A long silence had followed the last words of Sixtine, during which Entragues, without ceasing to be absorbedly interested in the present, could nevertheless not curb his analytical imagination.
"I know it, I know it too well," answered Hubert between two attitudes, "but you say bitter things with such sweetness and charm that they delight me like tender caresses. The future, where you let me glimpse the possibility of joy, appears to me like the thought and imagination of dawn to a poor pilgrim who has stayed too long in the horrors of a black forest...."
"Imagination, if such is your pleasure, my friend; but strike and the spring will gush. Strike boldly, make way to my heart, make my blood flow like a stream, and let me fall into the murderer's arms, dying of joy and dying of love. I would like, I would like...."
"Ah! tell me just what I would like," Sixtine continued inwardly, "evoke my will before me, let me see it with my eyes, let me touch it with my hands. You can do it, you should be able, since you are a man!..."
She waited a second: the aura of a nervous stroke hovered nearby and played along her spine, the swelling ball traveled along her neck; her fingers thrilled in the hand of Entragues, she felt the imperious necessity of shunning all contact and, suddenly rising, she went to her piano and feverishly played an incoherent piece of music which saved her.
"She is strange," thought Entragues. "One might say that she was going to let herself go and suddenly she flies away from peril. She never loses her head and I should truly applaud the advice which a diabolic inspiration made me give this poor Moscowitch. She is not a Coquerette, she can master herself, but on the day when the river shall have been crossed, shoulder against shoulder, she will be united to her lover as iron to iron under the hammer of the good smith:
"Love, good smith of hearts,
Hammer, hammer,
Hammer two by two the hearts,
Hammer, hammer,
Love, good smith of hearts!"
He hummed this verse, improvised at the end of a rhythm that sang under Sixtine's fingers. Verses, welcome phrases, fine periods rose to his lips according to the cadence of the music and with the words came ideas, curious ideas with which he had no acquaintance, plans of romances, metaphysical romances, interesting views on himself, on his friends, on love, on politics. During the hour that Sixtine was at the piano, he lived through several days of a full deep life, and when the music paused, Hubert felt a violent arrest of thought which seized his heart and brain, just as an extreme and sudden transition from warm to cold seizes the flesh and marrow.
"Now," said Sixtine, half turning on her stool, "to prove to you that you are still a person I trust, despite your blunder, I will tell you some fragments of my life. Do not take it for a confession, nor for a secret, nor for an avowal; it is nothing else than goodness of heart on my part, and the desire to satisfy your curiosity. I hardly like to explain my past miseries, and I really believe, besides, that no one has ever seen the spectacle, unless it be the countess and a dead friend, dear and always dear in memory, of Sixtine tearing aside the veil of Isis."
"Your past," said Entragues, "is as sacred to me as a religious mystery. I do not question that you have always behaved like a woman endowed with natural dignity...."