'But, my poor wife, all that is monstrous. They are driving you mad! If it is true that I set a new harvest in you, it is precisely on that harvest that I rely to ensure our happiness some day. Yes, we became so blended one with the other that we can never be wholly parted. And you will end by returning to me: our children will bring you back. The pretended poison which your foolish grandmother talks about is our love itself; it is working in your heart, and it will bring you back.'
'Never!... God would strike us down, both of us,' she retorted. 'You drove me from our home by your blasphemy. If you had really loved me, you would not have taken my daughter from me, by refusing to let her make her first Communion. How can I return to a home of impiety where it would not even be allowable for me to pray? Ah! how wretched I am; nobody, nobody loves me, and heaven itself will not open!'
She burst into sobs. Filled with despair by that frightful cry of distress Marc felt that it would be useless and cruel to torture her further. The hour for reunion had not yet come. Silence fell between them once more, while in the distance, on the Avenue des Jaffres, the cries of some children at play rose into the limpid evening atmosphere.
During their impassioned converse they had at last drawn nearer to each other on the lonely bench; and now, seated side by side, they seemed to be reflecting, their glances wandering away amid the golden dust of the sunset. At last Marc spoke again, as if finishing his thoughts aloud: 'I do not think, my friend, that you gave for a moment any credit to the abominable charges with which certain people wished to besmirch me à propos of my brotherly intercourse with Mademoiselle Mazeline.'
'Oh! no,' Geneviève answered quickly, 'I know you, and I know her. Do not imagine that I have become so foolish as to believe all that has been said to me.'
Then with some slight embarrassment she continued: 'It is the same with me. Some people, I know it, have set me among the flock which Father Théodose is said to have turned into a kind of cour galante. In the first place I do not admit that anything of the kind exists. Father Théodose is, perhaps, rather too proud of his person, but I believe his faith to be sincere. Besides, I should have known how to defend myself—you do not doubt it, I hope?'
In spite of his sorrow Marc could not help smiling slightly. Geneviève's evident embarrassment indicated that there had been some audacity on the part of the Capuchin, and that she had checked it. Assuming this to be the case Marc felt the better able to understand why she was so perturbed and embittered.
'I certainly do not doubt it,' he responded. 'I know you, as you know me, and I am aware that you are incapable of wrong-doing. I have no anxiety respecting Father Théodose on your account, whatever another husband of my acquaintance may have to say.... Yet all the same I regret that you were so badly advised as to quit worthy Abbé Quandieu for that handsome monk.'
A fugitive blush which appeared on Geneviève's cheeks while her husband was speaking told him that he had guessed aright. It was not without a profound knowledge of woman in her earlier years, when an amorosa may exist within the penitent, that Father Crabot had advised Madame Duparque to remove her daughter from the charge of old Abbé Quandieu and place her in that of handsome Father Théodose. The Catholic doctors are well aware that love alone can kill love, and that a woman who loves apart from Christ never wholly belongs to Christ. The return of Geneviève to her husband and her sin was fatal unless she should cease to love, or rather unless she should love elsewhere. But, as it happened, Father Théodose was not expert in analysing human nature, he had blundered with respect to the passionate yet loyal penitent confided to his hands, and had thus precipitated the crisis, provoking repugnance and rebellion in that distracted, suffering woman, who, without as yet returning to sober reason, saw the glorious, mystical stage-scenery of the religion of her childhood collapse around her.
Well pleased with the symptoms which he fancied he could detect, Marc asked somewhat maliciously: 'And so Father Théodose is no longer your confessor?'