But how could the mother be deceived by them—she who for so many years had watched all the reflections of those dark pupils, and who now grasped within them a depth of intoxicated and fathomless felicity? But to the putting of a question on the subject the poor woman was not equal. Shades of feeling, the principal events in the life of the heart, elude the formulas of phrases, and thence arise the worst misunderstandings. Hubert was very gay during dinner, with a gaiety that was rendered somewhat nervous by the prevision of an approaching difficulty. How would his mother take his going out in the evening? Half-an-hour had not elapsed since leaving table when he rose like one who is about to say good-bye.
"You are leaving us?" said Madame Liauran.
"Yes, mamma," he replied, with a slight blush on his cheeks; "Emmanuel Deroy has entrusted me with a commission, which is extremely pressing, and which I must execute to-night."
"You cannot put it off until to-morrow, and give us your first evening?" asked Madame Castel, who wished to spare her daughter the humiliation of a refusal which she could foresee.
"Indeed no, grandmother," he replied, in a tone of childish playfulness; "that would not be courteous to my friend, who has been so kind to me in London."
"He is deceiving us," said Madame Liauran to herself, and, as silence had fallen upon those in the drawing-room after Hubert's departure, she listened to hear whether the hall-door would be opened immediately. Half-an-hour passed without her hearing it. She could not stand it, and she begged the General to go to the young man's room, under pretence of fetching a book, in order to learn whether he had dressed that evening. He had, in fact, done so. He was going, then, to Madame de Sauve's house, or else somewhere in order to meet her again. Such was the conclusion drawn from this indication by the jealous mother, who, for the first time, confessed her lengthened anxieties to the Count. The tone in which she spoke prevented the latter from confessing, in his turn, the loan of one hundred and twenty pounds which Hubert had received from him, and which, so he thought to himself, had doubtless been spent in following this woman.
"He has deceived me once more," exclaimed Madame Liauran; "he who had such a horror of deceit. Ah! how she has changed him!"
Thus the evidence of a metamorphosis of character undergone by her son tortured her on that first day. It became even worse during those which followed. She would not, however, admit all at once that her dear, innocent Hubert was Madame de Sauve's lover. She would not resign herself to the idea that he could be guilty of an error of the kind without terrible remorse. She had brought him up in such strict principles of religion! She did not know that Theresa's first care was just to lull all the young man's scruples of conscience by leading him insensibly from timid tenderness to burning passion. Caught in the mesh of this sweet snare, Hubert had literally never judged his life for the past five months, and nature had become his lover's accomplice. We easily repent of our pleasures, but it is difficult to have remorse for happiness, and the youth was happy with such an absolute felicity as cannot even see the sufferings that it causes.
Nevertheless, it was upon the influence of her suffering that Madame Liauran almost solely relied in the campaign which she had undertaken—she, a simple woman, who knew nothing of life but its duties—against a creature whom she imagined as being at once fascinating and fatal, bewitching and deadly. She had adopted the ingenuous system which is common to all tender jealousies, and which consisted in showing her distress. She said to herself, "He will see that I am in an agony; will not that suffice?" The misfortune was that Hubert, in the intoxication of his passion, saw in his mother's distress only tyrannical injustice to a woman whom he looked upon as divine, and to a love which he considered sublime. When he returned from the Bois de Boulogne in the morning, after taking a ride on horseback and seeing Madame de Sauve pass in the carriage drawn by two grey ponies which she drove herself, he would at breakfast encounter the saddened profile of his mother, and would say to himself:
"She has no right to be sad. I have not taken any of my affection from her."