The Kill - Emile Zola [128]
She looked up, her eyes wide in an expression of supreme anguish. Then a rush of blood turned her complexion crimson, and, overcome by shame, she hid her face in her hands and stammered, “So you know? You know?”
Regaining her composure, she tried to lie. “It’s not true. . . . Who told you?”
Maxime shrugged. “Why, my father himself, who thinks you have an awfully nice figure and even discussed your hips with me.”
He had allowed himself to show a slight degree of annoyance. But he resumed his pacing, continuing between puffs on his cigar to speak to her in a chiding but friendly voice: “Really, I don’t understand you. You’re one of a kind. Yesterday it was your fault that I was so rude. You should have told me that it was my father, and I would have left quietly, you know. What right do I have? . . . But you went and told me it was M. de Saffré!”
She sobbed, her hands on her face. He approached, knelt in front of her, and forced her hands apart.
“So tell me why you said it was M. de Saffré.”
Then, averting her eyes once more, she answered, still crying, in a whisper: “I thought you would leave me if you knew that your father—”
He rose to his feet, took back the cigar that he had placed on the hearth, and contented himself with a murmured reply: “You’re really something, you know?”
She had stopped crying. The heat from the fireplace and in her cheeks dried her tears. Her astonishment at finding Maxime so calm in the face of a revelation that she had thought would crush him made her forget her shame. She watched him pace the room and listened to him speak as in a dream. Without taking his cigar out of his mouth he told her again that she was unreasonable, that it was perfectly natural for her to have relations with her husband, and that he couldn’t really think of getting angry about it. But to avow a lover when it wasn’t true! And he kept coming back to that, to the one thing he couldn’t understand, the one thing that seemed really monstrous to him. He spoke of the “wild imaginations” of women.
“You’re a bit cracked, my dear, you ought to have your head examined.”
In the end curiosity made him ask, “But why M. de Saffré rather than someone else?”
“He’s been after me,” Renée said.
Maxime checked himself as he was about to make an impertinent remark: he’d been on the point of saying that if she’d waited a month, she’d probably have been right in naming M. de Saffré as her lover. But he satisfied himself with a wicked smile at this nasty thought, tossed his cigar into the fire, and sat down at the other end of the hearth. He talked reason and hinted that they ought to remain good friends. The young woman’s fixed stare rather embarrassed him, though. He didn’t dare announce his marriage to her now. She contemplated him for a good long while through eyes still swollen from tears. Although she found him wretched, narrow, and contemptible, she loved him still, as tenderly as she loved her daintiest lace. He looked pretty in the light of the candelabra sitting on the edge of the hearth alongside him. When he threw back his head, the light from the candles gilded his hair and imparted to the soft down of his cheeks a charming auburn glow.
“I really must be going,” he said several times.
He had made up his mind not to stay. Renée wouldn’t have wanted him to in any case. Both were thinking, both had said that they were now nothing more than good friends. When Maxime finally shook the young woman’s hand and was about to leave the room, she stopped him for a moment and spoke to him about his father, whom she praised lavishly. “I feel too much remorse, you see. I’m glad this happened. . . . You don’t know your father. I’ve been surprised to discover how kind he is, how unselfish. The poor man has a lot to worry about right now.”
Maxime stared at the toes of his boots with an embarrassed look and said nothing. She persisted. “As long as he stayed out of my room, I didn’t care. But then. . . . When I saw him here, affectionate, bringing me