constraint, she said:
"How do you do, Armand. Are you in love with me to-day?"
"And yourself," he questioned, "are you in love with me?"
He was caressing the hand of the young woman who had thrown herself upon
the ground, and with her head resting on her lover's knees, was looking
at him in a fever of ecstasy.
"Ah! you flirt," she returned, "I have no need to tell you so to have
you believe it."
"No," he replied, "I know that you love me--much--though not enough to
go all lengths with the feeling."
The tone in which he uttered this sentence was marked with an irony
which made it palpably an epigram. It was an allusion to oft-stated
complaints. Helen, however, received the derisive utterance with the
smile of a woman who has her answer ready.
"So you will always have the same distrust," she said, and although she
was very happy, as her eyes sufficiently testified, a shadow of
melancholy passed into those soft eyes when she added: "So you cannot
believe in my feelings without this last proof?"
"Proof," said Armand, "you call that a proof! Why the unqualified gift
of the person is not a proof of love, it is love itself. It is true," he
went on with a more gloomy air, "so long as you refuse to be entirely
mine I shall suspect--not your sincerity, for I think that you think you
love me, but the truth of this love. Too often people imagine that they
have feelings which they have not. Ah! if you loved me, as you say, and
as you think, would you deny me yourself as you do? Would you refuse me
the meeting that I have asked of you more than twenty times? Why you
would grant it as much for your own sake as for mine."
"Armand--" she began thus, then stopped, blushing.
She had risen and was walking about the room without looking at her
lover, her arms apart from her body with the backs of her hands laid on
her hips, as was usual with her at moments of intense thought. Since she
had begun to love, and had acknowledged her feelings to Monsieur de
Querne she was quite aware that she must some day give up her beautiful
dream of an attachment which, though forbidden, should remain pure. Yes,
she knew that she must give her entire self after giving her heart, and
become the mistress of the man whom she had suffered to say to her: "I
love you." She knew it, and she had found strength for the prolonging of
her resistance to that day, not in coquetry--no woman was less capable
of speculating with a man's ungratified desire in order to kindle his
passion--but in the persistence of the duty-sense within her.
Where is the married woman who has not fondled this chimera of a
reconciliation between the infidelity of heart and the faith sworn to her
husband? The renunciation of the delights of complete love seems at
first to her a sufficient expiation. She engages in adultery believing
that she will not pass beyond a certain limit, and she does in fact keep
within it a longer or a shorter time according to the disposition of the
man she loves. But the inflexible logic that governs life resumes its
rights. Soul and body do not separate, and love admits of no other law
than itself.
Yes, the fatal hour had struck for Helen, and she felt it. How many
times during the last fortnight had she had this horrible discussion
with Armand, who always ended by requiring from her this last token of
love? She was sensible that after each of these scenes she had been
lessened in the eyes of this man. A few more, and he would lose
completely his faith in the feeling which she entertained towards him, a
feeling that was absolute and unreasoned; for she loved him, as women
alone are capable of loving, with such a love as is almost in the nature
of a bewitchment, and is the outcome of an irresistible longing to
afford happiness to the person who is thus loved. She loved him and she
loved to love him. Pain in those beloved eyes was physically intolerable
to her, and intolerable also mistrust, which betokened the shrinking
back of his soul.
She had taken account of all this, she had looked the necessity for her
guilt in the face, and she had resolved to offer herself to her
"beloved," as in her letters she always called him, because "friend" was
too cold, and the word "lover" purpled her heart with shame,--yes, to
offer him the supreme proof of tenderness that he asked for, and now,
when on the point of consenting, she was impotent. Her will was failing
at the last moment. Was she going again to begin what she used to call,
when she thought about it, a hateful contract? Ah! why was she not
free--free, that is, from duties towards her child, the only being whom
she could not sacrifice to him whom she loved--free to offer this man
not a clandestine interview but a flight together, a complete sacrifice
of her entire life.
All these thoughts came and went in her poor head while she herself was
walking to and fro in the room. She looked again at her lover. She
fancied she could see a change come over the features of the countenance
she idolised.
"Armand," she resumed, "do not be sad. I consent to all that you wish."
These words, which were uttered in the deep voice of a woman probing to
the inmost chamber of her heart, appeared to astonish the young man even
more than they moved him. He wrapped Helen in his strange gaze. If the
poor woman had had strength enough to observe him she would not have
encountered in those keen eyes the divine emotion which atones for the
guilt of the mistress by the happiness of the lover. It was just the
same gaze, at once contemptuous and inquisitive, with which he had
lately contemplated the group formed by Alfred and Helen. But the latter
was too much confused by what she had just said to keep cool enough for
observing