“But,” ingenuously said Pierre, “if I went at once to this person Salmon, I might perhaps be able to send up my card.”
Camille gave a shrill laugh, so funny did the idea appear to her. Then she retorted: “Oh! who knows if you would still find her there? She had another pressing appointment, and is no doubt already keeping it!”
“Well, then, I will wait for her here. She will surely come to fetch you, will she not?”
“Fetch us? Oh no! since I tell you that she has other important affairs to attend to. The carriage will take us home alone, my brother and I.”
Increasing bitterness was infecting the girl’s pain-fraught irony. Did he not understand her then, that priest who asked such naive questions which were like dagger-thrusts in her heart? Yet he must know, since everybody knew the truth.
“Ah! how worried I am,” Pierre resumed, so grieved indeed that tears almost came to his eyes. “It’s still on account of that poor man about whom I have been busying myself since this morning. I have a line from your father, and Monsieur Gerard told me—” But at this point he paused in confusion, and amidst all his thoughtlessness of the world, absorbed as he was in the one passion of charity, he suddenly divined the truth. “Yes,” he added mechanically, “I just now saw your father again with Monsieur de Quinsac.”
“I know, I know,” replied Camille, with the suffering yet scoffing air of a girl who is ignorant of nothing. “Well, Monsieur l’Abbe, if you have a line from papa for mamma, you must wait till mamma has finished her business. You might come to the house about six o’clock, but I doubt if you’ll find her there, as she may well be detained.”
While Camille thus spoke, her murderous eyes glistened, and each word she uttered, simple as it seemed, became instinct with ferocity, as if it were a knife, which she would have liked to plunge into her mother’s breast. In all certainty she had never before hated her mother to such a point as this in her envy of her beauty and her happiness in being loved. And the irony which poured from the girl’s virgin lips, before that simple priest, was like a flood of mire with which she sought to submerge her rival.
Just then, however, Rosemonde came back again, feverish and flurried as usual. And she led Camille away: “Ah, my dear, make haste. They are extraordinary, delightful, intoxicating!”
Janzen and little Massot also followed the Princess. All the men hastened from the adjoining rooms, scrambled and plunged into the salon at the news that the Mauritanians had again begun to dance. That time it must have been the frantic, lascivious gallop that Paris whispered about, for Pierre saw the rows of necks and heads, now fair, now dark, wave and quiver as beneath a violent wind. With every window-shutter closed, the conflagration of the electric lamps turned the place into a perfect brazier, reeking with human effluvia. And there came a spell of rapture, fresh laughter and bravos, all the delight of an overflowing orgy.