CHAPTER XI

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.

THE END.