The hatred which was fermenting in her veins, suddenly
roused her, and replying to that question with the
same firmness with which she had replied to his looks,
she raised both her hands, the right pointing towards
the boys and the left towards the girls, and said in
a firm, resolute voice, and without any hesitation:
“On the head of my children, I swear that I
have told you the truth.”
He got up, and throwing his table napkin onto the
table with an exasperated movement, he turned round
and flung his chair against the wall, and then went
out without another word, while she, uttering a deep
sigh, as if after a first victory, went on in a calm
voice: “You must not pay any attention
to what your father has just said, my darlings; he
was very much upset a short time ago, but he will be
all right again, in a few days.”
Then she talked with the Abbe and with Miss Smith,
and had tender, pretty words for all her children;
those sweet spoiling mother’s ways which unfold
little hearts.
When dinner was over, she went into the drawing-room
with all her little following. She made the elder
ones chatter, and when their bedtime came she kissed
them for a long time, and then went alone into her
room.
She waited, for she had no doubt that he would come,
and she made up her mind then, as her children were
not with her, to defend her human skin, as she defended
her life as a woman of the world; and in the pocket
of her dress she put the little loaded revolver, which
she had bought a few days previously. The hours
went by, the hours struck, and every sound was hushed
in the house. Only the cabs continued to rumble
through the streets, but their noise was only heard
vaguely through the shuttered and curtained windows.
She waited, energetic and nervous, without any fear
of him now, ready for anything, and almost triumphant,
for she had found means of torturing him continually,
during every moment of his life.
But the first gleams of dawn came in through the fringe
at the bottom of her curtains, without his having
come into her room, and then she awoke to the fact,
much to her stupefaction, that he was not coming.
Having locked and bolted her door, for greater security,
she went to bed at last, and remained there, with
her eyes open, thinking, and barely understanding
it all, without being able to guess what he was going
to do.
When her maid brought her tea, she at the same time
gave her a letter from her husband. He told her
that he was going to undertake a long journey, and
in a postscript he added that his lawyer would provide
her with any sums of money she might require for all
her expenses.
It was at the Opera, between two of the acts in Robert
the Devil. In the stalls, the men were standing
up, with their hats on, their waistcoats cut very
low so as to show a large amount of white shirt front,
in which the gold and precious stones of their studs
glistened, and were looking at the boxes full of ladies
in low dresses, covered with diamonds and pearls,
and who were expanding like flowers in that illuminated
hothouse, where the beauty of the faces and the whiteness
of their shoulders seemed to bloom in order to be
looked at, in the midst of the music and of human
voices.
