Cousin Betty

“Wait for Wenceslas, my child; all will be explained. The evil cannot be so great as you picture it! – I, too, have been deceived, my dear Hortense; you think me handsome, I have lived blameless; and yet I have been utterly forsaken for three-and-twenty years – for a Jenny Cadine, a Josepha, a Madame Marneffe! – Did you know that?”

“You, mamma, you! You have endured this for twenty – ”

She broke off, staggered by her own thoughts.

“Do as I have done, my child,” said her mother. “Be gentle and kind, and your conscience will be at peace. On his death-bed a man may say, ‘My wife has never cost me a pang!’ And God, who hears that dying breath, credits it to us. If I had abandoned myself to fury like you, what would have happened? Your father would have been embittered, perhaps he would have left me altogether, and he would not have been withheld by any fear of paining me. Our ruin, utter as it now is, would have been complete ten years sooner, and we should have shown the world the spectacle of a husband and wife living quite apart – a scandal of the most horrible, heart-breaking kind, for it is the destruction of the family. Neither your brother nor you could have married.

“I sacrificed myself, and that so bravely, that, till this last connection of your father’s, the world has believed me happy. My serviceable and indeed courageous falsehood has, till now, screened Hector; he is still respected; but this old man’s passion is taking him too far, that I see. His own folly, I fear, will break through the veil I have kept between the world and our home. However, I have held that curtain steady for twenty-three years, and have wept behind it – motherless, I, without a friend to trust, with no help but in religion – I have for twenty-three years secured the family honor – ”

Hortense listened with a fixed gaze. The calm tone of resignation and of such crowning sorrow soothed the smart of her first wound; the tears rose again and flowed in torrents. In a frenzy of filial affection, overcome by her mother’s noble heroism, she fell on her knees before Adeline, took up the hem of her dress and kissed it, as pious Catholics kiss the holy relics of a martyr.

“Nay, get up, Hortense,” said the Baroness. “Such homage from my daughter wipes out many sad memories. Come to my heart, and weep for no sorrows but your own. It is the despair of my dear little girl, whose joy was my only joy, that broke the solemn seal which nothing ought to have removed from my lips. Indeed, I meant to have taken my woes to the tomb, as a shroud the more. It was to soothe your anguish that I spoke. – God will forgive me!

“Oh! if my life were to be your life, what would I not do? Men, the world, Fate, Nature, God Himself, I believe, make us pay for love with the most cruel grief. I must pay for ten years of happiness and twenty-four years of despair, of ceaseless sorrow, of bitterness – ”

“But you had ten years, dear mamma, and I have had but three!” said the self-absorbed girl.

“Nothing is lost yet,” said Adeline. “Only wait till Wenceslas comes.”

“Mother,” said she, “he lied, he deceived me. He said, ‘I will not go,’ and he went. And that over his child’s cradle.”

“For pleasure, my child, men will commit the most cowardly, the most infamous actions – even crimes; it lies in their nature, it would seem. We wives are set apart for sacrifice. I believed my troubles were ended, and they are beginning again, for I never thought to suffer doubly by suffering with my child. Courage – and silence! – My Hortense, swear that you will never discuss your griefs with anybody but me, never let them be suspected by any third person. Oh! be as proud as your mother has been.”

Hortense started; she had heard her husband’s step.

“So it would seem,” said Wenceslas, as he came in, “that Stidmann has been here while I went to see him.”

“Indeed!” said Hortense, with the angry irony of an offended woman who uses words to stab.

“Certainly,” said Wenceslas, affecting surprise. “We have just met.”

“And yesterday?”

“Well, yesterday I deceived you, my darling love; and your mother shall judge between us.”

This candor unlocked his wife’s heart. All really lofty women like the truth better than lies. They cannot bear to see their idol smirched; they want to be proud of the despotism they bow to.

There is a strain of this feeling in the devotion of the Russians to their Czar.

“Now, listen, dear mother,” Wenceslas went on. “I so truly love my sweet and kind Hortense, that I concealed from her the extent of our poverty. What could I do? She was still nursing the boy, and such troubles would have done her harm; you know what the risk is for a woman. Her beauty, youth, and health are imperiled. Did I do wrong? – She believes that we owe five thousand francs; but I owe five thousand more. The day before yesterday we were in the depths! No one on earth will lend to us artists. Our talents are not less untrustworthy than our whims. I knocked in vain at every door. Lisbeth, indeed, offered us her savings.”

“Poor soul!” said Hortense.

“Poor soul!” said the Baroness.

“But what are Lisbeth’s two thousand francs? Everything to her, nothing to us. – Then, as you know, Hortense, she spoke to us of Madame Marneffe, who, as she owes so much to the Baron, out of a sense of honor, will take no interest. Hortense wanted to send her diamonds to the Mont-de-Piete; they would have brought in a few thousand francs, but we needed ten thousand. Those ten thousand francs were to be had free of interest for a year! – I said to myself, ‘Hortense will be none the wiser; I will go and get them.’

“Then the woman asked me to dinner through my father-in-law, giving me to understand that Lisbeth had spoken of the matter, and I should have the money. Between Hortense’s despair on one hand, and the dinner on the other, I could not hesitate. – That is all.

“What! could Hortense, at four-and-twenty, lovely, pure, and virtuous, and all my pride and glory, imagine that, when I have never left her since we married, I could now prefer – what? – a tawny, painted, ruddled creature?” said he, using the vulgar exaggeration of the studio to convince his wife by the vehemence that women like.

“Oh! if only your father had ever spoken so – !” cried the Baroness.

Hortense threw her arms round her husband’s neck.

“Yes, that is what I should have done,” said her mother. “Wenceslas, my dear fellow, your wife was near dying of it,” she went on very seriously. “You see how well she loves you. And, alas – she is yours!”

She sighed deeply.

“He may make a martyr of her, or a happy woman,” thought she to herself, as every mother thinks when she sees her daughter married. – “It seems to me,” she said aloud, “that I am miserable enough to hope to see my children happy.”

“Be quite easy, dear mamma,” said Wenceslas, only too glad to see this critical moment end happily. “In two months I shall have repaid that dreadful woman. How could I help it,” he went on, repeating this essentially Polish excuse with a Pole’s grace; “there are times when a man would borrow of the Devil. – And, after all, the money belongs to the family. When once she had invited me, should I have got the money at all if I had responded to her civility with a rude refusal?”

“Oh, mamma, what mischief papa is bringing on us!” cried Hortense.

The Baroness laid her finger on her daughter’s lips, aggrieved by this complaint, the first blame she had ever uttered of a father so heroically screened by her mother’s magnanimous silence.

“Now, good-bye, my children,” said Madame Hulot. “The storm is over. But do not quarrel any more.”

When Wenceslas and his wife returned to their room after letting out the Baroness, Hortense said to her husband:

“Tell me all about last evening.”

And she watched his face all through the narrative, interrupting him by the questions that crowd on a wife’s mind in such circumstances. The story made Hortense reflect; she had a glimpse of the infernal dissipation which an artist must find in such vicious company.

“Be honest, my Wenceslas; Stidmann was there, Claude Vignon, Vernisset. – Who else? In short, it was good fun?”

“I, I was thinking of nothing but our ten thousand francs, and I was saying to myself, ‘My Hortense will be freed from anxiety.’”

This catechism bored the Livonian excessively; he seized a gayer moment to say:

“And you, my dearest, what would you have done if your artist had proved guilty?”

“I,” said she, with an air of prompt decision, “I should have taken up Stidmann – not that I love him, of course!”

“Hortense!” cried Steinbock, starting to his feet with a sudden and theatrical emphasis. “You would not have had the chance – I would have killed you!”

Hortense threw herself into his arms, clasping him closely enough to stifle him, and covered him with kisses, saying:

“Ah, you do love me! I fear nothing! – But no more Marneffe. Never go plunging into such horrible bogs.”

“I swear to you, my dear Hortense, that I will go there no more, excepting to redeem my note of hand.”

She pouted at this, but only as a loving woman sulks to get something for it. Wenceslas, tired out with such a morning’s work, went off to his studio to make a clay sketch of the Samson and Delilah, for which he had the drawings in his pocket.

Hortense, penitent for her little temper, and fancying that her husband was annoyed with her, went to the studio just as the sculptor had finished handling the clay with the impetuosity that spurs an artist when the mood is on him. On seeing his wife, Wenceslas hastily threw the wet wrapper over the group, and putting both arms round her, he said:

“We were not really angry, were we, my pretty puss?”

Hortense had caught sight of the group, had seen the linen thrown over it, and had said nothing; but as she was leaving, she took off the rag, looked at the model, and asked:

“What is that?”

“A group for which I had just had an idea.”

“And why did you hide it?”

“I did not mean you to see it till it was finished.”

“The woman is very pretty,” said Hortense.

And a thousand suspicions cropped up in her mind, as, in India, tall, rank plants spring up in a night-time.

By the end of three weeks, Madame Marneffe was intensely irritated by Hortense. Women of that stamp have a pride of their own; they insist that men shall kiss the devil’s hoof; they have no forgiveness for the virtue that does not quail before their dominion, or that even holds its own against them. Now, in all that time Wenceslas had not paid one visit in the Rue Vanneau, not even that which politeness required to a woman who had sat for Delilah.

Whenever Lisbeth called on the Steinbocks, there had been nobody at home. Monsieur and madame lived in the studio. Lisbeth, following the turtle doves to their nest at le Gros-Caillou, found Wenceslas hard at work, and was informed by the cook that madame never left monsieur’s side. Wenceslas was a slave to the autocracy of love. So now Valerie, on her own account, took part with Lisbeth in her hatred of Hortense.

Women cling to a lover that another woman is fighting for, just as much as men do to women round whom many coxcombs are buzzing. Thus any reflections a propos to Madame Marneffe are equally applicable to any lady-killing rake; he is, in fact, a sort of male courtesan. Valerie’s last fancy was a madness; above all, she was bent on getting her group; she was even thinking of going one morning to the studio to see Wenceslas, when a serious incident arose of the kind which, to a woman of that class, may be called the spoil of war.

This is how Valerie announced this wholly personal event.

She was breakfasting with Lisbeth and her husband.

“I say, Marneffe, what would you say to being a second time a father?”

“You don’t mean it – a baby? – Oh, let me kiss you!”

He rose and went round the table; his wife held up her head so that he could just kiss her hair.

“If that is so,” he went on, “I am head-clerk and officer of the Legion of Honor at once. But you must understand, my dear, Stanislas is not to be the sufferer, poor little man.”

“Poor little man?” Lisbeth put in. “You have not set your eyes on him these seven months. I am supposed to be his mother at the school; I am the only person in the house who takes any trouble about him.”

“A brat that costs us a hundred crowns a quarter!” said Valerie. “And he, at any rate, is your own child, Marneffe. You ought to pay for his schooling out of your salary. – The newcomer, far from reminding us of butcher’s bills, will rescue us from want.”

“Valerie,” replied Marneffe, assuming an attitude like Crevel, “I hope that Monsieur le Baron Hulot will take proper charge of his son, and not lay the burden on a poor clerk. I intend to keep him well up to the mark. So take the necessary steps, madame! Get him to write you letters in which he alludes to his satisfaction, for he is rather backward in coming forward in regard to my appointment.”

And Marneffe went away to the office, where his chief’s precious leniency allowed him to come in at about eleven o’clock. And, indeed, he did little enough, for his incapacity was notorious, and he detested work.

No sooner were they alone than Lisbeth and Valerie looked at each other for a moment like Augurs, and both together burst into a loud fit of laughter.

“I say, Valerie – is it the fact?” said Lisbeth, “or merely a farce?”

“It is a physical fact!” replied Valerie. “Now, I am sick and tired of Hortense; and it occurred to me in the night that I might fire this infant, like a bomb, into the Steinbock household.”

Valerie went back to her room, followed by Lisbeth, to whom she showed the following letter: —

“WENCESLAS MY DEAR, – I still believe in your love, though it is nearly three weeks since I saw you. Is this scorn? Delilah can scarcely believe that. Does it not rather result from the tyranny of a woman whom, as you told me, you can no longer love? Wenceslas, you are too great an artist to submit to such dominion. Home is the grave of glory. – Consider now, are you the Wenceslas of the Rue du Doyenne? You missed fire with my father’s statue; but in you the lover is greater than the artist, and you have had better luck with his daughter. You are a father, my beloved Wenceslas.

“If you do not come to me in the state I am in, your friends would think very badly of you. But I love you so madly, that I feel I should never have the strength to curse you. May I sign myself as ever,

“YOUR VALERIE.”

“What do you say to my scheme for sending this note to the studio at a time when our dear Hortense is there by herself?” asked Valerie. “Last evening I heard from Stidmann that Wenceslas is to pick him up at eleven this morning to go on business to Chanor’s; so that gawk Hortense will be there alone.”

“But after such a trick as that,” replied Lisbeth, “I cannot continue to be your friend in the eyes of the world; I shall have to break with you, to be supposed never to visit you, or even to speak to you.”

“Evidently,” said Valerie; “but – ”

“Oh! be quite easy,” interrupted Lisbeth; “we shall often meet when I am Madame la Marechale. They are all set upon it now. Only the Baron is in ignorance of the plan, but you can talk him over.”

“Well,” said Valerie, “but it is quite likely that the Baron and I may be on distant terms before long.”

“Madame Olivier is the only person who can make Hortense demand to see the letter,” said Lisbeth. “And you must send her to the Rue Saint-Dominique before she goes on to the studio.”

“Our beauty will be at home, no doubt,” said Valerie, ringing for Reine to call up Madame Olivier.

Ten minutes after the despatch of this fateful letter, Baron Hulot arrived. Madame Marneffe threw her arms round the old man’s neck with kittenish impetuosity.

“Hector, you are a father!” she said in his ear. “That is what comes of quarreling and making friends again – ”

Perceiving a look of surprise, which the Baron did not at once conceal, Valerie assumed a reserve which brought the old man to despair. She made him wring the proofs from her one by one. When conviction, led on by vanity, had at last entered his mind, she enlarged on Monsieur Marneffe’s wrath.

“My dear old veteran,” said she, “you can hardly avoid getting your responsible editor, our representative partner if you like, appointed head-clerk and officer of the Legion of Honor, for you really have done for the poor man, he adores his Stanislas, the little monstrosity who is so like him, that to me he is insufferable. Unless you prefer to settle twelve hundred francs a year on Stanislas – the capital to be his, and the life-interest payable to me, of course – ”

“But if I am to settle securities, I would rather it should be on my own son, and not on the monstrosity,” said the Baron.

This rash speech, in which the words “my own son” came out as full as a river in flood, was, by the end of the hour, ratified as a formal promise to settle twelve hundred francs a year on the future boy. And this promise became, on Valerie’s tongue and in her countenance, what a drum is in the hands of a child; for three weeks she played on it incessantly.

At the moment when Baron Hulot was leaving the Rue Vanneau, as happy as a man who after a year of married life still desires an heir, Madame Olivier had yielded to Hortense, and given up the note she was instructed to give only into the Count’s own hands. The young wife paid twenty francs for that letter. The wretch who commits suicide must pay for the opium, the pistol, the charcoal.

Hortense read and re-read the note; she saw nothing but this sheet of white paper streaked with black lines; the universe held for her nothing but that paper; everything was dark around her. The glare of the conflagration that was consuming the edifice of her happiness lighted up the page, for blackest night enfolded her. The shouts of her little Wenceslas at play fell on her ear, as if he had been in the depths of a valley and she on a high mountain. Thus insulted at four-and-twenty, in all the splendor of her beauty, enhanced by pure and devoted love – it was not a stab, it was death. The first shock had been merely on the nerves, the physical frame had struggled in the grip of jealousy; but now certainty had seized her soul, her body was unconscious.

For about ten minutes Hortense sat under the incubus of this oppression. Then a vision of her mother appeared before her, and revulsion ensued; she was calm and cool, and mistress of her reason.

She rang.

“Get Louise to help you, child,” said she to the cook. “As quickly as you can, pack up everything that belongs to me and everything wanted for the little boy. I give you an hour. When all is ready, fetch a hackney coach from the stand, and call me.

“Make no remarks! I am leaving the house, and shall take Louise with me. You must stay here with monsieur; take good care of him – ”

She went into her room, and wrote the following letter: —

“MONSIEUR LE COMTE, —

“The letter I enclose will sufficiently account for the determination I have come to.

“When you read this, I shall have left your house and have found refuge with my mother, taking our child with me.

“Do not imagine that I shall retrace my steps. Do not imagine that I am acting with the rash haste of youth, without reflection, with the anger of offended affection; you will be greatly mistaken.

“I have been thinking very deeply during the last fortnight of life, of love, of our marriage, of our duties to each other. I have known the perfect devotion of my mother; she has told me all her sorrows! She has been heroical – every day for twenty-three years. But I have not the strength to imitate her, not because I love you less than she loves my father, but for reasons of spirit and nature. Our home would be a hell; I might lose my head so far as to disgrace you – disgrace myself and our child.

“I refuse to be a Madame Marneffe; once launched on such a course, a woman of my temper might not, perhaps, be able to stop. I am, unfortunately for myself, a Hulot, not a Fischer.

“Alone, and absent from the scene of your dissipations, I am sure of myself, especially with my child to occupy me, and by the side of a strong and noble mother, whose life cannot fail to influence the vehement impetuousness of my feelings. There, I can be a good mother, bring our boy up well, and live. Under your roof the wife would oust the mother; and constant contention would sour my temper.

“I can accept a death-blow, but I will not endure for twenty-five years, like my mother. If, at the end of three years of perfect, unwavering love, you can be unfaithful to me with your father-in-law’s mistress, what rivals may I expect to have in later years? Indeed, monsieur, you have begun your career of profligacy much earlier than my father did, the life of dissipation, which is a disgrace to the father of a family, which undermines the respect of his children, and which ends in shame and despair.

“I am not unforgiving. Unrelenting feelings do not beseem erring creatures living under the eye of God. If you win fame and fortune by sustained work, if you have nothing to do with courtesans and ignoble, defiling ways, you will find me still a wife worthy of you.

“I believe you to be too much a gentleman, Monsieur le Comte, to have recourse to the law. You will respect my wishes, and leave me under my mother’s roof. Above all, never let me see you there. I have left all the money lent to you by that odious woman. – Farewell.

“HORTENSE HULOT.”

This letter was written in anguish. Hortense abandoned herself to the tears, the outcries of murdered love. She laid down her pen and took it up again, to express as simply as possible all that passion commonly proclaims in this sort of testamentary letter. Her heart went forth in exclamations, wailing and weeping; but reason dictated the words.

Informed by Louise that all was ready, the young wife slowly went round the little garden, through the bedroom and drawing-room, looking at everything for the last time. Then she earnestly enjoined the cook to take the greatest care for her master’s comfort, promising to reward her handsomely if she would be honest. At last she got into the hackney coach to drive to her mother’s house, her heart quite broken, crying so much as to distress the maid, and covering little Wenceslas with kisses, which betrayed her still unfailing love for his father.

The Baroness knew already from Lisbeth that the father-in-law was largely to blame for the son-in-law’s fault; nor was she surprised to see her daughter, whose conduct she approved, and she consented to give her shelter. Adeline, perceiving that her own gentleness and patience had never checked Hector, for whom her respect was indeed fast diminishing, thought her daughter very right to adopt another course.

In three weeks the poor mother had suffered two wounds of which the pain was greater than any ill-fortune she had hitherto endured. The Baron had placed Victorin and his wife in great difficulties; and then, by Lisbeth’s account, he was the cause of his son-in-law’s misconduct, and had corrupted Wenceslas. The dignity of the father of the family, so long upheld by her really foolish self-sacrifice, was now overthrown. Though they did not regret the money the young Hulots were full alike of doubts and uneasiness as regarded the Baron. This sentiment, which was evidence enough, distressed the Baroness; she foresaw a break-up of the family tie.

Hortense was accommodated in the dining-room, arranged as a bedroom with the help of the Marshal’s money, and the anteroom became the dining-room, as it is in many apartments.

When Wenceslas returned home and had read the two letters, he felt a kind of gladness mingled with regret. Kept so constantly under his wife’s eye, so to speak, he had inwardly rebelled against this fresh thraldom, a la Lisbeth. Full fed with love for three years past, he too had been reflecting during the last fortnight; and he found a family heavy on his hands. He had just been congratulated by Stidmann on the passion he had inspired in Valerie; for Stidmann, with an under-thought that was not unnatural, saw that he might flatter the husband’s vanity in the hope of consoling the victim. And Wenceslas was glad to be able to return to Madame Marneffe.

Still, he remembered the pure and unsullied happiness he had known, the perfections of his wife, her judgment, her innocent and guileless affection, – and he regretted her acutely. He thought of going at once to his mother-in-law’s to crave forgiveness; but, in fact, like Hulot and Crevel, he went to Madame Marneffe, to whom he carried his wife’s letter to show her what a disaster she had caused, and to discount his misfortune, so to speak, by claiming in return the pleasures his mistress could give him.