Sophie, in the extreme depths of her degradation and abasement, became
all at once quiet and composed. She lifted her face, pale, and smitten
with suffering, from her hands, and, folding them in her lap, looked at
Bressant calmly, because she understood herself at last, and felt that
the time for hiding her head in shame had gone by.
"You have not been nothing to me," said she, "though I didn't know it
before, or, rather, I would not. I had an idea that I was leading you
up to higher things, as an angel might, and all the time I was making
use of God's truth and recommendation, as it were, to gratify and shield
my own selfishness and--" here her voice sank, and her lips quivered,
and grew dry, but she waited, and struggled, and finally went on--"and
immodesty. I don't know why I should tell you this--except that I've
told you every thing else, and this may save you from some of the wrong
the rest has done you. But the most of it must remain irreparable." A
long sigh quivered up from Sophie's heart, and quivered down again, like
a pebble sinking through the water. Such a sigh, in a woman, is the sign
of what can scarcely come twice in a lifetime.
"I don't understand any thing about that; I don't want to!" exclaimed
Bressant, with an impetuous gesture. "What you've done seems to have
been better than what you meant to do, at any rate. You've made yourself
every thing to me. Say that I am as much to you, and what more do we
need? Say it! say it!" and, in the vehemence of his appeal, the sick man
half raised himself from his bed.
"I cannot! I cannot!" said Sophie, in a low, penetrating voice of
suffering. "If you were the lowest of all men, I could not. I came to
you in the guise of an angel, and what I have done, what woman is there
that would not blush at it? It may not be too late to save you--"
"Stop!" cried Bressant, with an accent of hoarse, masculine command,
such as she could not gainsay. "It is too late!--I will not be saved!
Look in my eyes, Sophie Valeyon, and tell me the name of what you see
there!"
Her sad, gray eyes, stern to herself, but tender and soft to him, as a
cloud ready to melt in rain-drops, met his, which were alight with all
the fire that an aroused and passionate spirit could kindle in them. She
saw what she had never beheld before indeed, but the meaning of which no
woman ever yet mistook. It was her work--the assurance of her
disgrace--the offspring of her self-seeking and unwomanly behavior; and
yet, as she looked, the blood rose gradually to her pale cheeks, and
stained them with a deeper and yet deeper spot of red; her glance caught
a spark from his, and her fragile and drooping figure seemed to dilate
and grow stately, as if inspired by some burst of glorious music.
Bressant, in the mid-whirl and heat of his emotion, fell back upon the
pillow, whence he had partly raised himself, trembling from head to
foot.