Camille, fils Alexandre Dumas [golden son ebook txt] 📗
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“You are mad,” replied Marguerite. “You know quite well that I don’t want you. It is no good at the end of two years to make love to a woman like me. With us, it is at once, or never. Come, gentlemen, supper!”
And, slipping away from Gaston, Marguerite made him sit on her right at table, me on her left, then called to Nanine:
“Before you sit down, tell them in the kitchen not to open to anybody if there is a ring.”
This order was given at one o’clock in the morning.
We laughed, drank, and ate freely at this supper. In a short while mirth had reached its last limit, and the words that seem funny to a certain class of people, words that degrade the mouth that utters them, were heard from time to time, amidst the applause of Nanine, of Prudence, and of Marguerite. Gaston was thoroughly amused; he was a very good sort of fellow, but somewhat spoiled by the habits of his youth. For a moment I tried to forget myself, to force my heart and my thoughts to become indifferent to the sight before me, and to take my share of that gaiety which seemed like one of the courses of the meal. But little by little I withdrew from the noise; my glass remained full, and I felt almost sad as I saw this beautiful creature of twenty drinking, talking like a porter, and laughing the more loudly the more scandalous was the joke.
Nevertheless, this hilarity, this way of talking and drinking, which seemed to me in the others the mere results of bad company or of bad habits, seemed in Marguerite a necessity of forgetting, a fever, a nervous irritability. At every glass of champagne her cheeks would flush with a feverish colour, and a cough, hardly perceptible at the beginning of supper, became at last so violent that she was obliged to lean her head on the back of her chair and hold her chest in her hands every time that she coughed. I suffered at the thought of the injury to so frail a constitution which must come from daily excesses like this. At length, something which I had feared and foreseen happened. Toward the end of supper Marguerite was seized by a more violent fit of coughing than any she had had while I was there. It seemed as if her chest were being torn in two. The poor girl turned crimson, closed her eyes under the pain, and put her napkin to her lips. It was stained with a drop of blood. She rose and ran into her dressing-room.
“What is the matter with Marguerite?” asked Gaston.
“She has been laughing too much, and she is spitting blood. Oh, it is nothing; it happens to her every day. She will be back in a minute. Leave her alone. She prefers it.”
I could not stay still; and, to the consternation of Prudence and Nanine, who called to me to come back, I followed Marguerite.”
The room to which she had fled was lit only by a single candle. She lay back on a great sofa, her dress undone, holding one hand on her heart, and letting the other hang by her side. On the table was a basin half full of water, and the water was stained with streaks of blood.
Very pale, her mouth half open, Marguerite tried to recover breath. Now and again her bosom was raised by a long sigh, which seemed to relieve her a little, and for a few seconds she would seem to be quite comfortable.
I went up to her; she made no movement, and I sat down and took the hand which was lying on the sofa.
“Ah! it is you,” she said, with a smile.
I must have looked greatly agitated, for she added:
“Are you unwell, too?”
“No, but you: do you still suffer?”
“Very little;” and she wiped off with her handkerchief the tears which the coughing had brought to her eyes; “I am used to it now.”
“You are killing yourself, madame,” I said to her in a moved voice. “I wish I were a friend, a relation of yours, that I might keep you from doing yourself harm like this.”
“Ah! it is really not worth your while to alarm yourself,” she replied in a somewhat bitter tone; “see how much notice the others take of me! They know too well that there is nothing to be done.”
Thereupon she got up, and, taking the candle, put it on the mantelpiece and looked at herself in the glass.
“How pale I am!” she said, as she fastened her dress and passed her fingers over her loosened hair. “Come, let us go back to supper. Are you coming?”
I sat still and did not move.
She saw how deeply I had been affected by the whole scene, and, coming up to me, held out her hand, saying:
“Come now, let us go.”
I took her hand, raised it to my lips, and in spite of myself two tears fell upon it.
“Why, what a child you are!” she said, sitting down by my side again. “You are crying! What is the matter?”
“I must seem very silly to you, but I am frightfully troubled by what I have just seen.”
“You are very good! What would you have of me? I can not sleep. I must amuse myself a little. And then, girls like me, what does it matter, one more or less? The doctors tell me that the blood I spit up comes from my throat; I pretend to believe them; it is all I can do for them.”
“Listen, Marguerite,” I said, unable to contain myself any longer; “I do not know what influence you are going to have over my life, but at this present moment there is no one, not even my sister, in whom I feel the interest which I feel in you. It has been just the same ever since I saw you. Well, for Heaven’s sake, take care of yourself, and do not live as you are living now.”
“If I took care of myself I should die. All that supports me is the feverish life I lead. Then, as for taking care of oneself, that is all very well for women with families and friends; as for us, from the moment we can no longer serve the vanity or the pleasure of our lovers, they leave us, and long nights follow long days. I know it. I was in bed for two months, and after three weeks no one came to see me.”
“It is true I am nothing to you,” I went on, “but if you will let me, I will look after you like a brother, I will never leave your side, and I will cure you. Then, when you are strong again, you can go back to the life you are leading, if you choose; but I am sure you will come to prefer a quiet life, which will make you happier and keep your beauty unspoiled.”
“You think like that tonight because the wine has made you sad, but you would never have the patience that you pretend to.”
“Permit me to say, Marguerite, that you were ill for two months, and that for two months I came to ask after you every day.”
“It is true, but why did you not come up?”
“Because I did not know you then.”
“Need you have been so particular with a girl like me?”
“One must always be particular with a woman; it is what I feel, at least.”
“So you would look after me?”
“Yes.”
“You would stay by me all day?”
“Yes.
“And even all night?”
“As long as I did not weary you.”
“And what do you call that?”
“Devotion.”
“And what does this devotion come from?”
“The irresistible sympathy which I have for you.”
“So you are in love with me? Say it straight out, it is much more simple.”
“It is possible; but if I am to say it to you one day, it is not to-day.”
“You will do better never to say it.”
“Why?”
“Because only one of two things can come of it.”
“What?”
“Either I shall not accept: then you will have a grudge against me; or I shall accept: then you will have a sorry mistress; a woman who is nervous, ill, sad, or gay with a gaiety sadder than grief, a woman who spits blood and spends a hundred thousand francs a year. That is all very well for a rich old man like the duke, but it is very bad for a young man like you, and the proof of it is that all the young lovers I have had have very soon left me.” I did not answer; I listened. This frankness, which was almost a kind of confession, the sad life, of which I caught some glimpse through the golden veil which covered it, and whose reality the poor girl sought to escape in dissipation, drink, and wakefulness, impressed me so deeply that I could not utter a single word.
“Come,” continued Marguerite, “we are talking mere childishness. Give me your arm and let us go back to the dining-room. They won’t know what we mean by our absence.”
“Go in, if you like, but allow me to stay here.”
“Why?”
“Because your mirth hurts me.”
“Well, I will be sad.”
“Marguerite, let me say to you something which you have no doubt often heard, so often that the habit of hearing it has made you believe it no longer, but which is none the less real, and which I will never repeat.”
“And that is … ?” she said, with the smile of a young mother listening to some foolish notion of her child.
“It is this, that ever since I have seen you, I know not why, you have taken a place in my life; that, if I drive the thought of you out of my mind, it always comes back; that when I met you to-day, after not having seen you for two years, you made a deeper impression on my heart and mind than ever; that, now that you have let me come to see you, now that I know you, now that I know all that is strange in you, you have become a necessity of my life, and you will drive me mad, not only if you will not love me, but if you will not let me love you.”
“But, foolish creature that you are, I shall say to you, like Mme. D., ‘You must be very rich, then!’ Why, you don’t know that I spend six or seven thousand francs a month, and that I could not live without it; you don’t know, my poor friend, that I should ruin you in no time, and that your family would cast you off if you were to live with a woman like me. Let us be friends, good friends, but no more. Come and see me, we will laugh and talk, but don’t exaggerate what I am worth, for I am worth very little. You have a good heart, you want some one to love you, you are too young and too sensitive to live in a world like mine. Take a married woman. You see, I speak to you frankly, like a friend.”
“But what the devil are you doing there?” cried Prudence, who had come in without our bearing her, and who now stood just inside the door, with her hair half coming down and her dress undone. I recognised the hand of Gaston.
“We are talking sense,” said Marguerite; “leave us alone; we will be
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