a low voice. “On the contrary, madame is the one who – you understand? What times does monsieur have to go after pleasures, he, who hasn’t slept out of madame’s room for five years, who goes to his study at ten and never leaves it till breakfast, at twelve. His life is all known, it is regular; whereas madame goes out nearly every day at three o’clock, Heaven knows where.”
“And monsieur too,” said the maid, taking her mistress’s part.
“Yes, but he goes straight to the Bourse. I told him three times that dinner was ready,” continued the valet, after a pause. “You might as well talk to a post.”
Monsieur Jules entered the dining-room.
“Where is madame?” he said.
“Madame is going to bed; her head aches,” replied the maid, assuming an air of importance.
Monsieur Jules then said to the footmen composedly: “You can take away; I shall go and sit with madame.”
He went to his wife’s room and found her weeping, but endeavoring to smother her sobs with her handkerchief.
“Why do you weep?” said Jules; “you need expect no violence and no reproaches from me. Why should I avenge myself? If you have not been faithful to my love, it is that you were never worthy of it.”
“Not worthy?” The words were repeated amid her sobs and the accent in which they were said would have moved any other man than Jules.
“To kill you, I must love more than perhaps I do love you,” he continued. “But I should never have the courage; I would rather kill myself, leaving you to your – happiness, and with – whom! – ”
He did not end his sentence.
“Kill yourself!” she cried, flinging herself at his feet and clasping them.
But he, wishing to escape the embrace, tried to shake her off, dragging her in so doing toward the bed.
“Let me alone,” he said.
“No, no, Jules!” she cried. “If you love me no longer I shall die. Do you wish to know all?”
“Yes.”
He took her, grasped her violently, and sat down on the edge of the bed, holding her between his legs. Then, looking at that beautiful face now red as fire and furrowed with tears, —
“Speak,” he said.
Her sobs began again.
“No; it is a secret of life and death. If I tell it, I – No, I cannot. Have mercy, Jules!”
“You have betrayed me – ”
“Ah! Jules, you think so now, but soon you will know all.”
“But this Ferragus, this convict whom you go to see, a man enriched by crime, if he does not belong to you, if you do not belong to him – ”
“Oh, Jules!”
“Speak! Is he your mysterious benefactor? – the man to whom we owe our fortune, as persons have said already?”
“Who said that?”
“A man whom I killed in a duel.”
“Oh, God! one death already!”
“If he is not your protector, if he does not give you money, if it is you, on the contrary, who carry money to him, tell me, is he your brother?”
“What if he were?” she said.
Monsieur Desmarets crossed his arms.
“Why should that have been concealed from me?” he said. “Then you and your mother have both deceived me? Besides, does a woman go to see her brother every day, or nearly every day?”
His wife had fainted at his feet.
“Dead,” he said. “And suppose I am mistaken?”
He sprang to the bell-rope; called Josephine, and lifted Clemence to the bed.
“I shall die of this,” said Madame Jules, recovering consciousness.
“Josephine,” cried Monsieur Desmarets. “Send for Monsieur Desplein; send also to my brother and ask him to come here immediately.”
“Why your brother?” asked Clemence.
But Jules had already left the room.
CHAPTER IV. WHERE GO TO DIE?
For the first time in five years Madame Jules slept alone in her bed, and was compelled to admit a physician into that sacred chamber. These in themselves were two keen pangs. Desplein found Madame Jules very ill. Never was a violent emotion more untimely. He would say nothing definite, and postponed till the morrow giving any opinion, after leaving a few directions, which were not executed, the emotions of the heart causing all bodily cares to be forgotten.
When morning dawned, Clemence had not yet slept. Her mind was absorbed in the low murmur of a conversation which lasted several hours between the brothers; but the thickness of the walls allowed no word which could betray the object of this long conference to reach her ears. Monsieur Desmarets, the notary, went away at last. The stillness of the night, and the singular activity of the senses given by powerful emotion, enabled Clemence to distinguish the scratching of a pen and the involuntary movements of a person engaged in writing. Those who are habitually up at night, and who observe the different acoustic effects produced in absolute silence, know that a slight echo can be readily perceived in the very places where louder but more equable and continued murmurs are not distinct. At four o’clock the sound ceased. Clemence rose, anxious and trembling. Then, with bare feet and without a wrapper, forgetting her illness and her moist condition, the poor woman opened the door softly without noise and looked into the next room. She saw her husband sitting, with a pen in his hand, asleep in his arm-chair. The candles had burned to the sockets. She slowly advanced and read on an envelope, already sealed, the words, “This is my will.”
She knelt down as if before an open grave and kissed her husband’s hand. He woke instantly.
“Jules, my friend, they grant some days to criminals condemned to death,” she said, looking at him with eyes that blazed with fever and with love. “Your innocent wife asks only two. Leave me free for two days, and – wait! After that, I shall die happy – at least, you will regret me.”
“Clemence, I grant them.”
Then, as she kissed her husband’s hands in the tender transport of her heart, Jules, under the spell of that cry of innocence, took her in his arms and kissed her forehead, though ashamed to feel himself still under subjection to the power of that noble beauty.
On the morrow, after taking a few hours’ rest, Jules entered his wife’s room, obeying mechanically his invariable custom of not leaving the house without a word to her. Clemence was sleeping. A ray of light passing through a chink in the upper blind of a window fell across the face of the dejected woman. Already suffering had impaired her forehead and the freshness of her lips. A lover’s eye could not fail to notice the appearance of dark blotches, and a sickly pallor in place of the uniform tone of the cheeks and the pure ivory whiteness of the skin, – two points at which
