But when she heard the callous voice, uttering a scientific wish
at the moment when her heart was breaking, her courage came back to
her; she resolved to struggle with that awful power which had torn a
lover from her arms, a father from her children, a fortune from their
home, happiness from all. And yet she could not repress a trepidation
which made her quiver; in all her life no such solemn scene as this
had taken place. This dreadful moment--did it not virtually contain
her future, and gather within it all the past?
Weak and timid persons, or those whose excessive sensibility magnifies
the smallest difficulties of life, men who tremble involuntarily
before the masters of their fate, can now, one and all, conceive the
rush of thoughts that crowded into the brain of this woman, and the
feelings under the weight of which her heart was crushed as her
husband slowly crossed the room towards the garden-door. Most women
know that agony of inward deliberation in which Madame Claes was
writhing. Even one whose heart has been tried by nothing worse than
the declaration to a husband of some extravagance, or a debt to a
dress-maker, will understand how its pulses swell and quicken when the
matter is one of life itself.
A beautiful or graceful woman might have thrown herself at her
husband's feet, might have called to her aid the attitudes of grief;
but to Madame Claes the sense of physical defects only added to her
fears.
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