"And what did you do?" asked Marie Alice.
"What a man does when he has a leg broken by the bursting of a shell," said the old soldier; "I amputated my heart bravely. It was hard, but I cut clean."
"You can quite see that my son must learn all," replied the mother, in a tone at once of triumph and of pity.
It was after lunching with one of Madame de Sauve's friends, and tasting the delicious pleasure of seeing his mistress come in with the coffee, that Hubert Liauran betook himself to the Quai d'Orléans, where a line from the General had asked him to be at about three o'clock. The young man had fancied, on receiving his godfather's note, that it had to do with the arrears of his debt. He knew that the Count was fastidious, and he had allowed two months to pass away without clearing off the promised amount. The conversation accordingly began with some words of excuse, which he stammered out immediately on entering the apartment on the ground floor.
He had not revisited it since the eve of his departure for Folkestone, and he experienced in thought all his former sensations on finding the aspect of the room exactly such as he had left it. The notes on the reorganisation of the army still covered the table; the bust of Marshal Bugeaud adorned the mantel-piece; and the General, attired in a pelisse-shaped dressing-jacket, was methodically smoking his briarwood pipe. To the first words uttered by his godson he merely replied:
"That is not the question, my dear fellow," in a voice that was at once grave and sad.
By the mere intonation Hubert understood too well that a scene was preparing of capital importance to himself. If it is puerile to believe in presentiments in the sense in which the crowd take the term, no creature gifted with refinement can deny that the slightest of details are sufficient to invoke an accurate perception of approaching danger. The General was silent, and Hubert could see the name of Madame de Sauve in his eyes and on his lips, although it had never been uttered between his godfather and himself. He waited, therefore, for the resumption of the conversation with that passionate beating of the heart which makes impatience an almost intolerable torture to highly-strung natures.
Scilly, whose whole sentimental experience since his youth was summed up in a single deception in love, now felt himself seized with great pity for the blow that he was about to inflict upon a youth so dear to himself, and the phrases which he had been putting together during the whole of that morning appeared to him to be devoid of common sense. Nevertheless, it was necessary to speak. At times of supreme uncertainty it is the characteristic impressed upon us by our callings in life which usually manifests itself and guides our action. Scilly was a soldier, brave and exact. He was bound to go, and he did go, straight to the point.
"My boy," he said, with a certain solemnity, "you must first know that I am acquainted with your life. You are the lover of a married woman, who is called Madame de Sauve. Do not deny it. Honour forbids you to tell me the truth. But the essential point is to take immediate precautions."
"Why do you speak to me of this," replied the young man, rising and taking up his hat, "when you acknowledge that honour commands me not even to listen to you? Look here, godfather, if you have brought me here to broach this subject, let us have no more of it. I prefer to bid you good-bye before quarrelling with you."
"But it was not to question you nor to lecture you that I asked for this interview," replied the Count, taking the hand which Hubert had stiffly held out to him. "It was to tell you a very grave fact, and one of which you must, yes, must be informed. Madame de Sauve has another lover, Hubert, who is not yourself."
"Godfather," said the young man, disengaging his fingers from those of the old General, and growing pale with sudden anger, "I do not know why you wish me to cease to respect you. It is infamous to say of a woman what you have just said of her."
"If you were not concerned," replied the Count, rising, and the sad gravity of his countenance contrasted strangely with the wild looks of his godson, "you know very well that I would not speak to you of Madame de Sauve or of any other woman. But I love you as I should love a son of my own, and I tell you what I would tell him. You have misplaced your love; the woman has another lover!"
"Who? When? Where? What are your proofs?" replied Hubert, exasperated beyond all bounds by the insistence and coolness of the General; "tell me, tell me——"
"When?—this summer. Who?—a Monsieur de La Croix-Firmin. Where?—at Trouville. But it is the talk of all the drawing-rooms," continued Scilly; and, without naming George, he related the indisputable details which the latter had confided to Madame Liauran, from the statement of the eye-witness to the indiscreet utterances of La Croix-Firmin.
The young man listened without interruption, but to one who knew him the expression of his face was terrible. Anger that was blended of grief and indignation made him grow pale to the lips.
"And who told you this story?" he asked.
"How does that concern you?" said the General, who understood that to indicate the real author of the whole statement to Hubert just at first would be to expose George to a scene which might have a tragical issue. "Yes, how does that concern you since you are not Madame de Sauve's lover?"
"I am her friend," rejoined Hubert; "and I have the right to protect her, as I would protect you, against odious calumnies. Moreover," he added, looking fixedly at his godfather, "if you refuse to answer my question, I give you my word of honour that within two days I will find this Monsieur de La Croix-Firmin who indulges in these knavish calumnies, and I will have something to say to him without any woman's name being mentioned."
The General, seeing Hubert's state of overexcitement, and not knowing what words to use against a frenzy which he had not foreseen,—for it was based upon the most absolute incredulity,—said to himself that Madame Liauran alone possessed the power to calm her son.
"I have told you what I had to tell you," he returned, in a melancholy tone; "if you want to know more, ask your mother."
"My mother?" said the young man violently, "I might have suspected as much. Well! I will go to her."
And half-an-hour later he entered the little drawing-room in the Rue Vaneau, where Madame Liauran was at that moment alone. She was waiting, in fact, for her son, but with mortal anguish. She knew that it was the time for his explanation with Scilly, and the issue of it now frightened her. The sight of Hubert's physiognomy increased her fears. He was livid, with bistre rings beneath his eyes, and Marie Alice immediately felt the counter-shock of this visible emotion.
"I have come from my godfather's, mother," the young man began, "and he has said things to me that I shall not forgive him as long as I live. What pained me still more was that he pretended to have from yourself the calumnies which he repeated to me concerning one whom you may not like—but I do not recognise your right to brand her to me, to whom she has always been perfect—"
"Do not speak to me in that tone, Hubert," said Madame Liauran, "you hurt me so. It is just as though you were burying a knife in me here." She pointed to her bosom.
Ah! it was not only Hubert's tone, his short, hard tone, that was torturing her; it was above all, and once again, the evidence of the feeling that bound him to Madame de Sauve.
"Of us two," she thought, "he would choose her." The immediate result of her grief was to revive her hatred for the woman who was its cause, and in her impulse of aversion she found strength to continue the conversation.
"You have lost the feelings of our home, my child," she said, in a calmer voice; "you do not understand what tenderness binds us to yourself, and what duties it imposes upon us."
"Strange duties, if they consist in echoing degrading reports about one whose only offence is that she has inspired me with a deep affection."
"No," said Madame Liauran, who was growing excited in her turn; "it is not a question of resuming a discussion which has already set us face to face as though for a duel," and the glances of mother and son crossed at that moment like two sword-blades. "It is a question of this—that you love a creature who is unworthy of you, and that I, your mother, have had you told so and tell you so again."
"And I, your son, reply to you—," and he had the word LIE on his lips; then, as though frightened at what he had been going to say—"that you are mistaken, mother. I ask your pardon for speaking to you in this strain," he added, taking her hand and kissing it; "I am not master of myself."
"Listen, my child," said Marie Alice, from whose eyes the unlooked-for kindness of this gesture caused the tears to flow; "I cannot go into all those sad details with you." Here she touched his hair just as in the days when he was a little child. "Go to your cousin George. He will repeat to you all that he has told us. For it was he who, in his anxiety, thought it his duty to warn us. But remember what your mother tells you now. I believe in the double sight of the heart. I should not have hated this woman as I have hated her from the very first, if she had not been bound to prove fatal to you. Now, good-bye, my child. Kiss me," she added, in broken tones. Did she understand that from that hour her son's kisses would never be to her what they had formerly been?
Hubert dashed from the room, leaped into a cab, and gave the driver the address of the club at which he hoped to find George—a small and very aristocratic one in the Rue du Cirque. But while the man, stimulated by the promise of a large tip, was whipping his horse, the unhappy youth was beginning to reflect upon the entirely unexpected blow which had just fallen upon him. The character of the race of action to which he belonged manifested itself in the recovery of his self-possession.
From the very first he set aside all notion of calumnious invention on the part of his mother and godfather. That they both detested Theresa, he knew. That they were capable of venturing a great deal in order to detach him from her, had just been proved to him. Yes, Madame Liauran and the Count might venture upon anything, except falsehood. They believed, therefore, what they had said, and they believed it on the word of George Liauran, who had been hawking about one of the thousand infamous reports of Paris; but with what purpose? Hubert's mind did not, at this moment, admit that there was an atom of truth in the story of his mistress's relations with another man.
He did not wait to discuss the fact within himself; he thought only of the person from whose lips the tale had come. What motive, then, had prompted his cousin, to whom he was now going in order to demand an explanation? He saw him in imagination with his thin face, his pointed beard, his short hair, and his shrewd look. The vision raised within him a strangely uncomfortable feeling, which, though he did not suspect it, was the work of Madame de Sauve. George had never up to the present spoken to Hubert about her in any way that could admit of allusion or banter.
But women possess a sure instinct of mistrust, and from the first she had noticed that her love was repugnant to Hubert's cousin. She guessed that he saw only the whim of ablaséewoman where she herself saw a religion. A woman forgives formal slanders sooner than she forgives the tone in which she is spoken of, and she understood that the accent of George's voice as he pronounced her name was in absolute disagreement with the feelings with which she wished to inspire Hubert. And then, to keep back nothing, she had a past, and George might be acquainted with that past. A shudder passed through her at the mere idea of this.
For these diverse reasons she had employed her shrewdest and most secret diplomacy to part the two cousins from each other. This work was now bearing its fruit, and was the means of inspiring Hubert with unconquerable distrust, while the cab was taking him to the club in the Rue du Cirque.
"In what way," he thought, "can I question George? I cannot say to him: 'I am Madame de Sauve's lover, and you have accused her of having deceived me; prove it to me.'"
The moral impossibility of such a conversation had become a physical one at the moment when the cab stopped in front of the club.
"After all," said Hubert to himself, "I am a very child to trouble myself about what Monsieur George Liauran believes or does not believe."
He dismissed his cab, and instead of entering the club, walked in the direction of the Champs Elysées.
That which constitutes the marvellous essence and the unique charm of love, is that it gathers, as into a bundle, and sets vibrating in unison, the three beings within us, of thought, feeling, and instinct,—the brain, the heart, and all the flesh. But it is also this unison which forms its terrible infirmity. It remains defenceless against the encroachment of physical imagination, and this feebleness appears especially in the birth of jealousy. In this way is explained the monstrous facility with which suspicion rises in the soul of a man that knows himself loved above all others, if any particulars frame, before his mind's eye, a picture wherein he sees his mistress deceiving him.
To be sure the lover does not believe in the truth of this picture, yet he is none the more able to forget it entirely, and it gives him pain until a proof comes to render the image absurd at every point. But as there enters a great part of physical life into the formation of the picture, the more material the proof is the more complete is the cure. It is exactly what happens to one awaking from a nightmare, when the assault of surrounding sensations comes to dissipate the torturing image which has occasioned the hallucination of the sleeper.
Certainly, for a year past, during which he had been in love with Theresa de Sauve, Hubert had never, even for a minute, doubted a love of which, through a feeling of delicacy that was a creature of prudence, he had never spoken to any one; and even now, after the accusations formulated against her by Count Scilly and Madame Liauran, he did not believe her capable of treachery. Nevertheless, these accusations carried a possible reality with them, and while he was going up again towards the Arc de Triomphe he was pursued by the recollection of the phrases uttered by his godfather and his mother, evoking within him the spectacle of Theresa resigning herself to another man.
It was but a flash, and scarcely had this vision of hideousness occurred to Hubert's mind than it induced a reaction. By a violent effort he drove away the image, which vanished for a few minutes and then reappeared, this time accompanied by a whole train of probative ideas. Hubert suddenly recollected that during the trip to Tourville several of his mistress' letters had been written from day to day in a somewhat changed hand. She seemed to have sat down to her table in great haste to perform her labour of love, as though it were a task to be hurriedly accomplished. Hubert had been pained by this little momentary change, and then he had reproached himself for a tender susceptibility of heart which was like ingratitude.
Yes; but was it not immediately after this short period of negligent letters that Theresa had left Trouville, under the pretext that the sea air was doing her no good? Her departure had been decided upon in twenty-four hours. Hubert could again feel the impulse of wondering joy which had been caused him by this sudden return. He had not expected to see his mistress back in Paris before the month of October, and he met her again in the first week of September The joy of that time was transformed by retrospection into vague anxiety. Had the evident perturbation of the letters written before the departure, and had the departure itself, no connection with the abominable action of which Theresa was accused? But it was infamous on his part to admit such ideas, even in imagination. He threw back his head, closed his eyes, knit his forehead, and, mustering all his energy of soul, was enabled to drive the suspicion away once more.
He was now in the highest part of the avenue. He felt so tired that he did what was for him an extraordinary action, he looked for a café at which he might stop and rest. He noticed a little English tavern, hidden in this corner of fashionable Paris, for the use of coachmen and bookmakers. He went in. Two men, with red faces and of sturdy appearance, who looked as though they must be redolent of the stable, were standing before the counter. The shadow of a closing autumn afternoon was gloomily invading this deserted nook.
Facing the bar ran an empty bench, and on a long wooden table lay an English newspaper in several sheets. Here Hubert sat down and ordered a glass of port wine, which he drank mechanically and which had the effect of freshly exciting his strained nerves. The vision came back to him a third time, accompanied by a still greater number of ideas, which automatically grouped themselves into a single body of argument. Theresa had then returned to Paris so speedily, and had repaired to one of their clandestine meetings. But why had she had such a violent fit of sobbing in his very arms? She was often melancholy in her voluptuousness. The intoxications of love usually ended with her in sad emotion. But how far removed was this frenzy of despair from her habitual, dreamy languor! Hubert had been almost frightened at it, and then she had answered him:
"It was so long since I had tasted your kisses! They are so sweet to me that they pain me. But it is a dear pain," she had added, drawing him to her heart and cradling him in her arms.
Nevertheless her despair had not entirely disappeared on the following day or during the weeks which ensued, and which she had spent in the neighbourhood of Paris at a country house belonging to one of her friends who was acquainted with Hubert. He had gone there to see her and had found her as silent as ever, and at times almost dull. She had returned to Paris in the same condition, and with her face somewhat altered; but he had attributed the change to physical uneasiness. A sudden and new association of ideas now caused him to say to himself:
"What if this were remorse? Remorse for what? Why, for her infamy!"
He got up, went out of the café, resumed his walk, and shook off this frightful hypothesis.
"Fool that I am," he thought, "if she had deceived me it would have been because she did not love me, and what motive would she then have to lie to me?"
This objection, which appeared irrefutable to him, drove away the suspicion for a few minutes. Then it came back again as it always does: "But who is this Count de la Croix-Firmin? Has she ever spoken of him to me?" he asked himself.
He searched anxiously through all his recollections, but could not find that this name had ever been uttered by her. Still, if— Suddenly in a hidden corner of his memory he perceived the syllables of the already hateful name. He had seen them printed in a newspaper article on the festivities at Trouville. It was certainly in a Boulevard paper, and in a connection in which he had also remarked his mistress's name. By what chance did this little fact, in itself insignificant, return to torment him at this moment?
He had a doubt as to his accuracy, and he took a carriage to go to the office of the only paper that he read habitually. He searched through the collection, and laid his hand upon the short paragraph, which he recollected, doubtless, because he had read it several times on Theresa's account. It was the report of a garden party given by a Marchioness de Jussat. Did it merely prove that this Monsieur de la Croix-Firman had been introduced to Madame de Sauve?
"Ah!" exclaimed the poor fellow after these murderous reflections, "am I going to become jealous?"
This represented an insupportable idea to him, for nothing was more contrary to the innate loyalty of his whole nature than distrust. Then he remembered the warm tenderness which she had lavished upon him from the first, and as he had ever since followed the sweet practice of opening up his whole heart to her, he said to himself that he had a sure means of removing this evil vision for ever. He had simply to see Theresa and tell her everything. In the first place this would warn her of a calumny which she must immediately put down. Then, he felt that a single word coming from the lips of this woman would immediately dissipate every shadow of anxiety in his mind. He entered a post-office and scrawled on the blue paper of a little pneumatic despatch:
"Tuesday, five o'clock.—The lover is sad, and cannot do without his mistress. Wicked persons have been maligning her to him. Who should hear all this, if not the dear confidante of every sorrow and every joy? Can she come to-morrow, she knows where, at ten o'clock in the morning? Let her do so, and she shall be loved still more, if that be possible, by her H.L.,—which denotes this closing afternoon: Horrible lassitude."
It was in this strain of tender childishness that he wrote to her, with the fondness of language wherein passion often dissembles its native violence. He slipped the slender despatch into the box, and was astonished to find himself feeling almost placid again. He had acted, and the presence of the real had driven the vision away.
At the moment when Theresa de Sauve received Hubert's despatch she was preparing to dress for dining out. She immediately countermanded her carriage, and wrote a hasty line, pleading headache as an excuse for absence. She had been seized with trembling and an icy sweat on reading the simple phrases of the blue note. She gave orders that she was not at home, and cowered down in a low chair before her bedroom fire, with her head in her hands.
Since her return from Trouville she had been living in continued agony, and what she had been dreading like death was come. Her darling, whom she had left so perfectly tranquil and cheerful at two o'clock, could not have fallen into the state of mind which she could feel through the graceful childishness of his note, if some catastrophe had not happened. What catastrophe? Theresa guessed it too well.
George Liauran had been told the truth. During the unhappy woman's stay at the seaside there had been enacted in her life one of those secret dreams of infidelity which frequently occur in the lives of women who have once deviated from the straight path. But our actions, however guilty they may be, do not always give the measure of our souls. Madame de Sauve's nature comprised very lofty portions by the side of very low ones, and was a singular mixture of corruption and nobility. She might, indeed, commit abominable faults, but to forgive them in herself, after the happy custom of most women of the same description, that she could not do, and now less than ever after what her passion for Hubert had been to her life for several months.
Ah! her life! her life! It was this that Theresa de Sauve saw in the flickering flames in the fireplace that autumn evening, with her heart racked with apprehension. The whole weight of her former errors, her criminal errors, was now falling upon her heart, and she remembered her state of dull agony when she had met Hubert. Theresa de Sauve had been endowed by nature with those dispositions which are most fatal to a woman in modern society, unless she marries under rare conditions, or unless maternity saves her from herself by breaking the energies of her physical, and engrossing the fervour of her moral, vitality. She had a romantic heart, while her temperament made her a creature of passion, that is to say, she fostered both dreams of feeling and unconquerable appetites for sensation.
When persons of this kind meet on the threshold of their lives, with a man who satisfies the twofold needs of their nature, there are between them and this man such mysterious festivities of love as poets conceive but never embrace. Where their destiny wills that they shall be delivered, as Theresa had been to her husband, to a man who treats them from the very first like courtesans, who initiates them in deed and thought into the whole science of pleasure, but who has not sufficient poetry to satisfy the other half of their souls, such women necessarily become curiosos, capable of falling into the worst experiences, and then their sterility even becomes a happiness, for they at least do not transmit that flame of sentimental and sensual life which they have commonly inherited from a mother's error.
It was, in fact, from her mother, who, cold though she was, had been led by weariness and abandonment into guilty misconduct, that Theresa derived her dreamy imagination, while there flowed in her veins the burning blood of her true father, the handsome Count Branciforte. Further, this child of license and infatuation had been brought up without religious principles or bridle of any kind, by Adolphe Lussac, a most immoral man, who was amused by the little girl's vivacity, and had early made her a guest at many dinners, where she heard all that she ought not to have heard, and guessed all that she ought not to have known. Who can calculate the amount of influence over the falls of a woman of twenty-five that is attributable to the conversations listened to or overheard by the young girl in short frocks?
Nevertheless, Theresa, who had married when very young, had had only two intrigues up to the time of her chance meeting with Hubert, and these two amours had caused her such disgust that she had sworn that she would never again fall into the folly of taking a lover. The good resolutions of a woman who has fallen, and who has suffered for her fault, are like the firm intentions of a gambler who has lost two thousand pounds, or a drunkard who has told his secrets during his intoxication. The deep-lying causes which have produced the first adultery continue to subsist after the fault has given the guilty one cruelly to taste of every bitterness.
The woman who takes a lover is not so much attached to this lover as she is to love, and she continues to be still attached to love when the chosen lover has deceived her, until disillusion after disillusion brings her to love pleasure without love, and sometimes pleasure of the most degrading nature. Theresa de Sauve could never descend so far as this, because a sentiment of the ideal persisted within her, too feeble to counterbalance the fever of the senses, but strong enough to illumine in her own eyes the abyss of her weaknesses. This taciturn woman, through whom there passed at times the tremors of almost brutal desire, was no epicurean, no light and cheerful courtesan of the world.
Conceived amid her mother's remorse, Theresa had a tragic soul. She was capable of depravity, but incapable of that amused forgetfulness which plucks the fleeting hour, and cannot, without effort, recall the first lover's name among all the rest. No; this first lover, this Frederick Suzel, whom George Liauran had justly suspected, could never be thought of by her without causing her thorough nausea by the recollection of the sad motives of her surrender to him. He was a man gay even to buffoonery, and witty even to cynicism, with that sort of wit which is current between the Opera House, Tortoni, and the Café Anglais.
When paying his addresses to Theresa, he had the good sense not to lose himself in the tricks of fashionable flirtations as did his numerous rivals—a troop of beasts of prey on the scent of a victim. With great skilfulness of language and a certain penetration of vice, he had frankly offered to arrange with her a kind of partnership for pleasure which should be secret, sure, and with no future, and the unfortunate woman had accepted his proposal. Why? Because she was dreadfully dull; because she was carrying off Suzel from one of her friends; because she was greedy for new sensations, and this person, with his dishonouring talk, had about him a sort of strange prestige of libertinism. Of this connection, in which Frederick had at least been faithful to his promise in not seeking to prolong it, Theresa had soon been deeply ashamed, and she had escaped from it as from the galleys.
After a year spent in enduring her remorse, and in feeling herself sullied by all the knowledge of evil that her intimacy with this man had revealed to her, she had thought to find satisfaction for the needs of her heart in the person of Alfred Fanières, one of the most subtle novelists of the day. Did not all the books of this charming narrator, from his first and only volume of poetry to his last collection of tales, reveal the most minute and tender understanding of the gentle feminine mind? In this second connection, begun with the most intoxicating hope—that, namely, of consoling all the deceptions of an admired artist—Theresa had soon struck upon the implacable barrenness of the inmost nature of the worn-out literary man, in whom there is an absolute divorce between feeling and written expression.
Though undeceived, she nevertheless persisted in remaining this man's mistress, from that reason which causes a woman's second love affair to be the longest of all in coming to a conclusion. She will admit that the first has been a mistake; but the mistake of her marriage and the mistake of her first amour make two; at the third error she acknowledges that the fault in her conduct is due to herself, and not to the circumstances of her life, and this is a cruel confession for secret pride. Then the writer's egotism had manifested itself so harshly, when he had believed himself sure of her, that the revolt had been too strong, and Theresa had broken with him.
It was during the period of hard distress subsequent to this rupture that she had met Hubert Liauran. From the corner of her solitary hearth, beside which she watched persistently, she could see so very clearly what the discovery of this tender child's heart had been to her. In an existence which had comprised nothing but wounding or disgrace—had not her keenest sorrows been dishonoured beforehand by their cause?—with what delighted emotion had she measured the purity of this young man's heart? What anxiety had she felt, and what a dread of not pleasing him! What a dread, too, knowing that she had pleased him, of being ruined in his thoughts!
How she had trembled lest one of the cruel talkers of society should reveal her past to Hubert! How had she employed all her woman's art to make this love an adorable poem, wherein should be lacking nothing that might enchant a soul innocent and new to life! How had she enjoyed his reverence, and how had she allowed it to be prolonged! Ah! when she thought now of those two days at Folkestone she could scarcely believe that they had been real, and that she had had the courage to survive them. She remembered that she had gone with Hubert to the terminus in spite of every consideration of prudence; she had seen him disappear in the direction of London, leaning out of the carriage window to watch her the longer; she had re-entered the rooms which they had both occupied, before herself taking train for Dover, and there she had spent two hours in the grievous loneliness of a soul overwhelmed with simultaneous despair and felicity.
Her soul bent beneath its weight of recollections like a flower overladen with dew. She had there known a complete union between her two natures—an almost passionate vibration of her entire being. She had half forgiven herself the past, excusing herself by saying mentally to Hubert the words which so many women have said aloud to men jealous of those bygone days which belonged to others: "I did not know you!"
On their subsequent return to Paris, how carefully and piously had she set herself, during the spring and summer, to live in such a way as not to lose his affection for a single minute! She had resumed all the modesty admitted by love that is complete, but is ennobled by the soul. She trembled constantly lest her caresses should be a cause of corruption to this being, so young both in heart and in body, whom she wished to intoxicate without defiling.
Although she was enamoured to distraction, she had desired the meetings in the little abode in the Avenue Friedland to be far between, lest she should not long enough preserve in his eyes her charm of divine novelty. They had not been very numerous—she might have counted them, tasting in thought the distinct sweetness of each—those afternoons when, with all the shutters closed, and with no light, she had again found the delights of the Folkestone time, sunk in her lover's arms, and dead to everything but the present moment and its intoxication.
She had gone so far in her idolatry of Hubert as to worship Madame Liauran, although she well knew that she was hated by her. She worshipped her for having brought up this son in such an atmosphere of pure and shrinking sensibility. She worshipped her for having kept him for her during the years of adolescence and youth, so delicate, so graceful, so tender, so much her own, so absolutely her own in the past, the present, and the future. For there was loftiness, almost folly, in her pride. She would say to him:
"Yours is beginning and mine is ending. Yes, child, at twenty-six a woman is almost at the end of her youth, and you have so many years before you! But never, never will you be loved as I love you, and never will you forget me, never, never." And at other times: "You will marry," she would say; "she lives, she breathes, and yet she is not known to me, she who is to take you from me, and who will sleep every night upon your heart as I did at Folkestone. Ah! must it indeed be that I have met you so late, and that I cannot bind you to my kisses."
And she would encircle his neck with the loosened tresses of her long, black hair. Since she had belonged to him she had again acquired the habit which she had had as a young girl, of dressing her own hair, so that he might handle her beautiful locks. Then when she had dressed them again quite alone, and was attired and veiled, she would come back to him, not wishing to bid him good-bye anywhere but in the room where they had loved each other, and she would understand from the throbbings of Hubert's heart that no sensation told so much upon him as this good-bye kiss which she gave him with nearly cold lips. She would depart a prey to a nameless sadness, but one at least of which she told her lover. For she did not tell him of every sadness.
She was married, and although she had at all times had a room of her own, she was sometimes obliged to receive her husband in it. Alas! it was all the more necessary because she had a lover. It was a sinister expiation of her passion, and one which she justified on her part by telling herself that she owed as much to Hubert. If she ever became a mother could she fly with him and take from him his whole life? and the pitiless necessity of baleful lies and degrading partitions would thus come to torture her at the height of her happiness. She acquitted herself, nevertheless, since it was for him, her darling, that she lied.
Yes, but what monstrous enigma suddenly reared itself before her? Oh, the cruel, cruel enigma! With this divine love in her heart, how had she been able to do what she had done? For it had been, indeed, herself, and none other—she, with those feet of hers which now were feeling icy cold, with those hands which now were pressing her feverishly-throbbing brow—she, in short, with her whole physical being, who had left for Trouville at the end of the month of July—she, Theresa de Sauve, who had installed herself for the season in a villa on the hill. Yes, it had been herself. And yet no! It was not possible that Hubert's mistress had done this. What—this? Oh, cruel, cruel enigma!
From what depths of the memory of her senses had there issued those strange impulses, those secret, lustful temptations which had commenced to assail her? But have the senses really a memory? Can it be that the guilty fevers will not depart for ever from the blood which they have fired in evil hours?
Once settled in her villa, she had met again with old friends who had been greatly neglected since the beginning of her connection with Hubert. With these women and their admirers—their "fancy men," as a lady said who mixed in their "set"—she had formed several very cheerful and innocent country parties, and here she was, day by day, beginning, not to love Hubert less, but to live somewhat apart from her love, and to take pleasure anew in habits of masculine familiarities which she had forbidden to herself for a year past. She was so idle in her villa with no indoor occupation—not even reading. For she had never liked books much, and her connection with Alfred Fanières had disgusted her for ever with the falsity of fine phrases. When she had written lengthily to Hubert, and then briefly to her husband—who, moreover, came to see her every week—it was necessary to beguile the tedious hours; and at times fitful thoughts came to her which she dared not acknowledge to herself. Hankerings after sensations arose within her, and astonished her.
She knew by hearsay that almost all men, however tender they may be, and however dearly loved their mistresses, cannot remain long away from the latter without experiencing irresistible temptations to deceive her with the first girl that they meet. But this was true of men, and not of women. Why, then, did she find herself a prey to this inexplicable agitation, to this thirst for sensual intoxications, of which she had believed herself for ever cured by the influence of her ennobling, her ideal love? The depraved creature that she had formerly been awoke by degrees. At night, in her sleep, she was haunted by visions of her past. In vain, had she striven, and in vain had she cursed her secret perversion.
Then she had allowed herself to listen to the addresses of the young Count de la Croix-Firmim. She remembered with horror the kind of nervous fascination which this man's presence, his smile, and his eyes had exerted upon her. Then—she would fain have died at the recollection of this—one afternoon, when he had come up to see her, and there was a torrid heat, such as makes the will feel itself drooping, he had been venturesome, and she had given herself to him, faintly at first, and then impetuously and madly. For three days she had been his mistress—a prey to the wildness of physical passion—banishing, ever banishing, the recollection of Hubert, feeling herself rolling into a gulf of infamy, and flinging herself still further into it, until the day when she had awakened from this sensual frenzy as from a dream. She had opened her eyes, measured her shame, and, like a wounded and dying creature, had fled from the accursed spot and from her detested accomplice to return—to what?—and to whom?
A melancholy and heart-breaking return to what had been the restoration of her entire life, to what she had blasted for ever! She had returned to the room of those sweet hours, and she had found Hubert, her Hubert—but could she still call him so?—more tender, more loving, and more loved than before. Alas! alas! had her inexpiable deceit rendered her for ever powerless to taste that of which she was no longer worthy? In the young man's arms, and on his heart, she had remembered the other, and the ecstacy of former times, the delicious and unspeakable swooning in the excess of feeling, had fled from her.
It was then that Hubert had seen her sobbing despairingly, and an immense sadness had come upon her, a death-like torpor, crossed by a cruel anxiety lest some indiscreet speech should reach her lover and awake his suspicions. Her own reputation she heeded but little; she was well aware that after acting as she did with La Croix-Firmin, she could count on little but contempt and hatred from him. She also knew what the honour of those men who make it their profession to have women is worth. What tortured her, however, was not a fear lest he might compromise her personal security by speaking. After all, what had she, childless, and rich with an independent fortune, to dread from her husband?
But a look of distrust in Hubert's eyes was what she felt to be beyond her powers of endurance. Perhaps, nevertheless, it might be better that he should know the frightful truth? He would drive her from him like an unfortunate; but at times anything seemed preferable to the torment of having such remorse at her heart, and of lying ceaselessly to so noble a fellow. She had again set herself to love him with desperate frenzy, and, as her revolt against the baser part of her nature hurried her to an extreme in the other or romantic direction, a mad desire came upon her to tell him everything, that at least the voluntary humiliation of her confession might be, as it were, a ransom for her infamy. And yet, although silence was a very lie, this lie she had still the strength to sustain; but, as for an actual lie, she suffered too much to have the shameful energy for it, if ever he questioned her.
And this questioning she was now about to face; she could read it between the lines of the despatch. Ah! what was she now to do, if she had guessed aright? She had drunk as much of the gall of shame as she could bear. Would she have heart enough still to drink this, the bitterest drop, and once more betray her only love by a fresh deception? If she were frank Hubert must at least esteem her for her frankness, and if she were not how could she endure herself? Yes, but to speak was the death of her happiness.
Alas! had not this been dead ever since her return? Would she ever recover what she had once felt? What was the use of disputing with fate for this mutilated, sullied remnant of a divine dream? And all that night she was bowed beneath the agony of these thoughts, a poor creature born for all the nobility of a single and faithful love, who had caught a glimpse of her dream and had possessed it, to be then dispossessed of it by the fault of a nature hidden within her, but which, nevertheless, was not her entire self.
In the cab which brought her to the Avenue Friedland on the day following this night of agony, Theresa de Sauve, took none of the precautions that were habitual with her, such as changing vehicles on the way, tying a double veil across her face, or peeping at the street corners through the little pane of glass behind, to see whether anything of a suspicious nature was accompanying her clandestine drive. All these timorous secrecies of forbidden love used formerly to please her delightfully on Hubert's account. Was not the continuance of their intrigue secured by securing its mysteriousness? There was little question of that now. In her ungloved hand she held a little gold key hanging to the chain of a bracelet—a pretty trinket of tenderness which her lover had had contrived for her. This key, which never left her wrist, served to open the door of the ground floor lent by Emmanuel Deroy, the worshipped refuge of the few days during which she had really lived her life—a dream-oasis to which the unhappy woman was now going as to a cemetery.
There was likely to be a storm in the course of the day, for the atmosphere of the autumn morning was heavy, and completely charged with a sort of electric torpor, the influence of which irritated still further her weak, womanish nerves. She did not tell the cabman, as she always used to do, to drive into the entry,—for the house had two exits, and the large open gateway allowed her to be brought in the cab to the very door of the apartments without being seen by the porter, whose discretion was, moreover, guaranteed by the profits resulting from the amour of his tenant's friend. She had fastened her eyes the whole way upon the slightest details in the streets successively passed through; she knew them well, from the signs of the shops to the look of the houses, because these images were associated with the happiest memories of her too short romance. She uttered to them in thought the same mournful farewell as to her happiness.
A prey, too, to the hallucinations of terror, she could no longer distinguish the possible from the real, and she no longer doubted that Hubert knew all. She read again the note which she had received the day before, and every word of which, to her who knew the young man's character so well, betrayed profound anguish. Whence had this anguish come if not from an event relating to their love? And from what event if not from a revelation of the horrible deception, the infamous act committed by her, yes, by herself? Ah! if there were somewhere a lustral water to cleanse the blood, and with it the recollection of all evil fevers! But, no; it continues to course in our veins, this blood, laden with the most shameful sins. There is no interruption between the beating of our pulse in the hour of our remorse and its beating in the hour of our fault. And Theresa could again feel pressing upon her face the kisses of the man with whom she had betrayed Hubert. Yet she had paid back these frightful kisses.
"Ah! if he questions me, how could I find strength to lie to him, and what would be the use?"
These words had terminated all her meditations since the day before, and she uttered them to herself again when she found herself in front of the door within which there was doubtless going to be enacted one of the, to her, most tragical scenes in the drama of her life. Her fingers trembled so that she had some trouble in slipping the little gold key into the lock—the key which had been given to be handled with other feelings! She knew, beyond doubt, that at the mere sounding of this key turning on the bolt Hubert would be there behind the door awaiting her.
He was there, in fact, and received her in his arms. He felt her lips to be perfectly cold. He looked at her, as he did on each occasion, after pressing her to him. It seemed as though he wished to persuade himself of the truth of her presence. This first kiss always gave Theresa a spasm at the heart, and it needed all her dread of displeasing her lover to make her release herself from his arms. Even at this moment, and in spite of all the tortures of the night before, she thrilled to the very depths of her being, and she was seized with something like a mad desire to intoxicate Hubert with so many endearments that they should both forget—he, what he had to ask, and she, what she had to reply. It was but a quiver, nevertheless, and it died away on simply hearing the young man's voice questioning her with anxiety.
"You are ill?" he said.
Seeing her quite pale, the tender-hearted fellow reproached himself for having brought her there that morning, and, at the sight of her evident suffering, he had already forgotten the motive of their meeting. Moreover, his confidence as to the result of the conversation was such that he had had no renewal of his suspicions since the day before.
"You are ill?" he repeated, drawing her into the next room and making her sit down on a divan.
As Emmanuel Deroy had been attached to the embassy at Constantinople before going to London, his apartments were adorned throughout with Oriental materials, and this large divan, hung with drapery, and placed just opposite the door of a little garden, was particularly dear to Hubert and Theresa. They had chatted so much among these cushions, with their heads resting unitedly upon them, at those moments of intimacy which follow upon the intoxications of love, and which, by him at least, were preferred to them; for, although he loved Theresa to the point of sacrificing everything for her, he had, nevertheless, at the bottom of his conscience, remained a Catholic, and a dim remorse mingled its secret bitterness with the sweetness that was given him by the kisses. He used to think of his own fault, and especially of the sin which he caused Theresa to commit; for in the simplicity of his heart he imagined that he had seduced her.
She sank rather than sat down on the deep divan, and he began to take off her veil, bonnet, and mantle. She allowed him to do so, smiling at him the while with infinite tenderness. After her hours of torturing sleeplessness, there was to her something at once very bitter and very affecting in the impress of the young man's coaxing. She found him so affectionate, so delicately intimate, so like himself, that she thought that she had without doubt been mistaken as to the meaning of the note, and, to rid herself immediately of uncertainty, she said, in reply to his question about her health:
"No, I am not ill; but the tone of your note was so strange that it has made me uneasy."
"My note?" rejoined Hubert, pressing her cold hands, in order to warm them. "Ah! it was not worth while. Look here, I dare not now acknowledge to you why I wrote it."
"Acknowledge it all the same," she said, with an already anguish-stricken insistence, for Hubert's embarrassment had just brought back to her the anxiety which had caused her so much suffering.
"People are so strange!" replied the young man, shaking his head. "There are times when, in spite of themselves they doubt what they know best. But first you must forgive me beforehand."
"Forgive you, my angel!" she said. "Ah! I love you too well! Forgive you!" she repeated; and these syllables, which she heard her own voice uttering, echoed in an almost intolerable fashion through her conscience. How willingly, indeed, would she have had reason to forgive instead of to be forgiven. "But for what?" she asked, in a lower tone, which revealed the renewal of her inward emotion.
"For having allowed myself to be disturbed for a moment by an infamous calumny which persons who hate our love have repeated to me about your life at Trouville. But what is the matter?"
These words, and still more the tone of voice in which they were uttered, had entered like a blade into Theresa's heart. If Hubert had received her on her arrival with those words of suspicion which men know how to devise, and every word of which implies an absence of faith that anticipates the proofs, she might, perhaps, have found in her woman's pride sufficient energy to face the suspicion and to deny it.
But from the outset of this explanation, the young man's whole attitude had displayed that kind of tender and candid confidence which imposes sincerity upon every soul that possesses any remnant of nobility; and in spite of her weaknesses, Theresa had not been born for the compromises of adultery, nor, above all, for the complications of treachery. She was one of those creatures who are capable of great impulses of conscience and sudden returns of generosity, and who, after descending to a certain depth, say: "This is debasement enough," and prefer to destroy themselves altogether rather than sink still lower.
Moreover, the remorse of the last few weeks had brought her into that state of suffering sensibility which impels to the most unreasonable acts, provided that these acts bring the suffering to an end. And then the unnerving of the sleepless nights, increased still further by the uneasiness of the stormy day, rendered it as impossible for her to dissemble her emotions as it is for a panic-stricken soldier to dissemble his fear. At that moment her countenance was literally thrown into confusion by the effect of what she had just been listening to, and by the expectation of what her unconscious tormentor was going to say.
For a minute there was a silence that was more than painful to them both. The young man, seated on the divan by the side of his mistress, was looking at her with drooping eyelids, his mouth half open and his face death-like. The excessiveness of her emotion was so astonishingly significant that all the suspicions which had been raised and banished the day before awoke simultaneously in the mind of the youth. He suddenly saw abysses before him by the lightning-flash of one of those instantaneous intuitions which sometimes illumine the whole brain at times of supreme emotion.
"Theresa!" he cried, terror-stricken by his own vision and by the sudden horror that was seizing upon him. "No, it is not true; it is not possible—"
"What?" she said again; "speak, and I will answer you."
The transition from the tender "thou" of their intimacy to this "you," rendered so humble by her subdued accents, completed Hubert's distraction.
"No!" he went on, rising and beginning to walk about the room with an abrupt step, the sound of which trampled upon the poor woman's heart; "I cannot formulate that—I cannot—well, yes!" he said, stopping in front of her; "I was told that you were the mistress of Count de la Croix-Firmin at Trouville, that it was the talk of the place, that some young men had seen you entering his room and kissing him, that he himself had boasted of having been your lover. That is what I was told, and told with such persistence that for a moment I was maddened by the calumny, and then I felt the morbid longing to see you, to hear you only declare to me that it is not true. Answer, my love, that you forgive me for having doubted you, that you love me, that you have loved me, that all this is nothing but a hateful lie."
He had thrown himself at her feet as he said these words; he took her hands, her arms, her waist; he hung to her as, when drowning, he would have caught at the body of one who had leapt into the water to save him.
"It is true that I love you," she replied, in a scarcely audible voice.
"And all the rest is a lie?" he besought her distractedly.
Ah! he would have given his life at that moment for a word from those lips. But the lips remained mute, and upon the woman's pale cheeks slow, long tears began to flow, without sob or sigh, as though it had been her soul that was weeping thus. Did not such a silence and such tears, at such a moment, form the clearest, the most cruel, of all replies?
"It is true, then?" he asked again.
And as she continued silent: "But answer, answer, answer," he went on, with a frightful violence, which wrung from those lips—at the corners of which the slow tears were still flowing—a "Yes" so feeble that he could scarcely hear it; and yet he was destined to hear it, for ever!
He leaped up, and cast his eyes wildly around him. Some weapons hung on the walls. A temptation seized upon the soldier's son to mangle this woman with one of those shining blades; and so strong was it that he recoiled. He looked again at that face, upon which the same tears were flowing freely. He uttered that "Ah!" of agony—that cry, as of an animal wounded unto death, which is drawn forth by a sight of horror; and as though he were afraid of everything—of the sight before him—of the walls—of this woman—of himself—he fled from the room and the house, bare-headed and with soul distraught. He had been strong enough to feel that in five minutes he would have become a murderer.
He fled, whither? how? by what routes? He never knew with clearness what he had done that day. On the morrow he recollected, because he had the palpable proof of it before him, that once he had caught sight of his haggard face and windblown hair in the glass of a shop window, and that, with an odd survival of carefulness about his dress, he had entered a shop to buy a hat. Then he had walked straight before him, passing through innumerable Paris districts. Houses succeeded houses indefinitely. At one time he was in the country of the suburbs. The storm burst, and he had been able to take shelter under a railway-bridge. How long did he remain thus? The rain fell in torrents. He was leaning against one of the walls of the bridge. Trains passed at intervals, shaking all the stones.
The rain ceased. He resumed his walk, splashing through the puddles of water, without food since the morning, and heedless of his fast. The automatic movement of his body was necessary to him that he might not founder in madness, and instinctively he walked on. The monstrous thing which he had perceived through the shock of a terrible dread was there before his eyes; he could see it; he knew it to be real, and he did not understand it. He was like a crushed man. He experienced a sensation so intolerable that it had even ceased to be pain, with such completeness did it suppress the powers of his being and overwhelm them. Evening was coming on. He found himself again on the road towards home, guided to it by the mechanical impulse which brings back the bleeding animal in the direction of its den. About ten o'clock he rang at the door of the house in the Rue Vaneau.
"Nothing has happened to you, sir?" asked the doorkeeper; "the ladies were so anxious——"
"Let them know that I have come in," said the young man, "but that I am unwell and wish to be alone, absolutely alone, Firmin; you understand."
The tone in which these words were uttered cut short all questions on the lips of the old servant. He followed Hubert, apparently dazed by the furious lightning which he had just perceived in the eyes of his young master and by the disorder of his dress. He saw him cross the hall and enter the pavilion, and went up himself to the drawing-room to give his mistress the strange message with which he was charged. The mother had expected her son at luncheon. Hubert had not come in. Although he had never before failed to appear without giving her notice, she had striven not to be too anxious about it. The afternoon passed without news, and then the dinner-hour struck. Still no news.
"Mamma," Madame Liauran said to Madame Castel, "some misfortune has happened. Who can tell whither despair has led him?"
"He has been detained by friends," the old lady replied, concealing her own in order to control her daughter's anxiety.
When the door opened at ten o'clock, Madame Liauran, with her quickness of hearing, caught the sound from the furthest end of the drawing-room, and said to her mother and to Count Scilly, who had been informed since dinner; "It is Hubert."
When Firmin repeated the young man's words the invalid exclaimed: "I must speak to him."
And she sat upright, as though forgetting that she was no longer able to walk.
"The Count will go to him," said Madame Castel, "and bring him back to us."
At the end of ten minutes Scilly returned, but alone. He had knocked at the door, and then tried to open it. It was double-locked. He had called Hubert several times, and the latter at last entreated him to leave him.
"And not a word for us?" asked Madame Liauran.
"Not a word," replied the General.
"What have we done?" rejoined the mother. "What good will it do me to have separated him from this woman if I have lost his heart?"
"To-morrow," replied Scilly, "you will see him returning to you more tender than ever. Just at first, it is too much for you. He has been seeking proofs for what we have told him, and he has found them. This is the explanation of his absence and his behaviour."
"And he has not come to grieve with me!" said the mother. "Alas! can it be that I have loved him for myself alone, while believing that I loved him for his own sake? Will you ring, General, for them to take me to my room?"
And when the easy chair, which she never left now, had been wheeled into the next room, and she was in bed:
"Mamma," she said to Madame Castel, "draw back the curtain that I may look at his windows."
Then, as Hubert had not closed his shutters, and his shadow could be seen passing to and fro, "Ah! mamma," she said again, "why do children grow up? Formerly, he never had a trouble that he did not come and cry over it on my shoulder, as I do on yours, and now——"
"Now he is as unreasonable as his mother," said the old lady, who had scarcely spoken during the whole evening, and who, printing a kiss upon her daughter's hair, silenced her by letting fall these words, which revealed her own martyrdom: "My heart aches for you both."
In the morning, when Madame Liauran sent to ask for her son, the latter replied that he would be down for luncheon. He appeared, in fact, at noon. His mother and he exchanged merely a look, and she at once understood the extent of the suffering which he had undergone, simply by the kind of shiver with which he was affected on seeing her again. She was associated with this suffering as its occasion, if not its cause, and he could never forget the fact. His eyes had something so particularly distant in them, and his mouth so close a curve of lip, his whole face was so expressive of a determination to permit no explanation of any kind, that neither Madame Liauran nor Madame Castel ventured to question him.
For a year past these three persons had had many silent meals in the antiquely-wainscoted dining-room—an apartment so spacious as to make the round table placed in the centre appear small. But all three had never been sensible of an impression, as they were on this day, that, even when speaking to one another, there would henceforth be a silence between them impossible to break, something which could not be put into words, and which, for a very long time, would create a background of muteness, even behind their most cordial expansions.
After luncheon, when Hubert, who had scarcely touched the various dishes, took the handle of the door, in order to leave the little drawing-room in which he had remained for scarcely five minutes, his mother felt a timid and almost repentant desire to ask his forgiveness for the pain that she read on his taciturn countenance.
"Hubert?" she said.
"Mamma?" he replied, turning round.
"You feel quite well to-day?" she asked.
"Quite well," he replied in a blank tone, such a tone as immediately suppresses all possibility of conversation; and he added: "I shall be punctual at dinner-time this evening."
The young man was now singularly preoccupied. After a night of torture, so continuously keen that he could not remember having ever undergone anything like it, he had become master of himself again. He had passed through the first crisis of his grief, a crisis after which a man ceases to die from despair, because he has really reached the deepest depth of sorrow. Then he had recovered that momentary calm which follows upon prodigious deperditions of nervous energy, and had been able to think. It was then that he had been seized with anxiety respecting Madame de Sauve—an anxiety which was devoid of tenderness, for at this moment, after the assault of grief which he had just sustained, his soul was dried up, his inward lethargy was absolute, all capacity for feeling was gone.
But he had suddenly remembered that he had left Theresa in the little ground floor apartment in Avenue Friedland, and his imagination dared not form any conjectures upon what had taken place after his departure. It was just at the end of luncheon that this thought had assailed him, and, over and above his main sorrow, it had immediately caused him a shiver of nervous terror—the only emotion of which he was capable.
He went straight from the Rue Vaneau to the Avenue, and when he found himself in front of the house he dared not enter, although he had the key in his hand. He called the doorkeeper, an ugly individual to whom he could never speak without repugnance, so hateful to him was his brazen, glabrous face, his servile and, at the same time, insolent eye, and the tone which he assumed as a generously-paid accomplice.
"I beg a thousand pardons, sir," said this man, even before Hubert had questioned him. "I did not know that the lady was still there. I had seen you go out, sir, and in the afternoon I went in to give a look round the place, as I do every day, and found the lady sitting on the sofa. She seemed to be in great pain. Is she better to-day, sir?" he added.
"She is very well," replied Hubert, and as he suddenly felt a strong repugnance to entering the apartments, and on the other hand wished at all costs to avoid giving this man, for whom he had such an antipathy, any grounds for suspecting the drama in his life, he replied, "I have come to settle your bill. I am going on a journey."
"But you have already paid me, sir, at the beginning of the month," said the other.
"I may be away for a long time," said Hubert drawing a bank-note from his pocket-book. "You will put this down to the account."
"You are not coming in, sir?" resumed the doorkeeper.
"No," said Hubert, and he went away, saying to himself, "I am a simpleton. Women of that sort don't kill themselves!"
Women of that sort! The phrase, which had occurred naturally to him, the youth hitherto so ingenuous, so gentle, and so refined, was a fitting translation of the kind of feeling which now held the ascendancy over him, and which lasted for several days. It was a boundless disgust, a thorough nausea; but so complete and so profound was it, that it left no room in his heart for anything else. He could not even have told whether he was suffering, so entirely did contempt absorb all the living energies of his being.
He perceived the woman whom he had idolised so religiously and with so noble a fervour, plunged, as it were, and wallowing in such an abyss of uncleanness, that he felt as though by loving her he had himself been rolling in the mire. This was the physical sight of which he was now the victim from one end of the day to the other, and to such a degree that he was unable to interpret it or form any hypothesis concerning Theresa's character. The sight of it was inflicted upon him with a material exactness which bordered on hallucination. Yes, he could see the act, and the act alone, without having strength enough to shake off the hideous, besetting fellowship. It paralysed him with horror, and he could think of nothing else.
A sort of unbroken mirage showed him the abominable pollution of his mistress's prostitution, and, just as a man attacked by jaundice looks at all objects through bile-infected eyes, so it was, through his disgust, that he viewed, the whole of life. His soul was as though saturated with bitterness, and yet was frightfully dry. There was not an impression that was not transformed in him into this perception of foulness and melancholy.
He rose, and spent the morning among his books, opening but not reading them. He lunched, and the sight of his mother irritated, instead of softening him. He went back to his room, and resumed the dull idleness of the morning. He dined, and then, immediately after dinner, left the drawing-room, so as not to encounter either the General or his cousin, whose presence was intolerable to him.
At night he lay awake, continuing to see the accursed scene with the same impossibility of arriving at relaxation of grief. If he fell asleep, he had every second time to endure the nightmare of this same vision. As he had no conception of the physiognomy of the man with whom his mistress had deceived him, there rose up in his morbid sleep horrible dreams wherein all kinds of different faces were mingled together. The distress which such imagining caused him would awake him. His body would be bathed in sweat, he could feel a rending of the bosom as though his quick-beating heart were about to leave its place, and with this suffering there was, as before, such complete prostration of his affectionate powers, that he was not even anxious to know what had become of Theresa.
"After all," he said to himself one morning as he was getting up, "I lived well enough before I knew her! I have only to put myself again in thought into the condition in which I was before that 12th of October." He had an exact recollection of the date. "It was scarcely more than a year ago; I was so tranquil then! I have had an evil dream, that is all. But I must destroy everything that might bring back the memory of it to me."
He sat down before his writing table after putting fresh wood upon the fire to increase the blaze, and double-locking the door. Involuntarily, he recollected that he used so to act formerly, when he wished to see the precious treasure of his love-relics again. He opened the drawer in which the treasure was hidden: it consisted of a black morocco box, on which were entwined two initial letters—a "T." and an "H." Theresa and he had exchanged two of these boxes, to keep their letters in them. Upon the one which he had given to his mistress he had caused Theresa's name to be autographed in full, instead of the two initials.
"What a child I was!" he thought, as he recollected the thousand little weaknesses of this order in which he had indulged. There is always puerility, indeed, in extreme weaknesses; but it is on the day when we are on the road to hardness of heart that we think so.
Beside this box lay two objects which Hubert had thrown there on the evening of the same day on which he had learnt his mistress's treachery: one was his ring, and the other a slender gold chain, to which hung a tiny key. He took the little hoop in his hand, and, in spite of himself, looked at the inner surface. Theresa had had a star engraved there, with the date of their stay at Folkestone. This simple token suddenly called up before Hubert an indefinite perspective of reminiscences; he could again see the door of the hotel, the staircase with its red carpet, the drawing-room in which they had dined, and the waiter who had waited on them, with his face of Britannic respectability, his shaven lip, and his over-long chin. He could hear him say: "I beg your pardon," and Theresa's smile appeared before him. What languishment swam then in her eyes—those eyes, whose green-grey shade was at such moments completely liquid—completely bathed with an entire abandonment of the inmost nature!—those eyes, wherein slumbered a sleep which seemed to invite you to be its dream!
Hubert mechanically slipped the ring upon his finger, and then flung it almost angrily into the drawer, causing the metal to rebound against the wood. To open the box it was necessary to handle the chain. It was an old chain which he had from Theresa. He had given her the bracelet with the key of the apartments attached to it, and she had given him this chainlet that he might carry the key of the box at his neck. He had worn this scapulary of love for months and months, and often had he felt beneath his shirt for the tiny trinket to hurt himself a little by pressing it against his breast, and thus remind himself of the tender mystery of his dear happiness.
How far away to-day was all this intoxication, ah! how far and how lost in the abyss of the past, whence there issues so frightful an odour of death! When he had raised the lid of the box he leaned upon his elbow, and, with his forehead in his hand, gazed upon what was left of his happiness, the few nothings so perfectly insignificant to anyone else, but so full of soul to him; an embroidered handkerchief, a glove, a veil, a bundle of letters, a bundle of little blue notes, placed within one another, and forming as it were a tiny book of tenderness. And the envelopes of the letters had been opened so carefully, and the paper of the blue notes torn with such precision. The slightest details reminded Hubert of the scruples of loving piety which he had felt for everything that came from his mistress.
Beneath the letters and blue notes there was still a likeness of her, representing her in the costume which she had worn at Folkestone: a plain, close-fitting cloth jacket, and a projecting hat which cast a slight shadow upon the upper part of the face. She had had this portrait taken for Hubert alone, and, when giving it, she had said to him:
"I thought so much of ourselves while I was sitting. If you knew how much this likeness, loves you!"
And Hubert felt himself really loved by it. It seemed to him that from the oval face, the slender lips, and the dream-bathed eyes, there proceeded a tender effluence which encompassed him, and it was there that, by the side of the vision of perfidy, there began to rise afresh the vision of Theresa's love. He knew as clearly from the memories of this woman that she had loved, and still loved him, as he knew from her own confession that she had betrayed him. He saw her again as he had left her on the sofa in their retreat, with her face convulsed, and, above all, her tears—ah, what tears! For the first time since the fatal hour he perceived the nobility with which she had acknowledged her fault, when it was so easy for her to speak falsely, and he suddenly uttered a cry which hitherto had not come to him through his days of parched and passionate pain:
"But why? why?"
Yes, why? why? This anguish of a completely moral order henceforward accompanied the anguish of physical sight. Hubert began to think, not only about his trouble, but about the cause of his trouble. To burn these letters, to tear this likeness, to break and throw away the chain and ring, to destroy this last remnant of his love, would have been as impossible to him as to rend with steel his mistress's quivering body. These objects were living persons with looks, caresses, pantings, voices. He closed the drawer, unable any longer to endure the presence of these things which to him seemed made of the very substance of his heart.