With a single glance Beatrix divined the state of Calyste’s heart; she saw the marks of the collar she had put upon him at Les Touches, still fresh and red. Calyste, however, wounded by the speech made to him about his wife, hesitated between his dignity as a husband, Sabine’s defence, and a harsh word cast upon a heart which held such memories for him, a heart which he believed to be bleeding. The marquise observed his hesitation; she had made that speech expressly that she might know how far her empire over Calyste still extended. Seeing his weakness, she came at once to his succor to relieve his embarrassment.
“Well, dear friend, you find me alone,” she said, as soon as the two gentlemen had left the box,—“yes, alone in the world!”
“You forget me!” said Calyste.
“You!” she replied, “but you are married. That was one of my griefs, among the many I have endured since I saw you last. Not only—I said to myself—do I lose love, but I have lost a friendship which I thought was Breton. Alas! we can make ourselves bear everything. Now I suffer less, but I am broken, exhausted! This is the first outpouring of my heart for a long, long time. Obliged to seem proud before indifferent persons, and arrogant as if I had never fallen in presence of those who pay court to me, and having lost my dear Felicite, there was no ear into which I could cast the words, I suffer! But to you I can tell the anguish I endured on seeing you just now so near to me. Yes,” she said, replying to a gesture of Calyste’s, “it is almost fidelity. That is how it is with misery; a look, a visit, a mere nothing is everything to us. Ah! you once loved me—you—as I deserved to be loved by him who has taken pleasure in trampling under foot the treasures I poured out upon him. And yet, to my sorrow, I cannot forget; I love, and I desire to be faithful to a past that can never return.”
Having uttered this tirade, improvised for the hundredth time, she played the pupils of her eyes in a way to double the effect of her words, which seemed to be dragged from the depths of her soul by the violence of a torrent long restrained. Calyste, incapable of speech, let fall the tears that gathered in his eyes. Beatrix caught his hand and pressed it, making him turn pale.
“Thank you, Calyste, thank you, my poor child; that is how a true friend responds to the grief of his friend. We understand each other. No, don’t add another word; leave me now; people are looking at us; it might cause trouble to your wife if some one chanced to tell her that we were seen together,—innocently enough, before a thousand people! There, you see I am strong; adieu—”
She wiped her eyes, making what might be called, in woman’s rhetoric, an antithesis of action.
“Let me laugh the laugh of a lost soul with the careless creatures who amuse me,” she went on. “I live among artists, writers, in short the world I knew in the salon of our poor Camille—who may indeed have acted wisely. To enrich the man we love and then to disappear saying, ‘I am too old for him!’ that is ending like the martyrs,—and the best end too, if one cannot die a virgin.”
She began to laugh, as it to remove the melancholy impression she had made upon her former adorer.
“But,” said Calyste, “where can I go to see you?”