"For having allowed myself to be disturbed for a moment by an infamous calumny which persons who hate our love have repeated to me about your life at Trouville. But what is the matter?"
These words, and still more the tone of voice in which they were uttered, had entered like a blade into Theresa's heart. If Hubert had received her on her arrival with those words of suspicion which men know how to devise, and every word of which implies an absence of faith that anticipates the proofs, she might, perhaps, have found in her woman's pride sufficient energy to face the suspicion and to deny it.
But from the outset of this explanation, the young man's whole attitude had displayed that kind of tender and candid confidence which imposes sincerity upon every soul that possesses any remnant of nobility; and in spite of her weaknesses, Theresa had not been born for the compromises of adultery, nor, above all, for the complications of treachery. She was one of those creatures who are capable of great impulses of conscience and sudden returns of generosity, and who, after descending to a certain depth, say: "This is debasement enough," and prefer to destroy themselves altogether rather than sink still lower.
Moreover, the remorse of the last few weeks had brought her into that state of suffering sensibility which impels to the most unreasonable acts, provided that these acts bring the suffering to an end. And then the unnerving of the sleepless nights, increased still further by the uneasiness of the stormy day, rendered it as impossible for her to dissemble her emotions as it is for a panic-stricken soldier to dissemble his fear. At that moment her countenance was literally thrown into confusion by the effect of what she had just been listening to, and by the expectation of what her unconscious tormentor was going to say.
For a minute there was a silence that was more than painful to them both. The young man, seated on the divan by the side of his mistress, was looking at her with drooping eyelids, his mouth half open and his face death-like. The excessiveness of her emotion was so astonishingly significant that all the suspicions which had been raised and banished the day before awoke simultaneously in the mind of the youth. He suddenly saw abysses before him by the lightning-flash of one of those instantaneous intuitions which sometimes illumine the whole brain at times of supreme emotion.
"Theresa!" he cried, terror-stricken by his own vision and by the sudden horror that was seizing upon him. "No, it is not true; it is not possible—"
"What?" she said again; "speak, and I will answer you."
The transition from the tender "thou" of their intimacy to this "you," rendered so humble by her subdued accents, completed Hubert's distraction.
"No!" he went on, rising and beginning to walk about the room with an abrupt step, the sound of which trampled upon the poor woman's heart; "I cannot formulate that—I cannot—well, yes!" he said, stopping in front of her; "I was told that you were the mistress of Count de la Croix-Firmin at Trouville, that it was the talk of the place, that some young men had seen you entering his room and kissing him, that he himself had boasted of having been your lover. That is what I was told, and told with such persistence that for a moment I was maddened by the calumny, and then I felt the morbid longing to see you, to hear you only declare to me that it is not true. Answer, my love, that you forgive me for having doubted you, that you love me, that you have loved me, that all this is nothing but a hateful lie."
He had thrown himself at her feet as he said these words; he took her hands, her arms, her waist; he hung to her as, when drowning, he would have caught at the body of one who had leapt into the water to save him.