Paul Bourget - A LOVE CRIME

nature, as also her heart's secret wound. Although she did not account

fully to herself for Armand's character--a character frightful in

aridity beneath loving externals, for in this man there was an absolute

divorce between imagination and heart--she perceived only too clearly

that he was inclined to misinterpret the slightest indications. She saw

that distrust was springing up in him with an almost unhealthy

suddenness. She had been quite aware that he suspected her, but she had

believed that this doubt proceeded solely from her refusals to belong to

him.

It was on this account that she was consenting to give him this last

proof. "He will doubt no longer," she thought to herself, and the mere

idea of this warmed her whole heart. If only he did not give a guilty

construction to her replies? She rose to go to him, and leaning over the

back of his arm-chair, encircled his forehead with her hands.

"Ah!" she said with a sigh, "if I could know what is going on in here.

It is such a little space, and it is in this little space that all my

happiness and my misfortune are contained."

"If you were able to read in it," the young man replied, "you would see

only your own image."

"I shall read in it to-morrow," she said subtly.

"To-morrow," he returned with a smile; "but what about the place of our

meeting? There is nothing left but furnished rooms or a hotel."

Furnished rooms! A hotel! These words made Helen shudder. All the shames

of adultery appeared to her to be comprised in their syllables. There

was the hiring of a cab, with the driver's cunning smile; there was the

entry into one of those houses, whose thresholds have seen the passage

of so many furtive, quivering women; and, as a setting for her divine

passion, there was the furniture that had, perhaps, been utilised for

similar scenes. Yes, but there was also an element of anonymity, of

impersonality, of never-ending strangeness. And since all was pollution,

the former of the two alternatives carried with it the least. She was

too certain of Armand's refinement to think that he might take her to a

place which he had visited with others. She would have to endure

personal loathing, but nothing that would touch the very essence of her

feeling. It was accordingly with courageous resolution that she replied

to her lover.

"Will you have time enough to find them in one morning?"

"Yes," he said, after a moment's reflection. "I have in my mind a very

convenient house, where one of my English friends always used to stay.

See," he went on, "between eleven and twelve o'clock I will send you

some books and a note. I will give you the address of the house and the

number of the room, just as though you had asked me for the address for

one of your country friends. Don't let that prevent you, however, from

burning the note immediately. You will come at whatever hour you can; I

will spend the whole afternoon waiting for you, and, if you do not come,

I shall not be put out; I shall think that you have not been able."

She listened to him with a mingling of pain and enchantment--pain,

because it would cost her so dear to keep her promise; and enchantment,

because all the trouble that he took to point out these details to her,

instead of enlightening her concerning the man's heart, appeared to her

a sign of his love, and their talk proceeded in the quiet drawing-room,

in front of the expiring fire, until the stopping of a carriage at the

door announced Alfred's return.

"Good-bye, my love," said Helen, taking Armand's hand and kissing it, as

she sometimes did with sweet coaxing; and she had already begun a piece

of work when Chazel came in, with a cheery "Well!" He looked at once

towards his wife with his loyal, honest gaze.

How well Armand knew that gaze, one which had not altered from the days

of their childhood, when they were both at the Institution Vanaboste,

whence they followed the courses of study in the Lycée Henri IV.! The

establishment stood yonder behind the Panthéon, at the corner of the

Rue du Puits-qui-Parle, now the Rue Amyot. Yet it was not remorse for

deceiving the man whom he had known from quite a child that suddenly

made De Querne feel uncomfortable. It was the thought that Helen was

deceiving this confiding nature. Masculine egotism has such monstrous

ingenuousness. A seducer engaged in enticing a woman, despises the woman

for yielding to him, and forgets to despise himself for seducing her.

Meanwhile Alfred had taken Helen's hands.

"I have bored myself conscientiously this evening; what will you give me

in reward?" he asked.

How his familiarity hurt her! How willingly would she have cried to this

unsuspecting husband:

"Do you not see that I love another? Let me go away. I do not want to

lie to you any more."

But two rooms farther off stood a little bed, beneath the white curtains

of which slept her son, her little Henry. Why was it that the picture of

this curly head was something too weak to arrest her on the fatal high

road to adultery, and yet strong enough to prevent her from seeing her

passion through to the end. She had a glimpse of the child while her

husband was speaking to her. It did not occur to her to scorn Armand for

having gained her love, although she was the wife of his friend. She

scorned herself for not loving him enough, since she did not love the

sufferings of which he was the cause, and, sustained by the thought that

she was doing it for him, it was with something like an impulse of pride

that she held out her forehead to her husband's kiss, and said

gracefully:

"That's just like men; they must be paid, and immediately too, for doing

their duty."

It was half-past eleven o'clock when Armand de Querne left the house in

the Rue de La Rochefoucauld. The wind had swept away all the clouds, and

the sky was filled with stars. "What a beautiful night!" said Armand to

himself; "I shall walk home." It was a long way, for he lived in the Rue

Lincoln, in the upper part of the Champs-Élysées. Here, on the second

floor of a wing projecting upon a garden, he had rooms which he had once

amused himself with furnishing in quaint and exquisite fashion with all

kinds of old-fashioned trifles. But how long had he ceased to spend the

evening in this "home?"

He was following the pavement of the Rue St.-Lazare, which, after quite

a narrow and slender beginning, suddenly, like a river swelled by

tributaries, widens after the Place de la Trinité, when it receives,

one after the other, the flood of passengers and vehicles drifting

through the Rue de Chateaudun, the Rue de la Chaussée-d'Antin, and the

Rue de Londres. Cabs were plying, omnibuses were changing horses, the

crowd was surging. Sometimes a girl came out from the corner of a

doorway, and with obscene speech accosted the young man, who put her

away gently with his hand.

Was it the contrast between the intimacy of the little drawing-room and

the swarming infamy of the pavement? Armand felt deeply melancholy. He

could not help seeing Alfred's face again in thought, with Helen's close

beside it. Yet, was he jealous? No. Pictures of childhood came back to

him as they had done just before, but with increased precision, showing

him Chazel dressed in the uniform of the "Vanabosteans"--a small jacket

similar to that of the Barbistes. They always went side by side in the