"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 a.s.sured 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 embarra.s.sing 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 pa.s.sing cab. She stepped into it. The vehicle disappeared.
And this was all.
CHAPTER XX.
"WAIT TILL YOU COME TO FORTY YEAR."
About the beginning of this winter, Frederick and Deslauriers were chatting by the fireside, once more reconciled by the fatality of their nature, which made them always reunite and be friends again.
Frederick briefly explained his quarrel with Madame Dambreuse, who had married again, her second husband being an Englishman.
Deslauriers, without telling how he had come to marry Mademoiselle Roque, related to his friend how his wife had one day eloped with a singer. In order to wipe away to some extent the ridicule that this brought upon him, he had compromised himself by an excess of governmental zeal in the exercise of his functions as prefect. He had been dismissed. After that, he had been an agent for colonisation in Algeria, secretary to a pasha, editor of a newspaper, and canva.s.ser for advertis.e.m.e.nts, his latest employment being the office of settling disputed cases for a manufacturing company.
As for Frederick, having squandered two thirds of his means, he was now living like a citizen of comparatively humble rank.
Then they questioned each other about their friends.
Martinon was now a member of the Senate.
Hussonnet occupied a high position, in which he was fortunate enough to have all the theatres and entire press dependent upon him.
Cisy, given up to religion, and the father of eight children, was living in the chateau of his ancestors.
Pellerin, after turning his hand to Fourrierism, h.o.m.oeopathy, table-turning, Gothic art, and humanitarian painting, had become a photographer; and he was to be seen on every dead wall in Paris, where he was represented in a black coat with a very small body and a big head.