“Ah! I calculate, I bargain? Well, listen. Yes, it is true. I did value
my reputation as an honest woman more highly, a thousand times more,
than my life; but, above my life and my reputation, I valued you. You
are drowning, you say. Well, then, let us flee. One word from you, and I
leave all,--honor, country, family, husband, children. Say one word,
and I follow you without turning my head, without a regret, without a
remorse.”
Her whole body was shivering from head to foot; her bosom rose and fell;
her eyes shone with unbearable brilliancy.
Thanks to the violence of her action, her dress, put on in great haste,
had opened, and her dishevelled hair flowed in golden masses over
her bosom and her shoulders, which matched the purest marble in their
dazzling whiteness.
And in a voice trembling with pent-up passion, now sweet and soft like a
tender caress, and now deep and sonorous like a bell, she went on,--
“What keeps us? Since you have escaped from prison, the greatest
difficulty is overcome. I thought at first of taking our girl, your
girl, Jacques; but she is very ill; and besides a child might betray us.
If we go alone, they will never overtake us. We will have money enough,
I am sure, Jacques. We will flee to those distant countries which
appear in books of travels in such fairy-like beauty. There, unknown,
forgotten, unnoticed, our life will be one unbroken enjoyment. You will
never again say that I bargain. I will be yours, entirely, and solely
yours, body and soul, your wife, your slave.”
She threw her head back, and with half-closed eyes, bending with her
whole person toward him, she said in melting tones,--
“Say, Jacques, will you? Jacques!”
He pushed her aside with a fierce gesture. It seemed to him almost a
sacrilege that she also, like Dionysia, should propose to him to flee.
“Rather the galleys!” he cried.
She turned deadly pale; a spasm of rage convulsed her features; and
drawing back, stiff and stern, she said,--
“What else do you want?”
“Your help to save me,” he replied.
“At the risk of ruining myself?”
He made no reply.
Then she, who had just now been all humility, raised herself to her full
height, and in a tone of bitterest sarcasm said slowly,--
“In other words, you want me to sacrifice myself, and at the same time
all my family. For your sake? Yes, but even more for Miss Chandore’s
sake. And you think that it is quite a simple thing. I am the past to
you, satiety, disgust: she is the future to you, desire, happiness. And
you think it quite natural that the old love should make a footstool of
her love and her honor for the new love? You think little of my being
disgraced, provided she be honored; of my weeping bitterly, if she but
smile? Well, no, no! it is madness in you to come and ask me to save
you, so that you may throw yourself into the arms of another. It is
madness, when in order to tear you from Dionysia, I am ready to ruin
myself, provided only that you be lost to her forever.”
“Wretch!” cried Jacques.
She looked at him with a mocking air, and her eyes beamed with infernal
audacity.
“You do not know me yet,” she cried. “Go, speak, denounce me! M. Folgat
no doubt has told you how I can deny and defend myself.”
Maddened by indignation, and excited to a point where reason loses its
power over us, Jacques de Boiscoran moved with uplifted hand towards the
countess, when suddenly a voice said,--
“Do not strike that woman!”
Jacques and the countess turned round, and uttered, both at the same
instant, the same kind of sharp, terrible cry, which must have been
heard a great distance.
In the frame of the door stood Count Claudieuse, a revolver in his hand,
and ready to fire.
He looked as pale as a ghost; and the white flannel dressing-gown which
he had hastily thrown around him hung like a pall around his lean limbs.
The first cry uttered by the countess had been heard by him on the bed
on which he lay apparently dying. A terrible presentiment had seized
him. He had risen from his bed, and, dragging himself slowly along,
holding painfully to the balusters, he had come down.
“I have heard all,” he said, casting crushing looks at both the guilty
ones.
The countess uttered a deep, hoarse sigh, and sank into a chair. But
Jacques drew himself up, and said,--
“I have insulted you terribly, sir. Avenge yourself.”
The count shrugged his shoulders.
“Great God! You would allow me to be condemned for a crime which I have
not committed. Ah, that would be the meanest cowardice.”
The count was so feeble that he had to lean against the door-post.
“Would it be cowardly?” he asked. “Then, what do you call the act of
that miserable man who meanly, disgracefully robs another man of his
wife, and palms off his own children upon him? It is true you are
neither an incendiary nor an assassin. But what is fire in my house in
comparison with the ruin of all my faith? What are the wounds in my body
in comparison with that wound in my heart, which never can heal? I leave
you to the court, sir.”
Jacques was terrified; he saw the abyss opening before him that was to
swallow him up.
“Rather death,” he cried,--“death.”