"I am mad," she said, rousing herself from the sort of waking dream, which had reproduced with the detail of an hallucination that brief scene, her apartment at Saint-Mihiel, Madame Privat's face, her voice, her very words. "If Monsieur Jaubourg had been Madame de Claviers' lover, he would not have continued to be Monsieur de Claviers' friend after her death. If only my movement and my exclamation did not arouse suspicion in Landri's mind! I should never forgive myself. No. He is so honest, so straightforward. He has too noble a heart to imagine in others the evil that it would be a horror to him to commit. If he will only speak to his father about that possibility of an expedition against a church! He promised. He will speak to him. His father will prevent him from following out that shocking purpose. For my part, I cannot. I love him too well. Mon Dieu! how I love him! how I love him! I defended myself too long. Ah! I feel that I am all his, now!"
And as, at that moment, she heard laughter through the partition, announcing little Ludovic's return, she opened the door to call her child, and, pressing him to her heart, she embraced him frantically, to prove to herself that this love to which she was on the point of abandoning herself, by promising to become the wife of a second husband, would take nothing from the son of the first; and she said to him:—
"You know that your mother loves you, you know it, tell me that you know it."
II
A GRAND SEIGNEUR
Madame Olier's prevision was just: that little unthinking gesture, as of a hand extended to prevent a fall, was destined to be one of the signs which should arouse in Landri the most painful of ideas, but not until later. That youthful heart—Valentine had read it accurately in this respect, as well—was too noble not to entertain an instinctive repugnance for suspicion, that calumny of the mind. How could he have made an exception in his mother's case? He had never ascribed a criminal motive, even for a second, nor imagined that any one could ascribe such a motive to the assiduities of one of the intimate friends of their family. The tears that he had shed on Madame de Claviers-Grandchamp's death had been the loving, sincere tears of a son, with no alloy in his veneration. And so, while he returned from Rue Monsieur to Place Saint-François, to get his automobile, no suspicion entered his mind. The imprudent entreaty that his friend had addressed to him not to see the invalid on Rue de Solferino was only a proof of an affection a little too easily disturbed, and he was the more touched by it.
"How I love her!" he exclaimed, echoing, and conscious of it, the passionate sigh which she, on her side, was breathing toward him. "And she loves me, too. She fights against it still, but I understood it, I saw it, I know it. I know that she will be my wife.—My wife!" he repeated, with an intimate quiver of his whole being which made him close his eyes. Suddenly Valentine's image brought before his eyes that of his father, and the memory of the undertaking he had entered into abruptly crushed that outburst of joy. "She is right," he said to himself, without transition, mentally repeating the very words that she had used. "I owe it to him to speak both of her and of all the rest. I owe it to him from respect for his noble heart. I will do it."
The bare thought of that explanation oppressed the young man with an agony of timidity. He had always suffered from it in the presence of that man whose name he bore, whose heir he was, whom he loved, and by whom he was loved, and he had never been able to open his heart to him fully, to explain himself concerning his inmost thoughts. His character, which was very manly in respect to important decisions, but extremely sensitive, and consequently easily disconcerted in its outward manifestations, had always been taken by surprise as it were by that of the marquis, so unhesitating, so dominating, so impervious to argument. His resistance to this moral despotism was not altogether conscious. It was that which incited him in his constant effort not to be an "émigré," as he said, to make himself useful, to belong to his own time, "to do his duty"—another of his phrases. We must repeat it. There are none more just. Many another young man of his class has felt, as he did, that magnanimous and praiseworthy appetite for efficient and beneficent action. Many have, like him, tried to rebel against the ostracism which France, the offspring of the Revolution, practises, by her customs as well as by her laws, against the old families. They have, like him, stumbled over obstacles. They have rarely felt them, as he did, as tragedies. This excessive and morbid view of his destiny betrayed in Landri a lack of equilibrium, of certainty. In truth, if, in certain directions, his ideas were absolutely opposed to those of his father, in others he underwent a veritable hypnotism at the hands of that powerful personality, and he was very near the point of doubting himself before an irreconcilability which he had not dared really to face but once, when it was a question of entering Saint-Cyr. His mind had been developed by reading, observation, reflection, all solitary, constantly held in check by the loud speech, the imperious intelligence, the steadfast and logical convictions, in a word, the decision, of the marquis. Landri, too, had decision, but by fits and starts, and when he had provided himself with very well-considered reasons therefor. His father had it always, gaily, buoyantly, as he walked, as he breathed, by an unfolding of his inward energy, if one may say so, which was as natural in him as the muscular development is in a lion. The prestige of that opulent and powerful nature maintained so complete a domination over the temperament, more refined perhaps, but less masterful, of his son, that he had been on the point of equivocating when Valentine asked him for that promise. He had given it, however. His lover's pride would have been too deeply humiliated to confess a weakness of which he was now sensible once more.
"Yes," he repeated, "I must speak to him—but how? Of her? That will be very difficult, but let him once see her and my cause will be won. She is so refined, so pretty, such a lady!—Of the inventories? It is impossible. She understood me at once, devout as she is. Their religion is not the same. To her the Church is the faith. Those who haven't it are simply to be pitied. To him the Church is like the monarchy, like the nobility, the essential condition of public order. It is the hierarchy that guarantees all the others. What answer can I make? I should think as he does if our time were not our time."
Soliloquizing thus he reached the side of the Church of Saint-François-Xavier, at the spot where he had left his automobile. His chauffeur, when he did not return, had left his car in the care of one of the numerous idlers who transform that isolated square into a club of bicyclists and tennis-players, and had gone to refresh himself at one of the wine-shops in the neighborhood.