In two
days be at the same spot, say the same word to the same man. That man
is my foster-father. Cristemio worships me, and would die in torments
for me before they could extract one word against me from him.
Farewell," she said seizing Henri by the waist and twining round him
like a serpent.
She pressed him on every side at once, lifted her head to his, and
offered him her lips, then snatched a kiss which filled them both with
such a dizziness that it seemed to Henri as though the earth opened;
and Paquita cried: "Enough, depart!" in a voice which told how little
she was mistress of herself. But she clung to him still, still crying
"Depart!" and brought him slowly to the staircase. There the mulatto,
whose white eyes lit up at the sight of Paquita, took the torch from
the hands of his idol, and conducted Henri to the street. He left the
light under the arch, opened the door, put Henri into the carriage,
and set him down on the Boulevard des Italiens with marvelous
rapidity. It was as though the horses had hell-fire in their veins.
The scene was like a dream to De Marsay, but one of those dreams
which, even when they fade away, leave a feeling of supernatural
voluptuousness, which a man runs after for the remainder of his life.
A single kiss had been enough. Never had _rendezvous_ been spent in a
manner more decorous or chaste, or, perhaps, more coldly, in a spot of
which the surroundings were more gruesome, in presence of a more
hideous divinity; for the mother had remained in Henri's imagination
like some infernal, cowering thing, cadaverous, monstrous, savagely
ferocious, which the imagination of poets and painters had not yet
conceived.
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