"When you married me through generosity, I gave myself to you through grat.i.tude, and I loved you with all my girlish heart. I loved you as I loved my own father--almost as much; and one day, while I sat on your knee, and you were kissing me, I called you "Father" in spite of myself.
It was a cry of the heart, instinctive, spontaneous. Indeed, you were to me a father, nothing but a father. You laughed, and you said to me, "Address me always in that way, my child; it gives me pleasure."
"We came to the city; and--forgive me, father--I fell in love. Ah! I resisted long, well, nearly two years--and then I yielded, I sinned, I became a fallen woman.
"And as to him? You will never guess who he is. I am easy enough about that matter, since there were a dozen officers always around me and with me, whom you called my twelve constellations.
"Father, do not seek to know him, and do not hate him. He only did what any man, no matter whom, would have done in his place, and then I am sure that he loved me, too, with all his heart.
"But listen! One day we had an appointment in the isle of Beca.s.ses--you know the little isle, close to the mill. I had to get there by swimming, and he had to wait for me in a thicket, and then to remain there till nightfall, so that n.o.body should see him going away. I had just met him when the branches opened, and we saw Philippe, your orderly, who had surprised us. I felt that we were lost, and I uttered a great cry.
Thereupon he said to me--he, my lover--"Go, swim back quietly, my darling, and leave me here with this man."
"I went away so excited that I was near drowning myself, and I came back to you expecting that something dreadful was about to happen.
"An hour later, Philippe said to me in a low tone, in the lobby outside the drawing-room where I met him: "I am at madame"s orders, if she has any letters to give me." Then I knew that he had sold himself, and that my lover had bought him.
"I gave him some letters, in fact--all my letters--he took them away, and brought me back the answers.
"This lasted about two months. We had confidence in him, as you had confidence in him yourself.
"Now, father, here is what happened. One day, in the same isle which I had to reach by swimming, but this time alone, I found your orderly. This man had been waiting for me; and he informed me that he was going to reveal everything about us to you, and deliver to you the letters which he had kept, stolen, if I did not yield to his desires.
"Oh! father, father, I was filled with fear--a cowardly fear, an unworthy fear, a fear above all of you who had been so good to me, and whom I had deceived--fear on his account too--you would have killed him--for myself also perhaps! I cannot tell; I was mad, desperate; I thought of once more buying this wretch who loved me, too--how shameful!
"We are so weak, we women, we lose our heads more easily than you do. And then, when a woman once falls, she always falls lower and lower. Did I know what I was doing? I understood only that one of you two and I were going to die--and I gave myself to this brute.
"You see, father, that I do not seek to excuse myself.
"Then, then--then what I should have foreseen happened--he had the better of me again and again, when he wished, by terrifying me. He, too, has been my lover, like the other, every day. Is not this abominable? And what punishment, father?
"So then it is all over with me. I must die. While I lived, I could not confess such a crime to you. Dead, I dare everything. I could not do otherwise than die--nothing could have washed me clean--I was too polluted. I could no longer love or be loved. It seemed to me that I stained everyone by merely allowing my hand to be touched.
"Presently I am going to take my bath, and I will never come back.
"This letter for you will go to my lover. It will reach him when I am dead, and without anyone knowing anything about it, he will forward it to you, accomplishing my last wishes. And you shall read it on your return from the cemetery.
"Adieu, father! I have no more to tell you. Do whatever you wish, and forgive me."
The colonel wiped his forehead, which was covered with perspiration. His coolness; the coolness of days when he had stood on the field of battle, suddenly came back to him. He rang.
A man-servant made his appearance. "Send in Philippe to me," said he.
Then, he opened the drawer of his table.
The man entered almost immediately--a big soldier with red moustache, a malignant look, and a cunning eye.
The colonel looked him straight in the face.
"You are going to tell me the name of my wife"s lover."
"But, my colonel--"
The officer s.n.a.t.c.hed his revolver out of the half-open drawer.
"Come! quick! You know I do not jest!"
"Well--my colonel--it is Captain Saint-Albert."
Scarcely had he p.r.o.nounced this name when a flame flashed between his eyes, and he fell on his face, his forehead pierced by a ball.
DUCHOUX
While descending the wide staircase of the club heated like a conservatory by the stove the Baron de Mordiane had left his fur-coat open; therefore, when the huge street-door closed behind him he felt a shiver of intense cold run through him, one of those sudden and painful shivers which make us feel sad, as if we were stricken with grief.
Moreover, he had lost some money, and his stomach for some time past had troubled him, no longer permitting him to eat as he liked.
He went back to his own residence; and, all of a sudden, the thought of his great, empty apartment, of his footman asleep in the ante-chamber, of the dressing-room in which the water kept tepid for the evening toilet simmered pleasantly under the chafing-dish heated by gas, and the bed, s.p.a.cious, antique, and solemn-looking, like a mortuary couch, caused another chill, more mournful still than that of the icy atmosphere, to penetrate to the bottom of his heart, the inmost core of his flesh.
For some years past he had felt weighing down on him that load of solitude which sometimes crushes old bachelors. Formerly, he had been strong, lively, and gay, giving all his days to sport and all his nights to festive gatherings. Now, he had grown dull, and no longer took pleasure in anything. Exercise fatigued him; suppers and even dinners made him ill; women annoyed him as much as they had formerly amused him.
The monotony of evenings all like each other, of the same friends met again in the same place, at the club, of the same game with a good hand and a run of luck, of the same talk on the same topics, of the same witty remarks by the same lips, of the same jokes on the same themes, of the same scandals about the same women, disgusted him so much as to make him feel at times a veritable inclination to commit suicide. He could no longer lead this life regular and inane, so commonplace, so frivolous and so dull at the same time, and he felt a longing for something tranquil, restful, comfortable, without knowing what.
He certainly did not think of getting married, for he did not feel in himself sufficient fort.i.tude to submit to the melancholy, the conjugal servitude, to that hateful existence of two beings, who, always together, knew one another so well that one could not utter a word which the other would not antic.i.p.ate, could not make a single movement which would not be foreseen, could not have any thought or desire or opinion which would not be divined. He considered that a woman could only be agreeable to see again when you know her but slightly, when there is something mysterious and unexplored attached to her, when she remains disquieting, hidden behind a veil. Therefore, what he would require was a family without family-life, wherein he might spend only a portion of his existence; and, again, he was haunted by the recollection of his son.
For the past year he had been constantly thinking of this, feeling an irritating desire springing up within him to see him, to renew acquaintance with him. He had become the father of this child, while still a young man, in the midst of dramatic and touching incidents. The boy dispatched to the South, had been brought up near Ma.r.s.eilles without ever hearing his father"s name.
The latter had at first paid from month to month for the nurture, then for the education and the expense of holidays for the lad, and finally had provided an allowance for him on making a sensible match. A discreet notary had acted as an intermediary without ever disclosing anything.
The Baron de Mordiane accordingly knew merely that a child of his was living somewhere in the neighborhood of Ma.r.s.eilles, that he was looked upon as intelligent and well-educated, that he had married the daughter of an architect and contractor, to whose business he had succeeded. He was also believed to be worth a lot of money.
Why should he not go and see this unknown son without telling his name, in order to form a judgment about him at first and to a.s.sure himself that he would be able, in case of necessity, to find an agreeable refuge in this family?
He had acted handsomely towards the young man, had settled a good fortune on him, which had been thankfully accepted. He was, therefore, certain that he would not find himself clashing against any inordinate sense of self-importance; and this thought, this desire, which every day returned to him afresh, of setting out for the South, tantalized him like a kind of itching sensation. A strange self-regarding feeling of affection also attracted him, bringing before his mental vision this pleasant, warm abode by the seaside, where he would meet his young and pretty daughter-in-law, his grandchildren, with outstretched arms, and his son, who would recall to his memory the charming and short-lived adventure of bygone years. He regretted only having given so much money, and that this money had prospered in the young man"s hands, thus preventing him from any longer presenting himself in the character of a benefactor.
He hurried along, with all these thoughts running through his brain, and the collar of his fur-coat wrapped round his head. Suddenly he made up his mind. A cab was pa.s.sing; he hailed it, drove home, and, when his valet, just roused from a nap, had opened the door.
"Louis," said he, "we start to-morrow evening for Ma.r.s.eilles. We"ll remain there perhaps a fortnight. You will make all the necessary preparations."
The train rushed on past the Rhone with its sandbanks, then through yellow plains, bright villages, and a wide expanse of country, shut in by bare mountains, which rose on the distant horizon.
The Baron de Mordiane, waking up after a night spent in a sleeping compartment of the train, looked at himself, in a melancholy fashion, in the little mirror of his dressing-case. The glaring sun of the South showed him some wrinkles which he had not observed before--a condition of decrepitude unnoticed in the imperfect light of Parisian rooms. He thought, as he examined the corners of his eyes, and saw the rumpled lids, the temples, the skinny forehead:
"d.a.m.n it, I"ve not merely got the gloss taken off--I"ve become quite an old fogy."
And his desire for rest suddenly increased, with a vague yearning, born in him for the first time, to take his grandchildren on his knees.