Erotic Classics I

by Various Authors

  “Poor Ralph!” he thought as he ascended the secret staircase with a bold, light step, “you would have it so!”

  Part Third

  Chapter XVII

  On leaving Sir Ralph, Madame Delmare had locked herself into her room, and a thousand tempestuous thoughts had invaded her mind. It was not the first time that a vague suspicion had cast its ominous light upon the fragile edifice of her happiness. Monsieur Delmare had previously let slip in conversation some of those indelicate jests which pass for compliments. He had complimented Raymon on his knightly triumphs in a way to give the cue to ears that knew naught of the incident. Every time that Madame Delmare had spoken to the gardener, Noun’s name had been injected, as if by an unavoidable necessity, into the most trivial details, and then Monsieur de Ramière’s had always glided in by virtue of some mysterious junction of ideas which seemed to have taken possession of the man’s brain and to beset him in spite of himself. Madame Delmare had been struck by his strange and bungling questions. He became confused in his speech on the slightest pretext; he seemed to be oppressed by a burden of remorse which he betrayed while struggling to conceal it. At other times Indiana had found in Raymon’s own confusion those indications which she did not seek, but which forced themselves upon her. One circumstance in particular would have enlightened her further, if she had not closed her mind to all distrust. They had found on Noun’s finger a very handsome ring which Madame Delmare had noticed some time before her death and which the girl claimed to have found. Since her death Madame Delmare had always worn that pledge of sorrow, and she had often noticed that Raymon changed color when he took her hand to put it to his lips. Once he had begged her never to mention Noun to him because he looked upon himself as the cause of her death; and when she sought to banish that painful thought by taking all the blame to herself, he had replied:

  “No, my poor Indiana, do not accuse yourself; you have no idea how guilty I am.”

  Those words, uttered in a bitter, gloomy tone, had alarmed Madame Delmare. She had not dared to insist, and, now that she was beginning to understand all these fragments of discoveries, she had not the courage to fix her thoughts upon them and put them together.

  She opened her window, and, as she looked out upon the calm night, upon the moon so pale and lovely behind the silvery vapors on the horizon, as she remembered that Raymon was coming, that he was perhaps in the park even now, and thought of all the joy she had anticipated in that hour of love and mystery, she cursed Ralph who with a word had poisoned her hope and destroyed her repose forever. She even felt that she hated him, the unhappy man who had been a father to her and who had sacrificed his future for her; for his future was Indiana’s friendship; that was his only treasure, and he resigned himself to the certainty of forfeiting it in order to save her.

  Indiana could not read in the depths of his heart, nor had she been able to fathom Raymon’s. She was unjust, not from ingratitude, but from ignorance. Being under the influence of a strong passion she could not but feel strongly the blow that had been dealt her. For an instant she laid the whole crime upon Ralph, preferring to accuse him rather than to suspect Raymon.

  And then she had so little time to collect her thoughts, and make up her mind: Raymon was coming. Perhaps it was he whom she had seen for some minutes wandering about the little bridge. How much more intense would her aversion for Ralph have been at that moment, if she could have recognized him in that vague figure, which constantly appeared and disappeared in the mist, and which, like a spirit stationed at the gate of the Elysian Fields, sought to keep the guilty man from entering!

  Suddenly there came to her mind one of those strange, half-formed ideas, which only restless and unhappy persons are capable of conceiving. She risked her whole destiny upon a strange and delicate test against which Raymon could not be on his guard. She had hardly completed her mysterious preparations when she heard Raymon’s footsteps on the secret stairway. She ran and unlocked the door, then returned to her chair, so agitated that she felt that she was on the point of falling; but, as in all the great crises of her life, she retained a remarkable clearness of perception and great strength of mind.

  Raymon was still pale and breathless when he opened the door; impatient to see the light, to grasp reality once more. Indiana’s back was turned to him, she was wrapped in a fur-lined pelisse. By a strange chance it was the same that Noun wore when she went to meet him in the park at their last rendezvous. I do not know if you remember that at that time Raymon had had for an instant the untenable idea that that woman shrouded in her cloak was Madame Delmare. Now, when he saw once more the same apparition sitting inert in a chair, with her head on her breast, by the light of a pale, flickering lamp, on the same spot where so many memories awaited him, in that room which he had not entered since the darkest night in his life and which was full to overflowing of his remorse, he involuntarily recoiled and remained in the doorway, his terrified gaze fixed upon that motionless figure, and trembling like a coward, lest, when it turned, it should display the livid features of a drowned woman.

  Madame Delmare had no suspicion of the effect she produced upon Raymon. She had wound about her head a handkerchief of India silk, tied carelessly in true creole style; it was Noun’s usual headdress. Raymon, fairly overcome by terror, nearly fell backward, thinking that his superstitious fancies were realized. But, recognizing the woman he had come to seduce, he forgot the one whom he had seduced and walked toward her. Her face wore a grave, meditative expression: she gazed earnestly at him, but with close attention rather than affection, and did not make a motion to draw him to her side more quickly.

  Raymon, surprised by this reception, attributed it to some scruple of chastity, to some girlish impulse of delicacy or constraint. He knelt at her feet, saying:

  “Are you afraid of me, my beloved?” But at that moment he noticed that Madame Delmare held something in her hands to which she seemed to direct his attention with a playful affectation of gravity. He looked more closely and saw a mass of black hair, of varying lengths, which seemed to have been cut in haste, and which Indiana was smoothing with her hand.

  “Do you recognize it?” she asked, fastening upon him her limpid eyes, in which there was a peculiar, penetrating gleam.

  Raymon hesitated, looked again at the handkerchief about her head, and thought that he understood.

  “Naughty girl!” he said, taking the hair in his hand, “why did you cut it off? It was so beautiful, and I loved it so dearly!”

  “You asked me yesterday,” she said with the shadow of a smile, “if I would sacrifice it to you.”

  “O Indiana!” cried Raymon, “you know well that you will be lovelier than ever to me henceforth. Give it to me. I do not choose to regret the absence from your head of that glorious hair which I admired every day, and which now I can kiss every day without restraint. Give it to me, so that it may never leave me.”

  But as he gathered up in his hand that luxuriant mass of which some locks reached to the floor, Raymon fancied that it had a dry, rough feeling which his fingers had never noticed in the silken tresses over Indiana’s forehead. He was conscious, also, of an indefinable nervous thrill, it felt so cold and dead, as if it had been cut a long time, and seemed to have lost its perfumed moisture and vital warmth. Then he looked at it again, and sought in vain the blue gleam which made Indiana’s hair resemble the blue-black wing of the crow; this was of an Ethiopian black, of an Indian texture, of a lifeless heaviness.

  Indiana’s bright piercing eyes followed Raymon’s. He turned them involuntarily upon an open ebony casket from which several locks of the same hair protruded.

  “This is not yours,” he said, untying the kerchief which concealed Madame Delmare’s hair.

  It was untouched, and fell over her shoulders in all its splendor. But she made a gesture as if to push him away and said, still pointing to the hair:

  “Don’t you rec
ognize this? Did you never admire, never caress it? Has the damp night air robbed it of all its fragrance? Have you not a thought, a tear for her who wore this ring?”

  Raymon sank upon a chair; Noun’s locks fell from his trembling hand. So much painful excitement had exhausted him. He was a man of choleric temper, whose blood flowed rapidly, whose nerves were easily and deeply irritated. He shivered from head to foot and fell in a swoon on the floor.

  When he came to himself, Madame Delmare was on her knees beside him, weeping copiously and asking his forgiveness; but Raymon no longer loved her.

  “You have inflicted a horrible wound on me,” he said; “a wound which it is not in your power to cure. You will never restore the confidence I had in your heart; that is evident to me. You have shown me how vindictive and cruel your heart can be. Poor Noun! poor unhappy girl! It was she whom I treated badly, not you; it was she who had the right to avenge herself, and she did not. She took her own life in order to leave me the future. She sacrificed herself to my repose. You are not the woman to have done as much, madame! Give me her hair; it is mine—it belongs to me; it is all that remains to me of the only woman who ever loved me truly. Unhappy Noun! you were worthy of a better love! And you, madame, dare to reproach me with her death; you, whom I loved so well that I forgot her—that I defied the ghastly torture of remorse; you who, on the faith of a kiss, have led me across that river—across that bridge—alone, with terror at my side, pursued by the infernal illusions of my crime! And when you discover with what a frantic passion I love you, you bury your woman’s nails in my heart, seeking there another drop of blood which may still be made to flow for you! Ah! when I spurned so devoted a love to take up with so savage a passion as yours, I was no less mad than guilty.”

  Madame Delmare did not reply. Pale and motionless, with dishevelled hair and staring eyes, she moved Raymon to pity. He took her hand.

  “And yet,” he said, “this love I feel for you is so blind that, in spite of myself, I can still forget the past and the present—the sin that blasted my life and the crime you have just committed. So love me, and I will forgive you.”

  Madame Delmare’s despair rekindled desire and pride in her lover’s heart. When he saw how dismayed she was at the thought of losing his love—how humble before him, how resigned to accept his decrees for the future by way of atonement for the past—he remembered what his intentions had been when he eluded Ralph’s vigilance, and he realized all the advantages of his position. He pretended to be absorbed in a melancholy, sombre reverie for some moments; he hardly responded to Indiana’s tears and caresses. He waited until her heart should break and overflow in sobs, until she should realize all the horrors of desertion—until she should have exhausted all her strength in heart-rending emotion; and then, when he saw her at his feet, fainting, utterly worn out, awaiting death at a word from him, he seized her in his arms with convulsive passion and strained her to his heart. She yielded like a weak child; she abandoned her lips to him unresistingly. She was almost dead.

  But suddenly, as if waking from a dream, she snatched herself away from his burning caresses, rushed to the end of the room where Sir Ralph’s portrait hung on the panel; and, as if she would place herself under the protection of that grave personage with the unruffled brow and tranquil lips, she shrank back against the portrait, wild-eyed, quivering from head to foot, in the clutches of a strange fear. It was this that made Raymon think that she had been deeply moved in his arms—that she was afraid of herself—that she was his. He ran to her; drew her by force from her retreat, and told her that he had come with the purpose of keeping his promises, but that her cruel treatment of him had absolved him from his oath.

  “I am no longer either your slave or your ally,” he said. “I am simply the man who loves you madly and who has you in his arms, a wicked, capricious, cruel, mad creature, but lovely and adored. With sweet, confiding words you might have cooled my blood. Had you been as calm and generous as yesterday, you would have made me mild and submissive as usual. But you have kindled all my passions, overturned all my ideas. You have made me unhappy, cowardly, ill, frantic, desperate, one after another. You must make me happy now, or I feel that I can no longer believe in you—that I can no longer love you or bless you. Forgive me, Indiana, forgive me! If I frighten you it is your own fault; you have made me suffer so that I have lost my reason!”

  Indiana trembled in every limb. She knew so little of life that she believed resistance to be impossible; she was ready to concede from fear what she would refuse from love; but, as she struggled feebly in Raymon’s arms, she said, in desperation:

  “So you are capable of using force with me?”

  Raymon paused, impressed with this moral resistance, which survived physical resistance. He hastily pushed her away.

  “Never!” he cried: “I would rather die than possess you except by your own will!”

  He threw himself on his knees, and all that the mind can supply in place of the heart, all the poesy that the imagination can impart to the ardor of the blood, he expressed in a fervent and dangerous entreaty. And when he saw that she did not surrender, he yielded to necessity and reproached her with not loving him; a commonplace expedient which he despised and which made him smile, with a feeling of something like shame at having to do with a woman so innocent as not to smile at it herself.

  That reproach went to Indiana’s heart more swiftly than all the exclamations with which Raymon had embellished his discourse.

  But suddenly she remembered.

  “Raymon,” she said, “the other, who loved you so dearly—of whom we were speaking just now—she refused you nothing, I suppose?”

  “Nothing!” exclaimed Raymon, annoyed by this inopportune reminder. “Instead of reminding me of her so continually, you would do well to make me forget how dearly she loved me!”

  “Listen!” rejoined Indiana, thoughtfully and gravely; “have a little courage, for I must say something more. Perhaps you have not been as guilty towards me as I thought. It would be sweet to me to be able to forgive you for what I considered a mortal insult. Tell me then—when I surprised you here—for whom did you come? for her or for me?”

  Raymon hesitated; then, as he thought that the truth would soon be known to Madame Delmare, that perhaps she knew it already, he answered:

  “For her.”

  “Well, I prefer it so,” she said sadly; “I prefer an infidelity to an insult. Be frank to the end, Raymon. How long had you been in my room when I came? Remember that Ralph knows all, and that, if I chose to question him—”

  “There is no need of Sir Ralph’s testimony, madame. I had been here since the night before.”

  “And you had passed the night in this room. Your silence is a sufficient answer.”

  They both remained silent for some moments; then Indiana rose and was about to continue, when a sharp knock at the door checked the flow of the blood in her veins. Neither she nor Raymon dared to breathe.

  A paper was slipped under the door. It was a leaf from a note-book on which these words were scrawled in pencil, almost illegibly:

  “Your husband is here.

  “RALPH.”

  Chapter XVIII

  “This is a wretchedly devised falsehood,” said Raymon, as soon as the sound of Ralph’s footsteps had died away. “Sir Ralph needs a lesson, and I will administer it in such shape—”

  “I forbid it,” said Indiana, in a cold, determined tone: “my husband is here: Ralph never lied. You and I are lost. There was a time when the thought would have frozen me with horror; today it matters little to me!”

  “Very well!” said Raymon, seizing her in his arms excitedly, “since death encompasses us, be mine! Forgive everything, and let your last word in this supreme moment be a word of love, my last breath a breath of joy.”

  “This moment of terror and courage might have been the sweetest
moment in my life,” she said, “but you have spoiled it for me.”

  There was a rumbling of wheels in the farmyard, and the bell at the gate of the château was rung by a strong and impatient hand.

  “I know that ring,” said Indiana, watchful and cool. “Ralph did not lie; but you have time to escape; go!”

  “I will not,” cried Raymon; “I suspect some despicable treachery and you shall not be the only victim. I will remain and my breast shall protect you—”

  “There is no treachery—listen—the servants are stirring and the gate will be opened directly. Go: the trees in the garden will conceal you, and the moon is not fairly out yet. Not a word more, but go!”

  Raymon was compelled to obey; but she accompanied him to the foot of the stairs and cast a searching glance about the flower garden. All was silent and calm. She stood a long while on the last stair, listening with terror to the grinding of his footsteps on the gravel, entirely oblivious of her husband’s arrival. What cared she for his suspicions and his anger, provided that Raymon was out of danger?