“How long I have been waiting for you!” she cried in a different voice, in which the accent of desire was plain to his ears.
“You were really waiting for me?”
He could scarcely misunderstand her when she replied:
“I am still waiting for you.”
The orchestra was playing the prelude to the second act. Madame de Marthenay came back into the box with M. de Lavernay, to whom M. Landeau had given up his place. The latter, to get away from this serious music, which differed so much from light opera, and to direct in peace from the reading-room his dealings on the Stock Exchange, dispatched to his wife a second admirer, whom he destined in his mind to be a check on the other. By her coldness to him, which he refused like so many husbands to attribute to his own shortcomings, Isabelle infatuated him and made sure of her dominion. She had the art of mastering this coarse, full-blooded adorer, who growled to show himself off, like a wild animal before his tamer. He satisfied all her fancies, all her whims, inspired as much by his own vanity as by the passion to which he surrendered himself so whole-heartedly. And if he hated her flirtations, he paid no more attention to them than one would pay to the tiresome noise of bells on a show horse’s neck.
The old story of Iphigenia unfolded itself slowly. But Jean was beyond the musician’s power. Before him, between the black velvet ribbon and the dress, he saw Isabelle’s fair flesh and imagined the silky softness of it. Half turned towards him, she showed her face in profile. He followed the proud, slightly curved line of her nose, and stopped to dwell on those red lips, those lonely lips of an Eastern slave. Had she not said: “I am still waiting for you?” What was he waiting for? Had the countless seductions of life suddenly lost their charm for him, summed up for him as they were in this lovely woman, as a drop of scent in a Persian bottle contains the attar of a thousand roses? Had the African sun frozen his blood instead of infusing fire into it? Young and free, how could he use his youth and freedom in a better way? The head of whose every movement his thoughts were so filled turned, and now that the profile was lost to him, his glance had to content itself with the heavy mass of her hair, with the neck and the line of her shoulders, so sensuous in their appeal. Giddy, he closed his eyes for a moment and swore in a passionate fury that he would bring to fruition the mad desire which overwhelmed him.
At this moment of his abandonment he was swept by the chords of a deep and sustained harmony, which even in the stress of the sorrow which they were depicting never lost their grave serenity. His overstrung nerves were all a-quiver. His soul, its sensitiveness increased tenfold by the expectation of pleasure, drank in the divine music as a dried-up flower drinks in the dew.
On the stage Orestes and Pylades were disputing as to who should have the joy of dying for the other. They had reached the dark shores of Tauris. The idol of the barbarians had demanded the sacrifice of one of them. The high priestess, none other than the unhappy Iphigenia, had indicated Pylades, and Orestes claimed the pain for himself—a quarrel whose pathos can never grow old, where friendship, inspired by the intoxication of generosity, surpasses love itself in its transports.
Jean strove to shut out the troubling influence of those sounds which were so at war with the turmoil of his senses. But his deadened will-power could not defend him long. He loved life in all its manifestations of beauty too much not to understand and admire such perfect art, whose holy inspiration tore from the heart, as one tears up weeds from a garden, all evil desires, all hatreds and light thoughts.
He was no longer absorbed by the exclusive worship of a woman. A wild longing to live several lives at one and the same time seized upon him. Voluptuous and heroic thoughts came and went quickly, and gained the mastery over him in turn. Swiftly his mind reviewed his experiences of the past. He lived again through his friendship with Marcel, and that crossing of the desert, where perhaps, in solitude and danger, in intense hardship and struggle, he had learnt the supreme lesson as he realised the meaning of courage and unfaltering will. And the thought of the brother brought him to that of the sister. From the beginning of the evening he had put thoughts of Paule away from him. A few minutes ago he had succeeded in forgetting her entirely. Why had she come into his mind now, and why had this exalted music so untoward an effect? He tried to banish her image rudely, though not without regret.