[CHAPTER IV]
The evening which succeeded to this day of fever, agony, and bliss, was spent by Helen in torturing and delicious yearning. Is not the regretting of one's happiness the thinking of it again? Why had she asked her lover not to come to the Rue de la Rochefoucauld that evening? When yonder, beside him, she had thought that to meet him again in her own home after an interval of so few hours, would be distressing to her. Now she said to herself, while working after dinner at her crochet in the little drawing-room, and seated in the arm-chair which Armand usually occupied—yes, she said to herself with melancholy that it would be very sweet if she had him there, close beside her.
She would touch her lover's hand sometimes with her own. She would breathe the faint aroma of the scent which she had asked him to use and which was the same as hers. In imagination she grasped that enjoyment at once severe and soothing to a woman's soul—the enjoyment of hearing the lips that have told you "I love you" between two kisses in the afternoon, employ "Madame" and similar formalities to you, so that the most insignificant phrase brings home the charm of the mystery that links you together. And Helen's delicate fingers continued their agile handling of the tortoise-shell crochet hook, while Alfred turned over the leaves of a book without speaking.
On her return, she had experienced a bitter moment when, meeting her son again, she had been forced to allow little Henry to give her kisses—which she had not returned. She had contented herself with embracing him, with resting the child's cheek against her own, and then she had felt that she loved him even more than before. All these different kinds of emotion had left their traces in her face, which, usually rosy, was on this evening strangely pale, but of that toned and shrouded paleness that succeeds to complete voluptuousness.
A halo of lassitude hovered about her eyes, a softness about her smile, an air of suppleness and languor about her entire person, and this lover-like appearance lent her such seductiveness as would have frightened her had she taken the trouble to watch Alfred. The latter never turned his eyes from her as she bent her tenderly wearied head over her work. Dressed in white, as was her custom, the faint brown tint of her eyelids was the better seen since she kept them downcast, apparently upon her wool, in reality upon the visions which were rekindling her soul. Alfred reflected with rapture that she was his wife—his wife.
He was more in love with her than ever. Only, ever since their settlement at Paris had brought with it a separation of rooms, he had felt himself seized, whenever he longed for her caresses, by an emotion which he could with difficulty subdue. He must ask his Helen to allow him to remain with her, or else enter her room when she was in bed. This need of acting, united to the torment of physical desire, is so painful to certain men, that timid youths experience an almost unbearable throbbing of the heart on merely crossing the threshold of those houses in which pleasure is sold ready-made. During the whole of this evening, Alfred, although he was satisfied of Helen's submission, endured that emotion which is not without sweetness, since it renders still more perceptible the keenness of desire. He looked at her, and the words which he was preparing beforehand to say to her, caused him a sinking of the heart. He kept silence with such persistency that the poor woman had almost forgotten his existence when she rose to go to her room and held out her forehead to him, with the words:
"Till to-morrow."
"Eh! what! till to-morrow?" he replied, trying to bring his kiss down to her eyes, and lower still. She shuddered, repulsed him abruptly, and looked at him. In the depths of her husband's eyes there was the same gleam of desire the reflection of which she had that morning surprised in her looking-glass, while combing her hair to surrender it to the hands of the other.
It was an abrupt awakening from the dreams of that whole evening. The palpable sensation of physical partition was present in all its hideousness, and as Alfred approached her with a smile, and the words, "My little Helen," she passed quickly to the other side of an easy-chair, and, separated from him, replied:
"Do you not see that I am quite ill this evening?"