“I was fully aware of it!”
“How?”
She had seen him in the street outside the house, and had hidden herself.
“Why did you do that?”
Then, in a trembling voice, and with long pauses between her words:
“I was afraid! Yes—afraid of you and of myself!”
This disclosure gave him, as it were, a shock of voluptuous joy. His heart began to throb wildly. She went on:
“Excuse me for not having come sooner.” And, pointing towards the little pocketbook covered with golden palm-branches:
“I embroidered it on your account expressly. It contains the amount for which the Belleville property was given as security.”
Frederick thanked her for letting him have the money, while chiding her at the same time for having given herself any trouble about it.
“No! ’tis not for this I came! I was determined to pay you this visit—then I would go back there again.”
And she spoke about the place where they had taken up their abode.
It was a low-built house of only one story; and there was a garden attached to it full of huge box-trees, and a double avenue of chestnut-trees, reaching up to the top of the hill, from which there was a view of the sea.
“I go there and sit down on a bench, which I have called ‘Frederick’s bench.’ ”
Then she proceeded to fix her gaze on the furniture, the objects of virtu, the pictures, with eager intentness, so that she might be able to carry away the impressions of them in her memory. The Maréchale’s portrait was half-hidden behind a curtain. But the gilding and the white spaces of the picture, which showed their outlines through the midst of the surrounding darkness, attracted her attention.
“It seems to me I knew that woman?”
“Impossible!” said Frederick. “It is an old Italian painting.”
She confessed that she would like to take a walk through the streets on his arm.
They went out.
The light from the shopwindows fell, every now and then, on her pale profile; then once more she was wrapped in shadow, and in the midst of the carriages, the crowd, and the din, they walked on without paying any heed to what was happening around them, without hearing anything, like those who make their way across the fields over beds of dead leaves.
They talked about the days which they had formerly spent in each other’s society, the dinners at the time when L’Art Industriel flourished, Arnoux’s fads, his habit of drawing up the ends of his collar and of squeezing cosmetic over his moustache, and other matters of a more intimate and serious character. What delight he experienced on the first occasion when he heard her singing! How lovely she looked on her feast-day at Saint-Cloud! He recalled to her memory the little garden at Auteuil, evenings at the theatre, a chance meeting on the boulevard, and some of her old servants, including the negress.
She was astonished at his vivid recollection of these things.
“Sometimes your words come back to me like a distant echo, like the sound of a bell carried on by the wind, and when I read passages about love in books, it seems to me that it is about you I am reading.”
“All that people have found fault with as exaggerated in fiction you have made me feel,” said Frederick. “I can understand Werther, who felt no disgust at his Charlotte for eating bread and butter.”
“Poor, dear friend!”
She heaved a sigh; and, after a prolonged silence:
“No matter; we shall have loved each other truly!”
“And still without having ever belonged to each other!”
“This perhaps is all the better,” she replied.
“No, no! What happiness we might have enjoyed!”
“Oh, I am sure of it with a love like yours!”
And it must have been very strong to endure after such a long separation.
Frederick wished to know from her how she first discovered that he loved her.
“It was when you kissed my wrist one evening between the glove and the cuff. I said to myself, ‘Ah! yes, he loves me—he loves me;’ nevertheless, I was afraid of being assured of it. So charming was your reserve, that I felt myself the object, as it were, of an involuntary and continuous homage.”
He regretted nothing now. He was compensated for all he had suffered in the past.
When they came back to the house, Madame Arnoux took off her bonnet. The lamp, placed on a bracket, threw its light on her white hair. Frederick felt as if someone had given him a blow in the middle of the chest.
In order to conceal from her his sense of disillusion, he flung himself on the floor at her feet, and seizing her hands, began to whisper in her ear words of tenderness:
“Your person, your slightest movements, seemed to me to have a more than human importance in the world. My heart was like dust under your feet. You produced on me the effect of moonlight on a summer’s night, when around us we find nothing but perfumes, soft shadows, gleams of whiteness, infinity; and all the delights of the flesh and of the spirit were for me embodied in your name, which I kept repeating to myself while I tried to kiss it with my lips. I thought of nothing further. It was Madame Arnoux such as you were with your two children, tender, grave, dazzlingly beautiful, and yet so good! This image effaced every other. Did I not think of it alone? for I had always in the very depths of my soul the music of your voice and the brightness of your eyes!”
She accepted with transports of joy these tributes of adoration to the woman whom she could no longer claim to be. Frederick, becoming intoxicated with his own words, came to believe himself in the reality of what he said. Madame Arnoux, with her back turned to the light of the lamp, stooped towards him. He felt the caress of her breath on his forehead, and the undefined touch of her entire body through the garments that
