Part 29 (1/2)
”Nonsense!” she thought. ”He was afraid of me--Yes, that's it!--Of course, he was afraid of me. He loves me much, too much, and distrusts himself. He has gone away.”
She commenced to laugh uneasily as she got into her carriage again.
”a.s.suredly, that is part of my fate. That stupid Guy leaves for Italy.
Rosas leaves for England. Steam was invented to admit of escape from dangerous women. I did not follow Lissac. What if I followed the duke?”
She shrugged her shoulders, and gnawed her cambric handkerchief under her veil, her head resting on the back of the coach, while the driver waited, standing on the sidewalk in front of the hotel, ignorant of the direction in which the young woman wished to go.
Marianne felt herself beaten. She was like a gambler who loses a decisive game. Evidently, Rosas only showed more clearly by the action he had taken, how much he was smitten; she measured his love by her own dismay; but what was the good of that love, if the duke escaped in a cowardly fas.h.i.+on?--But where could she find him? Where follow him? Where write to him?--A man who runs about as he does! A madman! Perhaps on arriving at Dover he had already re-embarked for j.a.pan or Australia.
”Ah! the unexpected happens, it seems,” thought Marianne, laughing maliciously, as she considered the ludicrousness of her failure.
”Madame, we are going--?” indifferently asked the coachman, who was tired of waiting.
”Where you please--to the Bois!”
”Very good, madame.”
He looked at his huge aluminum watch, coolly remarking:
”It was a quarter of twelve when I took Madame--”
”Good! good!--to the Bois!”
The movement of the carriage, the sight of the pa.s.sers-by, the sunlight playing on the fountains and the paving-stones of the Place de la Concorde fully occupied Marianne's mind, although irritating her at the same time. All the cheerfulness attending the awakening spring, delightful as it is in Paris, seemed irony to her. She felt again, but with increased bitterness, all the sentiments she experienced a few mornings previously when she called on Guy and told him of her burdensome weariness and distaste of life. Of what use was she now? She had just built so many fond dreams on hope! And all her edifices had crumbled.
”All has to be recommenced. To lead the stupid life of a needy, lost, hara.s.sed woman; no, that is too ridiculous, too sad! What then--” she said to herself, as with fixed eyes she gazed into the infinite and discovered no solution.
She was savagely annoyed at Rosas. She would have liked to tear him in pieces like the handkerchief that she shredded. Ah! if he should ever return to her after this flight!
But perhaps it was not a flight--who knows? The duke would write, would perhaps reappear.
”No,” a secret voice whispered to Marianne. ”The truth is that he is afraid of you! It is you, you, whom he flees from.”
To renounce everything was enough to banish all patience. Yesterday, on leaving Rosas, she believed herself to be withdrawn forever from the wretched Bohemian life she had so painfully endured. To-day, she felt herself sunk deeper in its mire. Too much mire and misery at last!
However, if she only had courage!
It was while looking at the great blue lake, the snowy swans, the gleaming barks, that she dreamed, as she had just told Vaudrey, of making an end of all. Madness, worse than that, stupidity! One does not kill one's self at her age; one does not make of beauty a valueless draft. In order to occupy herself, she had bought some brown bread, which she mechanically threw to the ducks, in order to draw her out of herself. It was then that Sulpice saw her.
”a.s.suredly,” she thought, as she left the minister, ”those who despair are idiots!”
In fact, it seemed that chance, as her fingers had cast mouthfuls of bread to the hungry bills, had thrown Vaudrey to her in place of Rosas.
A minister! that young man who smiled on her just now in the alleys of the Bois and drew near her with trembling breath was a minister. A minister as popular as Vaudrey was a power, and since Marianne, weary of seeking love, was pursuing an actuality quite as difficult to obtain--riches, Sulpice unquestionably was not to be despised.
”As a last resource, one might find worse,” thought Marianne, as she entered her home.
She had not, moreover, hesitated long. She was not in the mood for prolonged anger. She was at an age when prompt decisions must be made on every occasion that life, with its harsh spurs, proposed a problem or furnished an opportunity. On the way between the Lake and Rue de Navarin, Marianne had formed her plan. Since she had to reply to Vaudrey, she would write him. She felt an ardent desire to avenge herself for Rosas's treatment, as if he ought to suffer therefor, as if he were about to know that Sulpice loved her.
Had she found the duke awaiting her, as she entered the house, she would have been quite capable of las.h.i.+ng his face with a whip, while making the lying confession: