第16章

THE CONFESSION OF A PRETTY WOMAN

One evening Daniel found the princess thoughtful, one elbow resting on a little table, her beautiful blond head bathed in light from the lamp.She was toying with a letter which lay on the table-cloth.When d'Arthez had seen the paper distinctly, she folded it up, and stuck it in her belt.

"What is the matter?" asked d'Arthez; "you seem distressed.""I have received a letter from Monsieur de Cadignan," she replied.

"However great the wrongs he has done me, I cannot help thinking of his exile--without family, without son--from his native land."These words, said in a soulful voice, betrayed angelic sensibility.

D'Arthez was deeply moved.The curiosity of the lover became, so to speak, a psychological and literary curiosity.He wanted to know the height that woman had attained, and what were the injuries she thus forgave; he longed to know how these women of the world, taxed with frivolity, cold-heartedness, and egotism, could be such angels.

Remembering how the princess had already repulsed him when he first tried to read that celestial heart, his voice, and he himself, trembled as he took the transparent, slender hand of the beautiful Diane with its curving finger-tips, and said,--"Are we now such friends that you will tell me what you have suffered?""Yes," she said, breathing forth the syllable like the most mellifluous note that Tulou's flute had ever sighed.

Then she fell into a revery, and her eyes were veiled.Daniel remained in a state of anxious expectation, impressed with the solemnity of the occasion.His poetic imagination made him see, as it were, clouds slowly dispersing and disclosing to him the sanctuary where the wounded lamb was kneeling at the divine feet.

"Well?" he said, in a soft, still voice.

Diane looked at the tender petitioner; then she lowered her eyes slowly, dropping their lids with a movement of noble modesty.None but a monster would have been capable of imagining hypocrisy in the graceful undulation of the neck with which the princess again lifted her charming head, to look once more into the eager eyes of that great man.

"Can I? ought I?" she murmured, with a gesture of hesitation, gazing at d'Arthez with a sublime expression of dreamy tenderness."Men have so little faith in things of this kind; they think themselves so little bound to be discreet!""Ah! if you distrust me, why am I here?" cried d'Arthez.

"Oh, friend!" she said, giving to the exclamation the grace of an involuntary avowal, "when a woman attaches herself for life, think you she calculates? It is not question of refusal (how could I refuse you anything?), but the idea of what you may think of me if I speak.Iwould willingly confide to you the strange position in which I am at my age; but what would you think of a woman who could reveal the secret wounds of her married life? Turenne kept his word to robbers;do I not owe to my torturers the honor of a Turenne?""Have you passed your word to say nothing?""Monsieur de Cadignan did not think it necessary to bind me to secrecy-- You are asking more than my soul! Tyrant! you want me to bury my honor itself in your breast," she said, casting upon d'Arthez a look, by which she gave more value to her coming confidence than to her personal self.

"You must think me a very ordinary man, if you fear any evil, no matter what, from me," he said, with ill-concealed bitterness.

"Forgive me, friend," she replied, taking his hand in hers caressingly, and letting her fingers wander gently over it."I know your worth.You have related to me your whole life; it is noble, it is beautiful, it is sublime, and worthy of your name; perhaps, in return, I owe you mine.But I fear to lower myself in your eyes by relating secrets which are not wholly mine.How can you believe--you, a man of solitude and poesy--the horrors of social life? Ah! you little think when you invent your dramas that they are far surpassed by those that are played in families apparently united.You are wholly ignorant of certain gilded sorrows.""I know all!" he cried.

"No, you know nothing."

D'Arthez felt like a man lost on the Alps of a dark night, who sees, at the first gleam of dawn, a precipice at his feet.He looked at the princess with a bewildered air, and felt a cold chill running down his back.Diane thought for a moment that her man of genius was a weakling, but a flash from his eyes reassured her.

"You have become to me almost my judge," she said, with a desperate air."I must speak now, in virtue of the right that all calumniated beings have to show their innocence.I have been, I am still (if a poor recluse forced by the world to renounce the world is still remembered) accused of such light conduct, and so many evil things, that it may be allowed me to find in one strong heart a haven from which I cannot be driven.Hitherto I have always considered self-justification an insult to innocence; and that is why I have disdained to defend myself.Besides, to whom could I appeal? Such cruel things can be confided to none but God or to one who seems to us very near Him--a priest, or another self.Well! I do know this, if my secrets are not as safe there," she said, laying her hand on d'Arthez's heart, "as they are here" (pressing the upper end of her busk beneath her fingers), "then you are not the grand d'Arthez I think you--I shall have been deceived."A tear moistened d'Arthez's eyes, and Diane drank it in with a side look, which, however, gave no motion either to the pupils or the lids of her eyes.It was quick and neat, like the action of a cat pouncing on a mouse.