"Oh, how I loved that man! How good, how perfect I thought him! I fancied him a model man! Even now I cannot accuse him. It was not his fault, but mine alone. His sin is my crime. Oh, what folly! Let us speak of the situation seriously. You know now, I suppose, why I wanted to see you. I wished to ask your advice."
I sat down beside her.
Bessy dried her eyes, and then began to speak quite soberly.
"The whole world judges me wrongly. They fancy I am full of levity. But if anything pains me, the pain lasts a long, long time. Since he went away I have been nowhere, and seen nobody. If any of my old acquaintances came to see me, I told them that the whole place was topsy-turvy, and there was not even a chair to sit down upon. My servant had orders to say to every one who called—with one exception—that I was not visible. Who was this exception? Yourself! She could easily guess whom I meant, and if she didn't guess it, it didn't much matter. When he had to go away so suddenly, he was in a very tender mood. He wanted to make me swear that I would not be faithless while he was away. He even brought me a crucifix for the purpose, and when he saw that I laughed at him, he besought me, if I really must deceive him, at least not to bestow my favours upon the first ragamuffin that turned up; nay, he even took the trouble to indicate a worthy man to me, of whom he could not be jealous; whereupon I told him, very seriously, that the man he meant was capable of killing anybody who stood in the way of his love, but was altogether incapable of filching love from anybody else!"
(At this my face grew very red indeed.)
"Then he suddenly assumed a mystic mood, he knew my weak side. He said: 'If you deceive me for the sake of any other man, at that same moment I shall die. Day and night I stand where death is meted out every instant, and the moment a kiss from your lips touches the lips of another man, at that self-same moment, I say, the bullet which is lying in wait for me will fly straight to my heart!' A horrible saying! It would not let me sleep, and rose up before me in my dreams. When one or other of my lady friends came to visit me and we fell a-chatting and began to laugh and joke, a sort of cold shiver would suddenly run all down my body. While I am smiling, I thought, perhaps he is dying a death of torments beneath the horses' hoofs. Every savoury morsel sticks in my throat when I think—perhaps he is now suffering hunger and thirst; and when the blast shakes my windows, I think—now he is standing defenceless amidst the tempest and freezing. And I unable to protect him!
"In short, this threat of his made me quite a somnambulist. At last I denied myself even to my lady friends. I became quite morbid. I fancied I had no right to be gay. Ten times a day I went to the crucifix by which he had wished me to swear and knelt down before it to pray. I made all sorts of vows provided he were preserved and brought back safely to me. And yet I am a Calvinist! But that crucifix was his. He remained faithful to it through all his change of faith. In fact, I was in a fair way of becoming a Pietist. I began to think a life of virtue very beautiful. I should very much have liked to see you now and again, if only to show you that I could be just as moral as you. I would have praised your wife to you, and you would have returned the compliment by praising my husband. This would have been my ambition."
It was the cook who interrupted this burst of feeling.
"Shall I bring in the stew, madame?"
"Yes, bring it in, if it is ready."