After luncheon, when Hubert, who had scarcely touched the various dishes, took the handle of the door, in order to leave the little drawing-room in which he had remained for scarcely five minutes, his mother felt a timid and almost repentant desire to ask his forgiveness for the pain that she read on his taciturn countenance.
"Hubert?" she said.
"Mamma?" he replied, turning round.
"You feel quite well to-day?" she asked.
"Quite well," he replied in a blank tone, such a tone as immediately suppresses all possibility of conversation; and he added: "I shall be punctual at dinner-time this evening."
The young man was now singularly preoccupied. After a night of torture, so continuously keen that he could not remember having ever undergone anything like it, he had become master of himself again. He had passed through the first crisis of his grief, a crisis after which a man ceases to die from despair, because he has really reached the deepest depth of sorrow. Then he had recovered that momentary calm which follows upon prodigious deperditions of nervous energy, and had been able to think. It was then that he had been seized with anxiety respecting Madame de Sauve—an anxiety which was devoid of tenderness, for at this moment, after the assault of grief which he had just sustained, his soul was dried up, his inward lethargy was absolute, all capacity for feeling was gone.
But he had suddenly remembered that he had left Theresa in the little ground floor apartment in Avenue Friedland, and his imagination dared not form any conjectures upon what had taken place after his departure. It was just at the end of luncheon that this thought had assailed him, and, over and above his main sorrow, it had immediately caused him a shiver of nervous terror—the only emotion of which he was capable.
He went straight from the Rue Vaneau to the Avenue, and when he found himself in front of the house he dared not enter, although he had the key in his hand. He called the doorkeeper, an ugly individual to whom he could never speak without repugnance, so hateful to him was his brazen, glabrous face, his servile and, at the same time, insolent eye, and the tone which he assumed as a generously-paid accomplice.
"I beg a thousand pardons, sir," said this man, even before Hubert had questioned him. "I did not know that the lady was still there. I had seen you go out, sir, and in the afternoon I went in to give a look round the place, as I do every day, and found the lady sitting on the sofa. She seemed to be in great pain. Is she better to-day, sir?" he added.
"She is very well," replied Hubert, and as he suddenly felt a strong repugnance to entering the apartments, and on the other hand wished at all costs to avoid giving this man, for whom he had such an antipathy, any grounds for suspecting the drama in his life, he replied, "I have come to settle your bill. I am going on a journey."