And with this rejoinder, uttered with all the coolness that the feeling of his mother's injustice had left him, he quitted the room without another word.
"She has perverted his heart, she has made a monster of him," said Madame Liauran to Madame Castel when telling her of this scene, which was followed by three weeks of silence between mother and son. The latter appeared at breakfast, kissed his mother's forehead, asked her how she was, sat down to table, and did not open his mouth during the entire meal. Most frequently he was not present at dinner. He had confided this grief, as he confided all his griefs, to Theresa, who had entreated him to yield.
"Do this," she said, "if it be only for me. It is cruel to me to think that I am the prompter of an evil action in your life."
"Noble darling!" the young man had said, covering her hands with kisses, and drowning himself in the look from those eyes which were so sweet to him.
But if his love for his mistress had been increased by this generosity, so, too, had his sensibility to the rancour which the expressions used in their painful quarrel had stirred up within him against his mother. The latter, however, had been so shaken by this disagreement as to have a recurrence of her nervous malady, which she was able to conceal from him who was its cause. She was almost entirely forbidden to move, which did not prevent her from dragging herself at night to her window, at the cost of grievous suffering. She would open the panes and then the shutters silently, and with the precaution of a criminal, in order to see the illumination of Hubert's casements on his return, and as she gazed at this light filtering in a slender stream, and witnessing to the presence of the son at once so dear and so completely lost, she would feel her anger relax, and despair take possession of her.
They were reconciled, thanks to the intervention of Madame Castel, who, between these two hostilities, suffered a double martyrdom. From the mother she obtained the promise that Madame de Sauve should never again be spoken of, and from the son apologies for his sulkiness during so many days. A fresh period began, in which Marie Alice sought to keep Hubert at home by some modification in her mode of life. Obstinately hoping even in despair, as happens whenever the heart holds too passionate a desire, she told herself that this woman's power over her son must be largely the result of the recreation that he derived from the society surrounding her. Was not the home in the Rue Vaneau very monotonous for an idle young man?
She now felt that she had been very imprudent in considering Hubert's health too delicate, and in being, moreover, too desirous of his presence to give him a profession. She was ingenious enough to tell herself that she ought to enliven their solitude, and, for the first time during her widowhood, she gave some large dinner-parties. The doors of the house were thrown open. The chandeliers were lighted. The old silver plate, with the De Trans' arms upon it, adorned the table, around which crowded some old people, and some charming young girls as elegant and pretty as the De Trans' cousins were countrified and awkward.
But since Hubert had been in love with Theresa he had, with a sweet exaggeration of fidelity, forbidden himself ever to look at any woman but her. And then it was the month of May. The days were warm and bright. His mistress and he had ventured upon excursions in some of the woods which surround Paris—at Saint Cloud, at Chaville, and in the Forest of Marly. Sitting in the dining-room in the Rue Vaneau, Hubert would recall Theresa's smile on offering him a flower, the alternation of sunlight and shadow from the foliage upon her forehead, the paleness of her complexion among the greenness, a gesture that she had made, the turn of her foot on the grass of a pathway.
If he listened to the conversation it was to compare the talk of Madame Liauran's guests with the repartees of Madame de Sauve. The first abounded in prejudice, which is the inevitable ransom of all very profound moral life. The second were impregnated with that Parisian wit the sad vacuity of which was no longer apparent to the young man. He assisted, then, at his mother's dinners with the face of one whose soul was elsewhere.
"Ah! what can I do—what can I do?" sobbed Madame Liauran; "everything wearies him of us, and everything amuses him with that woman.