If any proof of the thorough many-sidedness of our nature were required,
it might be found in that law which is a customary object of indignation
with moralists, and which ordains that the sight of the sorrow of our
most loved ones cannot, at certain times, prevent us from being happy.
Our feelings seem to maintain a sort of life and death struggle against
one another in our hearts. Intensity of existence in anyone among them,
though it be but momentary, is only to be obtained at the cost of
weakening all the rest. It is certain that Hubert loved his two
mothers--as he always called the two women who had brought him up--to
distraction. It is certain that he had guessed that for many days they
had been holding conversations together analogous to that of the evening
on which he had borrowed from his godfather the three thousand francs
which he required for settling his debts and meeting the cost of his
journey.
And yet, on the second day after that evening, when he found himself in
the train which was taking him to Boulogne, it was impossible for him
not to feel his soul steeped, as it were, in divine bliss. He did not
ask himself whether Count Scilly would or would not speak of the step
that he had taken. He put aside the apprehension of this just as he
drove away the recollection of Madame Liauran's eyes at the moment of
his departure, and just as he stifled all the scruples that might be
suggested by his uncompromising piety.
If he had not absolutely lied to his mother in telling her that he was
going to join his friend Emmanuel Deroy in London, he had nevertheless
deceived this jealous mother by concealing from her that he would meet
Madame de Sauve at Folkestone. Now, Madame de Sauve was not free. Madame
de Sauve was married, and in the eyes of a young man brought up as the
pious Hubert had been, to love a married woman constituted an inexpiable
fault. Hubert must and did believe himself in a condition of mortal sin.
His Catholicism, which was not merely a religion of fashion and posture,
left him in no doubt on this point. But religion, family obligations of
truthfulness, fears for the future, all these phantoms of conscience
appeared to him--conditioned only as phantoms, vain, powerless images,
vanishing before the living evocation of the beauty of the woman who,
five months before had entered into his heart to renew all within it,
the woman whom he loved and by whom he knew himself to be loved.
Hubert had told the truth, in that he was not Madame de Sauve's lover in
that sense of entire and physical possession in which the term is
understood in our language. She had never belonged to him, and it was
the first time that he was going to be really alone with her, in that
solitude of a foreign land which is the secret dream of everyone who
loves.
While the train was steaming at full speed through plains alternately
ribbed with hills, intersected with watercourses, and bristling with
bare trees, the young man was absorbed in telling the rosary of his
recollections. The charm of the hours that were gone was rendered still
dearer to him by the expectation of some immense and undefined
happiness.
Although Madame Liauran's son was twenty-two years of age, the manner of
his education had kept him in that state of purity so rare among the
young men of Paris, who, for the most part, have exhausted pleasure
before they have had so much as a suspicion of love. But a fact of which
the young fellow was not aware was that it had been this very purity
which had acted more powerfully than the most accomplished libertinism
could have done upon the romantic imagination of the woman whose profile
was passing to and fro before his gaze with the motion of the carriage,
and showing itself alternately against woods, hills and dunes. How many
images does a passing train thus bear along, and with them how many
destinies rushing towards weal or woe in the distant and the unknown!
It was at the beginning of the month of October, in the preceding year,
that Hubert had seen Madame de Sauve for the first time. On account of
Madame Liauran's health, which rendered the shortest journey dangerous
to her, the two women never left Paris; but the young man sometimes went
during the summer or autumn to spend three or four days in some country
house. He was coming back from one of these visits in company with his
cousin George, when, getting into a carriage at a station on the same
northern line along which he was now travelling, he had met the young
lady with her husband. The De Sauves were acquainted with George, and
thus it was that Alexander Hubert had been introduced.
Monsieur de Sauve was a man of about forty-five years of age, very tall
and strong, with a face that was already too red, and with traces of
wear and tear which were discernible through his vigour, and the
explanation of which might be found, merely by listening to his
conversation, in his mode of regarding life. Existence to him was
self-lavishment, and he carried out this programme in all directions.
Head of a ministerial cabinet in 1869, thrown after the war into the
campaign of Bonapartist propaganda, a deputy since then, and always
re-elected, but an active deputy, and one who bribed his electors, he
had at the same time launched forth more and more freely into society.
He had a _salon_, gave dinners, occupied himself with sport, and still
found sufficient leisure to interest himself competently and
successfully in financial enterprises. Add to this that before his
marriage he had had much experience of ballet dancers, green-rooms of
small theatres, and private supper-rooms.
There are temperaments of this kind which nature makes into machines at
a great outlay, and consequently with great returns. Everything in
André de Sauve revealed a taste for what is ample and powerful, from
the construction of his great body to his style of dress, or to the
gesture with which he would take a long black cigar from his case to
smoke it. Hubert well remembered how this man, with his hairy hands and
ears, his large feet and his dragon's mien, had inspired him with that
description of physical repulsion which we all endure on meeting with a
physiology precisely contrary to our own.
Are there not respirations, circulations of blood, plays of muscle which
are hostile to us, thanks, probably, to that indefinable instinct of
life which impels two animals of different species to rend each other as
soon as they come face to face? Truth to tell, the antipathy of the
delicate Hubert was capable of being more simply explained on the ground
of an unconscious and sudden jealousy of Madame de Sauve's husband; for
Theresa, as her husband familiarly called her, had immediately exercised
a sort of irresistible attraction upon the young man. In his childhood
he had often turned over a portfolio of engravings brought back from
Italy by his illustrious grandfather, who had served under Bonaparte,
and at the first glance that fell upon this woman, he could not help
recalling the heads drawn by the masters of the Lombardic school, so
striking was the resemblance between her face and those of the familiar
Herodiases and Madonnas of Luini and his pupils.
There was the same full, broad forehead, the same large eyes charged
with somewhat heavy eyelids, the same delicious oval at the lower part
of the cheek terminating in an almost square chin, the same sinuosity of
lips, the same delightful union of eyebrow to the rising of the nose,
and over all these charming features, a suffusion, as it were, of
gentleness, grace, and mystery. Madame de Sauve had further, the
vigorous neck and broad shoulders of the women of the Lombardic school,
as well as all the other tokens of a race at once refined and strong,
with a slender waist and the hands and feet of a child. What marked her
out from this traditional type was the colour of her hair, which was not
red and gold but very black, and of her eyes, the mingled grey of which
bordered upon green. The amber paleness of her complexion, as well as
the languishing listlessness of all her movements, completed the
singular character of her beauty.
In the presence of this creature, it was impossible not to think of some
portrait of past times, although she breathed youth with the purple of
her mouth and the living fluid of her eyes, and although she was dressed
in the fashion of the day, and wore a jacket fitting close to her
figure. The skirt of her dress, made of an English material of a grey
shade, her feet cased in laced boots, her little man's collar, her
straight cravat, fastened with a diamond horseshoe pin, her Swede
gloves, and her round hat, scarcely suggested the toilet of princesses
of the sixteenth century; and yet she presented to the eye a finished
model of Milanese beauty, even in this costume of Parisian elegance. By
what mystery?
She was the daughter of Madame Lussac, _née_ Bressuire, whose relations
had not left the Rue Saint-Honoré for three generations, and of
Adolphus Lussac, Prefect under the Empire, who had come from Auvergne in
Monsieur Rouher's train. The chronicle of the drawing-rooms would have
answered the question by recalling the Parisian career of the handsome
Count Branciforte, somewhere about the year 1858, his greenish-grey
eyes, his dead-white complexion, his attentions to Madame Lussac, and
his sudden disappearance from surroundings in which for months and
months he had always lived. But Hubert was never to have these
particulars. By education and by nature he belonged to the race of those
who accept life's official gifts and ignore their deep-lying causes,
their thorough animality, and their tragic lining--a happy race, for to
them belongs the enjoyment of the flower of things, but a race devoted
beforehand to catastrophes, for only a clear view of the real will admit
of any manipulation of it.
No; what Hubert Liauran remembered of this first interview did not
consist of questions concerning the singularity of Madame de Sauve's
charm. Neither had he examined himself as to the shade of character that
might be indicated by the movements of the woman. Instead of studying
her face he had enjoyed it as a child will relish the freshness of the
atmosphere, with a sort of unconscious delight. The complete absence of
irony which distinguished Theresa, and which might be noted in her
gentle smile, her calm gaze, her smooth voice, and her tranquil
gestures, had instantly been sweet to him. He had not felt in her
presence those pangs of painful timidity which the incisive glance of
most Parisian ladies inflicts upon all young men.
During the journey which they had made together, while De Sauve and
George Liauran were speaking of a law concerning religious
congregations, the tenour of which was at that time exciting every
party, he had sat opposite to her, and had been able to talk to her
softly and, without knowing why, with intimacy. He who was usually
silent about himself, with a vague idea that the almost insane
excitability of his being made him a unique exception, had opened his
mind to this woman of twenty-five, whom he had not known for
half-an-hour, more than he had ever done to people with whom he dined
every fortnight.
In answer to a question from Theresa about his travels in the summer, he
had naturally, as it were, spoken of his mother and her complaint, then
of his grandmother, and then of their common life. He had given this
stranger a glimpse of the secret retreat in the house in the Rue Vaneau,
not indeed without remorse; but the remorse had been later, when he was
no longer within the range of her glances, and had come less from a
feeling of outraged modesty than from a fear of having been displeasing
to her. How captivating, in truth, were those gentle glances. There
emanated from them an inexpressible caress, and when they settled upon
your eyes, full in your face, the resultant sensation was like that of a
tender touch, and bordered upon physical voluptuousness.
Days afterwards Hubert still remembered the species of intoxicating
comfort which he had experienced in this first chat merely through
feeling himself looked at in this way, and this comfort had only
increased in succeeding interviews, until it had almost immediately
become a real necessity for him, like breathing or sleeping. When
leaving the carriage she had told him that she was at home every
Thursday, and he had soon learnt the way to the house in the Boulevard
Haussmann, where she lived. In what recess of his heart had he found the
energy for paying this visit, which fell on the next day but one after
their meeting? Almost immediately, she had asked him to dinner. He
remembered so vividly the childish pleasure which he took in reading and
re-reading the insignificant note of invitation, in inhaling its slight
perfume, and in following the details of the letters of his name,
written by the hand of Theresa. It was a handwriting which, from the
abundance of little, useless flourishes, presented a peculiarly light
and fantastic appearance, in which a graphologist would have been
prepared to read the sign of a romantic nature; but, at the same time,
the bold fashion in which the lines were struck and the firmness of the
down-strokes, where the pen pressed somewhat liberally, denoted a
willingly practical and almost material mode of life.
Hubert did not reason so much as this; but, from the first note, every
letter that he received in the same handwriting became to him a person
whom he would have recognised among thousands, of others. With what
happiness had he dressed to go to that dinner, telling himself that he
was about to see Madame de Sauve during long hours, hours which,
reckoned in advance, appeared infinite to him! He had felt a somewhat
angry astonishment when his mother, at the moment that he was taking
leave of her, had uttered a critical observation on the familiarity that
was customary in society now-a-days. Then, separated though he was by
months from those events, he was able, thanks to the special imagination
with which, like all very sensitive creatures, he was endowed, to recall
the exact shade of emotion which had been caused him by the dinner and
the evening, the demeanour of the guests and that of Theresa. It is
according as we possess a greater or smaller power of imagining past
pains and pleasures anew that we are beings capable of cold calculation,
or slaves to our sentimental life. Alas! all Hubert's faculties
conspired to rivet round his heart the bruising chain of memories that
were too dear.
Theresa wore, that first evening, a dress of black lace with pink knots,
and, for her only ornament, a heavy bracelet of massive gold on one
wrist. Her dress was not low enough to shock the young man, whose
modesty was of virginal susceptibility on this point. There were some
persons in the drawing-room, not one of whom, with the exception of
George Liauran, was known to him. They were, for the most part, men
celebrated by different titles in the society more particularly
denominated Parisian by those journals which pique themselves on
following the fashion. Hubert's first sensation had been a slight shock,
owing merely to the fact that some of these men presented to the
malevolent observer several of the little toilet heresies familiar to
the more fastidious if they have gone too late into society. Such is a
coat of antiquated cut, a shirt-collar badly made and worse bleached, or
a neck-tie of a white that borders upon blue, and tied by an unskilful
hand.
These trifles inevitably appeared signs of a touch of Bohemianism--the
word in which correct people confound all social irregularities--in the
eyes of a young man accustomed to live under the continuous
superintendence of two women of rare education, who had sought to make
him something irreproachable. But these small signs of unsatisfactory
dress had rendered Theresa's finished distinction still more graceful in
his eyes, just as, to him, the sometimes cynical freedom of the talk
uttered at table had imparted a charming significance to the silence of
the mistress of the house. Madame Liauran had not been mistaken when she
affirmed that there was very daring conversation at the house of the De
Sauves.
The evening that Hubert dined there for the first time a divorce suit
was discussed during the first half-hour, and a great lawyer gave some
unpublished details of the case--the abominable character of a
politician who had been arrested in the Champs Elysées, the two
mistresses of another politician and their rivalry--but all related, as
things are related only at Paris, with those hints which admit the
telling of everything. Many allusions escaped Hubert, and he was
accordingly less shocked by such narrations than by other speeches
bearing upon ideas, such as the following paradox, started by one of the
most famous novelists of the day.
"Ah! divorce! divorce!" said this man, whose renown as a daring realist
had crossed the threshold even of the house in the Rue Vaneau, "it has
some good in it; but it is too simple a solution for a very complicated
problem. Here, as elsewhere, Catholicism has perverted all our ideas.
The characteristic of advanced societies is the production of many men
of very different kinds, and the problem consists in constructing an
equally large number of moralists. For my part, I would have the law
recognise marriages in five, ten, twenty categories, according to the
sensitiveness of the parties concerned. Thus we should have life-unions
intended for persons of aristocratic scrupulosity; for persons of less
refined consciences, we should establish contracts with facilities for
one, two or three divorces; for persons inferior still, we should have
temporary connections for five years, three years, one year."
"People would marry just as they grant a lease," it was jestingly
observed.
"Why not?" continued the other; "the age boasts of being a revolutionary
one, and it has never ventured upon what the pettiest legislator of
antiquity undertook without hesitation--interference with morals."
"I see what you mean," replied André de Sauve; "you would assimilate
marriages with funerals--first, second, or third class----."
None of the guests who were amused by this tirade and the reply, amid
the brightness of the crystal, the dresses of the women, the pyramids of
fruit and the clusters of flowers, suspected the indignation which such
talk aroused in Hubert. Who would notice the silent and modest youth at
one end of the table? He himself, however, felt wounded to the very soul
in the inmost convictions of his childhood and his youth, and he glanced
by stealth at Theresa. She did not utter fifty words during this dinner.
She seemed to have wandered in thought far away from the conversation
which she was supposed to control, and, as though accustomed to this
absence of mind, no one sought to interrupt her reverie. She used to
pass whole hours in this way, absorbed in herself. Her pale complexion
became warmer; the brilliancy of her eyes was, so to speak, turned
within; and her teeth appeared small and close through her half-opened
lips. What was she thinking of at minutes such as these, and by what
secret magic were these same minutes those which acted most strongly
upon the imagination of those who were sensible of her charm?
A physiologist would doubtless have attributed these sudden torpors to
passages of nervous emotion, were they not the token of a sensual
aberration against which the poor creature struggled with all her
strength. Hubert had seen in the silence of that evening only a delicate
woman's disapprobation of the talk of her friends and her husband, and
he had found it a supreme pleasure to go up to her and talk to her on
leaving the dinner-table, at which his dearest beliefs had been wounded.
He had seated himself beneath the gaze of her eyes, now limpid once
more, in one of the corners of the drawing-room--an apartment furnished
completely in the modern style, and which, with its opulence that made
it like a little museum, its plushes, its ancient stuffs, and its
Japanese trinkets, contrasted with the severe apartments in the Rue
Vaneau as absolutely as the lives of Madame Castel and Madame Liauran
could contrast with the life of Madame de Sauve.
Instead of recognising this evident difference and making it a
starting-point for studying the newness of the world in which he found
himself, Hubert gave himself up to a feeling very natural in those whose
childhood has been passed in an atmosphere of feminine solicitude.
Accustomed by the two noble creatures who had watched over his childhood
always to associate the idea of a woman with something inexpressibly
delicate and pure, it was inevitable that the awakening of love should
in his case be accomplished in a sort of religious and reverential
emotion. He must extend to the person he loved, whoever she might be,
all the devotion that he had conceived for the saints whose son he was.
A prey to this strange confusion of ideas, he had, on that very first
evening on his return home, spoken of Theresa to his mother and his
grandmother, who were waiting for him, in terms which had necessarily
aroused the mistrust of the two women. He understood that now. But what
young man has ever begun to love without being hurried by the sweet
intoxication of the beginnings of a passion into confidences that were
irreparable, and too often deathful, to the future of his feelings?
In what manner and by what stage had this feeling entered into him? He
could not have told that. When once a man loves, does it not seem as
though he has always loved? Scenes were evoked, nevertheless, which
reminded Hubert of the insensible habituation which had led him to visit
Theresa several times a week. But had he not been gradually introduced
at her house to all her friends, and, as soon as he had left his card,
had he not found himself invited in all directions into that world which
he scarcely knew, and which was composed partly of high functionaries of
the fallen administration, partly of great manufacturers and political
financiers, and partly, again, of celebrated artists and wealthy
foreigners.
It formed a society free from constraint and full of luxury, pleasure
and life, but one the tone of which ought to have displeased the young
man, for he could not comprehend its qualities of elegance and
refinement, and he was very sensible of its terrible fault--the want of
silence, of moral life, and of long custom. Ah! he was not much
concerned with observations of this kind, occupied solely as he was to
know where he should perceive Madame de Sauve and her eyes. He called to
mind countless times at which he had met her--sometimes at her own
house, seated at the corner of her fireplace, towards the close of the
afternoon, and lost in one of her silent reveries; sometimes visiting in
full costume and smiling with her Herodias lips at conversations about
dresses or bonnets; sometimes in the front of a box at a theatre and
talking in undertones during an interval; sometimes in the tumult of the
street, dashing along behind her bright bay horse and bowing her head at
the window with a graceful movement.
The recollection of this carriage produced a new association of ideas in
Hubert, and he could see again the moment at which he had confessed the
secret of his feelings for the first time. Madame de Sauve and he had
met that day about five o'clock in a drawing-room in the Avenue du Bois
de Boulogne, and as it was beginning to rain in torrents the young woman
had proposed to Hubert, who had come on foot, to take him in her
carriage, having, she said, a visit to pay near the Rue Vaneau, which
would enable her to leave him at his door on the way. He had, in fact,
taken his seat beside her in the narrow double brougham lined with green
leather, in which there lingered something of that subtle atmosphere
which makes the carriage of an elegant woman a sort of little boudoir on
wheels, with all the trifling objects belonging to a pretty interior.
The hot-water jar was growing lukewarm beneath their feet; the glass,
set in its sheath in front, awaited a glance; the memorandum book placed
in the nook, with its pencil and visiting cards, spoke of worldly tasks;
the clock hanging on the right marked the rapid flight of those sweet
minutes. A half-opened book, slipped into the place where portable
purchases are usually put, showed that Theresa had obtained the
fashionable novel at the bookseller's.
Outside in the streets, where the lamps were beginning to light up,
there was the wildness of a glacial winter storm. Theresa, wrapped in a
long cloak which showed the outlines of her figure, was silent. In the
triple reflection from the carriage lamps, the gas in the street and the
expiring day, she was so divinely pale and beautiful that Hubert,
overpowered by emotion, took her hand. She did not withdraw it; she
looked at him with motionless eyes, that were drowned, as it were, in
tears which she would not have dared to shed. Without even hearing the
sound of his own words, so intoxicated was he by this look, he said to
her:
"Ah! how I love you!"
She grew still more pale, and laid her gloved hand upon his mouth to
make him be silent. He began to kiss this hand madly, seeking for the
place where the opening of the glove allowed him to feel the living
warmth of the wrist. She replied to this caress by that word which all
women utter at like moments--a word so simple, but one into which creep
so many inflexions, from the most mortal indifference to the most
emotional tenderness--
"You are a child."
"Do you love me a little?" he asked her.
And then, as she looked at him with those same eyes which sent forth a
ray of happiness, he could hear her murmur in a stifled voice:
"A great deal."
For most Parisian young men, such a scene would have been the prelude to
an effort towards the complete possession of a woman so evidently
smitten--an effort which might, perhaps, have miscarried; for a woman of
the world who wishes to protect herself finds many means, if she be
anything of a coquette, of avoiding a surrender, even after avowals of
the kind, or still more compromising marks of attachment. But there was
as little coquetry in the case of Madame de Sauve as there was physical
daring in that of the child of twenty-two who loved her. Did not these
two beings find themselves placed by chance in a situation of the
strangest delicacy? He was incapable of any further enterprise by reason
of his entire purity. As for her, how could she fail to understand that
to offer herself to him was to risk a diminution of his love? Such
difficulties are less rare under the conditions imposed upon the
feelings by modern manners than the fatuity of men will allow.
As manners are at present, all action between two persons who love each
other simultaneously becomes a sign, and how could a woman who knows
this fail to hesitate about compromising her happiness for ever by
seeking to embrace it too soon? Did Theresa obey this prudential motive,
or did she, perchance, find a heart's delight of delicious novelty in
the burning respect of her friend? With all men whom she had met before
this one, love had been only a disguised form of desire, and desire
itself an intoxicated form of self-pride. But whatever the reason might
be, she granted the young man all the meetings that he asked for during
the months following this first avowal, and all these meetings remained
as essentially innocent as they were clandestine.
While the Boulogne train was carrying Hubert towards the most longed-for
of these meetings he remembered the former ones--those passionate and
dangerous walks, nearly all hazarded across early Paris. They had in
this way adventured their ingenuous and guilty idyll in all the places
in which it seemed unlikely that anyone belonging to their set would
meet them. How many times, for instance, had they visited the towers of
Notre Dame, where Theresa loved to walk in her youthful grace amid the
old stone monsters carved on the balustrades? Through the slender ogive
windows of the ascent they looked alternately at the horizon of the
river confined between the quays, and that of the street confined
between the houses. In one of the buildings crouching in the shadow of
the cathedral, on the side of the Rue de Chanoinesse, there was a small
apartment on the fifth storey running out into a terrace, behind the
panes of which they used to imagine the existence of a romance similar
to their own, because they had twice seen a young woman and a young man
breakfasting there, seated at the same round table, with the window half
open.
Sometimes the squalls of the December wind would roar round the pile,
and storms of melted snow would heat upon the walls. Theresa was none
the less punctual to the appointment, leaving her cab before the great
doorway and crossing the church to go out of it at the side, and there
join Hubert in the dark peristyle which comes before the towers. Her
delicate teeth shone in her pretty smile, and her slender figure
appeared still more elegant in this ornament of the ancient city. Her
happy grace seemed to work even upon the old caretaker who, surrounded
by her cats, gives out the tickets from the depths of her lodge, for she
used to give her a grateful smile.
It was on the staircase of one of these ancient towers that Hubert had
ventured, for the first time, to print a kiss upon the pale face that to
him was divine. Theresa was climbing in front of him that morning up the
hollowed steps which turn about the stone pillar. She stopped for a
minute to take breath; he supported her in his arms, and, as she leaned
back gently and rested her head upon his shoulder, their lips met. The
emotion was so strong that he was like to die. This first kiss had been
followed by another, then by ten, then by such numbers of others that
they lost count of them. Oh, those long, thrilling, deep kisses, of
which she used to say tenderly, as though to justify herself in the
thought of her sweet accomplice:
"I am as fond of kisses as a little girl!"
They had thus madly peopled all the retreats wherein their imprudent
love had taken shelter with these adorable kisses. Hubert could remember
having embraced Theresa when they both were seated on a tomb-stone in a
deserted walk of one of the Paris cemeteries one bright, warm morning,
while around them stretched the garden of the dead, with its funereal
landscape of evergreens and tombs. He had embraced her again on one of
the benches in the distant park of Montsouris, one of the least known in
the town--a park quite recently planted, crossed by a railway,
overlooked by a pavilion of Chinese architecture, and having a horizon
formed by the factories in the mournful Glacière quarter stretching
around it.
At other times they had driven in an indeterminate fashion along the
dull slopes of the fortifications, and when it was time to return home
Theresa was always the first to depart. Himself hidden in the cab, which
remained stationary, he could see her crossing the kennels with her
dainty feet. She would walk along the footpath, not a spot of mud
dishonouring her dress, and would turn as though involuntarily to enwrap
him in a last look. It was on such occasions that he was only too
sensible of the dangers which he was causing this woman to incur, but
when he spoke to her of his fears she would reply, shaking her head with
so easily tragic an expression:
"I have no children. What harm can be done to me unless you are taken
from me?"
Although they did not belong entirely to each other they had come to
employ those familiarities in language which accompany a mutual passion.
Nearly every morning they wrote notes to each other, a single one of
which, would have been sufficient to prove Theresa to be Hubert's
mistress, and yet she was nothing of the kind. But whatever the detail
over which the young man's memory lingered, he always found that she had
not opposed any of the marks of tenderness which he had asked of her.
However, he had never ventured to imagine anything beyond clasping her
hands, her waist, her face, or resting, like a child, upon her heart.
She had with him that entire, confiding, indulgent abandonment of soul
which is the only token of true love that the most skilful coquetry
cannot imitate.
And in contrast with this tenderness, and serving to heighten its
sweetness still more, each scene in this idyll had corresponded to some
painful explanation between the young man and his mother, or some cruel
anguish on finding Madame de Sauve in the evening with her husband. The
latter, in reality, paid no attention to Hubert, but Madame Liauran's
son was not yet accustomed to the dishonouring falsehood of the cordial
hand-shake offered to the man who is being deceived. What mattered these
trifles, however, since they were going--he to join her, and she to wait
for him in the little English town at which they were to spend two days
together? Was it to Hubert or to Theresa that this idea had occurred?
The young man could not have told. André de Sauve was in Algeria for
the purpose of a Parliamentary inquiry.
Theresa had a convent friend who lived in the country, and was
sufficiently trustworthy to allow her to give out that she had gone to
see her. On the other hand she affirmed that the position of Folkestone,
on the way from Paris to London, made it the safest shelter in winter,
because French travellers pass through the town without ever stopping
there. At the mere thought of seeing her again, Hubert's heart melted in
his breast, and, with a quivering impossible of definition, he felt
himself on the point of rolling into a gulf of mystery, of intoxicating
forgetfulness and felicity.