The slowness of the servant in answering, the sudden pallor that overspread his big impudent face framed in long whiskers, did not at first strike her. She only saw a servant embarrassed at being caught helping himself to his master’s wines and good things. Still it was absolutely necessary to say that his master was still there, but that he was very much occupied and would be occupied for quite a while. But it took him some time to stammer out this information. How the fellow’s hands trembled as he cleared off the table and began to rearrange it for his mistress’s luncheon!
“Has he been lunching alone?”
“Yes, Madame; at least, only Monsieur Bompard.”
She had suddenly caught sight of a black lace scarf lying on a chair. The foolish fellow saw it at the same moment, and as their eyes were fixed on the same object the whole thing stood before her in a flash. Quickly, without a word, she crossed the little waiting room, went straight to the door of the library, opened it wide, and fell flat on the floor. They had not even troubled themselves to lock the door!
And if you had seen the woman! Forty years old, a washed-out blonde with a pimply complexion, thin lips and eyelids wrinkled like an old glove! Under her eyes were purple scars, signs of her evil life; her shoulders were bony and her voice harsh. But—she was high-born, the Marquise d’Escarbès! which to the Southerner means everything. The escutcheon concealed her defects as a woman. Separated from her husband through an unsavory divorce suit, disowned by her family and no longer received in the great houses of the Faubourg, Mme. d’Escarbès had gone over to the Empire and had opened a political diplomatic salon, one of those which are for the police rather than politicians, where one could find the most notorious persons of the day—without their wives. Then, after two years of intrigues, having gathered together quite a following, she determined to appeal her law case. Roumestan, who had been her lawyer in the first suit, could not very well refuse to take up the second. He hesitated, nevertheless, for public opinion was very strong against her. But the entreaties of the Marquise took such convincing steps and the lawyer’s vanity was so flattered by the steps themselves that he had yielded. Now that the case was soon to be on, they saw each other every day, either at her house or his own, pushing the affair vigorously and from two standpoints.
This terrible discovery nearly killed Rosalie; it struck her doubly in her sensibility to pain as a woman with child, bearing as she did two hearts within her, two spots for suffering. The child was killed, but the mother lived. But after three days of unconsciousness, when she regained memory and the power of suffering, her tears poured forth in a torrent, a bitter flood that nothing could stem. When she had wept her heart out over the faithlessness of her husband, the empty cradle and the dainty little garments resting useless under the transparent blue curtains caused her anguish to break forth again in tears—but without a cry or lament!
Poor Numa was in almost as deep despair as she was. The hope of a little Roumestan, “the eldest,” who is always a great personage in Provençal families, was gone forever, destroyed by his own fault. The pale face of his wife with its resigned expression, her compressed lips and smothered sobs, nearly broke his heart—her grief was so different from his way of acting, from the coarse, superficial sensibility that he showed as he sat at the foot of his victim’s bed, saying at intervals with swimming eyes and trembling lips, “Come now, Rosalie, come now!” That was all he could find to say; but what vanity in that “Come now,” uttered with the Southern accent that so easily takes on a sympathetic tone; yet beneath it all one seemed to hear: “Don’t let it worry you, my darling little pet! Is it really worth while? Does it keep me from loving you just the same?”
It is true that he did love her just as much as his shallow nature was capable of loving constantly any one. He could not bear to think of any one else presiding over his house, caring for him, or petting him.
“I must have devotion about me,” he said naïvely, and he well knew that the devotion she had to give was the perfection of everything that a man could desire; so the idea of losing her was horrible to him. If that is not love, what is?
Rosalie, alas, was thinking on quite another line. Her life was wrecked, her idol fallen, her confidence in him forever lost. And yet she had forgiven him. She had forgiven him, however, as a mother yields to the child that cries and begs for her pardon; also for the sake of their name, her father’s honored name that the scandal of a separation would have tarnished, and because every one believed her happy and she could not let them know the truth.