A BITTER-SWEET REUNION.
He travelled.
He realised the melancholy associated with packet-boats, the chill one
feels on waking up under tents, the dizzy effect of landscapes and
ruins, and the bitterness of ruptured sympathies.
He returned home.
He mingled in society, and he conceived attachments to other women. But
the constant recollection of his first love made these appear insipid;
and besides the vehemence of desire, the bloom of the sensation had
vanished. In like manner, his intellectual ambitions had grown weaker.
Years passed; and he was forced to support the burthen of a life in
which his mind was unoccupied and his heart devoid of energy.
Towards the end of March, 1867, just as it was getting dark, one
evening, he was sitting all alone in his study, when a woman suddenly
came in.
"Madame Arnoux!"
"Frederick!"
She caught hold of his hands, and drew him gently towards the window,
and, as she gazed into his face, she kept repeating:
"'Tis he! Yes, indeed--'tis he!"
In the growing shadows of the twilight, he could see only her eyes under
the black lace veil that hid her face.
When she had laid down on the edge of the mantelpiece a little
pocket-book bound in garnet velvet, she seated herself in front of him,
and they both remained silent, unable to utter a word, smiling at one
another.
At last he asked her a number of questions about herself and her
husband.
They had gone to live in a remote part of Brittany for the sake of
economy, so as to be able to pay their debts. Arnoux, now almost a
chronic invalid, seemed to have become quite an old man. Her daughter
had been married and was living at Bordeaux, and her son was in garrison
at Mostaganem.
Then she raised her head to look at him again:
"But I see you once more! I am happy!"
He did not fail to let her know that, as soon as he heard of their
misfortune, he had hastened to their house.
"I was fully aware of it!"
"How?"
She had seen him in the street outside the house, and had hidden
herself.
"Why did you do that?"
Then, in a trembling voice, and with long pauses between her words:
"I was afraid! Yes--afraid of you and of myself!"
This disclosure gave him, as it were, a shock of voluptuous joy. His
heart began to throb wildly. She went on:
"Excuse me for not having come sooner." And, pointing towards the little
pocket-book covered with golden palm-branches:
"I embroidered it on your account expressly. It contains the amount for
which the Belleville property was given as security."
Frederick thanked her for letting him have the money, while chiding her
at the same time for having given herself any trouble about it.
"No! 'tis not for this I came! I was determined to pay you this
visit--then I would go back there again."
And she spoke about the place where they had taken up their abode.
It was a low-built house of only one story; and there was a garden
attached to it full of huge box-trees, and a double avenue of
chestnut-trees, reaching up to the top of the hill, from which there was
a view of the sea.
"I go there and sit down on a bench, which I have called 'Frederick's
bench.'"
Then she proceeded to fix her gaze on the furniture, the objects of
virtu, the pictures, with eager intentness, so that she might be able to
carry away the impressions of them in her memory. The Marechale's
portrait was half-hidden behind a curtain. But the gilding and the white
spaces of the picture, which showed their outlines through the midst of
the surrounding darkness, attracted her attention.
"It seems to me I knew that woman?"
"Impossible!" said Frederick. "It is an old Italian painting."
She confessed that she would like to take a walk through the streets on
his arm.
They went out.
The light from the shop-windows fell, every now and then, on her pale
profile; then once more she was wrapped in shadow, and in the midst of
the carriages, the crowd, and the din, they walked on without paying any
heed to what was happening around them, without hearing anything, like
those who make their way across the fields over beds of dead leaves.
They talked about the days which they had formerly spent in each other's
society, the dinners at the time when _L'Art Industriel_ flourished,
Arnoux's fads, his habit of drawing up the ends of his collar and of
squeezing cosmetic over his moustache, and other matters of a more
intimate and serious character. What delight he experienced on the first
occasion when he heard her singing! How lovely she looked on her
feast-day at Saint-Cloud! He recalled to her memory the little garden at
Auteuil, evenings at the theatre, a chance meeting on the boulevard, and
some of her old servants, including the negress.
She was astonished at his vivid recollection of these things.
"Sometimes your words come back to me like a distant echo, like the
sound of a bell carried on by the wind, and when I read passages about
love in books, it seems to me that it is about you I am reading."
"All that people have found fault with as exaggerated in fiction you
have made me feel," said Frederick. "I can understand Werther, who felt
no disgust at his Charlotte for eating bread and butter."
"Poor, dear friend!"
She heaved a sigh; and, after a prolonged silence:
"No matter; we shall have loved each other truly!"
"And still without having ever belonged to each other!"
"This perhaps is all the better," she replied.
"No, no! What happiness we might have enjoyed!"
"Oh, I am sure of it with a love like yours!"
And it must have been very strong to endure after such a long
separation.
Frederick wished to know from her how she first discovered that he loved
her.
"It was when you kissed my wrist one evening between the glove and the
cuff. I said to myself, 'Ah! yes, he loves me--he loves me;'
nevertheless, I was afraid of being assured of it. So charming was your
reserve, that I felt myself the object, as it were, of an involuntary
and continuous homage."
He regretted nothing now. He was compensated for all he had suffered in
the past.
When they came back to the house, Madame Arnoux took off her bonnet. The
lamp, placed on a bracket, threw its light on her white hair. Frederick
felt as if some one had given him a blow in the middle of the chest.
In order to conceal from her his sense of disillusion, he flung himself
on the floor at her feet, and seizing her hands, began to whisper in her
ear words of tenderness:
"Your person, your slightest movements, seemed to me to have a more than
human importance in the world. My heart was like dust under your feet.
You produced on me the effect of moonlight on a summer's night, when
around us we find nothing but perfumes, soft shadows, gleams of
whiteness, infinity; and all the delights of the flesh and of the spirit
were for me embodied in your name, which I kept repeating to myself
while I tried to kiss it with my lips. I thought of nothing further. It
was Madame Arnoux such as you were with your two children, tender,
grave, dazzlingly beautiful, and yet so good! This image effaced every
other. Did I not think of it alone? for I had always in the very depths
of my soul the music of your voice and the brightness of your eyes!"
She accepted with transports of joy these tributes of adoration to the
woman whom she could no longer claim to be. Frederick, becoming
intoxicated with his own words, came to believe himself in the reality
of what he said. Madame Arnoux, with her back turned to the light of the
lamp, stooped towards him. He felt the caress of her breath on his
forehead, and the undefined touch of her entire body through the
garments that kept them apart. Their hands were clasped; the tip of her
boot peeped out from beneath her gown, and he said to her, as if ready
to faint:
"The sight of your foot makes me lose my self-possession."
An impulse of modesty made her rise. Then, without any further movement,
she said, with the strange intonation of a somnambulist:
"At my age!--he--Frederick! Ah! no woman has ever been loved as I have
been. No! Where is the use in being young? What do I care about them,
indeed? I despise them--all those women who come here!"
"Oh! very few women come to this place," he returned, in a complaisant
fashion.
Her face brightened up, and then she asked him whether he meant to be
married.
He swore that he never would.
"Are you perfectly sure? Why should you not?"
"'Tis on your account!" said Frederick, clasping her in his arms.
She remained thus pressed to his heart, with her head thrown back, her
lips parted, and her eyes raised. Suddenly she pushed him away from her
with a look of despair, and when he implored of her to say something to
him in reply, she bent forward and whispered:
"I would have liked to make you happy!"
Frederick had a suspicion that Madame Arnoux had come to offer herself
to him, and once more he was seized with a desire to possess
her--stronger, fiercer, more desperate than he had ever experienced
before. And yet he felt, the next moment, an unaccountable repugnance to
the thought of such a thing, and, as it were, a dread of incurring the
guilt of incest. Another fear, too, had a different effect on him--lest
disgust might afterwards take possession of him. Besides, how
embarrassing it would be!--and, abandoning the idea, partly through
prudence, and partly through a resolve not to degrade his ideal, he
turned on his heel and proceeded to roll a cigarette between his
fingers.
She watched him with admiration.
"How dainty you are! There is no one like you! There is no one like
you!"
It struck eleven.
"Already!" she exclaimed; "at a quarter-past I must go."
She sat down again, but she kept looking at the clock, and he walked up
and down the room, puffing at his cigarette. Neither of them could think
of anything further to say to the other. There is a moment at the hour
of parting when the person that we love is with us no longer.
At last, when the hands of the clock got past the twenty-five minutes,
she slowly took up her bonnet, holding it by the strings.
"Good-bye, my friend--my dear friend! I shall never see you again! This
is the closing page in my life as a woman. My soul shall remain with you
even when you see me no more. May all the blessings of Heaven be yours!"
And she kissed him on the forehead, like a mother.
But she appeared to be looking for something, and then she asked him for
a pair of scissors.
She unfastened her comb, and all her white hair fell down.
With an abrupt movement of the scissors, she cut off a long lock from
the roots.
"Keep it! Good-bye!"
When she was gone, Frederick rushed to the window and threw it open.
There on the footpath he saw Madame Arnoux beckoning towards a passing
cab. She stepped into it. The vehicle disappeared.
And this was all.