Part 21 (1/2)

At the memory of that miserable hopeless moment, in which he had resolved on flight, the tears, no longer to be denied, came dripping down his cheeks.

THE LIE

I

For some time they had ceased to speak, too oppressed with the needless anguish of this their last night. At their feet the tiny s.h.i.+ning windows of Etretat were dropping back into the night, as though sinking under the rise of that black, mysterious flood that came luminously from the obscure regions of the faint sky. Overhead, the swollen August stars had faded before the pale flush that, toward the lighthouse on the cliff, heralded the red rise of the moon.

He held himself a little apart, the better to seize every filmy detail of the strange woman who had come inexplicably into his life, watching the long, languorous arms stretched out into an impulsive clasp, the dramatic harmony of the body, the brooding head, the soft, half-revealed line of the neck. The troubling alchemy of the night, that before his eyes slowly mingled the earth with the sea and the sea with the sky, seemed less mysterious than this woman whose body was as immobile as the stillness in her soul.

All at once he felt in her, whom he had known as he had known no other, something unknown, the coming of another woman, belonging to another life, the life of the opera and the mult.i.tude, which would again flatter and intoxicate her. The summer had pa.s.sed without a doubt, and now, all at once, something new came to him, indefinable, colored with the vague terror of the night, the fear of other men who would come thronging about her, in the other life, where he could not follow.

Around the forked promontory to the east, the lights of the little packet-boat for England appeared, like the red cinder in a pipe, slipping toward the horizon. It was the signal for a lover's embrace, conceived long ago in fancy and kept in tenderness.

”Madeleine,” he said, touching her arm. ”There it is--our little boat.”

”Ah! _le p't.i.t bateau_--with its funny red and green eyes.”

She turned and raised her lips to his; and the kiss, which she did not give but permitted, seemed only fraught with an ineffable sadness, the end of all things, the tearing asunder and the numbness of separation.

She returned to her pose, her eyes fixed on the little packet, saying:

”It's late.”

”Yes.”

”It goes fast.”

”Very.”

They spoke mechanically, and then not at all. The dread of the morning was too poignant to approach the things that must be said. Suddenly, with the savage directness of the male to plunge into the pain which must be undergone, he began:

”It was like poison--that kiss.”

She turned, forgetting her own anguish in the pain in his voice, murmuring, ”Ben, my poor Ben.”

”So you will go--to-morrow,” he said bitterly, ”back to the great public that will possess you, and I shall remain--here, alone.”

”It must be so.”

He felt suddenly an impulse he had not felt before, an instinct to make her suffer a little. He said brutally:

”But you want to go!”

She did not answer, but, in the obscurity, he knew her large eyes were searching his face. He felt ashamed of what he had said, and yet because she made no protestation, he persisted:

”You have left off your jewels, those jewels you can't do without.”

”Not to-night.”