Beatrix - Honoré de Balzac (best book reader TXT) 📗

and senseless words which gay young mothers do and say. This little scene gave Calyste the chance to maintain a countenance. He was charming to his wife, thinking in his heart that he was a monster, and he played like a child with Monsieur le chevalier; in fact he played too well,--he overdid the part; but Sabine had not reached the stage at which a woman recognizes so delicate a distinction.

At breakfast, however, she asked him suddenly:--

"What did you do yesterday?"

"Portenduere kept me to dinner," he replied, "and after that we went to the club to play whist."

"That's a foolish life, my Calyste," said Sabine. "Young noblemen in these days ought to busy themselves about recovering in the eyes of the country the ground lost by their fathers. It isn't by smoking cigars, playing whist, idling away their leisure, and saying insolent things of parvenus who have driven them from their positions, not yet by separating themselves from the masses whose soul and intellect and providence they ought to be, that the nobility will exist. Instead of being a party, you will soon be a mere opinion, as de Marsay said. Ah! if you only knew how my ideas on this subject have enlarged since I have nursed and cradled your child! I'd like to see that grand old name of Guenic become once more historical!" Then suddenly plunging her eyes into those of Calyste, who was listening to her with a pensive air, she added: "Admit that the first note you ever wrote me was rather stiff."

"I did not think of sending you word till I got to the club."

"But you wrote on a woman's note-paper; it had a perfume of feminine elegance."

"Those club directors are such dandies!"

The Vicomte de Portenduere and his wife, formerly Mademoiselle Mirouet, had become of late very intimate with the du Guenics, so intimate that they shared their box at the Opera by equal payments. The two young women, Ursula and Sabine, had been won to this friendship by the delightful interchange of counsels, cares, and confidences apropos of their first infants.

While Calyste, a novice in falsehood, was saying to himself, "I must warn Savinien," Sabine was thinking, "I am sure that paper bore a coronet." This reflection passed through her mind like a flash, and Sabine scolded herself for having made it. Nevertheless, she resolved to find the paper, which in the midst of her terrors of the night before she had flung into her letter-box.

After breakfast Calyste went out, saying to his wife that he should soon return. Then he jumped into one of those little low carriages with one horse which were just beginning to supersede the inconvenient cabriolet of our ancestors. He drove in a few minutes to the vicomte's house and begged him to do him the service, with rights of return, of fibbing in case Sabine should question the vicomtesse. Thence Calyste, urging his coachman to speed, rushed to the rue de Chartres in order to know how Beatrix had passed the rest of the night. He found that unfortunate just from her bath, fresh, embellished, and breakfasting with a very good appetite. He admired the grace with which his angel ate her boiled eggs, and he marvelled at the beauty of the gold service, a present from a monomaniac lord, for whom Conti had composed a few ballads on _ideas_ of the lord, who afterwards published them as his own!

Calyste listened entranced to the witty speeches of his idol, whose great object was to amuse him, until she grew angry and wept when he rose to leave her. He thought he had been there only half an hour, but it was past three before he reached home. His handsome English horse, a present from the Vicomtesse de Grandlieu, was so bathed in sweat that it looked as though it had been driven through the sea. By one of those chances which all jealous women prepare for themselves, Sabine was at a window which looked on the court-yard, impatient at Calyste's non-return, uneasy without knowing why. The condition of the horse with its foaming mouth surprised her.

"Where can he have come from?"

The question was whispered in her ear by that power which is not exactly consciousness, nor devil, nor angel; which sees, forebodes, shows us the unseen, and creates belief in mental beings, creatures born of our brains, going and coming and living in the world invisible of ideas.

"Where do you come from, dear angel?" Sabine said to Calyste, meeting him on the first landing of the staircase. "Abd-el-Kader is nearly foundered. You told me you would be gone but a moment, and I have been waiting for you these three hours."

"Well, well," thought Calyste, who was making progress in dissimulation, "I must get out of it by a present--Dear little mother," he said aloud, taking her round the waist with more cajolery than he would have used if he had not been conscious of guilt, "I see that it is quite impossible to keep a secret, however innocent, from the woman who loves us--"

"Well, don't tell secrets on the staircase," she said, laughing. "Come in."

In the middle of a salon which adjoined their bedroom, she caught sight in a mirror of Calyste's face, on which, not aware that it could be seen, he allowed his real feelings and his weariness to appear.

"Now for your secret?" she said, turning round.

"You have shown such heroism as a nurse," he said, "that the heir presumptive of the Guenics is dearer to me than ever, and I wanted to give you a surprise, precisely like any bourgeois of the rue Saint Denis. They are finishing for you at this moment a dressing-table at which true artists have worked, and my mother and aunt Zephirine have contributed."

Sabine clasped him in her arms, and held him tightly to her breast with her head on his neck, faint with the weight of happiness, not for the piece of furniture, but for the dispersion of her first dark doubt. It was one of those magnificent transports which can be counted, and which no love, however excessive, can prodigally spend, or life would be too soon burned out. Then, indeed, men should fall at the feet of women to adore them, for such moments are sublime, moments when the forces of the heart and intellect gush forth like the waters of sculptured nymphs from their inclining urns. Sabine burst into tears.

Suddenly as if bitten by a viper, she left Calyste, threw herself on a sofa and fainted away, for the reaction of a chill to her glowing heart came near to killing her. As she held Calyste in her arms, her nose at his cravat, abandoned to her joy, she smelt the perfume of that letter paper! Another woman's head had lain there, whose hair and face had left that adulterous odor! She had just kissed the spot where the kisses of her rival were still warm.

"What is the matter?" asked Calyste, after he had brought Sabine back to consciousness by passing a damp cloth over her face and making her smell salts.

"Fetch the doctor and my nurse, both! Yes, my milk has turned, I feel it. They won't come at once unless you fetch them yourself--go!"

Calyste, alarmed, rushed out. The moment Sabine heard the closing of the porte-cochere she started up like a frightened doe, and walked about the salon as if beside herself, crying out, "My God! my God! my God!"

Those two words took the place of all ideas. The crisis she had seized upon as a pretext in reality took place. The hairs of her head were like so many red-hot needles heated in the fire of a nervous fever. Her boiling blood seemed to her to mingle with her nerves and yet try to issue from all her pores. She was blind for a few moments, and cried aloud, "I am dying!"

At that terrible cry of the injured wife and mother her maid ran in. After she was laid upon her bed and recovered both sight and mind, the first act of her intelligence was to send the maid to her friend, Madame de Portenduere. Sabine felt that her ideas were whirling in her brain like straws at the will of a waterspout. "I saw," she said later, "myriads all at once."

She rang for the footman and in the transport of her fever she found strength to write the following letter, for she was mastered by one mad desire--to have certainty:--

To Madame la Baronne du Guenic:

Dear Mamma,--When you come to Paris, as you allow us to hope you
will, I shall thank you in person for the beautiful present by
which you and my aunt Zephirine and Calyste wish to reward me for
doing my duty. I was already well repaid by my own happiness in
doing it. I can never express the pleasure you have given me in
that beautiful dressing-table, but when you are with me I shall
try to do so. Believe me, when I array myself before that
treasure, I shall think, like the Roman matron, that my noblest
jewel is our little angel, etc.

She directed the letter to Guerande and gave it to the footman to post.

When the Vicomtesse de Portenduere came, the shuddering chill of reaction had succeeded in poor Sabine this first paroxysm of madness.

"Ursula, I think I am going to die," she said.

"What is the matter, dear?"

"Where did Savinien and Calyste go after they dined with you yesterday?"

"Dined with me?" said Ursula, to whom her husband had said nothing, not expecting such immediate inquiry. "Savinien and I dined alone together and went to the Opera without Calyste."

"Ursula, dearest, in the name of your love for Savinien, keep silence about what you have just said to me and what I shall now tell you. You alone shall know why I die--I am betrayed! at the end of three years, at twenty-two years of age!"

Her teeth chattered, her eyes were dull and frozen, her face had taken on the greenish tinge of an old Venetian mirror.

"You! so beautiful! For whom?"

"I don't know yet. But Calyste has told me two lies. Do not pity me, do not seem incensed, pretend ignorance and perhaps you can find out who _she_ is through Savinien. Oh! that letter of yesterday!"

Trembling, shaking, she sprang from her bed to a piece of furniture from which she took the letter.

"See," she said, lying down again, "the coronet of a marquise! Find out if Madame de Rochefide has returned to Paris. Am I to have a heart in which to weep and moan? Oh, dearest!--to see one's beliefs, one's poesy, idol, virtue, happiness, all, all in pieces, withered, lost! No God in the sky! no love upon earth! no life in my heart! no anything! I don't know if there's daylight; I doubt the sun. I've such anguish in my soul I scarcely feel the horrible sufferings in my body. Happily, the baby is weaned; my milk would have poisoned him."

At that idea the tears began to flow from Sabine's eyes which had hitherto been dry.

Pretty Madame de Portenduere, holding in her hand the fatal letter, the perfume of which Sabine again inhaled, was at first stupefied by this true sorrow, shocked by this agony of love, without as yet understanding it, in spite of Sabine's