He reasoned instead of feeling. His mother laid her bleeding heart in the way before him and he passed it by. When he was to dine out, and his mother's good-bye at the moment of his departure forewarned him that Madame Liauran would spend an evening of melancholy in regretting him, he would think:
"Yet what if she knew that Theresa reproaches me for devoting too much of my time to her love!"
And it was true. His mistress had the ready generosity of women who know that they are vastly preferred, and who are very careful not to ask the man who loves them to act as they wish. There is such a delicate pleasure in leaving one's lover free, in encouraging him, even, to sacrifice you, when it is certain what his decision will be! It thus happened that Hubert would return to the house in the Rue Vaneau after having a secret meeting with Theresa during the day,—for Emmanuel Deroy had put his small bachelor abode in the Avenue Friedland at his friend's disposal. But then, whether it was that the nervous sadness which accompanies over-keen pleasures made him cruel, or that secret remorse of conscience came to torment him, or that there was too strong a contrast between the charming forms assumed by Theresa's tenderness and the sad ones in which that of Madame Liauran was arrayed, the young man became really ungrateful.
Irritation, not pity, increased within him before the sorrow of her whose idolised son he nevertheless was. Marie Alice apprehended this shade of feeling, and she suffered more from it than from all the rest, not divining that the excess of her grief was an irreparable error of management, and that a demoralising comparison was being set up in Alexander Hubert's mind between the severities of his relatives and the fond delights of his chosen affection.
Spent by continual anxiety, the mother had exhausted her strength when an event, unexpected though easy to be foreseen, gave still greater prominence to the antagonism which brought her into ceaseless collision with her son. It was Holy Week. She had counted upon Hubert's confession and communion for making a supreme attempt, and inducing him to sever relations which she considered as yet incompletely guilty, but full of danger. It could not enter into her head as a fervent Christian that her son would fail in his paschal duty. Thus she felt no doubt with respect to his reply as she asked him at a time when they were alone together:
"On what day will you receive the sacrament this year?"
"Mamma," replied Hubert, with evident embarrassment, "I ask your forgiveness for the sorrow that I am going to cause you. I must, however, confess to you that doubts have come upon me, and that conscientiously I do not think that I can approach the holy table."
This reply was the lightning-flash which suddenly showed Marie Alice the abyss wherein her son had sunk, while she believed him to be merely on the brink. She was not for a moment deceived by Hubert's imaginary pretext. And whence could religious doubts come to him who for months had not read a book? She knew, further, her child's simplicity of soul towards the instruction over which she had herself presided. No; if he would not communicate it was because he would not confess. He had a horror of acknowledging some unacknowledgable fault. And what was this if not that one which had been the evil work of the past six months? . . .
An adulterer! Her son was an adulterer! A terrible word, which to her, so loyal and pure and pious, described the most repellant baseness, the ignominy of falsehood mingled with the turpitude of the flesh. In her indignation she found energy to at last open up her whole heart to Hubert. Agitated as she was by religious fears for the salvation of her beloved child, she uttered sentences which she would never have believed herself capable of pronouncing, mentioning Madame de Sauve by name, heaping the harshest reproaches upon her, withering her with all the scorn which a woman who is virtuous can harbour for one who is not, invoking the memory of their common past, threatening and beseeching in turns—in short, throwing aside all calculation.
"You are mistaken, mamma," replied Hubert, who had endured this first assault without speaking. "Madame de Sauve is not at all what you say; but as I cannot allow my friends to be insulted in my presence, I warn you that, on the next conversation of the kind that we have together, I shall leave the house."