“When you speak of my mother, Madame, you will do so with consideration, and respect, and reverence. Let that for the future be understood.”
She laughed harshly, setting his teeth on edge with a sensation that was sheer loathing of her. She said, shrugging her shoulders, driven on to the verge of self-degradation by her resentment, and her contempt, and her weariness; willing to break her spell over the man forever, if only she might wound him sufficiently deep:
“With all my heart, Monsieur! But at the same time, accord to me a measure of the consideration, respect, and so forth you lavish so abundantly upon Madame there! I may lay claim to it, I fancy.... After all, we are in the same galley; though, let me point out, I was not chained to the bench by an irrevocable vow.” She added, as Dunoisse stared at her speechlessly: “Good Heavens! it is inconceivable that nobody has ever told you, when people are so malicious! Have you never heard that I was a novice in the Convent of the Vergen de la Soledad at Cartagena when de Roux saw me, and fell in love with me, and begged me to run away with him?...”
A strange sound came from the man’s throat. She pursued, cynically smiling in his horror-stricken eyes, playing her little hand as though she held a fan:
“Listen!... My father was killed when I was an infant. My mother died when I was five years old. The Sisters of the Soledad brought me up with the idea that I might perhaps become a religious.... I dreamed of the vocation, and prayed much....” Her pearl-white teeth gleamed between the mocking curves of scarlet. “Then—my dreams changed,” she said, “and my prayers became shorter. Except the Chaplain who confessed the nuns and the pupils, and the Bishop who visited us for Confirmations, no man ever set foot inside the Convent walls. Yet we elder girls constantly talked and thought of lovers, from little Dolores, who was twelve and had a hump, to great Carlota, who was seventeen, and ah! so beautiful.... And you may imagine whether or no Henriette had her visions too!... Yet I was quite content to be a nun.... I had had the White Veil of Reception from the Bishop on my sixteenth birthday ... my behavior gave great edification to the Sisters, and his Lordship, and the clergy ... everybody said, ‘That young girl will one day become a Saint!’ And one night, a week later, I got over the garden-wall because a band was playing on the Calle Major—I walked down the middle of the great, crowded street, in my little old cast-off black alpaca Convent frock and blue ribbon.... I had left the habit and the White Veil folded on the pillow of my bed.... A French officer accosted me and asked my name. It was Eugéne—I thought him splendid!—perhaps he was—compared with the Bishop, and the Chaplain, and the gardener.... And—I never went back to the Convent of the Soledad. De Roux married me. Another man might have been less honorable.... Perhaps it would have been wiser to have waited, you may think?” She laughed jeeringly. “Some odd chance might have brought you to Cartagena. Some lucky wind might have blown you over the Convent garden-wall!”
The tale was a trumped-up one at least as regards the novice’s habit and the White Veil—yet her gift of deception lent it such reality that shame and horror struggled in the heart of the man who heard. To kill her—and himself—was an almost ungovernable impulse, but he drove the nails of his clenched hands deep into their palms, and moved stiffly to the door, and Henriette shrank away.... If he had seized her by the throat,—struck her and cursed her,—marred her beauty with merciless bruises,—stabbed her, even,—he would have won her back again, though only for a time.... But in conquering the mad desire to wreak such brutal vengeance on the woman, he lost her irretrievably.... And so went from her out into the clear morning sunshine, and fled blindly, hunted by all the devils she had roused, into the dew-wet forest, and flung himself face downwards amidst the tall golden bracken at the knees of a graybeard oak that spread its giant boughs and browning foliage as though to afford sanctuary to such hunted, desperate creatures,—and wept, with groans and chokings—what bitter, scalding, shameful tears....
LXI
But he dried them, and controlled himself, and returned to “The Heron” inn, and from thence traveled with his fair companion back to Paris. Some sort of a truce was patched up before the ending of the first day’s journey—a week, and Monsieur the Colonel and Madame were upon almost their old terms of familiar, easy intimacy. Returned to Paris, the tenor of the old life was resumed as though the rupture had never happened. But the exquisite glamour of their passion had vanished; the rose-colored mist no longer veiled the crude realities of life. A heavy shadow brooded between the pair, and, gradually assuming substance, thrust them, with every day that dawned, a little farther apart. There would be days when their cooling passion would blaze up again as fiercely as a bonfire of straw.... There would be weeks when their intercourse would be limited to the baldest commonplaces that may be exchanged between a politely-indifferent husband and a civilly-contemptuous wife. The easy-going camaraderie that had existed between Henriette and de Roux would never reign between Henriette and her lover. For to attain that level of complete mutual understanding, all rights must be abrogated—the last claim resigned—the last shred of self-respect cast upon the winds. Dunoisse knew that very well.
How much of self-respect remained to him as it was, he did not venture to question. Nor did he own to himself that his life was lived in fear. But sometimes the burnt-in memory of that November night of his return from London would ache and throb, and at other times he would hear the voice of his mistress saying:
“You will have yourself to thank for whatever happens now!”