CHAPTER VII

When Alfred Chazel had left the drawing-room in the Rue Lincoln, Armand, being left alone, felt the need of seeing clear within himself. The visit from the friend of his childhood had brought him a strangely uncomfortable feeling which he was unable to shake off either during the close of that morning, or during the afternoon, which was entirely taken up with going about from one place to another. By a line alleging an imaginary excuse he had released himself from the appointment made with Helen the evening before, and in his room as well as in the cab which drove him from one neighbourhood to another, he had the courage to question himself frankly.

He strove to beguile with physical motion the indefinable and unbearable sadness with which the scene that he had gone through continuously overwhelmed him. He went from tradesman to tradesman, paying bills that were in arrears, leaving cards at houses in which he had not set foot for months, and unceasingly he reverted to this questioning of the recesses of his conscience: Why was he so greatly shaken by a natural event which it was so easy to foresee, and which, when all was said, did not result in any disastrous consequence?

But no; he could not think of Chazel without feeling an inward wound, bleeding and keen. His pride had been stricken to its deepest depths. He, who since their common adolescence had in thought treated Alfred as an inferior creature, he, who had robbed the poor wretch of his wife without the slightest remorse, he now had suddenly been crushed with generosity by this man, had been almost outrageously contemned. There was no means of rebelling against it, of standing out against it. Of the two it was he, Armand, who was playing the unworthy part, and he was pained by it in the baser portions of his being, in that pride in taking the first place, which, from their childhood, had been manifested in the pettiest details. Did they enter a restaurant, or take part in a country excursion? It was Armand who sought to pay, just as he sought to surpass at every game, and to win prizes at the distributions. Vanity had prevented him from choosing a career. Vanity again had inclined him to intrigues with women. Thus he was humiliated to the very soul.

But his painful sensations proceeded at the same time from a more noble cause. The cord of pity had thrilled within him at the sighing forth of the terrible lament to which he had listened for an hour. Aridity of soul was not an essential part of Armand de Querne's nature. It was caused by the fact that with him emotion passed through the brain before it reached the heart. By a rooted deformity to be found in all intellectual lives, he must needs give himself reasons for feeling in such or such a manner. The powerlessness to love of which he was a victim proceeded from this peculiar disposition. He had never been able to believe in the truth of any woman's heart, and as a consequence he had always given himself reasons for not loving any of them unreservedly.

Such a nature is the most miserable of all, for it prompts those who possess it to the worst acts of egotism without securing to them the icy and unconscious serenity of true egotists. Thus it was that the young man was able to become Helen's lover without a scruple, and to tread upon friendship as tranquilly as upon the carpet in the room where they met; and yet Alfred's suffering had just moved him to the inmost fibre. Ah! the reason was that he did not dispute the sincerity of this suffering; he had touched it as though it were an object, and as he believed in it, he felt it.

At the same moment, and for the first time, he perceived the real scope of his conduct. If he had only suspected the depth of Chazel's love for Helen! If he had known with what ardent friendship this man had been attached to himself, Armand! But, people form ideas concerning a person, and proceed to no further verification. They say to themselves: "This man is nothing." They make no more account of his existence than that of a beast or a plant. And then they find themselves face to face with a heart that beats and that has been stricken, with a happiness that was living and that has been slain. What misconceptions lie at the root of our errors! And how many of the latter are merely the misunderstandings--but the irreparable misunderstandings--of others!

Armand de Querne pursued these thoughts the whole day, and at the end of them all, encountering him in a continuous fashion above all the rest, was the image of Helen, and again of Helen. For whom had he betrayed Alfred's confidence? For Helen. To whom had he so lightly sacrificed the memories of his childhood and his youth? To Helen. In whose interest had he just pledged that shameful word of honour? In Helen's. Now the young man had in his feelings towards his mistress reached that moment when the slightest contrariety is so exaggerated as to become almost unbearable; what, then, was to be said of such a humiliation? He had not deceived himself when, on the very eve of the first assignation, he had recognised that he could never love her.

He had at first passed through a sufficiently sweet period of intoxicated pleasure, during which he had abandoned himself to the charm of having a delightful mistress, as endearing as she was pretty, as submissive as she was impassioned. But even at that period he entertained no illusions regarding the nature of the feelings with which she inspired him or regarding their duration. As to the demonstrations of affection to which Helen surrendered herself, he looked upon them as a display of romanticism to be accounted for by long residence in the country among bad books and absurd dreams.

"She is a Madame Bovary," he said to himself, and with this simple phrase he had answered everything.

When once the malady of disbelief has assailed a tormented heart, every fresh detail serves as food for it. Helen's transports and fits of melancholy, her utterances, and her silences, had served for weapons against her. Did she abandon herself to her feelings with the ardour of a deeply affected soul? He thought badly of her; she was a libertine and nothing more. Did she shroud herself in melancholy reserve? He thought badly of her; she wanted to produce an effect, to assume an attitude. Did she question him respecting himself and his wife? What tyranny! Was she silent? What hypocrisy!

For all this, and by a seeming inconsistency such as characterises the facile kindliness of the indifferent when anxious to save themselves useless shocks, Armand had lent himself to the requisitions of Helen's passion. To evade petty contradictions, he had laid aside many of his habits. He declined dinner after dinner, deferred visit after visit, distanced his appearances at the club, in the Rue Royale, where formerly he used to show himself nearly every day. "You are never to be seen now." "I thought you were abroad." "You rascal, what good fortune are you hiding from us?" Such were the phrases with which he was greeted by nearly every one he met at the corner of a footpath, on the threshold of a restaurant, in the lobby of a theatre.

These phrases had at first made him smile. They now caused him a vague regret for his former mode of life. In proportion as habituation deadened his pleasure in the possession of Helen, did he surprise himself remembering with longing the insipid diversions of his freedom, which, as soon as they were renewed, he was again to look upon as hateful drudgery. All these different shades of feeling were beginning to have the effect of rendering his connection with Helen burdensome to him, and that long before the scene, the cruel recollection of which was persecuting him now. But the scene once passed through, how could he maintain his actual relations with his mistress?

No, a thousand times no. He could not do it. And first with respect to himself.

"Upon my word," he said to himself, "I will despise myself up to a certain point, but not beyond. So long as he had not spoken to me--"

He paused upon this thought, then went on aloud with an evil laugh:

"Ha! ha! so long as he had not spoken to me, it was exactly the same thing. Yes, but I did not feel it as I do now. I have had enough of all this lying. Pah! Pah!" and there was a physical bitterness in his mouth, almost a real nausea at the thought of deceiving Alfred again, after the step that the other had taken so loyally and so affectionately.

"And then," he reflected, "I cannot do it on her account. When jealousy has been roused, it is never completely lulled again. Alfred would understand it all in the end. He would follow his wife or have her followed. Then, behold a surprise, a scandal, and the unhappy Helen loses at a blow her position, her child, a part, doubtless, of her fortune, and all to be constrained to live with me who do not love her, and whom she does not love."

In order to give force to the plan of a final rupture which was already being sketched in his brain, he took pleasure in considering this last thought. No, Helen did not love him. She thought that she loved him, as she had probably thought she loved Varades and the rest; for there must have been others, in conformity with the axiom that a man is never a woman's first or second lover.

"If we break, there will be a tearful scene to be gone through, she will spend a few melancholy weeks, enabling her to say to her next lover, with eyes raised heavenwards, 'How I have suffered, love!' or else to her most intimate confidante, 'Oh! men! men!'"

There was a moment of base merriment; then his reflections began again.

"What strange animals women are! Here is a fellow who has a heart, frankness, and fidelity, as they call it; he can love--which is another of their expressions--and his wife must deceive him--for whom? For a cynic like me who am just the opposite. And if it had not been I, it would have been some one worse. It is humiliating to one's vanity, but refreshing to one's conscience--yes, it would have been some one else."

And a few minutes later:

"What fine reasoning, too, in order to justify myself! Suppose one applied it to assassination! If I do not kill you to-day you will die sooner or later in some other fashion. The truth is that adultery is a great pollution. Pah! Pah!"

He returned home, turning these melancholy conclusions over and over. When he was again in his drawing-room and in front of the easy-chair in which Alfred had sat that morning, he felt still more incapable of continuing to be Helen's lover--no, not two days, not a single day longer.

"We must put an end to it and break with each other, and that immediately," he said aloud.

He sat down at his table to write to Helen, but a note asking merely for an appointment, for to break with her by letter and leave such a weapon in her hands would be madness. Why not withdraw without seeing her again as he had done in the case of more than one mistress? It was impossible under the circumstances; it would be necessary also to renounce ever seeing Alfred again. He must therefore resign himself to a rupture by means of a scene.

The most important point was the choice of a locality. At her own house? And what if she had hysterics and some one came in? In the Rue de Stockholm? But what if she threw herself into his arms and the fever of the senses led him to take her once more, only to leave her afterwards like a clown, after possessing her? Once more, no.

"This is the best place after all," he said to himself. "The fact that the servant is at the door will be enough to restrain me from yielding to her. And if she has an hysterical attack, I have my little travelling medicine chest." And he scribbled a note absolutely correct in form. Had Alfred intercepted the missive he would have found in it nothing but an offer very natural, considering their somewhat exceptional degree of intimacy, to show Helen some albums for the choice of a costume for a fancy dress ball. In order to justify the meeting at his own house, he alleged the size of the albums and the difficulty of transporting them.

When he had sent this letter, melancholy took possession of him. A sudden vision showed him in anticipation the gladness that Helen would feel on the receipt of this note. The two occasions on which she had visited the rooms in the Rue Lincoln had been holidays of the heart to her. What a deception was there awaiting her on the morrow!

"Come, come," said Armand with energy. "In one short month I shall be in London for the season. On my return they will be spending their holidays away from Paris. This ugly story will have a better ending than many others. Poor Alfred! There is still time to act as an honourable man."

He said this to himself, and our miserable hearts are so ingenious in duping themselves, that while he said it he believed it.

It was a little after two o'clock in the afternoon of the following day, when Helen Chazel entered this same drawing-room in the Rue Lincoln where the day before her husband had spoken, and her lover reflected, in a manner that would have prostrated her soul with despair had she been able to know their words and thoughts; but she was aware of but one thing--her deep joy at seeing her lover again after so long a time. The past forty-eight hours had seemed endless to her. When passing in front of the servant she had experienced a slight impulse of nervous emotion, although she had her veil over her face, and the man would probably never know her name. Joy at this meeting prevailed--joy and also anxiety. Since she had lost the intoxicated certainty of the early days of their love, she never parted from Armand without asking herself:

"How shall I find him next time?"

And now again, while he was relieving her of her muff and cloak, she was at once enraptured and uneasy. She took off her veil and then merely said to him: "How do you do!" laying her head upon the young man's shoulder and looking at him. This look was sufficient to enable her to discern on his countenance the premonitory tokens of the impending conversation. He had said nothing to her, and already she knew that he had not brought her to show her albums, that the excuse of the preceding day for not seeing her was a false one, that an important event had come to pass.

But what event? On the occasion of their walk in the Jardin des Plantes, just two days before, he had been more coaxing, more loving, less reserved than was his wont. She had almost ventured to feel aloud in his presence. A sudden transition had again ruffled the intimacy between them. What was he going to say? He had forced her to sit down without giving her any other caress than the stroking of her hair with his hand, and he began to speak to her, relating Alfred's visit of the previous day, the result of their explanations, and the meeting in the Jardin des Plantes.

"You reproached me for being over-prudent. You see now whether I was wrong in telling you that he was growing jealous. What did he say to you in the evening?"

"Nothing," she replied.

Although this birth of jealousy on Alfred's part, and the evidence of his deception towards herself were facts of weighty importance to her security, what chiefly concerned her at that moment was to ascertain how her lover had defended his love--their love--and she asked him:

"What did you say to him yourself?"

"If I alone had been involved," returned Armand, "you can understand that I should not have resorted to subterfuge in the presence of such loyalty. In short, I have wronged him, he has a right to every reparation, and I should have felt it a great relief to offer him such; but you were implicated, and I gave him my word that there had never been anything but the relations of friendship between us."

He paused for a moment, and then went on with visible irritation.

"As it has never been our custom, neither his nor mine, to have two such words, one true and the other false, he believed me, and for the moment he is quieted."

She listened to him and looked at him, while he himself looked at the fire, his elbows upon his knees, and his chin on his hands. She was asking herself:

"If we were driven to such an extremity would he love me sufficiently to go away with me, to give me all his life and to accept mine?"

She was silent, absorbed in the expectation of that which was to follow, and which she could not yet foresee. On his part, he employed his last phrase in continuation.

"He is quieted--for the moment," he repeated, and he emphasized the last three words. "But our relations will be rendered very difficult ones. You see, when a man is not suspicious, everything that should serve as a proof against, serves as a proof for. When a man is suspicious, the contrary happens. Am I right?"

He was embarrassed by the silence in which she continued to look at him. Leaning back in her easy-chair, her hands extended on the two arms of it, her lips parted, she watched, panting as it were, for a gleam of tender emotion on her lover's face. She read on it nothing but the dry reflectiveness with which men set forth the data of a piece of business. His voice especially--that voice whose slightest tones she knew, the voice which always made its way into the remotest chambers of her heart--ah! that voice had a cruel, almost metallic harshness. Well! 'twas another episode to join to the tale of her prolonged martyrdom, the torture of a living creature chained to a dead soul wherein that which caused her to writhe in anguish did not awake so much as a vibration. Nevertheless, to this question, "Am I right," she replied in a voice choking with anxiety:

"It is possible; you are a better judge of such matters than I am." Then with an effort: "And what conclusion do you draw?"

"First promise me," replied Armand, "that you will not take ill what I am going to say to you. Be persuaded that I shall never have any object in view but your own interest. You do not doubt this?"

Why did Helen bow her head at these simple words as though she had plainly read the fatal words of rupture on his lips? Why was she on the point of crying out like the woman condemned during the Terror:

"Sir executioner, a moment longer."

Ah! why does the heart that loves possess this second sight which increases misfortune by the anticipation of them?

"We must endure a separation for a short time," the young man resumed, "until Alfred's suspicions have been set at rest--four or five months, perhaps six, but not more. I will make all easy for you by leaving Paris myself, although it is very inconvenient for me to do so just now. But your peace is the first thing to be considered, is it not?"

He continued speaking, but she had ceased to listen to him. It was not danger that she perceived before her. What was danger to her? Only one misfortune existed for her, that of seeing Armand no more. He spoke of separation for four or five months, perhaps six, just as he would have spoken of the beauty of the day, of a new play, of the paying of a visit. To him it appeared a very simple matter to be absent from the town in which she lived, to lay aside the sweet custom of their daily interviews! No, no, the man did not love her.

"And you announce this news to me calmly like that," she said; "and if you were to love me no longer after this absence, what would become of me? What would be left to me."

"I entreat you," replied Armand impatiently, for he felt that the lead in the conversation was slipping from him, "not to let us confuse the questions at issue. Just now we have to deal with your husband's jealousy and your own safety. Is an absence necessary? Yes or no? Everything turns on that."

"But what if I suggest another plan to you," she asked. "My husband is jealous--be it so. My safety is compromised--be it so. Then, take me away with you. I would rather lose everything and keep you."

And she devoured him with her eyes as she uttered these words. He was obliged to show the bottom of his heart this time. She was in one of these crises in which one stakes all to win all, to learn--yes to learn the truth, to hold it, clasp it, feel it as though it were a body, should death be the consequence!

"You know better than I," he replied, "that I cannot do that, and the reason why I cannot. You were forgetting your child. A wife may be taken from a husband, but never a mother from a son!"

"Ah!" she exclaimed, "why do you not tell me that you have ceased to love me? Why these phrases and this circumspection? Do you think that I am not brave enough to look reality in the face, whatever it may be? I swear to you, Armand, that it would be less cruel on your part to tell me everything at once. Armand, say that you have ceased to love me; I will not be angry with you, and will go away quite alone with my grief. A grief that you have caused will still be something of yourself; but do not leave me in this horrible uncertainty, do not speak so coldly of going far away from me if you love me. Heavens! what I am enduring!"

Her mouth was distorted with emotion, her breath came short, and tears started from her eyes, big, heavy tears that flowed down her cheek one after another, leaving what looked like furrows behind them.

"It is just as I expected," said Armand to himself, and these tears, instead of softening him, enervated him even to anger. He did not sympathise with this grief as he had sympathised with Alfred's, perhaps owing to that difference between the sexes which brings it to pass that a woman's grief is not always as intelligible to us as that of a fellow-man; at times, also, the feeling of cowardice that we feel when giving pain to a mistress so provokes us, by lowering us in our own eyes, as to exclude tenderness. He had risen, and was walking about the room, thinking to himself:

"Why not put an end to the whole thing at once?"

Then he added aloud:

"I really do not know what it is that makes you cry. In what I have said to you there was nothing that did not breathe the deepest affection for you."

How could she have failed to notice that already he no longer made use of the word "love."

"But since you require me to speak frankly to you, I will obey you. No; it is not only on your own account that I request this separation, but also on my own. There is now a barrier between us, Helen, that a man of honour cannot cross."

"What is it?" replied Helen, finding strength enough to raise her pale, tear-stained face.

"The unqualified trust of another man," he answered brusquely. "When Alfred came here, to this very spot, he did not speak to me of his jealousy only, he displayed such esteem and friendship towards me as I forbear from describing to you. He suspected me, and he came to me with open heart. There is no bitterness, no bitter sentiment in that heart, but beauty of feeling, straightforwardness and sincerity of friendship. No, Helen, I can deceive that man no longer. I should despise myself too much if I did."

"Well! and what of me?" she cried, rising in her turn. This praise of her husband by her lover completed her distraction, and anger was overtaking her. "Did I not trample upon all that, in order to come to you? Do you think that I was born for treachery and falsehood? Did you hesitate for one moment about asking me to deceive this honest man, this confiding friend, when you wished to have me? Ah! you are not ashamed of it on my account and you are on your own! I forbid you to speak of honour, and perjured faith, and betrayed friendship. You have no right to do so, seeing that it is upon yourself, upon yourself, understand, that it all recoils. Did you entreat me to be yours? Answer in your turn, yes or no?"

"Pardon me," returned Armand. "Let us go back to the facts. We loved each other. You were not a young girl so far as I know. I was not a youth. We were not making our first entry upon life--we were both persons of experience. Is that not so? We knew where we were going. I owed it to you not to compromise you. Did I speak of you to any living soul? I owed it to you not to disturb your peace? I am disturbing it and I withdraw. As to my conscience, permit me to be the sole judge of what it enjoins and what it forbids."

"And in six months," replied Helen, "will your conscience be more accommodating? Come, be logical and frank. It is not a momentary separation that you want but a rupture. Let me at least hear you say as much since you desire people to esteem you."

"Yes," replied the young man brutally, exasperated by the revolt of a woman usually so gentle and submissive.

"So you thought that you were free from all duty towards me?" she continued. "You were leaving me all alone in that way. You were going away. You would have written me five or six letters, and then that would have been the end. You would have uttered these fine phrases to yourself: 'We knew where we were going.' 'She was not a young girl.' 'We were both persons of experience.' I should be curious to know," she added with that mournful irony which is imparted by rising frenzy, "just what you understand by that."

"What would be the use?" he said.

"I want to know," she returned vehemently. "I have a good right to know at least what you think of me."

"Do you believe that I am not acquainted with your life?"

"With my life," Helen questioned, crushed by a kind of stupor, which the young man took for terror at this sudden revelation.

"Do you wish for facts?" he returned harshly. "Well, you shall have them. Have you forgotten your intrigue with Monsieur de Varades!"

"Ah!" she cried, "nay, that is infamous. Monsieur de Varades!" And she passed her hands wildly across her forehead. "Tell me that you did not believe that, I entreat you. My love, tell me that you did not think that of me. Oh! tell me, tell me, tell me!"

"I did believe it," he replied, his heart closed to the wail of his mistress by that keen, insidious jealousy of the past which, by a strange anomaly of his nature, had always caused him some pain when by her side, although he did not love her.

"Then," said Helen, frozen now by this reply, "if you believed it, why did you never speak of it to me? If the thought of it governed you when you asked me to be yours, if you considered that you had less responsibility towards me by reason of it, why did you entertain no doubt about it? Were you sure of it? Had you seen it? Was there not a chance against it being true--a chance, a single chance? Why, are you not aware that it is a crime to take all a woman's heart, and to keep thoughts of that kind in one's own?"

"Tut!" he replied, shrugging his shoulders; "you would have thought me perfectly ridiculous if I had not been your lover. Your past belonged to you alone, and I had no right to call you to account for it any more than for your future. As to the present, I know you well enough to be sure that you are not a woman who would take two lovers at the same time."

"'Tis a great honour," she replied in an almost stifled voice. She was pale as death. The egotism and insensibility of the man she loved paralysed her with such horror that her tears would no longer come. She felt but one desire: to leave this man, to see no longer those eyes and those lips--those lips that she had loved so well, and which had always lied so to her, since from the very first day he had believed this without proof! Mechanically she resumed her cloak and muff, and fastened her veil.

"Good-bye," she said. It would have been impossible for her to continue the conversation just then, so choked was she with indignation.

He did not try to detain her, and also said:

"Good-bye."

She left the room, and he accompanied her, without a word being spoken on either side, to the outer door. The latter once closed, he returned to the drawing-room, where no trace of the tragic scene enacted in it remained but the disarrangement of the easy chair that had been pushed aside by Helen as she rose.

"All has passed off better than I expected," he said to himself. "How easy it is to pin them to the wall with a little fact! Well! it is over."

"It is over," he repeated aloud with that strange feeling both of relief and of distress which accompanies the interruption of love. "She was very pretty," he reflected to himself. "Now we must be on the look out for revenge. But what revenge? She has not a note in which I speak familiarly to her. I shall have the trouble of taking away all those trifles of hers at Madame Palmyre's. I will have them returned to her later on, when we have reached the stage at which she can say to me 'You gave me great pain,' with the letter of my successor in her bosom, between the chemisette and her skin."

He sat down again in front of the fire, from which he drew a few sparks.

"Ah!" he continued, "the after-taste of life is too bitter!"