It was in this strain of tender childishness that he wrote to her, with the fondness of language wherein passion often dissembles its native violence. He slipped the slender despatch into the box, and was astonished to find himself feeling almost placid again. He had acted, and the presence of the real had driven the vision away.
[CHAPTER VIII]
At the moment when Theresa de Sauve received Hubert's despatch she was preparing to dress for dining out. She immediately countermanded her carriage, and wrote a hasty line, pleading headache as an excuse for absence. She had been seized with trembling and an icy sweat on reading the simple phrases of the blue note. She gave orders that she was not at home, and cowered down in a low chair before her bedroom fire, with her head in her hands.
Since her return from Trouville she had been living in continued agony, and what she had been dreading like death was come. Her darling, whom she had left so perfectly tranquil and cheerful at two o'clock, could not have fallen into the state of mind which she could feel through the graceful childishness of his note, if some catastrophe had not happened. What catastrophe? Theresa guessed it too well.
George Liauran had been told the truth. During the unhappy woman's stay at the seaside there had been enacted in her life one of those secret dreams of infidelity which frequently occur in the lives of women who have once deviated from the straight path. But our actions, however guilty they may be, do not always give the measure of our souls. Madame de Sauve's nature comprised very lofty portions by the side of very low ones, and was a singular mixture of corruption and nobility. She might, indeed, commit abominable faults, but to forgive them in herself, after the happy custom of most women of the same description, that she could not do, and now less than ever after what her passion for Hubert had been to her life for several months.
Ah! her life! her life! It was this that Theresa de Sauve saw in the flickering flames in the fireplace that autumn evening, with her heart racked with apprehension. The whole weight of her former errors, her criminal errors, was now falling upon her heart, and she remembered her state of dull agony when she had met Hubert. Theresa de Sauve had been endowed by nature with those dispositions which are most fatal to a woman in modern society, unless she marries under rare conditions, or unless maternity saves her from herself by breaking the energies of her physical, and engrossing the fervour of her moral, vitality. She had a romantic heart, while her temperament made her a creature of passion, that is to say, she fostered both dreams of feeling and unconquerable appetites for sensation.
When persons of this kind meet on the threshold of their lives, with a man who satisfies the twofold needs of their nature, there are between them and this man such mysterious festivities of love as poets conceive but never embrace. Where their destiny wills that they shall be delivered, as Theresa had been to her husband, to a man who treats them from the very first like courtesans, who initiates them in deed and thought into the whole science of pleasure, but who has not sufficient poetry to satisfy the other half of their souls, such women necessarily become curiosos, capable of falling into the worst experiences, and then their sterility even becomes a happiness, for they at least do not transmit that flame of sentimental and sensual life which they have commonly inherited from a mother's error.
It was, in fact, from her mother, who, cold though she was, had been led by weariness and abandonment into guilty misconduct, that Theresa derived her dreamy imagination, while there flowed in her veins the burning blood of her true father, the handsome Count Branciforte. Further, this child of license and infatuation had been brought up without religious principles or bridle of any kind, by Adolphe Lussac, a most immoral man, who was amused by the little girl's vivacity, and had early made her a guest at many dinners, where she heard all that she ought not to have heard, and guessed all that she ought not to have known. Who can calculate the amount of influence over the falls of a woman of twenty-five that is attributable to the conversations listened to or overheard by the young girl in short frocks?
Nevertheless, Theresa, who had married when very young, had had only two intrigues up to the time of her chance meeting with Hubert, and these two amours had caused her such disgust that she had sworn that she would never again fall into the folly of taking a lover. The good resolutions of a woman who has fallen, and who has suffered for her fault, are like the firm intentions of a gambler who has lost two thousand pounds, or a drunkard who has told his secrets during his intoxication. The deep-lying causes which have produced the first adultery continue to subsist after the fault has given the guilty one cruelly to taste of every bitterness.
The woman who takes a lover is not so much attached to this lover as she is to love, and she continues to be still attached to love when the chosen lover has deceived her, until disillusion after disillusion brings her to love pleasure without love, and sometimes pleasure of the most degrading nature. Theresa de Sauve could never descend so far as this, because a sentiment of the ideal persisted within her, too feeble to counterbalance the fever of the senses, but strong enough to illumine in her own eyes the abyss of her weaknesses. This taciturn woman, through whom there passed at times the tremors of almost brutal desire, was no epicurean, no light and cheerful courtesan of the world.