Читать книгу Pelham — Complete - Эдвард Джордж Бульвер-Литтон, Эдвард Бульвер-Литтон - Страница 27

I am not one of those persons who are many days in deciding what may be effected in one. “On the third day from this,” said I to Bedos, “at half past nine in the morning, I shall leave Paris for England.”

“Oh, my poor wife!” said the valet, “she will break her heart if I leave her.”

“Then stay,” said I. Bedos shrugged his shoulders.

“I prefer being with Monsieur to all things.”

“What, even to your wife?” The courteous rascal placed his hand to his heart and bowed. “You shall not suffer by your fidelity—you shall take your wife with you.”

The conjugal valet’s countenance fell. “No,” he said, “no; he could not take advantage of Monsieur’s generosity.”

“I insist upon it—not another word.”

“I beg a thousand pardons of Monsieur; but—but my wife is very ill, and unable to travel.”

“Then, in that case, so excellent a husband cannot think of leaving a sick and destitute wife.”

“Poverty has no law; if I consulted my heart and stayed, I should starve, et il faut vivre.”

“Je n’en vois pas la necessite,” replied I, as I got into my carriage. That repartee, by the way, I cannot claim as my own; it is the very unanswerable answer of a judge to an expostulating thief.

I made the round of reciprocal regrets, according to the orthodox formula. The Duchesse de Perpignan was the last—(Madame D’Anville I reserved for another day)—that virtuous and wise personage was in the boudoir of reception. I glanced at the fatal door as I entered. I have a great aversion, after any thing has once happened and fairly subsided, to make any allusion to its former existence. I never, therefore, talked to the Duchess about our ancient egaremens. I spoke, this morning, of the marriage of one person, the death of another, and lastly, the departure of my individual self.

“When do you go?” she said, eagerly.

“In two days: my departure will be softened, if I can execute any commissions in England for Madame.”

“None,” said she; and then in a low tone (that none of the idlers, who were always found at her morning levees, should hear), she added, “you will receive a note from me this evening.”

I bowed, changed the conversation, and withdrew. I dined in my own rooms, and spent the evening in looking over the various billets-doux, received during my sejour at Paris.

“Where shall I put all these locks of hair?” asked Bedos, opening a drawer full.

“Into my scrap-book.”

“And all these letters?”

“Into the fire.”

I was just getting into bed when the Duchesse de Perpignan’s note arrived—it was as follows:—

“My dear Friend,

“For that word, so doubtful in our language, I may at least call you in your own. I am unwilling that you should leave this country with those sentiments you now entertain of me, unaltered, yet I cannot imagine any form of words of sufficient magic to change them. Oh! if you knew how much I am to be pitied; if you could look for one moment into this lonely and blighted heart; if you could trace, step by step, the progress I have made in folly and sin, you would see how much of what you now condemn and despise, I have owed to circumstances, rather than to the vice of my disposition. I was born a beauty, educated a beauty, owed fame, rank, power to beauty; and it is to the advantages I have derived from person that I owe the ruin of my mind. You have seen how much I now derive from art I loathe myself as I write that sentence; but no matter: from that moment you loathed me too. You did not take into consideration, that I had been living on excitement all my youth, and that in my maturer years I could not relinquish it. I had reigned by my attractions, and I thought every art preferable to resigning my empire: but in feeding my vanity, I had not been able to stifle the dictates of my heart. Love is so natural to a woman, that she is scarcely a woman who resists it: but in me it has been a sentiment, not a passion.

“Sentiment, then, and vanity, have been my seducers. I said, that I owed my errors to circumstances, not to nature. You will say, that in confessing love and vanity to be my seducers, I contradict this assertion—you are mistaken. I mean, that though vanity and sentiment were in me, yet the scenes in which I have been placed, and the events which I have witnessed, gave to those latent currents of action a wrong and a dangerous direction. I was formed to love; for one whom I did love I could have made every sacrifice. I married a man I hated, and I only learnt the depths of my heart when it was too late.

“Enough of this; you will leave this country; we shall never meet again—never! You may return to Paris, but I shall then be no more; n’importe—I shall be unchanged to the last. Je mourrai en reine.

“As a latest pledge of what I have felt for you, I send you the enclosed chain and ring; as a latest favour, I request you to wear them for six months, and, above all, for two hours in the Tuileries tomorrow. You will laugh at this request: it seems idle and romantic—perhaps it is so. Love has many exaggerations in sentiment, which reason would despise. What wonder, then, that mine, above that of all others, should conceive them? You will not, I know, deny this request. Farewell!—in this world we shall never meet again, and I believe not in the existence of another. Farewell!

“E. P.”

“A most sensible effusion,” said I to myself, when I had read this billet; “and yet, after all, it shows more feeling and more character than I could have supposed she possessed.” I took up the chain: it was of Maltese workmanship; not very handsome, nor, indeed, in any way remarkable, except for a plain hair ring which was attached to it, and which I found myself unable to take off, without breaking. “It is a very singular request,” thought I, “but then it comes from a very singular person; and as it rather partakes of adventure and intrigue, I shall at all events appear in the Tuileries, tomorrow, chained and ringed.”