CHAPTER VII

It was after lunching with one of Madame de Sauve's friends, and tasting the delicious pleasure of seeing his mistress come in with the coffee, that Hubert Liauran betook himself to the Quai d'Orléans, where a line from the General had asked him to be at about three o'clock. The young man had fancied, on receiving his godfather's note, that it had to do with the arrears of his debt. He knew that the Count was fastidious, and he had allowed two months to pass away without clearing off the promised amount. The conversation accordingly began with some words of excuse, which he stammered out immediately on entering the apartment on the ground floor.

He had not revisited it since the eve of his departure for Folkestone, and he experienced in thought all his former sensations on finding the aspect of the room exactly such as he had left it. The notes on the reorganisation of the army still covered the table; the bust of Marshal Bugeaud adorned the mantel-piece; and the General, attired in a pelisse-shaped dressing-jacket, was methodically smoking his briarwood pipe. To the first words uttered by his godson he merely replied:

"That is not the question, my dear fellow," in a voice that was at once grave and sad.

By the mere intonation Hubert understood too well that a scene was preparing of capital importance to himself. If it is puerile to believe in presentiments in the sense in which the crowd take the term, no creature gifted with refinement can deny that the slightest of details are sufficient to invoke an accurate perception of approaching danger. The General was silent, and Hubert could see the name of Madame de Sauve in his eyes and on his lips, although it had never been uttered between his godfather and himself. He waited, therefore, for the resumption of the conversation with that passionate beating of the heart which makes impatience an almost intolerable torture to highly-strung natures.

Scilly, whose whole sentimental experience since his youth was summed up in a single deception in love, now felt himself seized with great pity for the blow that he was about to inflict upon a youth so dear to himself, and the phrases which he had been putting together during the whole of that morning appeared to him to be devoid of common sense. Nevertheless, it was necessary to speak. At times of supreme uncertainty it is the characteristic impressed upon us by our callings in life which usually manifests itself and guides our action. Scilly was a soldier, brave and exact. He was bound to go, and he did go, straight to the point.

"My boy," he said, with a certain solemnity, "you must first know that I am acquainted with your life. You are the lover of a married woman, who is called Madame de Sauve. Do not deny it. Honour forbids you to tell me the truth. But the essential point is to take immediate precautions."

"Why do you speak to me of this," replied the young man, rising and taking up his hat, "when you acknowledge that honour commands me not even to listen to you? Look here, godfather, if you have brought me here to broach this subject, let us have no more of it. I prefer to bid you good-bye before quarrelling with you."

"But it was not to question you nor to lecture you that I asked for this interview," replied the Count, taking the hand which Hubert had stiffly held out to him. "It was to tell you a very grave fact, and one of which you must, yes, must be informed. Madame de Sauve has another lover, Hubert, who is not yourself."

"Godfather," said the young man, disengaging his fingers from those of the old General, and growing pale with sudden anger, "I do not know why you wish me to cease to respect you. It is infamous to say of a woman what you have just said of her."

"If you were not concerned," replied the Count, rising, and the sad gravity of his countenance contrasted strangely with the wild looks of his godson, "you know very well that I would not speak to you of Madame de Sauve or of any other woman. But I love you as I should love a son of my own, and I tell you what I would tell him. You have misplaced your love; the woman has another lover!"

"Who? When? Where? What are your proofs?" replied Hubert, exasperated beyond all bounds by the insistence and coolness of the General; "tell me, tell me----"

"When?--this summer. Who?--a Monsieur de La Croix-Firmin. Where?--at Trouville. But it is the talk of all the drawing-rooms," continued Scilly; and, without naming George, he related the indisputable details which the latter had confided to Madame Liauran, from the statement of the eye-witness to the indiscreet utterances of La Croix-Firmin.

The young man listened without interruption, but to one who knew him the expression of his face was terrible. Anger that was blended of grief and indignation made him grow pale to the lips.

"And who told you this story?" he asked.

"How does that concern you?" said the General, who understood that to indicate the real author of the whole statement to Hubert just at first would be to expose George to a scene which might have a tragical issue. "Yes, how does that concern you since you are not Madame de Sauve's lover?"

"I am her friend," rejoined Hubert; "and I have the right to protect her, as I would protect you, against odious calumnies. Moreover," he added, looking fixedly at his godfather, "if you refuse to answer my question, I give you my word of honour that within two days I will find this Monsieur de La Croix-Firmin who indulges in these knavish calumnies, and I will have something to say to him without any woman's name being mentioned."

The General, seeing Hubert's state of overexcitement, and not knowing what words to use against a frenzy which he had not foreseen,--for it was based upon the most absolute incredulity,--said to himself that Madame Liauran alone possessed the power to calm her son.

"I have told you what I had to tell you," he returned, in a melancholy tone; "if you want to know more, ask your mother."

"My mother?" said the young man violently, "I might have suspected as much. Well! I will go to her."

And half-an-hour later he entered the little drawing-room in the Rue Vaneau, where Madame Liauran was at that moment alone. She was waiting, in fact, for her son, but with mortal anguish. She knew that it was the time for his explanation with Scilly, and the issue of it now frightened her. The sight of Hubert's physiognomy increased her fears. He was livid, with bistre rings beneath his eyes, and Marie Alice immediately felt the counter-shock of this visible emotion.

"I have come from my godfather's, mother," the young man began, "and he has said things to me that I shall not forgive him as long as I live. What pained me still more was that he pretended to have from yourself the calumnies which he repeated to me concerning one whom you may not like--but I do not recognise your right to brand her to me, to whom she has always been perfect--"

"Do not speak to me in that tone, Hubert," said Madame Liauran, "you hurt me so. It is just as though you were burying a knife in me here." She pointed to her bosom.

Ah! it was not only Hubert's tone, his short, hard tone, that was torturing her; it was above all, and once again, the evidence of the feeling that bound him to Madame de Sauve.

"Of us two," she thought, "he would choose her." The immediate result of her grief was to revive her hatred for the woman who was its cause, and in her impulse of aversion she found strength to continue the conversation.

"You have lost the feelings of our home, my child," she said, in a calmer voice; "you do not understand what tenderness binds us to yourself, and what duties it imposes upon us."

"Strange duties, if they consist in echoing degrading reports about one whose only offence is that she has inspired me with a deep affection."

"No," said Madame Liauran, who was growing excited in her turn; "it is not a question of resuming a discussion which has already set us face to face as though for a duel," and the glances of mother and son crossed at that moment like two sword-blades. "It is a question of this--that you love a creature who is unworthy of you, and that I, your mother, have had you told so and tell you so again."

"And I, your son, reply to you--," and he had the word LIE on his lips; then, as though frightened at what he had been going to say--"that you are mistaken, mother. I ask your pardon for speaking to you in this strain," he added, taking her hand and kissing it; "I am not master of myself."

"Listen, my child," said Marie Alice, from whose eyes the unlooked-for kindness of this gesture caused the tears to flow; "I cannot go into all those sad details with you." Here she touched his hair just as in the days when he was a little child. "Go to your cousin George. He will repeat to you all that he has told us. For it was he who, in his anxiety, thought it his duty to warn us. But remember what your mother tells you now. I believe in the double sight of the heart. I should not have hated this woman as I have hated her from the very first, if she had not been bound to prove fatal to you. Now, good-bye, my child. Kiss me," she added, in broken tones. Did she understand that from that hour her son's kisses would never be to her what they had formerly been?

Hubert dashed from the room, leaped into a cab, and gave the driver the address of the club at which he hoped to find George--a small and very aristocratic one in the Rue du Cirque. But while the man, stimulated by the promise of a large tip, was whipping his horse, the unhappy youth was beginning to reflect upon the entirely unexpected blow which had just fallen upon him. The character of the race of action to which he belonged manifested itself in the recovery of his self-possession.

From the very first he set aside all notion of calumnious invention on the part of his mother and godfather. That they both detested Theresa, he knew. That they were capable of venturing a great deal in order to detach him from her, had just been proved to him. Yes, Madame Liauran and the Count might venture upon anything, except falsehood. They believed, therefore, what they had said, and they believed it on the word of George Liauran, who had been hawking about one of the thousand infamous reports of Paris; but with what purpose? Hubert's mind did not, at this moment, admit that there was an atom of truth in the story of his mistress's relations with another man.

He did not wait to discuss the fact within himself; he thought only of the person from whose lips the tale had come. What motive, then, had prompted his cousin, to whom he was now going in order to demand an explanation? He saw him in imagination with his thin face, his pointed beard, his short hair, and his shrewd look. The vision raised within him a strangely uncomfortable feeling, which, though he did not suspect it, was the work of Madame de Sauve. George had never up to the present spoken to Hubert about her in any way that could admit of allusion or banter.

But women possess a sure instinct of mistrust, and from the first she had noticed that her love was repugnant to Hubert's cousin. She guessed that he saw only the whim of a _blasée_ woman where she herself saw a religion. A woman forgives formal slanders sooner than she forgives the tone in which she is spoken of, and she understood that the accent of George's voice as he pronounced her name was in absolute disagreement with the feelings with which she wished to inspire Hubert. And then, to keep back nothing, she had a past, and George might be acquainted with that past. A shudder passed through her at the mere idea of this.

For these diverse reasons she had employed her shrewdest and most secret diplomacy to part the two cousins from each other. This work was now bearing its fruit, and was the means of inspiring Hubert with unconquerable distrust, while the cab was taking him to the club in the Rue du Cirque.

"In what way," he thought, "can I question George? I cannot say to him: 'I am Madame de Sauve's lover, and you have accused her of having deceived me; prove it to me.'"

The moral impossibility of such a conversation had become a physical one at the moment when the cab stopped in front of the club.

"After all," said Hubert to himself, "I am a very child to trouble myself about what Monsieur George Liauran believes or does not believe."

He dismissed his cab, and instead of entering the club, walked in the direction of the Champs Elysées.

That which constitutes the marvellous essence and the unique charm of love, is that it gathers, as into a bundle, and sets vibrating in unison, the three beings within us, of thought, feeling, and instinct,--the brain, the heart, and all the flesh. But it is also this unison which forms its terrible infirmity. It remains defenceless against the encroachment of physical imagination, and this feebleness appears especially in the birth of jealousy. In this way is explained the monstrous facility with which suspicion rises in the soul of a man that knows himself loved above all others, if any particulars frame, before his mind's eye, a picture wherein he sees his mistress deceiving him.

To be sure the lover does not believe in the truth of this picture, yet he is none the more able to forget it entirely, and it gives him pain until a proof comes to render the image absurd at every point. But as there enters a great part of physical life into the formation of the picture, the more material the proof is the more complete is the cure. It is exactly what happens to one awaking from a nightmare, when the assault of surrounding sensations comes to dissipate the torturing image which has occasioned the hallucination of the sleeper.

Certainly, for a year past, during which he had been in love with Theresa de Sauve, Hubert had never, even for a minute, doubted a love of which, through a feeling of delicacy that was a creature of prudence, he had never spoken to any one; and even now, after the accusations formulated against her by Count Scilly and Madame Liauran, he did not believe her capable of treachery. Nevertheless, these accusations carried a possible reality with them, and while he was going up again towards the Arc de Triomphe he was pursued by the recollection of the phrases uttered by his godfather and his mother, evoking within him the spectacle of Theresa resigning herself to another man.

It was but a flash, and scarcely had this vision of hideousness occurred to Hubert's mind than it induced a reaction. By a violent effort he drove away the image, which vanished for a few minutes and then reappeared, this time accompanied by a whole train of probative ideas. Hubert suddenly recollected that during the trip to Tourville several of his mistress' letters had been written from day to day in a somewhat changed hand. She seemed to have sat down to her table in great haste to perform her labour of love, as though it were a task to be hurriedly accomplished. Hubert had been pained by this little momentary change, and then he had reproached himself for a tender susceptibility of heart which was like ingratitude.

Yes; but was it not immediately after this short period of negligent letters that Theresa had left Trouville, under the pretext that the sea air was doing her no good? Her departure had been decided upon in twenty-four hours. Hubert could again feel the impulse of wondering joy which had been caused him by this sudden return. He had not expected to see his mistress back in Paris before the month of October, and he met her again in the first week of September The joy of that time was transformed by retrospection into vague anxiety. Had the evident perturbation of the letters written before the departure, and had the departure itself, no connection with the abominable action of which Theresa was accused? But it was infamous on his part to admit such ideas, even in imagination. He threw back his head, closed his eyes, knit his forehead, and, mustering all his energy of soul, was enabled to drive the suspicion away once more.

He was now in the highest part of the avenue. He felt so tired that he did what was for him an extraordinary action, he looked for a café at which he might stop and rest. He noticed a little English tavern, hidden in this corner of fashionable Paris, for the use of coachmen and bookmakers. He went in. Two men, with red faces and of sturdy appearance, who looked as though they must be redolent of the stable, were standing before the counter. The shadow of a closing autumn afternoon was gloomily invading this deserted nook.

Facing the bar ran an empty bench, and on a long wooden table lay an English newspaper in several sheets. Here Hubert sat down and ordered a glass of port wine, which he drank mechanically and which had the effect of freshly exciting his strained nerves. The vision came back to him a third time, accompanied by a still greater number of ideas, which automatically grouped themselves into a single body of argument. Theresa had then returned to Paris so speedily, and had repaired to one of their clandestine meetings. But why had she had such a violent fit of sobbing in his very arms? She was often melancholy in her voluptuousness. The intoxications of love usually ended with her in sad emotion. But how far removed was this frenzy of despair from her habitual, dreamy languor! Hubert had been almost frightened at it, and then she had answered him:

"It was so long since I had tasted your kisses! They are so sweet to me that they pain me. But it is a dear pain," she had added, drawing him to her heart and cradling him in her arms.

Nevertheless her despair had not entirely disappeared on the following day or during the weeks which ensued, and which she had spent in the neighbourhood of Paris at a country house belonging to one of her friends who was acquainted with Hubert. He had gone there to see her and had found her as silent as ever, and at times almost dull. She had returned to Paris in the same condition, and with her face somewhat altered; but he had attributed the change to physical uneasiness. A sudden and new association of ideas now caused him to say to himself:

"What if this were remorse? Remorse for what? Why, for her infamy!"

He got up, went out of the café, resumed his walk, and shook off this frightful hypothesis.

"Fool that I am," he thought, "if she had deceived me it would have been because she did not love me, and what motive would she then have to lie to me?"

This objection, which appeared irrefutable to him, drove away the suspicion for a few minutes. Then it came back again as it always does: "But who is this Count de la Croix-Firmin? Has she ever spoken of him to me?" he asked himself.

He searched anxiously through all his recollections, but could not find that this name had ever been uttered by her. Still, if-- Suddenly in a hidden corner of his memory he perceived the syllables of the already hateful name. He had seen them printed in a newspaper article on the festivities at Trouville. It was certainly in a Boulevard paper, and in a connection in which he had also remarked his mistress's name. By what chance did this little fact, in itself insignificant, return to torment him at this moment?

He had a doubt as to his accuracy, and he took a carriage to go to the office of the only paper that he read habitually. He searched through the collection, and laid his hand upon the short paragraph, which he recollected, doubtless, because he had read it several times on Theresa's account. It was the report of a garden party given by a Marchioness de Jussat. Did it merely prove that this Monsieur de la Croix-Firman had been introduced to Madame de Sauve?

"Ah!" exclaimed the poor fellow after these murderous reflections, "am I going to become jealous?"

This represented an insupportable idea to him, for nothing was more contrary to the innate loyalty of his whole nature than distrust. Then he remembered the warm tenderness which she had lavished upon him from the first, and as he had ever since followed the sweet practice of opening up his whole heart to her, he said to himself that he had a sure means of removing this evil vision for ever. He had simply to see Theresa and tell her everything. In the first place this would warn her of a calumny which she must immediately put down. Then, he felt that a single word coming from the lips of this woman would immediately dissipate every shadow of anxiety in his mind. He entered a post-office and scrawled on the blue paper of a little pneumatic despatch:

"Tuesday, five o'clock.--The lover is sad, and cannot do without his mistress. Wicked persons have been maligning her to him. Who should hear all this, if not the dear confidante of every sorrow and every joy? Can she come to-morrow, she knows where, at ten o'clock in the morning? Let her do so, and she shall be loved still more, if that be possible, by her H.L.,--which denotes this closing afternoon: Horrible lassitude."

It was in this strain of tender childishness that he wrote to her, with the fondness of language wherein passion often dissembles its native violence. He slipped the slender despatch into the box, and was astonished to find himself feeling almost placid again. He had acted, and the presence of the real had driven the vision away.