She passed her hands over the young man's hair, and over his face, as though to convince herself of the real existence of the countenance she had loved so dearly, and then she broke away, hastening towards the door.
"Where are you going?" he asked her.
"I am flying from you," she said wildly, and already she was out of the room.
The outer door had closed after her and he had not found energy enough to follow her. He remained standing on the spot where she had left him, as though he had been smitten with a stroke of paralysis. A terrible dread suddenly sent an icy shiver through his whole body. What if Helen in the frenzy of her despair had fled from his house in order to kill herself? For a moment he had before his eyes a horrible hallucination—the shadow of a quay, the great, dim, moving sheet of river, and a woman's body rolled along in the icy water. In his turn he rushed away. He descended the staircase four steps at a time. On the footpath there was a woman going in the direction of the Champs Élysées. He hurried after her. It was not she. He reached the Avenue, which was filled with a swarm of passengers and vehicles. How could he find her in such a crowd? How guess in what direction the unhappy woman had fled. A drizzling rain was falling. He hailed several cabs in vain, and not until he had reached the crossways could he stop one. He gave the driver the address in the Rue de La Rochefoucauld, and on the way he, too, knew an anguish driven to the point of madness. But he was already at the foot of the street and in front of the little house. It was with a trembling of his entire heart that he drew the bell at the door, and asked the servant whether Madame Chazel had come in. On hearing the man's affirmative reply he nearly fell to the ground in the excess of his emotion. And forthwith—for the play of the passions constantly causes us to conflict with these countless trifles of existence—he felt like a fool in presence of the man, who stood aside to let him pass. How could he endure Helen's presence at that moment, or, more than all, Alfred's? He stammered out a sentence alleging that he had forgotten a piece of business, and saying that he would return in the evening. He threw himself again into his cab.
"The thought of her son has saved her!" he said to himself. "I am at least not a murderer!"
[CHAPTER X]
A few days after this scene, Armand sent Chazel a letter dated from London in which he made his excuses for not shaking hands with his friends before his final departure. To set foot again in the little house in the Rue de La Rochefoucauld, to see again the two beings whose lives he had broken, but who both had nevertheless only words of trust or forgiveness for him, to be present once more at those moral throes whose every sigh echoed in intolerable fashion to the very depths of his soul—this effort had been beyond his actual energy. He had said to himself when thinking on the one hand of Alfred's probable melancholy, and on the other, of Helen and of the life that she would lead amid such a bankruptcy of all modesty and feeling:
"It is horrible, but I cannot help it. I must forget it."
And to put petty facts, in accordance with one of his favourite maxims, between himself and his grief, he had hastened his journey to England. During the years of his cruelly idle and empty life, he had done his best to beguile weariness by cosmopolitan wanderings. He had thus formed three or four social centres for himself through Europe. In London, especially, he had a life ready made, rooms in Bolton Street, off Piccadilly, two clubs in which to find hospitality, and twenty houses in which to be received as a friend. But this year, when settled as usual in the three furnished apartments reserved for him, he felt incapable of entering immediately upon the whirl of society. "I will leave my cards in a few days," he said to himself.
The few days passed by, and he had the same repugnance to seeing his acquaintances again. He allowed a week to glide away in this manner, two weeks, three, and he continued to experience an unconquerable aversion to all conversation and all friendly meeting, to all things and all persons. He went so far as to walk only in the evening, the more surely to evade the human face. If he went out in daylight, it was to take one of those two-wheeled cabs, the driver of which is perched high up behind, and the horse in which trots so quickly.