"What needless torture you give yourself!" was his reply, while he
looked at me with tender, pitying eyes. "Never have I loved you so
deeply."
"If that is true, my beloved, let me sell Fedelta," I answered.
"Sell her, by all means!"
The reply crushed me. Was it not a covert taunt at my wealth and his
own nothingness in the house? This may never have occurred to him, but
I thought it had, and once more I left him. It was night, and I would go
to bed.
Oh! Renee, to be alone with a harrowing thought drives one to thoughts
of death. These charming gardens, the starry night, the cool air, laden
with incense from our wealth of flowers, our valley, our hills--all
seemed to me gloomy, black, and desolate. It was as though I lay at the
foot of a precipice, surrounded by serpents and poisonous plants, and
saw no God in the sky. Such a night ages a woman.
Next morning I said:
"Take Fedelta and be off to Paris! Don't sell her; I love her. Does she
not carry you?"
But he was not deceived; my tone betrayed the storm of feeling which I
strove to conceal.
"Trust me!" he replied; and the gesture with which he held out his hand,
the glance of his eye, were so full of loyalty that I was overcome.
"What petty creatures women are!" I exclaimed.
"No, you love me, that is all," he said, pressing me to his heart.
"Go to Paris without me," I said, and this time I made him understand
that my suspicions were laid aside.
He went; I thought he would have stayed. I won't attempt to tell you
what I suffered. I found a second self within, quite strange to me. A
crisis like this has, for the woman who loves, a tragic solemnity that
baffles words; the whole of life rises before you then, and you search
in vain for any horizon to it; the veriest trifle is big with meaning, a
glance contains a volume, icicles drift on uttered words, and the death
sentence is read in a movement of the lips.
I thought he would have paid me back in kind; had I not been
magnanimous? I climbed to the top of the chalet, and my eyes followed
him on the road. Ah! my dear Renee, he vanished from my sight with an
appalling swiftness.
"How keen he is to go!" was the thought that sprang of itself.
Once more alone, I fell back into the hell of possibilities, the
maelstrom of mistrust. There were moments when I would have welcomed
any certainty, even the worst, as a relief from the torture of suspense.
Suspense is a duel carried on in the heart, and we give no quarter to
ourselves.
I paced up and down the walks. I returned to the house, only to tear
out again, like a mad woman. Gaston, who left at seven o'clock, did not
return till eleven. Now, as it only takes half an hour to reach Paris
through the park of St. Cloud and the Bois de Boulogne, it is plain that
he must have spent three hours in town. He came back radiant, with a
whip in his hand for me, an india-rubber whip with a gold handle.
For a fortnight I had been without a whip, my old one being worn and
broken.
"Was it for this you tortured me?" I said, as I admired the workmanship
of this beautiful ornament, which contains a little scent-box at one
end.
Then it flashed on me that the present was a fresh artifice.
Nevertheless I threw myself at once on his neck, not without reproaching
him gently for having caused me so much pain for the sake of a trifle.
He was greatly pleased with his ingenuity; his eyes and his whole
bearing plainly showed the restrained triumph of the successful plotter;
for there is a radiance of the soul which is reflected in every feature
and turn of the body. While still examining the beauties of this work of
art, I asked him at a moment when we happened to be looking each other
in the face:
"Who is the artist?"
"A friend of mine."
"Ah! I see it has been mounted by Verdier," and I read the name of the
shop printed on the handle.
Gaston is nothing but a child yet. He blushed, and I made much of him
as a reward for the shame he felt in deceiving me. I pretended to notice
nothing, and he may well have thought the incident was over.
May 25th.
The next morning I was in my riding-habit by six o'clock, and by seven
landed at Verdier's, where several whips of the same pattern were shown
to me. One of the men serving recognized mine when I pointed it out to
him.
"We sold that yesterday to a young gentleman," he said. And from the
description I gave him of my traitor Gaston, not a doubt was left of his
identity. I will spare you the palpitations which rent my heart during
that journey to Paris and the little scene there, which marked the
turning-point of my life.
By half-seven I was home again, and Gaston found me, fresh and blooming,
in my morning dress, sauntering about with a make-believe nonchalance. I
felt confident that old Philippe, who had been taken into my confidence,
would not have betrayed my absence.
"Gaston," I said, as we walked by the side of the lake, "you cannot
blind me to the difference between a work of art inspired by friendship
and something which has been cast in a mould."
He turned white, and fixed his eyes on me rather than on the damaging
piece of evidence I thrust before them.
"My dear," I went on, "this is not a whip; it is a screen behind which
you are hiding something from me."
Thereupon I gave myself the gratification of watching his hopeless
entanglement in the coverts and labyrinths of deceit and the desperate
efforts he made to find some wall he might scale and thus escape. In
vain; he had perforce to remain upon the field, face to face with an
adversary, who at last laid down her arms in a feigned complacence. But
it was too late. The fatal mistake, against which my mother had tried to
warm me, was made. My jealousy, exposed in all its nakedness, had led
to war and all its stratagems between Gaston and myself. Jealousy, dear,
has neither sense nor decency.
I made up my mind now to suffer in silence, but to keep my eyes open,
until my doubts were resolved one way or another. Then I would either
break with Gaston or bow to my misfortune: no middle course is possible
for a woman who respects herself.
What can he be concealing? For a secret there is, and the secret has
to do with a woman. Is it some youthful escapade for which he still
blushes? But if so, what? The word _what_ is written in letters of
fire on all I see. I read it in the glassy water of my lake, in the
shrubbery, in the clouds, on the ceilings, at table, in the flowers of
the carpets. A voice cries to me _what?_ in my sleep. Dating from the
morning of my discovery, a cruel interest has sprung into our lives, and
I have become familiar with the bitterest thought that can corrode the
heart--the thought of treachery in him one loves. Oh! my dear, there is
heaven and hell together in such a life. Never had I felt this scorching
flame, I to whom love had appeared only in the form of devoutest
worship.
"So you wished to know the gloomy torture-chamber of pain!" I said to
myself. Good, the spirits of evil have heard your prayer; go on your
road, unhappy wretch!
May 30th.
Since that fatal day Gaston no longer works with the careless ease of
the wealthy artist, whose work is merely pastime; he sets himself tasks
like a professional writer. Four hours a day he devotes to finishing his
two plays.
"He wants money!"
A voice within whispered the thought. But why? He spends next to
nothing; we have absolutely no secrets from each other; there is not a
corner of his study which my eyes and my fingers may not explore. His
yearly expenditure does not amount to two thousand francs, and I know
that he has thirty thousand, I can hardly say laid by, but scattered
loose in a drawer. You can guess what is coming. At midnight, while he
was sleeping, I went to see if the money was still there. An icy shiver
ran through me. The drawer was empty.
That same week I discovered that he went to Sevres to fetch his letters,
and these letters he must tear up immediately; for though I am a very
Figaro in contrivances, I have never yet seen a trace of one. Alas! my
sweet, despite the fine promises and vows by which I bound myself after
the scene of the whip, an impulse, which I can only call madness, drove
me to follow him in one of his rapid rides to the post-office. Gaston
was appalled to be thus discovered on horseback, paying the postage of a
letter which he held in his hand. He looked fixedly at me, and then put
spurs to Fedelta. The pace was so hard that I felt shaken to bits when I
reached the lodge gate, though my mental agony was such at the time that
it might well have dulled all consciousness of bodily pain. Arrived at
the gate, Gaston said nothing; he rang the bell and waited without a
word. I was more dead than alive. I might be mistaken or I might not,
but in neither case was it fitting for Armande-Louise-Marie de Chaulieu
to play the spy. I had sunk to the level of the gutter, by the side of
courtesans, opera-dancers, mere creatures of instinct; even the vulgar
shop-girl or humble seamstress might look down on me.
What a moment! At last the door opened; he handed his horse to the
groom, and I also dismounted, but into his arms, which were stretched
out to receive me. I threw my skirt over my left arm, gave him my right,
and we walked on--still in silence. The few steps we thus took might
be reckoned to me for a hundred years of purgatory. A swarm of thoughts
beset me as I walked, now seeming to take visible form in tongues of
fire before my eyes, now assailing my mind, each with its own poisoned
dart. When the groom and the horses were far away, I stopped Gaston,
and, looking him in the face, said, as I pointed, with a gesture that
you should have seen, to the fatal letter still in his right hand:
"May I read it?"
He gave it to me. I opened it and found a letter from Nathan, the
dramatic author, informing Gaston that a play of his had been accepted,
learned, rehearsed, and would be produced the following Saturday. He
also enclosed a box ticket.
Though for me this was the opening of heaven's gates to the martyr, yet
the fiend would not leave me in peace, but kept crying, "Where are the
thirty thousand francs?" It was a question which self-respect, dignity,
all my old self in fact, prevented me from uttering. If my thought
became speech, I might as well throw myself into the lake at once, and
yet I could hardly keep the words down. Dear friend, was not this a
trial passing the strength of woman?