TORN PRIDE
M. de La Tour d’Azyr’s engagement in the
country on that Sunday was with M. de Kercadiou.
To fulfil it he drove out early in the day to Meudon,
taking with him in his pocket a copy of the last issue
of “Les Actes des Apotres,” a journal whose
merry sallies at the expense of the innovators greatly
diverted the Seigneur de Gavrillac. The venomous
scorn it poured upon those worthless rapscallions
afforded him a certain solatium against the discomforts
of expatriation by which he was afflicted as a result
of their detestable energies.
Twice in the last month, had M. de La Tour d’Azyr
gone to visit the Lord of Gavrillac at Meudon, and
the sight of Aline, so sweet and fresh, so bright
and of so lively a mind, had caused those embers smouldering
under the ashes of the past, embers which until now
he had believed utterly extinct, to kindle into flame
once more. He desired her as we desire Heaven.
I believe that it was the purest passion of his life;
that had it come to him earlier he might have been
a vastly different man. The cruelest wound that
in all his selfish life he had taken was when she
sent him word, quite definitely after the affair at
the Feydau, that she could not again in any circumstances
receive him. At one blow — through that
disgraceful riot — he had been robbed of a mistress
he prized and of a wife who had become a necessity
to the very soul of him. The sordid love of La
Binet might have consoled him for the compulsory renunciation
of his exalted love of Aline, just as to his exalted
love of Aline he had been ready to sacrifice his attachment
to La Binet. But that ill-timed riot had robbed
him at once of both. Faithful to his word to
Sautron he had definitely broken with La Binet, only
to find that Aline had definitely broken with him.
And by the time that he had sufficiently recovered
from his grief to think again of La Binet, the comedienne
had vanished beyond discovery.
For all this he blamed, and most bitterly blamed,
Andre-Louis. That low-born provincial lout pursued
him like a Nemesis, was become indeed the evil genius
of his life. That was it — the evil genius
of his life! And it was odds that on Monday...
He did not like to think of Monday. He was not
particularly afraid of death. He was as brave
as his kind in that respect, too brave in the ordinary
way, and too confident of his skill, to have considered
even remotely such a possibility as that of dying in
a duel. It was only that it would seem like
a proper consummation of all the evil that he had
suffered directly or indirectly through this Andre-Louis
Moreau that he should perish ignobly by his hand.
Almost he could hear that insolent, pleasant voice
making the flippant announcement to the Assembly on
Monday morning.
