The adulteress

He shook his head. "What harm is done by your staying awhile? Jean-Louis is sleeping. He would not know if you returned. Stay awhile with me, Zipporah."

He came toward me but I held him off. I was afraid of my emotions. I felt again that familiar desire which I had known with Gerard. It was there, I knew, ready to flare up and consume my resolutions. I knew that if I were not on guard all the time I should be swept away into the overwhelming need to slake my passion as I had done before.

There could not have been two men more unlike than Gerard and Charles and yet they both had this effect on me, this demanding, seering passion which I had never felt with Jean-Louis. Gerard had been so lighthearted, so ready to laugh, treating life as a joke. Charles was somber, weighed down by secrets, a man of deep passions when they were aroused, I was sure. Gerard's I fancied could be easily aroused but Charles would give long consideration to such matters and would not lightly fall in love.

I must be careful. I could not believe that I would be caught up in a whirlwind of passion while Jean-Louis lay ill—and yet thinking about over the years I could feel the same irresistible impulses.

I was in love with Charles. I had been in love with Gerard. I loved Jean-Louis, too; I was weak, I realized that. So I must tread very carefully.

He said: "I want to talk to you. I have never felt for anyone before what I do for you. I had a wife once. You knew that, did you?"

I shook my head.

"I thought perhaps Isabel had told you."

"Isabel has talked of you a good deal ... but she never really told me anything about you which I did not know."

"Zipporah, I want you to know about this part of my life. Come and sit down. I've wanted to talk to you so often. I've wanted to tell you ... to explain why these moods come upon me at times. I can never, never escape from my guilt. Whatever I do ... it is there. I want you to know everything about me, Zipporah ... I want to take you into those secret hiding places because I want you to know me for what I am. There must be no secrets between us."

I sat down beside him.

He went on: "It happened a long time ago ... ten years to be exact. I was young and ambitious then ... rather different from what I am now. Events change us more than time, perhaps. I was a doctor in fashionable London. My patients were among the rich; my reputation was growing, and then I met Dorinda. It was at the theater. She was a passionate theatergoer, and so was I. I was constantly at the Haymarket Theater and Drury Lane or Covent Garden. It was during a performance of King Lear, with Garrick magnificent in the leading role, that I was introduced to Dorinda.

"She was very beautiful—fair-haired, blue-eyed like an animated doll. She was high-spirited, full of vitality. I was completely enchanted. She enjoyed the company of actors and as I discovered later helped many of them financially. She had inherited a large fortune from her father, who had doted on her during his lifetime. Her mother had died soon after her birth.

"You can imagine what happened. I must have seemed something of an oddity to her. I was serious, the ambitious doctor; her life had been spent among stage people or those who never worked but were intent on the pursuit of pleasure.

"I could not understand why she accepted me, but she did. I think it was a sort of novelty. It was only after our marriage that I discovered my wife was one of the greatest heiresses in the country and her upbringing had made her highly unsuitable to be the wife of a doctor. She could not understand my desire to work. There was no need to work, she declared. She had never thought of money. It was something which was just there. As for work ... My patients, she said, were all malingerers. They fancied being ill for a while and thought it made them rather interesting. She found my absorption rather a bore.

"I realized within a month or so that I had made a great mistake. I used to go for long walks in the evenings into the poorer districts. That was when I went into Whitefriars. I told you about that. I had the feeling then that I wanted to get away from my work in fashionable London. I wanted to do something worthwhile.

"I tried to explain to Dorinda. She was skeptical. I had been noticing for some time strange things about her. And there came one night ... I had been out looking after a poor woman ... one of the servants of a wealthy family who had called me in. The woman was suffering from an incurable disease and I had been with her some time so that I was too late for the theater performance to which we had arranged to go.