The Countess looked up and saw him as he was driven
past. Her face lighted; almost it seemed to
him she was about to greet him or to call him, wherefore,
to avoid a difficulty, arising out of the presence
there of his late antagonist, he anticipated her by
bowing frigidly — for his mood was frigid, the
more frigid by virtue of what he saw — and then
resumed his seat with eyes that looked deliberately
ahead.
Could anything more completely have confirmed him
in his conviction that it was on M. de La Tour d’Azyr’s
account that Aline had come to plead with him that
morning? For what his eyes had seen, of course,
was a lady overcome with emotion at the sight of blood
of her dear friend, and that same dear friend restoring
her with assurances that his hurt was very far from
mortal. Later, much later, he was to blame his
own perverse stupidity. Almost is he too severe
in his self-condemnation. For how else could
he have interpreted the scene he beheld, his preconceptions
being what they were?
That which he had already been suspecting, he now
accounted proven to him. Aline had been wanting
in candour on the subject of her feelings towards
M. de La Tour d’Azyr. It was, he supposed,
a woman’s way to be secretive in such matters,
and he must not blame her. Nor could he blame
her in his heart for having succumbed to the singular
charm of such a man as the Marquis — for not
even his hostility could blind him to M. de La Tour
d’Azyr’s attractions. That she had
succumbed was betrayed, he thought, by the weakness
that had overtaken her upon seeing him wounded.
“My God!” he cried aloud. “What
must she have suffered, then, if I had killed him
as I intended!”
If only she had used candour with him, she could so
easily have won his consent to the thing she asked.
If only she had told him what now he saw, that she
loved M. de La Tour d’Azyr, instead of leaving
him to assume her only regard for the Marquis to be
based on unworthy worldly ambition, he would at once
have yielded.
He fetched a sigh, and breathed a prayer for forgiveness
to the shade of Vilmorin.
“It is perhaps as well that my lunge went
wide,” he said.
“What do you mean?” wondered Le Chapelier.
“That in this business I must relinquish all
hope of recommencing.”
THE OVERWHELMING REASON
M. de La Tour d’Azyr was seen no more in the
Manege — or indeed in Paris at all — throughout
all the months that the National Assembly remained
in session to complete its work of providing France
with a constitution. After all, though the wound
to his body had been comparatively slight, the wound
to such a pride as his had been all but mortal.
The rumour ran that he had emigrated. But that
was only half the truth. The whole of it was
that he had joined that group of noble travellers
who came and went between the Tuileries and the headquarters
of the emigres at Coblenz. He became, in short,
a member of the royalist secret service that in the
end was to bring down the monarchy in ruins.
