Cousin Bette (36 page)

‘He is at his studio.'

‘I came to discuss some work we are doing together.'

‘I'll send for him,' said Hortense, offering him a chair.

The young woman, inwardly thanking heaven for this chance, wanted to keep Stidmann, in order to hear some details about the party the evening before. Stidmann bowed in acknowledgement of the Countess's kindness. Madame Steinbock rang, the cook appeared and was told to go to the studio to fetch her master.

‘Did you have an enjoyable evening yesterday?' said Hortense. ‘Wenceslas didn't come in until after one in the morning.'

‘Enjoyable?… not really,' replied the artist, who had been anxious to
make
Madame Marneffe the evening before. ‘To find society enjoyable you have to have some special interest there. That little Madame Marneffe is certainly very clever, but she's a flirt.'

‘And what did Wenceslas think of her?' asked poor Hortense, endeavouring to remain calm. ‘He said nothing to me.'

‘I'll tell you only one thing about her,' replied Stidmann, ‘and that is that I think she's a very dangerous woman.'

Hortense grew as pale as a woman in childbirth.

‘So it was really… at Madame Marneffe's… and not at the Chanors' that you dined…' she said, ‘yesterday… with Wenceslas, and he…'

Stidmann, while not knowing what unlucky blunder he had made, saw that he had made one. The Countess could not finish her sentence, and fainted away. The artist rang the bell and the maid came.

When Louise tried to help Countess Steinbock to her room, she was seized with the hysterical convulsions of a severe nervous attack. Stidmann, like everyone whose unwitting indiscretion destroys the flimsy edifice of a husband's lie to his family, could not believe that what he had said could have caused such damage. He thought that the Countess must be in a delicate state of health in which it was dangerous to vex her in any way. The cook returned and said, in a loud voice, unfortunately, that Monsieur was not in his studio. Half-fainting as she was, the Countess heard this announcement, and hysterics began again.

‘Fetch Madame's mother!' said Louise to the cook. ‘Hurry!'

‘If I knew where to find Wenceslas, I would go and tell him,' said Stidmann, in desperation.

‘He's with that woman!' cried poor Hortense. ‘He's dressed very differently from the way he dresses when he goes to his studio.'

Stidmann hurried to the rue Vanneau, realizing that with passion's second sight Hortense had divined the truth. At that moment Valérie was posing as Delilah.

Too wary to ask for Madame Marneffe, Stidmann walked
straight past the porters' lodge and rapidly upstairs to the second floor, reasoning thus to himself: ‘If I ask for Madame Marneffe, she will be not at home. If I ask for Steinbock, like a fool, they will laugh in my face.… Better take the bull by the horns!'

Reine answered his ring.

‘Tell Count Steinbock to come at once. His wife is dying!'

Reine, as wide awake as Stidmann, stared at him in stupid incomprehension. ‘But, Monsieur, I don't understand. What do you…'

‘I tell you, my friend Steinbock is here, and his wife is dying. The matter is serious enough to be worth disturbing your mistress for.'

And Stidmann turned away.

‘Oh, he's there all right!' he said to himself. He loitered for a few minutes in the street, and as he expected, saw Wenceslas emerge, and beckoned to him to come quickly. Stidmann told him of the tragic scene at the house in the rue Saint-Dominique, and then reproached Steinbock for not having warned him to keep quiet about the dinner the evening before.

‘I'm done for,' replied Wenceslas; ‘but it's not your fault. I completely forgot our appointment for this morning, and I stupidly omitted to tell you that we were supposed to have dined with Florent. That's how things happen! That Valérie drove everything out of my mind. But you know my dear fellow, she's a prize as much worth having as fame, she's worth unlucky accidents like this.… Ah! she's… My God! I'm in a terrible fix. Advise me. What am I to say? What excuses can I make?'

‘Advise you? I don't know how to,' said Stidmann. ‘But your wife loves you, doesn't she? Well then, she'll believe anything. At least you can tell her that you were on your way to see me while I was calling on you, and that will keep this morning's sitting dark. Good-bye!'

At the corner of the rue Hillerin-Bertin they were joined by Lisbeth, who, warned by Reine, had hurried after Steinbock, for she did not want to be compromised, and was afraid of what in his Polish naïveté he might say. She spoke a few words to Wenceslas, who in his relief hugged her in the
open street. She had no doubt thrown him a floating spar to help him to cross these conjugal narrows.

On seeing her mother, who had come in all haste, Hortense had shed floods of tears, and her state of nervous tension was to some extent relieved.

‘Wenceslas has deceived me, Mama!' she said. ‘After giving me his word not to visit Madame Marneffe, he dined there yesterday, and he didn't come home until a quarter past one in the morning! If you only knew how we had talked to each other the day before, not having a quarrel but making our feelings clear. I had said such touching things to him; that I was jealous by nature and an infidelity would kill me; I was quick to feel suspicion, but that he ought to respect my weaknesses since they came from my love for him; in my veins I had as much of my father's blood as of yours; at the first discovery of an infidelity I should be beside myself and capable of anything, taking my revenge, dishonouring us all, him and his son and myself – truly I might kill him and then myself; and a great deal more. And yet he went there, and he's there now! That woman has made up her mind to destroy us all! Yesterday my brother and Célestine made themselves responsible for redeeming bills for seventy-two thousand francs drawn for the benefit of that abominable woman – Yes, Mama, they were going to sue my father and send him to prison. Is that horrible creature not content with my father, and with your tears? Must she take Wenceslas too? I'll go to her house and stab her!'

Madame Hulot, stricken to the heart by the heart-rending secret that Hortense had unthinkingly blurted out in her fury, controlled her feelings by such a heroic effort as truly great mothers are capable of. She drew her daughter's head to her breast and kissed her tenderly.

‘Wait till Wenceslas comes, child, and he will explain everything. Things are probably not so bad as you think! I have been deceived too, my dear Hortense. You think me beautiful, and I have been faithful, and yet for the last twenty-three years I have been deserted for Jenny Cadines, and Joséphas, and Marneffes! Did you know?'

‘You, Mama, you! You have endured that for twenty-…' She stopped, aghast at her own thoughts.

‘Follow my example, child,' her mother went on. ‘Be gentle and kind, and your conscience will be at peace. On his deathbed a man may say “My wife has never caused me the smallest pain!” And God hears those last sighs, and counts them as blessings. If I had given way to rages, like you, what would have happened? Your father would have grown bitter; perhaps he might have left me, and he would not have been restrained by the fear of hurting me. Our ruin, which is complete now, would have been so ten years ago, and we should have presented the spectacle to the world of a husband and wife living selfishly apart – a dreadful and heartbreaking scandal, because it means the death of the Family. Neither your brother nor you would have been able to get a start in life.… I sacrificed myself, and did so with sufficient spirit to make the world go on believing, until this latest liaison of your father's, that I was happy. The bold front I cheerfully maintained has protected Hector until now; he is still respected; only this passion of his old age carries him too far, I see. I dread that his folly may break down the screen I placed between us and the world.… But I have held it there for twenty-three years, a curtain behind which I have wept, without a mother or a friend to confide in, with no support but that given by religion, and I have procured twenty-three years of honourable life for the family.'

Hortense listened to her mother with her eyes held fixed. The calm voice and the resignation of that supreme suffering made her no longer feel the sting of a young wife's first wound. Tears overcame her, flowing in torrents. On an impulse of daughterly devotion, overwhelmed by her mother's sublime nobility, she knelt at her feet, seized the hem of her dress and kissed it, as pious Catholics kiss the holy relics of a martyr.

‘Come, don't kneel, my Hortense,' said the Baroness; ‘such a testimony of my daughter's love wipes out some very bitter memories. Let me put my arms round you and hold you to my heart, a heart that is full only of your grief. Your happiness was my only joy, my poor little girl, and your despair
has broken the seal placed on my lips, that should have remained as silent as the grave. Indeed it was my wish to take my sorrows with me to the tomb, wrapped secretly round me like a second shroud. In order to quiet your frenzy I have spoken.… God will forgive me. Oh, if you were to live the life that I have lived, I do not know what I should do! Men, society, the chances of life, the nature of human beings, God himself, I feel, grant us love at a cost of the most cruel suffering. I shall have paid with twenty-four years of despair, unending sorrow, and bitterness, for ten years of happiness.…'

‘You had ten years, dear Mama; I've had only three I' observed Hortense, with the egoism of her own love.

‘Nothing is lost yet, child. Wait until Wenceslas comes.'

‘Mother,' she said, ‘he has lied! He has deceived me. He said to me “I shall not go”, and he went. And that before his child's cradle!'

‘For the sake of their pleasure, men are capable of the utmost wickedness, my angel, the most shameful and dastardly acts. It is part of their nature, so it seems. We wives are destined sacrifices. I believed the tale of my miseries to be complete, and they are just beginning; I did not expect to suffer in the same way again through my daughter. But we must suffer with courage and in silence!… My Hortense, swear to me never to speak of your sorrows to anyone but me, to let no hint of them be seen by any third person.… Oh! be as proud as your mother!'

At this moment Hortense started, for she heard her husband's step.

‘It appears,' said Wenceslas, coming in, ‘that Stidmann came here, looking for me, while I was at his house.'

‘Is that so?' exclaimed poor Hortense, with the bitter sarcasm of an injured woman using words as a weapon.

‘Yes, indeed; we have just met,' replied Wenceslas, feigning surprise.

‘What about yesterday?' Hortense went on.

‘Well, I deceived you there, my dearest love, and your mother shall judge…'

Such candour was a relief to Hortense's spirit. All really noble women prefer the truth to a soothing lie. They hate to
see their idol with feet of clay, it is true; they want to be able to be proud of the man whose domination over them they accept. Russians have something of the same feeling with regard to their Czar.

‘Listen, dear Mother,' said Wenceslas. ‘I love my sweet good Hortense so much that I kept the full extent of our difficulties from her. What else could I do? She was still nursing our baby, and worries would have done her a lot of harm. You know what risks a woman runs at such a time – her beauty and bloom and her health may be damaged. Was I wrong? She thinks that we owe only five thousand francs, but I owe five thousand more than that. The day before yesterday we were in despair! No one in the world wants to lend an artist money. People believe in our talent about as readily as they believe in the fantastic creations we imagine. I knocked in vain on every door. Lisbeth offered us her savings.'

‘Poor soul!' said Hortense.

‘Poor soul!' the Baroness repeated.

‘But Lisbeth's two thousand francs, what did that amount to? Her all to her, but a drop in the ocean to us. Then our cousin spoke to us, you remember, Hortense, about Madame Marneffe, who, as a matter of self-respect, owing so much as she does to the Baron, would not take any interest at all.… Hortense wanted to pawn her diamonds. We should have had a few thousand francs, and we needed ten thousand. Those ten thousand francs were there for the taking, without interest, for a year! I said to myself, “Hortense doesn't have to know about it. I'll go and take them.” That woman sent me an invitation, through my father-in-law, to dinner yesterday, giving me to understand that Lisbeth had spoken to her and that I should have the money. Between seeing Hortense in despair and going to that dinner, I did not hesitate. That's all. How Hortense could imagine, at twenty-four years of age, fresh, pure, and faithful as she is, she who is my whole happiness and my pride, with whom I have spent all my days since we were married, how could she imagine that I could prefer to her, what?… a woman jaded, faded,
raddled
!…' he said, using vulgar studio slang to demonstrate his utter
contempt, by the kind of exaggeration that pleases women.

‘Ah I if your father had only spoken to me like that!' exclaimed the Baroness.

Hortense, as an act of grace and forgiveness, put her arms round her husband's neck.

‘Yes, that's what I would have done,' said Adeline. ‘Wenceslas, my boy, your wife was at death's door,' she went on, gravely. ‘You see how much she loves you. She is yours, alas!' And she sighed deeply.

‘He has the power to make a martyr of her, or a happy woman,' she said to herself, with the thoughts all mothers have when their daughters marry. ‘It seems to me,' she added aloud, ‘that I suffer sufficiently myself to be allowed to see my children happy.'

‘Set your mind at rest, dear Mama,' said Wenceslas, overjoyed to see this tempest happily ended. ‘Within two months I shall have repaid the money to that horrible woman. Life is like that!' he went on, repeating the typically Polish phrase with Polish grace. ‘There are times when a man would borrow from the devil. After all, the money belongs to the family. And, since she had invited me, should I have had the money that has cost us so dear if I had answered a polite gesture with rudeness?'