Cosmopolis Part 9

"Catherine!".... That cry of the young man, whose anger was increasing, decided her whom he thus addressed to precipitate the issue of a conversation in which each reply was to be a fresh burst of rancor.

"Well?" she inquired, crossing her arms in a manner so imperious that he paused in his menace, and she continued: "Listen, Boleslas, we have talked ten minutes without saying anything, because neither of us has the courage to put the question such as we know and feel it to be.

Instead of writing to me, as you did, letters which rendered replies impossible to me; instead of returning to Rome and hiding yourself like a malefactor; instead of coming to my home last night with that threatening face; instead of approaching me this morning with the solemnity of a judge, why did you not question me simply, frankly, as one who knows that I have loved him very, very much?... Having been lovers, is that a reason for detesting each other when we cease those relations?"

"'When we cease those relations!'" replied Gorka. "So you no longer love me? Ah, I knew it; I guessed it after the first week of that fatal absence! But to think that you should tell it to me some day like that, in that calm voice which is a horrible blasphemy for our entire past. No, I do not believe it. I do not yet believe it. Ah, it is too infamous."

"Why?" interrupted the Countess, raising her head with still more haughtiness.... "There is only one thing infamous in love, and that is a falsehood. Ah, I know it. You men are not accustomed to meeting true women, who have the respect, the religion of their sentiment. I have that respect; I practise that religion. I repeat that I loved you a great deal, Boleslas. I did not hide it from you formerly. I was as loyal to you as truth itself. I have the consciousness of being so still, in offering you, as I do, a firm friendship, the friendship of man for man, who only asks to prove to you the sincerity of his devotion."

"I, a friendship with you, I--I--I?" exclaimed Boleslas. "Have I had enough patience in listening to you as I have listened? I heard you lie to me and scented the lie in the same breath. Why do you not ask me as well to form a friendship for him with whom you have replaced me? Ah, so you think I am blind, and you fancy I did not see that Maitland near you, and that I did not know at the first glance what part he was playing in your life? You did not think I might have good reasons for returning as I did? You did not know that one does not dally with one whom one loves as I love you?... It is not true.... You have not been loyal to me, since you took this man for a lover while you were still my mistress. You had not the right, no, no, no, you had not the right!...

And what a man!... If it had been Ardea, Dorsenne, no matter whom, that I might not blush for you.... But that brute, that idiot, who has nothing in his favor, neither good looks, birth, elegance, mind nor talent, for he has none--he has nothing but his neck and shoulders of a bull.... It is as if you had deceived me with a lackey.... No..... it is too terrible.... Ah, Catherine, swear to me that it is not true. Tell me that you no longer love me, I will submit, I will go away, I will accept all, provided that you swear to me you do not love that man--swear, swear!"... he added, grasping her hands with such violence that she uttered a slight exclamation, and, disengaging herself, said to him:

"Cease; you pain me. You are mad, Gorka; that can be your sole excuse.... I have nothing to swear to you. What I feel, what I think, what I do no longer concerns you after what I have told you.... Believe what it pleases you to believe.... But," and the irritation of an enamored woman, wounded in the man she adores, possessed her, "you shall not speak twice of one of my friends as you have just spoken. You have deeply offended me, and I will not pardon you. In place of the friendship I offered you so honestly, we will have no further connections excepting those of society. That is what you desired.... Try not to render them impossible to yourself. Be correct at least in form.

Remember you have a wife, I have a daughter, and that we owe it to them to spare them the knowledge of this unhappy rupture.... G.o.d is my witness, I wished to have it otherwise."

"My wife! Your daughter!" cried Boleslas with bitterness. "This is indeed the hour to remember them and to put them between you and my just vengeance! They never troubled you formerly, the two poor creatures, when you began to win my love?... It was convenient for you that they should be friends! And I lent myself to it!... I accepted such baseness--that to-day you might take shelter behind the two innocents!... No, it shall not be.... you shall not escape me thus.

Since it is the only point on which I can strike you, I will strike you there. I hold you by that means, do you hear, and I will keep you.

Either you dismiss that man, or I will no longer respect anything. My wife shall know all! Her! So much the better! For some time I have been stifled by my lies.... Your daughter, too, shall know all. She shall judge you now as she would judge you one day."

As he spoke he advanced to her with a manner so cruel that she recoiled.

A few more moments and the man would have carried out his threat. He was about to strike her, to break objects around him, to call forth a terrible scandal. She had the presence of mind of an audacity more courageous still. An electric bell was near at hand. She pressed it, while Gorka said to her, with a scornful laugh, "That was the only affront left you to offer me--to summon your servants to defend you."

"You are mistaken," she replied. "I am not afraid. I repeat you are mad, and I simply wish to prove it to you by recalling you to the reality of your situation.... Bid Mademoiselle Alba come down," said she to the footman whom her ring had summoned. That phrase was the drop of cold water which suddenly broke the furious jet of vapor. She had found the only means of putting an end to the terrible scene. For, notwithstanding his menace, she knew that Maud's husband always recoiled before the young girl, the friend of his wife, of whose delicacy and sensibility he was aware.

Gorka was capable of the most dangerous and most cruel deeds, in an excess of pa.s.sion augmented by vanity.

He had in him a chivalrous element which would paralyze his frenzy before Alba. As for the immorality of that combination of defence which involved her daughter in her rupture with a vindictive lover, the Countess did not think of that. She often said: "She is my comrade, she is my friend.".... And she thought so. To lean upon her in that critical moment was only natural to her. In the tempest of indignation which shook Gorka, the sudden appeal to innocent Alba appeared to him the last degree of cynicism. During the short s.p.a.ce of time which elapsed between the departure of the footman and the arrival of the young girl, he only uttered these words, repeating them as he paced the floor, while his former mistress defied him with her bold gaze:

"I scorn you, I scorn you; ah, how I scorn you!" Then, when he heard the door open: "We will resume our conversation, Madame."

"When you wish," replied Countess Steno, and to her daughter, who entered, she said: "You know the carriage is to come at ten minutes to eleven, and it is now the quarter. Are you ready?"

"You can see," replied the young girl, displaying her pearl-gray gloves, which she was just b.u.t.toning, while on her head a large hat of black tulle made a dark and transparent aureole around her fair head. Her delicate bust was displayed to advantage in the corsage Maitland had chosen for her portrait, a sort of cuira.s.s of a dark-blue material, finished at the neck and wrists with bands of velvet of a darker shade.

The fine lines of cuffs and a collar gave to that pure face a grace of youth younger than her age.

She had evidently come at her mother's call, with the haste and the smile of that age. Then, to see Gorka's expression and the feverish brilliance of the Countess's eyes had given her what she called, in an odd but very appropriate way, the sensation of "a needle in the heart,"

of a sharp, fine point, which entered her breast to the left. She had slept a sleep so profound, after the soiree of the day before, on which she had thought she perceived in her mother's att.i.tude between the Polish count and the American painter a proof of certain innocence.

She admired her mother so much, she thought her so intelligent, so beautiful, so good, that to doubt her was a thought not to be borne!

There were times when she doubted her. A terrible conversation about the Countess, overheard in a ballroom, a conversation between two men, who did not know Alba to be behind them, had formed the princ.i.p.al part of the doubt, which, by turns, had increased and diminished, which had abandoned and tortured her, according to the signs, as little decisive as Madame Steno's tranquillity of the preceding day or her confusion that morning. It was only an impression, very rapid, instantaneous, the p.r.i.c.k of a needle, which merely leaves after it a drop of blood, and yet she had a smile with which to say to Boleslas:

"How did Maud rest? How is she this morning? And my little friend Luc?"

"They are very well," replied Gorka. The last stage of his fury, suddenly arrested by the presence of the young girl, was manifested, but only to the Countess, by the simple phrase to which his eyes and his voice lent an extreme bitterness: "I found them as I left them.... Ah!

They love me dearly.... I leave you to Peppino, Countess," added he, walking toward the door. "Mademoiselle, I will bear your love to Maud."....He had regained all the courtesy which a long line of savage 'grands seigneurs', but 'grands seigneurs' nevertheless, had instilled in him. If his bow to Madame Steno was very ceremonious, he put a special grace in the low bow with which he took leave of the Contessina.

It was merely a trifle, but the Countess was keen enough to perceive it.

She was touched by it, she whom despair, fury, and threats had found so impa.s.sive. For an instant she was vaguely humiliated by the success which she had gained over the man whom she would, voluntarily, five minutes before, have had cast out of doors by her servants. She was silent, oblivious even of her daughter's presence, until the latter recalled her to herself by saying:

"Shall I put on my veil and fetch my parasol?"

"You can join me in the office, whither I am going to talk with Ardea,"

replied her mother; adding, "I shall perhaps have some news to tell you in the carriage which will give you pleasure!".... She had again her bright smile, and she did not mistrust while she resumed her conversation with Peppino that poor Alba, on reentering her chamber, wiped from her pale cheeks two large tears, and that she opened, to re-read it, the infamous anonymous letter received the day before. She knew by heart all the perfidious phrases. Must it not have been that the mind which had composed them was blinded by vengeance to such a degree that it had no scruples about laying before the innocent child a denunciation which ran thus:

"A true friend of Mademoiselle Steno warns her that she is compromised, more than a marriageable young girl should be, in playing, with regard to M. Maitland the role she has already played with regard to M. Goyka. There are conditions of blindness so voluntary that they become complicity."

Those words, enigmatical to any one else, but to the Contessina horribly clear, had been, like the letters of which Boleslas had told Dorsenne, cut from a journal and pasted on a sheet of paper. How had Alba trembled on reading that note for the first time, with an emotion increased by the horror of feeling hovering over her and her mother a hatred so relentless! Later in the day how much had the words exchanged with Dorsenne comforted her, and how rea.s.sured had she been by the Countess's imperturbability on the entrance of Boleslas Gorka! Fragile peace, which had vanished when she saw her mother and the husband of her best friend face to face, with traces in their eyes, in their gestures, upon their countenances, of an angry scene! The thought "Why were they thus!

What had they said?" again occurred to her to sadden her. Suddenly she crushed in her hand with violence the anonymous letter, which gave a concrete form to her sorrow and her suspicion, and, lighting a taper, she held it to the paper, which the flames soon reduced to ashes. She ran her fingers through the debris until there was very little left, and then, opening the window, she cast it to the winds.

She looked at her glove after doing this--her glove, a few moments before, of so delicate a gray, now stained by the smoky dust. It was symbolical of the stain which the letter, even when destroyed, had left upon her mind. The gloves, too, inspired her with horror. She hastily drew them off, and, when she descended to rejoin Madame Steno, it was not any more possible to perceive on those hands, freshly gloved, the traces of that tragical childishness, than it was possible to discern, beneath the large veil which she had tied over her hat, the traces of tears. She found the mother for whom she was suffering so much, wearing, too, a large sun-hat, but a white one with a white veil, beneath which could be seen her fair hair, her sparkling blue eyes and pink-and-white complexion; her form was enveloped in a gown of a material and cut more youthful than her daughter's, while, radiant with delight, she said to Peppino Ardea:

"Well, I congratulate you on having made up your mind. The step shall be taken to-day, and you will be grateful to me all your life!"

"Yet," replied the young man, "I understand myself. I shall regret my decision all the afternoon. It is true," he added, philosophically, "that I should regret it just as much if I had not made it."

"You have guessed that we were talking of f.a.n.n.y's marriage," said Madame Steno to her daughter several minutes later, when they were seated side by side, like two sisters, in the victoria which was bearing them toward Maitland's studio.

"Then," asked the Contessina, "you think it will be arranged?"

"It is arranged," gayly replied Madame Steno. "I am commissioned to make the proposition.... How happy all three will be!... Hafner has aimed at it this long time! I remember how, in 1880, after his suit, he came to see me in Venice--you and f.a.n.n.y played on the balcony of the palace--he questioned me about the Quirinal, the Vatican and society.... Then he concluded, pointing to his daughter, 'I shall make a Roman princess of the little one!"

The 'dogaresse' was so delighted at the thought of the success of her negotiations, so delighted, too, to go, as she was going, to Maitland's studio, behind her two English cobs, which trotted so briskly, that she did not see on the sidewalk Boleslas Gorka, who watched her pa.s.s.

Alba was so troubled by that fresh proof of her mother's lack of conscience that she did not notice Maud's husband either. Baron Hafner's and Prince d'Ardea's manner toward f.a.n.n.y had inspired her the day before with a dolorous a.n.a.logy between the atmosphere of falsehood in which that poor girl lived and the atmosphere in which she at times thought she herself lived. That a.n.a.logy again possessed her, and she again felt the "needle in the heart" as she recalled what she had heard before from the Countess of the intrigue by which Baron Justus Hafner had, indeed, ensnared his future son-in-law. She was overcome by infinite sadness, and she lapsed into one of her usual silent moods, while the Countess related to her Peppino's indecision. What cared she for Boleslas's anger at that moment? What could he do to her? Gorka was fully aware of her utter carelessness of the scene which had taken place between them, as soon as he saw the victoria pa.s.s. For some time he remained standing, watching the large white and black hats disappear down the Rue du Vingt Septembre.

This thought took possession of him at once. Madame Steno and her daughter were going to Maitland's atelier.... He had no sooner conceived that bitter suspicion than he felt the necessity of proving it at once.

He entered a pa.s.sing cab, just as Ardea, having left the Villa, Steno after him, sauntered up, saying:

"Where are you going? May I go with you that we may have a few moments'

conversation?"

"Impossible," replied Gorka. "I have a very urgent appointment, but in an hour I shall perhaps have occasion to ask a service of you. Where shall I find you?"

"At home," said Peppino, "lunching."

"Very well," replied Boleslas, and, raising himself, he whispered in the cabman's ear, in a voice too low for his friend to hear what he said: "Ten francs for you if in five minutes you drive me to the corner of the Rue Napoleon III and the Place de la Victor-Emmanuel."

The man gathered up his reins, and, by some sleight-of-hand, the jaded horse which drew the botte was suddenly transformed into a fine Roman steed, the botte itself into a light carriage as swift as the Tuscan carrozzelle, and the whole disappeared in a cross street, while Peppino said to himself:

"There is a fine fellow who would do so much better to remain with his friend Ardea than to go whither he is going. This affair will end in a duel. If I had not to liquidate that folly," and he pointed out with the end of his cane a placard relative to the sale of his own palace, "I would amuse myself by taking Caterina from both of them. But those little amus.e.m.e.nts must wait until after my marriage."

As we have seen, the cunning Prince had not been mistaken as to the course taken by the cab Gorka had hailed. It was indeed into the neighborhood of the atelier occupied by Maitland that the discarded lover hastened, but not to the atelier. The madman wished to prove to himself that the exhibition of his despair had availed him nothing, and that, scarcely rid of him, Madame Steno had repaired to the other. What would it avail him to know it and what would the evidence prove? Had the Countess concealed those sittings--those convenient sittings--as the jealous lover had told Dorsenne? The very thought of them caused the blood to flow in his veins much more feverishly than did the thoughts of the other meetings. For those he could still doubt, notwithstanding the anonymous letters, notwithstanding the tete-a-tete on the terrace, notwithstanding the insolent "Linco," whom she had addressed thus before him, while of the long intimacies of the studio he was certain. They maddened him, and, at the same time, by that strange contradiction which is characteristic of all jealousy, he hungered and thirsted to prove them.

He alighted from his cab at the corner he had named to his cabman, and from which point he could watch the Rue Leopardi, in which was his rival's house. It was a large structure in the Moorish style, built by the celebrated Spanish artist, Juan Santigosa, who had been obliged to sell all five years before--house, studio, horses, completed paintings, sketches begun--in order to pay immense losses at gaming. Florent Chap.r.o.n had at the time bought the sort of counterfeit Alhambra, a portion of which he rented to his brother-in-law. During the few moments that he stood at the corner, Boleslas Gorka recalled having visited that house the previous year, while taking, in the company of Madame Steno, Alba, Maud, and Hafner, one of those walks of which fashionable women are so fond in Rome as well as in Paris. An irrational instinct had rendered the painter and his paintings antipathetic to him at their first meeting. Had he had sufficient cause? Suddenly, on leaning forward in such a manner as to see without being seen, he perceived a victoria which entered the Rue Leopardi, and in that victoria the black hat of Mademoiselle Steno and the light one of her mother. In two minutes more the elegant carriage drew up at the Moorish structure, which gleamed among the other buildings in that street, for the most part unfinished, with a sort of insolent, sumptuousness.

The two ladies alighted and disappeared through the door, which closed upon them, while the coachman started up his horses at the pace of animals which are returning to their stable. He checked them that they might not become overheated, and the fine cobs trembled impatiently in their harnesses. Evidently the Countess and Alba were in the studio for a long sitting. What had Boleslas learned that he did not already know?

Was he not ridiculous, standing upon the sidewalk of the square in the centre of which rose the ruin of an antique reservoir, called, for a reason more than doubtful, the trophy of Marius. With one glance the young man took in this scene--the empty victoria turning in the opposite direction, the large square, the ruin, the row of high houses, his cab.

He appeared to himself so absurd for being there to spy out that of which he was only too sure, that he burst into a nervous laugh and reentered his cab, giving his own address to the cabman: Palazzetto Doria, Place de Venise. The cab that time started off leisurely, for the man comprehended that the mad desire to arrive hastily no longer possessed his fare. By a sudden metamorphosis, the swift Roman steed became a common nag, and the vehicle a heavy machine which rumbled along the streets. Boleslas yielded to depression, the inevitable reaction of an excess of violence such as he had just experienced. His composure could not last. The studio, in which was Madame Steno, began to take a clear form in the jealous lover's mind in proportion as he drove farther from it. In his thoughts he saw his former mistress walking about in the framework of tapestry, armor, studies begun, as he had frequently seen her walking in his smoking-room, with the smile upon her lips of an amorous woman, touching the objects among which her lover lives. He saw impa.s.sive Alba, who served as chaperon in the new intrigue of her mother's with the same naivete she had formerly employed in shielding their liaison. He saw Maitland with his indifferent glance of the day before, the glance of a preferred lover, so sure of his triumph that he did not even feel jealous of the former lover.

The absolute tranquillity of one who replaces us in an unfaithful mistress's affections augments our fury still more if we have the misfortune to be placed in a position similar to Gorka's. In a moment his rival's evocation became to him impossible to bear. He was very near his own home, for he was just at that admirable square enc.u.mbered with the debris of basilica, the Forum of Trajan, which the statue of St.