CHAPTER IX

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.