"Ah!" thought Rodolphe, turning very pale, "that was what she came for."
At last he said with a calm air-"Dear madame, I have not got them."
He did not lie. If he had had them, he would, no doubt, have given them,
although it is generally disagreeable to do such fine things: a demand
for money being, of all the winds that blow upon love, the coldest and
most destructive.
First she looked at him for some moments.
"You have not got them!" she repeated several times. "You have not got
them! I ought to have spared myself this last shame. You never loved me.
You are no better than the others."
She was betraying, ruining herself.
Rodolphe interrupted her, declaring he was "hard up" himself.
"Ah! I pity you," said Emma. "Yes--very much."
And fixing her eyes upon an embossed carabine, that shone against its
panoply, "But when one is so poor one doesn't have silver on the butt of
one's gun. One doesn't buy a clock inlaid with tortoise shell," she went
on, pointing to a buhl timepiece, "nor silver-gilt whistles for one's
whips," and she touched them, "nor charms for one's watch. Oh, he wants
for nothing! even to a liqueur-stand in his room! For you love yourself;
you live well. You have a chateau, farms, woods; you go hunting; you
travel to Paris. Why, if it were but that," she cried, taking up two
studs from the mantelpiece, "but the least of these trifles, one can get
money for them. Oh, I do not want them, keep them!"
And she threw the two links away from her, their gold chain breaking as
it struck against the wall.
"But I! I would have given you everything. I would have sold all, worked
for you with my hands, I would have begged on the highroads for a smile,
for a look, to hear you say 'Thanks!' And you sit there quietly in your
arm-chair, as if you had not made me suffer enough already! But for you,
and you know it, I might have lived happily. What made you do it? Was
it a bet? Yet you loved me--you said so. And but a moment since--Ah!
it would have been better to have driven me away. My hands are hot with
your kisses, and there is the spot on the carpet where at my knees you
swore an eternity of love! You made me believe you; for two years you
held me in the most magnificent, the sweetest dream! Eh! Our plans for
the journey, do you remember? Oh, your letter! your letter! it tore my
heart! And then when I come back to him--to him, rich, happy, free--to
implore the help the first stranger would give, a suppliant, and
bringing back to him all my tenderness, he repulses me because it would
cost him three thousand francs!"