Her friend’s tears had relieved sad Alba’s heart while she held that
friend in her arms, quivering with sorrow and pity; but when she was
gone, and Madame Steno’s daughter was alone, face to face with her
thoughts, a greater distress seized her. The pity which her companion in
misery had shown for her--was it not one more proof that she was right
in mistrusting her mother? Alas! The miserable child did not know that
while she was plunged in despair, there was in Rome and in her immediate
vicinity a creature bent upon realizing a mad vow. And that creature was
the same who had not recoiled before the infamy of an anonymous letter,
pretty and sinister Lydia Maitland--that delicate, that silent young
woman with the large brown eyes, always smiling, always impenetrable in
the midst of that dull complexion which no emotion, it seemed, had ever
tinged. The failure of her first attempt had exasperated her hatred
against her husband and against the Countess to the verge of fury, but a
concentrated fury, which was waiting for another occasion to strike, for
weeks, patiently, obscurely. She had thought to wreak her vengeance by
the return of Gorka, and in what had it ended? In freeing Lincoln from
a dangerous rival and in imperilling the life of the only being for whom
she cared!
The sojourn at the country-seat of her husband’s mistress exasperated
Lydia’s hidden anger. She suffered so that she cried aloud, like an
imprisoned animal beating against the bars, when she pictured to herself
the happiness which the two lovers would enjoy in the intimacy of the
villa, with the beauties of the Venetian scenery surrounding them. No
doubt the wife could provoke a scandal and obtain a divorce, thanks to
proofs as indisputable as those with which she had overwhelmed Maud.
It would be sufficient to carry to a lawyer the correspondence in the
Spanish escritoire. But of what use? She would not be avenged on her
husband, to whom a divorce would be a matter of indifference now that he
earned as much money as he required, and she would lose her brother. In
vain Lydia told herself that, warned as Alba had been by her letter, her
doubt of Madame Steno’s misconduct would no longer be impossible. She
was convinced by innumerable trifling signs that the Contessina still
doubted, and then she concluded:
“It is there that the blow must be struck. But how?”
Yes. How? There was at the service of hatred in that delicate woman, in
appearance oblivious of worldliness, that masculine energy in decision
which is to be found in all families of truly military origin. The blood
of Colonel Chapron stirred within her and gave her the desire to act. By
dint of pondering upon those reasonings, Lydia ended by elaborating one
of those plans of a simplicity really infernal, in which she revealed
what must be called the genius of evil, for there was so much clearness
in the conception and of villainy in the execution. She assured herself
that it was unnecessary to seek any other stage than the studio for
the scene she meditated. She knew too well the fury of passion by which
Madame Steno was possessed to doubt that, as soon as she was alone
with Lincoln, she did not refuse him those kisses of which their
correspondence spoke. The snare to be laid was very simple. It required
that Alba and Lydia should be in some post of observation while the
lovers believed themselves alone, were it only for a moment. The
position of the places furnished the formidable woman with the means of
obtaining the place of espionage in all security. Situated on the second
floor, the studio occupied most of the depth of the house. The wall,
which separated it from the side of the apartments, ended in a partition
formed of colored glass, through which it was impossible to see. That
glass lighted a dark corridor adjoining the linen-room. Lydia employed
several hours of several nights in cutting with a diamond a hole, the
size of a fifty centime-piece, in one of those unpolished squares.
Her preparations had been completed several days when, notwithstanding
her absence of scruple in the satiating of her hatred, she still
hesitated to employ that mode of vengeance, so much atrocious cruelty
was there in causing a daughter to spy upon her mother. It was Alba
herself who kindled the last spark of humanity with which that
dark conscience was lighted up, and that by the most innocent of
conversations. It was the very evening of the afternoon on which she had
exchanged that sad adieu with Fanny Hafner. She was more unnerved than
usual, and she was conversing with Dorsenne in that corner of the long
hall. They did not heed the fact that Lydia drew near them, by a simple
change of seat which permitted her, while herself conversing with some
guest, to lend an ear to the words uttered by the Contessina.
It was Florent who was the subject of their conversation, and she said
to Dorsenne, who was praising him:
“What would you have? It is true I almost feel repulsion toward him.
He is to me like a being of another species. His friendship for his
brother-in-law? Yes. It is very beautiful, very touching; but it does
not touch me. It is a devotion which is not human. It is too instinctive
and too blind. Indeed, I know that I am wrong. There is that prejudice
of race which I can never entirely overcome.”
Dorsenne touched her fingers at that moment, under the pretext of taking
from her her fan, in reality to warn her, and he said, in a very low
voice that time:
“Let us go a little farther on. Lydia Maitland is too near.”
He fancied he surprised a start on the part of Florent’s sister, at whom
he accidentally glanced, while his too-sensible interlocutor no longer
watched her! But as the pretty, clear laugh of Lydia rang out at the
same moment, imprudent Alba replied:
“Fortunately, she has heard nothing. And see how one can speak of
trouble without mistrusting it.... I have just been wicked,” she
continued, “for it is not their fault, neither Florent’s nor hers, if
there is a little negro blood in their veins, so much the more so as
it is connected by the blood of a hero, and they are both perfectly
educated, and what is better, perfectly good, and then I know very well
that if there is a grand thought in this age it is to have proclaimed
that truly all men are brothers.”
She had spoken in a lower voice, but too late. Moreover, even if
Florent’s sister could have heard those words, they would not have
sufficed to heal the wound which the first ones had made in the most
sensitive part of her ‘amour propre’!
“And I hesitated,” said she to herself, “I thought of sparing her!”
The following morning, toward noon, she found herself at the atelier,
seated beside Madame Steno, while Lincoln gave to the portrait the last
touches, and while Alba posed in the large armchair, absent and pale as
usual. Florent Chapron, after having assisted at part of the sitting,
left the room, leaning upon the crutch, which he still used. His
withdrawal seemed so propitious to Lydia that she resolved immediately
not to allow such an opportunity to escape, and as if fatality
interfered to render her work of infamy more easy, Madame Steno aided
her by suddenly interrupting the work of the painter who, after hard
working without speaking for half an hour, paused to wipe his forehead,
on which were large drops of perspiration, so great was his excitement.
“Come, my little Linco,” said she, with the affectionate solicitude
of an old mistress, “you must rest. For two hours you have not ceased
painting, and such minute details.... It tires me merely to watch you.”
“I am not at all tired,” replied Maitland, who, however, laid down his
palette and brush, and rolling a cigarette, lighted it, continuing, with
a proud smile: “We have only that one superiority, we Americans, but we
have it--it is a power to apply ourselves which the Old World no longer
knows.... It is for that reason that there are professions in which we
have no rivals.”
“But see!” replied Lydia, “you have taken Alba for a Bostonian or a New
Yorker, and you have made her pose so long that she is pale. She must
have a change. Come with me, dear, I will show you the costume they have
sent me from Paris, and which I shall wear this afternoon to the garden
party at the English embassy.”
She forced Alba Steno to rise from the armchair as she uttered those
words, then she entwined her arms about her waist to draw her away and
kissed her. Ah, if ever a caress merited being compared to the hideous
flattery of Iscariot, it was that, and the young girl might have replied
with the sublime words: “Friend, why hast thou betrayed me by a kiss?”
Alas! She believed in it, in the sincerity of that proof of affection,
and she returned her false friend’s kiss with a gratitude which did not
soften that heart saturated with hatred, for five minutes had not passed
ere Lydia had put into execution her hideous project. Under the pretext
of reaching the liner-room more quickly, she took a servant’s staircase,
which led to that lobby with the glass partition, in which was the
opening through which to look into the atelier.
“This is very strange,” said she, pausing suddenly. And, pointing out to
her innocent companion the round spot, she said: “Probably some servant
who has wished to eavesdrop.--But what for? You, who are tall, look
and see how it has been done and what it looks on. If it is a hole cut
purposely, I shall discover the culprit and he shall go.”
Alba obeyed the perfidious request absently, and applied her eye to the
aperture. The author of the anonymous letters had chosen her moment only
too well. As soon as the door of the studio was closed, the Countess
rose to approach Lincoln. She entwined around the young man’s neck her
arms, which gleamed through the transparent sleeves of her summer gown,
and she kissed with greedy lips his eyes and mouth. Lydia, who had
retained one of the girl’s hands in hers, felt that hand tremble
convulsively. A hunter who hears rustle the foliage of the thicket
through which should pass the game he is awaiting, does not experience
a joy more complete. Her snare was successful. She said to her unhappy
victim:
“What ails you? How you tremble!”
And she essayed to push her away in order to put herself in her
place. Alba, whom the sight of her mother embracing Lincoln with those
passionate kisses inspired at that moment with an inexplicable horror,
had, however, enough presence of mind in the midst of her suffering
to understand the danger of that mother whom she had surprised thus,
clasping in the arms of a guilty mistress--whom?--the husband of the
very woman speaking to her, who asked her why she trembled with fear,
who would look through that same hole to see that same tableau!...
In order to prevent what she believed would be to Lydia a terrible
revelation, the courageous child had one of those desperate thoughts
such as immediate peril inspires. With her free hand she struck the
glass so violently that it was shivered into atoms, cutting her fingers
and her wrist.
Lydia exclaimed, angrily:
“Miserable girl, you did that purposely!”
The fierce creature as she uttered these words, rushed toward the large
hole now made in the panel--too late!
She only saw Lincoln erect in the centre of the studio, looking toward
the broken window, while the Countess, standing a few paces from him,
exclaimed:
“My daughter! What has happened to my daughter? I recognized her voice.”
“Do not alarm yourself,” replied Lydia, with atrocious sarcasm. “Alba
broke the pane to give you a warning.”
“But, is she hurt?” asked the mother.
“Very slightly,” replied the implacable woman with the same accent of
irony, and she turned again toward the Contessina with a glance of such
rancor that, even in the state of confusion in which the latter was
plunged by that which she had surprised, that glance paralyzed her with
fear. She felt the same shudder which had possessed her dear friend
Maud, in that same studio, in the face of the sinister depths of that
dark soul, suddenly exposed. She had not time to precisely define her
feelings, for already her mother was beside her, pressing her in her
arms--in those very arms which Alba had just seen twined around the neck
of a lover--while that same mouth showered kisses upon him. The
moral shock was so great that the young girl fainted. She regained
consciousness and almost at once. She saw her mother as mad with anxiety
as she had just seen her trembling with joy and love. She again saw
Lydia Maitland’s eyes fixed upon them both with an expression too
significant now. And, as she had had the presence of mind to save that
guilty mother, she found in her tenderness the strength to smile at
her, to lie to her, to blind her forever as to the truth of that hideous
scene which had just been enacted in that lobby.
“I was frightened at the sight of my own blood,” said she, “and I
believe it is only a small cut.... See! I can move my hand without
pain.”
When the doctor, hastily summoned, had confirmed that no particles of
glass had remained in the cuts, the Countess felt so reassured that her
gayety returned. Never had she been in a mood more charming than in the
carriage which took them to the Villa Steno.
To a person obliged by proof to condemn another without ceasing to
love her, there is no greater sorrow than to perceive the absolute
unconsciousness of that other person and her serenity in her fault. Poor
Alba, felt overwhelmed by a sadness greater, more depressing still, and
which became materially insupportable, when, toward half-past two, her
mother bade her farewell, although the fete at the English embassy did
not begin until five o’clock.
“I promised poor Hafner to go to see him to-day. I know he is bowed down
with grief. I would like to try to arrange all.... I will send back the
carriage if you wish to go out awhile. I have telephoned Lydia to expect
me at four o’clock.... She will take me.”
She had, on detailing the employment so natural of her afternoon, eyes
too brilliant, a smile too happy. She looked too youthful in her light
toilette. Her feet trembled with too nervous an impatience. How could
Alba not have felt that she was telling her an untruth? The undeceived
child had the intuition that the visit to Fanny’s father was only a
pretext. It was not the first time that the Countess employed it to
free herself from inconvenient surveillance, the act of sending back
the carriage, which, in Rome as in Paris, is always the probable sign of
clandestine meetings with women of their rank. It was not the first
time that Alba was possessed by suspicion on certain mysterious
disappearances of her mother. That mother did not mistrust that poor
Alba--her Alba, the child so tenderly loved in spite of all--was
suffering at that very moment and on her account the most terrible of
temptations.... When the carriage had disappeared the fixed gaze of the
young girl was turned upon the pavement, and then she felt arise in
her a sudden, instinctive, almost irresistible idea to end the moral
suffering by which she was devoured. It was so simple!... It was
sufficient to end life. One movement which she could make, one single
movement--she could lean over the balustrade, against which her arm
rested, in a certain manner--so, a little more forward, a little
more--and that suffering would be terminated. Yes, it would be so very
simple. She saw herself lying upon the pavement, her limbs broken, her
head crushed, dead--dead--freed! She leaned forward and was about to
leap, when her eyes fell upon a person who was walking below, the sight
of whom suddenly aroused her from the folly, the strange charm of which
had just laid hold so powerfully upon her. She drew back. She rubbed her
eyes with her hands, and she, who was accustomed to mystical enthusiasm,
said aloud:
“My God! You send him to me! I am saved.” And she summoned the footman
to tell him that if M. Dorsenne asked for her, he should be shown into
Madame Steno’s small salon. “I am not at home to any one else,” she
added.
It was indeed Julien, whom she had seen approach the house at the very
instant when she was only separated from the abyss by that last tremor
of animal repugnance, which is found even in suicide of the most ardent
kind. Do not madmen themselves choose to die in one manner rather than
in another? She paused several moments in order to collect herself.
“Yes,” said she at length, to herself, “it is the only solution. I will
find out if he loves me truly. And if he does not?”
She again looked toward the window, in order to assure herself that,
in case that conversation did not end as she desired, the tragical and
simple means remained at her service by which to free herself from that
infamous life which she surely could not bear.
Julien began the conversation in his tone of sentimental raillery, so
speedily to be transformed into one of drama! He knew very well, on
arriving at Villa Steno, that he was to have his last tete-a-tete with
his pretty and interesting little friend. For he had at length decided
to go away, and, to be more sure of not failing, he had engaged his
sleeping-berth for that night. He had jested so much with love that he
entered upon that conversation with a jest; when, having tried to take
Alba’s hand to press a kiss upon it, he saw that it was bandaged.
“What has happened to you, little Countess? Have my laurels or those of
Florent Chapron prevented you from sleeping, that you are here with
the classical wrist of a duellist?... Seriously, how have you hurt
yourself?”
“I leaned against a window, which broke and the pieces of glass cut my
fingers somewhat,” replied the young girl with a faint smile, adding:
“It is nothing.”
“What an imprudent child you are!” said Dorsenne in his tone of friendly
scolding. “Do you know that you might have severed an artery and have
caused a very serious, perhaps a fatal, hemorrhage?”
“That would not have been such a great misfortune,” replied Alba,
shaking her pretty head with an expression so bitter about her mouth
that the young man, too, ceased smiling.
“Do not speak in that tone,” said he, “or I shall think you did it
purposely.”
“Purposely?” repeated the young girl. “Purposely? Why should I have done
it purposely?”
And she blushed and laughed in the same nervous way she had laughed
fifteen minutes before, when she looked down into the street. Dorsenne
felt that she was suffering, and his heart contracted. The trouble
against which he had struggled for several days with all the energy
of an independent artist, and which for some time systematized his
celibacy, again oppressed him. He thought it time to put between “folly”
and him the irreparability of his categorical resolution. So he replied
to his little friend with his habitual gentleness, but in a tone of
firmness, which already announced his determination:
“I have again vexed you, Contessina, and you are looking at me with the
glance of our hours of dispute. You will later regret having been unkind
to-day.”
As he pronounced those enigmatical words, she saw that he had in his
eyes and in his smile something different and indefinable. It must have
been that she loved him still more than she herself believed as for a
second she forgot both her pain and her resolution, and she asked him,
quickly:
“You have some trouble? You are suffering? What is it?”
“Nothing,” replied Dorsenne. “But time is flying, the minutes are going
by, and not only the minutes. There is an old and charming. French ode,
which you do not know and which begins:
‘Le temps s’en va, le temps s’en va, Madame.
Las, le temps? Non. Mais nous nous en allons.’”
“Which means, little Countess, in simple prose, that this is no doubt
the last conversation we shall have together this season, and that it
would be cruel to mar for me this last visit.”
“Do I understand you aright?” said Alba. She, too, knew too well
Julien’s way of speaking not to know that that mannerism, half-mocking,
half-sentimental, always served him to prepare phrases more grave,
and against the emotion of which her fear of appearing a dupe rose in
advance. She crossed her arms upon her breast, and after a pause she
continued, in a grave voice: “You are going away?”
“Yes,” he replied, and from his coat-pocket he partly drew his ticket.
“You see I have acted like the poltroons who cast themselves into the
water. My ticket is bought, and I shall no longer hold that little
discourse which I have held for months, that, ‘Sir executioner, one
moment.... Du Barry’.”
“You are going away?” repeated the young girl, who did not seem to have
heeded the jest by which Julien had concealed his own confusion at the
effect of his so abruptly announced departure. “I shall not see you any
more!... And if I ask you not to go yet? You have spoken to me of our
friendship.... If I pray you, if I beseech you, in the name of that
friendship, not to deprive me of it at this instant, when I have no
one, when I am so alone, so horribly alone, will you answer no? You have
often told me that you were my friend, my true friend? If it be true,
you will not go. I repeat, I am alone, and I am afraid.”
“Come, little Countess,” replied Dorsenne, who began to be terrified
by the young girl’s sudden excitement, “it is not reasonable to agitate
yourself thus, because yesterday you had a very sad conversation with
Fanny Hafner! First, it is altogether impossible for me to defer my
departure. You force me to give you coarse, almost commercial reasons.
But my book is about to appear, and I must be there for the launching of
the sale, of which I have already told you. And then you are going away,
too. You will have all the diversions of the country, of your Venetian
friends and charming Lydia Maitland!”
“Do not mention that name,” interrupted Alba, whose face became
discomposed at the allusion to the sojourn at Piove. “You do not know
how you pain me, nor what that woman is, what a monster of cruelty
and of perfidy! Ask me no more. I shall tell you nothing. But,” the
Contessina that time clasping her hands, her poor, thin hands, which
trembled with the anguish of the words she dared to utter, “do you not
comprehend that if I speak to you as I do, it is because I have need of
you in order to live?” Then in a low voice, choked by emotion: “It
is because I love you!” All the modesty natural to a child of twenty
mounted to her pale face in a flood of purple, when she had uttered that
avowal. “Yes, I love you!” she repeated, in an accent as deep, but more
firm. “It is not, however, so common a thing to find real devotion, a
being who only asks to serve you, to be useful to you, to live in your
shadow. And you will understand that to have the right of giving you
my life, to bear your name, to be your wife, to follow you, I felt very
vividly in your presence at the moment I was about to lose you. You
will pardon my lack of modesty for the first, for the last time. I have
suffered too much.”
She ceased. Never had the absolute purity of the charming creature, born
and bred in an atmosphere of corruption, and remaining in the same so
intact, so noble, so frank, flashed out as at that moment. All that
virgin and unhappy soul was in her eyes which implored Julien, on her
lips which trembled at having spoken thus, on her brow around which
floated, like an aureole, the fair hair stirred by the breeze which
entered the open window. She had found the means of daring that
prodigious step, the boldest a woman can permit herself, still more so
a young girl, with so chaste a simplicity that at that moment Dorsenne
would not have dared to touch even the hand of that child who confided
herself to him so madly, so loyally.
Dorsenne was undoubtedly greatly interested in her, with a curiosity,
without enthusiasm, and against which a reaction had already set in.
That touching speech, in which trembled a distress so tender and each
word of which later on made him weep with regret, produced upon him
at that moment an impression of fear rather than love or pity. When at
length he broke the cruel silence, the sound of his voice revealed to
the unhappy girl the uselessness of that supreme appeal addressed by her
to life.
She had only kept, to exorcise the demon of suicide, her hope in
the heart of that man, and that heart, toward which she turned in so
immoderate a transport, drew back instead of responding.
“Calm yourself, I beseech you,” said he to her. “You can understand that
I am very much moved, very much surprised, at what I have heard! I did
not suspect it. My God! How troubled you are. And yet,” he continued
with more firmness, “I should despise myself were I to lie to you. You
have been so loyal toward me.... To marry you? Ah, it would be the
most delightful dream of happiness if that dream were not prevented by
honesty. Poor child,” and his voice sounded almost bitter, “you do not
know me. You do not know what a writer of my order is, and that to unite
your destiny to mine would be for you martyrdom more severe than your
moral solitude of to-day. You see, I came to your home with so much joy,
because I was free, because each time I could say to myself that I need
not return again. Such a confession is not romantic. But it is thus. If
that relation became a bond, an obligation, a fixed framework in which
to move, a circle of habits in which to imprison me, I should only have
one thought--flight. An engagement for my entire life? No, no, I could
not bear it. There are souls of passage as well as birds of passage, and
I am one. You will understand it tomorrow, now, and you will remember
that I have spoken to you as a man of honor, who would be miserable if
he thought he had augmented, involuntarily, the sorrows of your life
when his only desire was to assuage them. My God! What is to be done?”
he cried, on seeing, as he spoke, tears gush from the young girl’s eyes,
which she did not wipe away.
“Go away,” she replied, “leave me. I do not want you. I am grateful to
you for not having deceived me.”
“But your presence is too cruel. I am ashamed of having spoken to you,
now that I know you do not love me. I have been mad, do not punish me by
remaining longer. After the conversation we have just had, my honor will
not permit us to talk longer.”
“You are right,” said Julien, after another pause. He took his hat,
which he had placed upon a table at the beginning of that visit,
so rapidly and abruptly terminated by a confession of sentiments so
strange. He said:
“Then, farewell.” She inclined her fair head without replying.
The door was closed. Alba Steno was again alone. Half an hour later,
when the footman entered to ask for orders relative to the carriage sent
back by the Countess, he found her standing motionless at the window
from which she had watched Dorsenne depart. There she had once more
been seized by the temptation of suicide. She had again felt with an
irresistible force the magnetic attraction of death. Life appeared to
her once more as something too vile, too useless, too insupportable to
be borne. The carriage was at her disposal. By way of the Portese gate
and along the Tiber, with the Countess’s horses, it would take an hour
and a half to reach the Lake di Porto. She had, too, this pretext, to
avoid the curiosity of the servants: one of the Roman noblewomen of her
acquaintance, Princess Torlonia, owned an isolated villa on the border
of that lake.... She ascended hastily to don her hat. And without
writing a word of farewell to any one, without even casting a glance at
the objects among which she had lived and suffered, she descended the
staircase and gave the coachman the name of the villa, adding “Drive
quickly; I am late now.”
The Lake di Porto is only, as its name indicates, the port of the
ancient Tiber. The road which leads from Transtevere runs along the
river, which rolls through a plain strewn with ruins and indented with
barren hills, its brackish water discolored from the sand and mud of the
Apennines.
Here groups of eucalyptus, there groups of pine parasols above some
ruined walls, were all the vegetation which met Alba Steno’s eye. But
the scene accorded so well with the moral devastation she bore within
her that the barrenness around her in her last walk was pleasant to her.
The feeling that she was nearing eternal peace, final sleep in which she
should suffer no more, augmented when she alighted from the carriage,
and, having passed the garden of Villa Torlonia, she found herself
facing the small lake, so grandiose in its smallness by the wildness of
its surroundings, and motionless, surprised in even that supreme moment
by the magic of that hidden sight, she paused amid the reeds with their
red tufts to look at that pond which was to become her tomb, and she
murmured:
“How beautiful it is!”
There was in the humid atmosphere which gradually penetrated her a charm
of mortal rest, to which she abandoned herself dreamily, almost with
physical voluptuousness, drinking into her being the feverish fumes of
that place--one of the most fatal at that season and at that hour of all
that dangerous coast--until she shuddered in her light summer gown.
Her shoulders contracted, her teeth chattered, and that feeling of
discomfort was to her as a signal for action. She took another allee of
rose-bushes in flower to reach a point on the bank barren of vegetation,
where was outlined the form of a boat. She soon detached it, and,
managing the heavy oars with her delicate hands, she advanced toward the
middle of the lake.
When she was in the spot which she thought the deepest and the most
suitable for her design, she ceased rowing. Then, by a delicate care,
which made her smile herself, so much did it betray instinctive and
childish order at such a solemn moment, she put her hat, her umbrella
and her gloves on one of the transversal boards of the boat. She had
made effort to move the heavy oars, so that she was perspiring. A second
shudder seized her as she was arranging the trifling objects, so keen,
so chilly, so that time that she paused. She lay there motionless, her
eyes fixed upon the water, whose undulations lapped the boat. At the
last moment she felt reenter her heart, not love of life, but love for
her mother. All the details of the events which would follow her suicide
were presented to her mind.
She saw herself plunging into the deep water which would close over
her head. Her suffering would be ended, but Madame Steno? She saw the
coachman growing uneasy over her absence, ringing at the door of Villa
Torlonia, the servants in search. The loosened boat would relate enough.
Would the Countess know that she had killed herself? Would she know
the cause of that desperate end? The terrible face of Lydia Maitland
appeared to the young girl. She comprehended that the woman hated her
enemy too much not to enlighten her with regard to the circumstances
which had preceded that suicide. The cry so simple and of a significance
so terrible: “You did it purposely!” returned to Alba’s memory. She saw
her mother learning that her daughter had seen all. She had loved her so
much, that mother, she loved her so dearly still!
Then, as a third violent chill shook her from head to foot, Alba began
to think of another mode, and one as sure, of death without any one in
the world being able to suspect that it was voluntary. She recalled
the fact that she was in one of the most dreaded corners of the Roman
Campagna; that she had known persons carried off in a few days by the
pernicious fevers contracted in similar places, at that hour and in
that season, notably one of her friends, one of the Bonapartes living
in Rome, who came thither to hunt when overheated. If she were to try to
catch that same disease?... And she took up the oars. When she felt
her brow moist with the second effort, she opened her bodice and her
chemise, she exposed her neck, her breast, her throat, and she lay down
in the boat, allowing the damp air to envelop, to caress, to chill her,
inviting the entrance into her blood of the fatal germs. How long did
she remain thus, half-unconscious, in the atmosphere more and more laden
with miasma in proportion as the sun sank? A cry made her rise and again
take up the oars. It was the coachman, who, not seeing her return, had
descended from the box and was hailing the boat at all hazards. When she
stepped upon the bank and when he saw her so pale, the man, who had been
in the Countess’s service for years, could not help saying to her, with
the familiarity of an Italian servant:
“You have taken cold, Mademoiselle, and this place is so dangerous.”
“Indeed,” she replied, “I have had a chill. It will be nothing. Let us
return quickly. Above all, do not say that I was in the boat. You will
cause me to be scolded.”