Part 7

“We shall soon learn the name of two good people. Your father must have had your fascination, Gilberte; and your mother: I picture your mother as an exquisite, charming creature like yourself.... Did you love her very much?”

“More than my life, madame.”

“Here, Guillaume, read it out.”

Guillaume took and opened the envelope. As he was unfolding the letter which it contained, he had a momentary hesitation.

“Why, what’s the matter?” asked Mme. de la Vaudraye.

“Nothing,” he said, presently.

And he unfolded the letter.

They were there, all three of them, affected in different ways, but anxious and even a little timorous, as we are at the approach of the solemn events of our lives, even when we expect nothing from them but pleasure and satisfaction.

“Well?” asked Gilberte, who was certainly the least excited of the three.

Guillaume made up his mind and read, aloud:

“MADEMOISELLE,

“As I expected, our friend Renaudeau did not persist in his silence very long and, without further procrastination, has told us as much of your father’s story as interests you. We now know that, at the time when he was living in France....”

Guillaume stopped. He hesitated once more and the letter fell from his hands to his knees.

Mme. de la Vaudraye grew impatient:

“What are you thinking of, my boy?”

He replied, in a dreamy voice:

“I am thinking that we are about to violate the secret of two persons who must surely have had their reasons for keeping it so carefully. They may have been the offspring of two rival families, or a pair of lovers who were kept apart by convention, but whose hearts drew them together. Who can tell? In any case, don’t you think that their secret belongs to them and that there is no reason that authorizes us to violate it?”

“What do you mean?”

“Oh, mother, tell me what reasons you can have, tell me before that angel who is listening to us! You treated them as rubbish just now: have they become graver reasons since? State them: express your fear of public opinion, your dread of evil tongues, your horror of comment; and, as you do so, look into that pair of child-eyes and ask yourself if they understand what you are saying.”

She protested feebly:

“What a strange wish, Guillaume! There is something which you are keeping back.”

“Yes,” he cried, rising from his chair, “there is something else which I do not see clearly.... It is my love that objects.... I don’t want to lift the veil that shrouds Gilberte.... I prefer her so.... She is more mine like this....”

He was walking up and down excitedly. Gilberte held out her arms to him. He flung himself on his knees before her:

“Gilberte, I beseech you, remain for me the dear unknown whom I loved from the first day that I saw her. I do not know what prompts me to beg this of you, but I want you to give me the intense joy of feeling that you exist only through me, that you are commencing your life with me, that you are heaping still more darkness upon your past so that your eyes may be obliged to turn still more towards the future. Be the unknown lady of the Logis. Be the unknown who mingled her dreams with mine, the dear unknown who came from I know not where, but who came to me, of that I am certain.”

She hung on his words. He stammered, incoherently:

“Oh, you will do it ... I feel it!... And yet, Gilberte, listen ... the secret is yours ... you yourself have the right to know....”

She answered, with a smile that lifted him into the seventh heaven:

“Guillaume, I do not want to know what you will not know.... Besides, it matters so little! I was only happy for your mother’s sake.”

He bent his head and kissed her hands. Presently, they heard Mme. de la Vaudraye tearing up the letter. She said, simply:

“It shall be as you wish, my dear children. But don’t you think, Guillaume, that there will be difficulties, that the law requires ...?

“Never mind the difficulties!” he cried. “We shall see to that later. Everything will be settled as we intend, I am sure of it.”

A long silence followed, full of grave sweetness. At the end of it, however, Guillaume, smitten with a vague remorse, murmured:

“And so, dearest, you will never know your name?”

She smiled:

“But I know my name: is it not Gilberte de la Vaudraye?”

“But your mother?”

“Oh, my mother!” she said, with shining eyes. “Mother’s name was mamma!”

THE END

Typographical errors corrected by the etext transcriber:

all this preamable=> all this preamble {pg 64}

brillant talker=> brilliant talker {pg 86}