CHAPTER VI

When Alfred Chazel had said good-night to Helen as usual and was left alone, he began to suffer with an intensity of which he himself could not have believed himself capable. He had now no longer any need to discuss the fact. His wife had lied to him. The clearness of this simple fact prostrated him. He could hear her say in that voice whose slightest inflections he knew so well:

"How have you been since yesterday?"

The last four syllables rang pitilessly in his ear and to the depth of his heart. He had just lost, never, never again to recover it, complete trust in that gentle voice, in these beloved eyes. There are no such things as petty insincerities; a person who has once deceived may always deceive. The perception of this natural law, the same perception which had prevented Armand from believing in Helen, was torturing Alfred at this moment. Liar! Liar! When he came to the utterance of this word, he gave forth an outbreaking of grief as he paced to and fro about his study, to which, as often of an evening, he had withdrawn.

On one of the walls was displayed a long blackboard, covered with a medley of algebraical formulæ. Between the two windows stood a white wooden table constructed so as to facilitate writing in a standing position. Another low table, intended for correspondence; a bookcase filled with tall mathematical volumes; engraved likenesses of Lagrange, Fresnel, Cauchy, and Laplace; a leathern divan, and a carpet, completed the furniture of a room, the abstract, peaceful aspect of which presented a strange contrast to the disturbed countenance of the man who was walking about in it at that moment; and the contrast symbolised only too well the drama that was being enacted in the existence of a man born for study, for prolonged and painful thought, for happy labour, and constrained to action by the sudden revelation with which he had just been visited.

Yes, the necessity for action was present and inevitable. To rest at the suspicion which was tormenting him at that moment was what he could not do--neither morally, without losing self-respect, nor physically, for the pain of it was too great. As he raised his head with a gesture of despair, his eyes encountered the board; he perceived the signs of his calculations traced in chalk with that absolute equality of lettering, that absence of thick and thin strokes, which imparted an appearance of incomparable lucidity to his writing. The sudden sight of this changed the current of his grief.

"Let us reason out the thing," he said aloud, and involuntarily he recovered for subservience to his passion all the methodical habits contracted by his intellect. "Yes," he went on, "let us reason it out."

He sat down beside his fire in an easy-chair, and, with his forehead resting upon his hands, gathered together all his thoughts, which were not long in shaping themselves to the following dilemma:

"There are two alternatives. Either the walk and the falsehood are to be explained by some petty, innocent motive, a visit of charity or a chance meeting, and they have not spoken to me about it owing to a false dread of displeasing me; or else, the walk and the falsehood indicate that there is a mystery between Helen and Armand. Let us speak out and say that they love each other. There is no means of avoiding the alternative. In the first case, I should have to scold Helen for believing me to be so childishly jealous; in the second--"

Here his imagination paused, being taken unawares. There was within him no anticipatory prevision of a misfortune of the kind. The practical rules, received and accepted in his youth, upon which his whole life was based, did not afford an answer to this cruel hypothesis. On the other hand, he had for the determining of his will neither that dread of public opinion which serves to guide nearly all husbands in similar crises, nor the startling physical vision, that besetting, unendurable vision which maddens a jealous man by showing him sexual union, fleshly abandonment, irredeemable pollution.

The fact that Helen and Armand loved each other did not for a moment signify to Chazel that she was the young man's mistress. It signified that she had given him her heart. But then what was his duty as her husband? For lack of previously adopted principles, he suffered himself to be led away by the mania for absolute, ideal theories that is characteristic of mathematicians.

"My duty, if I am becoming an obstacle to her happiness, is to sacrifice myself. She must be left free; all must be given up."

He thought immediately of his son; he could see the little gestures, the pretty face, the bright eyes of the child whom he had already moulded in his own likeness.

"Ah!" he said to himself, "I have no right to forsake him. But to take him with me--to deprive his mother of him?"

The tragic nature of this possibility disconcerted his intellect afresh, and like a timorous swimmer who has ventured a few fathoms too far, he speedily returned to the place where he could keep his footing, where his reasoning stood firm close to the facts.

"I am losing my head," he groaned. "The question is, does she love him? Does she not love him?"

He had risen once more, and was walking with a more hurried step than before.

"How can I find out? How? how?" he asked himself, and the emotion of uncertainty became so insupportable to him that he said to himself: "Let there be an end of it. I will come to an understanding with Helen--and at once."

He looked at the clock which was pointing to midnight. He had been in these throes for an hour. He left his study with the lamp in his hand. The narrow wooden staircase, which was covered with a red carpet, was devoid of sound and light. All the servants were in bed. He went down the steps of the staircase leaning on the bannisters, his legs trembling, his lips parched, his throat choking. He was in front of the door of his wife's bedroom. He gave two slight knocks with the back of his hand. There was no reply. He turned the brass handle and leaned against it. The door was double-locked, and the key was inside.

"She is asleep," he said to himself.

The action of descending the stairs, and then of pressing against the door, had used up the feverish impulse produced by excess of uncertainty. Instead of knocking again, he paused, motionless.

"She is asleep," he repeated to himself; "if I awake her, what shall I say to her?"

He remained standing against the wall, with the lamp at his feet, listening. Only the murmur of nocturnal Paris reached him, and he reflected. He could see by anticipation the manner in which Helen would receive him. She would be lying in her bed, her plaited hair rolled about her head, while the lace of her fine night-dress quivered at neck and wrist.

At the thought of this, Alfred experienced a thrill of amorous emotion that restored to him the timidity with which the desire of his wife's person always overwhelmed him, and he continued to picture the scene.

"What shall I say to her?--'You have lied to me.' And what will she reply?"

He foresaw the countless pretexts that Helen could advance to explain her walk.

"I shall ask her: 'Are you in love with Armand?'"

He felt himself incapable of being the first to articulate the words in that way. Moreover, what might not the result of the question be? If it were not true that she was in love with Armand, he would inflict useless pain upon her, which would aggravate still further their divorce of intimacy. What if it were true? She would not acknowledge it. She had lied just now. What would another lie cost her?

Irresolution proved the stronger. He went up to his study again without having made a fresh attempt. There was a lull for a few minutes, such as succeeds to acute crises. It was one o'clock in the morning.

"I will go to sleep," he said to himself. "When I awake it will be time enough to make up my mind."

As was usual with him, he arranged a few papers, carefully covered up the fire to avoid accidents, and was almost tranquil as he got into bed. But scarcely was he there before his anguish began again, more torturing than before. The avenue in the Jardin des Plantes again extended its vault of naked branches beneath which Helen and Armand passed along. What were they saying to each other? The well-known voice uttered again the fatal syllables, "Since yesterday!" Ah! Liar! liar! the deceiver!

Once more the necessity for action pressed in its inevitableness upon this purely speculative nature. His thoughts distributed themselves again into two groups.

"Either they love each other or they do not love each other. If they do?--If they do not?--How can I find out? From her? From him?"

The thought of coming to an explanation with De Querne presented itself abruptly, and as this thought, while satisfying the need for acting, deferred the action for several hours, Alfred began mentally to muster all the arguments that told in its favour.

Such an explanation would not involve any of the drawbacks which must follow a conversation with Helen. If Armand and she did not love each other, everything would remain as it was, since she was in ignorance of her husband's suspicion and of the step that he had taken. If they were in love with each other, he would extort the acknowledgment of the fact more readily from the loyalty of his friend. The latter at least had not lied to him. Could he have replied otherwise than as he did to Helen's phrase, that simple phrase that was so terrible to himself, Alfred: "How have you been since yesterday?" To receive the young man with these words was tantamount to a prohibition to speak.

Again, there are suspicions respecting which one friend has no right to keep silence towards another. If he, Alfred, were to learn that Armand had harboured an insulting distrust of him in his heart without speaking of it, would he not feel deeply wounded? Would he not consider such silence an unwarrantable affront? Well, then, he would not offer this affront to De Querne. He would go to him with open hand and heart, and show him all his trouble. Such a step had further in its favour the fact that it would involve practical results. He might ask his friend to come to the Rue de La Rochefoucauld less frequently. If he were mistaken in his distrust, and if the real cause of Helen's grief had been confided to Armand, he might speak of it without indelicacy on that occasion, in the course of the conversation.

During the whole of that long night he turned this plan over and over, and in the end it impressed itself upon his will. Towards morning, he fell into that dark overwhelming sleep which follows upon excessive deperditions of nervous energy. Upon awaking, he again found himself face to face with his resolution of the night before; he foresaw, unless he acted, a day worse than that horrible night, and at nine o'clock he was ringing at Armand's door, not without a thrilling of his whole heart, yet with decision. These abstract souls, to whom action is so repellent, are capable of energy, provided this energy be sustained by reasoning, just as impassioned souls derive their force from blind impulse, and arid souls from a clear perception of self-interest.

Many days had gone by since Chazel had entered the rooms in the Rue Lincoln. The valet who answered his ring, an old servant of the De Querne family, was the same who formerly used to come to the school to take Armand away for his holidays. The few words that this man uttered when asking about his master's old companion with the familiarity of former days, brought real comfort to Alfred. He experienced an awakening of memories that to him was equivalent to an impression of friendship.

"The baron is in his bath," the servant went on, "but if Monsieur Alfred will walk into the drawing-room," and he opened the door with attentive assiduity, "and read the papers," and he handed them. Then kneeling in front of the fire to put on a fresh log, he asked:

"Will Monsieur Alfred take tea with the baron?"

These trifling attentions softened Alfred; in them he found as it were a palpable renewal of the intimacy in which he had lived with Armand. The aspect of the room heightened this first impression still more. He knew the room well; he had seen it forming year by year, and furniture being added to furniture. At every visit he was aware of some slight alterations.

"Stay, that's new, is it not?" he would say to his friend, who used then to explain to him the convenience or rarity of his recent acquisition.

He went up to the low bookcase, and by the look of the binding recognised some books which must have been college prizes. He took one out and saw the stamp of the Vanaboste School printed on the green shagreen. He replaced the volume, and the courtyard of the school was revived before his mind. What delightful hours had been spent in walking round that yard with Armand--an Armand who, despite the years, resembled the Armand of to-day; and to convince himself of the fact, he proceeded to look at a profile of his friend done by Bastien-Lepage, in the refined and exact manner of this master's portraits. From the portrait Alfred passed on to the photographs scattered over the mantelpiece; the comrades, living or dead, that they represented, had been known by him, ay, by him also.

Ah! from the most insignificant objects in the apartment there issued a voice to protest on behalf of the friendship that united De Querne and himself. After the anguish of the night before, this atmosphere of settled affection operated powerfully on Alfred's heart and brought him relief.

"How well it was I came," he reflected, throwing himself into an easy-chair, and looking at the fire, the flames of which were assuming a joyous brightness: "I will tell him everything in a straightforward way: what is the good of artifice! And I have full confidence that everything will be explained."

He had reached this stage in his meditations, when he felt a hand laid on his shoulder. It was the hand of Armand, who had just come in. But Alfred's absorption had been too great to admit of his being disturbed by the noise of the door. The young baron was wearing a handsome morning jacket of black quilted silk, light trousers, and thin patent leather shoes, while all about him there floated the fresh odour of a scent which Alfred suddenly recognised. This same delicate aroma was diffused around her by his wife in the morning hours when she went about in those loose dresses which best indicated the suppleness of the lines of her person. The fact that Helen and Armand made use of the same perfume was sufficient, in Alfred's present condition of soul, to make the soothing influence of youthful memories give way once more to the indefinable, the vague and torturing suspicion of the night before. He looked at his friend, but the latter seemed to be occupied solely with the preparations for his breakfast. The valet had wheeled a little movable table up to the fire, and arranged upon it a silver urn, a cup, slices of toast, butter and honey.

"Another cup for Monsieur Chazel," said Armand.

"Monsieur Alfred has refused already," said the servant.

"Then you will allow me," Armand resumed in a cheerful tone.

Sitting down, he poured the black tea into the cup, and then the hot water, calculating the proportion between them just as though his friend had not been present. Was this the attitude of a man who had a secret to conceal?

"No," said Alfred to himself, "if there were any mystery between Helen and him, my visit would put him out, he would want to know the reason of it. Are you not astonished," he went on aloud, "to see me so early in the morning?" putting his question with that incapacity for dissimulation which is characteristic of very sincere people, and which causes them almost involuntarily to continue outwardly and verbally their inmost thoughts.

"I suppose you have some little service to ask of me," replied the other, "and I am quite ready to perform it."

Then to himself: "Poor Alfred is too ingenuous. He wants to know why I am not astonished. Well, I certainly ought to be so, and should be expecting a question from him about Helen--what else could it be about? She would not believe me when I told her that he was growing jealous. Well, we'll lie as well as we can, since so much is due to her and he buttered a slice of toast, not without a certain melancholy at this necessity for lying, for he had preserved the haughtiness of personal pride which so often outlives true loftiness of feeling.

"Yes," Alfred resumed, in a tone of voice the seriousness of which revealed how deeply he felt the present interview, "you are my friend--my friend. Yes, I believe it, I know it."

It might have been thought that he was questioning himself the better to assure himself of his own sincerity. He again repeated, "I believe it," looking at Armand as he had never ventured to look at him in his life before. His eyes no longer expressed anything of that awkward timidity which in all arguments caused Alfred to feel beaten beforehand, even when he was right a hundred times over.

"And it is because you are my friend," he went on, "that I came to you to-day. Armand, you see in me the most unhappy of men."

The other raised his head, which, as though to pour some more tea into a cup that was already half full, he had bent down beneath his friend's gaze. He looked straight at the loyal man whom, in that very room on the eve of the first assignation, he had in thought held so cheap. Chazel had allowed his eyeglass to fall. His clear eyes showed the very depths of his soul. In them there was legible pain, so terrible and so genuine that it rendered touching and tragic a situation which, at any other moment, Armand would have considered very ridiculous--that, namely, of a deceived husband suffering from suspicion of the deception in the presence of the very man who has deceived him. No, it was simple, naked human suffering--that real suffering which grips your vitals like the shriek of a passer-by when crushed by a carriage at a street-corner. Armand suddenly felt this sympathy of humanity, then immediately afterwards a secret feeling of uncomfortableness at the thought that he was himself the cause of this visible suffering; and he listened to Alfred, who continued speaking.

"I have come to tell you things that people do not talk about, but you must listen to me. I am very unhappy, my friend, and for very vulgar reasons. Ah! there is nothing romantic in my story. It is comprised in a single line: I love my wife and my wife does not love me. How and how greatly I love her you cannot understand--no, not even you. I am a timid, awkward fellow, I know, and have always known. When quite a young man, I pictured in my dreams the ideal face of a woman. I called her my madonna--but I am talking nonsense to you. Let me go on. It was she who comforted me for the rest--those who all treated me with scorn--and it was she that I loved. When I saw Helen, I found in her a likeness to this chimera such as I had never met with. Do not smile. Just understand me. I married her. At first I was quite sensible of the fact that she was not very happy. I said to myself: Time will bring everything right. Time has brought nothing right. The martyrdom that it has been to me to see her dull, wearied, and sad, and to be able to do nothing for her--ah! no one shall ever know. Especially since we have been living in Paris, I can see that she is sinking into still greater melancholy, that her poor face is growing thin and her eyes hollow. She is suffering and wasting away before my eyes, every day a little more, and I am unable to do anything and am ignorant of the cause. Can you understand what a torture it is to see a woman loved as I love her passing away hour by hour by my very side, and not even to know the reason?"

He had risen as he uttered these words. In proportion as the phrases came to him, they swept away the plan of discourse which he had prepared on his way from the Rue de La Rochefoucauld to the Rue Lincoln. He had allowed himself to feel aloud. He passed his hand across his eyes and went on:

"I am wandering. Why do I tell you all these things? I have come to ask you whether you know what is the matter with her."

And he stopped in front of Armand, who also rose. The latter was trying to guess the object of his old companion's tirade. He was aware that in a conversation of this kind the chief point is to abstain from informing one's interlocutor of what he may not know. To Alfred's abrupt question he replied in the vaguest of formulas:

"Why, how could I know any more than yourself?"

"Armand," said the other, going up to him and laying his hands upon his shoulders, "do not deceive me. I am able to hear anything; I am ready for anything. Yes, if Helen loved some one, I should efface myself, I should go away. I should take my son with me, and allow her to begin her life anew. A revengeful husband--how I despise such a man as that! Either he does not love--and then for what does he take revenge? For a wound dealt to his pride? What pitifulness! Or else he does love, and has only to bring about the happiness of the woman he loves at the cost of his own. Ah, I have not the ideas of the world! Answer me, Armand, is Helen in love with any one?"

"I tell you again. How should I know?"

"Ah!" exclaimed Chazel, taking his friend's arm and grasping it with all his strength, "who can know if not you? Did you consider me blind to such a degree as not to see that you were becoming her most intimate confidant? If she does not talk to you about herself, her life, her feelings, what do you say to each other in your endless conversations? Why do you become silent when I appear, if you are not speaking of things that you do not want me to hear? Why do you hide from me?" he continued violently.

"We hide from you?" said Armand.

"Be silent," returned Alfred, laying his hand upon his friend's mouth, "do not say what is false. I can endure falsehood no longer. I must have the truth, whatever it may be. I saw you yesterday in the Jardin des Plantes, in the main avenue. I was there--I saw you. You were walking together, and in the evening she said to you: 'How have you been since yesterday?' You do not hide from me? Repeat that now. Ah, why have you both lied to me?"

"You are right," replied Armand, "we ought to have spoken to you about it immediately. That is the way in which the most innocent things assume an appearance of mystery."

While affecting the most absolute calmness, he said to himself: "Helen is saved." Logical on this point with his everlasting distrust, he used at every meeting to agree with his mistress upon a common explanation to be given in case of surprise, and he went on aloud:

"Madame de Chazel was returning from a visit of charity; I met her in the garden, and we walked together for a little because the weather was fine. She asked me to say nothing about it to you, because you would scold her for going in that way into the low quarters of the town."

And it was true that Alfred, still a provincial in this respect, used often to speak of the dangers that a woman might incur alone in out of the way corners in Paris.

"You have the means of ascertaining whether I am telling you the truth," added De Querne. "Take a cab, go home, and ask Madame Chazel. I shall not have time to forewarn her, shall I? You will see whether she makes you the same reply."

"For what do you take me?" said Alfred, "I have a horror of such spying ways. I am already too much ashamed of having spoken to you in this way.--Armand," he said, advancing towards his friend, "give me your word of honour that Helen and you are not in love with each other."

"Madame Chazel and I!" exclaimed De Querne, "nay, I give you my word of honour that not a word has passed between us that was not one of simple, honourable friendship. In my turn I will ask you: 'For what do you take me?'" And with the secret loathing of all his pride he added inwardly; "What mean actions a woman can make a man commit!"

"Then I ask your forgiveness," returned Alfred, "for I suspected you. Ah! I am not wronging you; I did not believe that there was anything between you. No, I think too highly of you both. But I thought that she might have formed an affection for you and you for her. She is charming, and you, Armand--why you have all that I have not! You are handsome, refined, witty. And I, I have only this," he said with a heart-broken gesture, striking his breast above his heart.

"Heavens! what I should have suffered had it been true! Just think, to have lost both her who is my entire life, and you whom I liked so much! You do not know, Armand, how sincerely I am your friend--just let me tell it you for once. At our age these protestations are ridiculous--but what is ridicule to me? With my father, and before I knew Helen, you are the person I loved most. I am of the Newfoundland breed; I must have some one to be attached to. Throughout my youth you were that some one to me. When we were children, I should have liked you to have a sacrifice to ask of me, something very difficult, almost impossible of execution. You were in my eyes like a more fortunate brother. I was not jealous of all your superior qualities; I was proud of them. When I got married you were not able to come to Bourges. Well! will you believe it, my heart throbbed when I introduced you to my wife in Paris? If you had not been pleased with her I should have been so unhappy. Think of that my friend, my dear friend," and he clasped his hands, "and you will excuse me for having said anything painful, or wounding to you. You and she, to lose you both! Ah! I should have gone away. I should have sacrificed everything to your happiness. But it would have killed me!"

He sank into the easy chair as though exhausted by the emotions that he had just experienced. His agitated face revealed too clearly the excessiveness of his grief, and Armand felt unspeakably moved by looking upon such a spectacle of sorrow and weakness. By truthfulness of soul, Alfred had just re-established between them the true nature of the situation. Husbands are not so often ridiculous, as the proverb says, but by reason of the deceived vanity which is at the bottom of nearly all their bitterness, or of the triumphant vanity which is at the bottom of their fancied security. But Alfred, face to face with Armand, was trust face to face with treachery, serious love, ready for the most tragic sacrifices, face to face with the depraved fancy of pride and sense that scruple had restrained.

And Armand was silent. Alfred's affection and esteem smote him as with a hand. Ah! how he would have liked to have said to this man:

"Yes, I have lied to you. I have robbed you of your wife. I had the excuse that I did not know how much you loved her and how much you loved me. Choose now the reparation that it may please you to require, and I will grant it you. Let us put an end to it."

Yes, but what of Helen? The secret of adultery does not belong to a single individual. To his duty towards Alfred was opposed another duty--a duty of honour also, and one freely contracted--and he was silent, feeling a very child in the presence of this honesty which suffered and wept before him, honesty possibly deceived and certainly simple. But a man who entrusts you with his pocket-book, and whom you rob of the bank-notes in one of the pockets of it, is also deceived and simple; only, on the other hand, you are a thief. Whatever Armand's superiority to Alfred might be, he found himself, by the mere fact of his own treachery and his friend's good faith, in that condition of humiliation which is intolerable to all higher natures. It was an experience that lasted for only a few minutes, but it was a very bitter one.

"Do not pay any attention to this complaining of mine," Alfred resumed; "my nerves are unstrung. I really do not know why I am like this, seeing that I have found with you the certainty that I needed. Ah! thank you!"--and he sprang forward to kiss his friend as brother kisses brother. Under this kiss Armand could feel the blood rising to his face.

"Come," he said in confusion, "calm yourself."

"Nay, I am calm," said Alfred; "you have been so good, you have listened to me with so much heart. Alas!" he added mournfully, "how is it that I cannot have an explanation with Helen like that which I have had with you? In her presence I feel so embarrassed, so constrained."

"And," replied Armand, who perceived the possibility of sparing his mistress a cruel scene, "you also take an exaggerated view of trifles. Shall I tell you my opinion about Madame Chazel? And this opinion has been confirmed by all the conversations that I have had with her. What she is suffering from is the change in her mode of life. The atmosphere of Paris, the habits of Paris, the people of Paris, are all enervating to her. She needs great consideration. Take my advice and spare her all discussion. Be gentle with her."

"You are right," said Alfred, who remembered having heard almost the same words in the mouth of the doctor, and this coincidence succeeded in momentarily tranquillising him. He shook his head, and uttered the following words, at which Armand felt no inclination to smile:

"I am an egotist; I see nothing but my own grief. But Helen has confidence in me. You see that I am jealous no longer. Speak to her of me; tell her how much I love her, how I desire only her happiness. Explain it all to her; she will believe you. God! I would give my whole life for a glance of tenderness in her eyes when she looks at me."