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These words, which were uttered in the deep voice of a woman probing to
the inmost chamber of her heart, appeared to astonish the young man even
more than they moved him. He wrapped Helen in his strange gaze. If the
poor woman had had strength enough to observe him she would not have
encountered in those keen eyes the divine emotion which atones for the
guilt of the mistress by the happiness of the lover. It was just the
same gaze, at once contemptuous and inquisitive, with which he had
lately contemplated the group formed by Alfred and Helen. But the latter
was too much confused by what she had just said to keep cool enough for
observing anything.
Then, as she had come back and was crouching on Armand's knees, and
pressing against his breast, a fresh expression, that, namely, of almost
intoxicated desire, was depicted on the young man's face. He felt close
to him the beauty of this yielding body, he held in his arms those
charming shoulders of which he had knowledge from having seen them in
the ball-room, he drank in that indefinable aroma which lingers about
every woman, and he pressed his lips upon those eyelids, which he could
feel quivering beneath his kiss.
"You will at least be happy?" she asked him in a sort of anguish between
two caresses.
"What a question! Why, you have never looked at yourself," he said, and
he began to extol to her all the exquisiteness of her face. "You have
never looked at your eyes"--and he again drew his lips across
them--"your pink cheek"--and he stroked it with his hand--"your soft
hair"--and he inhaled it like a flower--"your sweet mouth"--and he laid
his own upon it.
What answer could she have given to this worship of her beauty? She lent
herself to it with a half-frightened smile, surrendering to these
endearments and to these words as to music. They caused something so
deep and withal so vague to vibrate throughout her being that she came
forth half crushed from these embraces, like one dead. It was not for
the first time that she was thus abandoning herself to Armand's kisses.
But no matter how sweet, how intoxicating these kisses, which she found
it impossible to resist, she had on each occasion been strong enough to
escape from bolder caresses.
No, never, never would she have consented, even had there existed no
danger of a surprise, to yield thus in the little drawing-room, where
the portraits of her mother, her husband, and her son reminded her of
what she was nevertheless ready to sacrifice. Ah! not like that! And
again at this moment, when she saw on Armand's face a certain expression
of which she had so deep a dread, she found courage to escape, seated
herself once more in another easy chair, and opening and shutting a fan
which she had taken up in her quivering hands, replied:
"I will be yours to-morrow, if you wish."
Armand seemed to rouse himself from the sweep of passion in which he had
just been tossing. He looked at her, and she again experienced the
sensation which had already caused her so much pain, and which was that
of a veil drawn suddenly between herself and him. Yet, what could she
have said to displease him? She thought that he was wounded by the fact
of her shrinking from him, for was not the uttering of the words that
she had just uttered equivalent to giving herself to him beforehand, and
how could he be vexed with her for desiring that their happiness might
have another setting than that of her every-day life? But he had already
answered her by the following question:
"Where would you like me to meet you? At my own house? I can send away
my servant for the whole of the afternoon."
"Oh, no!" she replied hastily, "not at your own home."
The vision had just come to her that other women had visited Armand,
those other women whom a new mistress always finds between herself and
the man she loves, like the menace of a fatal comparison, like an
anticipated discrediting of her own caresses, since love is always
similar to itself; in its outward forms.
"At least," she thought to herself, "let it not be amid the same
furniture."
"Would you like me to request one of my friends to lend me his rooms?"
Armand asked.
She shook her head as she had done just before. She could hear by
anticipation the conversation of the two men. She was a woman, and
hitherto had been a virtuous one. She was only too well aware that the
manner in which she regarded her own love would have little resemblance
to that of the unknown friend to whom Armand would apply. In her own
eyes passion sanctified everything, even the worst errors; spiritualised
everything, even the most vehement voluptuousness. But he, this
stranger, what would he see in the affair but an intrigue to afford
matter for jesting. A shudder shook her, and she looked again at Armand.
Ah! how her lover's thoughts would have horrified her had she been able
to read them. It was very far from being De Querne's first affair of the
sort, nor did he believe that it was a first act of weakness on her
part. She had, indeed, told him that he was her first lover, and it was
true.
But what proof could be given of the truth of such vows? The young man
had himself deceived and been deceived too often for distrust not to be
the most natural of his feelings. He had provoked this odious discussion
concerning their place of meeting only for the purpose of studying in
Helen's replies the traces left by the amorous experiences through which
she had passed, and mere curiosity led him to dwell upon a subject which
at that moment was stifling the young woman with shame. The scruples
that she displayed about not yielding to him in her own house seemed to
him a calculation due to voluptuousness; those about not yielding to him
at his house, a calculation due to prudence. When she refused to go to
the rooms of a friend: "She is afraid of my confiding in some one," he
said to himself, "but what does she want?"
"Suppose I furnished a little suite of rooms?" he said.
She shook her head, though this had been her secret dream, but she was
afraid that he would see in her acceptance nothing but a desire to gain
time, and then--the necessity, if their meetings occurred always in the
same place, of enduring the notice of the people of the house, the
thought of being the veiled lady whose arrival is watched! Nevertheless,
although such a contrivance also involved a question of outlay which
horrified her, she would have consented to it had she not had another
feeling, the only one which, shaking her head with its rising fever, she
uttered aloud.
"Do not misjudge me, Armand; rather understand me. I should like to be
yours in a place of which nothing would remain afterwards. What would
become of the rooms you furnished for me if ever you ceased to love me?
Why, I cannot endure the thought of it, even now. Do not wrong me, dear;
only understand me."
Thus did she speak, laying bare the profoundly romantic side of her
nature, as also her heart's secret wound. Although she did not account
fully to herself for Armand's character--a character frightful in
aridity beneath loving externals, for in this man there was an absolute
divorce between imagination and heart--she perceived only too clearly
that he was inclined to misinterpret the slightest indications. She saw
that distrust was springing up in him with an almost unhealthy
suddenness. She had been quite aware that he suspected her, but she had
believed that this doubt proceeded solely from her refusals to belong to
him.
It was on this account that she was consenting to give him this last
proof. "He will doubt no longer," she thought to herself, and the mere
idea of this warmed her whole heart. If only he did not give a guilty
construction to her replies? She rose to go to him, and leaning over the
back of his arm-chair, encircled his forehead with her hands.
"Ah!" she said with a sigh, "if I could know what is going on in here.
It is such a little space, and it is in this little space that all my
happiness and my misfortune are contained."
"If you were able to read in it," the young man replied, "you would see
only your own image."
"I shall read in it to-morrow," she said subtly.
"To-morrow," he returned with a smile; "but what about the place of our
meeting? There is nothing left but furnished rooms or a hotel."
Furnished rooms! A hotel! These words made Helen shudder. All the shames
of adultery appeared to her to be comprised in their syllables. There
was the hiring of a cab, with the driver's cunning smile; there was the
entry into one of those houses, whose thresholds have seen the passage
of so many furtive, quivering women; and, as a setting for her divine
passion, there was the furniture that had, perhaps, been utilised for
similar scenes. Yes, but there was also an element of anonymity, of
impersonality, of never-ending strangeness. And since all was pollution,
the former of the two alternatives carried with it the least. She was
too certain of Armand's refinement to think that he might take her to a
place which he had visited with others. She would have to endure
personal loathing, but nothing that would touch the very essence of her
feeling. It was accordingly with courageous resolution that she replied
to her lover.
"Will you have time enough to find them in one morning?"
"Yes," he said, after a moment's reflection. "I have in my mind a very
convenient house, where one of my English friends always used to stay.
See," he went on, "between eleven and twelve o'clock I will send you
some books and a note. I will give you the address of the house and the
number of the room, just as though you had asked me for the address for
one of your country friends. Don't let that prevent you, however, from
burning the note immediately. You will come at whatever hour you can; I
will spend the whole afternoon waiting for you, and, if you do not come,
I shall not be put out; I shall think that you have not been able."
She listened to him with a mingling of pain and enchantment--pain,
because it would cost her so dear to keep her promise; and enchantment,
because all the trouble that he took to point out these details to her,
instead of enlightening her concerning the man's heart, appeared to her
a sign of his love, and their talk proceeded in the quiet drawing-room,
in front of the expiring fire, until the stopping of a carriage at the
door announced Alfred's return.
"Good-bye, my love," said Helen, taking Armand's hand and kissing it, as
she sometimes did with sweet coaxing; and she had already begun a piece
of work when Chazel came in, with a cheery "Well!" He looked at once
towards his wife with his loyal, honest gaze.
How well Armand knew that gaze, one which had not altered from the days
of their childhood, when they were both at the Institution Vanaboste,
whence they followed the courses of study in the Lycée Henri IV.! The
establishment stood yonder behind the Panthéon, at the corner of the
Rue du Puits-qui-Parle, now the Rue Amyot. Yet it was not remorse for
deceiving the man whom he had known from quite a child that suddenly
made De Querne feel uncomfortable. It was the thought that Helen was
deceiving this confiding nature. Masculine egotism has such monstrous
ingenuousness. A seducer engaged in enticing a woman, despises the woman
for yielding to him, and forgets to despise himself for seducing her.
Meanwhile Alfred had taken Helen's hands.
"I have bored myself conscientiously this evening; what will you give me
in reward?" he asked.
How his familiarity hurt her! How willingly would she have cried to this
unsuspecting husband:
"Do you not see that I love another? Let me go away. I do not want to
lie to you any more."
But two rooms farther off stood a little bed, beneath the white curtains
of which slept her son, her little Henry. Why was it that the picture of
this curly head was something too weak to arrest her on the fatal high
road to adultery, and yet strong enough to prevent her from seeing her
passion through to the end. She had a glimpse of the child while her
husband was speaking to her. It did not occur to her to scorn Armand for
having gained her love, although she was the wife of his friend. She
scorned herself for not loving him enough, since she did not love the
sufferings of which he was the cause, and, sustained by the thought that
she was doing it for him, it was with something like an impulse of pride
that she held out her forehead to her husband's kiss, and said
gracefully:
"That's just like men; they must be paid, and immediately too, for doing
their duty."
CHAPTER II
It was half-past eleven o'clock when Armand de Querne left the house in
the Rue de La Rochefoucauld. The wind had swept away all the clouds, and
the sky was filled with stars. "What a beautiful night!" said Armand to
himself; "I shall walk home." It was a long way, for he lived in the Rue
Lincoln, in the upper part of the Champs-Élysées. Here, on the second
floor of a wing projecting upon a garden, he had rooms which he had once
amused himself with furnishing in quaint and exquisite fashion with all
kinds of old-fashioned trifles. But how long had he ceased to spend the
evening in this "home?"
He was following the pavement of the Rue St.-Lazare, which, after quite
a narrow and slender beginning, suddenly, like a river swelled by
tributaries, widens after the Place de la Trinité, when it receives,
one after the other, the flood of passengers and vehicles drifting
through the Rue de Chateaudun, the Rue de la Chaussée-d'Antin, and the
Rue de Londres. Cabs were plying, omnibuses were changing horses, the
crowd was surging. Sometimes a girl came out from the corner of a
doorway, and with obscene speech accosted the young man, who put her
away gently with his hand.
Was it the contrast between the intimacy of the little drawing-room and
the swarming infamy of the pavement? Armand felt deeply melancholy. He
could not help seeing Alfred's face again in thought, with Helen's close
beside it. Yet, was he jealous? No. Pictures of childhood came back to
him as they had done just before, but with increased precision, showing
him Chazel dressed in the uniform of the "Vanabosteans"--a small jacket
similar to that of the Barbistes. They always went side by side in the
ranks. Poor Chazel! he was not rich. The head of the establishment had
taken him as a foundationer, with a view, to making a show-pupil of
him--a machine for winning prizes in competitions. How many times had
Armand paid for him at the little wicket, when the porter sold to the
pupils sweetmeats, fragments of iced chestnuts, cakes, and Parisian
creams--tablets of chocolate having a thick and oversweet liquid inside!
They had gone through all their classes together from the fourth up, and
had together passed through the evil days of the Commune, when, on
returning both of them from the country, after the siege, they found
themselves blockaded in Paris. Alfred had afterwards entered the École
Polytechnique. And when he came on Wednesdays and Sundays to visit his
old schoolfellow, who had already crossed the Seine and begun to lead
the life of a rich and idle young man, how ludicrous he was in his
military dress, embarrassed by his sword, not knowing how to set his hat
upon his head, and invariably scarred with clumsy razor-cuts!
While Alfred was at the School of Bridges, Armand was travelling. He had
gone round the world in the society of an amateur artist. On his return
he found that his friend was no longer at Paris. The letters passing
between them became rare. Could they have told why? Armand perhaps
might. There was only one point left in common between Alfred's life and
his own. Alfred had married Mademoiselle de Vaivre. They had made a trip
to Paris, and Armand well remembered how he had been deliciously
surprised by Helen's distinguished demeanour, when he had expected to
find her awkward, pretentious, and a fright. But at this period he was
taken up with another woman, little Aline, a mistress of his for whom he
had cherished the only genuine passion of which he was capable--painful
jealousy blended with delirium of the senses.
Later on, some one had spoken to him of Helen Chazel, and told him ugly
stories about her. And who was it that had done so? Another
school-fellow--big Lucien Rieume, who had been educated at the Vanaboste
establishment like Alfred and himself--during one of these
_tête-à-tête_ luncheons when an opening of the heart usually
accompanies that of the oysters between two college companions; and
Lucien--cordial, indiscreet, intolerable--had talked a great deal,
pouring out pell-mell whatever he knew concerning former friends. Armand
could again hear him chuckle, leaning forward somewhat with kindled eye
and humid lip:
"Poor Chazel, he hadn't a head worth a fig! It seems that his wife is
tricking him. I heard the gentleman's name: Marades, Tarades--just wait
a moment--yes, De Varades, an artillery officer. It was the talk of
Bourges. He was never out of the house."
It was an unfortunate trait in Armand's character that he was unable to
withstand the tempting of mistrust. When evil was asserted to him, he
preserved an indelible impression of it. He did not altogether believe
in it, and yet he believed in it sufficiently for a suspicion, and a
busy suspicion, to be planted within him. When the Chazels had come to
settle in Paris, ten months previously, and Armand had begun to interest
himself in Helen, the scruples of an old friendship might perhaps have
been stronger than his freak of curiosity if big Rieume's words had not
risen before his recollection.
"Really," he had said to himself, "it would be too foolish,"--a criminal
phrase which serves men for the justification of many a dastardly
action. Helen had not been slow in displaying towards him a kind of
passion which he had attributed to the natural exaltation of a
provincial. "I am the first Parisian who has paid her attentions," he
had said again to himself, and as she possessed charming gracefulness of
gesture, so sweet an expression of countenance and such an air of
complete refinement and nobility about her entire personality, he had
taken a pleasure in completing her education in elegance, thinking to
himself that she would be a delightful mistress.
But for many days she had refused really to become his mistress, and her
resistance had made him obstinate. He had become bent upon overcoming
her, recollecting the officer and telling himself that the officer had
not been the only one. A few skilful conversations with Alfred had
taught him that at one time Varades had really been a constant guest at
the house; was he not the same year's student at the École
Polytechnique as Alfred himself? Armand had lost his doubts, and in
Helen's refusals to be his, he had seen nothing but coquetry. Now, in
this respect like all men who hold the strange ethics of seducers,
Querne considered coquetry in a women a justification for the worst
behaviour. At last the long siege was about to issue in the coveted
result. Madame Chazel had granted him an appointment for the following
day. Twenty-four hours more and he would have a new mistress, as
desirable and as pretty as those whose memory was the most flattering to
the pride of his recollection. Why then did he, instead of being happy,
feel so deeply melancholy. Was it remorse for the treason to his friend?
His friend? Was Alfred really his friend? Yes, that was understood
between themselves, as well as in the eyes of others. But a friend is a
man who knows you and whom you know, to whom you show your heart and who
shows you his. Would he ever bring the tale of one of his hopes, his
joys, his sadnesses, to the calculating machine that bore the name of
Chazel? Had the latter ever confided a secret to him? So much the
better, too, for the ideas of this worthy schoolboy who seemed to look
upon life as the prolongation of a college task, must be silly enough.
It was their college life that continued to link them together, and the
recollections of their childhood. Their childhood? Turning down the Rue
Royale and arriving at the Champs Élysées, Armand suddenly recalled
the ranks of Vanaboste's school, on Thursdays, as they walked three and
three under the superintendence of a poor wretch of an usher who strove
to hide himself among the groups of people, so as to seem a passer-by
like the rest and not a watch-dog charged with the duty of looking after
a flock of schoolboys.
And what a flock it was! The majority had pale complexions, hollow eyes,
an enervated exhaustion of the whole being that spoke of secret
excesses. How much ignominy and baseness was there in that community,
the eldest in which were nineteen years of age and the youngest eight!
Within the walls of their prison, as within the walls of the great
Lycée to which they repaired twice a day, nothing was thought of but
the infamous amours existing between the elder boys and their juniors.
Of these unnatural loves, some were partly sensual, and had for their
theatre all the deserted corners in the house, from the dormitories to
the infirmary. And of the French youth confined within similar colleges,
how many were participators in this lewdness, while the rest defiled
their imaginations, although they repelled it! Among these college boys
there were also elevated and chaste connexions. The perusal of a certain
eclogue of Virgil's, a dialogue of Plato's, and a few of Shakespeare's
sonnets had excited the more literary of them, and Alfred Chazel, being