His Excellency the Minister Part 66

Vaudrey turned round abruptly, instinctively pus.h.i.+ng aside Molina's prospectus, as if he already felt some shame in holding it in his hands.

He flushed as he recognized Adrienne.

The young woman's reserved att.i.tude showed absolute firmness. She came to say adieu, she was about to leave.

He had not even the energy to keep her. He was afraid of an unbending reply that would have been an outrage.

"Do you intend to become a.s.sociated with Molina?" Adrienne asked in a clear voice, as she looked at Sulpice, who had risen.

"What! Molina?" he stammered.

"Yes, oh! he understands business. On leaving, he called on me. He thought that I had still sufficient influence over you to urge you, as he says, to make your fortune. He told me that you were in want of money, and after having been sharp enough to try the husband, he offered me, as you might give a commission to a courtesan, I do not know what emerald ornament, if I would advise you to accept his proposals!--That gentleman does not know the people with whom he is dealing!"

"Wretch!" said Vaudrey. "He did that?"

"And I thanked him," Adrienne replied calmly. "I did not know that you had debts and that, in order to pay them, you had come so near accepting the patronage of such a man. He told me so and he rendered me and you a service."

"Me?"

Vaudrey s.n.a.t.c.hed up the prospectus of the Algerian gas and angrily tore it in pieces.

"We shall probably not see each other again," said Adrienne, in a firm voice that contrasted strangely with her gentle grace; "but I shall never forget that I bear your name and that being mine, I will ever honor it."

She handed Sulpice a doc.u.ment.

"Here is a power of attorney to Monsieur Beauvais, my notary. All that you need of my dowry to free yourself from liabilities is yours. I do not wish to know why you have incurred debts, I am anxious only to know that you have paid them, and my signature provides you with the means to do so."

Dejected, his heart burning, and his sobs rising, Sulpice uttered a loud cry as he rushed toward her:

"Adrienne!"

She withdrew her hand slowly while he was trying to seize it.

"You have nothing to thank me for," she said. "I am a partner, saving, as I best can, the honor of the house. That a.s.sociation is better than Molina's."

"Adieu," she added bitterly.

"Are you going--? Going away?" asked Sulpice, trying to give to his entreaty something like an echo of the love of the former days.

"Whose fault is it?" replied the young woman, in a voice as chilly as steel.

She was no longer the Adrienne of old, the little timid provincial with blus.h.i.+ng cheek and trembling gesture. Sorrow, the most terrible of disillusions, had hardened and, as it were, petrified her. Vaudrey felt that to ask forgiveness would be in vain. Time only could soften that poor woman, obstinately unbending in her grief. He needed but to observe her att.i.tude and cutting tones to fully realize that.

"It is quite understood," she continued, treating this question of her happiness as if she were cutting deep into her flesh and severing the tenderest fibres of her being, but without trembling,--"it is quite understood, is it not, that we shall make no scene or scandal? We are separated neither judicially nor even in appearance. We live apart by mutual consent, far from each other, without anything being known by outsiders of this definitive rupture."

"Adrienne!" Sulpice repeated, "it is impossible, you will not leave!"

"Oh!" she said. "I gave myself and I have taken myself back. Your entreaties will not now alter my determination. I am eager to leave Paris. It seems to me that I have regained myself and that I escape from falsity, lies, and infamy, and from a swarm of insects that crawl over my body!--I bid you farewell, and farewell it is!"

"Well, let it be so!" exclaimed Vaudrey. "Go! But if it is a stranger who leaves me, I will accept nothing from her. Here is the authority.

Will you take it back?"

"I? No, I will not take it back! If you desire me to be worthy of the name that you have given me, keep it honored, at least, in the sight of the world, since to betray a woman, to mock and insult her, is not dishonoring. I alone have the right to save you from shame. Do not deny me the privilege that I claim. I do not desire that the man who has been my husband should descend to the questionable intrigues of a Molina.

You have outraged me enough, do not impose this last insult on me!"

"For the last time, adieu!"

She went out, and he allowed her to disappear, overwhelmed by this living mourning of a faith. She fled and he allowed her to descend the stairway, followed by her femme de chambre. She entered the carriage that was waiting for her below, in Rue Chaussee-d'Antin, but he had not the courage, hopeless as he was, to follow the carriage whose rumbling he heard above the noise of the street as it rolled away more quickly and more heavily than the others, and it seemed to him that its wheels had crushed his bosom.

"Ah! what a wretch I have been!" he said as he struck his knee with his closed fist. "How unhappy I am! Adrienne!"

He rose abruptly, as if moved by a spring, and bounded toward a window which he threw wide open to admit the cold wind of this November evening, and tried to distinguish among the many carriages that rolled through the brownish mud, with their lighted lamps s.h.i.+ning like so many eyes, to discover, to imagine the carriage that was bearing Adrienne away. He believed that he recognized it in a vehicle that was threading its way, loaded with trunks, almost out of sight yonder.

He leaned upon the window-sill, and like a s.h.i.+pwrecked sailor who sees a receding s.h.i.+p, he called out, with a loud cry lost in the tempest of that bustling and busy street:

"Adrienne! Adrienne!"

No reply! The carriage had disappeared in the distance, in the fog.

For a moment, Sulpice remained there crushed but drawn by the noise of the street, as if by some whirlpool in the deep sea. Had he been thrown out and been dashed upon the pavements, he would have been happy. Only a void seemed about him, and before him that black hollow in which moved confusedly only strangers who in no way formed part of his life.

This isolation terrified him. At last, he went downstairs in haste, threw himself into a carriage and had himself driven to the railway, intending to see Adrienne again.

"Quickly! quickly! at your best speed!"

The driver whipped up his horses and the carriage-windows clattered with the noise of old iron.

Vaudrey arrived too late. The train had left twenty minutes before. He had reflected too long at his window.

"Besides," he said to himself sadly, "she would not have forgiven me!

She will never forget!"

Buried in the corner of the coach that took her away, and closing her eyes, recalling all her past life, so cruelly ironical to-day, Adrienne, disturbed by the noise and rolling of the train that increased her feverish condition, felt her heart swell, and poor, broken creature that she was, called all her strength to her aid to refrain from weeping, from crying out in her grief. She was taking away, back to the country, the half-withered Christmas roses received from Gren.o.ble, and in the morbid confusion of the ideas that clashed in her poor brain, she saw once more Lissac's blanched face and heard Guy tell her again: "It is because you are a virtuous woman that I love you!"

"A virtuous woman! Does he know how to love as well as the others?" she murmured, as she thought of Vaudrey whom she would never see again, and whom she no longer loved.

"See! I am a widow now, and a widow who will never love anyone, and who will never marry again."

VIII

Alone in Paris now, a body without a soul, distracted, and the prey of ennui, with sad and bitter regret for his wasted life, repeating to himself that Adrienne, far away from him, would never forgive, and was doubtless, at this moment, saying and saying again to herself in her solitude at Gren.o.ble, that these politicians, at least, owed her divorce, Vaudrey, not knowing what to do after a weary day of troubled rest, mechanically entered the Opera House to distract his eyes if not his mind.

They were rendering _Aida_ that evening, and a debutante had been announced as a star.