Part 129 (1/2)

”Can it be that she has a lover?” he thought.

Then reflecting on his own conduct toward his wife since their marriage, he said to himself:

”And if she has, have I any right to complain? Did I not tacitly give her back her liberty?”

He was greatly troubled, and yet he would not have degraded himself so much as to play the spy, had it not been for one of those trifling circ.u.mstances which so often decide a man's destiny.

He was returning from a ride on horseback one morning about eleven o'clock, and he was not thirty paces from the Hotel de Sairmeuse when he saw a lady hurriedly emerge from the house. She was very plainly dressed--entirely in black--but her whole appearance was strikingly that of the d.u.c.h.ess.

”It is certainly my wife; but why is she dressed in such a fas.h.i.+on?” he thought.

Had he been on foot he would certainly have entered the house; as it was, he slowly followed Mme. Blanche, who was going up the Rue Crenelle.

She walked very quickly, and without turning her head, and kept her face persistently shrouded in a very thick veil.

When she reached the Rue Taranne, she threw herself into one of the _fiacres_ at the carriage-stand.

The coachman came to the door to speak to her; then nimbly sprang upon the box, and gave his bony horses one of those cuts of the whip that announce a princely _pourboire_.

The carriage had already turned the corner of the Rue du Dragon, and Martial, ashamed and irresolute, had not moved from the place where he had stopped his horse, just around the corner of the Rue Saint Pares.

Not daring to admit his suspicions, he tried to deceive himself.

”Nonsense!” he thought, giving the reins to his horse, ”what do I risk in advancing? The carriage is a long way off by this time, and I shall not overtake it.”

He did overtake it, however, on reaching the intersection of the Croix-Rouge, where there was, as usual, a crowd of vehicles.

It was the same _fiacre_; Martial recognized it by its green body, and its wheels striped with white.

Emerging from the crowd of carriages, the driver whipped up his horses, and it was at a gallop that they flew up the Rue du Vieux Columbier--the narrowest street that borders the Place Saint Sulpice--and gained the outer boulevards.

Martial's thoughts were busy as he trotted along about a hundred yards behind the vehicle.

”She is in a terrible hurry,” he said to himself. ”This, however, is scarcely the quarter for a lover's rendezvous.”

The carriage had pa.s.sed the Place d'Italie. It entered the Rue du Chateau-des-Rentiers and soon paused before a tract of unoccupied ground.

The door was at once opened, and the d.u.c.h.esse de Sairmeuse hastily alighted.

Without stopping to look to the right or to the left, she hurried across the open s.p.a.ce.

A man, by no means prepossessing in appearance, with a long beard, and with a pipe in his mouth, and clad in a workman's blouse, was seated upon a large block of stone not far off.

”Will you hold my horse a moment?” inquired Martial.

”Certainly,” answered the man.

Had Martial been less preoccupied, his suspicions might have been aroused by the malicious smile that curved the man's lips; and had he examined his features closely, he would perhaps have recognized him.

For it was Jean Lacheneur.