“Then you have not been happy?”
This terrible poem of feeling that had come like a storm on Calyste’s heart, and was to be sent like a whirlwind to another, frightened the Baroness; it was the first time in her life that she had ever read a love-letter.
Calyste was standing up; there was one great difficulty; he did not know how to send his letter.
The Chevalier du Halga was still in the sitting-room, where they were playing off the last pool of a very lively mouche. Charlotte de Kergarouët, in despair at Calyste’s indifference, was trying to charm the old people in the hope of thus securing her marriage. Calyste followed his mother, and came back into the room with the letter in his breast-pocket—it seemed to scorch his heart; he wandered about and up and down the room like a moth that had come in by mistake. At last the mother and son got Monsieur du Halga into the hall, whence they dismissed Mariotte and Mademoiselle de Pen-Hoël’s little servant.
“What do they want of the Chevalier?” said old Zéphirine to the other old maid.
“Calyste seems to me to be out of his mind,” replied she. “He pays no more heed to Charlotte than if she were one of the marsh-girls.”
The Baroness had very shrewdly supposed that the Chevalier du Halga must, somewhere about the year 1780, have sailed the seas of gallant adventure, and she advised Calyste to consult him.
“What is the best way to send a letter secretly to a lady?” said Calyste to the Chevalier in a whisper.
“You can give the note to her lady’s-maid, with a few louis in her hand, for sooner or later the maid is in the secret, and it is best to let her know it from the first,” replied the Chevalier, who could not suppress a smile; “but it is better to deliver it yourself.”
“A few louis!” exclaimed the Baroness.
Calyste went away and fetched his hat; then he flew off to les Touches, and walked like an apparition into the little drawing-room, where he heard Béatrix and Camille talking. They were sitting on the divan, and seemed on the best possible terms. Calyste, with the sudden wit that love imparts, flung himself heedlessly on the divan by the Marquise, seized her hand, and pressed the letter into it, so that Félicité, watchful as she might be, could not see it done. Calyste’s heart fluttered with an emotion that was at once acute and delightful, as he felt Béatrix’s hand grasp his, and without even interrupting her sentence or seeming surprised, she slipped the letter into her glove.
“You fling yourself on a woman as if she were a divan,” said she with a laugh.
“He has not, however, adopted the doctrine of the Turks!” said Félicité, who could not forbear from this retort.
Calyste rose, took Camille’s hand, and kissed it; then he went to the piano and made every note sound in a long scale by running one finger over them. This glad excitement puzzled Camille, who told him to come to speak to her.
“What is it?” she asked in his ear.
“Nothing,” said he.
“There is something between them,” said Mademoiselle des Touches to herself.
The Marquise was impenetrable. Camille tried to make Calyste talk, hoping that he might betray himself; but the boy made an excuse of the uneasiness his mother would feel, and he left les Touches at eleven o’clock, not without having stood the fire of a piercing look from Camille, to whom he had never before made this excuse.
After the agitations of a night filled with Béatrix, after he had been into the town twenty times in the course of the morning, in the hope of meeting the answer which did not come, the Marquise’s maid came to the Hôtel du Guénic, and gave the following reply to Calyste, who went off to read it in the arbor at the end of the garden:—
Béatrix to Calyste.
“You are a noble boy, but you are a boy. You owe yourself to Camille, who worships you. You will not find in me either the perfections that distinguish her, or the happiness she lavishes on you. Whatever you may think, it is she who is young and I who am old; her heart is full of treasures, and mine is empty. She is devoted to you in a way you do not appreciate enough; she has no selfishness, and lives wholly in you. I should be full of doubts; I should drag you into a life that is weariful, ignoble, and spoiled by my own fault. Camille is free, she comes and goes at her will; I am a slave. In short, you forget that I love and am loved. The position in which I find myself ought to protect me against any homage. To love me, to tell me that you love me, is an insult. Would not a second lapse place me on the level of the most abandoned woman?
“You, who are young and full of delicate feeling, how can you compel me to say things which the heart cannot utter without being torn?
“I prefer the scandal of an irreparable disaster to the shame of perpetual deceit, my own ruin to the loss of my self-respect. In the eyes of many people whose esteem I value, I stand still high; if I should change, I should fall some steps lower. The world is still merciful to women whose constancy cloaks their illicit happiness, but it is pitiless to a vicious habit.
“I feel neither scorn nor anger; I am answering you with frank simplicity. You are young, you know
