He threw himself upon the couch and lost himself in the gulf of his reflection. Yes, Theresa had loved him, and Theresa loved him still. There are tears, embraces, and a warmth of soul which do not lie. She loved him and she had betrayed him! With his own name in her heart she had given herself to another, less than six weeks after leaving him! But why? why? Driven by what force? Led away by what dizziness? Overwhelmed by what intoxication? What was the nature—not of women of that sort now, for he had no longer any such fierceness of thought—but of woman, that so monstrous an action should be barely possible to her? Of what flesh was she formed, this deceiving creature, that with all the appearances and all the realities of love, it was not possible to place more reliance upon her than upon water.
How soft they were, those woman's hands, and how loyal they seemed! but to entrust one's heart to them, believing in a mutual affection, was the most foolish of follies! She smiles upon you, and weeps for you, and already she has noticed a passer-by, to whom, if he amuse her for an hour, she will sacrifice all your tenderness, with flame in her eyes and grace on her lips! Ah! why? why? Yet what truth can there be in the world if even love is not true? And what love? Hubert was now thoroughly investigating his past; he conscientiously examined his attachment to Theresa, and he did himself the justice to acknowledge that for months past he had not had a thought that was not for her. He had certainly made mistakes, but they had always been for her, and even at this hour he could not repent them.
He would have found relief for all his pain in kneeling before the priest who had trained him, and saying: "Father, I have sinned." But no; it was beyond his power to regret the actions in which Theresa, his Theresa, had been involved. Yes, he had idolised her with unswerving fervour, and it was his first love, and it would be the last, or at least he thought so, and he had shown her his confidence in the continuance of their feelings with incalculable ingenuousness. Nothing of all this had had sufficient influence over her to arrest her at the moment when she committed her infamy,—with the same body.
He could suddenly breathe its aroma, and again feel its impression over his whole being; then there was a resurrection of jealousy, painful even to torture, and continually he harped on the "why? why?"—in despair, and pitiful, like so many before him, from clashing against the unanswerable riddle of a woman's soul, guilty once, guilty again, guilty even to her grey hairs and to her death itself.
This new form of grief lasted for days and days afterwards. The young man was giving free rein within himself to a new feeling of which he had never had a suspicion hitherto, and which he was henceforward to endure continually—mistrust. From his earliest years he had lived with a complete faith in the appearances which surrounded him. He had believed in his mother. He had believed in God. He had believed in the sincerity of every word and caress. Above all, he had believed in Theresa de Sauve. He had assimilated her in thought with the rest of his life. All was truth around him; thus Theresa's love had appealed to him as a supreme truth, and now, by a mental revolution which betrayed the primitive flaw in his education, he was assimilating all the rest of his life with this woman of falsehood.
His mother had accustomed him to have nothing to say to scepticism. This is probably the surest method of causing the first deception to transform the too implicit believer into an absolute negator. It is never well to expect much from men or from nature, for the former are wild animals scantily masked with decorum; while, as for the latter, her apparent harmony is the result of an injustice which knows no remission. To preserve the ideal within us until death at last releases us from the dangerous slavery to others and to ourselves, we must early habituate ourselves to regard the universe of moral beauty as the opium-smoker regards the dreams of his intoxication. Their charm consists in the fact that they are dreams, and consequently correspond to nothing that is real.
Hubert, quite on the contrary, was so accustomed to move his intellect in one piece that he was unable to doubt or to believe by halves. If Theresa had lied to him why should not everyone do the same? This idea did not frame itself in an abstract form, nor did he arrive at it by the aid of reasoning: it was the substitution of one mode of feeling for another. During this cruel period he found himself suspecting Theresa in their common past.
He asked himself whether her betrayal at Trouville had been the first, whether she had not had another lover than himself at the time of their most infatuated passion. This woman's perfidy was corrupting his very recollections. It was doing worse. Under this misanthropical influence he committed the greatest of moral crimes: he doubted his mother's tenderness. Yes, in Madame Liauran's passionate affection the unhappy fellow could see nothing but jealous egotism.
"If she really loved me," he said to himself, "she would not have told me what she did."
Thus, he found himself in that state of feeling to which popular language has given the expressive name of disenchantment. He had seen the last of the beauty of the human soul, and he was beginning to prove its misery, and always he fell back upon this question as upon the point of a sword:
"But why? why?"
And he sifted Theresa's character without meeting with any reply. He might as well have asked why Theresa had senses as well as a heart, and why at certain times there was set up, as with men, a divorce between the longings of her heart and the tyranny of her senses. Those debauchees in whom libertinism has not killed sentimentality know the secret of these divorces; but Hubert was not a debauchee. He must remain pure even in his despair, and it never occurred to him to seek forgetfulness of his trouble in the intoxication of loveless kisses. He was still ignorant of venal and consoling alcoves—where men lose indeed their regrets, but at the cost of losing their dreams.
And yet, since he was young, and since, in his intimacy with Theresa, he had made a habit of the most ardent pleasure—pleasure which exalts both mind and body in divine communion—he began, after some weeks of these sorrows and reflections, to feel a dim desire, an unacknowledged appetite for this woman of whom he wished to know nothing more, whom he must regard as dead, and whom he so utterly despised.
This strange and unconscious return towards the delights of his love, but a return no longer ennobled by any ideal, manifested itself in a curiosity such as those are which issue from the unfathomable depths of our being. He felt a sickly longing to see with his own eyes this man who had been Theresa's lover, this La Croix-Firmin, to whom his mistress had given herself, and, in whose arms she had quivered with voluptuousness as in his own. To a spiritual director who had traced, period by period, the ravage wrought in this soul by the corrupt leaven inoculated by Theresa's betrayal, such curiosity would doubtless have appeared the most decisive symptom of a metamorphosis in this youth who had grown up amid all modesty. Was it not the transition from that absolute horror of evil which is the torment and glory of virgin natures, to that kind of still more frightful attraction which borders so closely upon depravity?
But it was especially that frightful facility of imagination about the impurity of a desired woman, which, by one of the saddest laws of our nature, brings it to pass that proof of infidelity, while degrading the lover, and dishonouring the mistress, so frequently kindles love. It is probable that, in such cases, the conception of the perfidy acts like an infamous picture, and that this is the explanation of those fits of sensuality which occur amid the hatred felt, and which astonish the moralist in certain law-suits founded upon the dramas of jealousy.
Poor Hubert was certainly not one to harbour such base instincts; and yet his curiosity to become acquainted with his Trouville rival was already a very unhealthy one. Its nature was the same as that of Theresa's fault. It is the obscure, indestructible recollection of the flesh which operates without the knowledge of the being who is under its influence. The memory of all the caresses given and received since the night at Folkestone counted for something in this desire to feast his eyes on the real existence of the hated man. It became something so sharp And severe that after struggling for a long time, And with the feeling that he was lowering himself strangely, Hubert could resist no longer, and he employed the following almost childish procedure, for the realisation of his singular desire.
He calculated that La Croix-Firmin must belong to a fashionable club, and it was not long before he had discovered his name and address in the year-book of such a one. It was to this club that he had recourse in order to ascertain whether the individual in question was in Paris. The reply was in the affirmative. Hubert reconnoitred the Rue La Peyrouse, in which his rival lived, and he immediately satisfied himself that by standing on the footpath of one of the Places intersected by this street, he could watch the house, which was one of two stories in height, and which certainly contained but a very small number of tenants.
He had said to himself that he would take up a position there one morning, and wait until he saw some man come out who appeared to be he whom he sought. He would then question the porter, under some pretext or other, and would, doubtless, thus receive information. It was a method of primitive simplicity, and one in which all those who in their youth have had a passionate adoration for some celebrated writer will recognise the ingenuousness of the stratagems which they employed to see their hero. If this plan failed, Hubert could fall back upon an application to one of those whom he knew among the members of the club; but he felt a great repugnance to taking such a step.
Accordingly he found himself on the spot at nine o'clock one cold December morning. The weather was dry and clear, the sky of a pale blue, and the half-fashionable, half-exotic quarter given over to the traffic of its crowd of tradesmen and grooms. Hubert saw emerge successively from the house which he was examining, some servants, an old lady, a little boy followed by an abbé, and finally, at about half-past eleven, a man who was still young, of medium height, fashionably dressed, slender and strong in his otter-lined overcoat.
This man was just buttoning up his collar as he proceeded straight in Hubert's direction. The latter also advanced, and brushed past the stranger. He saw a somewhat heavy profile, a moustache of the colour of burnished gold, a complexion already coloured by the cold, and the dull eye of a hard liver who has gone late to bed, after a night spent at the gaming table or elsewhere. An inexpressible pain at his heart caused the jealous lover to hasten to the house.
"Monsieur de la Croix-Firmin?" he asked.
"The Count is not at home," replied the doorkeeper.
"But he made an appointment with me for half-past eleven, and I am punctual," said Hubert, drawing out his watch; "has he long gone out?"
"No, sir; you ought to have met him. The Count was here five minutes ago; he cannot have turned the corner."
Hubert had learnt what he wanted. He hurried in the direction of the place where he had passed La Croix-Firmin, and, after a few paces he saw him again, about to follow the footpath of the Avenue towards the Arc de Triomphe. It was he, then! Hubert followed him slowly at a little distance, and watched him with a sort of devouring anguish. He saw him walking daintily along, with a litheness that was at once refined and strong. He remembered what had taken place at Trouville, and every one of La Croix-Firmin's movements revived the physical vision.
Hubert compared himself mentally, frail and slight as he was, with the sturdy, haughty fellow, who, half a head taller than himself, was thus passing along beneath the beautiful sky of this winter's morning, with a step which spoke the certainty of strength, and holding his stick by the middle, in the English fashion, at some distance from his body. The comparison sufficiently explained the determining cause of Theresa's fault, and for the first time the young man perceived those deadly causes in their genuine brutishness. "Ah! the why! The why! There it is!" he thought, as, with painful envy, he observed this man's animal energy. His first emotion was too bitter for him, and the unhappy fellow was about to give up his pursuit when he saw La Croix-Firmin get into a cab. He hailed one himself.
"Follow that vehicle," he said to the driver.
The thought that his enemy was going to see Theresa had just restored all Hubert's frenzy. From time to time he leaned out of the window of his four-wheeler, and could see the one which conveyed his rival driving along. This cab, which was of a yellow colour, went down the Champs Elysées, passed along the Rue Royale, entered the Rue Saint Honoré, and then stopped in front of the Café-Voisin. La Croix-Firmin was merely going out to breakfast. Hubert could not repress a smile at the pitiful result of his curiosity. Mechanically he also entered the café. The young Count was already seated at a table with two friends, who had been waiting for him.
At the other extremity of the hall there was a single table unoccupied, at which Hubert placed himself. From here he was able, not, indeed, to hear the conversation of the three guests—the noise in the restaurant was too loud for that—but to study the physiognomy of the man whom he detested. He ordered his own meal at random, and sank into a kind of analysis known to those observers from taste or by profession, who will enter a theatre, a smoking-room, or a railway carriage with the sole desire of observing the workings of human physiology, and of tracing the instinctive manifestations of temperament in gesture, look, sound of breathing, or posture. It sometimes happened, indeed, that a raising of the voice would cause a fragmentary sentence to reach Hubert; but he paid no heed to it, sunk as he was in the contemplation of the man himself, whom he saw almost in front of him, with his bold eyes, his rather short neck, and his strong jaws.
When La Croix-Firmin had entered, his complexion had looked worn and pimply; but when breakfast was half over the work of digestion began to send an influx of blood into his face. He ate much and steadily, with potent slowness. He laughed loudly. His hands, holding his knife and fork, were strong, and displayed two rings. His forehead, which was shown in all its narrowness by his short curls, could never have been lit up by a flame of thought. All this formed a whole which, even in Hubert's hostile eyes, was not devoid of a manly, healthy beauty; but it was the brutish beauty of a being of flesh and blood, as to whom it was impossible for a person of refinement to entertain an illusion for an hour. To say of a woman that she had given herself to this man was to say that she had yielded to an instinct of a wholly physical order.
The more Hubert identified himself by observation with this temperament, the clearer did this become to him. He was interpreting Theresa's nature better at this moment than he had ever done before. He grasped its ambiguousness with frightful certainty, and it was then that there rose up within him the saddest, but at the same time the noblest, feeling that he had entertained since his accident, the only one truly worthy of what his soul had formerly been, that one which, in the presence of woman's perfidy, is man's preservation from complete ruin of heart:—pity.
An emotion of infinite bitterness and melancholy combined came upon him at the thought that the charming creature whom he had known, his dear silent one, as he used to call her, she who had shown herself possessed of such delicate refinement in the art of pleasing him, should have surrendered herself to the caresses of this man.
He suddenly recollected the tears of the night at Folkestone, and the tears, also, at their last interview; and, as though he had at last understood their meaning, he could find within him but a single utterance, which he whispered there in the restaurant filled with the smoke of cigars, then beneath the leafless trees of the Tuileries, then in the solitude of his own room in the Rue Vaneau—a single utterance, but one filled with the perception of the degrading fatalities of his life:
"What misery! My God, what misery!"
What was Theresa doing while he was suffering thus, and why did she afford him no sign of her existence? Although the young man had forbidden himself to think about her, he thought of her nevertheless, and this question came to add anxiety to his other anguish. Contradictory hypotheses passed in turns through his mind. Had Theresa died of remorse? Had she ceased to love him? Had she kept La Croix-Firmin for her lover? Was she pursuing a fresh intrigue. Everything seemed possible to Hubert, the worst as well as the best, on the part of this woman whom he had learned to be so strangely compounded of refinement and libertinism, of treachery and nobility. He then ascertained by the heart-burning caused him by some of his hypotheses, by what living fibres he still clung to this being from whom he wished himself released.
He was on the point of taking some steps in order at least to learn what the inclinations of her own soul were at that moment; then he despised himself for the weakness, and, to strengthen himself, he repeated some verses which were in correspondence with his condition of mind. He found them, by a strange irony of destiny which he did not suspect, in the single collection of poetry by Alfred Fanières. This volume, which had been reprinted after the poet's novels had made him celebrated, bore a title which was in itself a revelation of youthfulness: "Early Pride." Hubert had dined, in company with the writer, at Madame de Sauve's house without suspecting what the poor woman felt at being obliged by her husband to receive at her table the lover whom she idolised and the man with whom she had broken. Fanières had talked cleverly that evening, and it was after that dinner that the young man, with very natural curiosity, had obtained the book of verse at a bookseller's. The poem which pleased him just now was a sonnet, somewhat pretentiously called "Tender Cruelty":—
"Be still, my heart, but speak thou forth fierce pride,And tell me that my sway no share must know,Nor can I pardon her the grievous blowWho knew another's couch although my bride.At least, I've seen her as she vainly tried,Her soul in tears dissolved, and crouching low,To find the look my eyes could yet forego;And, kingly silent, I have turned aside.She knew not that, when grief distraught, were heardHer plaintive tones entreat a single word,I suffered even as she, and loved her still.In silence only, outraged man is strong;For vengeance tells a tale of secret ill,And I would be believed above all wrong."
"Be still, my heart, but speak thou forth fierce pride,And tell me that my sway no share must know,Nor can I pardon her the grievous blowWho knew another's couch although my bride.At least, I've seen her as she vainly tried,Her soul in tears dissolved, and crouching low,To find the look my eyes could yet forego;And, kingly silent, I have turned aside.She knew not that, when grief distraught, were heardHer plaintive tones entreat a single word,I suffered even as she, and loved her still.In silence only, outraged man is strong;For vengeance tells a tale of secret ill,And I would be believed above all wrong."
"Yes," said Hubert to himself, "he is right: silence—"
The verses moved him childishly, as happens with ordinary readers of poetry, who require a literary work merely to excite or to soothe the inward wound.
"Silence . . ." he resumed. "Do we speak to one that is dead? Well, Theresa is dead to me."
Thus expressing himself in the solitude of his study, where he now spent nearly all his days, Hubert had no ill-will remaining against his mistress. As no new fact came to rouse fresh feelings within him, the old ones, which had existed before the betrayal, reappeared. The images of his remembrances abounded within him, nor did he drive them away, and under their influence his anger little by little became something abstract, rational, and, so to speak, expedient in his eyes; but in reality he had never loved this woman so much as he did now when he believed himself sure of never seeing her again.
He loved her, in fact, as though she were dead; but who does not know that is the most indestructible and frantic tenderness? When irrevocable separation has not primarily resulted in the killing of love, it exalts it on the contrary in a strange fashion. Impossible to embrace, so present and so far away, the dim shape of the wished-for phantom hovers before our gaze with the beauty that life will never wither more, and our whole soul goes out sadly and passionately to meet it. The duration of days is annihilated. The sweetness of the past flows back in its fulness within us, and then begins a singular and retrospective kind of enchantment which is like hallucination in the heart.
Theresa de Sauve might have been a woman buried, sewn up in a shroud, laid in the coldness of the funeral vault for ever, and Hubert would not have abandoned himself more to the gnawings of his memory, to the mad ardour of love which lacks both hope and desire, and is wholly made up of ecstacy of what once has been,—and can never be again. By means of her notes, which he had kept, and which he re-read until he knew every word by heart, he reconstructed, hour by hour, the delicious months of his past intoxication. Theresa was in the habit of never dating her letters, but of simply writing the name of the day at the head of them, "Thursday," "Wednesday," "Saturday." Hubert found the day of the month from the post-mark, thanks to the pious care with which he had preserved all the envelopes, for the childish reason that he could not have destroyed a line of that handwriting without pain.
Even after so many weeks, he had failed to become insensible to the emotion caused him by the sight of the letters of his name traced by Theresa's hand. Yes; hour by hour he revived the life already lived. The charm of the bygone moments reappeared so complete, so rapturous, so heart-breaking! It had passed away as everything does, and the young man had come to rebel no longer against the enigma of which he was the victim. The Christian notion of responsibility was succeeded within him by an obscure fatalism. The termination of his happiness was now explained in his eyes by the inevitable misery of mankind. He almost acquitted his phantom of a fault which seemed to him to be bound up with natural fatalities; and then he began to think that this phantom was not that of a dead woman with closed eyes, motionless bosom, and shut lips, but of a living creature with beating eyelids, throbbing heart, and parted lips that were fresh and warm; and, tormented in spite of himself by some vague, dim desire, he again began to murmur:
"What is she doing?"
What then was Theresa doing, and how was it that she had essayed no effort to see again the man she loved? What thoughts and what feelings had she experienced since the terrible scene which had separated her from Hubert? With her, too, days had succeeded to days, but while the young man, a prey to a metamorphosis of soul provoked by the most unlooked-for and tragic of deceptions, suffered these rapid burning days to slip away as he passed from one extremity of the universe of feeling to the other, she, the guilty one, the vanquished one, was absorbed in a single thought. Herein like all women who love, she would have given her blood-drops, one after another, to cure the sorrow that she had caused to her lover. It was not that the visible details of her life were modified. Except for the first week, during which she had been overthrown, so to speak, by a continuous and shooting headache, she had, as the result of a reaction from the experience of so many emotions, resumed her vocation as a woman of fashion, her accustomed course of drives and visits, great dinners and receptions, theatre-goings or evening parties.
But this completely external movement has never been able to hinder dreams any more than the employment of the needle does in fancy work. Though a strange fact at first sight, the explanation in the Avenue Friedland had been followed by a half-soothed relaxation in her soul, simply because voluntary confession had lessened remorse, as it always does. It is, too, on this unexplained law of our consciousness that the subtle psychology of the Catholic Church has based the principle of confession. If Theresa did not altogether forgive herself for her fault, she was, at least, no longer compelled by her thoughts of it to endure the contemplation of absolute baseness. The notion of a certain moral loftiness was now associated with it, ennobling it in her own eyes. This sleep of remorse left her free to absorb herself in the remembrance of Hubert.
She now lived in a condition of deadly anxiety concerning him, and was dominated by a steady longing to see him again, not that she hoped to obtain her forgiveness from him, but she knew that he was unhappy, and she felt within her such a love for the youth whom she had wounded, that she would willingly have found means to dress and close the sore. How? She could not have told that; but it was not possible that such great, deeply-repentant tenderness could be inefficacious. In any case she must, at least, show Hubert the scope of the passion which she felt for him. Could this fail to touch him, to move him, to rescue him from despair? Now that she was no longer beneath the immediate burden of her infidelity, she did not judge of it from the essentially masculine standpoint, that is, as being something absolute and irreparable.
In woman, who is a creature much more instinctive than we men, and much closer to nature, the energies of renewing spring-time are much more unimpaired. A woman who is deceived forgives, provided that she knows herself to be loved, and a woman who has deceived can scarcely understand non-forgiveness provided that she loves. The fault committed is an idea, a shadow, a chimera. The love felt is a fact, a reality. Thus Theresa had entirely emerged from the period of moral depression, the extreme limit of which had been marked by her confession. Certainly, she did not regret the latter, as so many other women would have done in like circumstances; but it was her longing, her hope, her wish that it should not have marked the end of her happiness, for, after all, she loved and was loved.
Nevertheless, her longing did not blind her to such a degree as to make her forget what she knew of her lover's character. Proud and pure as she knew him to be, how difficult it was to effect a reconciliation with him! And, moreover, what means could she employ to be alone with him even for an hour? Write? She did so, not once, but ten times. Having sealed the letter she threw it into a drawer, and did not send it at all. At first no expression seemed to her sufficiently coaxing and humble, endearing and tender. Then she was terrified with the apprehension lest Hubert should not even open the envelope, and should return it to her without a reply. Meet him again in society? She had a frightful dread of such an accident. With what courage could she endure his glance, which would be a cruel one, and one which she could not even attempt to disarm? Go to the Rue Vaneau and obtain an interview from him? She knew only too well that this was not possible. Send him a message? By whom? The only person to whom she had confided her love was her country friend whom she had employed to post her letters to her husband, while she herself was at Folkestone. Among all the men whom she met in society, that one who was sufficiently intimate with Hubert to act as a messenger in such an embassy was also he in whom her woman's instinct showed her the probable author of the indiscreet remarks which had ruined her—George Liauran. She was bound by the thousand tiny threads which society fastens to the limbs of its slaves.
At last, without any calculation, and by obeying the impulses of her own heart, she succeeded in finding a means which appeared almost infallible to her for coming to an explanation. She experienced an irresistible longing to visit the little abode in the Avenue Friedland, and she told herself that Hubert would, sooner or later, feel this longing like herself. Of inevitable necessity she must meet him face to face on one of these visits. Under the influence of this idea she began to pay long solitary visits to those ground floor rooms, whose every nook spoke to her of her lost happiness. The first time that she came there in this way, the hour which she spent among the furniture, was the occasion of such intolerable emotion that she was nearly relapsing into the extravagance of her first despair. She returned, nevertheless, and by degrees it became strangely sweet to her to accomplish this pilgrimage of love nearly every day. The doorkeeper lit the fire; she allowed the flame to illuminate the little drawing-room with a flickering light which struggled against the invasion of the twilight; she lay down upon the divan, to experience a sensation at once torturing and delicious, a blending of expectation, melancholy, and remembrance. Each time she was careful to first ask:
"Has the gentleman been here?" and the negative reply would give her the hope that chance might cause the young man's visit to coincide with her own.
She noticed, with beating heart, the slightest noise. All the objects around her which were not coloured by the blaze from the fireplace, were drowned in the shadow. The apartment was scented with the exhalations from the flowers, the cups and vases of which she used herself to trim, and she alternately dreaded and desired the entry of Hubert. Would he forgive her? Would he repel her? And finally she had to leave this refuge of her last hope, and she departed, her veil drawn down, her soul flooded by the same sadness that she used formerly to feel when Hubert's kisses were still fresh on her lips, at once comforted and terrified by this thought:
"When shall I see him again? Will it be to-morrow?"
One afternoon when stretched thus upon the divan and absorbed in her dreams, she seemed to hear the turning of a key in the lock of the outer door. She sat up suddenly with a wild throbbing of heart. Yes, the door was opening and closing. A step sounded in the ante-room. A hand was opening the second door. She fell back again upon the cushions of the divan, unable to endure the approach of what she had so greatly hoped for, and thus finding, through her very sincerity, the vanquished attitude which the most refined coquetry would have chosen and which was calculated to work most powerfully upon her lover,—if it were he. But what other could come, and did she not immediately recognise his step? Yes, it was indeed Hubert who was just coming in.
Since their rupture, he, too, had often wished to come back to the little ground floor rooms, where the clock had struck for him so many sweet hours,—the clock over which Theresa used gracefully to throw the black lace of her second veil "in order to veil the time better," she said. Then he had not ventured. Fond memories made him timid. People are afraid, in renewing such, both of feeling too much and of feeling too little. This afternoon, however, was it the influence of the gloomy winter sky and his own bewitching melancholy? Was it the reading yesterday of one of Theresa's most charming notes, dated a year back on the very same day?
Without thinking about it, Hubert had found himself on the way to the Avenue Friedland. To reach the latter he had mechanically pursued a network of winding streets, as he used of old in order to avoid spies. What need was there of such stratagems to-day? And the contrast had made his heart heavy. On his way he had to pass a telegraph office which formerly he used to enter after their meetings to prolong the voluptuousness of them by writing Theresa a note to surprise her just after she had reached home—a stifled echo, distant and so tender of the intoxicated sighs of that day! He saw the door of the office, its dark colour, its inscription, the opening of the box reserved for telegraph cards, and he nearly fainted.
But he was already pursuing the pathway of the fatal Avenue, and he could see the house, the closed venetian blinds of the front rooms on the ground floor, and the entrance commanded by the gateway. How did he feel when the doorkeeper, after asking whether "the gentleman had had a good journey," added, in his hatefully obsequious tones: "The lady is there——?"
He had not yet taken the key from his pocket when this news, less unexpected, perhaps, than he would acknowledge to himself, struck him like a full blow upon the breast. What was to be done? Dignity commanded him to depart immediately. But the lurking, deep desire which he had to see Theresa again suggested to him one of those sophisms, thanks to which we always find means to prefer with our reason what we most desire with our instinct.
"If I do not go in," he said to himself, looking towards the lodge, "this odious individual will understand that we have quarrelled. He is capable of carrying his effrontery so far as to speak to Theresa of my interrupted visit. I owe it to her to spare her this humiliation, and besides, the matter of the rooms must be settled once for all. Shall I never be a man?"
It was at this moment, after the lightning flash of this sudden reasoning, that he opened the door, being aware the while that there was one in the adjoining room who was being thrown into agitation from feet to hair by this simple noise. He had often warmed those slender feet with many kisses, and so often handled that long black hair!
"If she has come, it is because she loves me still."
This thought moved him in spite of himself, and he was trembling as he passed into the drawing-room, where the dying of the twilight was striving with the flames on the hearth. He was surprised by the caressing aroma of the flowers standing in the vases on the mantel-shelf, with which was blended the odour of a perfume that he knew too well. On the divan at the back of the room he saw the prostrate form of a body, then the movement of a bust, the paleness of a face, and he found himself face to face with Theresa, now sitting up and looking at him.
The silence of both was such that he could hear the sharp beats of his own heart and the breathing of the woman, who was evidently wild with emotion. The presence of his mistress had suddenly restored to him all his nervous anger. What he felt at this moment was that frightful longing to brutally ill-treat the woman, the being of stratagem and falsehood, which takes hold of the man, the being of strength and fierceness, whenever physical jealousy awakes the primitive male within him, placed opposite the female in the truth of nature. At a certain depth, all the differences of education and character are annihilated before the inevitable necessities of the laws of sex.
It was Theresa who first broke the silence. She understood too well the gravity of the explanation which was about to ensue not to bring all her powers of feminine artifice into play. She loved Hubert at this moment as passionately as on the day when she confessed her inexplicable fault to him; but she was mistress of herself now, and could measure the scope of her words. Moreover, she had no play to act. It was enough for her to show herself just as she was, in the infinite humility of the most repentant tenderness, and it was in a nearly hoarse voice that she began to speak from the corner of the shadow in which she remained seated.
"I ask your forgiveness for being here," she said; "I am just going. When I allowed myself to come into this room sometimes, quite alone, I did not think that I was doing anything to displease you. It was the pilgrimage to that which has been the only happiness in my life; but I promise you that I will never do so again."
"It is for me to withdraw, madame," replied Hubert, who, at the sound of her voice, found himself disquieted by an emotion impossible of definition. "She has come several times," he thought, and the notion irritated him, as happens when one is unwilling to give way to a tender feeling. "I acknowledge," he continued, in quite a loud voice, "that I did not expect to see you here again after what has taken place. It seemed to me that you would fly from certain memories rather than seek for them again."
"Do not speak harshly to me," she replied, still more softly. "But why should you speak to me otherwise?" she added, in a melancholy tone; "I cannot justify myself in your eyes. Yet reflect that had I not clung, as I did, to the beauty of the feeling which united us, I should not have been sincere with you as I was. Alas! it was because I loved you as I love you still, as I shall always love you."
"Do not employ the word 'love,'" returned Hubert; "you have no longer the right to do so."
"Ah!" she replied, with growing excitement; "you cannot prevent me from feeling. Yes, Hubert, I love you; and if I can no longer hope that my love is shared, it is none the less living here;" and she struck her bosom. "And you must know it," she continued. "My only comfort in the most utter unhappiness will be the thought that I have been able to tell you one last time what I have so often told you in happy days: I love you. Do not see in this a dream of forgiveness; I shall not seek to move you, and you will never condemn me as much as I condemn myself. But it is none the less true that I love you more than ever."
"Well!" replied Hubert, "this love will be the only vengeance that I wish to exact from you. Know then that you have caused this man whom you love to endure a martyrdom such as may scarcely be survived; you have rent his heart, you have been his tormentor, the tormentor of every hour and every minute. There is nothing more within me but a wound, and it is you, you who have opened it. I have ceased to believe anything, hope for anything, love anything, andyouare the cause. And this will last for a long time, a long time, and every morning and every evening you will have to say to yourself: 'He whom I love is in his throes, and I am killing him.'"
And so he went on relieving his soul of the sorrow of so many days with all the cruel words with which his anger supplied him for the woman who was listening to him with downcast eyelids, disconcerted face, and frightful paleness, in the shadow wherein resounded the voice that was terrible in her ears. Was he not, merely by obeying his passion, inflicting upon her the most torturing of punishments, that of bleeding in her presence from a wound which she had dealt him and which she was unable to cure.
"Strike me," she replied simply, "I have deserved all."
"These are useless words," said Hubert, after a fresh silence, during which time he had been walking from one end of the room to the other to exhaust his passion, "Let us come to deeds. This interview must at least have a practical conclusion. We shall see each other again in society and at your house. Need I tell you that I shall act as an honourable man, and that no one shall suspect anything of what has passed between us? There remains the matter of these rooms. I shall write to Emmanuel Deroy to let him know that I shall come here no more. It is useless for us to meet here again, is it not? We have nothing more to say to each other."
"You are right," said Theresa, in a crushed voice; then, as though forming a supreme resolution, she rose.
She passed both her hands across her eyes, and loosing from her wrist the bracelet to which the little key was suspended, she offered the trinket to Hubert without uttering a word. He took the gold chainlet, and his fingers met those of the young woman. They looked at each other, and for the first time since his entry into the room he saw her fully face to face. Her beauty at that moment was sublime. Her mouth was half open, as though respiration had failed her, her eyes were laden with languor, her fingers pressed those of the young man with a lingering caress, and a quick flame swept suddenly through him.
As though seized with intoxication he went up to her, took her in his arms, and gave her a kiss. She gave way, and both fell upon the shadowed divan together, clasping each other in one of those wild and silent embraces wherein dissolves all animosity, just or unjust, but all dignity as well. These are moments when neither man nor woman utters the words, "I love you," as though feeling that such frenzies have, in fact, nothing in common with love.
When they recovered their senses, she looked at him. She trembled lest she should see him yield to the horrible impulse which is familiar to men after similar lapses, and which prompts them to punish their accomplice for their own weakness by loading her with contempt. If Hubert was seized with a shudder of revolt, he, at least, had the generosity to spare Theresa the sight of it, and then, in a voice rendered so captivating by fear:
"Oh, Hubert!" she said, "I have you again for my own. Could you but know it, I should not have survived our separation. I should have died of it, for I love you too much. I will be so kind, so kind to you, I will make you so happy. But do not leave me. If you love me no longer, let me love you. Take me, or send me away as your fancy wills. I am your slave, your thing, your property. Ah, if I could die now!"
And she covered her lover's wasted face with passionate tears. He nevertheless remained motionless, with lips and eyes closed, and thought of his downfall. Now that the intoxication was dispelled, he could compare what he had felt just then with what he had felt formerly. The symbol of the change that had been wrought was in the contrast between the brutality of the pleasure taken thus upon this divan, and the divine modesty of other days. He had not forgiven Theresa, and he had not been able to resist her, but for this very reason he had for ever lost the right of reproaching her with her betrayal.
And then, though he had had this right anew, how could he have used it? There was too strong a witchery in this woman's caresses. He foresaw that he would be subject to it from that day forth, and that his dream was over. He had loved this woman with the sublimest love, and she now held him by what was darkest and least noble within him. Something was dead in his moral life which he would never find again. It was one of those wrecks of soul which are felt by those suffering them to be irremediable. He had ceased to value himself after ceasing to value his mistress. The eternal Delilah had once more accomplished her work, and, as the lips of the woman were quivering and caressing, he paid her back her kisses.
About a fortnight after this scene, Hubert had again begun to dine from home and to go out nearly every evening, to the great stupefaction of his mother, who, after being silent in the presence of a grief that she was powerless to control, now perceived in her son an air of intoxicated feverishness which frightened her. She could not forbear opening up her astonishment to George Liauran when the latter had come one evening, as was his wont, to take his place in that little drawing-room which had been the witness of so many of the poor woman's agonies.
The wind was blowing outside as on the night when General Scilly had commenced to think of his friends' unhappiness; and the old soldier, who was also present in his customary easy-chair, could not help observing the ravages which some ten months past had wrought upon the two widows.
"I do not understand it at all," replied George to the questioning of his cousin; "Hubert and I have had no interview. It is certain that his despair is inexplicable if he did not believe in Madame de Sauve's guilt, and it is certain that he is again on the best of terms with her."
"Knowing what he does," said the Count, "he is not proud."
"What would you?" returned George, "he is like the rest."
Madame Liauran, lying on her couch, was holding Madame Castel's hand while her cousin uttered these words, the scope of which he did not realise. The fingers of mother and grandmother exchanged a pressure by which the two women told each other of the suffering of which neither could ever be cured. They had not brought up their child that he might become like the rest. They caught a glimpse of the inevitable metamorphosis which was on the eve of its accomplishment in Hubert just now.
Alas! it is a profound truth that "man is like his love;" but this love, why and whence does it come to us? A question without reply, and, like woman's treachery, like man's weakness, like life itself, A CRUEL, CRUEL ENIGMA!