"Ah, little girl, you know nothing of the precipices down which our virtue flings us when led by love," replied Sabine, making a sort of moral revelation, so distraught was she by her woe.
The speech was uttered with such incisive bitterness that the duchess, enlightened by the tone and accent and look of her daughter, felt certain there was some hidden trouble.
"My dears, it is midnight; come, go to bed," she said to Clotilde and Athenais, whose eyes were shining.
"In spite of my thirty-five years I appear to be /de trop/," said Clotilde, laughing. While Athenais kissed her mother, Clotilde leaned over Sabine and said in her ear: "You will tell what it is? I'll dine with you to-morrow. If my mother's conscience won't let her act, I--Imyself will get Calyste out of the hands of the infidels.""Well, Sabine," said the duchess, taking her daughter into her bedroom, "tell me, what new trouble is there, my child?""Mamma, I am lost!"
"But how?"
"I wanted to get the better of that horrible woman--I conquered for a time--I am pregnant again--and Calyste loves her so that I foresee a total abandonment. When she hears of it she will be furious. Ah! Isuffer such tortures that I cannot endure them long. I know when he is going to her, I know it by his joy; and his peevishness tells me as plainly when he leaves her. He no longer troubles himself to conceal his feelings; I have become intolerable to him. She has an influence over him as unhealthy as she is herself in soul and body. You'll see!
she will exact from him, as the price of forgiveness, my public desertion, a rupture like her own; she will take him away from me to Switzerland or Italy. He is beginning now to say it is ridiculous that he knows nothing of Europe. I can guess what those words mean, flung out in advance. If Calyste is not cured of her in three months I don't know what he may become; but as for me, I will kill myself.""But your soul, my unhappy child? Suicide is a mortal sin.""Don't you understand? She may give him a child. And if Calyste loved the child of that woman more than mine--Oh! that's the end of my patience and all my resignation."She fell into a chair. She had given vent to the deepest thought in her heart; she had no longer a hidden grief; and secret sorrow is like that iron rod that sculptors put within the structure of their clay,--it supports, it is a force.
"Come, go home, dear sufferer. In view of such misery the abbe will surely give me absolution for the venial sins which the deceits of the world compel us to commit. Leave me now, my daughter," she said, going to her /prie-Dieu/. "I must pray to our Lord and the Blessed Virgin for you, with special supplication. Good-bye, my dear Sabine; above all things, do not neglect your religious duties if you wish us to succeed.""And if we do triumph, mother, we shall only save the family. Calyste has killed within me the holy fervor of love,--killed it by sickening me with all things. What a honey-moon was mine, in which I was made to feel on that first day the bitterness of a retrospective adultery!"The next day, about two in the afternoon, one of the vicars of the faubourg Saint-Germain appointed to a vacant bishopric in 1840 (an office refused by him for the third time), the Abbe Brossette, one of the most distinguished priests in Paris, crossed the courtyard of the hotel de Grandlieu, with a step which we must needs call the ecclesiastical step, so significant is it of caution, mystery, calmness, gravity, and dignity. He was a thin little man about fifty years of age, with a face as white as that of an old woman, chilled by priestly austerities, and hollowed by all the sufferings which he espoused. Two black eyes, ardent with faith yet softened by an expression more mysterious than mystical, animated that truly apostolical face. He was smiling as he mounted the steps of the portico, so little did he believe in the enormity of the cases about which his penitent sent for him; but as the hand of the duchess was an open palm for charity, she was worth the time which her innocent confessions stole from the more serious miseries of the parish.
When the vicar was announced the duchess rose, and made a few steps toward him in the salon,--a distinction she granted only to cardinals, bishops, simple priests, duchesses older then herself, and persons of royal blood.
