The Seal of Vengeance

I Left The Club Early; the officers were playing cards for high stakes. It was evening, but the torrid heat made one think the sun was still shining. I found Pudica scarcely dressed, her shoulders exposed to the breeze which seemed to burn them. Her arms were bare, those beautiful arms into which I had bitten so many times during moments of emotion, and which tasted as sweet as a strawberry. Her hair, heavy with heat, tumbled on her bronzed neck, and she was ravishing thus. Half lying over a low round table, she was writing. Now if Pudica were writing, it was no doubt to some lover, for some rendezvous, for some new infidelity to her husband, Major Ydow, who accepted her acts in silence. When I came in, the letter was written, and she was melting some wax to seal it, some blue wax spangled with silver.

"Where is the Major?" she asked seeing me. She seemed flustered as she always did, this woman who made men believe she was moved by their presence.

"He is gambling in a frenzied fashion," I answered, watching the pink flush which came to her face, "but I, this evening, have another type of frenzy."

She understood me. "Bah!" she said, "your frenzy is over." And she put her seal on the hot wax as it began to congeal. "Here," she said with provoking insolence, pointing to the wax, "here is your character. It was boiling a few minutes ago, and now it is cold." While saying this she turned the envelope and was about to write the address.

I was not jealous, but in spite of myself I wanted to see to whom she was writing. I looked over her shoulder. But my look stopped at the intoxicating cleft between her breasts – that place where I had rained so many kisses. Entranced, I bestowed one more upon this valley of love. The effect was instantaneous; she stopped writing and straightened up as if someone had touched her with a red-hot iron. She threw back her head and looked at me with that mixture of desire and confusion which was part of her charm. I gave her, in the wet pink of her half-opened mouth, all the intensity of my feeling.

This sensitive woman had the nerves of a tiger. Suddenly she jumped up.

"The Major is coming up the steps," she whispered. "He must have lost a lot of money, and he is especially jealous when he has lost. He is going to make a frightful scene. Here, jump in this place... I am going to make him leave."

She opened a large wardrobe in which she hung her dresses and pushed me in. I believe there are few men who have not been put in a wardrobe on the arrival of a husband.

But I cared nothing for the indignity. I was conscious only of the feel of her dresses against my face and of the dear fragrance of her which they still held. Soon, however, I heard the Major come in. She was right; he was in an execrable humor, suffering from an attack of jealousy, and it was all the more explosive since he had hid it from the rest of us. Naturally inclined towards suspicion and anger, his look went towards the letter which remained on the table, and which my kisses had prevented Pudica from addressing.

"What is that letter?" he asked harshly.

"It is a letter for Italy," answered Pudica tranquilly.

He was not fooled by her placid answer.

"That is not true," he said in a rough voice, and in that short sentence I understood much about the intimate life of these people. I could not see, of course, but I heard, and for me that was seeing. Their gestures were in their words and in the intonation of their voices which, in a few minutes, rose to the pitch of fury. The Major insisted that he be shown the letter; Pudica, who had seized it, refused to give it up. I heard the rustle of clothes and the sound of feet as they struggled. The Major was strong, and he took the let-ter and read it. It fixed a rendezvous with a man, but his name was not given. Absurdly curious, as are all jealous men, the Major tried in vain to get the name of her lover. Pudica must have hurt her hand in the struggle because she cried out:

"You are tearing my hand, you brute!"

Furious at knowing nothing, defied and mocked by this letter which told him only one thing, that she had a lover – another one – Major Ydow fell into one of those rages which degrade a man. He showered Pudica with insults – in the language of a coachman. I thought he was going to hit her, but the blows came later. He reproached her in shocking terms. He was brutal and revolting, and she responded like a woman who knows she has nothing to lose. She was less ignoble than he, more insulting and more cruel. She was insolent, ironical, laughing with hysterical hatred, and answering the torrents of insult with those words which women find when they want to make us crazy and which act upon our violence like sparks upon powder. Of all those cool and outrageous words she used, the ones which fell on his ears the most were that she did not love him and never had.

"Never, never, never!" she repeated with joyous fury as if she were dancing on his heart.

Now this idea that she had never loved him was most ferocious for this handsome man so often loved by women. He cried out:

"And our child?"

"Our child!" She burst out laughing.

"Do you think he is yours?"

"And whose is he, you bitch?" he asked in something which was not his voice.

She continued to laugh. "You'll never know," she said, defying him. And she whipped him with this, "You'll never know," a thousand times, and when she was tired of saying it, she began to sing it. Then when she had struck him enough with this sentence, she began to name the lovers she had had; the list included all his fellow officers.

"I have had them all," she gloated.

"And that child you are stupid enough to think your own was given me by the only man I have ever really loved, that I have ever adored. And you have not guessed who he was? And you still don't guess?"

She was lying. She had never loved any man. But she felt that the dagger blow for the Major was in this lie, and she let him have it and then turned the blade in the wound with her next remark.

"Well," she said slowly, "since you do not guess, you will have to give up. It was Captain Mesnilgrand."

She was probably still lying, but I was no longer sure. My name pronounced by her hit me like a bullet through the door of the wardrobe.

There was a silence like after a strangling. Then suddenly I heard a cry, the like of which I had never heard before, and I have heard some frightful ones on the field of battle. It gave me the force to thrust open the wardrobe door. What I saw I will never forget. Pudica was on her back on the low table where she had written her letter, and the Major was holding her with a grip of iron. Her clothes had been thrust aside, and her beautiful naked body was twisting like a serpent under his grip. What do you suppose he was doing with the other hand? The writing table, the lighted candle with the wax beside it, these circumstances had given to the Major an infernal idea – the idea of sealing his wife in the way she had sealed the letter – and he was in the relentless, vengeful act of this monstrous sealing.

"Be punished where you have sinned, infamous wench!" he cried.

I rushed at him and thrust my sword into his back up to the hilt.

I thrust my sword into his back up to the hilt.