"We shall figure in them one of these days, I dare say, my dear fellow; that is one consolation."
"But we have another."
"What is that?"
"We might have found him strong, well-to-do, and in perfect health, which would, I admit, have been all very well for him, but rather disagreeable for us. On the contrary he is in a deplorable state, and, to speak frankly, our jealousy has no longer any locus standi."
"Our execution is only postponed," observed M. de Morin. "We have been told that none of his wounds are serious, and that the fever will leave him when he reaches the high ground. In a few days perhaps—"
"In a few days, my dear de Morin," added Périères, "the husband will doubtless be cured, but the wife will not."
"What do you mean?"
"My meaning is simple enough. To-day Madame de Guéran only beholds in her husband a wounded man, an invalid, almost at death's-door, whom it is her mission to recall to life. As soon as his health shall have been re-established, the husband will re-appear, and the sister of charity, a wife once more, will call him to account somewhat severely. She was only too ready to forget the errors, to use a mild word, of M. de Guéran, so long as she believed him dead or in captivity; she will remember them on the day of his restoration to life and health. She cannot conceal from herself that he left her very cavalierly, at the end of two years only of married life, to run about the world, and she already looks upon herself as having been rather a fool, believe me, for having taken so much trouble and encountered so many dangers to regain possession of an eccentric and fickle husband. Up to this time she has been fulfilling a duty, and she sees nothing but the heroism of her action. The heroism disappears with the fulfilment of the duty, and then the minor points of the subject will come to the surface.
"If she had found him still in the power of some terrible African potentate, reduced to slavery and more or less in durance vile, she would have been satisfied. But she surprised him in the midst of a tribe of very attractive women, or very uncommon, as you will admits One of them, their Queen by right both of birth and beauty, appears to love him to the verge of criminality. For fear he should escape her, she throws herself upon him, tears him in pieces like a wild beast, and if she does not kill him it is only because she is robbed of her prey. Madame de Guéran is fully alive to these—petty details, shall we call them? She is very keen, and nothing escapes her. She has divined what she has not seen, and she admits, as we do, that the Baron, to have inspired so sanguinary a passion, must for his part have afforded some grounds for it.
"She does not look upon him as criminal; so much I will concede. She is far too intelligent not to understand the difficulties of the situation, and the necessities of slavery; but she will for a long, long time, perhaps for ever, resent his having placed himself in such a position. There was nothing to compel him to leave Paris and expose himself to all these adventures. 'He ought not to have been, and gone, and done it,' she will say to herself, if she is aware of that vulgar phrase. We must also make due allowance for womanly pride, and the peculiar delicacy of Madame de Guéran. She cannot feel flattered at being the successor of a native of equatorial Africa. Rest assured that the recollection of this female savage will haunt her throughout the remainder of her life, and will be a perpetual moral shower bath. Queen Walinda is lovely in our eyes, and especially so in those of the susceptible Dr. Delange, but, as a woman, she does not exist, so far as Madame de Guéran is concerned. She is a being of some sort, a fine animal of the ape tribe, overlooked by naturalists in their classifications, and the Baroness will ever experience a feeling of repulsion towards the man who for six months took up his abode in the den of this semi-wild animal.