In the family way! What did he mean by that?
And by whom?
They were small, thoroughly respectable and upright
shopkeepers, and this made them cruel. They tormented
the poor girl, to make her acknowledge her fault and
tell them the name of her seducer. It was of
no use for her to bemoan herself, to throw herself
at their feet, to tear her hair in desperation, and
to swear that no man in the world had ever touched
her lips; in vain, did she exclaim indignantly that
it was impossible that such a dreadful thing could
be; that the man had made a mistake or was joking
with them. In vain, did she try to calm them,
and to soften them by her entreaties; they turned
away their heads, and had only one reply to make:
“His name, his name!”
When she saw that her figure was altering, she was
at length undeceived, and became like an imprisoned
animal, did not speak and cowered motionless in the
darkest corners, and did not even rebel at the blows,
which marked her pale, passive face. She carefully
thought over every minute in the past few months,
and did her utmost to fill up the voids in her memory,
and at last she guessed who the guilty person was.
Then, in despair, she scribbled on a scrap of paper:
“I swear to you, my dear parents, that I have
nothing to reproach myself with. The old doctor
treated me so strangely, that I often felt inclined
to run out of the consulting room. One day he
put me to sleep, and perhaps it was he who....”
And not having the courage to finish the lamentable
sentence, she went and drowned herself, and the parents
had the doctor, who had forgotten all about that old
story, arrested, and in his examination he confessed
the crime....
With an evil look on her face, such as I have never
seen before, and with vibrating nostrils, Elaine exclaimed
in a hard voice:
“To think that such a monster was not sent to
the guillotine!”
Can she also have suffered the same thing?
But unless Elaine was a monster of wickedness, unless
she had no heart and knew how to lie and to deceive
as well as a girl whose only pleasure consists in
making all those who are captivated by her beauty,
play the laughable part of dupes, unless that mask
of youth concealed a most polluted soul, if there
had been any unhappy episode in her life, if she had
endured the horrors of violation, and gone through
all the horrors of desolation, fear and shame, would
not something visible, something disgusting, attacks
of low spirits, and of gloom, and disgust with everything
have remained, which would have shown the progress
of some mysterious malady, the gradual weakening of
the brain and the enlargement of an incurable wound?
She would have cried occasionally, would have been
lost in thought and become confused when spoken to,
she would scarcely have taken any interest in anything
that happened, either at home or elsewhere. Kisses
would have become torture to her, and would have only
excited a fever of revolt in her inanimate being.
