Why did these words sting me? I laughed out loud as I answered, “Why, Auguste?”
“You have achieved an intimacy which we all covet.” He laid an insolent stress on the word intimacy.
I was a vile coward to allow such words to be uttered in my presence. Does an evil spirit enter into us at times, that thus, without cause or provocation, we belie our own hearts, and all but sanction the foul trifling words which sully that which ought to be sacred, and is in truth sacred in our own eyes? My companion looked hard at me and went on:
“You escorted Madame Rabenfels from Madame de L’s. I observed that you left together, and I find you at her door after midnight.”
“You must have done me the honour to watch me pretty closely.”
“I am interested in that lady.”
I winced, and looked at my companion from head to foot as he went on. “I have long admired her, and there is a mystery about her which is piquant. She ought to be a facile conquest, if all be true that I have heard of her. Indeed, I have myself witnessed strange things in her mode of life.”
The exquisite pain these words gave me were the fitting punishment for my disgraceful complicity in his impertinence a few minutes before. He continued: “You and I are such old friends, Seymour, that I don’t mind making you my father confessor. My engagements have sometimes led me at a late hour near one of the worst localities of this very naughty city. Invariably I have seen, myself unseen, this lady leave at about three or later in the morning one of the houses in the Rue du Puits. One day I had the meanness, or what you will, to go to the house, and by a small donation to the porter, heard that a lady visited almost daily, or rather nightly, a young man who lodged in one of the rooms. His name I have forgotten. He was in bad health, and very poor. He had lived there for a few months in the strictest retirement, and with the closest economy. His only visible means of subsistence was authorship, and he wrote almost day and night. Some time ago he met with an accident, was run over or knocked down:—que sais-je?—and was brought home by this lady in a fiacre. She did not leave him for three entire days. Since then she has constantly been to see him, and has arranged everything for his comfort.”
“Surely,” I said, “a woman can be charitable without exposing herself to such injurious comments? She may belong to some religious order.”
“Charity can be exercised by day, or dispensed by a servant. Besides, my informant, who seemed resolved to give me my money’s worth, entered into details. He had heard the man call the lady by her Christian name, and one night, in preparing a room (so he said), which opened upon that occupied by the young man, he had heard voices raised so high that, though he could not understand the words (for they spoke in Italian), he could comprehend by the tones, that the lady was imploring some favour which her companion was angrily refusing. In some occult manner he also discovered that she was in a convulsion of grief, and had thrown herself on her knees. I dare say some of this information was false. He no doubt wished to excite me sufficiently to come again and pay for more of his news. But there was verisimilitude in it. Our fair friend has something tragic in her mien. One of those women who take things so terribly in earnest, and who are not contented with the surface of things, as most of their dear sex are. The worst kind of women to have to deal with in any relation whatever,” said he sententiously.
Poor women, we complain of your frivolity, and if we meet with one who appears to possess some depth of character or reality of purpose, she becomes more surely a victim from those very qualities.
“This is no longer the age for tragedy,” said Auguste; “life has become a comedy, a sentimental comedy if you will, but there are no parts now for your Heloisas or your Saint Theresas.”
He might have gone on for an hour; all the time he spoke, and though every word was distinctly audible to me, a vision rose before me of a noble head, a clear, frank, lofty look, and an aspect so entirely the reverse of anything undisciplined or unprincipled that it seemed to be treason to listen to him.
“What are you thinking of? Have you no remark to make upon my revelations?”
“What reply would you have? It would take too long to sift the truth from the falsehood in this romantic story, and what does it matter to me?”
“Pshaw! I have seen you hover perpetually about her for the last three months. You admire her; so do I; so do we all; but there is a hitch somewhere. There is something about her which jars with her surroundings. Some go so far as to say she is not a widow, that her husband is still alive, but that she has been separated from him for years.”
“Who says so?”
“Some countrymen of hers. The name of Rabenfels, however, belongs to such a large Austrian clan, if I may so call it, that they may have been mistaken. Yet you must confess there is a mystery about her.”
“I confess nothing of the kind.”
“But I should say,” he went on, without noticing my interruption, “that her appearance belies the scandal. Her air is so frankly independent, so quietly distinguished. A manner which is not fluttered and defiant, like that of most women in that equivocal position, but calm and self-relying. A woman separated from her husband, as things are at present, is at once in an antagonistic relation to society. It requires more consummate tact than most women are gifted with, it needs less impulsiveness than they usually possess, to steer safely through all their difficulties. This is why so few separated women keep their position in society: they almost all sink into the demi-monde.”
“Is that the fault of women, or the fault of society?”
“I think it would take us too long to discuss that question, I against women and for society; you for women and against society. Hitherto Madame Rabenfels has lived so quietly, and being so rich, the world expects so much from her power