“No, I am not ill. But it is that thought which I can not bear. No, I can not. Ah, it is maddening!” And turning toward her companion, she in her turn pressed her hands, saying: “But you know nothing! You suspect nothing! It is that which maddens me, when I see you tranquil, calm, happy, as if the minutes were not valuable, every one, to-day, to you as well as to me. For if one is my brother, the other is your husband; and you love him. You must love him, to have pardoned him for what you have pardoned him.”
She had spoken in a sort of delirium, brought about by her extreme nervous excitement, and she had uttered, she, usually so dissembling, her very deepest thought. She did not think she was giving Madame Gorka any information by that allusion, so direct, to the liaison of Boleslas with Madame Steno. She was persuaded, as was entire Rome, that Maud knew of her husband’s infidelities, and that she tolerated them by one of those heroic sacrifices which maternity justifies. How many women have immolated thus their wifely pride to maintain the domestic relation which the father shall at least not desert officially! All Rome was mistaken, and Lydia Maitland was to have an unexpected proof. Not a suspicion that such an intrigue could unite her husband with the mother of her best friend had ever entered the thoughts of Boleslas’s wife. But to account for that, it is necessary to admit, as well, and to comprehend the depth of innocence of which, notwithstanding her twenty-six years, the beautiful and healthy Englishwoman, with her eyes so clear, so frank, was possessed.
She was one of those persons who command the respect of the boldest of men, and before whom the most dissolute women exercised care. She might have seen the freedom of Madame Steno without being disillusioned. She had only a liking for acquaintances and positive conversation. She was very intellectual, but without any desire to study character.
Dorsenne said of her, with more justness than he thought: “Madame Boleslas Gorka is married to a man who has never been presented to her,” meaning by that, that first of all she had no idea of her husband’s character, and then of the treason of which she was the victim. However, the novelist was not altogether right. Boleslas’s infidelity was of too long standing for the woman passionately, religiously loyal, who was his wife, not to have suffered by it. But there was an abyss between such sufferings and the intuition of a determined fact such as that which Lydia had just mentioned, and such a suspicion was so far from Maud’s thoughts that her companion’s words only aroused in her astonishment at the mysterious danger of which Lydia’s troubles was a proof more eloquent still than her words.
“Your brother? My husband?” she said. “I do not understand you.”
“Naturally,” replied Lydia, “he has hidden all from you, as Florent hid all from me. Well! They are going to fight a duel, and to-morrow morning.... Do not tremble, in your turn,” she continued, twining her arms around Maud Gorka. “We shall be two to prevent the terrible affair, and we shall prevent it.”
“A duel? To-morrow morning?” repeated Maud, in affright. “Boleslas fights to-morrow with your brother? No, it is impossible. Who told you so? How do you know it?”
“I read the proof of it with my eyes,” replied Lydia. “I read Florent’s will. I read the letter which he prepared for Maitland and for me in case of accident....”
“Should I be in the state in which you see me if it were not true?”
“Oh, I believe you!” cried Maud, pressing her hands to her eyelids, as if to shut out a horrible sight. “But where can they be seen? Boleslas has been here scarcely any of the time for two days. What is there between them? What have they said to one another? One does not risk one’s life for nothing when he has, like Boleslas, a wife and a son. Answer me, I conjure you. Tell me all. I desire to know all. What is there at the bottom of this duel?”