The shadowy ghost of the ancien régime seemed to have become more bowed during the conversation.
“How am I to keep an indifferent face this evening before those two women?” he groaned. “General! I find it very difficult to forgive you.”
General D'Hubert made no answer.
“Is your cause good at least?”
“I am innocent.”
This time he seized the Chevalier's ghostly arm above the elbow, gave it a mighty squeeze.
“I must kill him,” he hissed, and opening his hand strode away down the road.
The delicate attentions of his adoring sister had secured for the general perfect liberty of movement in the house where he was a guest. He had even his own entrance through a small door in one corner of the orangery. Thus he was not exposed that evening to the necessity of dissembling his agitation before the calm ignorance of the other inmates. He was glad of it. It seemed to him that if he had to open his lips, he would break out into horrible imprecation, start breaking furniture, smashing china and glasses. From the moment he opened the private door, and while ascending the twenty-eight steps of winding staircase, giving access to the corridor on which his room opened, he went through a horrible and humiliating scene in which an infuriated madman, with bloodshot eyes and a foaming mouth, played inconceivable havoc with everything inanimate that may be found in a well-appointed dining room. When he opened the door of his apartment the fit was over, and his bodily fatigue was so great that he had to catch at the backs of the chairs as he crossed the room to reach a low and broad divan on which he let himself fall heavily. His moral prostration was still greater. That brutality of feeling, which he had known only when charging sabre in hand, amazed this man of forty, who did not recognise in it the instinctive fury of his menaced passion. It was the revolt of jeopardised desire. In his mental and bodily exhaustion it got cleared, fined down, purified into a sentiment of melancholy despair at having, perhaps, to die before he had taught this beautiful girl to love him.
On that night General D'Hubert, either stretched on his back with his hands over his eyes or lying on his breast, with his face buried in a cushion, made the full pilgrimage of emotions. Nauseating disgust at the absurdity of the situation, dread of the fate that could play such a vile trick on a man, awe at the remote consequences of an apparently insignificant and ridiculous event in his past, doubt of his own fitness to conduct his existence and mistrust of his best sentiments—for what the devil did he want to go to Fouché for?—he knew them all in turn. “I am an idiot, neither more nor less,” he thought. “A sensitive idiot. Because I overheard two men talk in a café... I am an idiot afraid of lies—whereas in life it is only truth that matters.”
Several times he got up, and walking about in his socks, so as not to be heard by anybody downstairs, drank all the water he could find in the dark. And he tasted the torments of jealousy, too. She would marry somebody else. His very soul writhed. The tenacity of that Feraud, the awful persistence of that imbecile brute came to him with the tremendous force of a relentless fatality. General D'Hubert trembled as he put down the empty water ewer. “He will have me,” he thought. General D'Hubert was tasting every emotion that life has to give. He had in his dry mouth the faint, sickly flavour of fear, not the honourable fear of a young girl's candid and amused glance, but the fear of death and the honourable man's fear of cowardice.