We gave our full attention to the noise; a frightful moaning reached our ears.The wife of the banker came hurriedly towards us and closed the window.
"Let us avoid a scene," she said."If Mademoiselle Taillefer hears her father, she might be thrown into hysterics."The banker now re-entered the salon, looked round for Victorine, and said a few words in her ear.Instantly the young girl uttered a cry, ran to the door, and disappeared.This event produced a great sensation.The card-players paused.Every one questioned his neighbor.
The murmur of voices swelled, and groups gathered.
"Can Monsieur Taillefer be--" I began.
"--dead?" said my sarcastic neighbor."You would wear the gayest mourning, I fancy!""But what has happened to him?"
"The poor dear man," said the mistress of the house, "is subject to attacks of a disease the name of which I never can remember, though Monsieur Brousson has often told it to me; and he has just been seized with one.""What is the nature of the disease?" asked an examining-judge.
"Oh, it is something terrible, monsieur," she replied."The doctors know no remedy.It causes the most dreadful suffering.One day, while the unfortunate man was staying at my country-house, he had an attack, and I was obliged to go away and stay with a neighbor to avoid hearing him; his cries were terrible; he tried to kill himself; his daughter was obliged to have him put into a strait-jacket and fastened to his bed.The poor man declares there are live animals in his head gnawing his brain; every nerve quivers with horrible shooting pains, and he writhes in torture.He suffers so much in his head that he did not even feel the moxas they used formerly to apply to relieve it; but Monsieur Brousson, who is now his physician, has forbidden that remedy, declaring that the trouble is a nervous affection, an inflammation of the nerves, for which leeches should be applied to the neck, and opium to the head.As a result, the attacks are not so frequent; they appear now only about once a year, and always late in the autumn.When he recovers, Taillefer says repeatedly that he would far rather die than endure such torture.""Then he must suffer terribly!" said a broker, considered a wit, who was present.
"Oh," continued the mistress of the house, "last year he nearly died in one of these attacks.He had gone alone to his country-house on pressing business.For want, perhaps, of immediate help, he lay twenty-two hours stiff and stark as though he were dead.A very hot bath was all that saved him.""It must be a species of lockjaw," said one of the guests.
"I don't know," she answered."He got the disease in the army nearly thirty years ago.He says it was caused by a splinter of wood entering his head from a shot on board a boat.Brousson hopes to cure him.They say the English have discovered a mode of treating the disease with prussic acid--"At that instant a still more piercing cry echoed through the house, and froze us with horror.
"There! that is what I listened to all day long last year," said the banker's wife."It made me jump in my chair and rasped my nerves dreadfully.But, strange to say, poor Taillefer, though he suffers untold agony, is in no danger of dying.He eats and drinks as well as ever during even short cessations of the pain--nature is so queer! AGerman doctor told him it was a form of gout in the head, and that agrees with Brousson's opinion."I left the group around the mistress of the house and went away.On the staircase I met Mademoiselle Taillefer, whom a footman had come to fetch.
"Oh!" she said to me, weeping, "what has my poor father ever done to deserve such suffering?--so kind as he is!"I accompanied her downstairs and assisted her in getting into the carriage, and there I saw her father bent almost double.
Mademoiselle Taillefer tried to stifle his moans by putting her handkerchief to his mouth; unhappily he saw me; his face became even more distorted, a convulsive cry rent the air, and he gave me a dreadful look as the carriage rolled away.
That dinner, that evening exercised a cruel influence on my life and on my feelings.I loved Mademoiselle Taillefer, precisely, perhaps, because honor and decency forbade me to marry the daughter of a murderer, however good a husband and father he might be.A curious fatality impelled me to visit those houses where I knew I could meet Victorine; often, after giving myself my word of honor to renounce the happiness of seeing her, I found myself that same evening beside her.
My struggles were great.Legitimate love, full of chimerical remorse, assumed the color of a criminal passion.I despised myself for bowing to Taillefer when, by chance, he accompanied his daughter, but I bowed to him all the same.
Alas! for my misfortune Victorine is not only a pretty girl, she is also educated, intelligent, full of talent and of charm, without the slightest pedantry or the faintest tinge of assumption.She converses with reserve, and her nature has a melancholy grace which no one can resist.She loves me, or at least she lets me think so; she has a certain smile which she keeps for me alone; for me, her voice grows softer still.Oh, yes! she loves me! But she adores her father; she tells me of his kindness, his gentleness, his excellent qualities.
Those praises are so many dagger-thrusts with which she stabs me to the heart.