A Daughter of Eve

“Judge me,” she said, kneeling down beside him.

“Are we able to judge where we love?” he answered, throwing the letters into the fire; for he felt that later his wife might not forgive him for having read them. Marie, with her head upon his knee, burst into tears.

“My child,” he said, raising her head, “where are your letters?”

At this question the poor woman no longer felt the intolerable burning of her cheeks; she turned cold.

“That you may not suspect me of calumniating a man whom you think worthy of you, I will make Florine herself return you those letters.”

“Oh! Surely he would give them back to me himself.”

“Suppose that he refused to do so?”

The countess dropped her head.

“The world disgusts me,” she said. “I don’t want to enter it again. I want to live alone with you, if you forgive me.”

“But you might get bored again. Besides, what would the world say if you left it so abruptly? In the spring we will travel; we will go to Italy, and all over Europe; you shall see life. But to-morrow night we must go to the Opera-ball; there is no other way to get those letters without compromising you; besides, by giving them up, Florine will prove to you her power.”

“And must I see that?” said the countess, frightened.

“To-morrow night.”

The next evening, about midnight, Nathan was walking about the foyer of the Opera with a mask on his arm, to whom he was attending in a sufficiently conjugal manner. Presently two masked women came up to him.

“You poor fool! Marie is here and is watching you,” said one of them, who was Vandenesse, disguised as a woman.

“If you choose to listen to me I will tell you secrets that Nathan is hiding from you,” said the other woman, who was the countess, to Florine.

Nathan had abruptly dropped Florine’s arm to follow the count, who adroitly slipped into the crowd and was out of sight in a moment. Florine followed the countess, who sat down on a seat close at hand, to which the count, doubling on Nathan, returned almost immediately to guard his wife.

“Explain yourself, my dear,” said Florine, “and don’t think I shall stand this long. No one can tear Raoul from me, I’ll tell you that; I hold him by habit, and that’s even stronger than love.”

“In the first place, are you Florine?” said the count, speaking in his natural voice.

“A pretty question! if you don’t know that, my joking friend, why should I believe you?”

“Go and ask Nathan, who has left you to look for his other mistress, where he passed the night, three days ago. He tried to kill himself without a word to you, my dear, – and all for want of money. That shows how much you know about the affairs of a man whom you say you love, and who leaves you without a penny, and kills himself, – or, rather, doesn’t kill himself, for he misses it. Suicides that don’t kill are about as absurd as a duel without a scratch.”

“That’s a lie,” said Florine. “He dined with me that very day. The poor fellow had the sheriff after him; he was hiding, as well he might.”

“Go and ask at the hotel du Mail, rue du Mail, if he was not taken there that morning, half dead of the fumes of charcoal, by a handsome young woman with whom he has been in love over a year. Her letters are at this moment under your very nose in your own house. If you want to teach Nathan a good lesson, let us all three go there; and I’ll show you, papers in hand, how you can save him from the sheriff and Clichy if you choose to be the good girl that you are.”

“Try that on others than Florine, my little man. I am certain that Nathan has never been in love with any one but me.”

“On the contrary, he has been in love with a woman in society for over a year – ”

“A woman in society, he!” cried Florine. “I don’t trouble myself about such nonsense as that.”

“Well, do you want me to make him come and tell you that he will not take you home from here to-night.”

“If you can make him tell me that,” said Florine, “I’ll take you home, and we’ll look for those letters, which I shall believe in when I see them, and not till then. He must have written them while I slept.”

“Stay here,” said Felix, “and watch.”

So saying, he took the arm of his wife and moved to a little distance. Presently, Nathan, who had been hunting up and down the foyer like a dog looking for its master, returned to the spot where the mask had addressed him. Seeing on his face an expression he could not conceal, Florine placed herself like a post in front of him, and said, imperiously: —

“I don’t wish you to leave me again; I have my reasons for this.”

The countess then, at the instigation of her husband, went up to Raoul and said in his ear, —

“Marie. Who is this woman? Leave her at once, and meet me at the foot of the grand staircase.”

In this difficult extremity Raoul dropped Florine’s arm, and though she caught his own and held it forcibly, she was obliged, after a moment, to let him go. Nathan disappeared into the crowd.

“What did I tell you?” said Felix in Florine’s astonished ears, offering her his arm.

“Come,” she said; “whoever you are, come. Have you a carriage here?”

For all answer, Vandenesse hurried Florine away, followed by his wife. A few moments later the three masks, driven rapidly by the Vandenesse coachman, reached Florine’s house. As soon as she had entered her own apartments the actress unmasked. Madame de Vandenesse could not restrain a quiver of surprise at Florine’s beauty as she stood there choking with anger, and superb in her wrath and jealousy.

“There is, somewhere in these rooms,” said Vandenesse, “a portfolio, the key of which you have never had; the letters are probably in it.”

“Well, well, for once in my life I am bewildered; you know something that I have been uneasy about for some days,” cried Florine, rushing into the study in search of the portfolio.

Vandenesse saw that his wife was turning pale beneath her mask. Florine’s apartment revealed more about the intimacy of the actress and Nathan than any ideal mistress would wish to know. The eye of a woman can take in the truth of such things in a second, and the countess saw vestiges of Nathan which proved to her the certainty of what Vandenesse had said. Florine returned with the portfolio.

“How am I to open it?” she said.

The actress rang the bell and sent into the kitchen for the cook’s knife. When it came she brandished it in the air, crying out in ironical tones: —

“With this they cut the necks of ‘poulets.’”

The words, which made the countess shiver, explained to her, even better than her husband had done the night before, the depths of the abyss into which she had so nearly fallen.

“What a fool I am!” said Florine; “his razor will do better.”

She fetched one of Nathan’s razors from his dressing-table, and slit the leather cover of the portfolio, through which Marie’s letters dropped. Florine snatched one up hap-hazard, and looked it over.

“Yes, she must be a well-bred woman. It looks to me as if there were no mistakes in spelling here.”

The count gathered up the letters hastily and gave them to his wife, who took them to a table as if to see that they were all there.

“Now,” said Vandenesse to Florine, “will you let me have those letters for these?” showing her five bank-bills of ten thousand francs each. “They’ll replace the sums you have paid for him.”

“Ah!” cried Florine, “didn’t I kill myself body and soul in the provinces to get him money, – I, who’d have cut my hand off to serve him? But that’s men! damn your soul for them and they’ll march over you rough-shod! He shall pay me for this!”

Madame de Vandenesse was disappearing with the letters.