Part 57 (1/2)
”Kiss her then! One pardons when one loves!”
With a supplicating cry, Vaudrey threw himself on his knees before Adrienne, while Lissac hastily opened the door and left, feeling indeed that he could not say a word and that Vaudrey only could obtain Vaudrey's pardon.
”I, in my anger,” he said, ”he, in his jealousy, have allowed ourselves to get into a pa.s.sion. It is stupid. One should speak lower.”
He went away, much dissatisfied with himself and but little less with Vaudrey. Again he considered this man foolish, adored as he was by such a wife, whom he deceived. He was not sure that at the bottom of his own heart he did not feel a sentiment of love toward Adrienne. Ah! if he had been loved by such a creature, he would have been capable of great things!--He would have arranged and utilized his life instead of spoiling it. In place of vulgar love, he would have kept this unique love intact from the altar to the tomb!
Pale and tottering, and a child once more under her sorrow, as he had just seen her, she was so adorably lovely that he had received an entirely new impression, one of almost jealousy against Sulpice, and therefore, brusquely overcoming this strange, unseemly emotion, he had himself thrust Vaudrey toward his wife and had departed hastily, as if he felt that he must hurry away and never see them again. But as he left, on the contrary, he saw her again with her sad, wretched, suffering look and the young wife's sorrowful voice went with him, repeating in a tone of broken-hearted grief:
”That is known then!”
”Ah! that miserable fellow, Vaudrey!” thought Guy.
In going out, he had to wait a moment in the antechamber, to admit of the pa.s.sage of some vases of flowers, green shrubs and variegated foliage plants that were being brought in to decorate the salons. A fete! And this evening! In the arrival of those flowers for decoration, at the moment when chance, clumsily or wickedly, so suddenly revealed that crus.h.i.+ng news, Guy saw so much irony that he could not forbear looking at them for a moment, almost insulting in their beauty and their hothouse bloom.
Would Adrienne have the courage or strength to undertake the reception of the evening, within a few hours? Guy was annoyed at having come.
”I could well have waited and kept my anger to myself. The unhappy woman would have known nothing.”
”Bah!” he added. ”She is kind, she adores Sulpice, it is only a pa.s.sing storm. She will forgive!”
He promised himself, moreover, to return in the evening, to excuse himself to Adrienne, to comfort her if he could.
”There is some merit, after all, in that,” he thought again. ”On my word! I believe I love her and yet I am angry with that animal Vaudrey for not loving her enough.”
She will forgive!--Lissac knew courtesans but he did not know this woman, energetic as she was under her frail appearance, a child, a little provincial lost in the life of Paris, lost and, as it were, absorbed in the hubbub of political circles, smitten with her husband, who comprehended in her eyes every seduction and superiority, having given herself entirely and wis.h.i.+ng to wholly possess the elect being who possessed her, in whom she trusted and to whom she gave herself, body and soul, with all her confidence, her innocence and her modesty. He did not know what such a sensitive, nervously frail nature could feel on the first terrible impulses, full of enthusiasm under her exterior coldness, of resolution concealed under her timid manners, capable of madness, distracted in spite of her reason and calm; this candor of thought, of education, and a.s.sociations that made her, with all her irresistible attractiveness, the virtuous woman with all her charm.
Adrienne had at first read the journal that had been sent to her without understanding anything about it. Alkibiades, Basilea, the mistress of the Archon, what signified that to her? What did it mean? Then suddenly her thought rested on the name of Sulpice, travestied in the Greek of parody, Sulpicios. Was it of her husband that they intended to speak?
She immediately felt a bitter anguish at heart, but it was a matter only of allowing one's self to be impressed by a journalistic pleasantry, as contemptible as an anonymous letter! She would think no more about it.
She must concentrate her thoughts on the evening's reception. There was to be an official repast, followed by a soiree. She had nothing to concern herself about in regard to the menu; Chevet undertook that. For the ministerial dinners there was a fixed price as in restaurants. Hosts and guests live _au cabaret_, they dine at so much a head. Adrienne endeavored to occupy herself with the musical soiree, with the programmes that they brought her, with the names of comedians and female singers, printed on vellum, and with those bouquets with which the vases of her little salon were decorated. Ah! well, yes, in spite of the feverish activity, she could think only of that article in the journal, that miserable article, every line of which flamed before her eyes just as when one has looked too long at a fire. She had been seized with the temptation there and then to openly ask Sulpice what these veiled illusions meant.
”I hope, indeed,” she thought, with her contempt of all lying, ”that he will not charge me with suspecting him. No, certainly, I do not suspect him.”
She went to the little cabinet where Sulpice sometimes read or worked after breakfast, and there, as if she had thrown herself upon an open knife, she suddenly heard those sinister words which pierced her very flesh like pointed blades.
They were speaking of another woman. Lissac said in a loud tone: Your mistress! and Vaudrey allowed it to be said!--
A mistress! what mistress? Marianne Kayser! Oh, that woman of whom Sulpice had so often spoken in an indifferent manner, that pretty creature, so often seen, seductive, wonderfully beautiful, terrifyingly beautiful, it was she! Your mistress! Sulpice had a mistress! He lied, he deceived. He? She was betrayed! Was it possible? If it were possible?
But it was true! Eh! _parbleu_, yes, it was true--And this, then, was why they had sent her this horrible article! She knew now.
She had been tempted to enter the room suddenly, to throw herself between these men and interrupt their conversation. She had not the strength. And then, what Lissac said had the effect of consoling her!--Guy's reproaches to Sulpice were such as she would have liked to cast at him, if she could have found speech now. But not a word could she frame. She was stunned, dumb and like a crushed being. She knew only one thing, that she suffered horribly, as she had never before suffered.
At first she allowed Vaudrey, who knelt at her feet, as Lissac had told him on going away, to take her hand that hung listlessly down. Then she gently withdrew it as if she felt herself seized by an instinctive sense of outraged modesty.
Vaudrey tried to speak. At first only confused words, silly excuses, clumsy falsehoods, cruelly absurd phrases--_caprices_, _nothing serious_, _whim_, _madness_--so many avowals, so many insults, came to his lips. But then, before the silence of Adrienne, he could say nothing more, he was speechless, overwhelmed, and sought a hand that was refused.
”Will you never forgive me?” he asked at last, not knowing too well what he said.
”Never!” she said coldly.