Did he love her less? She did not admit for a moment that he had not loved her at the beginning of their connection. He was an honourable man, not a love criminal. He would not have asked her to be his had he not been drawn to do so by all the forces of passion. Then, to explain Armand's incredulity, she reverted to the young man's past, to the mysterious deceptions of which her husband had formerly spoken to her.
"A woman has spoiled his heart," she said to herself.
At the thought of this she was pained by a different pain. She pitied Armand more, and she was jealous with a dim, vague jealousy. Then she asked herself:
"Will my love ever have power to restore to him the faith that he has lost?"
Absorbed as she was in these thoughts, nothing of which she expressed to the man who was their object, she no longer studied the impression which she herself produced upon her lover. When Armand came to dine in the Rue de La Rochefoucauld, and all three of them—he, Alfred, and herself—remained to spend the evening in the little drawing-room, she lapsed into abysmal silence. Alfred delighted, as a mathematician, in abstract discussions, and set forth social, political, and economic theories to the young baron, who listened to him with visible weariness depicted upon his features. Then a moment would come when Helen, emerging from her reflections, looked at him. She saw this expression of weariness, and failed to comprehend its immediate and trifling cause. "He is not happy with me," she would say to herself, and immediately afterwards, with even greater simplicity, "He is not happy." So she reflected, she who had given herself to him to obliterate a wrinkle of melancholy upon his brow, she whose thoughts and feelings had but a single aim: his happiness!
At other times, Armand would come, and at the first glance she discerned that while away from herself he had passed through periods of sadness. Then she felt quite paralysed. She trembled to speak to him, to utter a word that, coming from her lips, would displease him. An indefinable uneasiness took possession of her, a fear of showing her soul to the man she loved, that was all the more painful, for the fact that she had at first surrendered herself with such deep delight to the charm of feeling aloud in his presence, and this uneasiness with her now went even to their interviews in the Rue de Stockholm.
It was not that in the little home she would find her lover less distracted with her beauty, less passionate than in the days which had followed upon the complete surrender. But his kisses, and the sort of frenzy with which he embraced her now, made her afraid. She dreaded to feel the contrast between the ecstasy caused to her lover by physical possession, and the evident weariness of soul which he displayed in their almost daily interviews. It seemed as though the young man were striving to electrify his heart with the desire for her person. When Helen perceived this cruel truth, the enchantment of the hours of meeting suddenly ceased. Sometimes she longed for these meetings with the gloomiest ardour, that she might at least hear her lover's voice lavishing upon her those phrases of intoxication which, at the beginning of their intercourse, had been the adorable music that had exalted her. Then she dreaded these same interviews, and their caresses into which the senses perhaps entered more than the heart.
"Ah! my Armand," she had ventured to say to him, "you love my person more than you love myself."
"Nay, do you not give yourself to me in giving me your person?" he had replied.
Heavens! how gladly would she have asked him: "And you, do you give yourself entirely to me?"
She had paused upon this question. Why interrogate him? Did she not know that he would coax her with these soft blandishments of speech which do not reveal the depths of the heart? Would she succeed in deciphering the meaning this living enigma of a man's character, set thus before her for weal or woe? Cruel heart! would it never yield her its secret? Kisses, however, may be more tender than he who gives them, soft looks may conceal a soul like a veil—and she was so thirsty for truth!
But whence came all this moral anxiety that preyed upon her? Nothing had to all appearance occurred between them, and already she was alternately asking herself:
"Does he love me as much as at first? Does he love me? Has he ever loved me? Can he love me?"
And every minute she struck upon some trifling fact that heightened her doubt. She ceaselessly encountered that mistrust which degraded her, that irony which bruised her, that dryness of heart which reduced her to despair. Some of their friends from Bourges would arrive in Paris, and Alfred would say to De Querne:
"Do not come to-morrow evening; you would be too much bored. We are having some acquaintances from the country."
"When I am going to be in your way," the young man would say to Helen next day, "why do you not give me notice yourself, instead of doing it through your husband?"
"To be in my way?" she would ask.
"Oh! why deceive me? You have had some flirtations over there for which you blush here. You do not want me to verify your familiarity with this man or the other. But what can that signify to me since you did not know me? What does signify is to see you deceiving me."
Deceiving! always deceiving! This word recurred in Armand's conversations—indefatigably; she read it in his eyes, his gestures, his thoughts. Did she find herself obliged at the last moment to fail at one of their meetings in the Rue de Stockholm, she knew that he would not believe in her excuse. But a man of that kind—no, such a man cannot love.
"Ah, love me, love me!" she would murmur feverishly as she drew closer to him after passing through one of those crisis of anguish in which she had felt how little her lover's heart belonged to her.
"Why, I do love you," he would reply, without understanding the agony of which this agony was a last sigh.Sheunderstood that the word had not the same signification to him as to her, and the whole of the inward tragedy whereof she was the silent, grief-stricken heroine, burst forth one frightful day. Like a captive who, during his sleep, has been bound by his conquerors to a corpse, and awakes to discover himself chained to this horrible companion, she found herself, a living heart, a heart susceptible to love, and happiness, and life, fastened to a corpse-like heart, icy, moveless—slain!
When the reality of this came before her, she quickly flung herself back. All that she had believed genuine was deceptive, all that she had believed full was empty; but she would not acknowledge this to herself. She treated as chimeras those almost indefinable tokens which enable a tormented soul to penetrate another to its remotest depths. She loved Armand, and she wished to love him. Was not her entire life staked now on this card? It was only four months since she had become his mistress. What! four such short months! It is a horrible thing that in so short a time one can pass, without any visible shame, from the sublimest hope—that of making amends for all the injustice in a man's destiny—to the bitterest conviction of impotence. Scarcely four months, and he was not happy, nor was she. Would she never again ascend the incline down which she felt herself falling?
She caught glimpses of the future with unconquerable anguish. Ah, if it were true that he could not love, what would become of her. She now existed only through him; she could not exist otherwise. And he seemed to have no suspicion of the crisis of sorrow through which she was passing. It was her own fault; why did she not show him all her soul? That again she was unable to do. Would she ever be able? And when her grief caused her excessive suffering she murmured: "Strange being, why have I loved you? And nevertheless I cannot regret that I have done so."
Alfred Chazel had been quite aware that a mysterious drama was being played in his household. He had been sensible of it, dimly at first. It has not been sufficiently remarked how much the peculiar nature of imagination, when developed by the habits of the mind, prevails over sensibility itself, and modifies it. Alfred had an altogether mathematical intellect, very skilful in abstract reasonings, very unskilful in the perception of the real. He was as little acquainted with his wife's character after several years of married life as he had been on the day when he fell in love with her during a visit to Monsieur de Vaivre. But it was not only Helen's soul, with its depths, and complexities, and singularities, that was unknown to him; it was her whole life. Just as he had accepted the principles of conduct of the middle class to which he belonged, so had he accepted its ideas; and to the credit of the French provincial middle class it must be said that their morals are, relatively speaking, very pure. The men have, perhaps, in their youth low pleasures. But the married women who cause themselves to be talked about are immediately pointed at in such a way that the number of them is very small.
Alfred had on this point preserved the impressions received in his own family, impressions which no experience had corrected; for very chaste men are like very virtuous women, and no one reposes in them those confidences which illuminate the unclean depths of life, the grossness hidden beneath sentimental phraseology, the sensual egotism dissembled beneath the hypocrisy of pretences. The notion of suspecting Helen of having a lover could no more occur to him than the notion of suspecting her of theft or forgery, and much less the notion that she had for lover De Querne, his own companion in childhood.
Towards the latter he entertained a feeling of friendship all the more intense that there was blended with it an element of admiration. When they were studying on the same form at school, he used to look at him, and the refinement of Armand's manners, his beauty, his intellect, his halo of social superiority, inspired him with a sort of fetichism. Himself so modest, so hard-working, so akin to the people, he had vaguely considered his friend as a being of a somewhat different species; and when a very clear vision of a difference of this kind produces neither hatred nor envy, it gives birth to an almost blind enthusiasm. Never had Chazel judged De Querne. He had become so habituated to taking him as he was, that he did not even ask himself what manner of friendship Armand was giving him in return for his own. When they had separated, and the young baron used to send about two hastily scribbled pages in reply to the interminable letters from his old companion, the latter would say to himself:
"Armand is very fond of me, but it is wearisome to him to write. It is only natural. He is such an agreeable fellow, and so much sought after;" and this was all the complaint of an excellent heart that was ever deceived by a trifling exhibition of sympathy.
At every visit that he paid to Paris he met with the same reception from Armand—a clasp of the hand, an invitation to luncheon, to dinner, to the theatre. These tokens of comradeship, at once indifferent and cordial, appeared to him proofs of loyal affection. Not having observed Armand any more than, once married, he was to observe his wife, he could not measure the depth of the abyss which from year to year yawned still wider between his old classmate and himself. He knew not how to recognise the visible signs of radical indifference: the absolute dumbness of the young baron respecting himself, his looks of inattention during their conversations.
While Alfred, for example, was detailing to him the beginnings of his love for Mademoiselle de Vaivre, the innocent privacies of his furtive wooing and his hopes, Armand would smoke a cigar, and think of the loves which had crossed his own life, amid all the studied elegance and corruption which at Paris make a woman of pleasure so complex a thing, an extreme attained in the art of refining upon voluptuousness. He could by anticipation see in the young girl loved by his friend an awkward and undesirable creature, with red hands, badly-made dresses, and white stockings.
Like all men in whom the source of sensibility is not flowing and rich, he discovered pretexts for disgust in the trifles of petty external fact, and he involuntarily despised Chazel for not being disgusted like himself. This contempt was even so continuous, that it prevented him from looking seriously on the life of this worthy student, this prize of social excellence, as he used to call him in his absence. The astonishment caused him by Helen's distinguished appearance, had merely prompted him to say to himself below his breath:
"It's only ninnies like him that ever get hold of such a woman as that."
Alfred had trembled to know the judgment passed by his friend upon his wife, and had been enraptured to find that she pleased him. Armand's constant presence in their home, after they had settled at Paris, caused him intense joy. He became still more attached to his friend, because he appreciated the woman he himself loved so dearly, and to the latter because she appreciated his friend.
"I knew he would please you," he used to say ingenuously to his wife. "He is such an affectionate fellow, for all his sceptical ways."
And he would tell her how, in the days of their early youth, the elder Chazel had been in want of ten thousand francs to pay a brother's debts, and how Armand had immediately lent them.
For the first few months Helen listened to these praises with brilliant eyes, and a happy soul; she found in them reason for loving still more the man she loved. Since she had been the young man's mistress, these same praises darkened her countenance as they wounded her love. Did not the husband's trust degrade the lover? If Alfred's ingenuous sensibility discovered in this sign, as well as in many others, a metamorphosis in his wife's character, he was incapable of discerning its secret cause. It was just this too delicate sensibility which rendered it intolerable to him to think continuously of evil instincts, disgraceful actions, treacheries. There is hardness of heart in all distrust. The admission of evil tortured Chazel, and he forced himself not to think about it.
What, however, was the matter with Helen, for she was not the same? He had begun by believing her seriously ill, after the visit to the doctor, which had passed off as Helen had foreseen. He had accompanied her, had waited in the drawing-room of the celebrated practitioner, who was a friend of Armand's, and had afterwards been too modest to ask her for any details. He was one of those men who shroud the feminine nature in a deep veneration, to whom the matters relating to the sex are confined within inaccessible mystery, who have never looked upon complete nakedness. Let him who will reconcile women's pretensions to refinement with the profound contempt which most of them feel for such men, while the purest have in them a slight weakness towards the wicked fellow who has seen and done everything. Everything? They do not know what this is, and they dream about it.
Although deeply in love with Helen in the physical meaning of the term, Alfred had found a species of pleasure in sacrificing to the requirements of a health so dear, pleasures which she had never shared; but having scarcely any points of comparison, he had come to dream no more. Yes, this renunciation was sweet to him—sweet and yet useless, since Helen's countenance was shadowed every day, and she was evidently suffering. When Alfred saw her absorbed in indefinite silence, when he was aware of the thinness and paleness of the cheeks that he had known so full and rosy, he gave way to unexpressed pity.
"What is the matter with her?" he would then ask himself. "What if she is in serious danger, and dares not tell me, that she may not make me anxious?"
The result of these reflections was that his ingenuousness and trustfulness prompted him to venture upon exactly the same procedure that would have been dictated to him by suspicion. Helen had thought it necessary to speak to him on several occasions of fresh visits to the doctor, in order to avoid further attempts at intimacy.
"Well," said Chazel to himself, "I will go to the doctor;" and one afternoon towards the end of that winter he again found himself, this time alone, in the waiting-room, an apartment furnished like a museum with that wealth of knick-knacks which is characteristic of modern interiors.
The French windows opened upon the garden of the old house, the ground-floor of which was occupied by Dr. Louvet. The latter belonged to that generation of society scientists who visit the hospital in the morning, receive their clients in the afternoon, and find means to be as witty as idlers in a drawing-room at ten o'clock in the evening. Further, they are intelligent enough to prepare for the prolonged waitings of their fair patients an adornment wherein the latter may find something of what they have left at home, and an aspect of things similar to that to which they have been accustomed. Alfred involuntarily felt uncomfortable in this vast room which, with its tapestries and wainscotings and pictures, appeared to be intended rather for lordly receptions than for the use of suffering humanity.
He experienced a feeling of relief on entering the doctor's room, in which there was nothing but books—a contrast skilfully contrived by Louvet, who was as able in stage management as he was excellent in diagnosis. He was a man still young and very fair, with a face that suggested somewhat the traditional type of the Valois, and dark eyes of singular penetration. He was slight and pale, and when he placed his finger against his temple—a familiar gesture of his which was reproduced in a fine portrait, by Nittis, that hung in the room—he presented a strange blending of extreme delicacy and studied posture, which women especially found imposing.
"How is Madame Chazel?" he asked in the polished and detached tone which he always affected.
"Well, doctor," said Alfred, "it is precisely about her health that I have come to consult you."
"And why has she not come herself?" asked the physician.
"She does not even know of the step I have taken," replied the husband. "She causes me much anxiety. You know how she is wasting away; you have seen her several times lately."
Doctor Louvet listened in the attitude of his portrait, with his eyelids half closed. Although he was completely master of himself, as became a man accustomed daily to receive the confidences of many persons deprived of hypocrisy by the presence of danger, he was unable, on hearing these words of Chazel's, to restrain a movement of his eyelids. Rapid as was this movement and the glance which accompanied it, it could not escape poor Alfred, whose whole powers of attention were at that moment concentrated upon the doctor's face. Why did that glance cause him a little shiver, and tempt him to ask:
"When have you seen my wife?"
But it was a question impossible to put. Moreover, the physician was already making his reply.
"When Madame Chazel did me the honour to consult me last"—and this word expressed both everything and nothing—"she appeared to me to be suffering more particularly in the nervous system."
And he entered into lengthened details respecting the delicacy of the feminine organisation, dwelling upon the contrast between the life to which his patient had been accustomed in the country and the life of Paris. Lacking in observation as Alfred might be, his habit of reasoning with precision forced him to recognise the vagueness of this talk, and he asked somewhat heedlessly:
"And you have no observation to make to the husband?"
"None," replied Louvet with a half smile, "unless it be to spoil our dear patient a good deal and to contradict her as little as possible."
Alfred's heart sank within his breast, and while the liveried servant, who waited fashionably in the physician's ante-chamber, was assisting him to put on his overcoat, he was already being gnawed by this thought:
"Helen has deceived me. It was not the doctor who ordered her to live apart from me. She has come to have a horror of me; but, what have I done to her?"
What had he done to her? A deep melancholy took possession of him from the time of this visit to Louvet, of which he was very careful not to speak. What was the use of adding another pain to those which Helen already felt? For she suffered, as he could see—but why? Ingenuously he made it his study to find out the wrongs that he had done her. What frightened him most was that he could almost palpably feel the whole mystery in his wife's character. This is one of the most cruel trials that can come to a loving husband. When she was beside him, and alone with him, drawing out the stitches in her tapestry, he used to look at her and ask himself of what she was thinking.
Of what? All his superiority of education availed him nothing in the presence of this silent creature whose mere presence troubled him in so obscure a fashion. The desire of her person, a desire the satisfaction of which he was incapable of demanding as a right, paralysed him with a sort of nervous suffering which, united to natural timidity and to the anxiety respecting this increasing paleness, was growing into a veritable torture. And then, when Armand arrived in the middle of such a silence, a comparison was inevitably instituted on Alfred's part between his friend's easy manners and his own constraint, and especially between the difficulty which he found in talking to Helen and the abundance of words that came to the Baron de Querne. Helen, too, appeared to make the same comparison, for in Armand's presence she took an interest at once in what was being said.
These visits gave Chazel an uncomfortable feeling; he experienced a vague impression that he was in the way in his own house. He had several times remarked when it was he himself who interrupted atête-à-têtebetween Armand and his wife, that the conversation suddenly ceased on his arrival; he recognised this by the brightness in Helen's eyes. On such occasions, that he might not give way to the vexation which he felt, he used to engage in those already mentioned abstract disquisitions. He saw that his old comrade had become more of a friend to his wife than to himself, he was hurt by it, he reproached himself for feeling hurt, and by the mere fact that he reproached himself, reflected about it.
He thus grew accustomed continually to unite the thoughts of his friend with that of his wife. But when we depict to ourselves simultaneously the images of two living persons, it is not long before we depict them acting upon each other, and in spite of himself Alfred came to consider the relations which united Armand to Helen. To ascertain the cause of his wife's suffering he had proceeded by elimination, instinctively studying as a problem the data that he possessed concerning her, and every time that he dwelt upon the mystery, he always struck upon a thought which he used to drive away, and which came back again. At other times he asked himself whether she had not confided the reason of her grief to De Querne, was on the point of questioning his friend, and then abstained from doing so.
"It would not be delicate," he thought to himself; "if she says nothing to me, she has her reasons for it."
One day, however, he saw her so pale, so downcast, that he took courage.
"You are suffering, Helen," he said; "will you find a better friend than I am to whom to confide your troubles, whatever they may be?"
"Nay, I have no troubles," she had replied, and she spoke falsely once more.
Why were her eyes then filled with that moisture which speaks of suppressed tears? Ah! it was because the loving kindness of her husband was a torture to her in her torture, were it only by its contrast to the frigidity of another man, the memory of whom was then passing through her heart. Why did the same memory pass at the same moment through Alfred's imagination? She, however, kept this memory before her mind, while he repelled it.
"Helen," he said to himself, "is an honourable woman. Armand is an honourable man. What right should I have to insult them with suspicion? He takes an interest in her; did I not desire that it should be so? She is attached to him—and why not? Can there not be honourable friendship between a man and a woman?"
Such were the habitual reasonings by which Alfred sought to stifle the growing viper of suspicion. But the more he reasoned in this way, the more his suspicion augmented, since by reasoning about his distrust he thought about it, and in consequence rendered it more present to his mind. He was striving against these inward thoughts one afternoon of that same month of February, when returning on foot from the Orleans terminus, whither a piece of duty had led him. The weather was fine, the pale, fresh azure of the cool winter days was floating over Paris, and although it took him out of his way, Alfred entered the Jardin des Plantes, in order to enjoy his walk a little. At a turning in one of the main avenues of the garden, his heart beat more quickly, for walking slowly under the bare trees, and talking together in an absorbed fashion, he had just perceived a woman who had Helen's figure and a man with the figure of Armand.
Yes, it was indeed they. He knew so well his wife's easy gait, and that other somewhat lagging step which reminded him of so many strolls in a college quadrangle, not very far from this spot. But why was he seized with acute pain at this meeting? What could be more natural than that Helen should walk thus with Armand, what more natural or more innocent? Do people who wish to do wrong come in this way into a public garden? They were not even arm-in-arm. Yes, but why had not Helen mentioned at luncheon that she was going to walk with Armand? Did she not know that he would think nothing of it? Hiding from him? Why?
"I will go up to them," he thought. "I will speak to them, and soon see whether she is confused. But no; it would look as though I had followed them. Perhaps they have met by chance? What if I were now to follow them?"
The thought of such espionage sickened him.
They were still walking in front of him in that vast avenue which runs beside the bison enclosure and the bear-pits. Overhead, the gigantic trees curved their naked boughs, the blackness of which stood out sadly against the blue sky. Chazel felt his limbs shaking beneath him, and sank upon a bench. He told himself that he must either look upon this meeting as a most natural thing, and in that case it was childish not to speak to his wife and her friend, or else—and it was just this second hypothesis whose sudden thrusting into his mind paralysed him.
"All," he said to himself, "will be explained on her return."
Some minutes passed away in this anguish and irresolution. The couple disappeared in the direction of the little hill that leads to the labyrinth. Chazel was almost happy at their disappearance. It provided him with a pretext for not acting immediately. And, in fact, he went out of the garden by the opposite gate, saying to himself, in vindication of the impotence of will to which he had just fallen a victim, that it was, moreover, the surest way of arriving at a certainty. If Helen spoke to him in the evening about this walk, the walk was, as he believed it to be, innocence itself. If not—but what sort of ideas was he again taking into his head?
The shock had been so great that, instead of returning home, he walked about for part of the afternoon. The advent of the moment when he would see his wife again was now what he desired, and at the same time what he most dreaded. He was on the point of turning back and entering the garden again, but it was too late.
He stepped upon the deck of one of the boats that ply on the Seine, and there, mingling with the crowd of lower middle-class folk, he watched the water breaking against the arches, and shattering against the quays, the construction of which he mechanically examined; and he followed with his gaze the huge lighters, with the clean little painted houses standing in the centre. The air became keen, but he did not notice it until he had reached Auteuil. He landed under the viaduct, amid the din of the fair which every afternoon attracts such a strange tribe of prostitutes and their followers. He returned on foot along the interminable parapet. His anguish was so great that he could not remember having ever experienced anything analogous to it. His heart was paining him in his left breast, so that it seemed as though breath would fail him. Night was falling fast, the winter night, whose oncoming is so melancholy. The death struggle of the light is so cruelly like the agony of thought!
Here he was at last at his own street, in his own courtyard, in front of his own door. He did not ask whether his wife had returned, but he went straight to her room, and knocked modestly. Helen's clear voice said, "Come in." He was in her presence, and involuntarily he looked at her feet. She still wore her walking boots, with that trifle of dust on them which shows that a woman has gone on foot. Ah! how he would have liked to question her! But instinctively he grasped that which constitutes the powerlessness of all jealousy; what is the use of entering, with a woman who is mistrusted, upon a discussion turning upon this very mistrust? She will not destroy it by saying "No," seeing that there is no belief in her.
"Where do you come from so late?" Helen asked tranquilly. No, never had a being capable of falsehood such beautiful eyes, and such a beautiful smile.
"Guess," he said, with more calmness. She was, no doubt, going herself to tell him of her walk, and as she was silent he went on:
"From Auteuil. I walked because I did not feel well. And you?" he questioned, with an anxiety grown terrible once more.
"I have been shopping," she replied.
Ah! why had he not the courage to tell her that she had just uttered a falsehood? He sat down with the sharp point buried still deeper in his heart. She let the conversation drop, and resumed her book.
"A frightful novel that Monsieur De Querne lent me," she said. "It is the story of a woman who deceives her lover, and does so while loving him. Authors don't know what to invent nowadays."
Her eyes shone as she uttered these words. She had pronounced the word "lover" with an intonation which distressed Alfred. She seemed to impart a mysterious depth to those two syllables. Ah! he would have given his blood at that moment to have her speak to him of her walk! After all, she had perhaps attached no importance to her reply. But neither then, nor at dinner, nor during the evening that followed, did she breathe a word about it. About ten o'clock, Armand arrived in his dress coat; he was going out afterwards. She received him with the words:
"You have been quite well since yesterday?"
Ah, the deceiver! the deceiver!
Alfred had seated himself at the corner of a table under the pretence of having some papers to examine, and from time to time he watched them conversing, those two beings whom he loved best of all the world. Was it possible that a criminal mystery united them, and at the expense of himself, whom they had betrayed? This Armand, whom he had seen playing in his schoolboy dress—had he been his brother he could not have loved him more. What nobility of brow! what grace of gesture! And this was the man who was a villain, for to deceive such a friend as himself was villainy.
And she, with her medallion-like profile, with her modesty and proud reserve! No; it was he, Alfred, who was losing his senses. A walk in a garden—what could be more innocent? Perhaps—for he knew that she was charitable, and so did Armand—yes, perhaps, they were both going to visit the poor. But, then, why this reticence? why this deception? And why did he himself keep silence? To this he could have given no reply, except that speaking was beyond his strength, just as acting had lately been.
And Armand and Helen conversed with tranquillity. He listened to their voices uttering words of unconcern, and all his dim suspicions, all his repressed doubts, came back simultaneously to his soul.
When Alfred Chazel had said good-night to Helen as usual and was left alone, he began to suffer with an intensity of which he himself could not have believed himself capable. He had now no longer any need to discuss the fact. His wife had lied to him. The clearness of this simple fact prostrated him. He could hear her say in that voice whose slightest inflections he knew so well:
"How have you been since yesterday?"
The last four syllables rang pitilessly in his ear and to the depth of his heart. He had just lost, never, never again to recover it, complete trust in that gentle voice, in these beloved eyes. There are no such things as petty insincerities; a person who has once deceived may always deceive. The perception of this natural law, the same perception which had prevented Armand from believing in Helen, was torturing Alfred at this moment. Liar! Liar! When he came to the utterance of this word, he gave forth an outbreaking of grief as he paced to and fro about his study, to which, as often of an evening, he had withdrawn.
On one of the walls was displayed a long blackboard, covered with a medley of algebraical formulæ. Between the two windows stood a white wooden table constructed so as to facilitate writing in a standing position. Another low table, intended for correspondence; a bookcase filled with tall mathematical volumes; engraved likenesses of Lagrange, Fresnel, Cauchy, and Laplace; a leathern divan, and a carpet, completed the furniture of a room, the abstract, peaceful aspect of which presented a strange contrast to the disturbed countenance of the man who was walking about in it at that moment; and the contrast symbolised only too well the drama that was being enacted in the existence of a man born for study, for prolonged and painful thought, for happy labour, and constrained to action by the sudden revelation with which he had just been visited.
Yes, the necessity for action was present and inevitable. To rest at the suspicion which was tormenting him at that moment was what he could not do—neither morally, without losing self-respect, nor physically, for the pain of it was too great. As he raised his head with a gesture of despair, his eyes encountered the board; he perceived the signs of his calculations traced in chalk with that absolute equality of lettering, that absence of thick and thin strokes, which imparted an appearance of incomparable lucidity to his writing. The sudden sight of this changed the current of his grief.
"Let us reason out the thing," he said aloud, and involuntarily he recovered for subservience to his passion all the methodical habits contracted by his intellect. "Yes," he went on, "let us reason it out."
He sat down beside his fire in an easy-chair, and, with his forehead resting upon his hands, gathered together all his thoughts, which were not long in shaping themselves to the following dilemma:
"There are two alternatives. Either the walk and the falsehood are to be explained by some petty, innocent motive, a visit of charity or a chance meeting, and they have not spoken to me about it owing to a false dread of displeasing me; or else, the walk and the falsehood indicate that there is a mystery between Helen and Armand. Let us speak out and say that they love each other. There is no means of avoiding the alternative. In the first case, I should have to scold Helen for believing me to be so childishly jealous; in the second—"
Here his imagination paused, being taken unawares. There was within him no anticipatory prevision of a misfortune of the kind. The practical rules, received and accepted in his youth, upon which his whole life was based, did not afford an answer to this cruel hypothesis. On the other hand, he had for the determining of his will neither that dread of public opinion which serves to guide nearly all husbands in similar crises, nor the startling physical vision, that besetting, unendurable vision which maddens a jealous man by showing him sexual union, fleshly abandonment, irredeemable pollution.
The fact that Helen and Armand loved each other did not for a moment signify to Chazel that she was the young man's mistress. It signified that she had given him her heart. But then what was his duty as her husband? For lack of previously adopted principles, he suffered himself to be led away by the mania for absolute, ideal theories that is characteristic of mathematicians.
"My duty, if I am becoming an obstacle to her happiness, is to sacrifice myself. She must be left free; all must be given up."
He thought immediately of his son; he could see the little gestures, the pretty face, the bright eyes of the child whom he had already moulded in his own likeness.
"Ah!" he said to himself, "I have no right to forsake him. But to take him with me—to deprive his mother of him?"
The tragic nature of this possibility disconcerted his intellect afresh, and like a timorous swimmer who has ventured a few fathoms too far, he speedily returned to the place where he could keep his footing, where his reasoning stood firm close to the facts.
"I am losing my head," he groaned. "The question is, does she love him? Does she not love him?"
He had risen once more, and was walking with a more hurried step than before.
"How can I find out? How? how?" he asked himself, and the emotion of uncertainty became so insupportable to him that he said to himself: "Let there be an end of it. I will come to an understanding with Helen—and at once."
He looked at the clock which was pointing to midnight. He had been in these throes for an hour. He left his study with the lamp in his hand. The narrow wooden staircase, which was covered with a red carpet, was devoid of sound and light. All the servants were in bed. He went down the steps of the staircase leaning on the bannisters, his legs trembling, his lips parched, his throat choking. He was in front of the door of his wife's bedroom. He gave two slight knocks with the back of his hand. There was no reply. He turned the brass handle and leaned against it. The door was double-locked, and the key was inside.
"She is asleep," he said to himself.
The action of descending the stairs, and then of pressing against the door, had used up the feverish impulse produced by excess of uncertainty. Instead of knocking again, he paused, motionless.
"She is asleep," he repeated to himself; "if I awake her, what shall I say to her?"
He remained standing against the wall, with the lamp at his feet, listening. Only the murmur of nocturnal Paris reached him, and he reflected. He could see by anticipation the manner in which Helen would receive him. She would be lying in her bed, her plaited hair rolled about her head, while the lace of her fine night-dress quivered at neck and wrist.
At the thought of this, Alfred experienced a thrill of amorous emotion that restored to him the timidity with which the desire of his wife's person always overwhelmed him, and he continued to picture the scene.
"What shall I say to her?—'You have lied to me.' And what will she reply?"
He foresaw the countless pretexts that Helen could advance to explain her walk.
"I shall ask her: 'Are you in love with Armand?'"
He felt himself incapable of being the first to articulate the words in that way. Moreover, what might not the result of the question be? If it were not true that she was in love with Armand, he would inflict useless pain upon her, which would aggravate still further their divorce of intimacy. What if it were true? She would not acknowledge it. She had lied just now. What would another lie cost her?
Irresolution proved the stronger. He went up to his study again without having made a fresh attempt. There was a lull for a few minutes, such as succeeds to acute crises. It was one o'clock in the morning.
"I will go to sleep," he said to himself. "When I awake it will be time enough to make up my mind."
As was usual with him, he arranged a few papers, carefully covered up the fire to avoid accidents, and was almost tranquil as he got into bed. But scarcely was he there before his anguish began again, more torturing than before. The avenue in the Jardin des Plantes again extended its vault of naked branches beneath which Helen and Armand passed along. What were they saying to each other? The well-known voice uttered again the fatal syllables, "Since yesterday!" Ah! Liar! liar! the deceiver!
Once more the necessity for action pressed in its inevitableness upon this purely speculative nature. His thoughts distributed themselves again into two groups.
"Either they love each other or they do not love each other. If they do?—If they do not?—How can I find out? From her? From him?"
The thought of coming to an explanation with De Querne presented itself abruptly, and as this thought, while satisfying the need for acting, deferred the action for several hours, Alfred began mentally to muster all the arguments that told in its favour.
Such an explanation would not involve any of the drawbacks which must follow a conversation with Helen. If Armand and she did not love each other, everything would remain as it was, since she was in ignorance of her husband's suspicion and of the step that he had taken. If they were in love with each other, he would extort the acknowledgment of the fact more readily from the loyalty of his friend. The latter at least had not lied to him. Could he have replied otherwise than as he did to Helen's phrase, that simple phrase that was so terrible to himself, Alfred: "How have you been since yesterday?" To receive the young man with these words was tantamount to a prohibition to speak.
Again, there are suspicions respecting which one friend has no right to keep silence towards another. If he, Alfred, were to learn that Armand had harboured an insulting distrust of him in his heart without speaking of it, would he not feel deeply wounded? Would he not consider such silence an unwarrantable affront? Well, then, he would not offer this affront to De Querne. He would go to him with open hand and heart, and show him all his trouble. Such a step had further in its favour the fact that it would involve practical results. He might ask his friend to come to the Rue de La Rochefoucauld less frequently. If he were mistaken in his distrust, and if the real cause of Helen's grief had been confided to Armand, he might speak of it without indelicacy on that occasion, in the course of the conversation.
During the whole of that long night he turned this plan over and over, and in the end it impressed itself upon his will. Towards morning, he fell into that dark overwhelming sleep which follows upon excessive deperditions of nervous energy. Upon awaking, he again found himself face to face with his resolution of the night before; he foresaw, unless he acted, a day worse than that horrible night, and at nine o'clock he was ringing at Armand's door, not without a thrilling of his whole heart, yet with decision. These abstract souls, to whom action is so repellent, are capable of energy, provided this energy be sustained by reasoning, just as impassioned souls derive their force from blind impulse, and arid souls from a clear perception of self-interest.
Many days had gone by since Chazel had entered the rooms in the Rue Lincoln. The valet who answered his ring, an old servant of the De Querne family, was the same who formerly used to come to the school to take Armand away for his holidays. The few words that this man uttered when asking about his master's old companion with the familiarity of former days, brought real comfort to Alfred. He experienced an awakening of memories that to him was equivalent to an impression of friendship.
"The baron is in his bath," the servant went on, "but if Monsieur Alfred will walk into the drawing-room," and he opened the door with attentive assiduity, "and read the papers," and he handed them. Then kneeling in front of the fire to put on a fresh log, he asked:
"Will Monsieur Alfred take tea with the baron?"
These trifling attentions softened Alfred; in them he found as it were a palpable renewal of the intimacy in which he had lived with Armand. The aspect of the room heightened this first impression still more. He knew the room well; he had seen it forming year by year, and furniture being added to furniture. At every visit he was aware of some slight alterations.
"Stay, that's new, is it not?" he would say to his friend, who used then to explain to him the convenience or rarity of his recent acquisition.
He went up to the low bookcase, and by the look of the binding recognised some books which must have been college prizes. He took one out and saw the stamp of the Vanaboste School printed on the green shagreen. He replaced the volume, and the courtyard of the school was revived before his mind. What delightful hours had been spent in walking round that yard with Armand—an Armand who, despite the years, resembled the Armand of to-day; and to convince himself of the fact, he proceeded to look at a profile of his friend done by Bastien-Lepage, in the refined and exact manner of this master's portraits. From the portrait Alfred passed on to the photographs scattered over the mantelpiece; the comrades, living or dead, that they represented, had been known by him, ay, by him also.
Ah! from the most insignificant objects in the apartment there issued a voice to protest on behalf of the friendship that united De Querne and himself. After the anguish of the night before, this atmosphere of settled affection operated powerfully on Alfred's heart and brought him relief.
"How well it was I came," he reflected, throwing himself into an easy-chair, and looking at the fire, the flames of which were assuming a joyous brightness: "I will tell him everything in a straightforward way: what is the good of artifice! And I have full confidence that everything will be explained."
He had reached this stage in his meditations, when he felt a hand laid on his shoulder. It was the hand of Armand, who had just come in. But Alfred's absorption had been too great to admit of his being disturbed by the noise of the door. The young baron was wearing a handsome morning jacket of black quilted silk, light trousers, and thin patent leather shoes, while all about him there floated the fresh odour of a scent which Alfred suddenly recognised. This same delicate aroma was diffused around her by his wife in the morning hours when she went about in those loose dresses which best indicated the suppleness of the lines of her person. The fact that Helen and Armand made use of the same perfume was sufficient, in Alfred's present condition of soul, to make the soothing influence of youthful memories give way once more to the indefinable, the vague and torturing suspicion of the night before. He looked at his friend, but the latter seemed to be occupied solely with the preparations for his breakfast. The valet had wheeled a little movable table up to the fire, and arranged upon it a silver urn, a cup, slices of toast, butter and honey.
"Another cup for Monsieur Chazel," said Armand.
"Monsieur Alfred has refused already," said the servant.
"Then you will allow me," Armand resumed in a cheerful tone.
Sitting down, he poured the black tea into the cup, and then the hot water, calculating the proportion between them just as though his friend had not been present. Was this the attitude of a man who had a secret to conceal?
"No," said Alfred to himself, "if there were any mystery between Helen and him, my visit would put him out, he would want to know the reason of it. Are you not astonished," he went on aloud, "to see me so early in the morning?" putting his question with that incapacity for dissimulation which is characteristic of very sincere people, and which causes them almost involuntarily to continue outwardly and verbally their inmost thoughts.
"I suppose you have some little service to ask of me," replied the other, "and I am quite ready to perform it."
Then to himself: "Poor Alfred is too ingenuous. He wants to know why I am not astonished. Well, I certainly ought to be so, and should be expecting a question from him about Helen—what else could it be about? She would not believe me when I told her that he was growing jealous. Well, we'll lie as well as we can, since so much is due to her and he buttered a slice of toast, not without a certain melancholy at this necessity for lying, for he had preserved the haughtiness of personal pride which so often outlives true loftiness of feeling.
"Yes," Alfred resumed, in a tone of voice the seriousness of which revealed how deeply he felt the present interview, "you are my friend—my friend. Yes, I believe it, I know it."
It might have been thought that he was questioning himself the better to assure himself of his own sincerity. He again repeated, "I believe it," looking at Armand as he had never ventured to look at him in his life before. His eyes no longer expressed anything of that awkward timidity which in all arguments caused Alfred to feel beaten beforehand, even when he was right a hundred times over.
"And it is because you are my friend," he went on, "that I came to you to-day. Armand, you see in me the most unhappy of men."
The other raised his head, which, as though to pour some more tea into a cup that was already half full, he had bent down beneath his friend's gaze. He looked straight at the loyal man whom, in that very room on the eve of the first assignation, he had in thought held so cheap. Chazel had allowed his eyeglass to fall. His clear eyes showed the very depths of his soul. In them there was legible pain, so terrible and so genuine that it rendered touching and tragic a situation which, at any other moment, Armand would have considered very ridiculous—that, namely, of a deceived husband suffering from suspicion of the deception in the presence of the very man who has deceived him. No, it was simple, naked human suffering—that real suffering which grips your vitals like the shriek of a passer-by when crushed by a carriage at a street-corner. Armand suddenly felt this sympathy of humanity, then immediately afterwards a secret feeling of uncomfortableness at the thought that he was himself the cause of this visible suffering; and he listened to Alfred, who continued speaking.
"I have come to tell you things that people do not talk about, but you must listen to me. I am very unhappy, my friend, and for very vulgar reasons. Ah! there is nothing romantic in my story. It is comprised in a single line: I love my wife and my wife does not love me. How and how greatly I love her you cannot understand—no, not even you. I am a timid, awkward fellow, I know, and have always known. When quite a young man, I pictured in my dreams the ideal face of a woman. I called her my madonna—but I am talking nonsense to you. Let me go on. It was she who comforted me for the rest—those who all treated me with scorn—and it was she that I loved. When I saw Helen, I found in her a likeness to this chimera such as I had never met with. Do not smile. Just understand me. I married her. At first I was quite sensible of the fact that she was not very happy. I said to myself: Time will bring everything right. Time has brought nothing right. The martyrdom that it has been to me to see her dull, wearied, and sad, and to be able to do nothing for her—ah! no one shall ever know. Especially since we have been living in Paris, I can see that she is sinking into still greater melancholy, that her poor face is growing thin and her eyes hollow. She is suffering and wasting away before my eyes, every day a little more, and I am unable to do anything and am ignorant of the cause. Can you understand what a torture it is to see a woman loved as I love her passing away hour by hour by my very side, and not even to know the reason?"
He had risen as he uttered these words. In proportion as the phrases came to him, they swept away the plan of discourse which he had prepared on his way from the Rue de La Rochefoucauld to the Rue Lincoln. He had allowed himself to feel aloud. He passed his hand across his eyes and went on:
"I am wandering. Why do I tell you all these things? I have come to ask you whether you know what is the matter with her."
And he stopped in front of Armand, who also rose. The latter was trying to guess the object of his old companion's tirade. He was aware that in a conversation of this kind the chief point is to abstain from informing one's interlocutor of what he may not know. To Alfred's abrupt question he replied in the vaguest of formulas:
"Why, how could I know any more than yourself?"
"Armand," said the other, going up to him and laying his hands upon his shoulders, "do not deceive me. I am able to hear anything; I am ready for anything. Yes, if Helen loved some one, I should efface myself, I should go away. I should take my son with me, and allow her to begin her life anew. A revengeful husband—how I despise such a man as that! Either he does not love—and then for what does he take revenge? For a wound dealt to his pride? What pitifulness! Or else he does love, and has only to bring about the happiness of the woman he loves at the cost of his own. Ah, I have not the ideas of the world! Answer me, Armand, is Helen in love with any one?"
"I tell you again. How should I know?"
"Ah!" exclaimed Chazel, taking his friend's arm and grasping it with all his strength, "who can know if not you? Did you consider me blind to such a degree as not to see that you were becoming her most intimate confidant? If she does not talk to you about herself, her life, her feelings, what do you say to each other in your endless conversations? Why do you become silent when I appear, if you are not speaking of things that you do not want me to hear? Why do you hide from me?" he continued violently.
"We hide from you?" said Armand.
"Be silent," returned Alfred, laying his hand upon his friend's mouth, "do not say what is false. I can endure falsehood no longer. I must have the truth, whatever it may be. I saw you yesterday in the Jardin des Plantes, in the main avenue. I was there—I saw you. You were walking together, and in the evening she said to you: 'How have you been since yesterday?' You do not hide from me? Repeat that now. Ah, why have you both lied to me?"
"You are right," replied Armand, "we ought to have spoken to you about it immediately. That is the way in which the most innocent things assume an appearance of mystery."
While affecting the most absolute calmness, he said to himself: "Helen is saved." Logical on this point with his everlasting distrust, he used at every meeting to agree with his mistress upon a common explanation to be given in case of surprise, and he went on aloud:
"Madame de Chazel was returning from a visit of charity; I met her in the garden, and we walked together for a little because the weather was fine. She asked me to say nothing about it to you, because you would scold her for going in that way into the low quarters of the town."
And it was true that Alfred, still a provincial in this respect, used often to speak of the dangers that a woman might incur alone in out of the way corners in Paris.
"You have the means of ascertaining whether I am telling you the truth," added De Querne. "Take a cab, go home, and ask Madame Chazel. I shall not have time to forewarn her, shall I? You will see whether she makes you the same reply."
"For what do you take me?" said Alfred, "I have a horror of such spying ways. I am already too much ashamed of having spoken to you in this way.—Armand," he said, advancing towards his friend, "give me your word of honour that Helen and you are not in love with each other."
"Madame Chazel and I!" exclaimed De Querne, "nay, I give you my word of honour that not a word has passed between us that was not one of simple, honourable friendship. In my turn I will ask you: 'For what do you take me?'" And with the secret loathing of all his pride he added inwardly; "What mean actions a woman can make a man commit!"
"Then I ask your forgiveness," returned Alfred, "for I suspected you. Ah! I am not wronging you; I did not believe that there was anything between you. No, I think too highly of you both. But I thought that she might have formed an affection for you and you for her. She is charming, and you, Armand—why you have all that I have not! You are handsome, refined, witty. And I, I have only this," he said with a heart-broken gesture, striking his breast above his heart.
"Heavens! what I should have suffered had it been true! Just think, to have lost both her who is my entire life, and you whom I liked so much! You do not know, Armand, how sincerely I am your friend—just let me tell it you for once. At our age these protestations are ridiculous—but what is ridicule to me? With my father, and before I knew Helen, you are the person I loved most. I am of the Newfoundland breed; I must have some one to be attached to. Throughout my youth you were that some one to me. When we were children, I should have liked you to have a sacrifice to ask of me, something very difficult, almost impossible of execution. You were in my eyes like a more fortunate brother. I was not jealous of all your superior qualities; I was proud of them. When I got married you were not able to come to Bourges. Well! will you believe it, my heart throbbed when I introduced you to my wife in Paris? If you had not been pleased with her I should have been so unhappy. Think of that my friend, my dear friend," and he clasped his hands, "and you will excuse me for having said anything painful, or wounding to you. You and she, to lose you both! Ah! I should have gone away. I should have sacrificed everything to your happiness. But it would have killed me!"
He sank into the easy chair as though exhausted by the emotions that he had just experienced. His agitated face revealed too clearly the excessiveness of his grief, and Armand felt unspeakably moved by looking upon such a spectacle of sorrow and weakness. By truthfulness of soul, Alfred had just re-established between them the true nature of the situation. Husbands are not so often ridiculous, as the proverb says, but by reason of the deceived vanity which is at the bottom of nearly all their bitterness, or of the triumphant vanity which is at the bottom of their fancied security. But Alfred, face to face with Armand, was trust face to face with treachery, serious love, ready for the most tragic sacrifices, face to face with the depraved fancy of pride and sense that scruple had restrained.
And Armand was silent. Alfred's affection and esteem smote him as with a hand. Ah! how he would have liked to have said to this man:
"Yes, I have lied to you. I have robbed you of your wife. I had the excuse that I did not know how much you loved her and how much you loved me. Choose now the reparation that it may please you to require, and I will grant it you. Let us put an end to it."
Yes, but what of Helen? The secret of adultery does not belong to a single individual. To his duty towards Alfred was opposed another duty—a duty of honour also, and one freely contracted—and he was silent, feeling a very child in the presence of this honesty which suffered and wept before him, honesty possibly deceived and certainly simple. But a man who entrusts you with his pocket-book, and whom you rob of the bank-notes in one of the pockets of it, is also deceived and simple; only, on the other hand, you are a thief. Whatever Armand's superiority to Alfred might be, he found himself, by the mere fact of his own treachery and his friend's good faith, in that condition of humiliation which is intolerable to all higher natures. It was an experience that lasted for only a few minutes, but it was a very bitter one.
"Do not pay any attention to this complaining of mine," Alfred resumed; "my nerves are unstrung. I really do not know why I am like this, seeing that I have found with you the certainty that I needed. Ah! thank you!"—and he sprang forward to kiss his friend as brother kisses brother. Under this kiss Armand could feel the blood rising to his face.
"Come," he said in confusion, "calm yourself."
"Nay, I am calm," said Alfred; "you have been so good, you have listened to me with so much heart. Alas!" he added mournfully, "how is it that I cannot have an explanation with Helen like that which I have had with you? In her presence I feel so embarrassed, so constrained."
"And," replied Armand, who perceived the possibility of sparing his mistress a cruel scene, "you also take an exaggerated view of trifles. Shall I tell you my opinion about Madame Chazel? And this opinion has been confirmed by all the conversations that I have had with her. What she is suffering from is the change in her mode of life. The atmosphere of Paris, the habits of Paris, the people of Paris, are all enervating to her. She needs great consideration. Take my advice and spare her all discussion. Be gentle with her."
"You are right," said Alfred, who remembered having heard almost the same words in the mouth of the doctor, and this coincidence succeeded in momentarily tranquillising him. He shook his head, and uttered the following words, at which Armand felt no inclination to smile:
"I am an egotist; I see nothing but my own grief. But Helen has confidence in me. You see that I am jealous no longer. Speak to her of me; tell her how much I love her, how I desire only her happiness. Explain it all to her; she will believe you. God! I would give my whole life for a glance of tenderness in her eyes when she looks at me."
When Alfred Chazel had left the drawing-room in the Rue Lincoln, Armand, being left alone, felt the need of seeing clear within himself. The visit from the friend of his childhood had brought him a strangely uncomfortable feeling which he was unable to shake off either during the close of that morning, or during the afternoon, which was entirely taken up with going about from one place to another. By a line alleging an imaginary excuse he had released himself from the appointment made with Helen the evening before, and in his room as well as in the cab which drove him from one neighbourhood to another, he had the courage to question himself frankly.
He strove to beguile with physical motion the indefinable and unbearable sadness with which the scene that he had gone through continuously overwhelmed him. He went from tradesman to tradesman, paying bills that were in arrears, leaving cards at houses in which he had not set foot for months, and unceasingly he reverted to this questioning of the recesses of his conscience: Why was he so greatly shaken by a natural event which it was so easy to foresee, and which, when all was said, did not result in any disastrous consequence?
But no; he could not think of Chazel without feeling an inward wound, bleeding and keen. His pride had been stricken to its deepest depths. He, who since their common adolescence had in thought treated Alfred as an inferior creature, he, who had robbed the poor wretch of his wife without the slightest remorse, he now had suddenly been crushed with generosity by this man, had been almost outrageously contemned. There was no means of rebelling against it, of standing out against it. Of the two it was he, Armand, who was playing the unworthy part, and he was pained by it in the baser portions of his being, in that pride in taking the first place, which, from their childhood, had been manifested in the pettiest details. Did they enter a restaurant, or take part in a country excursion? It was Armand who sought to pay, just as he sought to surpass at every game, and to win prizes at the distributions. Vanity had prevented him from choosing a career. Vanity again had inclined him to intrigues with women. Thus he was humiliated to the very soul.
But his painful sensations proceeded at the same time from a more noble cause. The cord of pity had thrilled within him at the sighing forth of the terrible lament to which he had listened for an hour. Aridity of soul was not an essential part of Armand de Querne's nature. It was caused by the fact that with him emotion passed through the brain before it reached the heart. By a rooted deformity to be found in all intellectual lives, he must needs give himself reasons for feeling in such or such a manner. The powerlessness to love of which he was a victim proceeded from this peculiar disposition. He had never been able to believe in the truth of any woman's heart, and as a consequence he had always given himself reasons for not loving any of them unreservedly.
Such a nature is the most miserable of all, for it prompts those who possess it to the worst acts of egotism without securing to them the icy and unconscious serenity of true egotists. Thus it was that the young man was able to become Helen's lover without a scruple, and to tread upon friendship as tranquilly as upon the carpet in the room where they met; and yet Alfred's suffering had just moved him to the inmost fibre. Ah! the reason was that he did not dispute the sincerity of this suffering; he had touched it as though it were an object, and as he believed in it, he felt it.
At the same moment, and for the first time, he perceived the real scope of his conduct. If he had only suspected the depth of Chazel's love for Helen! If he had known with what ardent friendship this man had been attached to himself, Armand! But, people form ideas concerning a person, and proceed to no further verification. They say to themselves: "This man is nothing." They make no more account of his existence than that of a beast or a plant. And then they find themselves face to face with a heart that beats and that has been stricken, with a happiness that was living and that has been slain. What misconceptions lie at the root of our errors! And how many of the latter are merely the misunderstandings—but the irreparable misunderstandings—of others!
Armand de Querne pursued these thoughts the whole day, and at the end of them all, encountering him in a continuous fashion above all the rest, was the image of Helen, and again of Helen. For whom had he betrayed Alfred's confidence? For Helen. To whom had he so lightly sacrificed the memories of his childhood and his youth? To Helen. In whose interest had he just pledged that shameful word of honour? In Helen's. Now the young man had in his feelings towards his mistress reached that moment when the slightest contrariety is so exaggerated as to become almost unbearable; what, then, was to be said of such a humiliation? He had not deceived himself when, on the very eve of the first assignation, he had recognised that he could never love her.
He had at first passed through a sufficiently sweet period of intoxicated pleasure, during which he had abandoned himself to the charm of having a delightful mistress, as endearing as she was pretty, as submissive as she was impassioned. But even at that period he entertained no illusions regarding the nature of the feelings with which she inspired him or regarding their duration. As to the demonstrations of affection to which Helen surrendered herself, he looked upon them as a display of romanticism to be accounted for by long residence in the country among bad books and absurd dreams.
"She is a Madame Bovary," he said to himself, and with this simple phrase he had answered everything.
When once the malady of disbelief has assailed a tormented heart, every fresh detail serves as food for it. Helen's transports and fits of melancholy, her utterances, and her silences, had served for weapons against her. Did she abandon herself to her feelings with the ardour of a deeply affected soul? He thought badly of her; she was a libertine and nothing more. Did she shroud herself in melancholy reserve? He thought badly of her; she wanted to produce an effect, to assume an attitude. Did she question him respecting himself and his wife? What tyranny! Was she silent? What hypocrisy!
For all this, and by a seeming inconsistency such as characterises the facile kindliness of the indifferent when anxious to save themselves useless shocks, Armand had lent himself to the requisitions of Helen's passion. To evade petty contradictions, he had laid aside many of his habits. He declined dinner after dinner, deferred visit after visit, distanced his appearances at the club, in the Rue Royale, where formerly he used to show himself nearly every day. "You are never to be seen now." "I thought you were abroad." "You rascal, what good fortune are you hiding from us?" Such were the phrases with which he was greeted by nearly every one he met at the corner of a footpath, on the threshold of a restaurant, in the lobby of a theatre.
These phrases had at first made him smile. They now caused him a vague regret for his former mode of life. In proportion as habituation deadened his pleasure in the possession of Helen, did he surprise himself remembering with longing the insipid diversions of his freedom, which, as soon as they were renewed, he was again to look upon as hateful drudgery. All these different shades of feeling were beginning to have the effect of rendering his connection with Helen burdensome to him, and that long before the scene, the cruel recollection of which was persecuting him now. But the scene once passed through, how could he maintain his actual relations with his mistress?
No, a thousand times no. He could not do it. And first with respect to himself.
"Upon my word," he said to himself, "I will despise myself up to a certain point, but not beyond. So long as he had not spoken to me—"
He paused upon this thought, then went on aloud with an evil laugh:
"Ha! ha! so long as he had not spoken to me, it was exactly the same thing. Yes, but I did not feel it as I do now. I have had enough of all this lying. Pah! Pah!" and there was a physical bitterness in his mouth, almost a real nausea at the thought of deceiving Alfred again, after the step that the other had taken so loyally and so affectionately.
"And then," he reflected, "I cannot do it on her account. When jealousy has been roused, it is never completely lulled again. Alfred would understand it all in the end. He would follow his wife or have her followed. Then, behold a surprise, a scandal, and the unhappy Helen loses at a blow her position, her child, a part, doubtless, of her fortune, and all to be constrained to live with me who do not love her, and whom she does not love."
In order to give force to the plan of a final rupture which was already being sketched in his brain, he took pleasure in considering this last thought. No, Helen did not love him. She thought that she loved him, as she had probably thought she loved Varades and the rest; for there must have been others, in conformity with the axiom that a man is never a woman's first or second lover.
"If we break, there will be a tearful scene to be gone through, she will spend a few melancholy weeks, enabling her to say to her next lover, with eyes raised heavenwards, 'How I have suffered, love!' or else to her most intimate confidante, 'Oh! men! men!'"
There was a moment of base merriment; then his reflections began again.
"What strange animals women are! Here is a fellow who has a heart, frankness, and fidelity, as they call it; he can love—which is another of their expressions—and his wife must deceive him—for whom? For a cynic like me who am just the opposite. And if it had not been I, it would have been some one worse. It is humiliating to one's vanity, but refreshing to one's conscience—yes, it would have been some one else."
And a few minutes later:
"What fine reasoning, too, in order to justify myself! Suppose one applied it to assassination! If I do not kill you to-day you will die sooner or later in some other fashion. The truth is that adultery is a great pollution. Pah! Pah!"
He returned home, turning these melancholy conclusions over and over. When he was again in his drawing-room and in front of the easy-chair in which Alfred had sat that morning, he felt still more incapable of continuing to be Helen's lover—no, not two days, not a single day longer.