Beatrix Part 32

When Calyste and Dommanget arrived, the d.u.c.h.ess, who had given instructions to the servants, was at once informed. She left Sabine to the care of Madame de Portenduere and stopped the _accoucheur_ and Calyste in the salon.

"Sabine's life is at stake, monsieur," she said to Calyste; "you have betrayed her for Madame de Rochefide."

Calyste blushed, like a girl still respectable, detected in a fault.

"And," continued the d.u.c.h.ess, "as you do not know how to deceive, you have behaved in such a clumsy manner that Sabine has guessed the truth.

But I have for the present repaired your blunder. You do not wish the death of my daughter, I am sure--All this, Monsieur Dommanget, will put you on the track of her real illness and its cause. As for you, Calyste, an old woman like me understands your error, though she does not pardon it. Such pardons can only be brought by a lifetime of after happiness.

If you wish me to esteem you, you must, in the first place, save my daughter; next, you must forget Madame de Rochefide; she is only worth having once. Learn to lie; have the courage of a criminal, and his impudence. I have just told a lie myself, and I shall have to do hard penance for that mortal sin."

She then told the two men the lies she had invented. The clever physician sitting at the bedside of his patient studied in her symptoms the means of repairing the ill, while he ordered measures the success of which depended on great rapidity of execution. Calyste sitting at the foot of the bed strove to put into his glance an expression of tenderness.

"So it was play which put those black circles round your eyes?" Sabine said to him in a feeble voice.

The words made the doctor, the mother, and the viscountess tremble, and they all three looked at one another covertly. Calyste turned as red as a cherry.

"That's what comes of nursing a child," said Dommanget brutally, but cleverly. "Husbands are lonely when separated from their wives, and they go to the club and play. But you needn't worry over the thirty thousand francs which Monsieur le baron lost last night--"

"Thirty thousand francs!" cried Ursula, in a silly tone.

"Yes, I know it," replied Dommanget. "They told me this morning at the house of the young d.u.c.h.esse Berthe de Maufrigneuse that it was Monsieur de Trailles who won that money from you," he added, turning to Calyste.

"Why do you play with such men? Frankly, monsieur le baron, I can well believe you are ashamed of it."

Seeing his mother-in-law, a pious d.u.c.h.ess, the young viscountess, a happy woman, and the old _accoucheur_, a confirmed egotist, all three lying like a dealer in bric-a-brac, the kind and feeling Calyste understood the greatness of the danger, and two heavy tears rolled from his eyes and completely deceived Sabine.

"Monsieur," she said, sitting up in bed and looking angrily at Dommanget, "Monsieur du Guenic can lose thirty, fifty, a hundred thousand francs if it pleases him, without any one having a right to think it wrong or read him a lesson. It is far better that Monsieur de Trailles should win his money than that we should win Monsieur de Trailles'."

Calyste rose, took his wife round the neck, kissed her on both cheeks and whispered:--

"Sabine, you are an angel!"

Two days later the young wife was thought to be out of danger, and the next day Calyste was at Madame de Rochefide's making a merit of his infamy.

"Beatrix," he said, "you owe me happiness. I have sacrificed my poor little wife to you; she has discovered all. That fatal paper on which you made me write, bore your name and your coronet, which I never noticed--I saw but you! Fortunately the 'B' was by chance effaced. But the perfume you left upon me and the lies in which I involved myself like a fool have betrayed my happiness. Sabine nearly died of it; her milk went to the head; erysipelas set in, and possibly she may bear the marks for the rest of her days."

As Beatrix listened to this tirade her face was due North, icy enough to freeze the Seine had she looked at it.

"So much the better," she said; "perhaps it will whiten her for you."

And Beatrix, now become as hard as her bones, sharp as her voice, harsh as her complexion, continued a series of atrocious sarcasms in the same tone. There is no greater blunder than for a man to talk of his wife, if she is virtuous, to his mistress, unless it be to talk of his mistress, if she is beautiful, to his wife. But Calyste had not received that species of Parisian education which we must call the politeness of the pa.s.sions. He knew neither how to lie to his wife, nor how to tell his mistress the truth,--two apprentices.h.i.+ps a man in his position must make in order to manage women. He was therefore compelled to employ all the power of pa.s.sion to obtain from Beatrix a pardon which she forced him to solicit for two hours; a pardon refused by an injured angel who raised her eyes to the ceiling that she might not see the guilty man, and who put forth reasons sacred to marquises in a voice quivering with tears which were furtively wiped with the lace of her handkerchief.

"To speak to me of your wife on the very day after my fall!" she cried.

"Why did you not tell me she is a pearl of virtue? I know she thinks you handsome; pure depravity! I, I love your soul! for let me tell you, my friend, you are ugly compared to many shepherds on the Campagna of Rome," etc., etc.

Such speeches may surprise the reader, but they were part of a system profoundly meditated by Beatrix in this her third incarnation,--for at each pa.s.sion a woman becomes another being and advances one step more into profligacy, the only word which properly renders the effect of the experience given by such adventures. Now, the Marquise de Rochefide had sat in judgment on herself before the mirror. Clever women are never deceived about themselves; they count their wrinkles, they a.s.sist at the birth of their crow's-feet, they know themselves by heart, and even own it by the greatness of their efforts at preservation. Therefore to struggle successfully against a splendid young woman, to carry away from her six triumphs a week, Beatrix had recourse to the knowledge and the science of courtesans. Without acknowledging to herself the baseness of this plan, led away to the employment of such means by a Turkish pa.s.sion for Calyste's beauty, she had resolved to make him think himself unpleasant, ugly, ill-made, and to behave as if she hated him. No system is more fruitful with men of a conquering nature. To such natures the presence of repugnance to be vanquished is the renewal of the triumph of the first day on all succeeding days. And it is something even better.

It is flattery in the guise of dislike. A man then says to himself, "I am irresistible," or "My love is all-powerful because it conquers her repugnance." If you deny this principle, divined by all coquettes and courtesans throughout all social zones, you may as well reject all seekers after knowledge, all delvers into secrets, repulsed through years in their duel with hidden causes. Beatrix added to the use of contempt as a moral piston, a constant comparison of her own poetic, comfortable home with the hotel du Guenic. All deserted wives who abandon themselves in despair, neglect also their surroundings, so discouraged are they. On this, Madame de Rochefide counted, and presently began an underhand attack on the luxury of the faubourg Saint-Germain, which she characterized as stupid.

The scene of reconciliation, in which Beatrix made Calyste swear and reswear hatred to the wife, who, she said, was playing comedy, took place in a perfect bower where she played off her graces amid ravis.h.i.+ng flowers, and rare plants of the costliest luxury. The science of nothings, the trifles of the day, she carried to excess. Fallen into a mortifying position through Conti's desertion, Beatrix was determined to have, at any rate, the fame which unprincipled conduct gives. The misfortune of the poor young wife, a rich and beautiful Grandlieu, should be her pedestal.

XX. A SHORT TREATISE ON CERTAINTY: BUT NOT FROM PASCAL'S POINT OF VIEW

When a woman returns to ordinary life after the nursing of her first child she reappears in the world embellished and charming. This phase of maternity, while it rejuvenates the women of a certain age, gives to young women a splendor of freshness, a gay activity, a _brio_ of mere existence,--if it is permissible to apply to the body a word which Italy has discovered for the mind. In trying to return to the charming habits of the honeymoon, Sabine discovered that her husband was not the former Calyste. Again she observed him, unhappy girl, instead of resting securely in her happiness. She sought for the fatal perfume, and smelt it. This time she no longer confided in her friend, nor in the mother who had so charitably deceived her. She wanted certainty, and Certainty made no long tarrying. Certainty is never wanting, it is like the sun; and presently shades are asked for to keep it out. It is, in matters of the heart, a repet.i.tion of the fable of the woodman calling upon Death,--we soon ask Certainty to leave us blind.

One morning, about two weeks after the first crisis, Sabine received this terrible letter:--

Guerande.

To Madame la Baronne du Guenic:

My dear Daughter,--Your aunt Zephirine and I are lost in conjectures about the dressing-table of which you tell us in your letter. I have written to Calyste about it, and I beg you to excuse our ignorance. You can never doubt our hearts, I am sure.

We are piling up riches for you here. Thanks to the advice of Mademoiselle de Pen-Hoel on the management of your property, you will find yourself within a few years in possession of a considerable capital without losing any of your income.

Your letter, dear child as dearly loved as if I had borne you in my bosom and fed you with my milk, surprised me by its brevity, and above all by your silence about my dearest little Calyste. You told me nothing of the great Calyste either; but then, I know that _he_ is happy, etc.

Sabine wrote across this letter these words, "n.o.ble Brittany does not always lie." She then laid the paper on Calyste's desk.

Calyste found the letter and read it. Seeing Sabine's sentence and recognizing her handwriting he flung the letter into the fire, determined to pretend that he had never received it. Sabine spent a whole week in an agony the secrets of which are known only to angelic or solitary souls whom the wing of the bad angel has never overshadowed.

Calyste's silence terrified her.

"I, who ought to be all gentleness, all pleasure to him, I have displeased him, wounded him! My virtue has made itself hateful. I have no doubt humiliated my idol," she said to herself. These thoughts plowed furrows in her heart. She wanted to ask pardon for her fault, but Certainty let loose upon her other proofs. Grown bold and insolent, Beatrix wrote to Calyste at his own home; Madame du Guenic received the letter, and gave it to her husband without opening it, but she said to him, in a changed voice and with death in her soul: "My friend, that letter is from the Jockey Club; I recognize both the paper and the perfume."

Calyste colored, and put the letter into his pocket.

"Why don't you read it?"

"I know what it is about."

The young wife sat down. No longer did fever burn her, she wept no more; but madness such as, in feeble beings, gives birth to miracles of crime, madness which lays hands on a.r.s.enic for themselves or for their rivals, possessed her. At this moment little Calyste was brought in, and she took him in her arms to dance him. The child, just awakened, sought the breast beneath the gown.

"He remembers,--he, at any rate," she said in a low voice.

Calyste went to his own room to read his letter. When he was no longer present the poor young woman burst into tears, and wept as women weep when they are all alone.

Pain, as well as pleasure, has its initiation. The first crisis, like that in which poor Sabine nearly succ.u.mbed, returns no more than the first fruits of other things return. It is the first wedge struck in the torture of the heart; all others are expected, the shock to the nerves is known, the capital of our forces has been already drawn upon for vigorous resistance. So Sabine, sure of her betrayal, spent three hours with her son in her arms beside the fire in a way that surprised herself, when Ga.s.selin, turned into a footman, came to say:--

"Madame is served."

"Let monsieur know."

"Monsieur does not dine at home, Madame la baronne."

Who knows what torture there is for a young woman of twenty-three in finding herself alone in the great dining-room of an old mansion, served by silent servants, under circ.u.mstances like these?

"Order the carriage," she said suddenly; "I shall go to the Opera."

She dressed superbly; she wanted to exhibit herself alone and smiling like a happy woman. In the midst of her remorse for the addition she had made to Madame de Rochefide's letter she had resolved to conquer, to win back Calyste by loving kindness, by the virtues of a wife, by the gentleness of the paschal lamb. She wished, also, to deceive all Paris.