She rose from her seat and went over to Madeline.
‘My poor child,’ she said, ‘this is your first quarrel, let us hope it will be your last. Emile Belleisle is a fool and a brute this morning—but he is not always so. Do not grieve, ma chère, or your good looks will leave you. I will reprove him for his insolence, and he—well, he shall make amends!’ and she followed her accomplice, leaving Madeline alone.
For a time the girl stood, moveless, speechless, comprehending only in a dull, stupefied manner the reality of all that had passed. Her eyes were tearless, her lips firmly set together, but her hands were trembling and cold as death. She seemed to see the Frenchman’s face before her, she seemed to hear his words; then again there came to her the pitiful refrain from the man whose heart she feared to have broken—
‘Madeline—my little Madeline!’
Again she sank down, crying—ah, what a relief she found in those tears! When they subsided her brain began to work, and she wondered what she must do.
Up to that moment she had sometimes pitied Monsieur Belleisle, if she could not love him. But that was all over; he had slain her pity, and he had not awakened affection. She knew now why the man wooed her, carried her off from school, and by force married her—he fancied her a rich heiress, a girl who would enable him to renounce his slavery of teaching and live in luxury all his days. Had this indeed been the case, Belleisle would have made a tolerably quiet husband; the sudden darkening of his daydreams had turned him into a devil.
Again Madeline thought ‘What shall I do?’ but the answer would not shape itself. The idea of writing to White repelled her, for she remembered the letter which she had sent to him little more than three weeks before—a letter overflowing with eulogiums upon Monsieur Belleisle. She could not write yet—rather let White think her dead than alive to cause him further sorrow. She had made her own bed; come what may, she would lie on it alone.
So she sat, half crying, listening in a vague dreamy way to the traffic in the village street, when the room door suddenly opened, and Monsieur Belleisle returned. At his entrance she raised her head; at the sight of her tormentor she dropped it again, and coldly turned away. He did not approach her—he walked about the room for some minutes; then he sat, and there was silence. How still the room was! Madeline could hear the beating of her heart; her breath came fast and thick: her hands were growing clammily cold; anger, self-pity, resentment, were struggling in her breast, but her quivering lips would not open.
She looked round the room. There sat the Frenchman in his easy-chair, with his eyes fixed gloomily upon the empty hearth. She rose to leave the room; in a moment the man sprang forward and stood in humiliation before her.
‘Madeline, my wife—will you forgive me?’