"All right, master," said the man, drawing up to the side of the footway, "where am I to drive to? Let's have a right understanding, and a look at the clock. Why, it's as close on half-after eleven as may be."
"Now, then, drive to the corner of the Rue St. Dominique, and wait at the end of the garden wall which runs along there; do you understand?"
"Yes, yes,—I know."
M. d'Harville then drew down the blinds of the fiacre; the coachman drove on, and soon arrived opposite the Hôtel d'Harville, from which point of observation it was impossible for any person to enter or quit the house without the marquis having a full view of them. One o'clock was the hour fixed in the note; and with his eyes riveted on the entrance-gates of the mansion, the marquis waited in painful suspense, absorbed in a whirl of fearful thoughts and maddening conjectures. Time stole on imperceptibly; twelve o'clock reverberated from the dome of St. Thomas Aquinas, when the door opened slowly at the Hôtel d'Harville, and Madame d'Harville herself came timidly forth.
"Already?" exclaimed the unhappy husband; "how punctual she is! She fears to keep him waiting," cried the marquis, with a mixture of irony and savage rage.
The cold was excessive; the pavement hard and dry. Clémence was dressed in a black velvet bonnet, covered with a veil of the same colour, and a thickly wadded pelisse of dark ruby satin, a large shawl of dark blue cashmere fell to the very hem of her pelisse, which she lightly and gracefully held up while crossing the street. Thanks to this movement, the taper foot and graceful ankle of Madame d'Harville, cased in an exquisitely fitting boot of black satin, were exposed to view.
It was strange, that amid the painful and bewildering ideas that crowded the brain of D'Harville, he should have found one thought to waste upon the beauty of his wife's foot; but so it was; and at the moment that was about to separate them for ever, to his eager gaze that fairy foot and well-turned ankle had never looked so charming; and then, as by a rapid train of thought he recalled the matchless loveliness of his wife, and, as he had ever believed till now, her purity, her mental graces, he groaned aloud as he remembered that another was preferred to him, and that the light figure that glided on before his fixed gaze, was but the hollow spectre of fallen goodness, a lost, degraded creature, hastening to steep her husband and infant in irremediable disgrace, for the indulging of a base and guilty passion. Even in that wretched moment he felt how dearly, how exclusively he had loved her; and for the first time during the blow which had fallen on him, he knew that he mourned the lovely woman almost equally with the virtuous mother and chaste wife. A cry of rage and mingled fury escaped him, as he pictured the rapture of her meeting with the lover of her choice; and a sharp, darting pain quivered through his heart as he remembered that Clémence, with all her youth and beauty, her countless charms, both of body and mind, was lost to him for ever.
Hitherto his passionate grief had been unmixed by any alloy of self. He had bewailed the sanctity of the marriage-vow trampled under foot, the abandonment of all sworn and sacred duties; but his sufferings of rage, jealousy, and regret almost overpowered him, and with much difficulty was he able to command his voice sufficiently to say to the coachman, while partially drawing up the blind:
"Do you see that lady in the blue shawl and black bonnet walking along by the wall?"
"Yes, yes! I see her safe enough."