And so M. Fabien rattled on, while the curé looked at him and listened with a growing discontent. Before he went to bed, he found it necessary to repeat to himself all the evidence he had gathered against M. Deshoulières. There was no denying it; things bore a very dark appearance. A suspicious trust; an appointment said to have been kept in the face of his own knowledge to the contrary; letters suppressed; rumours that all was not right; a letter from M. l’Abbé at the Evêché: “M. Deshoulières is a man well spoken of, but my own opinion of him does not coincide with that of the world.” A letter from the Préfet: “I consider this doctor a pestilent, discontented individual, always trying to advance his own schemes. In effect, I doubt him.”
“M. le Préfet would not have spoken without reason,” said M. le Curé to himself assuringly, as he folded up the letter. “After all, there are cases in the world when a man’s face does not agree with his actions.”
M. Deshoulières went sadly home that night. It was not of his own grey future that he was thinking, nor of the accusations that had been heaped upon him so unexpectedly—he almost smiled as he recalled them. He was thinking of Thérèse and of Fabien. Was this man to whom her heart had gone out, one who would keep it, and treasure it, and cherish it? There was a deep intolerable pain in the question that would come surging up in spite of his efforts to still it. The stars shone out, and a fresh rustling breeze was swaying the stiff sycamores, lights were gleaming from the old houses, the vines on the balconies had changed into dusky masses. The shadowy old sounds and sights were very familiar and sweet to poor Max, but this night they seemed to have lost their power.
Chapter Eighteen.
“Aimer sans Amour est amer.”
Thérèse was waiting for M. Deshoulières the next morning when he went to Rue St. Servan. He could not tell how she looked; she was eager, troubled, doubtful, all at once. He did not yet know what had happened, but he guessed directly. “Ah, that poor madame!” she said shuddering. “It is too terrible—” and then she stopped.
He saw that she had been overwrought. All that night Madame Roulleau had lain on the floor by the child’s bed, in a fierce agony of despair, not weeping, but writhing. Once she had looked up with dry, burning eyes, and said to Thérèse hoarsely, “Your lover is come. Do you remember? he told you so once, and I beat him for it. Do you hear that, all of you? I told a lie, and I beat my little Adolphe.” There was something so terrible in her voice and in her face, that Thérèse and Nannon shrank. And this was all that she knew of Fabien. The poor child, in spite of her bravery, could hardly endure these different emotions that were tearing at her heart. Nothing at the hospital had been so dreadful to witness as the sight of that hard, insupportable agony. And in the midst of it she had been told that Fabien was come.