第91章

The name of M.Termonde occurred several times in the earlier letters, and, when I came to the eleventh, I found it mentioned in a way which brought tears to my eyes, set my hands shaking, and made my heart leap as at the sound of a cry of sharp agony.In the pages which he had written during the night--the writing showed how deeply he was moved--the husband, hitherto so self-restrained, acknowledged to his sister, his kind and faithful confidante, that he was jealous.He was jealous, and of whom? Of that very man who was destined to fill his place at our fireside, to give a new name to her who had been Madame Cornelis; of the man with cat-like ways, with pale eyes, whom my childish instinct had taught me to regard with so precocious and so fixed a hate.He was jealous of Jacques Termonde.In his sudden confession he related the growth of this jealousy, with the bitterness of tone that relieves the heart of misery too long suppressed.In that letter, the first of a series which death only was destined to interrupt, he told how far back was the date of his jealousy, and how it awoke to life with his detection of one look cast at my mother by Termonde.He told how he had at once suspected a dawning passion on the part of this man, then that Termonde had gone away on a long journey, and that he, my father, had attributed his absence to the loyalty of a sincere friend, to a noble effort to fight from the first against a criminal feeling.Termonde came back; his visits to us were soon resumed, and they became more frequent than before.There was every reason for this; my father had been his chum at the Ecole de Droit, and would have chosen him to be his best man at his marriage had not Termonde's diplomatic functions kept him out of France at the time.In this letter and the following ones my father acknowledged that he had been strongly attached to Termonde, so much so, indeed, that he had considered his own jealousy as an unworthy feeling and a sort of treachery.But it is all very well to reproach one's self for a passion; it is there in our hearts all the same, tearing and devouring them.After Termonde's return, my father's jealousy increased, with the certainty that the man's love for the wife of his friend was also growing; and yet, the unhappy husband did not think himself entitled to forbid him the house.

Was not his wife the most pure and upright of women? Her very inclination to mysticism and exaggerated devotion, although he sometimes found fault with her for it, was a pledge that she would never yield to anything by which her conscience could be stained.

Besides, Termonde's assiduity was accompanied by such evident, such absolute respect, that it afforded no ground for reproach.What was he to do? Have an explanation with his wife--he who could not bring himself to enter upon the slightest discussion with her?

Require her to decline to receive his own friend? But, if she yielded, he would have deprived her of a real pleasure, and for that he should be unable to forgive himself.If she did not yield?

So, my poor father had preferred to toss about in that Gehenna of weakness and indecision wherein dwell timid and taciturn souls.

All this misery he revealed to my aunt, dwelling upon the morbid nature of his feelings, imploring advice and pity, deciding and blaming the puerility of his jealousy, but jealous all the same, unable to refrain from recurring again and again to the open wound in his heart, and incapable of the energy and decision that would have cured it.

The letters became more and more gloomy, as it always happens when one has not at once put an end to a false position; my father suffered from the consequences of his weakness, and allowed them to develop without taking action, because he could not now have checked them without painful scenes.After having tolerated the increased frequency of his friend's visits, it was torture to him to observe that his wife was sensibly influenced by this encroaching intimacy.He perceived that she took Termonde's advice on all little matters of daily life--upon a question of dress, the purchase of a present, the choice of a book.He came upon the traces of the man in the change of my mother's tastes, in music for instance.When we were alone in the evenings, he liked her to go to the piano and play to him, for hours together, at haphazard; now she would play nothing but pieces selected by Termonde, who had acquired an extensive knowledge of the German masters during his residence abroad.My father, on the contrary, having been brought up in the country with his sister, who was herself taught by a provincial music-master, retained his old-fashioned taste for Italian music.