(10)
"Perhaps we had better not wait any longer for my cousin," said Mme de Villecresne at last to the guest. "He must be out, I think."
The two of them were alone in the salon. Supper had been announced five minutes ago, since which event Laurent had been grimly waiting to cast his bombshell—as, obviously, it had not already been cast.
"He is out," he replied briefly. "I would have told you before, Madame, had I realized that it was for him that you were waiting." (For until that moment he had forgotten that Mme de la Rocheterie was not going to make her appearance at the meal.)
The news discomposed his companion, he could see. Did she then expect Aymar to come and sup with them as if nothing had happened?
"How strange!" she murmured. "Did he say, Monsieur de Courtomer, at what time he intended to return?"
"No, Madame. He has gone away, I fear—if not for good, at least for some time. So, if you will allow me——"
He held out his arm. But Avoye de Villecresne stood perfectly still; she had gone white, then red, and was now white again. Oh, how was it possible that with such eyes as hers she could have done it!
"Gone away!" she whispered. But at that moment the door suddenly opened, and admitted Mme de la Rocheterie, on the arm of her elderly maid, colour in her delicate cheeks and a sparkle in her eyes. She might be indisposed, but she was clearly very angry. In her hand was a letter.
"That will do, Rose." And when the door had closed she stood in the middle of the room, extremely erect, and said to Laurent, "As my grandson has so little idea of the courtesy due to a guest, to a departing guest, and one to whom he is under such an obligation, I am constrained to take his place. If you will accept my apologies for his extraordinary behaviour, Monsieur de Courtomer, be good enough to give me your arm to the dining-room."
Laurent, petrified, offered it.
The discomfort of the meal was intense. For one thing only was Laurent grateful—that Mme de la Rocheterie was so wroth that, after announcing that the culprit had said he had gone off on business connected with the late Eperviers, she left the subject of Aymar's defection alone, and kept the conversation going on other subjects. Mme de Villecresne, on the contrary, seemed almost dazed.
After supper, half to Laurent's relief, the Vicomtesse withdrew again, leaving her granddaughter to give him coffee in the salon.
Laurent was in reality quite unwilling to accept even this conventional office from the hands of Mme de Villecresne. That he had come to think her charming only made this evening's revulsion fiercer. She a worthy mate for Aymar, whom she had forsaken in his bitterest need, stabbed when—nay, because—he had endured so much for her! But, though he was brimming with anger against her, he would probably have held his hand if she, too, had not murmured, as she gave him his cup, something not very coherent about an apology. How was he to guess that she was so torn with misery and dismay that she hardly knew what she was saying, and caught at any banality lest she should weep before him?
He drank off the coffee and cleared his decks for action.
"There is no need for apology, Madame," he observed. "The situation is not unfamiliar to me. It reminds me of the evening I spent when M. de la Rocheterie was turned out of Arbelles."
Mme de Villecresne looked faintly startled.
"You mean the evening after he was released?"
"No, Madame. He never was 'released' in the sense commonly attached to that term. He was turned out into the road, weak and ill, at a quarter of an hour's notice—turned out before the eyes of the whole garrison."
The blood began to ebb from Avoye's face. "But why——"
"Why? To humiliate him, and because, weeks earlier, he would not betray M. du Tremblay's plans. The attempt to wring information out of him then, when he was barely able to speak, nearly killed him as it was."
"Tried to wring information out of him—out of Aymar!" repeated Avoye in a horrified voice. "And turned out of Arbelles! But, Monsieur de Courtomer, why have I not been told these things before—why have they been kept from me, and I allowed to think . . ."
Laurent, who had been standing, sat down heavily. "Yes, it might have been better not. But he would do it—anything to spare you a moment's pain."
She stiffened. "I do not like being spared, Monsieur de Courtomer."
"No, Madame. And I know that you are brave; your cousin knows it, too. But it is difficult for a man—for some men, that is" (he did not at the moment feel himself to be of their number) "to hurt a woman when by keeping the hurt to themselves they can spare her."
"I know they think that. They do not realize what a woman—what some women—feel about it. And need sparing a woman involve lying to her?" There was a passion of abhorrence in her tone—then, with extreme suddenness, she caught herself up. "I do not mean, of course, that my cousin lied to me!" And there was almost defiance in the gaze with which she met Laurent's. But as that young man was speechless, trying to digest this remarkable statement, she was able to hurry on to say, "Then I was misled when I thought he was well treated at Arbelles?"
"I verily believe that she is trying to prove me the liar, Aymar having suddenly become so immaculate!" thought Laurent. He replied soberly, "You must pardon me, Madame, but that was not a thing on which anybody consciously misled you. You assumed it, because he had excellent medical attention and was 'released.' But in other respects he was treated abominably—at least when the Colonel was there." And he proceeded to give her a résumé of what Aymar had undergone at their hands, told her how he had found him exhausted under a haystack—in short, what had nearly been the consequence of his "release."
Avoye turned her face away. After a silence she said in a voice whose tremulousness was pierced with terror, "I knew that there was something more amiss with him than wounds! Monsieur de Courtomer, you swore to me . . ."
She became inaudible; all he could catch was the word "decline."
"No, no, Madame," he said quickly, anxious to reassure her (for it was plain that in spite of what she had done she did care). "No, his condition is merely the result of the blood he has lost. The doctor said so clearly, and that it would perhaps be as much as a year before he was strong again."
"How did he come to—to lose so much blood?" she asked faintly. "Was it then so long before the enemy found him after . . . after what happened in the Bois des Fauvettes?"
"Not so very long—not more than an hour perhaps; but you see he struggled hard to get free, and being fastened like that, upright——"
He broke off before the uncomprehending horror of the face she had raised. Was it possible that she did not know that essence of "what had happened in the Bois des Fauvettes"?
"Don't you know?" he jerked out almost mechanically.
"Know what? Struggled to get free . . . fastened . . . Monsieur de Courtomer, what awful thing are you talking about?"
And Laurent cursed himself. Aymar had not told her the worst. Equally, of course, he did not wish her to know it.
"Oh, nothing, Madame," he stammered. "I would not for worlds have mentioned it had I not thought that you knew already."
"O God!" cried the girl rather hysterically, "more things kept from me! For pity's sake, Monsieur, try to forget that I am a woman!"
Laurent, recovering himself, bowed. "If you wish it." And on that, sparing her very little, he did tell her the true and full story of the Bois des Fauvettes. But he had the grace not to look at her meanwhile.
"Aymar made out that it was . . . all over very quickly . . . done in the surprise . . . almost a mistake," she said faintly at the end.
"On the contrary," replied Laurent remorselessly, "it was as protracted and deliberate as I have told you. You can imagine that the Imperialists, finding him in the situation they did, were not likely to show him more consideration than . . . than some of his friends have done since. He was taken to Arbelles, senseless, in a farm cart. How he was looked on there I have told you. One would have thought he had paid enough. . . ."
He was very brutal; he knew it. He was going very far—he did not care. He was so worked up that a very little more would have brought out the story of the ramrod. But there was also a limit to what his hearer could endure. He saw her now get up, and ask him to excuse her "for a few minutes." As he shut the door which he had held open for her he was almost sure that he heard a stifled sob on the other side.
Then he paced up and down the room thinking, "I have done it now! What would Aymar say if he knew! I don't care, I don't care! It was time she heard these things. Look what keeping this from her has resulted in!" And this was his most secret thought: "She has hurt Aymar bitterly, unbearably: but I have hurt her!"
He did not believe that she would reappear that evening; and she did not. By that he knew that his blows had gone home. After waiting a little he wandered round the salon again, coming finally to an anchor in front of the picture of the two children. That to end in this! "How could you?" he said to the laughing little girl, and soon afterwards went unhappily, guiltily, yet unrepentantly to bed.