He rose and went into his bedroom to make sure that the fire was burning brightly, then he returned and sat down, without even arranging his room as he had the other times. Now that he no longer cared for this woman, gallantry and self-consciousness had fled. He awaited her without impatience, his slippers on his feet.
"To tell the truth, I have had nothing pleasant from Hyacinthe except that kiss we exchanged when her husband was only a few feet away. I certainly shall not again find her lips a-flame and fragrant. Here her kiss is insipid."
Mme. Chantelouve rang earlier than usual.
"Well," she said, sitting down. "You wrote me a nice letter."
"How's that?"
"Confess frankly that you are through with me."
He denied this, but she shook her head.
"Well," he said, "what have you to reproach me with? Having written you only a short note? But there was someone here, I was busy and I didn't have time to assemble pretty speeches. Not having set a date sooner? I told you our relation necessitates precautions, and we can't see each other very often. I think I gave you clearly to understand my motives-"
"I am so stupid that I probably did not understand them. You spoke to me of 'family reasons,' I believe."
"Yes."
"Rather vague."
"Well, I couldn't go into detail and tell you that-"
He stopped, asking himself whether the time had come to break decisively with her, but he remembered that he wanted her aid in getting information about Docre.
"That what? Tell me."
He shook his head, hesitating, not to tell her a lie, but to insult and humiliate her.
"Well," he went on, "since you force me to do it, I will confess, at whatever cost, that I have had a mistress for several years-I add that our relations are now purely amical-"
"Very well," she interrupted, "your family reasons are sufficient."
"And then," he pursued, in a lower tone, "if you wish to know all, well-I have a child by her."
"A child! Oh, you poor dear." She rose. "Then there is nothing for me to do but withdraw."
But he seized her hands, and, at the same time satisfied with the success of his deception and ashamed of his brutality, he begged her to stay awhile. She refused. Then he drew her to him, kissed her hair, and cajoled her. Her troubled eyes looked deep into his.
"Ah, then!" she said. "No, let me undress."
"Not for the world!"
"Yes!"
"Oh, the scene of the other night beginning all over again," he murmured, sinking, overwhelmed, into a chair. He felt borne down, burdened by an unspeakable weariness.
He undressed beside the fire and warmed himself while waiting for her to get to bed. When they were in bed she enveloped him with her supple, cold limbs.
"Now is it true that I am to come here no more?"
He did not answer, but understood that she had no intention of going away and that he had to do with a person of the staying kind.
"Tell me."
He buried his head in her breast to keep from having to answer.
"Tell me in my lips."
He beset her furiously, to make her keep silent, then he lay disabused, weary, happy that it was over. When they lay down again she put her arm about his neck and ran her tongue around in his mouth like an auger, but he paid little heed to caresses and remained feeble and pathetic. Then she bent over, reached him, and he groaned.
"Ah!" she exclaimed suddenly, rising, "at last I have heard you cry!"
He lay, broken in body and spirit, incapable of thinking two thoughts in sequence. His brain seemed to whir, undone, in his skull.
He collected himself, however, rose and went into the other room to dress and let her do the same.
Through the drawn portière separating the two rooms he saw a little pinhole of light which came from the wax candle placed on the mantel opposite the curtain. Hyacinthe, going back and forth, would momentarily intercept this light, then it would flash out again.
"Ah," she said, "my poor darling, you have a child."
"The shot struck home," said he to himself, and aloud, "Yes, a little girl."
"How old?"
"She will soon be six," and he described her as flaxen-haired, lively, but in very frail health, requiring multiple precautions and constant care.
"You must have very sad evenings," said Mme. Chantelouve, in a voice of emotion, from behind the curtain.
"Oh yes! If I were to die tomorrow, what would become of those two unfortunates?"
His imagination took wing. He began himself to believe the mother and her. His voice trembled. Tears very nearly came to his eyes.
"He is unhappy, my darling is," she said, raising the curtain and returning, clothed, into the room. "And that is why he looks so sad, even when he smiles!"
He looked at her. Surely at that moment her affection was not feigned. She really clung to him. Why, oh, why, had she had to have those rages of lust? If it had not been for those they could probably have been good comrades, sin moderately together, and love each other better than if they wallowed in the sty of the senses. But no, such a relation was impossible with her, he concluded, seeing those sulphurous eyes, that ravenous, despoiling mouth.
She had sat down in front of his writing table and was playing with a penholder. "Were you working when I came in? Where are you in your history of Gilles de Rais?"
"I am getting along, but I am hampered. To make a good study of the Satanism of the Middle Ages one ought to get really into the environment, or at least fabricate a similar environment, by becoming acquainted with the practitioners of Satanism all about us-for the psychology is the same, though the operations differ." And looking her straight in the eye, thinking the story of the child had softened her, he hazarded all on a cast, "Ah! if your husband would give me the information he has about Canon Docre!"
She stood motionless, but her eyes clouded over. She did not answer.
"True," he said, "Chantelouve, suspecting our liaison-"
She interrupted him. "My husband has no concern with the relations which may exist between you and me. He evidently suffers when I go out, as tonight, for he knows where I am going; but I admit no right of control either on his part or mine. He is free, and I am free, to go wherever we please. I must keep house for him, watch out for his interests, take care of him, love him like a devoted companion, and that I do, with all my heart. As to being responsible for my acts, they're none of his business, no more his than anybody else's."
She spoke in a crisp, incisive tone.
"The devil;" said Durtal. "You certainly reduce the importance of the rôle of husband."
"I know that my ideas are not the ideas of the world I live in, and they appear not to be yours. In my first marriage they were a source of trouble and disaster-but I have an iron will and I bend the people who love me. In addition, I despise deceit, so when a few years after marriage I became smitten on a man I quite frankly told my husband and confessed my fault."
"Dare I ask you in what spirit he received this confidence?"
"He was so grieved that in one night his hair turned white. He could not bear what he called-wrongly, I think-my treason, and he killed himself."
"Ah!" said Durtal, dumbfounded by the placid and resolute air of this woman, "but suppose he had strangled you first?"
She shrugged her shoulders and picked a cat hair off her skirt.
"The result," he resumed after a silence, "being that you are now almost free, that your second husband tolerates-"
"Let us not discuss my second husband. He is an excellent man who deserves a better wife. I have absolutely no reason to speak of Chantelouve otherwise than with praise, and then-oh, let's talk of something else, for I have had sufficient botheration on this subject from my confessor, who interdicts me from the Holy Table."
He contemplated her, and saw yet another Hyacinthe, a hard, pertinacious woman whom he had not known. Not a sign nor an accent of emotion, nothing, while she was describing the suicide of her first husband-she did not even seem to imagine that she had a crime on her conscience. She remained pitiless, and yet, a moment ago, when she was commiserating him because of his fictitious parenthood, he had thought she was trembling. "After all, perhaps she is acting a part-like myself."