XII
One night in February a suspicion crossed Jean’s mind.
Cora had asked him to leave at midnight, and just as he was going away, he thought he heard a sound of pacing in an adjoining room, as if someone were waiting there.
He left at midnight, and then he returned with stealthy tread, stepping noiselessly over the sand. He climbed over a wall and on to a balcony, and looked into Cora’s room through the half-opened door leading on to the terrace.
Someone had taken Jean’s place by his mistress’s side—quite a young man, wearing the uniform of a naval officer. He had made himself at home, and was lounging in an arm chair with an air of disdainful ease.
She was standing, and they were talking.
At first it seemed to Jean that they were speaking an unknown tongue. The words were French, yet Jean could not understand them. These scraps of speech, which they interchanged so lightly, seemed to him mocking enigmas, perfectly meaningless for him. Cora too, was no longer the same; her expression had changed; a kind of smile hovered on her lips, a smile such as he remembered to have seen on the lips of a tall girl in a place of ill-repute.
Jean found himself trembling. He felt as if all the blood had left his head, and had poured back into his heart. He heard a roaring in his ears, like the noise of the sea; his eyes grew dim.
He was ashamed of being there, yet he was determined to remain and to understand.
He heard his name spoken; they were talking about him; he drew nearer, supporting himself against the wall, and he caught some words more distinctly spoken.
“You are wrong, Cora,” said the young man in a very quiet voice, with an exasperating smile. “In the first place, he is a very handsome fellow, and then he, at all events, loves you.”
“True, but I wanted two of you. I chose you because your name is Jean, like his. Otherwise I should have been capable of making a slip in the name when I was talking to him. I am very absent-minded.”
And then she drew closer to the new Jean.
She was still more changed in voice and face. With the languorous, lisping, coaxing inflections of the creole accent she murmured childish words to him, and offered him her lips, still warm from the spahi’s kisses.
But her lover had caught sight of the pale face of Jean Peyral gazing at them through the half-open door, and for all reply he pointed Cora towards him with his hand.
The spahi was standing there, motionless, petrified, fixing his wide, haggard eyes upon them.
When he found that they in their turn were looking at him, he simply stepped back into the shadow. Cora had advanced towards him, with the hideous expression of an animal disturbed in its love-making; this woman frightened him; she was almost near enough to touch him. She shut her door with a furious gesture; shot a bolt behind it... and all was over.
Through the disguise of the polished élégante the mulatto woman, grand-daughter of a slave, had betrayed herself again with her appalling cynicism. She felt neither remorse, nor fear, nor pity....
The coloured woman and her lover heard a noise as of a body falling heavily to the ground, a loud sinister noise in the silence of the night—and then later, towards morning, a sob behind that door, and a rustling sound as of hands fumbling in the dark.
The spahi had risen to his feet, and feeling his way, he went out into the night.