CHAPTER VIII

At the moment when Theresa de Sauve received Hubert's despatch she was preparing to dress for dining out. She immediately countermanded her carriage, and wrote a hasty line, pleading headache as an excuse for absence. She had been seized with trembling and an icy sweat on reading the simple phrases of the blue note. She gave orders that she was not at home, and cowered down in a low chair before her bedroom fire, with her head in her hands.

Since her return from Trouville she had been living in continued agony, and what she had been dreading like death was come. Her darling, whom she had left so perfectly tranquil and cheerful at two o'clock, could not have fallen into the state of mind which she could feel through the graceful childishness of his note, if some catastrophe had not happened. What catastrophe? Theresa guessed it too well.

George Liauran had been told the truth. During the unhappy woman's stay at the seaside there had been enacted in her life one of those secret dreams of infidelity which frequently occur in the lives of women who have once deviated from the straight path. But our actions, however guilty they may be, do not always give the measure of our souls. Madame de Sauve's nature comprised very lofty portions by the side of very low ones, and was a singular mixture of corruption and nobility. She might, indeed, commit abominable faults, but to forgive them in herself, after the happy custom of most women of the same description, that she could not do, and now less than ever after what her passion for Hubert had been to her life for several months.

Ah! her life! her life! It was this that Theresa de Sauve saw in the flickering flames in the fireplace that autumn evening, with her heart racked with apprehension. The whole weight of her former errors, her criminal errors, was now falling upon her heart, and she remembered her state of dull agony when she had met Hubert. Theresa de Sauve had been endowed by nature with those dispositions which are most fatal to a woman in modern society, unless she marries under rare conditions, or unless maternity saves her from herself by breaking the energies of her physical, and engrossing the fervour of her moral, vitality. She had a romantic heart, while her temperament made her a creature of passion, that is to say, she fostered both dreams of feeling and unconquerable appetites for sensation.

When persons of this kind meet on the threshold of their lives, with a man who satisfies the twofold needs of their nature, there are between them and this man such mysterious festivities of love as poets conceive but never embrace. Where their destiny wills that they shall be delivered, as Theresa had been to her husband, to a man who treats them from the very first like courtesans, who initiates them in deed and thought into the whole science of pleasure, but who has not sufficient poetry to satisfy the other half of their souls, such women necessarily become curiosos, capable of falling into the worst experiences, and then their sterility even becomes a happiness, for they at least do not transmit that flame of sentimental and sensual life which they have commonly inherited from a mother's error.

It was, in fact, from her mother, who, cold though she was, had been led by weariness and abandonment into guilty misconduct, that Theresa derived her dreamy imagination, while there flowed in her veins the burning blood of her true father, the handsome Count Branciforte. Further, this child of license and infatuation had been brought up without religious principles or bridle of any kind, by Adolphe Lussac, a most immoral man, who was amused by the little girl's vivacity, and had early made her a guest at many dinners, where she heard all that she ought not to have heard, and guessed all that she ought not to have known. Who can calculate the amount of influence over the falls of a woman of twenty-five that is attributable to the conversations listened to or overheard by the young girl in short frocks?

Nevertheless, Theresa, who had married when very young, had had only two intrigues up to the time of her chance meeting with Hubert, and these two amours had caused her such disgust that she had sworn that she would never again fall into the folly of taking a lover. The good resolutions of a woman who has fallen, and who has suffered for her fault, are like the firm intentions of a gambler who has lost two thousand pounds, or a drunkard who has told his secrets during his intoxication. The deep-lying causes which have produced the first adultery continue to subsist after the fault has given the guilty one cruelly to taste of every bitterness.

The woman who takes a lover is not so much attached to this lover as she is to love, and she continues to be still attached to love when the chosen lover has deceived her, until disillusion after disillusion brings her to love pleasure without love, and sometimes pleasure of the most degrading nature. Theresa de Sauve could never descend so far as this, because a sentiment of the ideal persisted within her, too feeble to counterbalance the fever of the senses, but strong enough to illumine in her own eyes the abyss of her weaknesses. This taciturn woman, through whom there passed at times the tremors of almost brutal desire, was no epicurean, no light and cheerful courtesan of the world.

Conceived amid her mother's remorse, Theresa had a tragic soul. She was capable of depravity, but incapable of that amused forgetfulness which plucks the fleeting hour, and cannot, without effort, recall the first lover's name among all the rest. No; this first lover, this Frederick Suzel, whom George Liauran had justly suspected, could never be thought of by her without causing her thorough nausea by the recollection of the sad motives of her surrender to him. He was a man gay even to buffoonery, and witty even to cynicism, with that sort of wit which is current between the Opera House, Tortoni, and the Café Anglais.

When paying his addresses to Theresa, he had the good sense not to lose himself in the tricks of fashionable flirtations as did his numerous rivals--a troop of beasts of prey on the scent of a victim. With great skilfulness of language and a certain penetration of vice, he had frankly offered to arrange with her a kind of partnership for pleasure which should be secret, sure, and with no future, and the unfortunate woman had accepted his proposal. Why? Because she was dreadfully dull; because she was carrying off Suzel from one of her friends; because she was greedy for new sensations, and this person, with his dishonouring talk, had about him a sort of strange prestige of libertinism. Of this connection, in which Frederick had at least been faithful to his promise in not seeking to prolong it, Theresa had soon been deeply ashamed, and she had escaped from it as from the galleys.

After a year spent in enduring her remorse, and in feeling herself sullied by all the knowledge of evil that her intimacy with this man had revealed to her, she had thought to find satisfaction for the needs of her heart in the person of Alfred Fanières, one of the most subtle novelists of the day. Did not all the books of this charming narrator, from his first and only volume of poetry to his last collection of tales, reveal the most minute and tender understanding of the gentle feminine mind? In this second connection, begun with the most intoxicating hope--that, namely, of consoling all the deceptions of an admired artist--Theresa had soon struck upon the implacable barrenness of the inmost nature of the worn-out literary man, in whom there is an absolute divorce between feeling and written expression.

Though undeceived, she nevertheless persisted in remaining this man's mistress, from that reason which causes a woman's second love affair to be the longest of all in coming to a conclusion. She will admit that the first has been a mistake; but the mistake of her marriage and the mistake of her first amour make two; at the third error she acknowledges that the fault in her conduct is due to herself, and not to the circumstances of her life, and this is a cruel confession for secret pride. Then the writer's egotism had manifested itself so harshly, when he had believed himself sure of her, that the revolt had been too strong, and Theresa had broken with him.

It was during the period of hard distress subsequent to this rupture that she had met Hubert Liauran. From the corner of her solitary hearth, beside which she watched persistently, she could see so very clearly what the discovery of this tender child's heart had been to her. In an existence which had comprised nothing but wounding or disgrace--had not her keenest sorrows been dishonoured beforehand by their cause?--with what delighted emotion had she measured the purity of this young man's heart? What anxiety had she felt, and what a dread of not pleasing him! What a dread, too, knowing that she had pleased him, of being ruined in his thoughts!

How she had trembled lest one of the cruel talkers of society should reveal her past to Hubert! How had she employed all her woman's art to make this love an adorable poem, wherein should be lacking nothing that might enchant a soul innocent and new to life! How had she enjoyed his reverence, and how had she allowed it to be prolonged! Ah! when she thought now of those two days at Folkestone she could scarcely believe that they had been real, and that she had had the courage to survive them. She remembered that she had gone with Hubert to the terminus in spite of every consideration of prudence; she had seen him disappear in the direction of London, leaning out of the carriage window to watch her the longer; she had re-entered the rooms which they had both occupied, before herself taking train for Dover, and there she had spent two hours in the grievous loneliness of a soul overwhelmed with simultaneous despair and felicity.

Her soul bent beneath its weight of recollections like a flower overladen with dew. She had there known a complete union between her two natures--an almost passionate vibration of her entire being. She had half forgiven herself the past, excusing herself by saying mentally to Hubert the words which so many women have said aloud to men jealous of those bygone days which belonged to others: "I did not know you!"

On their subsequent return to Paris, how carefully and piously had she set herself, during the spring and summer, to live in such a way as not to lose his affection for a single minute! She had resumed all the modesty admitted by love that is complete, but is ennobled by the soul. She trembled constantly lest her caresses should be a cause of corruption to this being, so young both in heart and in body, whom she wished to intoxicate without defiling.

Although she was enamoured to distraction, she had desired the meetings in the little abode in the Avenue Friedland to be far between, lest she should not long enough preserve in his eyes her charm of divine novelty. They had not been very numerous--she might have counted them, tasting in thought the distinct sweetness of each--those afternoons when, with all the shutters closed, and with no light, she had again found the delights of the Folkestone time, sunk in her lover's arms, and dead to everything but the present moment and its intoxication.

She had gone so far in her idolatry of Hubert as to worship Madame Liauran, although she well knew that she was hated by her. She worshipped her for having brought up this son in such an atmosphere of pure and shrinking sensibility. She worshipped her for having kept him for her during the years of adolescence and youth, so delicate, so graceful, so tender, so much her own, so absolutely her own in the past, the present, and the future. For there was loftiness, almost folly, in her pride. She would say to him:

"Yours is beginning and mine is ending. Yes, child, at twenty-six a woman is almost at the end of her youth, and you have so many years before you! But never, never will you be loved as I love you, and never will you forget me, never, never." And at other times: "You will marry," she would say; "she lives, she breathes, and yet she is not known to me, she who is to take you from me, and who will sleep every night upon your heart as I did at Folkestone. Ah! must it indeed be that I have met you so late, and that I cannot bind you to my kisses."

And she would encircle his neck with the loosened tresses of her long, black hair. Since she had belonged to him she had again acquired the habit which she had had as a young girl, of dressing her own hair, so that he might handle her beautiful locks. Then when she had dressed them again quite alone, and was attired and veiled, she would come back to him, not wishing to bid him good-bye anywhere but in the room where they had loved each other, and she would understand from the throbbings of Hubert's heart that no sensation told so much upon him as this good-bye kiss which she gave him with nearly cold lips. She would depart a prey to a nameless sadness, but one at least of which she told her lover. For she did not tell him of every sadness.

She was married, and although she had at all times had a room of her own, she was sometimes obliged to receive her husband in it. Alas! it was all the more necessary because she had a lover. It was a sinister expiation of her passion, and one which she justified on her part by telling herself that she owed as much to Hubert. If she ever became a mother could she fly with him and take from him his whole life? and the pitiless necessity of baleful lies and degrading partitions would thus come to torture her at the height of her happiness. She acquitted herself, nevertheless, since it was for him, her darling, that she lied.

Yes, but what monstrous enigma suddenly reared itself before her? Oh, the cruel, cruel enigma! With this divine love in her heart, how had she been able to do what she had done? For it had been, indeed, herself, and none other--she, with those feet of hers which now were feeling icy cold, with those hands which now were pressing her feverishly-throbbing brow--she, in short, with her whole physical being, who had left for Trouville at the end of the month of July--she, Theresa de Sauve, who had installed herself for the season in a villa on the hill. Yes, it had been herself. And yet no! It was not possible that Hubert's mistress had done this. What--this? Oh, cruel, cruel enigma!

From what depths of the memory of her senses had there issued those strange impulses, those secret, lustful temptations which had commenced to assail her? But have the senses really a memory? Can it be that the guilty fevers will not depart for ever from the blood which they have fired in evil hours?

Once settled in her villa, she had met again with old friends who had been greatly neglected since the beginning of her connection with Hubert. With these women and their admirers--their "fancy men," as a lady said who mixed in their "set"--she had formed several very cheerful and innocent country parties, and here she was, day by day, beginning, not to love Hubert less, but to live somewhat apart from her love, and to take pleasure anew in habits of masculine familiarities which she had forbidden to herself for a year past. She was so idle in her villa with no indoor occupation--not even reading. For she had never liked books much, and her connection with Alfred Fanières had disgusted her for ever with the falsity of fine phrases. When she had written lengthily to Hubert, and then briefly to her husband--who, moreover, came to see her every week--it was necessary to beguile the tedious hours; and at times fitful thoughts came to her which she dared not acknowledge to herself. Hankerings after sensations arose within her, and astonished her.

She knew by hearsay that almost all men, however tender they may be, and however dearly loved their mistresses, cannot remain long away from the latter without experiencing irresistible temptations to deceive her with the first girl that they meet. But this was true of men, and not of women. Why, then, did she find herself a prey to this inexplicable agitation, to this thirst for sensual intoxications, of which she had believed herself for ever cured by the influence of her ennobling, her ideal love? The depraved creature that she had formerly been awoke by degrees. At night, in her sleep, she was haunted by visions of her past. In vain, had she striven, and in vain had she cursed her secret perversion.

Then she had allowed herself to listen to the addresses of the young Count de la Croix-Firmim. She remembered with horror the kind of nervous fascination which this man's presence, his smile, and his eyes had exerted upon her. Then--she would fain have died at the recollection of this--one afternoon, when he had come up to see her, and there was a torrid heat, such as makes the will feel itself drooping, he had been venturesome, and she had given herself to him, faintly at first, and then impetuously and madly. For three days she had been his mistress--a prey to the wildness of physical passion--banishing, ever banishing, the recollection of Hubert, feeling herself rolling into a gulf of infamy, and flinging herself still further into it, until the day when she had awakened from this sensual frenzy as from a dream. She had opened her eyes, measured her shame, and, like a wounded and dying creature, had fled from the accursed spot and from her detested accomplice to return--to what?--and to whom?

A melancholy and heart-breaking return to what had been the restoration of her entire life, to what she had blasted for ever! She had returned to the room of those sweet hours, and she had found Hubert, her Hubert--but could she still call him so?--more tender, more loving, and more loved than before. Alas! alas! had her inexpiable deceit rendered her for ever powerless to taste that of which she was no longer worthy? In the young man's arms, and on his heart, she had remembered the other, and the ecstacy of former times, the delicious and unspeakable swooning in the excess of feeling, had fled from her.

It was then that Hubert had seen her sobbing despairingly, and an immense sadness had come upon her, a death-like torpor, crossed by a cruel anxiety lest some indiscreet speech should reach her lover and awake his suspicions. Her own reputation she heeded but little; she was well aware that after acting as she did with La Croix-Firmin, she could count on little but contempt and hatred from him. She also knew what the honour of those men who make it their profession to have women is worth. What tortured her, however, was not a fear lest he might compromise her personal security by speaking. After all, what had she, childless, and rich with an independent fortune, to dread from her husband?

But a look of distrust in Hubert's eyes was what she felt to be beyond her powers of endurance. Perhaps, nevertheless, it might be better that he should know the frightful truth? He would drive her from him like an unfortunate; but at times anything seemed preferable to the torment of having such remorse at her heart, and of lying ceaselessly to so noble a fellow. She had again set herself to love him with desperate frenzy, and, as her revolt against the baser part of her nature hurried her to an extreme in the other or romantic direction, a mad desire came upon her to tell him everything, that at least the voluntary humiliation of her confession might be, as it were, a ransom for her infamy. And yet, although silence was a very lie, this lie she had still the strength to sustain; but, as for an actual lie, she suffered too much to have the shameful energy for it, if ever he questioned her.

And this questioning she was now about to face; she could read it between the lines of the despatch. Ah! what was she now to do, if she had guessed aright? She had drunk as much of the gall of shame as she could bear. Would she have heart enough still to drink this, the bitterest drop, and once more betray her only love by a fresh deception? If she were frank Hubert must at least esteem her for her frankness, and if she were not how could she endure herself? Yes, but to speak was the death of her happiness.

Alas! had not this been dead ever since her return? Would she ever recover what she had once felt? What was the use of disputing with fate for this mutilated, sullied remnant of a divine dream? And all that night she was bowed beneath the agony of these thoughts, a poor creature born for all the nobility of a single and faithful love, who had caught a glimpse of her dream and had possessed it, to be then dispossessed of it by the fault of a nature hidden within her, but which, nevertheless, was not her entire self.