The more Hubert identified himself by observation with this temperament, the clearer did this become to him. He was interpreting Theresa's nature better at this moment than he had ever done before. He grasped its ambiguousness with frightful certainty, and it was then that there rose up within him the saddest, but at the same time the noblest, feeling that he had entertained since his accident, the only one truly worthy of what his soul had formerly been, that one which, in the presence of woman's perfidy, is man's preservation from complete ruin of heart:—pity.
An emotion of infinite bitterness and melancholy combined came upon him at the thought that the charming creature whom he had known, his dear silent one, as he used to call her, she who had shown herself possessed of such delicate refinement in the art of pleasing him, should have surrendered herself to the caresses of this man.
He suddenly recollected the tears of the night at Folkestone, and the tears, also, at their last interview; and, as though he had at last understood their meaning, he could find within him but a single utterance, which he whispered there in the restaurant filled with the smoke of cigars, then beneath the leafless trees of the Tuileries, then in the solitude of his own room in the Rue Vaneau—a single utterance, but one filled with the perception of the degrading fatalities of his life:
"What misery! My God, what misery!"
[CHAPTER XI]
What was Theresa doing while he was suffering thus, and why did she afford him no sign of her existence? Although the young man had forbidden himself to think about her, he thought of her nevertheless, and this question came to add anxiety to his other anguish. Contradictory hypotheses passed in turns through his mind. Had Theresa died of remorse? Had she ceased to love him? Had she kept La Croix-Firmin for her lover? Was she pursuing a fresh intrigue. Everything seemed possible to Hubert, the worst as well as the best, on the part of this woman whom he had learned to be so strangely compounded of refinement and libertinism, of treachery and nobility. He then ascertained by the heart-burning caused him by some of his hypotheses, by what living fibres he still clung to this being from whom he wished himself released.
He was on the point of taking some steps in order at least to learn what the inclinations of her own soul were at that moment; then he despised himself for the weakness, and, to strengthen himself, he repeated some verses which were in correspondence with his condition of mind. He found them, by a strange irony of destiny which he did not suspect, in the single collection of poetry by Alfred Fanières. This volume, which had been reprinted after the poet's novels had made him celebrated, bore a title which was in itself a revelation of youthfulness: "Early Pride." Hubert had dined, in company with the writer, at Madame de Sauve's house without suspecting what the poor woman felt at being obliged by her husband to receive at her table the lover whom she idolised and the man with whom she had broken. Fanières had talked cleverly that evening, and it was after that dinner that the young man, with very natural curiosity, had obtained the book of verse at a bookseller's. The poem which pleased him just now was a sonnet, somewhat pretentiously called "Tender Cruelty":—
"Be still, my heart, but speak thou forth fierce pride,
And tell me that my sway no share must know,
Nor can I pardon her the grievous blow
Who knew another's couch although my bride.
At least, I've seen her as she vainly tried,
Her soul in tears dissolved, and crouching low,
To find the look my eyes could yet forego;
And, kingly silent, I have turned aside.
She knew not that, when grief distraught, were heard
Her plaintive tones entreat a single word,
I suffered even as she, and loved her still.
In silence only, outraged man is strong;
For vengeance tells a tale of secret ill,
And I would be believed above all wrong."
"Yes," said Hubert to himself, "he is right: silence—"
The verses moved him childishly, as happens with ordinary readers of poetry, who require a literary work merely to excite or to soothe the inward wound.