The speech was uttered with such incisive bitterness that the duchess, enlightened by the tone and accent and look of her daughter, felt certain there was some hidden trouble.
“My dears, it is midnight; come, go to bed,” she said to Clotilde and Athenais, whose eyes were shining.
“In spite of my thirty-five years I appear to be de trop,” said Clotilde, laughing. While Athenais kissed her mother, Clotilde leaned over Sabine and said in her ear: “You will tell what it is? I’ll dine with you to-morrow. If my mother’s conscience won’t let her act, I—I myself will get Calyste out of the hands of the infidels.”
“Well, Sabine,” said the duchess, taking her daughter into her bedroom, “tell me, what new trouble is there, my child?”
“Mamma, I am lost!”
“But how?”
“I wanted to get the better of that horrible woman—I conquered for a time—I am pregnant again—and Calyste loves her so that I foresee a total abandonment. When she hears of it she will be furious. Ah! I suffer such tortures that I cannot endure them long. I know when he is going to her, I know it by his joy; and his peevishness tells me as plainly when he leaves her. He no longer troubles himself to conceal his feelings; I have become intolerable to him. She has an influence over him as unhealthy as she is herself in soul and body. You’ll see! she will exact from him, as the price of forgiveness, my public desertion, a rupture like her own; she will take him away from me to Switzerland or Italy. He is beginning now to say it is ridiculous that he knows nothing of Europe. I can guess what those words mean, flung out in advance. If Calyste is not cured of her in three months I don’t know what he may become; but as for me, I will kill myself.”
“But your soul, my unhappy child? Suicide is a mortal sin.”
“Don’t you understand? She may give him a child. And if Calyste loved the child of that woman more than mine—Oh! that’s the end of my patience and all my resignation.”
She fell into a chair. She had given vent to the deepest thought in her heart; she had no longer a hidden grief; and secret sorrow is like that iron rod that sculptors put within the structure of their clay,—it supports, it is a force.