His Excellency the Minister Part 64

She extended her hand to him, that soft hand that imparted an electrical influence when he touched it.

"Well, what!--You are pouting?"

"I love you," he replied distractedly. "I love you, you hear, and I wish to keep you!"

"Ah! no, no! no roughness," she said with a laugh, as he, taking a seat near her, tried to draw her to him in his arms.

"To keep you, although belonging to another," whispered Vaudrey slowly.

"For whom do you take me?" said Marianne, proudly drawing herself up.

"If I have a husband, I require that he be respected. A man who gives his name to a woman is clearly ent.i.tled to be dealt with truthfully!"

"Then," stammered Sulpice, "what?--Must we never see each other again?"

"We shall recognize each other."

"You drive me away?"

"As a lover!"

"Ah! stay," said Vaudrey, as, pale with anger, he walked across the room, "you are a miserable woman, a courtesan, you understand, a courtesan!--Guy has told me everything! You gave yourself to Jouvenet to avenge yourself on Lissac, you made a tool of me and you are making a sport of Rosas who is marrying you!--What have I not done for you!--I have ruined myself! yes, ruined myself!"

"My dear," interrupted Marianne, "see the difference between a gentleman like Monsieur de Rosas and a little bourgeois like yourself. The duke might have ruined himself for me but he would never have reproached me.

One never speaks of money to a woman. You are a very honest, domestic man and you were born to worship your wife! You should stick to her! You are not made of the stuff of a true-born lover. What you have just told me is the remark of a loon!"

"Ah! if I had only known you!"

"Or anything! But I am better than you, you see. I was better advised than you. The bill of exchange that you owe to the Dujarrier or to Gochard,--whichever you like--it inconveniences you, I know!"

"Yes," said Vaudrey, "but--"

"You would not, I think, desire me to pay it with the duke's money, that Monsieur de Rosas should pay your debts?"

"Marianne," cried Sulpice, livid with rage.

"Bless me! you speak to me of money? You chant your ruin to me! The _De Profundis_ of your money-box, should I know that? I question with myself as to what it means!--However, knowing you to be financially embarra.s.sed, I have myself found you help--Yes, I told someone who understands how to extricate business men, that you were embarra.s.sed!"

"I?"

"There is nothing to blush about. I told Molina the _Tumbler_--You know him?"

Did he know him! At that very moment he saw the ruddy gold moon that represented the banker's face amid all the expanse of his shining flesh.

He trembled as if in the face of temptation.

"Molina is a man of means," said Marianne. "If you need money, you can have it there! And now, once more, leave me to my new life! The past is as if it had never been!--_Bonjour, Bonsoir!_--and adieu, go!--Give me your hand!"

She smiled so strangely, half lying on the divan, and stretched out her white hand, which he covered with kisses, murmuring:

"Well, yes, adieu! Yes, adieu!--But once more--once!--this evening--I love you so dearly!--Will you?"

She quietly reached out her bare arm toward a silk bell-rope that she jerked suddenly and Vaudrey rose enraged and humiliated.

"Show Monsieur Vaudrey out," Marianne said to Justine, as she appeared at the door. "Then you may go to bed, my girl!"

Vaudrey left this woman's house in a fit of frenzy. She had just treated him who had paid for the divan on which she was reclining as a genuine d.u.c.h.ess might have treated a man who had been insolently disrespectful toward her. He was almost inclined to laugh at it.

"It is well done! well done for you! Ah! the dolt! To trust a wanton! To trust Warcolier! To trust everybody! To trust everybody except Adrienne!--"

He, mechanically and without thought, resumed the way to Place Beauvau, forgetting that the ministerial home was no longer his. The porter--who knows? might not have opened the gate to him. The lackeys would have driven him off as the girl had done whom he had paid, yes, paid, paid!

For she was a harlot, nothing more!

Gradually, the thought of that debt swelled by successive bills of exchange, and almost forgotten during the recent days of feverish excitement, took possession of his mind, he remembered that it must be discharged on the first day of December, in five days, and the thought troubled him like an impending danger. The prospect had often, during the last few weeks, made him anxious. He saw the months pa.s.s, the days flit with extraordinary rapidity, and the maturity, the inevitable due date draw near with the mathematical regularity of a clock. So long as months were ahead he felt no anxiety. Like gamblers he counted on chance. Besides, he still had some farms in Dauphiny. In short, a word to his notary and he could speedily get out of danger. Then, too, the date of payment was far away. He calculated that by economy as to his personal income and his official salary he could meet the bill to Gochard, whose very name sometimes made him laugh. But Marianne's exactions, unforeseen outlays, the eternal _leakage_ of Parisian life had quite prevented saving, and had dissipated in a thousand little streams the money that he wished to pay out in a lump in December. He soon grew alarmed by degrees at the approach of the maturity of the debt. He had written to his notary at Gren.o.ble, and this old friend had replied that the farms of Saint-Laurent-du-Pont, mortgaged and cut up one after another, now represented only a ridiculous value, but that after all, Vaudrey had nothing to be concerned about, seeing that Madame Vaudrey's fortune was intact.

Adrienne's fortune! That then was all that remained to Vaudrey, and that might be his salvation. A fortune that was not very considerable, but still solid and creditable. But even if he were strangled by debt, dunned and driven into a corner, could he pay the debts he had contracted for his mistress by means of his wife's fortune? He was disgusted at the thought. It was impossible.

Vaudrey felt his head turn under the humiliation of his double defeat, the loss of parliamentary confidence, and Marianne's insulting laugh, and urged by the anxiety he felt about the obligation to be met in eight days, in his bewilderment he thought of writing to Gochard of Rue des Marais, to ask for time. This Gochard must be a half-usurer. Certain of being paid, some day, he would perhaps be delighted to renew the bill of exchange in inordinately swelling the amount. The letter was written and Vaudrey mailed it himself the following morning.

That very evening Adrienne was to leave. He endeavored to dissuade her from her plan. She did not even reply to him. She stood looking at a crystal vase on the chimney-piece in which were some winter roses, Christmas roses, fresh and milk-white, that had been sent as a souvenir from yonder Dauphiny. Her glance rested fixedly on that fair bouquet that seemed like a bursting cloud of whiteness.

"Then," said Vaudrey, "it is settled--quite settled--you are going?"

"I am."

"In three hours?"

"In three hours!"

"I know where those roses were gathered," said Sulpice tenderly. "It was at the foot of the window where we leaned elbow to elbow and dreamed."

"Yes," Adrienne answered, in a broken voice whose sound was like that which might have been given out by the vase had it been struck and shattered. "We had lovely dreams! The reality has indeed belied them!"

"Adrienne!" he murmured.

She made no reply.

He tried to approach her, feeling ashamed as he thought that he had similarly wished to approach Marianne.

She instinctively drew back.

"You remember," she said coldly, "that one day when we were speaking about divorce, I told you that there was a very simple way of divorce?

It was never to see each other again, never, to be nothing more to each other from the day on which confidence should die?--You have deceived me, it is done. I am a stranger to you! If I were a mother, I should have duties to fulfil. I would not have failed therein. I would have endured everything for a son!--Nothing is left to me. I have not even the joy of caressing a child that would have consoled me. I am your widow while you yet live. Well, be it so. You have willed it, there, then, is divorce!"

For the third time since Adrienne had learned everything, he tried to stammer the word _pardon_. He felt it was useless. This sensitive being had withdrawn within herself and wrapped herself, as with a cloak, in all her outraged chast.i.ty. He could only humiliate himself without softening her. All Adrienne's deceived trustfulness and insulted love strengthened her in her determination never to forgive.

She would go.

Vaudrey in despair returned to his study, where the books that had been sent from the ministry were piled upon the carpet in all the confusion attending an entry into occupation. The servant at once brought him his lamp and handed him a package of cards in envelopes,--cards of condolence as for a death--and a large card, saying: "That gentleman is here!"