A LOVE CRIME. Paul Bourget
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her, she would have consented to it had she not had another
feeling, the only one which, shaking her head with its rising fever, she
uttered aloud.
"Do not misjudge me, Armand; rather understand me. I should like to be
yours in a place of which nothing would remain afterwards. What would
become of the rooms you furnished for me if ever you ceased to love me?
Why, I cannot endure the thought of it, even now. Do not wrong me, dear;
only understand me."
Thus did she speak, laying bare the profoundly romantic side of her
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