CHAPTER II

Nevertheless, in spite of his curiosity, the General did not make a gesture the quicker. The habit of military minuteness was too strong with him to be vanquished by any emotion. He himself put his stick into the stand, drew off his furred gloves one after the other and laid them on the table in the antechamber beside his hat, which was carefully placed on its side. His servant took off his overcoat with the same slowness. Not until then did he enter the apartment where, as his servant had just told him, the young man had been awaiting him for half-an-hour.

It was a cheerless looking room, and one which revealed the simplicity of a life reduced to its strictest wants. Oak shelves overladen with books, the mere appearance of which indicated official publications, ran along two sides. Some maps and a few weapon-trophies adorned the rest. A writing-table placed in the centre of the apartment displayed papers classified in groups--notes for the great work which the Count had been preparing for an indefinite time on the reorganisation of the army. Two lustring sleeves, methodically folded, lay among the squares and rulers; a bust of Marshal Bugeaud adorned the fireplace, which was furnished with a grate, in which a coke fire was dying out.

The tile-paved floor was tinted red, and the carpet scarcely extended beyond the legs of the table which rested upon them. On the table stood a bright copper lamp, which was lighted at the present moment, and the green cardboard shade threw the light upon the face of young Liauran, who was seated beside it in the straw arm-chair, and was looking at the fire, with his chin resting on his hand. He was so absorbed in his reverie that he appeared to have heard neither the rolling of the carriage-wheels nor the General's entrance into the apartment. Never, moreover, had the latter been so struck as he was just then with the astonishing likeness presented by the physiognomy of the child with that of the two women by whom he had been brought up.

If Madame Liauran appeared more frail than her mother, and less capable of coping with the bitterness of life, this fragility was still more exaggerated in Hubert. The thin cloth of his dress-coat--for he was in evening dress, with a white nosegay in his button-hole--allowed the outlines of his slender shoulders to be seen. The fingers extended across his temple were as delicate as a woman's. The paleness of his complexion, which, owing to the extreme regularity of his life, was usually tinged with pink, betrayed, in this hour of sadness, the depth of vibration awakened by all emotion in this too delicate organism. There were deep, nacreous circles round his handsome black eyes; but, at the same time, a touch of pride in the line of the nobly-cut forehead and almost perfectly straight nose, the curve of the lips with its slender dark moustache, the set of the chin marked with a manly dimple, and other tokens still, such as the bar of the knitted eyebrows, betrayed the heredity of a race of action in the over-petted child of two lovely women.

If the General had been as good a connoisseur in painting as he was skilled in arms, this face would certainly have reminded him of those portraits of young princes painted by Van Dyck, in which the almost morbid delicacy of an ancient race is blended with the obstinate pride of heroic blood. After pausing for a few seconds in contemplation, the General walked towards the table. Hubert raised the charming head which his brown ringlets, disordered as they were at that moment, rendered completely similar to the portraits executed by the painter of Charles I.; he saw his godfather and rose to greet him. He had a slight and well-made figure, and merely in the graceful fashion in which he held out his hand could be traced the lengthened watchfulness of maternal eyes. Are not our manners the indestructible work of the looks which have followed us and judged us during our childhood?

"And so you have come to speak to me on very serious business," said the General, going straight to the point. "I suspected as much," he added. "I left your mother and your grandmother more melancholy than I had ever seen them since the Italian war. Why were you not with them this evening? If you do not make those two women happy, Hubert, you are cruelly ungrateful, for they would give their lives for your happiness. And now, what is going on?"

The General, in uttering these words, had pursued aloud the thoughts which had been tormenting him during the drive home from the Rue Vaneau. He could see the young man's features changing visibly as he spoke. It was one of the hereditary fatalities in the temperament of this too dearly loved child that the sound of a harsh voice always gave him a painful little spasm of the heart; but, no doubt, to the harshness of Count Scilly's accents there was added the harshness of the meaning of his words. They brutally laid bare a too sensitive wound. Hubert sat down as though crushed; then he replied in a voice which, naturally somewhat clouded, was at this moment more muffled than usual. He did not even attempt to deny that he was the cause of the sorrow on the part of the two women.

"Do not question me, godfather. I give you my word of honour that I am not guilty, only I cannot explain to you the misunderstanding which makes me a subject of grief to them. I cannot help it. I have gone out oftener than usual, and that is my only crime."

"You are not telling me the whole truth," replied Scilly, softened, in spite of his anger, by the young man's evident grief. "Your mother and your grandmother are too fond of keeping you tied to their apron strings, and I have always thought so. You would have been brought up more hardily if I had been your father. Women do not understand how to train a man. But have they not been urging you for the last two years to go into society? It is not your going out, therefore, that grieves them, but your motive for doing so."

As he uttered these words, which he considered very clever, the Count looked at his godson through the smoke from a little brier pipe which he had just lighted, a mechanical custom sufficiently explaining the acrid atmosphere with which the room was saturated. He saw Hubert's cheeks colour with a sudden inflow of blood, which to a more perspicacious observer would have been an undeniable confession. Only an allusion or the dread of an allusion to a woman whom he loves, has the power to disturb a young man of such evident purity as Hubert was. After a few moments of this sudden emotion, he replied:

"I declare to you, godfather, that there is nothing in my conduct of which I should be ashamed. It is the first time that neither my mother nor my grandmother has understood me--but I shall not yield to them on the point in dispute. They are unjust about it, frightfully unjust," he continued, rising and taking a few steps.

This time his face was no longer expressive of submission, but of the indomitable pride which military heredity had infused into his blood. He did not give the General time to notice his words, which in the mouth of a son, usually only too submissive, disclosed an extraordinary intensity of passion. He contracted his eyebrows, shook his head as though to drive away some tormenting thought, and, once more master of himself, went on:

"I have not come here to complain to you, godfather; you would give me a bad reception, and you would not be wrong. I have to ask a service of you, a great service. But I would wish all that I am going to confide to you to remain between ourselves."

"I never enter into such engagements," said the Count. "A man has not always the right to be silent," he added. "All that I can promise you is to keep your secret if my affection for you know whom, does not make it a duty that I should speak. Come, now, decide for yourself."

"Be it so," rejoined the young man, after a silence, during which he had, no doubt, judged of the situation in which he found himself; "you will do as you please. What I have to say to you is comprised in a short sentence. Godfather, can you lend me three thousand francs?"

This question was so unexpected by the Count that it forthwith changed the current of his thoughts. Since the beginning of the conversation he had been trying to guess the young man's secret, which was also the secret of his two friends, and he had necessarily thought that some intrigue was in question. To tell the truth, he did not consider this very shocking. Though very devout, Scilly had remained too essentially a soldier not to have most indulgent theories respecting love. Military life leads those who follow it to a simplification of thought which causes them to admit all facts, whatever they may be, in their verity. A "quean" in Scilly's eyes was a necessary malady with a young man. It was enough if the malady did not last too long, and if the young man came out of it with tolerable impunity. Now he had suddenly a misgiving that was more alarming to him, for, owing to his regimental experience, he considered cards much more dangerous than women.

"You have been gambling?" he said abruptly.

"No, godfather," replied the young man. "I have merely spent more than my allowance for the last few months; I have debts to settle, and," he added, "I am leaving for England the day after to-morrow."

"And your mother knows of this journey?"

"Undoubtedly; I am going to spend a fortnight in London with my friend, Emmanuel Deroy, of the Embassy, whom you know."

"If your mother lets you go," returned the old man, continuing the logical pursuit of his inquiry, "it is because your conduct in Paris is grieving her cruelly. Answer me frankly--You have a mistress?"

"No," replied Hubert, with a fresh rush of purple across his cheeks. "I have no mistress."

"If it is neither the Queen of Spades nor the Queen of Hearts," said the General, who did not doubt his godson's veracity for a moment--he knew him to be incapable of a falsehood--"will you do me the honour of telling me what has become of the five hundred francs a month, a colonel's pay, which your mother gives you for pocket-money?"

"Ah! godfather," returned the young man, visibly relieved; "you do not know the requirements of a life in society. Why, to-day I gave a dinner to three friends at the Café Anglais; that came to very nearly a hundred and fifty francs. I have sent several bouquets, hired carriages to go into the country, and given a few keepsakes. The five bank-notes are so soon at an end! In short, I repeat, I have debts that I want to pay, I have to meet the expenses of my journey, and I do not want to apply to my mother or my grandmother just now. They do not know what a young man's life in Paris is like; I do not want to add a second misunderstanding to the first. With our present relations what they are they would see faults where there have been only inevitable necessities. And, then, I am physically unable to endure a scene with my mother."

"And if I refuse?" Scilly asked.

"I shall apply elsewhere," said Alexander Hubert; "it will be terribly painful to me, but I shall do so."

There was silence between the two men. The whole story was darkening again in the General's eyes, like the smoke which he was sending from his pipe in methodical puffs. But what he did see clearly was the definitive nature of Hubert's resolve, whatever its secret cause might be. To refuse him would be perhaps to send him to a money-lender, or at all events to force him to take some step wounding to his pride. On the other hand, to advance this sum to his godson was to acquire a right to follow out more closely the mystery which lay at the bottom of his excitement, as well as behind the melancholy of the two women. And then, when all is told, the Count loved Hubert with an affection that bordered closely on weakness. If he had been deeply moved by Madame Liauran's and Madame Castel's dull despair, he was now completely upset by the visible anguish written on the face of this child, who was, in his thoughts, an adopted son as dear as any real son could have been.

"My dear fellow," he said at last, taking Hubert's hand, and in a tone of voice giving no further token of the harshness which had marked the beginning of their conversation, "I think too highly of you to believe that you would associate me in any action that could displease your mother. I will do what you wish, but on one condition----"

Hubert's eyes betrayed fresh anxiety.

"It is merely to fix the date on which you expect to repay me the money. I want to oblige you," continued the old soldier, "but it would not be worthy of you to borrow a sum that you believed yourself unable to pay back again, nor of me to lend myself to a calculation of the kind. Will you come back here to-morrow afternoon? You will bring me an account of what you can spare from your allowance every month. Ah! it will not do to offer any more bouquets, or dinners at the Café Anglais, or keepsakes. But, then, have you not lived for a long time past without these foolish expenses?"

This little speech, in which the spirit of order that was essential to the General, his goodness of heart, and his taste for regularity of life were blended in equal proportion, moved Hubert so deeply that he pressed his godfather's fingers without replying, as though crushed by emotions which he had left unexpressed. He suspected that while this interview was taking place at the Quai d'Orléans, the evening was being lengthened out at the house in the Rue Vaneau, and that the two beings whom he loved so deeply were commenting on his absence. He himself suffered from the pain that he was causing, as though a mysterious thread linked him to those two women seated beside their lonely hearth.

And, indeed, the General once gone, the "two saints" had remained silent for a long time in the quiet little drawing-room. Nothing of all the tumult of Parisian life reached them but a vast, confused murmuring analogous to that of the sea when heard a long way off. The seclusion of this retired abode, with the hum of life outside, was a symbol of what had so long been the destiny of Madame Castel and her daughter. Marie Alice Liauran, lying on her couch, and looking very slight in her black attire, seemed to be listening to this hum, or to her thoughts, for she had relinquished the work with which she had been engaged; while her mother, seated in her easy-chair, and also in black, continued to ply her tortoiseshell crochet-hook, sometimes raising her eyes towards her daughter with a look wherein a twofold anxiety might be read. She also experienced the sensation felt by her daughter, on account both of Hubert and of this daughter, whose almost morbid sensitiveness she knew. It was not she, however, who first broke the silence, but Madame Liauran, who suddenly, and as though pursuing her reverie aloud, began to lament:

"What renders my pain still more intolerable is that he sees the wound which he has dealt my heart, and that he is not to be stopped by it--he who, from childhood until within the last six months, could never encounter a shadow in my look or a wrinkle on my forehead without a change of countenance. That is what convinces me of the depth of his passion for this woman. What a passion and what a woman!"

"Do not become excited," said Madame Castel, rising and kneeling in front of her daughter's couch. "You are in a fever," she said, taking her hand. Then, in a low voice, and as though probing her consciousness to the bottom, she went on: "Alas! my child, you are jealous of your son, as I have been jealous of you. I have spent so many days--I can tell you this now--in loving your husband----"

"Ah! mother," replied Madame Liauran, "that is not the same kind of grief. I did not degrade myself in giving part of my heart to the man whom you had chosen, while you know that cousin George has told us of this Madame de Sauve, and of her education by that unworthy mother, and of her reputation since she has been married, and of the husband who can suffer his wife to have a drawing-room in which the conversation is more than free, and of the father, the old prefect, who, on being left a widower, brought up his daughter helter-skelter with his mistresses. I confess, mamma, that if there is egotism in maternal love, I have had that egotism; I have been grieved by anticipation at the thought that Hubert would marry, and that he would continue his life apart from mine. But I blamed myself greatly for feeling in that way,--whereas now he has been taken from me, and taken from me only to be disgraced!"

For some minutes longer she prolonged this violent lamentation, wherein was revealed that kind of passionate frenzy which had caused all the keen forces of her heart to be concentrated about her son. It was not only the mother that suffered in her, it was the pious mother to whom human faults were abominable crimes; it was the sad and isolated mother upon whom the rivalry of a young, rich, and elegant woman inflicted secret humiliation; in fine, her heart was bleeding at every pore. The sight of this suffering, however, wounded Madame Castel so cruelly, and her eyes expressed such sorrowful pity, that Marie Alice broke off her complaint. She leaned over on her couch, laid a kiss upon those poor eyes, so like her own, and said:

"Forgive me, mamma; but to whom should I tell my trouble if not to you? And then--would you not see it? Hubert is not coming in," she added, looking at the clock, the pendulum of which continued to move quietly to and fro. "Do you not think that I ought to have opposed this journey to England?"

"No, my child; if he is going to pay a visit to his friend, why should you exercise your authority in vain? And if he were going from any other motive, he would not obey you. Remember that he is twenty-two years old, and that he is a man."

"I am growing foolish, mother; this journey was settled a long time ago--I have seen Emmanuel's letters; but, when I am grieved, I can no longer reason, I can see nothing but my sorrow, and it obstructs all my thoughts---- Ah! how unhappy I am!"