She had hurled forth these words in a panting voice, drawing closer to Armand as she went on in a convulsion of frenzy, and in the tone of her voice, in her looks, in the whole of her agitated person, there was that levelling power of truth against which doubt in vain tries to stand. The kind of frightful, dishonouring proof of her former purity resting upon the cynical avowal of her present infamy became irrefutable through the evident exaltation which possessed her and which did not suffer her to conceal anything in her thoughts. But what rendered this reasoning still more decisive to the man listening to the miserable confession with a blending of astonishment and terror, was the sudden crisis of emotion wrought in her after she had spoken. Passion, sated by this frantic utterance, suddenly gave way to despair. All at once she looked at Armand with eyes in which the flush of indignation was drowned in tears, and uttering a shriek she sank upon the floor.
There, stretched at length, she began to moan. It was a slow, continuous sob, the dull, uniform wail of a dying creature. It came up, up to Armand, and this supreme wail gathered into itself the echoes of all the wails that she had stifled, of all the sighs that had been checked on the margin of her heart. It was the throes of many days breathed forth in a last appeal. If on coming into contact with Alfred's distress, Armand had experienced an irresistible feeling of sorrowful humanity, how much the more and with how much greater power was he visited with this feeling now, on coming into contact with the distress of the woman lying thus on the ground? The frail and potent tie which had united him to this vanquished being, the unconquerable tie of mutual voluptuousness, suddenly bound him to her anew. He believed that he had forgotten her, and here, beneath the two-fold influence of unconscious jealousy and physical pity, he was again finding within himself feelings of which he had deemed himself no longer capable. A passionate impulse prompted him to fling himself upon his knees, and he strove to raise her as though she had been his mistress still.
"Helen," he said, "recover yourself. In pity to me do not weep in this way. Stand up."
She obeyed, and slowly turned towards him her swimming eyes and parted lips. An expression of unspeakable gratitude passed across her mournful countenance. He seated her in an arm-chair, placing himself at her feet to wipe away her tears. Then she was able to speak again.
"Ah!" she said, "all is over—over! Ah! never again—! You do not know, Armand, how I loved you, how I love you. Ah! why have I done what I did? You see, I was like a madwoman. I could do nothing, I could do nothing but love you. You were my whole life, my whole faith, all that to me was noble and good. And then, suddenly, it all failed me! I have suffered so greatly! I could always hear you saying those frightful words to me. It was like a knife turning every moment in my heart. I wanted to forget you, to forget myself, to destroy everything, unhappy woman! What have I done? Why did I not come to entreat you to take me back again, to believe in me? I should have found words to convince you. Now, all is over. Do not touch me; I loathe myself."
And she freed herself, and repulsed him. He perceived that she had just seen the other, her new lover. Then she went on passionately:
"No! tormentor! tormentor! 'Tis your fault. Yes, 'tis you who flung me there. Had you any right to treat me so? Answer. What wrong had I done you? When had I deceived you? Why did you doubt me? No, my love. 'Tis you who are so good, so kind, whom I love so much. Forgive me! Forgive me! Grief is killing me!"
Thus she lamented, revealing by the reciprocation of her alternately reviling and loving utterances the incoherence of the feelings whose tempest was shaking her. Then came relief from this frenzy, and she said:
"Let me weep a little. It eases me. Do not speak to me. Presently."
And he left her side. How powerless he felt in presence of this outbreak of despair. He began to pace backwards and forwards in the room, which was being invaded by the melancholy of the twilight; and Helen's sobbing had grown quite humble now, quite low, almost like that of a little girl. Instead of the frantic rebellion that there had been at first, there was a long sigh, ceaselessly broken and ceaselessly resumed, which completed the young man's perturbation. He no longer tried to comfort her, and he tried no more to contest the cruel evidence that had become fixed within him, never more to leave him. Pity for such agony, shivering horror at such irretrievable pollution, and the sight of the cruel injustice which he had committed, blended together to torture him. But what more than all beside overwhelmed him, and laid upon his heart a weight which he could feel would thenceforward be irremovable, was the feeling of his own terrible responsibility for the ruin of this woman. What! it was through knowing him and loving him that the unhappy woman had sunk so low! Helen's instinct had not deceived her; he could doubt no longer. He believed her, and in all respects. He believed that she had really loved him. He believed that before meeting him she had been pure. He believed that frenzy at an iniquitous desertion had led her so far astray as to throw her into the arms of another, and that he, Armand, was the cause, the sole cause of it all. He continued to walk up and down, and every time that he turned to retrace his steps he could see between the dismally lighted windows that sunken form, that face standing out so pale against the background of shadow! What had become of his indifference before Helen's entrance? And his power of negation, what had he done with it? People do not dispute with a death-rattle, and he had been present at the death of a soul. It was too true that she asked for nothing and wished for nothing, unless that he should see her heart laid bare; he had seen it, he saw it still and the blood that flowed from the wound inflicted by himself. How long did they continue thus without speaking, he still walking, and she still weeping? In the end he went up to her, took her hand with a shudder at feeling this soft, damp, cold hand, raised it to his lips, and let fall upon it the first tears that he had shed for years. In the depths of the abyss of despair in which she was lying, she could still find pity for her tormentor's tears. "Do not weep," she said to him, and drawing him to her, she passionately covered his face with kisses. He could feel burning lips traverse his eyes, his brow, his mouth. Then she disengaged herself from him. She rose. Once again had she just seen the other.
"Ah," she exclaimed, in anguish, "I cannot even comfort you now. Good-bye, good-bye," she repeated, "and this time it is good-bye for ever."
She passed her hands over the young man's hair, and over his face, as though to convince herself of the real existence of the countenance she had loved so dearly, and then she broke away, hastening towards the door.
"Where are you going?" he asked her.
"I am flying from you," she said wildly, and already she was out of the room.
The outer door had closed after her and he had not found energy enough to follow her. He remained standing on the spot where she had left him, as though he had been smitten with a stroke of paralysis. A terrible dread suddenly sent an icy shiver through his whole body. What if Helen in the frenzy of her despair had fled from his house in order to kill herself? For a moment he had before his eyes a horrible hallucination—the shadow of a quay, the great, dim, moving sheet of river, and a woman's body rolled along in the icy water. In his turn he rushed away. He descended the staircase four steps at a time. On the footpath there was a woman going in the direction of the Champs Élysées. He hurried after her. It was not she. He reached the Avenue, which was filled with a swarm of passengers and vehicles. How could he find her in such a crowd? How guess in what direction the unhappy woman had fled. A drizzling rain was falling. He hailed several cabs in vain, and not until he had reached the crossways could he stop one. He gave the driver the address in the Rue de La Rochefoucauld, and on the way he, too, knew an anguish driven to the point of madness. But he was already at the foot of the street and in front of the little house. It was with a trembling of his entire heart that he drew the bell at the door, and asked the servant whether Madame Chazel had come in. On hearing the man's affirmative reply he nearly fell to the ground in the excess of his emotion. And forthwith—for the play of the passions constantly causes us to conflict with these countless trifles of existence—he felt like a fool in presence of the man, who stood aside to let him pass. How could he endure Helen's presence at that moment, or, more than all, Alfred's? He stammered out a sentence alleging that he had forgotten a piece of business, and saying that he would return in the evening. He threw himself again into his cab.
"The thought of her son has saved her!" he said to himself. "I am at least not a murderer!"
A few days after this scene, Armand sent Chazel a letter dated from London in which he made his excuses for not shaking hands with his friends before his final departure. To set foot again in the little house in the Rue de La Rochefoucauld, to see again the two beings whose lives he had broken, but who both had nevertheless only words of trust or forgiveness for him, to be present once more at those moral throes whose every sigh echoed in intolerable fashion to the very depths of his soul—this effort had been beyond his actual energy. He had said to himself when thinking on the one hand of Alfred's probable melancholy, and on the other, of Helen and of the life that she would lead amid such a bankruptcy of all modesty and feeling:
"It is horrible, but I cannot help it. I must forget it."
And to put petty facts, in accordance with one of his favourite maxims, between himself and his grief, he had hastened his journey to England. During the years of his cruelly idle and empty life, he had done his best to beguile weariness by cosmopolitan wanderings. He had thus formed three or four social centres for himself through Europe. In London, especially, he had a life ready made, rooms in Bolton Street, off Piccadilly, two clubs in which to find hospitality, and twenty houses in which to be received as a friend. But this year, when settled as usual in the three furnished apartments reserved for him, he felt incapable of entering immediately upon the whirl of society. "I will leave my cards in a few days," he said to himself.
The few days passed by, and he had the same repugnance to seeing his acquaintances again. He allowed a week to glide away in this manner, two weeks, three, and he continued to experience an unconquerable aversion to all conversation and all friendly meeting, to all things and all persons. He went so far as to walk only in the evening, the more surely to evade the human face. If he went out in daylight, it was to take one of those two-wheeled cabs, the driver of which is perched high up behind, and the horse in which trots so quickly.
Without an object, he had himself driven at random through the interminable streets of the huge city. Small, dark houses succeeded to small, dark houses, squares with railings and miserable trees, open spaces with discoloured statues, and boundless parks with herbage browsed by flocks, opened up at distant intervals. Over the monstrous ant-hill extended the vault of a sooty sky. Sometimes the said sky was wholly drowned in a yellow fog; at other times the mist broke in pelting rain, or else there was a dim, cold azure in which coal-dust seemed to be floating. A population was hurrying along these streets, but Armand did not recognise a single face, and he would go on thus for whole hours, alone with his thought as when he awoke, and dressed, and ate—with that thought which was always present and was always similar to itself.
And what was it that was shown him by this fixed and torturing thought? Unceasingly, unceasingly Helen, and the terrible confession during their last interview showed itself in all its details, and he could see the act which she had avowed in terms so pitilessly precise and clear. She was evoked before him in the arms of De Varades; for he told himself that after the first crisis of despair she must have relapsed again, and the vision inflicted upon him a feeling which he again compared to a weight upon his heart, crushing it with sadness.
This dull weight had descended upon it on the day when she had lamented so tragically in the drawing-room in the Rue Lincoln. And, as on that occasion, he endured an unbearable oppression in knowing himself to be the cause of this woman's misery. After the present intrigue with De Varades, doubtless she would have others. Is there ever a check on that slippery incline which leads from the second lover to the tenth? When the habit and power of self-respect, that unique principle of all dignity, has been lost, what dike can be opposed to the invading flood of temptation and curiosity? Helen was beautiful and would be courted. Her successive falls occurred by anticipation now beneath his eyes, he could do nothing to prevent them, and it was he, as she had exclaimed through her tears, it was he who had ruined her.
In presence of the image of this woman's life, he felt as though set over against a being for whom he had poured out poison with his own hands. The mortal discomposure of the face, the cold sweat, the terrible convulsions, how could these be prevented when the fatal drug was flowing in her blood? The venom of adultery with which he had infected this creature would accomplish its work of destruction. What excuse had he for having done this? None, seeing that he had taken her without loving her. Yes, if only he had loved her, if he had repaid her a little happiness in exchange for the gift of her person!
But to the inevitable humiliation of guilt he had united another ground of humiliation, namely, the most cruel disillusion. Of a child rich in hopes, and led astray by a generous seeking after the most elevated feelings, what had he made? One undeceived and in quest of forgetfulness. What would she be in a year, and then in another year, and in yet another? He repeated the celebrated phrase: "All the perfumes of Arabia will not sweeten this little hand." And he bent beneath the weight of remorse, a weight so heavy, ah! so cruelly heavy, that he was rendered incapable of any experience save that overwhelming, continuous crushing beneath the thought of the act committed.
"What an absurd machine man is," he thought, "and what contemptible weakness this distress! To justify such remorse I should of necessity be guilty, that is so say, responsible and free. Is not freedom an empty word, as also in consequence good and evil, virtue and vice?"
He had thought much on these questions in his youth, and had allowed as accurate the chief modern arguments against the freedom of the will. He studied himself that, by applying them to his own case, he might destroy the moral misery that affected him.
"What am I?" he went on; "the product of a certain heredity placed in a certain environment. The circumstances once given, I could not but feel as I felt, think as I thought, desire as I desired."
And he decomposed his own personality into its elements, as he had done only too often in his periods of "Hamletism," as he called his analytic crises of inward paralysis. He recognised the first beginning of his egotism in the absence of family life; he took cognisance of the fact that college life had too early polluted his imagination, and the sight of the slaughter in the civil war too early awaked his misanthropy. He could see himself losing his religious faith by precocious reading, becoming uninterested in all ambition for lack of a cause in which he could believe, and because he was rich enough to live without a profession. Then he watched the long, useless, and fatal series of his love experiences unfold itself down to the hour when he had met Madame Chazel.
"How could I have judged of her otherwise than I did?" he went on. "She in a measure threw herself at my head. Could I understand that this was the madness of a romantic, irrational, but sincere nature? I thought she was a woman like the rest. I thought so, and it was inevitable that I should think so."
He thrust the words expressive of necessity—"it was inevitable"—into his heart, like a lever wherewith he might raise the weight of his remorse, but the weight continued there still. His striving was in vain; something within him that was stronger than himself constrained him to consider himself the author of this woman's ruin.
Then he exerted himself to devise some other process of alleviation. He reverted in imagination to all the halting-places in their mutual intrigue, and he passed along this road of perdition seeking for the crossways, the moments when he might have entered and caused her to enter upon a different route. Why during the first few weeks of the Chazels' stay in Paris had he, when walking with Helen, taken pains to assume a sentimental attitude towards her? That he might appeal to her thoughts and influence them to curiosity. Could he have helped it? "No," he replied, angrily; "seduction is a part of my nature, as the chase is of the nature of a greyhound."
A moment had come when he had perceived that Helen was beginning to love him. Could he then have withdrawn himself from her life? Yes, if he had believed himself to be her first love. But does a man command himself to believe this or that, to think in one way or another? What would he not now have given to judge of Helen as he formerly did, and this was impossible just as it had been impossible that he should judge of her during that period as he did now!
On the night before their first secret interview, he could again see himself hesitating and on the point of writing her a truthful letter in order to break with her before the irreparable hour had come. But could he have prevented such or such an image from beleaguering his thought and restraining his pen?
During the few months of their union he had not loved her, and his lack of feeling had martyred her! But is emotion to be commanded, and tenderness? If he had broken brutally with her, this was a further effect of the potency of ideas over the human will. The perception within him of his friend's sorrow had been stronger than that of his mistress's. He grasped as through a magnifying glass the internal mechanism of which his actions had been the visible sign, the final result; he buried himself in this minute examination of his past.
It was all in vain. The weight of his remorse was still there. He succeeded in convincing his intellect, and the conviction did not relieve his heart. His conscience, as the vulgar phrase has it, was tormenting him. But what is conscience other than an illusion? A stone that has been thrown, and that feels itself rolling without even knowing that a hand has thrown it, might also believe itself to be the cause of its own motion. Its conscience might reproach it for the crushing of the grass-blades in its path. Remorse might start up in it.
"If I had a spectre before my eyes in consequence of an hallucination," Armand concluded, "should I place credence in apparitions? I should tell myself that I saw a spectre, an empty form, that the condition of my bodily organs inflicted the obsession upon me, and that would be all. Let me suffer from my spectre if it must be so, but let me not believe in it."
Granted! Good, evil, remorse, conscience, freedom—all so many unreal apparitions, so many bodiless shadows! But there was indisputable reality in the ruin of a soul, and in the fact that a dreadful destiny had made him the instrument of its ruin. A ruined soul? There are then a life and a death of souls, something that fosters them and something that destroys them, after the manner of spiritual damnation and salvation. Then he thought of Helen's soul before the final disaster, all the episodes of their common past recurred simultaneously to him, and he interpreted and understood them.
Now that he knew the truth concerning her, and the extent to which he had misjudged her, the pettiest facts in that past were possessed of unlooked-for significance. The mute moments of his sad sweetheart, her melancholy, her effusiveness, showed to him in turn, and each memory revealed to him at once his own ingratitude and the strength of the feeling that he had inspired. How living was then that woman's soul! How noble even in guilt! What richness in its sensibility! What fulness in its emotions! What depth in its sorrow, and what magnificence in its striving after an inaccessible happiness! And now, in the same soul, what ineffaceable pollution!
His reflections turned upon Alfred, and he recalled his last conversation with the man he had so unworthily deceived. He too possessed a living soul whence gushed, as from kindly springs, tenderness and loyalty, all the forces of belief and love. Then Armand directed his thought to himself: "Ah! It is I," he said, "I who have the dead soul!"
He retraced the course of his youth. He saw himself young and incapable of devoting his activity to an ideal faith, a libertine incapable of steadying his heart upon a passion—powerless for self-surrender, belief, love! He went over the fatal list which had been drawn up certainly no less by his vanity as a seducer than by his curiosity as a debauchee. He sought again the names and countenances of the women who had given themselves to him, from those who had been his in rooms of infamy, where the mirrors of alcove and ceiling multiply the whiteness of naked charms, to those whom he had possessed in modesty and who required that endearments should be shrouded in the shadow of lowered curtains. What had he made of the first and of the second, of the impassioned and of the venal, of the romantic and of the depraved, of little Aline and of Juliette, of Madame de Rugle and of Helen? Instruments of sensation and nothing more. Could he remember a single one to whom he had been good and helpful, and who was the better for having known him? The prostitutes he had caused to commit an act of prostitution among a thousand others. The adulteresses had lied once more for him. His soul had not only been dead; it had spread around it the infection of its own essential death. With his keen intellect, his rare imagination, and all the implements of superiority that fortune had placed in his hands, what work had he been accomplishing since his youth? And all was to end in the moral assassination of a woman who had believed in him!
Then the weight increased in heaviness and he strove anew.
"Life and death of the soul! Words! Words! A trifling cerebral alteration and the soul is changed. The microscope would reveal the slight disposition of cells which has it that I have never loved. But why," he added "does this soul live by means of certain ideas and die through others? Why? I do not know, and there are many other things that I do not know. I talk of the brain. What is the brain? It is matter. And what is matter? No one knows, no one understands. What is the use of asking: Why this or why that? There is but one question: Why anything? And the only thing we really know is that we shall never be able to answer that question."
He perceived the gulf of mystery, the abyss of the unknowable which science shows to be at the basis of all thought and of all existence. Beneath the problem of his own particular destiny, he touched upon the problem of all destiny, and his moral pain was so intense that he felt a temptation to interpret, in a consolatory sense, the mystery wherein he felt drowned. Why should not the key to this enigma of life, undecipherable by reason according to reason's own avowal, be one of salvation, a key that should redeem the universal distress here below, that should restore life to dead souls such as his own soul, and deep peace to tortured consciences such as his own conscience? Why should there not be a heart like to our own hearts and capable of pitying us at the centre of that nature which has nevertheless produced us, us with our bitter or tender manner of feeling, with our appetite for the ideal and our infirmities, with our greatness and our depravity?
"But then," he reflected, "God would exist. I might throw myself upon my knees now in this hour of suffering, and say, 'Our Father, which art in heaven.' Our Father!"
When the young man had reached this stage in his reasonings, tears rose to his eyes. He who had known neither father nor mother was caused unspeakable emotion by this single phrase of the sublime prayer.
Then he immediately grew steady again. Thoughts came to him that were stronger than such mystic effusion. He was disputing with his intellect against his heart, and his intellect was always victorious. The objections to a belief in God, drawn from the existence of evil, took shape before him. How reconcile a Father's goodness with that law of reversion which wills it that the sins of some shall fall ceaselessly upon others? Of Helen and himself, which was guilty? Himself. Which of the two had committed a crime in love? Himself, by seducing this woman without loving her, solely to satisfy a whim of pride, weariness, and sensuality. Who was punished? Helen. Of the latter and Alfred, who was guilty? Helen. Who suffered? Alfred. Thus the sin of each, if there be sin, bears its poisonous fruit in the soul of another, and the same solidarity governs all the relations of men among themselves. The sons atone for the fathers, the just for the wicked, the innocent for the guilty! Ah! how is it possible, in presence of this uninterrupted transmission of misery, to believe in the existence of a principle of justice and goodness in that obscurity beyond the day?
"No," said Armand to himself, "just as errors are produced by the combined necessities of circumstances and temperaments, so are the consequences of these acts distributed at random—at least on earth."
The mystic effusion then returned: "On earth? Can there be then another world whereof this is but the symbol or the preparation? But how can any link subsist between this and that? How can any help come in hours of distress? Ah! if He were a heavenly Father, would not all suffering be in his sight a prayer?"
Through the tumult of all these contradictory thoughts, the unhappy man perceived that grand, unique problem of human life which religion alone can solve, that of knowing whether beyond our limited days, our brief sensations, our fleeting actions, there be something which does not pass away, and which can satisfy our hunger and thirst for the infinite. Armand was perhaps to become religious again some day; at the present moment he was not so, and he answered himself:
"If there be nothing, why this terrible remorse? If there be something, why am I unable either to conceive it with my intellect or to feel it with my heart? How can I put an end to this unbearable anguish? How raise the weight that is stifling me?"
The principal incidents during these gloomy days were some letters from Alfred, filled with affection and with complaints about his wife's health, the sadness of his home, his anxieties for the future. Helen therefore continued to be unhappy.
"Ah!" thought Armand, "it is possible that the words 'good' and 'evil,' 'soul' and 'God,' have no kind of meaning. For thousands of years philosophers have been disputing inconclusively about them, and religions have been succeeding to one another and crumbling away. I have measured the impotence of reason and I have not faith. But there is need neither of reason nor of faith to know whether human misery exists, and to know that we ought to do everything to avoid being the cause of this misery."
We ought! As though we were free! But free or not, let us be sensible of this misery and pity it! When the young man entered upon the new path of pity, he experienced, not absolute relief from his remorse, but a sort of despairing tenderness which at last moistened his heart. He pictured Helen to himself when quite a little girl in a past such as her confidences had revealed to him, and he pitied her for her sad childhood and her oppressed youth. He pitied her for her marriage and for the moral divorce which had separated her from Alfred. He pitied her for having known himself, Armand, for the words that he had uttered to her and which she had believed, for the kisses which he had asked of her and which she had given him. But especially for that second fall, for that frenzy which had thrown her into the arms of Varades did he passionately pity her, and for all the errors into which this first error would draw her. He pitied her for her birth, for her existence, for her subjection to an unconquerable fate!
He was now more sensible of her life than he had been in the days when she had been his, lost in emotion on his breast. By a strange kind of soul-transposition he suffered from the sorrows of a mistress whose joys he had been unable to share. He abode in thought within that sick heart, and the feeling of pity became so strong and full that it overflowed from him upon all life.
When in the evening he walked along the streets and reached the sinister corners of the Haymarket and Regent Street, the sight of the girls of different nationalities wandering there in all weathers moved him to the bottom of his soul. They walked in their dark toilets and accosted the passers-by in every idiom. There were tall, heavy Germans, delicate Frenchwomen, and Englishwomen recognisable by faces that had often retained an expression of purity. The majority were old, with fierce gleaming in their gaze. What lamentable adventures—criminal ones, perhaps—had cast these foreigners, far from their native lands and beneath an ever-gloomy sky, upon the pavement of these streets, pitilessly traversed by the busy work of commerce? And the young, with profiles as of angels—for there were some such—how melancholy to see them pushing open the bar-doors, and drinking large glasses of brandy at a draught! They came out with a little colour on their cheeks and resumed their pilgrimage of infamy, warmed by the draught of alcohol against the rude climate, the sudden showers, the penetrating fog.
Armand watched them going and coming, accosting this man, abusing that, and talking among themselves. There was a whole populace of these lost ones passing through the streets. Yes, lost ones, for nothing can save them any more than the prostitutes of luxury who go in pursuit of men with diamonds and horses, or the adulteresses, those victims of the search for new sensations. Nothing can save them, for there is nothing that can save! Sometimes, however, the young man chanced to pass in front of temples and to remember that thousands of beings believe in a Saviour.
"But if I do not believe in Him," he asked himself, "is it my fault? A true Saviour would be one who saved even the incredulous, even the renegades, even the rebellious, even those who do not repent, seeing that they are most to be pitied! No, there is no redemption, and Christ has died in vain!"
Then he perceived life as the work of blind and destructive necessity, of an evil force impelling creatures to ruin one another. Prostitution below, adultery above, such are the products of the noblest of human feelings—love. Civilisation appeared to him as a huge orgie where the dishes are more numerous, the wines more heating, the guests a larger crowd; but on what mystic plate will the bread of ransom be found by those hungering for forgiveness? Meanwhile the orgie hums and roars, the women offer the fruit of their red lips, a colossal hymn of mirth encompasses the intoxication, every moment one of those present rolls beneath the table, thunder-smitten by death who takes his victims at random; he is so quickly replaced by another that his disappearance is not even noticed, and joy plays on every brow and laughs in every eye. Joy? Yes, provided that no thought be given to one's own distress, and further that one's own misery be endured with courage; but the misery of another—when can we find courage to endure that when we are ourselves its cause? And suddenly his visions would fade away, and his theories and dreamings, to give place to the sole image of Helen in agony, or else of Helen depraved, and of these two images Armand could not have told which tortured his thought the most.
"Can I be in love with her?" he asked himself one morning as he was rising, "and is what I am taking for remorse simply love?"
He found it impossible to answer this question. When a man loves, he conceives happiness as coming from the woman he loves, and how could he imagine a single minute of happiness as coming from Helen now? He might return to Paris, try to renew relations with her, carry her off, take her to a land where everything should be strange to them, and where they might forget! He felt that the worst follies committed for her would remove nothing of his present anguish. Therefore he did not love her.
But then, why this cruel throbbing of the heart at the mere thought of the act to which despair had led her? Why this continual anxiety which caused him at the sight of Chazel's letters to pause with trembling hand before opening them, as though he were about to read some fresh intrigue that had been at last discovered by the unhappy man? Why was he unable to take a book, or sit down to table, or go out, or come in, without having the spectre of this woman beside him. Yet he had not killed her, he had not shed her blood with his hands. Why this unwearied recurrence to their mutual relations with the everlasting reflection as a despairing background: "If I had known?" If he had known the worth of what she gave him when she was giving it to him, if he had felt as he was feeling now when she used to come and rest so tenderly, so sincerely, upon his heart, if he had had that in his heart towards her which was in it now, then—then he would have loved her—he would have loved her!
That impotence to arrive at complete emotion, the martyrdom of egotism to which he had been a victim, his lack of feeling, his barren rancour, his vexation of spirit in solitude and distress, all his moral miseries would have been brought to an end if he had had a simpler heart, if he had understood, if he had believed! He believed in her now, and it was too late. He understood her when she had ceased to be pure. He loved her when she had endured pollution from the endearments of another. He was discovering that he had passed by the side of happiness, now that the enchanted palace which he had traversed without seeing it was closed to him for ever. He was beginning to cherish her, like one dead to whom he could never speak more. But one that is dead remains sheltered from pollutions, and Helen? "All the perfumes of Arabia," he repeated, rubbing his hand like the blood-stained queen. The weight was again on his heart. How could he ever remove it?
But what if this remorse were merely a mirage fostered by absence? When children are afraid of a dim form at night, what remedy does their father adopt? He leads them to the object of their terror, and by touching it cures their panic. What if he, too, tried this remedy? What if he saw Helen again, and with his own eyes measured the evil that he had wrought her? "It is the only step that is left to try," he said to himself one day, and he abruptly resolved to return to Paris. He had spent more than six weeks in preying thus upon his heart.
What a charming and coquettish summer-like Paris Armand passed through in going from the Rue Lincoln to the Rue de La Rochefoucauld on the day after his return! It was two o'clock; a slight breeze was quivering among the green leaves of the trees in the Champs Élysées, and the carriages were driving gaily along. There was a light such as makes all women pretty, but he had darkness within.
His memories rose from the pavement to form his melancholy escort, and especially those of that cold winter night when he had passed on foot through the same avenue on the eve of their first secret meeting. An entire year had not passed away since then. How swift is time, and how it carries away chances of happiness with it! Certainly, he had been mournful even to death on that night, but not with the same sadness as to-day, and yet he recognised that to-day's sadness was of higher worth than the other. He would no longer act as he had done. Had, then, his remorse purified while torturing him? Is there, then, a source of ennoblement in sorrow? But of what use is this nobleness if it only serves to show what a criminal use we have made of our powers?
He passed in front of the Marché de la Madeleine, and inhaled on the warm wind the aroma of the bouquets and plants. He recollected that the previous winter he used to bring violets to his mistress. On each occasion she used to place one of these violets between the leaves of some favourite book. There was one that was quite filled with these love relics, one that she had lent one day with these words written in her own handwriting on the first page: "Take care of my little flowers." It was a childlike and charming token of the tender carefulness which she bestowed upon the smallest detail of their mutual romance! And what had he made of this passionate tenderness with which he had inspired her but a means of perdition?
At last he was in front of the door of the little house. He rang, and had scarcely entered the narrow courtyard when a joyful voice cried: "Monsieur de Querne! Monsieur de Querne!" and little Henry Chazel, who was making ready to go out with his nurse, ran up to him to welcome him. The child's reception increased still more the melancholy of his return. Armand was pained by encountering the brightness of affection in the eyes of the son of the woman whom he had tortured and the man whom he had betrayed.
"Is your father at home?" he asked.
"He's gone out," replied Henry; "but mamma's at home. She has been very ill while you were away."
"And now?"
"She is better," said the little boy.
His nurse was already leading him away, and De Querne passed into the narrow entrance-hall, and climbed the red-carpeted wooden staircase that led to Helen's drawing-room. The aspect of things had not altered—those things which had seen him so cheerfully plan and commit the crime in love for which he had during the past two months been going through a terrible expiation! How light had been his foot in clearing the low steps of this staircase in the house of a friend of his childhood, when on his way to outrage that friend! Whither without our knowledge do our footsteps lead us?
He was shown into the drawing-room where, like a robber, he had given his mistress so many kisses as soon as the master of the house was gone. Why had these actions left him indifferent at the time, and why did the sick place of his sensibility bleed so cruelly for them to-day? The servant had uttered his name when opening the door. Helen, who was seated near the window, and working, raised her head, laying her work upon her knees. He saw her face, which was still more worn than on the day of their last interview, and her features became discomposed as though she were going to be ill. Suddenly he perceived the ravages that grief had wrought: the eyes were hollow, the lips drawn, the chin wasted, and—a detail which touched him more than anything else—her gray dress, a dress which he had known the previous summer, lay on the shoulders in folds that witnessed to the decline of the whole of her poor body.
She did not say a word to him, and he, too, remained for a moment without speaking. Mechanically he sought with his eyes for the low arm-chair which he used formerly to wheel beside her, in order to talk the better with her. This arm-chair had disappeared, as well as the couch which formerly had stood crosswise at the corner of the fireplace. They had spent so many intimate evenings together, seated, she on the couch and he in the easy-chair! It was no doubt for the purpose of forgetting those scenes of tenderness that the deserted woman had banished these pieces of furniture from her home in this room. If he had known the true reason of the change!
He seated himself on a chair beside her, and taking her hand said to her:
"I have come to ask you to forgive me."
She withdrew that little hand whose almost convulsive trembling he had felt. She looked at him with eyes of singular depth. The dark point of the pupil dilated strangely. Then in a low, almost stifled voice she replied:
"It is not for me to forgive you. If you have made me unhappy, it was never your fault. Ah!" she went on, "I am greatly changed. I have been ill, very ill, but I wished for my son's sake, and for yours also, that you might not have that upon your conscience. I have thought so much of you, during so many feverish nights! No, it was not your fault if you were unable to believe me. Heavens! I have greatly pitied you!"
He listened with infinite gratitude to these words of charity coming from lips from which his injustice had wrung so many sobs. For a moment this forgiveness coming to him from his victim melted to tenderness the weight of remorse, the alleviation of which he had so long sought in vain, and he said to her in tones of deep emotion:
"What suffering I have caused you!"
"Do not reproach yourself for it," she said, with that angelic mildness which caused in him so strange a feeling at once of sadness and of consolation—of sadness, for this mildness betokened so great a shattering, of consolation, for the balm of this pity penetrated to the most secret recesses of his wounded heart—"Yes," she went on, shaking her head, "it is this suffering that has saved me, and it is through it that I have judged my life. When we parted in the way you know, I returned here nearly mad, I had to take to my bed for many days, and unceasingly I found the eyes of the man I had deceived fixed upon me with devotion and sadness! By what I suffered, I understood the suffering that I had caused and the evil that I had spread around one. The shame into which I had fallen appeared to me, and in the presence of death I inwardly vowed to make every endeavour to become once more a virtuous woman."
She paused; he saw clearly that she wished to speak to him of the other, to tell him that man had not been received at her house again; but was not her silence after the last sentence sufficiently eloquent?
"And then," she resumed, "that was again for your sake. To cause you that remorse for having ruined me—ah! the distraction caused by injustice could alone have impelled me to such unworthy revenge. But I had seen you weep. I thought to myself: He will return to me some day if he is suffering, and if he be not suffering, why cause him to suffer? But no, he will return to me, and I will tell him to live in peace. There is now nothing in my life but my duty towards my son and his father, and you must know that I found strength for this resolve only in the remnant of my affection for you. But I have perhaps the right to ask you for a promise in exchange for what I have given you."
She added in a deep tone:
"In memory of me, for we must see each other no more, say that you will never trample upon a heart, that you will respect feeling wherever you may find it."
He was silent. These last words, in revealing to him the transformation wrought in this soul by its martyrdom, reassured him concerning the terrible anxiety of those cruel weeks in London. After perceiving all the ruin that may be multiplied by egotistical and mistrustful injustice, he felt the supreme beneficence of pity. It was through having pity for her lover's remorse, pity for her husband's love, pity for her son's future, that Helen had been arrested in the fatal path. It was from pity that she was blotting out all their sad and gloomy past. It was further from pity for her husband and for her son that she might perhaps find means to live a life of reparation if only he, Armand, pitied and assisted her.
Thus, the principle of salvation which he had failed to obtain from impotent reason, and which the dogmas of faith had not given him, he now met with in that virtue of charity which foregoes all demonstrations and all revelations—though is it not itself the abiding and supreme revelation? And he felt that something had sprung up within him through which he might always find reasons for living and acting—the religion of human suffering.