To finish with it all! She looked at herself in the mirror, her teeth chattering, her face lividly pale, all her body convulsively trembling. She realized that such a step in her present state with such a woman would be absurd. But suppose some one else took this step? Suppose some one else went to Olivier and said, "Your wife knows all. She is dying. Come."
The idea of him whom she believed to be her husband's confidant had no sooner occurred to the mind of the unhappy woman when she rang for her chambermaid with the same automatic nervousness.
"Beg Monsieur Hautefeuille to come here, if he is in his room," she said, she who had never had a single conversation in her life tête-à-tête with the young man.
But she cared nothing for conventionality at the moment. Her nervousness was so great that she had to sit down when the chambermaid returned, and said that Monsieur Hautefeuille was coming. Her limbs would no longer support her. When he entered the room about five minutes later she did not give him the time to greet her, to ask why she had sent for him. She sprang toward him like some wild creature seizing her prey, and, taking his arm in her trembling hand with the incoherence of a madwoman who only sees the idea possessing her and not the being to whom she speaks, she said:—
"Ah! you have come at last.—You must have felt that I suspected something.—You must go and tell him that I know all, you hear me, all,—and bring him here. Go! Go! If he does not come back I shall go mad.—You have an honorable heart, Monsieur Hautefeuille. You must think it wrong, very wrong, that he should return to that woman after only six months of married life. Go, and tell him that he must come back, that I forgive him, that I will never speak about it again. I cannot show him how I love him.—But I do love him, I swear that I love him.—Ah! my head is reeling."
"But, Madame du Prat," said Pierre, "what is the matter? What has gone wrong? Where must I go to find Olivier? What is it that you know? What is it that he has hidden from you? Where has he returned to?—I assure you I do not understand a single thing."
"Ah! you are lying to me again!" replied Berthe, more violent still. "You are trying to spare me!—But I tell you I know all.—Do you want proofs? Would you like me to tell you what you talked about in your first conversation together the day we arrived, when you left me alone at the hotel? Would you like to know what you talk about every time that I am not present?—It is of the woman who was his mistress in Rome, of whom he has never ceased thinking.—He travelled with her portrait in his portfolio during our honeymoon! I saw that portrait—I tell you I saw it! That was how I learned her name. The portrait was signed at the bottom, signed 'Ely.'—You are satisfied now.—Do you think I did not notice your agitation, the uneasiness of both of you, when some one spoke of this woman before me the day we went to Monte Carlo?—You thought I did not see anything, that I suspected nothing.—I know, I tell you, that she is here. I will tell you the name of her villa if you like. It is the Villa Helmholtz.—I know that he only came to Cannes to see her again. He is with her now, I am certain.—He is with her now! Don't tell me I am wrong. I have here the pieces of letters that he wrote to her this past night asking for a meeting."
With her trembling hands, which had hardly strength enough to lift up the sheets of paper upon which she had arranged the damning fragments with such patience, she showed Pierre all the beginnings of a letter, among them the irrefutable sentence that had another significance for him. He was trembling so violently, his features expressed such anguish, that Berthe was convinced of his complicity. This fresh proof, after so many, that her suspicions were well founded, was so painful to the poor woman that before Pierre's eyes she gave way to a fit of hysterics. She made a sign to show that her breath was failing her. Her heart beat so furiously that she felt she was suffocating. She pressed her hand upon her heart, sobbing, "Oh, God!"—Her voice died away in her throat, and she fell upon the floor, her head hanging loosely, her eyes gleaming whitely, and with a little foam at the corners of her mouth as though she were dying.
The young man recovered his senses before the necessity of helping the poor woman, whose anguish terrified him, of succoring her by the simplest means that could be imagined readily, of summoning the chambermaid, of sending for the doctor and of awaiting his diagnosis. These cares carried him through the frightful half hour that follows every such revelation, the half hour that is so terrible.
He only recovered consciousness of the reality of his own misfortune when the departure of the doctor had reassured him of the young woman's state. The physician recommended antispasmodics and promised to come again during the evening. Although he did not seem much alarmed, the young wife's illness was serious enough to demand the presence of the husband.