I have,” she replied, triumphantly. “I have a hundred thousand francs. It all fits in capitally….”
She took from the looking-glass wardrobe the deed of transfer which her husband had left with her, in the vague hope that she might lose her senses. She laid it on the toilet-table, ordered Maxime to give her a pen and ink from the bedroom, and pushing back the soap-dishes, said, as she signed the deed:
“There, the folly’s done. If I am robbed, it is because I choose to be…. we will call at Larsonneau’s on the way to the station…. Now, my little Maxime, I am going to lock you in, and we will escape through the garden when I’ve turned all these people out of the house. We don’t even need to take any luggage.”
She resumed her gaiety. This mad freak delighted her. It was a piece of supreme eccentricity, a finish which, in her crisis of raging fever, seemed to her entirely original. It far surpassed her desire for the balloon voyage. She came and took Maxime in her arms, murmuring:
“My poor darling, did I hurt you just now? You see, you refused…. But you shall see how nice it will be. Would your hunchback ever love you as I love you? She’s not a woman, that little darkie….”
She laughed, she drew him to her, kissed him on the lips, when a sound made them both turn round. Saccard stood on the threshold.
A terrible silence ensued. Slowly, Renée took her arms from around Maxime’s neck; and she did not lower her brow, she continued staring at her husband with wide eyes, fixed like those of one dead; while the young man, dumbfoundered and terrified, staggered with bowed head, now that he was no longer sustained by her embrace. Stunned by this culminating blow which at last made the husband and the father cry out within him, Saccard stood where he was, livid, burning them from afar with the fire of his glances. In the moist, fragrant atmosphere of the room, the three candles flared very high, their flames erect, with the immobility of fiery tears. And alone to break the silence, the terrible silence, a breath of music floated up through the narrow staircase: the waltz, with its serpentine modulations, glided, coiled, died away on the snow-white carpet, among the split tights and the skirts fallen on the floor.
Then the husband stepped forward. A desire for brutality mottled his complexion, he clenched his fists to strike down the guilty pair. Anger in this small, turbulent man burst forth with the report of firearms. He gave a strangled chuckle, and always approaching:
“You were announcing your marriage to her, I suppose?”
Maxime retreated, leaned up against the wall.
“Listen,” he stammered, “it was she….”
He was about to accuse her like a coward, to cast the crime upon her shoulders, to say that she wanted to carry him off, to defend himself with the meekness and the trepidation of a child detected in fault. But his strength failed him, the words expired in his throat. Renée kept her statuesque rigidity, her mute air of defiance. Then Saccard, no doubt to find a weapon, threw a rapid glance around him. And on the corner of the toilet-table, among the combs and nail-brushes, he caught sight of the deed of transfer, whose stamped paper lay yellow on the marble. He looked at the deed, looked at the guilty pair. Then, leaning forward, he saw that the deed was signed. His eyes went from the open inkstand to the pen still wet, lying at the foot of the candlestick. He remained standing before this signature, reflecting.
The silence seemed to increase, the flames of the candles grew longer, the waltz passed along the hangings with a softer lullaby. Saccard gave an imperceptible shrug of the shoulders. He looked again at his wife and son with a penetrating air, as though to wring from their faces an explanation that he was unable to supply. Then he slowly folded up the deed, placed it in the pocket of his dress-coat. His cheeks had become quite pale.
“You did well to sign it, my dear,” he said, quietly, to his wife….”It’s a hundred thousand francs in your pocket. I will give you the money this evening.”
He almost smiled, and his hands alone still trembled. He took one or two steps, and added:
“It is stifling here. What an idea to come and hatch one of your jokes in this vapour-bath…!”
And addressing Maxime, who had raised his head, surprised at his father’s mollified voice:
“Here, come downstairs, you!” he resumed. “I saw you come up, I came to fetch you to say goodnight to M. de Mareuil and his daughter.”
The two men went downstairs, talking together. Renée remained behind alone, standing in the middle of the dressing-room, staring at the gaping well of the little staircase, down which she had just seen the shoulders of the father and the son disappear. She could not take away her eyes from this well. What! they had gone off quietly, amicably! These two men had not smashed one another! She lent an ear, she listened whether some hideous struggle were not causing the bodies to roll down the stairs. Nothing. In the tepid darkness, nothing but a sound of dancing, a long lullaby. She thought she could hear in the distance the marquise’s laugh, M. de Saffré’s clear voice. Then the drama was ended. Her crime, the kisses on the great gray-and-pink bed, the wild nights in the hothouse, all the accursed love that had consumed her for months came to this mean, vulgar ending. Her husband knew all, and did not even strike her. And the silence surrounding her, the silence through which trailed the never-ending waltz, frightened her more than the sound of a murder. She felt afraid of this peacefulness, afraid of this delicate, discreet dressing-room, filled with the fragrance of love.
She saw herself in the tall glass of the wardrobe. She came nearer, surprised at her own sight, forgetting her husband, forgetting Maxime, quite taken up with the strange woman she beheld before her. Madness rose to her brain. Her yellow hair, caught up at the temples and on the neck, seemed to her a nudity, an obscenity. The wrinkle in her forehead deepened to such a degree that it placed a dark bar above her eyes, the thin blue scar of a lash from a whip. Who had marked her like that? Her husband had not raised his hand, surely. And her lips astonished her by their pallor, her shortsighted eyes seemed extinct. How old she looked! She inclined her forehead, and when she saw herself in her tights, in her light gauze blouse, she gazed at herself with lowered eyelashes and sudden blushes. Who had stripped her naked? What was she doing there, bare-breasted, like a prostitute who uncovers herself to her stomach? She no longer knew. She looked at her thighs, rounded out by the tights; at her hips, whose supple lines she followed under the gauze; at her bust broadly discovered; and she was ashamed of herself, and contempt of her flesh filled her with mute anger against those who had left her thus, with mere bangles of gold at her wrists and ankles to cover her skin.
Then endeavouring, with the fixed idea of a brain giving way, to remember what she was there for, quite naked, before that glass, she went back by a sudden bound to her childhood, and she again saw herself at the age of seven in the solemn gloom of the Hôtel Béraud. She recalled a day when Aunt Elisabeth had dressed them, Christine and her, in frocks of grey homespun with little red checks. It was at Christmas-time. How pleased they had been with these two dresses just alike! Their auntie spoiled them, and she went so far as to give them each a coral bracelet and necklace. The sleeves were long, the bodices came up to their chins, and the trinkets showed up on the stuff, and they thought it very pretty. Renée remembered too that her father was there, that he smiled in his sad way. That day she and her sister had walked up and down the children’s room like grown-up people, without playing, so as not to dirty themselves. Then, at the Ladies of the Visitation, her schoolfellows had laughed at her about “her clown’s dress,” which came down to her fingertips and up over her ears. She had begun to cry during lesson-time. At playtime, so that they should not make fun of her any longer, she had turned up the sleeves and tucked in the neckband of the bodice. And the necklace and bracelet seemed to her to look prettier on the skin of her neck and arm. Was that when she had first begun
