Valentine (39 page)

“Bah ! you're joking, ain't you ?” said Georges. “I went in with you just for a thrashing.”

“A thrashing till death follows,” rejoined the other with the utmost seriousness. “His face has driven me crazy long enough. One of us two must stand aside for the other to-night.”

“The devil! it's more serious than I thought. What is it you've got there for a club ? It's so dark ! Do you still persist in carrying about that infernal pitchfork ?”

“Perhaps!”

“But, look here, ain't we going to get into a scrape that will land us at the assizes ? That wouldn't amuse me, and I with a wife and children !”

“If you're afraid, don't come !”

“I'll come, to prevent your getting into a bad scrape.”

They walked on.

“Listen,” said Valentine, taking from her breast a letter with a black seal; “I am utterly upset, and what I feel within me fills me with horror of myself. Read ; but, if your heart is as guilty as mine, do not speak, for I am afraid that the earth will open and swallow us.”

Bénédict, alarmed by her manner, opened the letter. It was from Franck, Monsieur de Lansac's valet. Monsieur de Lansac had been killed in a duel.

A wave of cruel and overpowering joy took possession of all Bénédict's faculties. He began to pace the floor in his agitation, to conceal from Valentine an emotion which she condemned, but which she herself could not escape. His efforts were fruitless. He rushed to her, fell at her feet, and embraced her in an outburst of frantic passion.

“What is the use of feigning a hypocritical solemnity? “ he cried. “Can I deceive you, or God ? Does not God guide our destinies ? Is it not He who sets you free from the shameful chain of that marriage ? Is it not He who has purged the earth of that false, unfeeling man ?”

“Hush!” said Valentine, putting her hand over his mouth. “Do you want to call down the vengeance of heaven on our heads ? Did we not wrong that man enough in his lifetime ? Must we continue to insult him even after his death ? Oh ! hush ! this is sacrilege. Perhaps God has permitted him to die, only to punish us and make us more wretched than ever.”

“Foolish, fearful Valentine ! What can happen to us now, in God's name ? Aren't you free ? Is not the future ours ? Very good ; we will not insult the dead ; I agree to that. On the contrary, let us bless that man's memory for having taken it upon himself to level the barriers of rank and fortune between us. Bless him for making you the poor, deserted creature that you are I
for, if it had not been for him, I could never have aspired to you. Your wealth, your rank would have been obstacles which my pride would not have sought to overcome. Now you belong to me; you cannot, you must not escape me, Valentine. I am your husband ; I have a claim to you. Your conscience, your religion, order you to take me for your staff and your avenger. Oh! let them come and insult you in my arms, if they dare ! I shall know what my duty is ; I shall not underrate the value of the treasure entrusted to my care. I will not leave you; I will watch over you with a loving heart! How happy we shall be ! See how kind God is ! how, after all these cruel trials, he sends us the blessings we craved ! Do you remember that one day you regretted that you were not a farmer's daughter, that you could not escape the slavery of a life of opulence, to live like a simple village maiden beneath a thatched roof ? Well, now your longing is gratified. You shall be queen in the cottage in the ravine; you shall run about among the trees with your white goat; you shall raise your own flowers, and sleep without fear or anxiety on a peasant's breast. Dear Valentine ! how lovely you will be in the haymaker's straw hat! how you will be adored and obeyed in your new home ! You will have but one servant and one slave—myself; but I alone will be more zealous in your service than a whole liveried household. All the hard work will be my business ; you will have no other care than to make my life beautiful and sleep among the flowers at my side. And we shall be rich too. I have already doubled the value of my property; I have a thousand francs a year! And you will have almost as much when you have sold what you have left. We will add to our estate. Oh I it will be a magnificent domain ! We will have your dear Catherine for our
factotum. We will have a cow and calf, and I don't know what else. Come, cheer up; help me to make plans !”

“Alas ! I am depressed beyond words,” said Valentine, “but I haven't the strength to contradict your dreams. Oh ! talk to me ! Tell me some more about our happiness ; tell me that it cannot escape us. I would like to believe in it.”

“And why, in heaven's name, should you refuse to believe in it ?”

“I don't know,” she said, putting her hand to her breast; “ I feel a weight here which suffocates me. Remorse ! oh ! yes, it is remorse ! I have not deserved to be happy; I ought not to be. I have been very guilty ; I have broken my oaths; I have forgotten God; God owes me punishment, not rewards.”

“Banish these black thoughts, Valentine. Poor Valentine, why allow yourself to be tortured and distracted thus by grief ? Wherein have you been so guilty ? Did you not resist long enough ? Am not I the only culprit ? Have you not atoned for your sin by your sorrow ?”

“Ah ! yes, my tears ought to have washed me clean ! But alas ! each day buried me deeper in the abyss, and who can say that I should not have grovelled there all my life ? What merit shall I have now ? How shall I make good the past ? Will you yourself be able to love me always ? Will you have confidence in a woman who broke her past oaths ?”

“But, Valentine, think of all that you had to excuse you. Think of your false and miserable position. Remember the husband who deliberately drove you to your destruction, the mother who refused to open her arms to you in time of danger, the old woman who could think of nothing better to say to you on her deathbed than these pious words: ‘My dear, take a lover of your own rank.'”

“Ah ! yes, it is true' said Valentine, reflecting bitterly on the past; “ they all treated my virtue with incredible levity. I alone, whom they all accused of guilt, had a true conception of the grandeur of my duties, and I tried to make our marriage a sacred, mutual obligation. But they sneered at my simplicity; one talked of money, another of dignity, a third of the proprieties. Ambition or pleasure was the sole incentive of all their acts, the sole meaning of all their precepts. They urged me to sin, and exhorted me only to make a show of virtue. If, instead of being a peasant's son, you had been a duke and peer, Bénédict, they would have borne me in triumph !”

“You may be sure of it; so do not mistake the threats of their folly and malignity for reproaches of your conscience.”

When the cuckoo clock at the farm struck eleven, Bénédict and Valentine prepared to separate. He had succeeded in pacifying her, in intoxicating her with hope, in making her smile; but, at the moment that he strained her to his heart to bid her adieu, she was seized with a strange terror.

“Suppose I should lose you !” she said, turning pale. “We have foreseen everything except that! Before all our dreams of happiness are realized, you may die, Bénédict!”

“Die !” he said, covering her face with kisses ; “as if one could die when he loves as I do !”

She noiselessly opened the orchard door and kissed him again in the doorway.

“Do you remember,” he whispered, “that it was here that you gave me your first kiss on the forehead ?”

“Until to-morrow!” she replied.

She had hardly reached her room when a terrible, piercing shriek rang out in the orchard. It was the only sound, but it was blood-curdling, and the whole household heard it.

As he approached the farm, Pierre Blutty had seen a light in his wife's bedroom, which he did not know to be occupied by Valentine. He had distinctly seen two shadows pass across the curtain, a man's shadow and a woman's. All doubt was at an end. In vain did Simonneau try to pacify him. Despairing of success, and afraid of being involved in a criminal prosecution, he decided to go away. Blutty saw the door open, and, in the ray of light which shone through the opening, he recognized Bénédict. A woman stood beside him; he could not see her face, because Bénédict concealed it by kissing her ; but it could be no other than Athénaïs. Thereupon the jealous wretch raised his iron pitchfork, just as Bénédict climbed the wall of loose stones at the same place which still bore the marks of his passage on the preceding night. He leaped down on the other side, and threw himself on the sharp weapon ; the two points sank deep into his breast, and he fell to the ground bathed in blood.

On that same spot, two years before, he had supported Valentine in his arms the first time that she came to the farm secretly to see her sister.

A panic-stricken clamor arose in the house at sight of the crime. Blutty rushed from the spot and placed himself at the disposal of the prosecuting attorney. He told him the story without reservation: the man was his rival; he had been murdered in the murderer's own garden. The latter could defend his act on the plea that he had taken him for a thief. In the eyes of the law he was likely to be acquitted ; in the eyes of the magistrate,
to whom he frankly admitted the passion under the influence of which he had acted and the remorse by which he was consumed, he found mercy. A trial would have resulted in a shocking scandal for the whole Lhéry family, the most numerous and most highly esteemed family in the department. Pierre Blutty was not prosecuted.

The body was taken into the living-room.

Valentine received one last smile, one word of love, one upward glance. He died on her breast.

Then she was led to her room by Lhéry, while Madame Lhéry carried away the unconscious Athénaïs.

Louise, pale and cold, and in full possession of her senses, of all her powers of suffering, was left alone with the dead body.

After an hour Lhéry joined her.

“Your sister is in a very bad way,” said the terror-stricken old man. “You must go to attend to her. I will undertake the melancholy duty of remaining here.”

Louise made no reply, but entered Valentine's room.

Lhéry had laid her on her bed. Her face was of a greenish pallor ; her red eyes glowed like burning coals, but shed no tears. Her hands were clasped rigidly about her neck; her breath came with a sort of convulsive rattle.

Louise, also pale but apparently calm, took a candle and leaned over her sister.

When the eyes of those two women met, it was as if a ghastly sort of magnetism drew them together. Louise's face wore an expression of savage contempt, of pitiless hate; Valentine's, distorted by terror, strove in vain to avoid that awful scrutiny, that avenging apparition.

“And so,” said Louise, running her hand fiercely through Valentine's dishevelled locks, as if she would have liked to tear them out, “ so you have killed him 1”

“Yes, it was I! I! I!” stammered Valentine, with a dazed air.

“That was sure to come,” said Louise. “He would have it so; he involved himself in your destiny, and you have destroyed him ! Very well, complete your work—take my life too; for my life was his, and I will not survive him ! Do you know that you have dealt a twofold blow ? No, you did not flatter yourself that you had done so much harm ! Well, triumph! You supplanted me; you have tortured my heart all the days of your life, and now you have plunged the knife into it. It is well! You have consummated the work of your family, Valentine. It was written that I should owe all imaginable suffering to your family. You have been your mother's own daughter; yes, and your father's, who also was expert in shedding blood. It was you who drew me back to this neighborhood, which I ought never to have seen again ; you who fascinated me like a basilisk, and bound me fast in order to feast upon my entrails at your ease! Ah! you have no conception how unhappy you have made me ! You have succeeded beyond your expectations. You do not know how I loved him, this man who is dead ! But you cast a spell on him and he could no longer see clearly. Oh ! I would have made him happy! I wouldn't have tortured him as you did ! I would have sacrificed empty glory and supercilious principles to him. I would not have made his life a daily torment. His noble, lovely youth would not have been blighted by my selfish caresses ! I would not have condemned him to pine away consumed by disappointment and vain longings. And I would not then have lured him into a trap to betray him to a murderer. No! he would be full of life and hope to-day, if he had chosen to love me ! Curse you, who prevented him from doing it!”

As she hurled these imprecations at her sister, poor Louise grew weaker and weaker, and, finally, fell in a swoon at Valentine's feet.

When she recovered consciousness, she had forgotten all that she had said. She nursed Valentine with devoted affection ; she covered her with kisses and tears. But she could not do away with the horrible impression which her involuntary avowal had produced. In the paroxysms of her fever, Valentine would throw herself into her arms and implore her forgiveness with all the ghastly terror of madness.

She died a week later. Religion afforded her some consolation in her last moments, and Louise's love smoothed that painful journey from earth to heaven.

Louise had suffered so much that her faculties, broken to the yoke of sorrow, hardened in the fire of consuming passions, had acquired supernatural strength. She survived that crushing blow, and lived for her son's sake.

Pierre Blutty never recovered from the effect of his mistake. Despite the unsusceptibility of his nature, remorse and grief devoured him secretly. He became moody, quarrelsome, irritable. Anything resembling a reproach angered him, because he inwardly reproached himself much more bitterly. He had little intercourse with his family during the year which followed his crime. Athénaïs made fruitless efforts to conceal the horror and repugnance which she felt at sight of him. Madame Lhéry hid to avoid seeing him, and Louise left the farm-house on the days when he was likely to come there. He sought consolation for his troubles in wine, and succeeded in diverting his thoughts by getting tipsy every day. One night he went out and jumped into the river which he mistook for a sandy road in the white moonlight. The peasants observed, as an instance of the justice of Heaven
in meting out punishment, that his death occurred just a year after Bénédict's, day for day and hour for hour.