"Who do you mean?"
"I can not tell you."
"Then you are lying to me."
Marguerite rose and went toward the door. I could not behold this silent
and expressive sorrow without being touched, when I compared in my mind
this pale and weeping woman with the madcap who had made fun of me at
the Opera Comique.
"You shall not go," I said, putting myself in front of the door.
"Why?"
"Because, in spite of what you have done to me, I love you always, and I
want you to stay here."
"To turn me out to-morrow? No; it is impossible. Our destinies are
separate; do not try to reunite them. You will despise me perhaps, while
now you can only hate me."
"No, Marguerite," I cried, feeling all my love and all my desire
reawaken at the contact of this woman. "No, I will forget everything,
and we will be happy as we promised one another that we would be."
Marguerite shook her head doubtfully, and said: "Am I not your slave, your dog? Do with me what you will. Take me; I am
yours."
And throwing off her cloak and hat, she flung them on the sofa, and
began hurriedly to undo the front of her dress, for, by one of those
reactions so frequent in her malady, the blood rushed to her head and
stifled her. A hard, dry cough followed.
"Tell my coachman," she said, "to go back with the carriage."
I went down myself and sent him away. When I returned Marguerite was
lying in front of the fire, and her teeth chattered with the cold.
I took her in my arms. I undressed her, without her making a movement,
and carried her, icy cold, to the bed. Then I sat beside her and tried
to warm her with my caresses. She did not speak a word, but smiled at
me.
It was a strange night. All Marguerite's life seemed to have passed into
the kisses with which she covered me, and I loved her so much that in
my transports of feverish love I asked myself whether I should not kill
her, so that she might never belong to another.
A month of love like that, and there would have remained only the corpse
of heart or body.
The dawn found us both awake. Marguerite was livid white. She did not
speak a word. From time to time, big tears rolled from her eyes, and
stayed upon her cheeks, shining like diamonds. Her thin arms opened,
from time to time, to hold me fast, and fell back helplessly upon the
bed.