"Madame," she said as she ended, "do you not think with me, that in order to avoid some fatal illness--perhaps, I don't know, even madness --we had better confide the whole truth to the doctor, and invent some tale to clear that hateful Calyste and make him seem for the time being innocent?""My dear child," said the duchess, who was chilled to the heart by this confidence, "friendship has given you for the moment the experience of a woman of my age. I know how Sabine loves her husband;you are right, she might become insane."
"Or lose her beauty, which would be worse," said the viscountess.
"Let us go to her!" cried the duchess.
Fortunately they arrived a few moments before the famous /accoucheur/, Dommanget, the only one of the two men of science whom Calyste had been able to find.
"Ursula has told me everything," said the duchess to her daughter, "and you are mistaken. In the first place, Madame de Rochefide is not in Paris. As for what your husband did yesterday, my dear, I can tell you that he lost a great deal of money at cards, so that he does not even know how to pay for your dressing-table.""But /that?/" said Sabine, holding out to her mother the fatal letter.
"That!" said the duchess, laughing; "why, that is written on the Jockey Club paper; everybody writes nowadays on coroneted paper; even our stewards will soon be titled."The prudent mother threw the unlucky paper into the fire as she spoke.
When Calyste and Dommanget arrived, the duchess, who had given instructions to the servants, was at once informed. She left Sabine to the care of Madame de Portenduere and stopped the /accoucheur/ and Calyste in the salon.
"Sabine's life is at stake, monsieur," she said to Calyste; "you have betrayed her for Madame de Rochefide."Calyste blushed, like a girl still respectable, detected in a fault.
"And," continued the duchess, "as you do not know how to deceive, you have behaved in such a clumsy manner that Sabine has guessed the truth. But I have for the present repaired your blunder. You do not wish the death of my daughter, I am sure--All this, Monsieur Dommanget, will put you on the track of her real illness and its cause. As for you, Calyste, an old woman like me understands your error, though she does not pardon it. Such pardons can only be brought by a lifetime of after happiness. If you wish me to esteem you, you must, in the first place, save my daughter; next, you must forget Madame de Rochefide; she is only worth having once. Learn to lie; have the courage of a criminal, and his impudence. I have just told a lie myself, and I shall have to do hard penance for that mortal sin."She then told the two men the lies she had invented. The clever physician sitting at the bedside of his patient studied in her symptoms the means of repairing the ill, while he ordered measures the success of which depended on great rapidity of execution. Calyste sitting at the foot of the bed strove to put into his glance an expression of tenderness.
"So it was play which put those black circles round your eyes?" Sabine said to him in a feeble voice.
The words made the doctor, the mother, and the viscountess tremble, and they all three looked at one another covertly. Calyste turned as red as a cherry.
"That's what comes of nursing a child," said Dommanget brutally, but cleverly. "Husbands are lonely when separated from their wives, and they go to the club and play. But you needn't worry over the thirty thousand francs which Monsieur le baron lost last night--""Thirty thousand francs!" cried Ursula, in a silly tone.
"Yes, I know it," replied Dommanget. "They told me this morning at the house of the young Duchesse Berthe de Maufrigneuse that it was Monsieur de Trailles who won that money from you," he added, turning to Calyste. "Why do you play with such men? Frankly, monsieur le baron, I can well believe you are ashamed of it."Seeing his mother-in-law, a pious duchess, the young viscountess, a happy woman, and the old /accoucheur/, a confirmed egotist, all three lying like a dealer in bric-a-brac, the kind and feeling Calyste understood the greatness of the danger, and two heavy tears rolled from his eyes and completely deceived Sabine.
"Monsieur," she said, sitting up in bed and looking angrily at Dommanget, "Monsieur du Guenic can lose thirty, fifty, a hundred thousand francs if it pleases him, without any one having a right to think it wrong or read him a lesson. It is far better that Monsieur de Trailles should win his money than that we should win Monsieur de Trailles'."Calyste rose, took his wife round the neck, kissed her on both cheeks and whispered:--"Sabine, you are an angel!"
