“You laugh! you laugh!” stammered he. “Tell me who the letter is from? it must be from somebody, that letter must.”
He had taken the entire afternoon to disengage that one idea from the confusion into which Octave’s answers had plunged him. Now, he stuck to it: if it was not Monsieur Mouret, it was then some one else, and he demanded a name. As Valerie was walking off without answering him, he seized hold of her arm and twisted it spitefully, with the rage of an exasperated child, repeating the while:
“I’ll break it. Tell me, who is the letter from?”
The young woman, frightened, and stifling a cry of pain, had become quite white. Campardon felt her abandoning herself against his shoulder, succumbing to one of those nervous attacks which would shake her for hours together. He had scarcely time to lead her into the apartment reserved for the two families, where he laid her on a sofa. Some ladies had followed him—Madame Juzeur, Madame Dambreville—who unlaced her, whilst he discreetly retired.
“Sir, I beg your pardon,” said Théophile, going up to Octave, whose eyes he had encountered when twisting his wife’s arm. “Every one in my place would have suspected you; is it not so? But I wish to shake hands with you, to prove to you that I admit myself to have been in the wrong.”
He shook hands with him, and led him one side, tortured by a necessity to unbosom himself, to find a confidant for the outpourings of his heart.
“Ah! sir, if I were to tell you——”
And he talked for a long while of his wife. When a young girl, she was delicate, it was said jokingly that marriage would set her right. She had not sufficient air in her parents’ shop, where, every evening for three months, she had appeared to him very nice, obedient, of a rather sad disposition, but charming.
“Well! sir, marriage did not set her right—far from it. After a few weeks she became terrible; we could no longer agree together. There were quarrels about nothing at all. Changes of temper at every minute—laughing, crying, without my knowing why. And absurd sentiments, ideas that would knock a person down, a perpetual mania for making people wild. In short, sir, my home has become a hell.”
“It is very remarkable,” murmured Octave, who felt a necessity for saying something.