第31章

We become bond-slaves when we give ourselves body and soul, but a man is bound to nothing by accepting the gift.Who will assure me that love will last? The very love that I might show for you at every moment, the better to keep your love, might serve you as a reason for deserting me.I have no wish to be a second edition of Mme de Beauseant.Who can ever know what it is that keeps you beside us? Our persistent coldness of heart is the cause of an unfailing passion in some of you; other men ask for an untiring devotion, to be idolised at every moment; some for gentleness, others for tyranny.No woman in this world as yet has really read the riddle of man's heart."There was a pause.When she spoke again it was in a different tone.

"After all, my friend, you cannot prevent a woman from trembling at the question, `Will this love last always?' Hard though my words may be, the dread of losing you puts them into my mouth.

Oh, me! it is not I who speaks, dear, it is reason; and how should anyone so mad as I be reasonable? In truth, I am nothing of the sort."The poignant irony of her answer had changed before the end into the most musical accents in which a woman could find utterance for ingenuous love.To listen to her words was to pass in a moment from martyrdom to heaven.Montriveau grew pale; and for the first time in his life, he fell on his knees before a woman.

He kissed the Duchess's skirt hem, her knees, her feet; but for the credit of the Faubourg Saint-Germain it is necessary to respect the mysteries of its boudoirs, where many are fain to take the utmost that Love can give without giving proof of love in return.

The Duchess thought herself generous when she suffered herself to be adored.But Montriveau was in a wild frenzy of joy over her complete surrender of the position.

"Dear Antoinette," he cried."Yes, you are right; I will not have you doubt any longer.I too am trembling at this moment--lest the angel of my life should leave me; I wish I could invent some tie that might bind us to each other irrevocably.""Ah!" she said, under her breath, "so I was right, you see.""Let me say all that I have to say; I will scatter all your fears with a word.Listen! if I deserted you, I should deserve to die a thousand deaths.Be wholly mine, and I will give you the right to kill me if I am false.I myself will write a letter explaining certain reasons for taking my own life; I will make my final arrangements, in short.You shall have the letter in your keeping; in the eye of the law it will be a sufficient explanation of my death.You can avenge yourself, and fear nothing from God or men.""What good would the letter be to me? What would life be if Ihad lost your love? If I wished to kill you, should I not be ready to follow? No; thank you for the thought, but I do not want the letter.Should I not begin to dread that you were faithful to me through fear? And if a man knows that he must risk his life for a stolen pleasure, might it not seem more tempting? Armand, the thing I ask of you is the one hard thing to do.""Then what is it that you wish?"

"Your obedience and my liberty."

"Ah, God!" cried he, "I am a child."

"A wayward, much spoilt child," she said, stroking the thick hair, for his head still lay on her knee."Ah! and loved far more than he believes, and yet he is very disobedient.Why not stay as we are? Why not sacrifice to me the desires that hurt me? Why not take what I can give, when it is all that I can honestly grant? Are you not happy?""Oh yes, I am happy when I have not a doubt left.Antoinette, doubt in love is a kind of death, is it not?"In a moment he showed himself as he was, as all men are under the influence of that hot fever; he grew eloquent, insinuating.And the Duchess tasted the pleasures which she reconciled with her conscience by some private, Jesuitical ukase of her own; Armand's love gave her a thrill of cerebral excitement which custom made as necessary to her as society, or the Opera.To feel that she was adored by this man, who rose above other men, whose character frightened her; to treat him like a child; to play with him as Poppaea played with Nero--many women, like the wives of King Henry VIII, have paid for such a perilous delight with all the blood in their veins.Grim presentiment! Even as she surrendered the delicate, pale, gold curls to his touch, and felt the close pressure of his hand, the little hand of a man whose greatness she could not mistake; even as she herself played with his dark, thick locks, in that boudoir where she reigned a queen, the Duchess would say to herself--"This man is capable of killing me if he once finds out that Iam playing with him."

Armand de Montriveau stayed with her till two o'clock in the morning.From that moment this woman, whom he loved, was neither a duchess nor a Navarreins; Antoinette, in her disguises, had gone so far as to appear to be a woman.On that most blissful evening, the sweetest prelude ever played by a Parisienne to what the world calls "a slip"; in spite of all her affectations of a coyness which she did not feel, the General saw all maidenly beauty in her.He had some excuse for believing that so many storms of caprice had been but clouds covering a heavenly soul;that these must be lifted one by one like the veils that hid her divine loveliness.The Duchess became, for him, the most simple and girlish mistress; she was the one woman in the world for him;and he went away quite happy in that at last he had brought her to give him such pledges of love, that it seemed to him impossible but that he should be but her husband henceforth in secret, her choice sanctioned by Heaven.

Armand went slowly home, turning this thought in his mind with the impartiality of a man who is conscious of all the responsibilities that love lays on him while he tastes the sweetness of its joys.He went along the Quais to see the widest possible space of sky; his heart had grown in him; he would fain have had the bounds of the firmament and of earth enlarged.It seemed to him that his lungs drew an ampler breath.