“You idiot,” she replied, “everyone knows it except you. I tell you that that man there is his father. You’ve only to look in order to see. …”
Parent recoiled before her, tottering. Then suddenly he turned round, snatched up a candle, and dashed into the next room.
He came back almost immediately, carrying little Georges wrapped in his bedclothes. The child, awakened with a start, was crying with terror. Parent flung him into his wife’s hands and, without adding a word, thrust her roughly out on to the staircase where Limousin was prudently awaiting her.
Then he shut and double-locked the door and thrust home the bolts. He had scarcely regained the drawing room when he fell full length upon the floor.
II
Parent lived alone, entirely alone. During the first few weeks following his separation, the strangeness of his new life prevented him from thinking much. He had resumed his bachelor life, his loafing habits, and had his meals at a restaurant, as in the old days. Anxious to avoid scandal, he made his wife an allowance regulated by their lawyers. But, little by little, the remembrance of the child began to haunt his thoughts. Often, when he was alone at home in the evenings, he would imagine that he suddenly heard Georges cry “Daddy.” In a moment his heart would begin to beat and he would promptly rise and open the front door, to see if by any chance the little boy had returned. Yes, he might have come home again as dogs and pigeons do. Why should a child have less natural instinct than an animal?
Then, realising his error, he would return and sit down in his armchair, and think of the child. He thought of him for whole hours, whole days. It was no mere mental obsession, but a yet stranger physical obsession as well, a need of the senses and the nerves to embrace him, hold him, feel him, take him on his knee and dandle him. He grew frantic at the feverish remembrance of past caresses. He felt the little arms clasping his neck, the little mouth pressing a great kiss on his beard, the little hair tickling his cheek. The longing for these sweet vanished endearments, for the delicate, warm, dainty skin held to his lips, maddened him like the desire for a woman beloved and departed.
He would suddenly burst into tears in the street as he thought that he might have had fat little Georgy trotting along beside him on his little legs, as in the old days when he took him for walks. Then he would go home and sob till evening, his head between his hands.
Twenty times, a hundred times a day, he asked himself this question: “Was he, or was he not, Georges’s father?” But it was chiefly at night that he gave himself up to interminable speculation on this subject. As soon as he was in bed, he began, every evening, the same series of desperate arguments.
After his wife’s departure he had at first had no doubts: the child was assuredly Limousin’s. Then, little by little, he began to hesitate again. Henriette’s statement certainly had no value. She had defied him in an attempt to make him desperate. When he came coolly to weigh the pros and the cons, there was many a chance that she was lying.
Limousin alone, perhaps, could have told the truth. But how was he to know it, to question him, to get him to confess?
Sometimes Parent would get up in the middle of the night, resolved to go and find Limousin, to beseech him, to offer him anything he wanted, if he would only put an end to his abominable anguish. Then he would return hopelessly to bed, reflecting that doubtless the lover would lie too! It was positively certain that he would lie in order to hinder the real father from taking back his child.
Then what was he to do? Nothing!
He was heartbroken that he had precipitated events like this, that he had not reflected or been more patient, had not had the sense to wait and dissemble for a month or two, until his own eyes might have informed him. He ought to have pretended to have no suspicions, and have left them calmly to betray themselves. It would have been enough for him to have seen the other man kiss the child to guess, to understand. A friend’s kiss is not the same as a father’s. He could have spied on them from behind doors. Why had he not thought of it? If Limousin, left alone with Georges, had not promptly seized him, clasped him in his arms, and kissed him passionately, if he had left him to play without taking any interest in him, no hesitation would have been possible; it would have meant that he was not the father, did not believe himself or feel himself to be the father.
With the result that Parent could have turned out the mother and kept his son, and he would have been happy, perfectly happy.
He would go back to bed, perspiring and tormented, ransacking his memory for Limousin’s behaviour with the child. But he could remember nothing, absolutely nothing, no gesture, no glance, no word, no suspicious caress. Nor did the mother take any notice of her child. If he had been the fruit of her lover, doubtless she would have loved him more.
He had been separated from his son, then, out of revenge, out of cruelty, to punish him for having surprised them.
He would make up his mind to go at dawn and ask the magistrate to give him the right to claim Georgy.
But he had scarcely formed this resolve when he would feel himself overcome by a certainty of the contrary. From the moment that Limousin had been Henriette’s lover, her beloved lover from the first day, she must have given herself to him with the passionate ardent abandon that makes a woman a mother. And was
