Rénine suddenly interrupted himself. It seemed to him that all his remarks were falling on deaf ears. Hortense had put her hand to her forehead and, thus veiling her eyes, sat motionless and remote.
She was indeed not listening. The end of this particular adventure and the manner in which Rénine had acted on this occasion no longer interested her. What she was thinking of was the complex series of adventures amid which she had been living for the past three months and the wonderful behavior of the man who had offered her his devotion. She saw, as in a magic picture, the fabulous deeds performed by him, all the good that he had done, the lives saved, the sorrows assuaged, the order restored wherever his masterly will had been brought to bear. Nothing was impossible to him. What he undertook to do he did. Every aim that he set before him was attained in advance. And all this without excessive effort, with the calmness of one who knows his own strength and knows that nothing can resist it.
Then what could she do against him? Why should she defend herself and how? If he demanded that she should yield, would he not know how to make her do so and would this last adventure be any more difficult for him than the others? Supposing that she ran away: did the wide world contain a retreat in which she would be safe from his pursuit? From the first moment of their first meeting, the end was certain, since Rénine had decreed that it should be so.
However, she still cast about for weapons, for protection of some sort, and she said to herself that, though he had fulfilled the eight conditions and restored the cornelian clasp to her before the eighth hour had struck, she was nevertheless protected by the fact that this eighth hour was to strike on the clock of the Château de Halingre and not elsewhere. It was a formal compact. Rénine had said that day, gazing on the lips which he longed to kiss:
“The old brass pendulum will start swinging again; and, when, on the fixed date, the clock once more eight, then...”
She looked up. He was not moving either but sat solemnly, patiently waiting.
She was on the point of saying, she was even preparing her words:
“You know, our agreement says it must be the Halingre clock. All the other conditions have been fulfilled... but not this one. So I am free, am I not? I am entitled not to keep my promise, which, moreover, I never made, but which in any case falls to the ground?... And I am perfectly free... released from any scruple of conscience?”
She had not time to speak. At that precise moment there was a click behind her, like that of a clock about to strike.
A first stroke sounded, then a second, then a third.
Hortense moaned. She had recognized the very sound of the old clock, the Halingre clock, which three months ago, by breaking in a supernatural manner the silence of the deserted château, had set both of them on the road of the eight adventures.
She counted the strokes. The clock struck eight.
“Ah!” she murmured, half swooning and hiding her face in her hands. “The clock... the clock is here... the one from over there... I recognize its voice.”
She said no more. She felt that Rénine had his eyes fixed upon her, and this sapped all her energies. Besides, had she been able to recover them, she would have been no better off nor sought to offer him the least resistance for the reason that she did not wish to resist. All the adventures were over, but one remained to be undertaken, the anticipation of which wiped out the memory of all the rest. It was the adventure of love, the most delightful, the most bewildering, the most adorable of all adventures. She accepted fate’s decree, rejoicing in all that might come, because she was in love. She smiled in spite of herself as she reflected that happiness was again to enter her life at the very moment when her well-beloved was bringing her the cornelian clasp.
The clock struck the hour for the second time.
Hortense raised her eyes to Rénine. She struggled a few seconds longer. But she was like a charmed bird, incapable of any movement of revolt; and at the eighth stroke she fell upon his breast and offered him her lips...