Part 9 (1/2)
”Catherine!”.... That cry of the young man, whose anger was increasing, decided her whom he thus addressed to precipitate the issue of a conversation in which each reply was to be a fresh burst of rancor.
”Well?” she inquired, crossing her arms in a manner so imperious that he paused in his menace, and she continued: ”Listen, Boleslas, we have talked ten minutes without saying anything, because neither of us has the courage to put the question such as we know and feel it to be.
Instead of writing to me, as you did, letters which rendered replies impossible to me; instead of returning to Rome and hiding yourself like a malefactor; instead of coming to my home last night with that threatening face; instead of approaching me this morning with the solemnity of a judge, why did you not question me simply, frankly, as one who knows that I have loved him very, very much?... Having been lovers, is that a reason for detesting each other when we cease those relations?”
”'When we cease those relations!'” replied Gorka. ”So you no longer love me? Ah, I knew it; I guessed it after the first week of that fatal absence! But to think that you should tell it to me some day like that, in that calm voice which is a horrible blasphemy for our entire past. No, I do not believe it. I do not yet believe it. Ah, it is too infamous.”
”Why?” interrupted the Countess, raising her head with still more haughtiness.... ”There is only one thing infamous in love, and that is a falsehood. Ah, I know it. You men are not accustomed to meeting true women, who have the respect, the religion of their sentiment. I have that respect; I practise that religion. I repeat that I loved you a great deal, Boleslas. I did not hide it from you formerly. I was as loyal to you as truth itself. I have the consciousness of being so still, in offering you, as I do, a firm friends.h.i.+p, the friends.h.i.+p of man for man, who only asks to prove to you the sincerity of his devotion.”
”I, a friends.h.i.+p with you, I--I--I?” exclaimed Boleslas. ”Have I had enough patience in listening to you as I have listened? I heard you lie to me and scented the lie in the same breath. Why do you not ask me as well to form a friends.h.i.+p for him with whom you have replaced me? Ah, so you think I am blind, and you fancy I did not see that Maitland near you, and that I did not know at the first glance what part he was playing in your life? You did not think I might have good reasons for returning as I did? You did not know that one does not dally with one whom one loves as I love you?... It is not true.... You have not been loyal to me, since you took this man for a lover while you were still my mistress. You had not the right, no, no, no, you had not the right!...
And what a man!... If it had been Ardea, Dorsenne, no matter whom, that I might not blush for you.... But that brute, that idiot, who has nothing in his favor, neither good looks, birth, elegance, mind nor talent, for he has none--he has nothing but his neck and shoulders of a bull.... It is as if you had deceived me with a lackey.... No..... it is too terrible.... Ah, Catherine, swear to me that it is not true. Tell me that you no longer love me, I will submit, I will go away, I will accept all, provided that you swear to me you do not love that man--swear, swear!”... he added, grasping her hands with such violence that she uttered a slight exclamation, and, disengaging herself, said to him:
”Cease; you pain me. You are mad, Gorka; that can be your sole excuse.... I have nothing to swear to you. What I feel, what I think, what I do no longer concerns you after what I have told you.... Believe what it pleases you to believe.... But,” and the irritation of an enamored woman, wounded in the man she adores, possessed her, ”you shall not speak twice of one of my friends as you have just spoken. You have deeply offended me, and I will not pardon you. In place of the friends.h.i.+p I offered you so honestly, we will have no further connections excepting those of society. That is what you desired.... Try not to render them impossible to yourself. Be correct at least in form.
Remember you have a wife, I have a daughter, and that we owe it to them to spare them the knowledge of this unhappy rupture.... G.o.d is my witness, I wished to have it otherwise.”
”My wife! Your daughter!” cried Boleslas with bitterness. ”This is indeed the hour to remember them and to put them between you and my just vengeance! They never troubled you formerly, the two poor creatures, when you began to win my love?... It was convenient for you that they should be friends! And I lent myself to it!... I accepted such baseness--that to-day you might take shelter behind the two innocents!... No, it shall not be.... you shall not escape me thus.
Since it is the only point on which I can strike you, I will strike you there. I hold you by that means, do you hear, and I will keep you.
Either you dismiss that man, or I will no longer respect anything. My wife shall know all! Her! So much the better! For some time I have been stifled by my lies.... Your daughter, too, shall know all. She shall judge you now as she would judge you one day.”
As he spoke he advanced to her with a manner so cruel that she recoiled.
A few more moments and the man would have carried out his threat. He was about to strike her, to break objects around him, to call forth a terrible scandal. She had the presence of mind of an audacity more courageous still. An electric bell was near at hand. She pressed it, while Gorka said to her, with a scornful laugh, ”That was the only affront left you to offer me--to summon your servants to defend you.”
”You are mistaken,” she replied. ”I am not afraid. I repeat you are mad, and I simply wish to prove it to you by recalling you to the reality of your situation.... Bid Mademoiselle Alba come down,” said she to the footman whom her ring had summoned. That phrase was the drop of cold water which suddenly broke the furious jet of vapor. She had found the only means of putting an end to the terrible scene. For, notwithstanding his menace, she knew that Maud's husband always recoiled before the young girl, the friend of his wife, of whose delicacy and sensibility he was aware.
Gorka was capable of the most dangerous and most cruel deeds, in an excess of pa.s.sion augmented by vanity.
He had in him a chivalrous element which would paralyze his frenzy before Alba. As for the immorality of that combination of defence which involved her daughter in her rupture with a vindictive lover, the Countess did not think of that. She often said: ”She is my comrade, she is my friend.”.... And she thought so. To lean upon her in that critical moment was only natural to her. In the tempest of indignation which shook Gorka, the sudden appeal to innocent Alba appeared to him the last degree of cynicism. During the short s.p.a.ce of time which elapsed between the departure of the footman and the arrival of the young girl, he only uttered these words, repeating them as he paced the floor, while his former mistress defied him with her bold gaze:
”I scorn you, I scorn you; ah, how I scorn you!” Then, when he heard the door open: ”We will resume our conversation, Madame.”
”When you wish,” replied Countess Steno, and to her daughter, who entered, she said: ”You know the carriage is to come at ten minutes to eleven, and it is now the quarter. Are you ready?”
”You can see,” replied the young girl, displaying her pearl-gray gloves, which she was just b.u.t.toning, while on her head a large hat of black tulle made a dark and transparent aureole around her fair head. Her delicate bust was displayed to advantage in the corsage Maitland had chosen for her portrait, a sort of cuira.s.s of a dark-blue material, finished at the neck and wrists with bands of velvet of a darker shade.
The fine lines of cuffs and a collar gave to that pure face a grace of youth younger than her age.
She had evidently come at her mother's call, with the haste and the smile of that age. Then, to see Gorka's expression and the feverish brilliance of the Countess's eyes had given her what she called, in an odd but very appropriate way, the sensation of ”a needle in the heart,”
of a sharp, fine point, which entered her breast to the left. She had slept a sleep so profound, after the soiree of the day before, on which she had thought she perceived in her mother's att.i.tude between the Polish count and the American painter a proof of certain innocence.
She admired her mother so much, she thought her so intelligent, so beautiful, so good, that to doubt her was a thought not to be borne!
There were times when she doubted her. A terrible conversation about the Countess, overheard in a ballroom, a conversation between two men, who did not know Alba to be behind them, had formed the princ.i.p.al part of the doubt, which, by turns, had increased and diminished, which had abandoned and tortured her, according to the signs, as little decisive as Madame Steno's tranquillity of the preceding day or her confusion that morning. It was only an impression, very rapid, instantaneous, the p.r.i.c.k of a needle, which merely leaves after it a drop of blood, and yet she had a smile with which to say to Boleslas:
”How did Maud rest? How is she this morning? And my little friend Luc?”
”They are very well,” replied Gorka. The last stage of his fury, suddenly arrested by the presence of the young girl, was manifested, but only to the Countess, by the simple phrase to which his eyes and his voice lent an extreme bitterness: ”I found them as I left them.... Ah!
They love me dearly.... I leave you to Peppino, Countess,” added he, walking toward the door. ”Mademoiselle, I will bear your love to Maud.”....He had regained all the courtesy which a long line of savage 'grands seigneurs', but 'grands seigneurs' nevertheless, had instilled in him. If his bow to Madame Steno was very ceremonious, he put a special grace in the low bow with which he took leave of the Contessina.
It was merely a trifle, but the Countess was keen enough to perceive it.
She was touched by it, she whom despair, fury, and threats had found so impa.s.sive. For an instant she was vaguely humiliated by the success which she had gained over the man whom she would, voluntarily, five minutes before, have had cast out of doors by her servants. She was silent, oblivious even of her daughter's presence, until the latter recalled her to herself by saying: