"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 incoherent attempts to relate the facts. Suddenly Ursula was illuminated by one of those ideas which come to none but sincere friends.
"I must save her!" she thought to herself. "Trust me, Sabine," she cried. "Wait for my return; I will find out the truth.""Ah! in my grave I'll love you," exclaimed Sabine.
The viscountess went straight to the Duchesse de Grandlieu, pledged her to secrecy, and then explained to her fully her daughter's situation.
