She had sat down in front of his writing table and was playing with a penholder. “Were you working when I came in? Where are you in your history of Gilles de Rais?”
“I am getting along, but I am hampered. To make a good study of the Satanism of the Middle Ages one ought to get really into the environment, or at least fabricate a similar environment, by becoming acquainted with the practitioners of Satanism all about us—for the psychology is the same, though the operations differ.” And looking her straight in the eye, thinking the story of the child had softened her, he hazarded all on a cast, “Ah! if your husband would give me the information he has about Canon Docre!”
She stood motionless, but her eyes clouded over. She did not answer.
“True,” he said, “Chantelouve, suspecting our liaison—”
She interrupted him. “My husband has no concern with the relations which may exist between you and me. He evidently suffers when I go out, as tonight, for he knows where I am going; but I admit no right of control either on his part or mine. He is free, and I am free, to go wherever we please. I must keep house for him, watch out for his interests, take care of him, love him like a devoted companion, and that I do, with all my heart. As to being responsible for my acts, they’re none of his business, no more his than anybody else’s.”
She spoke in a crisp, incisive tone.
“The devil;” said Durtal. “You certainly reduce the importance of the role of husband.”
“I know that my ideas are not the ideas of the world I live in, and they appear not to be yours. In my first marriage they were a source of trouble and disaster—but I have an iron will and I bend the people who love me. In addition, I despise deceit, so when a few years after marriage I became smitten on a man I quite frankly told my husband and confessed my fault.”
“Dare I ask you in what spirit he received this confidence?”
“He was so grieved that in one night his hair turned white. He could not bear what he called—wrongly, I think—my treason, and he killed himself.”
“Ah!” said Durtal, dumbfounded by the placid and resolute air of this woman, “but suppose he had strangled you first?”
She shrugged her shoulders and picked a cat hair off her skirt.
“The result,” he resumed after a silence, “being that you are now almost free, that your second husband tolerates—”
“Let us not discuss my second husband. He is an excellent man who deserves a better wife. I have absolutely no reason to speak of Chantelouve otherwise than with praise, and then—oh, let’s talk of something else, for I have had sufficient botheration on this subject from my confessor, who interdicts me from the Holy Table.”
He contemplated her, and saw yet another Hyacinthe, a hard, pertinacious woman whom he had not known. Not a sign nor an accent of emotion, nothing, while she was describing the suicide of her first husband—she did not even seem to imagine that she had a crime on her conscience. She remained pitiless, and yet, a moment ago, when she was commiserating him because of his fictitious parenthood, he had thought she was trembling. “After all, perhaps she is acting a part—like myself.”
He remained awed by the turn the conversation had taken. He sought, mentally, a way of getting back to the subject from which Hyacinthe had diverted him, of the Satanism of Canon Docre.
“Well, let us think of that no more,” she said, coming very near. She smiled, and was once more the Hyacinthe he knew.
“But if on my account you can no longer take communion—”
She interrupted him. “Would you be sorry if I did not love you?” and she kissed his eyes. He squeezed her politely in his arms, but he felt her trembling, and from motives of prudence he got away.
“Is he so inexorable, your confessor?”
“He is an incorruptible man, of the old school. I chose him expressly.”
“If I were a woman it seems to me I should take, on the contrary, a confessor who was pliable and caressible and who would not violently pillory my dainty little sins. I would have him indulgent, oiling the hinges of confession, enticing forth with beguiling gestures the misdeeds that hung back. It is true there would be risk of seducing a confessor who perhaps would be defenceless—”
“And that would be incest, because the priest is a spiritual father, and it would also be sacrilege, because the priest is consecrated.—Oh,” speaking to herself, “I was mad, mad—” suddenly carried away.
He observed her; sparks glinted in the myopic eyes of this extraordinary woman. Evidently he had just stumbled, unwittingly, onto a guilty secret of hers.
“Well,” and he smiled, “do you still commit infidelities to me with a false me?”
“I do not understand.”
“Do you receive, at night, the visit of the incubus which resembles me?”
“No. Since I have been able to possess you in the flesh I have no need to evoke your image.”
“What a downright Satanist you are!”
“Maybe. I have been so constantly associated with priests.”
“You’re a great one,” he said, bowing. “Now listen to me, and do me a great favour. You know Canon Docre?”
“I should say!”
“Well, what in the world is this man, about whom I hear so much?”
“From whom?”
“Gévingey and Des Hermies.”
“Ah, you consult the astrologer! Yes, he met the Canon in my own house, but I didn’t know that Docre was acquainted with Des Hermies, who didn’t attend our receptions in those days.”
“Des Hermies has never seen Docre. He knows him, as I do, only by hearsay,
