"No," said Madame Liauran, who was growing excited in her turn; "it is not a question of resuming a discussion which has already set us face to face as though for a duel," and the glances of mother and son crossed at that moment like two sword-blades. "It is a question of this—that you love a creature who is unworthy of you, and that I, your mother, have had you told so and tell you so again."
"And I, your son, reply to you—," and he had the word LIE on his lips; then, as though frightened at what he had been going to say—"that you are mistaken, mother. I ask your pardon for speaking to you in this strain," he added, taking her hand and kissing it; "I am not master of myself."
"Listen, my child," said Marie Alice, from whose eyes the unlooked-for kindness of this gesture caused the tears to flow; "I cannot go into all those sad details with you." Here she touched his hair just as in the days when he was a little child. "Go to your cousin George. He will repeat to you all that he has told us. For it was he who, in his anxiety, thought it his duty to warn us. But remember what your mother tells you now. I believe in the double sight of the heart. I should not have hated this woman as I have hated her from the very first, if she had not been bound to prove fatal to you. Now, good-bye, my child. Kiss me," she added, in broken tones. Did she understand that from that hour her son's kisses would never be to her what they had formerly been?
Hubert dashed from the room, leaped into a cab, and gave the driver the address of the club at which he hoped to find George—a small and very aristocratic one in the Rue du Cirque. But while the man, stimulated by the promise of a large tip, was whipping his horse, the unhappy youth was beginning to reflect upon the entirely unexpected blow which had just fallen upon him. The character of the race of action to which he belonged manifested itself in the recovery of his self-possession.
From the very first he set aside all notion of calumnious invention on the part of his mother and godfather. That they both detested Theresa, he knew. That they were capable of venturing a great deal in order to detach him from her, had just been proved to him. Yes, Madame Liauran and the Count might venture upon anything, except falsehood. They believed, therefore, what they had said, and they believed it on the word of George Liauran, who had been hawking about one of the thousand infamous reports of Paris; but with what purpose? Hubert's mind did not, at this moment, admit that there was an atom of truth in the story of his mistress's relations with another man.
He did not wait to discuss the fact within himself; he thought only of the person from whose lips the tale had come. What motive, then, had prompted his cousin, to whom he was now going in order to demand an explanation? He saw him in imagination with his thin face, his pointed beard, his short hair, and his shrewd look. The vision raised within him a strangely uncomfortable feeling, which, though he did not suspect it, was the work of Madame de Sauve. George had never up to the present spoken to Hubert about her in any way that could admit of allusion or banter.
But women possess a sure instinct of mistrust, and from the first she had noticed that her love was repugnant to Hubert's cousin. She guessed that he saw only the whim of a blasée woman where she herself saw a religion. A woman forgives formal slanders sooner than she forgives the tone in which she is spoken of, and she understood that the accent of George's voice as he pronounced her name was in absolute disagreement with the feelings with which she wished to inspire Hubert. And then, to keep back nothing, she had a past, and George might be acquainted with that past. A shudder passed through her at the mere idea of this.
For these diverse reasons she had employed her shrewdest and most secret diplomacy to part the two cousins from each other. This work was now bearing its fruit, and was the means of inspiring Hubert with unconquerable distrust, while the cab was taking him to the club in the Rue du Cirque.
"In what way," he thought, "can I question George? I cannot say to him: 'I am Madame de Sauve's lover, and you have accused her of having deceived me; prove it to me.'"
The moral impossibility of such a conversation had become a physical one at the moment when the cab stopped in front of the club.