"Do not become excited," said Madame Castel, rising and kneeling in front of her daughter's couch. "You are in a fever," she said, taking her hand. Then, in a low voice, and as though probing her consciousness to the bottom, she went on: "Alas! my child, you are jealous of your son, as I have been jealous of you. I have spent so many days—I can tell you this now—in loving your husband——"
"Ah! mother," replied Madame Liauran, "that is not the same kind of grief. I did not degrade myself in giving part of my heart to the man whom you had chosen, while you know that cousin George has told us of this Madame de Sauve, and of her education by that unworthy mother, and of her reputation since she has been married, and of the husband who can suffer his wife to have a drawing-room in which the conversation is more than free, and of the father, the old prefect, who, on being left a widower, brought up his daughter helter-skelter with his mistresses. I confess, mamma, that if there is egotism in maternal love, I have had that egotism; I have been grieved by anticipation at the thought that Hubert would marry, and that he would continue his life apart from mine. But I blamed myself greatly for feeling in that way,—whereas now he has been taken from me, and taken from me only to be disgraced!"
For some minutes longer she prolonged this violent lamentation, wherein was revealed that kind of passionate frenzy which had caused all the keen forces of her heart to be concentrated about her son. It was not only the mother that suffered in her, it was the pious mother to whom human faults were abominable crimes; it was the sad and isolated mother upon whom the rivalry of a young, rich, and elegant woman inflicted secret humiliation; in fine, her heart was bleeding at every pore. The sight of this suffering, however, wounded Madame Castel so cruelly, and her eyes expressed such sorrowful pity, that Marie Alice broke off her complaint. She leaned over on her couch, laid a kiss upon those poor eyes, so like her own, and said:
"Forgive me, mamma; but to whom should I tell my trouble if not to you? And then—would you not see it? Hubert is not coming in," she added, looking at the clock, the pendulum of which continued to move quietly to and fro. "Do you not think that I ought to have opposed this journey to England?"
"No, my child; if he is going to pay a visit to his friend, why should you exercise your authority in vain? And if he were going from any other motive, he would not obey you. Remember that he is twenty-two years old, and that he is a man."
"I am growing foolish, mother; this journey was settled a long time ago—I have seen Emmanuel's letters; but, when I am grieved, I can no longer reason, I can see nothing but my sorrow, and it obstructs all my thoughts—— Ah! how unhappy I am!"
[CHAPTER III]
If any proof of the thorough many-sidedness of our nature were required, it might be found in that law which is a customary object of indignation with moralists, and which ordains that the sight of the sorrow of our most loved ones cannot, at certain times, prevent us from being happy. Our feelings seem to maintain a sort of life and death struggle against one another in our hearts. Intensity of existence in anyone among them, though it be but momentary, is only to be obtained at the cost of weakening all the rest. It is certain that Hubert loved his two mothers—as he always called the two women who had brought him up—to distraction. It is certain that he had guessed that for many days they had been holding conversations together analogous to that of the evening on which he had borrowed from his godfather the three thousand francs which he required for settling his debts and meeting the cost of his journey.
And yet, on the second day after that evening, when he found himself in the train which was taking him to Boulogne, it was impossible for him not to feel his soul steeped, as it were, in divine bliss. He did not ask himself whether Count Scilly would or would not speak of the step that he had taken. He put aside the apprehension of this just as he drove away the recollection of Madame Liauran's eyes at the moment of his departure, and just as he stifled all the scruples that might be suggested by his uncompromising piety.
If he had not absolutely lied to his mother in telling her that he was going to join his friend Emmanuel Deroy in London, he had nevertheless deceived this jealous mother by concealing from her that he would meet Madame de Sauve at Folkestone. Now, Madame de Sauve was not free. Madame de Sauve was married, and in the eyes of a young man brought up as the pious Hubert had been, to love a married woman constituted an inexpiable fault. Hubert must and did believe himself in a condition of mortal sin. His Catholicism, which was not merely a religion of fashion and posture, left him in no doubt on this point. But religion, family obligations of truthfulness, fears for the future, all these phantoms of conscience appeared to him—conditioned only as phantoms, vain, powerless images, vanishing before the living evocation of the beauty of the woman who, five months before had entered into his heart to renew all within it, the woman whom he loved and by whom he knew himself to be loved.