while, did you
not?” she added after a pause.
A thrill ran through Lord Grenville at her words.
“It was down there,” he said, in a melancholy voice, indicating as he
spoke a cluster of walnut trees by the roadside, “that I, a prisoner,
saw you for the first time.”
“Yes, but even at that time I felt very sad. This country looked wild to
me then, but now----” She broke off, and Lord Grenville did not dare to
look at her.
“All this pleasure I owe to you,” Julie began at last, after a long
silence. “Only the living can feel the joy of life, and until now have
I not been dead to it all? You have given me more than health, you have
made me feel all its worth--”
Women have an inimitable talent for giving utterance to strong feelings
in colorless words; a woman’s eloquence lies in tone and gesture, manner
and glance. Lord Grenville hid his face in his hands, for his tears
filled his eyes. This was Julie’s first word of thanks since they left
Paris a year ago.
For a whole year he had watched over the Marquise, putting his whole
self into the task. D’Aiglemont seconding him, he had taken her first to
Aix, then to la Rochelle, to be near the sea. From moment to moment he
had watched the changes worked in Julie’s shattered constitution by
his wise and simple prescriptions. He had cultivated her health as
an enthusiastic gardener might cultivate a rare flower. Yet, to all
appearance, the Marquise had quietly accepted Arthur’s skill and care
with the egoism of a spoiled Parisienne, or like a courtesan who has
no idea of the cost of things, nor of the worth of a man, and judges of
both by their comparative usefulness to her.
The influence of places upon us is a fact worth remarking. If melancholy
comes over us by the margin of a great water, another indelible law
of our nature so orders it that the mountains exercise a purifying
influence upon our feelings, and among the hills passion gains in depth
by all that it apparently loses in vivacity. Perhaps it was the light of
the wide country by the Loire, the height of the fair sloping hillside
on which the lovers sat, that induced the calm bliss of the moment
when the whole extent of the passion that lies beneath a few
insignificant-sounding words is divined for the first time with a
delicious sense of happiness.
Julie had scarcely spoken the words which had moved Lord Grenville so
deeply, when a caressing breeze ruffled the treetops and filled the air
with coolness from the river; a few clouds crossed the sky, and the soft
cloud-shadows brought out all the beauty of the fair land below.
Julie turned away her head, lest Arthur should see the tears which she
succeeded in repressing; his emotion had spread at once to her. She
dried her eyes, but she dared not raise them lest he should read the
excess of joy in a glance. Her woman’s instinct told her that during
this hour of danger she must hide her love in the depths of her heart.
Yet silence might prove equally dangerous, and Julie saw that Lord
Grenville was unable to utter a word. She went on, therefore, in a
gentle voice:
“You are touched by what I have said. Perhaps such a quick outburst
of feeling is the way in which a gracious and kind nature like yours
reverses a mistaken judgment. You must have thought me ungrateful when
I was cold and reserved, or cynical and hard, all through the journey
which, fortunately, is very near its end. I should not have been worthy
of your care if I had been unable to appreciate it. I have forgotten
nothing. Alas! I shall forget nothing, not the anxious way in which you
watched over me as a mother watches over her child, nor, and above
all else, the noble confidence of our life as brother and sister, the
delicacy of your conduct--winning charms, against which we women are
defenceless. My lord, it is out of my power to make you a return----”
At these words Julie hastily moved further away, and Lord Grenville made
no attempt to detain her. She went to a rock not far away, and there
sat motionless. What either felt remained a secret known to each alone;
doubtless they wept in silence. The singing of the birds about them,
so blithe, so overflowing with tenderness at sunset time, could only
increase the storm of passion which had driven them apart. Nature took
up their story for them, and found a language for the love of which they
did not dare to speak.
“And now, my lord,” said Julie, and she came and stood before Arthur
with a great dignity, which allowed her to take his hand in hers. “I am
going to ask you to hallow and purify the life which you have given back
to me. Here, we will part. I know,” she added, as she saw how white his
face grew, “I know that I am repaying you for your devotion by requiring
of you a sacrifice even greater than any which you have hitherto
made for me, sacrifices so great that they should receive some better
recompense than this.... But it must be... You must not stay in France.
By laying this command upon you, do I not give you rights which shall be
held sacred?” she added, holding his hand against her beating heart.
“Yes,” said Arthur, and he rose.
He looked in the direction of d’Aiglemont, who appeared on the opposite
side of one of the hollow walks with the child in his arms. He had
scrambled up on the balustrade by the chateau that little Helene might
jump down.
“Julie, I will not say a word of my love; we understand each other too
well. Deeply and carefully though I have hidden the pleasures of my
heart, you have shared them all. I feel it, I know it, I see it. And
now, at this moment, as I receive this delicious proof of the constant
sympathy of our hearts, I must go.... Cunning schemes for getting rid of
him have crossed my mind too often; the temptation might be irresistible
if I stayed with you.”
“I had the same thought,” she said, a look of pained surprise in her
troubled face.
Yet in her tone and involuntary shudder there was such virtue, such
certainty of herself, won in many a hard-fought battle with a love that
spoke in Julie’s tones and involuntary gestures, that Lord Grenville
stood thrilled with admiration of her. The mere shadow of a crime had
been dispelled from that clear conscience. The religious sentiment
enthroned on the fair forehead could not but drive away the evil
thoughts that arise unbidden, engendered by our imperfect nature,
thoughts which make us aware of the grandeur and the perils of human
destiny.
“And then,” she said, “I should have drawn down your scorn upon me,
and--I should have been saved,” she added, and her eyes fell. “To be
lowered in your eyes, what is that but death?”
For a moment the two heroic lovers were silent, choking down their
sorrow. Good or ill, it seemed that their thoughts were loyally one,
and the joys in the depths of their heart were no more experiences apart
than the pain which they strove most anxiously to hide.
“I have no right to complain,” she said after a while, “my misery is of
my own making,” and she raised her tear-filled eyes to the sky.
“Perhaps you don’t remember it, but that is the place where we met each
other for the first time,” shouted the General from below, and he waved
his hand towards the distance. “There, down yonder, near those poplars!”
The Englishman nodded abruptly by way of answer.
“So I was bound to die young and to know no happiness,” Julie continued.
“Yes, do not think that I live. Sorrow is just as fatal as the dreadful
disease which you have cured. I do not think that I am to blame. No. My
love is stronger than I am, and eternal; but all unconsciously it grew
in me; and I will not be guilty through my love. Nevertheless, though I
shall be faithful to my conscience as a wife, to my duties as a mother,
I will be no less faithful to the instincts of my heart. Hear me,” she
cried in an unsteady voice, “henceforth I belong to _him_ no longer.”
By a gesture, dreadful to see in its undisguised loathing she indicated
her husband.
“The social code demands that I shall make his existence happy,” she
continued. “I will obey, I will be his servant, my devotion to him
shall be boundless; but from to-day I am a widow. I will neither be a
prostitute in my own eyes nor in those of the world. If I do not belong
to M. d’Aiglemont, I will never belong to another. You shall have
nothing, nothing save this which you have wrung from me. This is the
doom which I have passed upon myself,” she said, looking proudly at him.
“And now, know this--if you give way to a single criminal thought, M.
d’Aiglemont’s widow will enter a convent in Spain or Italy. By an evil
chance we have spoken of our love; perhaps that confession was bound to
come; but our hearts must never vibrate again like this. To-morrow you
will receive a letter from England, and we shall part, and never see
each other again.”
The effort had exhausted all Julie’s strength. She felt her knees
trembling, and a feeling of deathly cold came over her. Obeying a
woman’s instinct, she sat down, lest she should sink into Arthur’s arms.
“_Julie!_” cried Lord Grenville.
The sharp cry rang through the air like a crack of thunder. Till then he
could not speak; now, all the words which the dumb lover could not utter
gathered themselves in that heartrending appeal.
“Well, what is wrong with her?” asked the General, who had hurried up at
that cry, and now suddenly confronted the two.
“Nothing serious,” said Julie, with that wonderful self-possession which
a woman’s quick-wittedness usually brings to her aid when it is most
called for. “The chill, damp air under the walnut tree made me feel
quite faint just now, and that must have alarmed this doctor of mine.
Does he not look on me as a very nearly finished work of art? He
was startled, I suppose, by the idea of seeing it destroyed.” With
ostentatious coolness she took Lord Grenville’s arm, smiled at her
husband, took a last look at the landscape, and went down the pathway,
drawing her traveling companion with her.
“This certainly is the grandest view that we have seen,” she said; “I
shall never forget it. Just look, Victor, what distance, what an expanse
of country, and what variety in it! I have fallen in love with this
landscape.”
Her laughter was almost hysterical, but to her husband it sounded
natural. She sprang gaily down into the hollow pathway and vanished.
“What?” she cried, when they had left M. d’Aiglemont far behind.
“So soon? Is it so soon? Another moment, and we can neither of us be
ourselves; we shall never be ourselves again, our life is over, in
short--”
“Let us go slowly,” said Lord Grenville, “the carriages are still some
way off, and if we may put words into our glances, our hearts may live a
little longer.”
They went along the footpath by the river in the late evening light,
almost in silence; such vague words as they uttered, low as the murmur
of the Loire, stirred their souls to the depths. Just as the sun sank,
a last red gleam from the sky fell over them; it was like a mournful
symbol of their ill-starred love.
The General, much put out because the carriage was not at the spot where
they had left it, followed and outstripped the pair without interrupting
their converse. Lord Grenville’s high minded and delicate behavior
throughout the journey had completely dispelled the Marquis’ suspicions.
For some time past he had left his wife in freedom, reposing confidence
in the noble amateur’s Punic faith. Arthur and Julie walked on together
in the close and painful communion of two hearts laid waste.
So short a while ago as they climbed the cliffs at Montcontour, there
had been a vague hope in either mind, an uneasy joy for which they dared
not account to themselves; but now as they came along the pathway by the
river, they pulled down the frail structure of imaginings, the child’s
cardcastle, on which neither of them had dared to breathe. That hope was
over.
That very evening Lord Grenville left them. His last look at Julie made
it miserably plain that since the moment when sympathy revealed the full
extent of a tyrannous passion, he did well to mistrust himself.
The next morning, M. d’Aiglemont and his wife took their places in the
carriage without their traveling companion, and were whirled swiftly
along the road to Blois. The Marquise was constantly put in mind of the
journey made in 1814, when as yet she know nothing of love, and had
been almost ready to curse it for its persistency. Countless forgotten
impressions were revived. The heart has its own memory. A woman who
cannot recollect the most important great events will recollect through
a lifetime things which appealed to her feelings; and Julie d’Aiglemont
found all the most trifling details of that journey laid up in her mind.
It was pleasant to her to recall its little incidents as they occurred
to her one by one; there were points in the road when she could even
remember the thoughts that passed through her mind when she saw them
first.
Victor had fallen violently in love with his wife since she had
recovered the freshness of her youth and all her beauty, and now he
pressed close to her side like a lover. Once he tried to put his arm
round her, but she gently disengaged herself, finding some excuse or
other for evading the harmless caress. In a little while she shrank from
the close contact with Victor, the sensation of warmth communicated by
their position. She tried to take the unoccupied place opposite, but
Victor gallantly resigned the back seat to her. For this attention she
thanked him with a sigh, whereupon he forgot himself, and the Don Juan
of the garrison construed his wife’s melancholy to his own advantage,
so that at the end of the day she was compelled to speak with a firmness
which impressed him.
“You have all but killed me, dear, once already, as you know,” said
she. “If I were still an inexperienced girl, I might begin to sacrifice
myself afresh; but I am a mother, I have a daughter to bring up, and I
owe as much to her as to you. Let us resign ourselves to a misfortune
which affects us both alike. You are the less to be pitied. Have you
not, as it is, found consolations which duty and the honor of both,
and (stronger still) which Nature forbids to me? Stay,” she added, “you
carelessly left three letters from Mme. de Sérizy in a drawer; here they
are. My silence about this matter should make it plain to you that in me
you have a wife who has plenty of indulgence and does not exact from you
the sacrifices prescribed by the law. But I have thought enough to see
that the roles of husband and wife are quite different, and that the
wife alone is predestined to misfortune. My virtue is based upon firmly
fixed and definite principles. I shall live blamelessly, but let me
live.”
The Marquis was taken aback by a logic which women grasp with the clear
insight of love, and overawed by a certain dignity natural to them at
such crises. Julie’s instinctive repugnance for all that jarred upon her
love and the instincts of her heart is one of the fairest qualities of
woman, and springs perhaps from a natural virtue which neither laws nor
civilization can silence. And who shall dare to blame women? If a woman
can silence the exclusive sentiment which bids her “forsake all other”
for the man whom she loves, what is she but a priest who has lost his
faith? If a rigid mind here and there condemns Julie for a sort of
compromise between love and wifely duty, impassioned souls will lay it
to her charge as a crime. To be thus blamed by both sides shows one of
two things very clearly--that misery necessarily follows in the train of
broken laws, or else that there are deplorable flaws in the institutions
upon which society in Europe is based.
Two years went by. M. and Mme. d’Aiglemont went their separate ways,
leading their life in the world, meeting each other more frequently
abroad than at home, a refinement upon divorce, in which many a marriage
in the great world is apt to end.
One evening, strange to say, found husband and wife in their own
drawing-room. Mme. d’Aiglemont had been dining at home with a friend,
and the General, who almost invariably dined in town, had not gone out
for once.
“There is a pleasant time in store for you, _Madame la Marquise_,” said
M. d’Aiglemont, setting his coffee cup down upon the table. He looked
at the guest, Mme. de Wimphen, and half-pettishly, half-mischievously
added, “I am starting off for several days’ sport with the Master of
the Hounds. For a whole week, at any rate, you will be a widow in good
earnest; just what you wish for, I suppose.--Guillaume,” he said to the
servant who entered, “tell them to put the horses in.”
Mme. de Wimphen was the friend to whom Julie had begun the letter upon
her marriage. The glances exchanged by the two women said plainly that
in her Julie had found an intimate friend, an indulgent and invaluable
confidante. Mme. de Wimphen’s marriage had been a very happy one.
Perhaps it was her own happiness which secured her devotion to Julie’s
unhappy life, for under such circumstances, dissimilarity of destiny is
nearly always a strong bond of union.
“Is the hunting season not over yet?” asked Julie, with an indifferent
glance at her husband.
“The Master of the Hounds comes when and where he pleases, madame. We
are going boar-hunting in the Royal Forest.”
“Take care that no accident happens to you.”
“Accidents are usually unforeseen,” he said, smiling.
“The carriage is ready, my Lord Marquis,” said the servant.
“Madame, if I should fall a victim to the boar--” he continued, with a
suppliant air.
“What does this mean?” inquired Mme. de Wimphen.
“Come, come,” said Mme. d’Aiglemont, turning to her husband; smiling at
her friend as if to say, “You will soon see.”
Julie held up her head; but as her husband came close to her, she
swerved at the last, so that his kiss fell not on her throat, but on the
broad frill about it.
“You will be my witness before heaven now that I need a firman to obtain
this little grace of her,” said the Marquis, addressing Mme. de Wimphen.
“This is how this wife of mine understands love. She has brought me to
this pass, by what trickery I am at a loss to know.... A pleasant time
to you!” and he went.
“But your poor husband is really very good-natured,” cried Louisa de
Wimphen, when the two women were alone together. “He loves you.”
“Oh! not another syllable after that last word. The name I bear makes me
shudder----”
“Yes, but Victor obeys you implicitly,” said Louisa.
“His obedience is founded in part upon the great esteem which I have
inspired in him. As far as outward things go, I am a model wife. I make
his house pleasant to him; I shut my eyes to his intrigues; I touch not
a penny of his fortune. He is free to squander the interest exactly as
he pleases; I only stipulate that he shall not touch the principal. At
this price I have peace. He neither explains nor attempts to explain my
life. But though my husband is guided by me, that does not say that I
have nothing to fear from his character. I am a bear leader who daily
trembles lest the muzzle should give way at last. If Victor once took
it into his head that I had forfeited my right to his esteem, what would
happen next I dare not think; for he is violent, full of personal pride,
and vain above all things. While his wits are not keen enough to enable
him to behave discreetly at a delicate crisis when his lowest passions
are involved, his character is weak, and he would very likely kill me
provisionally even if he died of remorse next day. But there is no fear
of that fatal good fortune.”
A brief pause followed. Both women were thinking of the real cause of
this state of affairs. Julie gave Louisa a glance which revealed her
thoughts.
“I have been cruelly obeyed,” she cried. “Yet I never forbade him to
write to me. Oh! _he_ has forgotten me, and he is right. If his life had
been spoiled, it would have been too tragical; one life is enough, is it
not? Would you believe it, dear; I read English newspapers simply to
see his name in print. But he has not yet taken his seat in the House of
Lords.”
“So you know English.”
“Did I not tell you?--Yes, I learned.”
“Poor little one!” cried Louisa, grasping Julie’s hand in hers. “How can
you still live?”
“That is the secret,” said the Marquise, with an involuntary gesture
almost childlike in its simplicity. “Listen, I take laudanum. That
duchess in London suggested the idea; you know the story, Maturin made
use of it in one of his novels. My drops are very weak, but I sleep; I
am only awake for seven hours in the day, and those hours I spend with
my child.”
Louisa gazed into the fire. The full extent of her friend’s misery was
opening out before her for the first time, and she dared not look into
her face.
“Keep my secret, Louisa,” said Julie, after a moment’s silence.
Just as she spoke the footman brought in a letter for the Marquise.
“Ah!” she cried, and her face grew white.
“I need not ask from whom it comes,” said Mme. de Wimphen, but the
Marquise was reading the letter, and heeded nothing else.
Mme. de Wimphen, watching her friend, saw strong feeling wrought to the
highest pitch, ecstasy of the most dangerous kind painted on Julie’s
face in swift changing white and red. At length Julie flung the sheet
into the fire.
“It burns like fire,” she said. “Oh! my heart beats till I cannot
breathe.”
She rose to her feet and walked up and down. Her eyes were blazing.
“He did not leave Paris!” she cried.
Mme. de Wimphen did not dare to interrupt the words that followed,
jerked-out sentences, measured by dreadful pauses in between. After
every break the deep notes of her voice sank lower and lower. There was
something awful about the last words.
“He has seen me, constantly, and I have not known it.--A look, taken by
stealth, every day, helps him to live.--Louisa, you do not know!--He
is dying.--He wants to say good-bye to me. He knows that my husband has
gone away for several days. He will be here in a moment. Oh! I shall
die: I am lost.--Listen, Louisa, stay with me!--_I am afraid!_”
“But my husband knows that I have been dining with you; he is sure to
come for me,” said Mme. de Wimphen.
“Well, then, before you go I will send _him_ away. I will play the
executioner for us both. Oh me! he will think that I do not love him any
more--And that letter of his! Dear, I can see those words in letters of
fire.”
A carriage rolled in under the archway.
“Ah!” cried the Marquise, with something like joy in her voice, “he is
coming openly. He makes no mystery of it.”
“Lord Grenville,” announced the servant.
The Marquise stood up rigid and motionless; but at the sight of Arthur’s
white face, so thin and haggard, how was it possible to keep up the
show of severity? Lord Grenville saw that Julie was not alone, but he
controlled his fierce annoyance, and looked cool and unperturbed. Yet
for the two women who knew his secret, his face, his tones, the look
in his eyes had something of the power attributed to the torpedo. Their
faculties were benumbed by the sharp shock of contact with his horrible
pain. The sound of his voice set Julie’s heart beating so cruelly that
she could not trust herself to speak; she was afraid that he would see
the full extent of his power over her. Lord Grenville did not dare to
look at Julie, and Mme. de Wimphen was left to sustain a conversation
to which no one listened. Julie glanced at her friend with touching
gratefulness in her eyes to thank her for coming to her aid.
By this time the lovers had quelled emotion into silence, and could
preserve the limits laid down by duty and convention. But M. de Wimphen
was announced, and as he came in the two friends exchanged glances. Both
felt the difficulties of this fresh complication. It was impossible to
enter into explanations with M. de Wimphen, and Louisa could not think
of any sufficient pretext for asking to be left.
Julie went to her, ostensibly to wrap her up in her shawl. “I will be
brave,” she said, in a low voice. “He came here in the face of all the
world, so what have I to fear? Yet but for you, in that first moment,
when I saw how changed he looked, I should have fallen at his feet.”
“Well, Arthur, you have broken your promise to me,” she said, in a
faltering voice, when she returned. Lord Grenville did not venture to
take the seat upon the sofa by her side.
“I could not resist the pleasure of hearing your voice, of being near
you. The thought of it came to be a sort of madness, a delirious frenzy.
I am no longer master of myself. I have taken myself to task; it is
no use, I am too weak, I ought to die. But to die without seeing you,
without having heard the rustle of your dress, or felt your tears. What
a death!”
He moved further away from her; but in his hasty uprising a pistol fell
out of his pocket. The Marquise looked down blankly at the weapon; all
passion, all expression had died out of her eyes. Lord Grenville stooped
for the thing, raging inwardly over an accident which seemed like a
piece of lovesick strategy.
“_Arthur!_”
“Madame,” he said, looking down, “I came here in utter desperation; I
meant----” he broke off.
“You meant to die by your own hand here in my house!”
“Not alone!” he said in a low voice.
“Not alone! My husband, perhaps----?”
“No, no,” he cried in a choking voice. “Reassure yourself,” he
continued, “I have quite given up my deadly purpose. As soon as I came
in, as soon as I saw you, I felt that I was strong enough to suffer in
silence, and to die alone.”
Julie sprang up, and flung herself into his arms. Through her sobbing
he caught a few passionate words, “To know happiness, and then to
die.--Yes, let it be so.”
All Julie’s story was summed up in that cry from the depths; it was
the summons of nature and of love at which women without a religion
surrender. With the fierce energy of unhoped-for joy, Arthur caught her
up and carried her to the sofa; but in a moment she tore herself from
her lover’s arms, looked at him with a fixed despairing gaze, took his
hand, snatched up a candle, and drew him into her room. When they stood
by the cot where Helene lay sleeping, she put the curtains softly aside,
shading the candle with her hand, lest the light should dazzle the
half-closed eyes beneath the transparent lids. Helene lay smiling in her
sleep, with her arms outstretched on the coverlet. Julie glanced from
her child to Arthur’s face. That look told him all.
“We may leave a husband, even though he loves us: a man is strong; he
has consolations.--We may defy the world and its laws. But a motherless
child!”--all these thoughts, and a thousand others more moving still,
found language in that glance.
“We can take her with us,” muttered he; “I will love her dearly.”
“Mamma!” cried little Helene, now awake. Julie burst into tears. Lord
Grenville sat down and folded his arms in gloomy silence.
“Mamma!” At the sweet childish name, so many nobler feelings, so many
irresistible yearnings awoke, that for a moment love was effaced by the
all-powerful instinct of motherhood; the mother triumphed over the woman
in Julie, and Lord Grenville could not hold out, he was defeated by
Julie’s tears.
Just at that moment a door was flung noisily open. “Madame d’Aiglemont,
are you hereabouts?” called a voice which rang like a crack of thunder
through the hearts of the two lovers. The Marquis had come home.
Before Julie could recover her presence of mind, her husband was on the
way to the door of her room which opened into his. Luckily, at a sign,
Lord Grenville escaped into the dressing-closet, and she hastily shut
the door upon him.
“Well, my lady, here am I,” said Victor, “the hunting party did not come
off. I am just going to bed.”
“Good-night, so am I. So go and leave me to undress.”
“You are very cross to-night, Madame la Marquise.”
The General returned to his room, Julie went with him to the door and
shut it. Then she sprang to the dressing-close to release Arthur. All
her presence of mind returned; she bethought herself that it was quite
natural that her sometime doctor should pay her a visit; she might have
left him in the drawing-room while she put her little girl to bed. She
was about to tell him, under her breath, to go back to the drawing-room,
and had opened the door. Then she shrieked aloud. Lord Grenville’s
fingers had been caught and crushed in the door.
“Well, what is it?” demanded her husband.
“Oh! nothing, I have just pricked my finger with a pin.”
The General’s door opened at once. Julie imagined that the irruption was
due to a sudden concern for her, and cursed a solicitude in which love
had no part. She had barely time to close the dressing-closet, and Lord
Grenville had not extricated his hand. The General did, in fact, appear,
but his wife had mistaken his motives; his apprehensions were entirely
on his own account.
“Can you lend me a bandana handkerchief? The stupid fool Charles leaves
me without a single one. In the early days you used to bother me with
looking after me so carefully. Ah, well, the honeymoon did not last very
long for me, nor yet for my cravats. Nowadays I am given over to the
secular arm, in the shape of servants who do not care one jack straw for
what I say.”
“There! There is a bandana for you. Did you go into the drawing-room?”
“No.”
“Oh! you might perhaps have been in time to see Lord Grenville.”
“Is he in Paris?”
“It seems so.”
“Oh! I will go at once. The good doctor.”
“But he will have gone by now!” exclaimed Julie.
The Marquis, standing in the middle of the room, was tying the
handkerchief over his head. He looked complacently at himself in the
glass.
“What has become of the servants is more than I know,” he remarked. “I
have rung the bell for Charles, and he has not answered it. And your
maid is not here either. Ring for her. I should like another blanket on
my bed to-night.”
“Pauline is out,” the Marquise said drily.
“What, at midnight!” exclaimed the General.
“I gave her leave to go to the Opéra.”
“That is funny!” returned her husband, continuing to undress. “I thought
I saw her coming upstairs.”
“She has come in then, of course,” said Julie, with assumed impatience,
and to allay any possible suspicion on her husband’s part she pretended
to ring the bell.
The whole history of that night has never been known, but no doubt it
was as simple and as tragically commonplace as the domestic incidents
that preceded it.
Next day the Marquise d’Aiglemont took to her bed, nor did she leave it
for some days.
“What can have happened in your family so extraordinary that every one
is talking about your wife?” asked M. de Ronquerolles of M. d’Aiglemont
a short time after that night of catastrophes.
“Take my advice and remain a bachelor,” said d’Aiglemont. “The curtains
of Helene’s cot caught fire, and gave my wife such a shock that it will
be a twelvemonth before she gets over it; so the doctor says. You marry
a pretty wife, and her looks fall off; you marry a girl in blooming
health, and she turns into an invalid. You think she has a passionate
temperament, and find her cold, or else under her apparent coldness
there lurks a nature so passionate that she is the death of you, or
she dishonors your name. Sometimes the meekest of them will turn out
crotchety, though the crotchety ones never grow any sweeter. Sometimes
the mere child, so simple and silly at first, will develop an iron will
to thwart you and the ingenuity of a fiend. I am tired of marriage.”
“Or of your wife?”
“That would be difficult. By-the-by, do you feel inclined to go to
Saint-Thomas d’Aquin with me to attend Lord Grenville’s funeral?”
“A singular way of spending time.--Is it really known how he came by his
death?” added Ronquerolles.
“His man says that he spent a whole night sitting on somebody’s window
sill to save some woman’s character, and it has been infernally cold
lately.”
“Such devotion would be highly creditable to one of us old stagers; but
Lord Grenville was a youngster and--an Englishman. Englishmen never can
do anything like anybody else.”
“Pooh!” returned d’Aiglemont, “these heroic exploits all depend upon the
woman in the case, and it certainly was not for one that I know, that
poor Arthur came by his death.”