Where did he go? She never knew. He did not appear in society: the damp, cold weather precluded the idea that he went on the water for pleasure. However, he often said that he had been on a boat, and his clothes smelt of tar. He was learning to row, taking lessons of a fisherman in the harbor. He pretended that the fatigue calmed the excitement of his nerves, and put him in good condition for the next day's labor. Thérèse no longer dared to go to his studio. He seemed annoyed when she expressed a wish to see his work. He did not want her reflections when he was working out his own idea, nor did he wish to have her come there and say nothing, which would make him feel as if she were inclined to find fault. She was not to see his work until he deemed it worthy to be seen. Formerly, he never began anything without explaining his idea to her; now, he treated her like the public.
Two or three times he passed the whole night abroad. Thérèse did not become accustomed to the anxiety these prolonged absences caused her. She would have exasperated him by giving any sign that she noticed them; but, as may be imagined, she watched him and tried to learn the truth. It was impossible for her to follow him herself at night in a city full of sailors and adventurers of all nations. Not for anything in the world would she have stooped to have him followed by any one. She stole noiselessly into his room and looked at him as he lay asleep. He seemed utterly exhausted. Perhaps he had, in reality, undertaken a desperate struggle against himself, to deaden by physical exercise the excessive activity of his thought.
One night she noticed that his clothes were muddy and torn, as if he had actually been in a fight, or as if he had had a fall. Alarmed beyond measure, she approached him, and discovered blood on his pillow; he had a slight wound on the forehead. He was sleeping so soundly that she thought that she could, without rousing him, partly uncover his breast to see if there was any other wound; but he woke, and flew into a rage which was the coup de grâce to her. She tried to fly, but he detained her by force, put on a dressing-gown, locked the door, and then, striding excitedly up and down the room which was dimly lighted by a small night-lamp, he poured forth at last all the suffering that was heaped up in his heart.
"Enough of this," he said; "let us be frank with each other. We no longer love each other, we have never loved each other! We have deceived each other; you meant to take a lover; perhaps I was not the first nor the second, but no matter! you wanted a servant, a slave; you thought that my unhappy disposition, my debts, my ennui, my weariness of a life of debauchery, my illusions concerning true love, would put me at your mercy, and that I could never recover possession of myself. To carry such an enterprise to a successful issue, you needed to have a happier disposition yourself, and more patience, more flexibility, and, above all, more spirit! You have no spirit at all, Thérèse, be it said without offence. You are all of a piece, monotonous, pig-headed, and excessively vain of your pretended moderation, which is simply the philosophy of short-sighted people with limited faculties. As for myself, I am a madman, fickle, ungrateful, whatever you choose; but I am sincere, I am no selfish schemer; I give myself, heart and soul, without reservation: that is why I resume possession of myself in the same way. My moral liberty is a sacred thing, and I allow no one to seize it. I simply entrusted it, not gave it to you; it was for you to make a good use of it and to succeed in making me happy. Oh! do not try to say that you did not want me! I know all about these tricks of modesty and these evolutions of the female conscience. On the day that you yielded to me, I realized that you thought you had conquered me, and that all that feigned resistance, those tears of distress, and that constant pardoning of my temerity were simply the old commonplace way of throwing a line, and luring the poor fish, dazzled by the artificial fly, to nibble at the hook. I deceived you, Thérèse, by pretending to be deceived by that fly; it was my privilege. You wished adoration: I lavished it upon you without effort and without hypocrisy; you are beautiful, and I desired you! But a woman is only a woman, and the lowest of them all affords us as much pleasure as the greatest queen. You were simple enough not to know it, and now you must depend upon yourself. You must understand that monotony does not suit me, you must leave me to my instincts, which are not always sublime, but which I cannot destroy without destroying myself with them. Where is the harm, and why should we tear our hair? We have been partners, and we separate, that is the whole of it. There is no need of our hating and abusing each other just for that. Avenge yourself by granting the prayers of the excellent Palmer, who is languishing for love of you; I shall rejoice in his joy, and we three will continue to be the best friends in the world. You will recover your charms of other days, which you have lost, and the brilliancy of your lovely eyes, which are growing haggard and dull by dint of spying upon my acts. I shall become once more the jolly fellow that I used to be, and we will forget this nightmare that we are passing through together. Is it a bargain? You don't answer. Do you prefer hatred? Beware! I have never hated, but I can learn how; I learn quickly, you know! See, I clinched to-night with a drunken sailor twice as tall and strong as I; I thrashed him soundly, and received only a scratch. Beware lest I prove to be as strong mentally as physically on occasion, and lest, in a contest of hatred and vengeance, I crush the devil in person without leaving one of my hairs in his claws!"
Laurent, pale-faced and bitter, by turns ironical and frantic, with his hair in disorder, his shirt torn, and his forehead smeared with blood, was so ghastly to look at and to hear, that Thérèse felt all her love change into disgust. She was in such despair at that moment that it did not occur to her to be afraid. Silent and motionless in the chair in which she had seated herself, she allowed this torrent of blasphemous words to roll forth unchecked, and, saying to herself that that madman was quite capable of killing her, she awaited with frigid disdain and absolute indifference the climax of his frenzy.
He held his peace when he no longer had the strength to speak. Thereupon, she rose and left the room, without answering him by a single syllable, without casting a single glance at him.
[VII]
Laurent was not so contemptible as his words implied; he did not really believe a syllable of all the atrocious things he said to Thérèse during that horrible night. He believed them at the moment, or, rather, he spoke without heeding what he said. He remembered nothing of it after sleeping upon it, and if he had been reminded of it, would have denied every word.
But one fact was undeniably true, that he was weary, for the moment, of dignified love, and craved, with his whole heart, the degrading excitements of the past. It was his punishment for following the evil path he had chosen early in life,—a very harsh punishment, no doubt, of which we can readily imagine that he complained bitterly, since he had not sinned with premeditation, but had plunged laughingly into an abyss from which he supposed that he could easily escape when he chose. But love is regulated by a code which seems to rest, like all social codes, upon that terrible formula: No one is supposed to be ignorant of the law! So much the worse for those who are ignorant of it! Let the child go within reach of the claws of the panther, thinking to pat it: the panther will make no allowance for such ignorance; it will devour the child because it is not in its nature to spare him. And so with poison, with the lightning and with vice, blind agents of the fatal law which man must study, or take the consequences.
On the morrow of that explosion, naught remained in Laurent's memory save a vague idea that he had had a decisive explanation with Thérèse, and that she had seemed resigned.