feign tenderness was gradually becoming fainter and fainter. He saw that she was weary of wearing this mask, so weary that she could continue it no longer, and he himself was so exasperated by the little power that he had over her, so stung by his vain and unreasoning desire of this woman, that he was beginning to say to himself in his despairing moments of solitude: “It will be better to break with her than to continue to live like this.”
He asked her, by way of fathoming her intentions: “Won’t you take off your cloak now?”
“Oh, no,” she said; “I have been coughing all the morning; this fearful weather has given me a sore throat. I am afraid that I may be ill.” She was silent a moment, then added: “If I had not wanted to see you very much indeed I would not have come to-day.” As he did not reply, in his grief and anger, she went on: “This return of cold weather is very dangerous, coming as it does after the fine days of the past two weeks.”
She looked out into the garden, where the trees were already almost green despite the clouds of snow that were driving among their branches. He looked at her and thought: “So that is the kind of love that she feels for me!” and for the first time he began to feel a sort of jealous hatred of her, of her face, of her elusive affection, of her form, so long pursued, so subtle to escape him. “She pretends that she is cold,” he said to himself. “She is cold only because I am here. If it were a question of some party of pleasure, some of those idiotic caprices that go to make up the useless existence of these frivolous creatures, she would brave everything and risk her life. Does she not ride about in an open carriage on the coldest days to show her fine clothes? Ah! that is the way with them all nowadays!”
He looked at her as she sat there facing him so calmly, and he knew that in that head, that dear little head that he adored so, there was one wish paramount, the wish that their tête-à-tête might not be protracted; it was becoming painful to her.
Was it true that there had ever existed, that there existed now, women capable of passion, of emotion, who weep, suffer, and bestow themselves in a transport, loving with heart and soul and body, with mouth that speaks and eyes that gaze, with heart that beats and hand that caresses; women ready to brave all for the sake of their love, and to go, by day or by night, regardless of menaces and watchful eyes, fearlessly, tremorously, to him who stands with open arms waiting to receive them, mad, ready to sink with their happiness?
Oh, that horrible love that which now held him in its fetters! — love without issue, without end, joyless and triumphless, eating away his strength and devouring him with its anxieties; love in which there was no charm and no delight, cause to him only of suffering, sorrow, and bitter tears, where he was constantly pursued by the intolerable regret of the impossibility of awaking responsive kisses upon lips that are as cold and dry and sterile as dead trees!
He looked at her as she sat there, so charming in her feathery dress. Were not her dresses the great enemy that he had to contend against, more than the woman herself, jealous guardians, coquettish and costly barriers, that kept him from his mistress?
“Your toilette is charming,” he said, not caring to speak of the subject that was torturing him so cruelly.
She replied with a smile: “You must see the one that I shall wear tonight.” Then she coughed several times in succession and said: “I am really taking cold. Let me go, my friend. The sun will show himself again shortly, and I will follow his example.”
He made no effort to detain her, for he was discouraged, seeing that nothing could now avail to overcome the inertia of this sluggish nature, that his romance was ended, ended forever, and that it was useless to hope for ardent words from those tranquil lips, or a kindling glance from those calm eyes. All at once he felt rising with gathering strength within him the stern determination to end this torturing subserviency. She had nailed him upon a cross; he was bleeding from every limb, and she watched his agony without feeling for his suffering, even rejoicing that she had had it in her power to effect so much. But he would tear himself from his deathly gibbet, leaving there bits of his body, strips of his flesh, and all his mangled heart. He would flee like a wild animal that the hunters have wounded almost unto death, he would go and hide himself in some lonely place where his wounds might heal and where he might feel only those dull pangs that remain with the mutilated until they are released by death.
“Farewell, then,” he said.
She was struck by the sadness of his voice and rejoined: “Until this evening, my friend.”
“Until this evening,” he re-echoed. “Farewell.” He saw her to the garden gate, and came back and seated himself, alone, before the fire.
Alonel How cold it was; how cold, indeed! How sad he was, how lonely! It was all ended! Ah, what a horrible thought! There was an end of hoping and waiting for her, dreaming of her, with that fierce blazing of the heart that at times brings out our existence upon this somber earth with the vividness of fireworks displayed against the blackness of the night. Farewell those nights of solitary emotion when, almost until the dawn, he paced his chamber thinking of her; farewell those wakings when, upon opening his eyes, he said to himself: “Soon I shall see her at our little house.”
How he loved her! how he loved her! What a long, hard task it would be to him to forget her! She had left him because it was cold! He saw her before him as but now, looking at him and bewitching him, bewitching him the better to break his heart. Ah, how well she had done her work! With one single stroke, the first and last, she had cleft it asunder. He felt the old gaping wound begin to open, the wound that she had dressed and now had made incurable by plunging into it the knife of death-dealing indifference. He even felt that from this broken heart there was something distilling itself through his frame, mounting to his throat and choking him; then, covering his eyes with his hands, as if to conceal this weakness even from himself, he wept.
She had left him because it was cold! He would have walked naked through the driving snow to meet her, no matter where; he would have cast himself from the house top, only to fall at her feet. An old tale came to his mind, that has been made into a legend: that of the Côte des Deux Amans, a spot which the traveler may behold as he journeys toward Rouen. A maiden, obedient to her father’s cruel caprice, which prohibited her from marrying the man of her choice unless she accomplished the task of carrying him, unassisted, to the summit of the steep mountain, succeeded in dragging him up there on her hands and knees, and died as she reached the top. Love, then, is but a legend, made to be sung in verse or told in lying romances!
Had not his mistress herself, in one of their earliest interviews, made use of an expression that he had never forgotten: “Men nowadays do not love women so as really to harm themselves by it. You may believe me, for I know them both” She had been wrong in his case, but not in her own, for on another occasion she had said: “In any event, I give you fair warning that I am incapable of being really smitten with anyone, be he who he may.”
Be he who he may? Was that quite a sure thing? Of him, no; of that he was quite well assured now, but of another?
Of him? She could not love him. Why not?
Then the feeling that his life had been a wasted one, which had haunted him for a long time past, fell upon him as if it would crush him. He had done nothing, obtained nothing, conquered nothing, succeeded in nothing. When he had felt an attraction toward the arts he had not found in himself the courage that is required to devote one’s self exclusively to one of them, nor the persistent determination that they demand as the price of success. There had been no triumph to cheer him; no elevated taste for some noble career to ennoble and aggrandize his mind. The only strenuous effort that he had ever put forth, the attempt to conquer a woman’s heart, had proved ineffectual like all the rest. Take him all in all, he was only a miserable failure.
He
