Eight o’clock struck, and almost on the instant, there was a double knock at the door.
“Come in.”
The butler appeared, and said:
“Dinner is served, madame.”
“Is the comte in?”
“Yes, madam. M. le comte is in the dining room.”
For a moment or two, she had some thought of arming herself with a little revolver that she had bought some time previously, in view of the drama she was preparing in her heart. But she remembered that all the children would be there: and she took nothing but a bottle of salts.
When she entered the dining room, her husband was waiting, standing near his chair. They bowed slightly to each other and sat down. Then the children took their places, too. The three boys, with their tutor, the Abbé Marin, were on their mother’s right hand: the three girls, with the English governess, Miss Smith, were on her left. The youngest child, aged three months, stayed alone in her room with her nurse.
The three girls, all fair, of whom the eldest was ten, wore blue frocks and were like exquisite dolls. The youngest was not three years old. They were all very pretty already and they gave promise of becoming as lovely as their mother.
The three boys, two brown-haired, and the eldest, aged nine, already very dark, seemed likely to grow into vigorous big-built men, with broad shoulders. The whole family seemed to come of one stock, healthy and active.
The abbé pronounced benediction, as always when no one had been invited to dinner, for the children did not come to the table when there were guests. Then they began dinner.
The comtesse, in the grip of an emotion she had not anticipated, sat with downcast eyes, while the count scrutinised both the three boys and the three girls, with questioning eyes that wandered from one head to another, disturbed and wretched. Suddenly, as he replaced his thin-stemmed glass in front of him, he broke it, and the red liquid spread upon the tablecloth. At the slight noise made by this slight accident, the comtesse started so violently that she jumped in her chair. They looked at each other for the first time. Then, from moment to moment, in spite of themselves, in spite of the revulsion of body and mind with which every glance they exchanged overwhelmed them, they continued to cross glances like exchanging shots.
The abbé, feeling that some constraint, of which he did not guess the cause, existed, tried to raise a conversation. He scattered subjects round him, but his useless attempts did not hatch out one idea or bring one word to birth.
The comtesse, urged by her woman’s tact, fell back instinctively on her social training, and tried two or three times to answer him: but in vain. She found no words in the confusion of her thoughts; and in the silence of the vast room where the only sounds were the slight ones made by the knives and forks and plates, her voice almost frightened her.
Suddenly, leaning towards her, her husband said:
“Here in this room, in the middle of your children, will you swear to the truth of what you have just told me?”
The hatred that had fermented in her veins broke suddenly out, and answering the question determinedly as she answered his glance, she lifted her two hands, the right towards the heads of her sons, the left towards her daughters’, and in a firm, resolute and unfaltering voice, said:
“On my children’s heads, I swear that I have told you the truth.”
He got up, and flinging his napkin on the table with a gesture of exasperation, he turned away, pushing his chair against the wall; then went out without another word.
Thereupon she drew a deep breath, as if she had won a first victory, and went on in a calm voice:
“Don’t take any notice, my darlings, your father has just suffered a great sorrow. And he is still very unhappy. It will pass off in a few days.”
Then she talked to the abbé; she talked to Miss Smith; for her children she found loving words, little kindnesses, the gentle indulgent mother ways that gladden childish hearts.
When dinner was over, she went into the drawing room with the whole family. She made the elder ones chatter, told stories to the young ones, and when it was time for them all to go to bed, she pressed lingering kisses on them, and then sending them away to sleep, she returned to her bedroom alone.
She waited, without the least doubt that he would come. And now that her children were far from her, she determined to defend her mortal body as she had defended her life as a society woman; and in the pocket of her gown she hid the little loaded revolver that she had bought some days before.
Hours passed; clocks struck. All the noises of the house died down. Only the carriages continued to rush down the streets with a confused rumbling, faint and far off through the thickness of the walls.
She waited, wide-awake and poised, not afraid of him now, prepared for anything and almost triumphant, since she had found for him a torture that he would feel every moment throughout his life.
But the first gleam of daylight had slipped through the fringed border of her curtains, and still he had not come to her. Then, stunned, she realised that he was not coming. Locking her door and thrusting across it the safety bolt that she had had fixed, she went to bed at last and lay there with wide-open eyes, thinking, unable to understand now, unable
