“No, do not thank me, Madame.—Yes, it was hard—but for the last eight days I have lived with that ‘I believe in you and I love you,’ and at times I could imagine that it was meant for me.” And then very low and timidly: “How is she getting on?”
“Oh, not well at all—Mamma is taking her South. Now she is willing to do whatever anybody wishes—it is just as if a spring had broken in her.”
“Altered?”
Rosalie made a gesture: “Ah!”
“Till we meet again, Madame,” said Méjean very quickly, moving away with hurried steps; he turned back again at the door and squaring his solid shoulders beneath the half-raised curtain:
“It is the luckiest thing in the world that I have no imagination. I should be altogether too unhappy!”
Rosalie returned to her room deeply dejected. There was no use in fighting against it by recalling her sister’s youth and the encouraging words of Jarras, who persisted in looking upon it merely as a crisis which it was necessary to cross; black thoughts invaded her which would not tally with the festive white in the baby’s layette. She hastened to tie up, lay in order and turn the key upon these little scattered articles, and as she got up she perceived the letter lying on the bureau, took and read it mechanically, expecting to find the commonplace begging statement which she received every day from so many different hands, and which would have come at a lucky moment during one of those spells of superstition, when charity seems a bringer of good luck. That was why she did not understand it at first and was obliged to read again these lines, which had been written out as a copy by the ignorant pen of a schoolboy, the boy employed by Guilloche:
“If you are fond of codfish à la brandade, delicious is that which is eaten to-night at the house of Mme. Bachellery in the Rue de Londres. Your husband pays for the supper. Ring three times and enter straight ahead.”
From these foolish phrases, from this slimy and perfidious abyss, the truth arose and appeared to her, helped by coincidences and recollections—that name “Bachellery” pronounced so often during the past year, enigmatical articles in the papers concerning her engagement at the opera, that address which she had heard Numa himself give, and the long stay at Arvillard. In a second, doubt crystallized itself in her to certainty. And besides, did not the past throw a light for her upon this present and all its actual horror? Lies and grimace—he was not and could not be anything but that. Why should this eternal maker of dupes spare her? It was her fault; she had been the fool to allow herself to be caught by his lying voice and vulgar caresses. And in the same second certain details came to her mind which made her red and pale by turns.
This time it was no longer despair showing itself with heavy, pure tears as in the early deceptions, but anger against herself for having been so feeble and cowardly as to have been able to pardon him, and against him who had duped her in contempt of the promises and oaths in connection with the former crime. She would like to have convicted him of his villainy there, on the moment, but he was at Versailles in the Chamber of Deputies. It occurred to her to call Méjean, but then she felt a repugnance to force that honest fellow to lie. And being thus reduced to crushing down a swarm of contrary feelings, prevent herself from crying out and surrendering to the terrible nerve-crisis which she felt rising in her, she strode to and fro on the carpet, her hands with a familiar action resting against the loosened waist of her dressing-gown. All of a sudden she stopped and shuddered, seized by a crazy fear.