CHAPTER IX

In the cab which brought her to the Avenue Friedland on the day following this night of agony, Theresa de Sauve, took none of the precautions that were habitual with her, such as changing vehicles on the way, tying a double veil across her face, or peeping at the street corners through the little pane of glass behind, to see whether anything of a suspicious nature was accompanying her clandestine drive. All these timorous secrecies of forbidden love used formerly to please her delightfully on Hubert's account. Was not the continuance of their intrigue secured by securing its mysteriousness? There was little question of that now. In her ungloved hand she held a little gold key hanging to the chain of a bracelet--a pretty trinket of tenderness which her lover had had contrived for her. This key, which never left her wrist, served to open the door of the ground floor lent by Emmanuel Deroy, the worshipped refuge of the few days during which she had really lived her life--a dream-oasis to which the unhappy woman was now going as to a cemetery.

There was likely to be a storm in the course of the day, for the atmosphere of the autumn morning was heavy, and completely charged with a sort of electric torpor, the influence of which irritated still further her weak, womanish nerves. She did not tell the cabman, as she always used to do, to drive into the entry,--for the house had two exits, and the large open gateway allowed her to be brought in the cab to the very door of the apartments without being seen by the porter, whose discretion was, moreover, guaranteed by the profits resulting from the amour of his tenant's friend. She had fastened her eyes the whole way upon the slightest details in the streets successively passed through; she knew them well, from the signs of the shops to the look of the houses, because these images were associated with the happiest memories of her too short romance. She uttered to them in thought the same mournful farewell as to her happiness.

A prey, too, to the hallucinations of terror, she could no longer distinguish the possible from the real, and she no longer doubted that Hubert knew all. She read again the note which she had received the day before, and every word of which, to her who knew the young man's character so well, betrayed profound anguish. Whence had this anguish come if not from an event relating to their love? And from what event if not from a revelation of the horrible deception, the infamous act committed by her, yes, by herself? Ah! if there were somewhere a lustral water to cleanse the blood, and with it the recollection of all evil fevers! But, no; it continues to course in our veins, this blood, laden with the most shameful sins. There is no interruption between the beating of our pulse in the hour of our remorse and its beating in the hour of our fault. And Theresa could again feel pressing upon her face the kisses of the man with whom she had betrayed Hubert. Yet she had paid back these frightful kisses.

"Ah! if he questions me, how could I find strength to lie to him, and what would be the use?"

These words had terminated all her meditations since the day before, and she uttered them to herself again when she found herself in front of the door within which there was doubtless going to be enacted one of the, to her, most tragical scenes in the drama of her life. Her fingers trembled so that she had some trouble in slipping the little gold key into the lock--the key which had been given to be handled with other feelings! She knew, beyond doubt, that at the mere sounding of this key turning on the bolt Hubert would be there behind the door awaiting her.

He was there, in fact, and received her in his arms. He felt her lips to be perfectly cold. He looked at her, as he did on each occasion, after pressing her to him. It seemed as though he wished to persuade himself of the truth of her presence. This first kiss always gave Theresa a spasm at the heart, and it needed all her dread of displeasing her lover to make her release herself from his arms. Even at this moment, and in spite of all the tortures of the night before, she thrilled to the very depths of her being, and she was seized with something like a mad desire to intoxicate Hubert with so many endearments that they should both forget--he, what he had to ask, and she, what she had to reply. It was but a quiver, nevertheless, and it died away on simply hearing the young man's voice questioning her with anxiety.

"You are ill?" he said.

Seeing her quite pale, the tender-hearted fellow reproached himself for having brought her there that morning, and, at the sight of her evident suffering, he had already forgotten the motive of their meeting. Moreover, his confidence as to the result of the conversation was such that he had had no renewal of his suspicions since the day before.

"You are ill?" he repeated, drawing her into the next room and making her sit down on a divan.

As Emmanuel Deroy had been attached to the embassy at Constantinople before going to London, his apartments were adorned throughout with Oriental materials, and this large divan, hung with drapery, and placed just opposite the door of a little garden, was particularly dear to Hubert and Theresa. They had chatted so much among these cushions, with their heads resting unitedly upon them, at those moments of intimacy which follow upon the intoxications of love, and which, by him at least, were preferred to them; for, although he loved Theresa to the point of sacrificing everything for her, he had, nevertheless, at the bottom of his conscience, remained a Catholic, and a dim remorse mingled its secret bitterness with the sweetness that was given him by the kisses. He used to think of his own fault, and especially of the sin which he caused Theresa to commit; for in the simplicity of his heart he imagined that he had seduced her.

She sank rather than sat down on the deep divan, and he began to take off her veil, bonnet, and mantle. She allowed him to do so, smiling at him the while with infinite tenderness. After her hours of torturing sleeplessness, there was to her something at once very bitter and very affecting in the impress of the young man's coaxing. She found him so affectionate, so delicately intimate, so like himself, that she thought that she had without doubt been mistaken as to the meaning of the note, and, to rid herself immediately of uncertainty, she said, in reply to his question about her health:

"No, I am not ill; but the tone of your note was so strange that it has made me uneasy."

"My note?" rejoined Hubert, pressing her cold hands, in order to warm them. "Ah! it was not worth while. Look here, I dare not now acknowledge to you why I wrote it."

"Acknowledge it all the same," she said, with an already anguish-stricken insistence, for Hubert's embarrassment had just brought back to her the anxiety which had caused her so much suffering.

"People are so strange!" replied the young man, shaking his head. "There are times when, in spite of themselves they doubt what they know best. But first you must forgive me beforehand."

"Forgive you, my angel!" she said. "Ah! I love you too well! Forgive you!" she repeated; and these syllables, which she heard her own voice uttering, echoed in an almost intolerable fashion through her conscience. How willingly, indeed, would she have had reason to forgive instead of to be forgiven. "But for what?" she asked, in a lower tone, which revealed the renewal of her inward emotion.

"For having allowed myself to be disturbed for a moment by an infamous calumny which persons who hate our love have repeated to me about your life at Trouville. But what is the matter?"

These words, and still more the tone of voice in which they were uttered, had entered like a blade into Theresa's heart. If Hubert had received her on her arrival with those words of suspicion which men know how to devise, and every word of which implies an absence of faith that anticipates the proofs, she might, perhaps, have found in her woman's pride sufficient energy to face the suspicion and to deny it.

But from the outset of this explanation, the young man's whole attitude had displayed that kind of tender and candid confidence which imposes sincerity upon every soul that possesses any remnant of nobility; and in spite of her weaknesses, Theresa had not been born for the compromises of adultery, nor, above all, for the complications of treachery. She was one of those creatures who are capable of great impulses of conscience and sudden returns of generosity, and who, after descending to a certain depth, say: "This is debasement enough," and prefer to destroy themselves altogether rather than sink still lower.

Moreover, the remorse of the last few weeks had brought her into that state of suffering sensibility which impels to the most unreasonable acts, provided that these acts bring the suffering to an end. And then the unnerving of the sleepless nights, increased still further by the uneasiness of the stormy day, rendered it as impossible for her to dissemble her emotions as it is for a panic-stricken soldier to dissemble his fear. At that moment her countenance was literally thrown into confusion by the effect of what she had just been listening to, and by the expectation of what her unconscious tormentor was going to say.

For a minute there was a silence that was more than painful to them both. The young man, seated on the divan by the side of his mistress, was looking at her with drooping eyelids, his mouth half open and his face death-like. The excessiveness of her emotion was so astonishingly significant that all the suspicions which had been raised and banished the day before awoke simultaneously in the mind of the youth. He suddenly saw abysses before him by the lightning-flash of one of those instantaneous intuitions which sometimes illumine the whole brain at times of supreme emotion.

"Theresa!" he cried, terror-stricken by his own vision and by the sudden horror that was seizing upon him. "No, it is not true; it is not possible--"

"What?" she said again; "speak, and I will answer you."

The transition from the tender "thou" of their intimacy to this "you," rendered so humble by her subdued accents, completed Hubert's distraction.

"_No!_" he went on, rising and beginning to walk about the room with an abrupt step, the sound of which trampled upon the poor woman's heart; "I cannot formulate that--I cannot--well, yes!" he said, stopping in front of her; "I was told that you were the mistress of Count de la Croix-Firmin at Trouville, that it was the talk of the place, that some young men had seen you entering his room and kissing him, that he himself had boasted of having been your lover. That is what I was told, and told with such persistence that for a moment I was maddened by the calumny, and then I felt the morbid longing to see you, to hear you only declare to me that it is not true. Answer, my love, that you forgive me for having doubted you, that you love me, that you have loved me, that all this is nothing but a hateful lie."

He had thrown himself at her feet as he said these words; he took her hands, her arms, her waist; he hung to her as, when drowning, he would have caught at the body of one who had leapt into the water to save him.

"It is true that I love you," she replied, in a scarcely audible voice.

"And all the rest is a lie?" he besought her distractedly.

Ah! he would have given his life at that moment for a word from those lips. But the lips remained mute, and upon the woman's pale cheeks slow, long tears began to flow, without sob or sigh, as though it had been her soul that was weeping thus. Did not such a silence and such tears, at such a moment, form the clearest, the most cruel, of all replies?

"It is true, then?" he asked again.

And as she continued silent: "But answer, answer, answer," he went on, with a frightful violence, which wrung from those lips--at the corners of which the slow tears were still flowing--a "Yes" so feeble that he could scarcely hear it; and yet he was destined to hear it, for ever!

He leaped up, and cast his eyes wildly around him. Some weapons hung on the walls. A temptation seized upon the soldier's son to mangle this woman with one of those shining blades; and so strong was it that he recoiled. He looked again at that face, upon which the same tears were flowing freely. He uttered that "Ah!" of agony--that cry, as of an animal wounded unto death, which is drawn forth by a sight of horror; and as though he were afraid of everything--of the sight before him--of the walls--of this woman--of himself--he fled from the room and the house, bare-headed and with soul distraught. He had been strong enough to feel that in five minutes he would have become a murderer.

He fled, whither? how? by what routes? He never knew with clearness what he had done that day. On the morrow he recollected, because he had the palpable proof of it before him, that once he had caught sight of his haggard face and windblown hair in the glass of a shop window, and that, with an odd survival of carefulness about his dress, he had entered a shop to buy a hat. Then he had walked straight before him, passing through innumerable Paris districts. Houses succeeded houses indefinitely. At one time he was in the country of the suburbs. The storm burst, and he had been able to take shelter under a railway-bridge. How long did he remain thus? The rain fell in torrents. He was leaning against one of the walls of the bridge. Trains passed at intervals, shaking all the stones.

The rain ceased. He resumed his walk, splashing through the puddles of water, without food since the morning, and heedless of his fast. The automatic movement of his body was necessary to him that he might not founder in madness, and instinctively he walked on. The monstrous thing which he had perceived through the shock of a terrible dread was there before his eyes; he could see it; he knew it to be real, and he did not understand it. He was like a crushed man. He experienced a sensation so intolerable that it had even ceased to be pain, with such completeness did it suppress the powers of his being and overwhelm them. Evening was coming on. He found himself again on the road towards home, guided to it by the mechanical impulse which brings back the bleeding animal in the direction of its den. About ten o'clock he rang at the door of the house in the Rue Vaneau.

"Nothing has happened to you, sir?" asked the doorkeeper; "the ladies were so anxious----"

"Let them know that I have come in," said the young man, "but that I am unwell and wish to be alone, absolutely alone, Firmin; you understand."

The tone in which these words were uttered cut short all questions on the lips of the old servant. He followed Hubert, apparently dazed by the furious lightning which he had just perceived in the eyes of his young master and by the disorder of his dress. He saw him cross the hall and enter the pavilion, and went up himself to the drawing-room to give his mistress the strange message with which he was charged. The mother had expected her son at luncheon. Hubert had not come in. Although he had never before failed to appear without giving her notice, she had striven not to be too anxious about it. The afternoon passed without news, and then the dinner-hour struck. Still no news.

"Mamma," Madame Liauran said to Madame Castel, "some misfortune has happened. Who can tell whither despair has led him?"

"He has been detained by friends," the old lady replied, concealing her own in order to control her daughter's anxiety.

When the door opened at ten o'clock, Madame Liauran, with her quickness of hearing, caught the sound from the furthest end of the drawing-room, and said to her mother and to Count Scilly, who had been informed since dinner; "It is Hubert."

When Firmin repeated the young man's words the invalid exclaimed: "I must speak to him."

And she sat upright, as though forgetting that she was no longer able to walk.

"The Count will go to him," said Madame Castel, "and bring him back to us."

At the end of ten minutes Scilly returned, but alone. He had knocked at the door, and then tried to open it. It was double-locked. He had called Hubert several times, and the latter at last entreated him to leave him.

"And not a word for us?" asked Madame Liauran.

"Not a word," replied the General.

"What have we done?" rejoined the mother. "What good will it do me to have separated him from this woman if I have lost his heart?"

"To-morrow," replied Scilly, "you will see him returning to you more tender than ever. Just at first, it is too much for you. He has been seeking proofs for what we have told him, and he has found them. This is the explanation of his absence and his behaviour."

"And he has not come to grieve with me!" said the mother. "Alas! can it be that I have loved him for myself alone, while believing that I loved him for his own sake? Will you ring, General, for them to take me to my room?"

And when the easy chair, which she never left now, had been wheeled into the next room, and she was in bed:

"Mamma," she said to Madame Castel, "draw back the curtain that I may look at his windows."

Then, as Hubert had not closed his shutters, and his shadow could be seen passing to and fro, "Ah! mamma," she said again, "why do children grow up? Formerly, he never had a trouble that he did not come and cry over it on my shoulder, as I do on yours, and now----"

"Now he is as unreasonable as his mother," said the old lady, who had scarcely spoken during the whole evening, and who, printing a kiss upon her daughter's hair, silenced her by letting fall these words, which revealed her own martyrdom: "My heart aches for you both."