After a very long walk, Mrs. Evremond gained the boulevard she sought, turned into a dark little street, into a still darker alley.
The old concierge met her at the loge, a peasant gardienne, blear-eyed and wearing the white cap of her province. She blinked at madame, and under the thick lace veil Mrs. Evremond had worn to shield her emotion from the curious, the old woman did not recognize her tenant’s wife.
“Monsieur told me that he is expecting madame,” she said, familiarly. “He will not be long. Madame will go in——”
Without reply, she passed the woman and went up to her husband’s room.
Expecting her? No, that she knew was not the case—he was expecting another; even the old portière was in his wretched secret, while she alone, perhaps, of all Paris had been ignorant.
As she crossed the threshold of the studio she seemed to enter the apartment of a perfect stranger, so far away from her the last few hours had served to put him. The room was cold. She opened the door of the little stove, and, finding the fire laid, put a match to the kindling; in a moment the sharp crackling of the wood met her ears with a friendly domestic voice whose language was to her ears cruelly that of the hearth and home. If what the missive implied were true, her husband had loved another woman for many months. He had met her here in this place which the wife looked upon as sacred to his art; whose precincts she had respected with fidelity, believing them devoted to his work, and fearing to be obtrusive.
The studio had indeed been sacred, but to an unlawful love.
Her first impulse was to throw her muff down, unwind the fur from her neck and make herself as comfortable as she could in the gloom of the spacious room; but instead she walked restlessly about, taking in the details of decoration, the attractive disorder, with unseeing eyes. Behind that large screen Maurice’s models dressed and undressed—women of the people, women of the streets, of course, of the lowest, most degrading type; face to face with them, alone with them, he had passed hours of his life with them for years. She had never been jealous of them, she had never thought of them; she had regarded them in the same light with easels, and paint, and studio equipment.
Why had she not been jealous of them? They were women, and if Maurice was so unattached that he was either a prey or a victim, or a seeker of such affairs as this which she now believed she had discovered, why should she not take it for granted that there were many and varied experiences of which she had been the unconscious dupe? She shuddered—anger and distrust whispered her to hate her husband, to despise his weakness and never to forgive him.
In her lonely promenade she peopled the room with incidents and scenes which did her wrong, and proved to what extent she had unnerved herself, what rein she gave to jealousy and fear. She had lighted a lamp, and in its light took out the crumpled piece of paper from her glove and re-read it again. It was a love letter, the warm and confident letter of a woman who loves to the man who loves her. At its close it gave him rendezvous for half-past five o’clock at 11 bis, Passage du Maine.