XIII
Dunoisse had not long returned to Paris when he received one of those rare communications from his mother, bearing no address, forwarded by the hands of the priest who had been the director of Madame Dunoisse. Lifeless, formal notes, without a throb in them, without a hint of tenderness to the eye incapable of reading between the rigid lines:
“J. M. J.—x.“My Son,“I am told that you are well, have returned from Algeria in good health, that your services have earned you distinguished mention in the dispatches of your Colonel, and that your abilities seem to promise a career of brilliance. Giving thanks to Almighty God and to Our Blessed Lady, and praying with all my heart that the highest spiritual graces may be vouchsafed you in additionto those mental and bodily gifts which you already possess,“I am,“Your mother in Christ“Térèse de S. François.“I love you and bless you! Pray also for me, my son!”
“J. M. J.—x.“My Son,
“I am told that you are well, have returned from Algeria in good health, that your services have earned you distinguished mention in the dispatches of your Colonel, and that your abilities seem to promise a career of brilliance. Giving thanks to Almighty God and to Our Blessed Lady, and praying with all my heart that the highest spiritual graces may be vouchsafed you in additionto those mental and bodily gifts which you already possess,
“I am,“Your mother in Christ“Térèse de S. François.
“I love you and bless you! Pray also for me, my son!”
A picture burned up in living colors in the son’s memory as he read. Hector saw himself as a fair-haired boy of six in a little blue velvet dress, playing on the carpet of his mother’s boudoir. She sat in a low Indian cane chair with her year-old baby on her lap; a tiny Marie Bathilde, whose death of some sudden infantile complaint a few months later, turned the thoughts of the mother definitely in the direction of the abandoned way of religion, the vocation lost.
Even the magnificent new rocking-horse, with real hairy hide, and redundant mane and tail, and a splendid saddle, bridle, and stirrups of scarlet leather, could not blind the boy’s childish eyes to the beauty of his mother. She was all in white; her skin had the gleam of satin and the pinky hue of rose-granite in its sheath of snow; she was slender as a nymph, upright and lissome as a tall swaying reed of the river shore, with a wealth of black hair that crowned her small high-bred head with a turban of silky, glistening coils, yet left looped braids to fall down to the narrow ribbon of silver tissue that was her girdle, defining the line of the bosom as girdles did long after the death of the First Empire. And her child upon her knee was as pearly fair as she shone dark and lustrous, though with the mother’s eyes of changeful gleaming gray, so dark as almost to seem black.
The boudoir opened at one side into a dome-shaped conservatory full of palms and flowers, where a fountain played in an agate basin, and through the gush and tinkle of the falling water and the cracking of Hector’s toy-whip, Monsieur the Marshal had come upon the pretty domestic picture unseen and unheard. He stood in the archway that led from the conservatory, a stalwart handsome figure of a soldierly dandy of middle-age, who has not yet begun to read in pretty women’s eyes that his best days are over. His wife looked up from the child with which she played,holding a bunch of cherries beyond reach of the eager, dimpled hands. Their glances met.
“My own Marie!—was this not worth it?” Achille Dunoisse had exclaimed.
And Madame Dunoisse had answered, with a strange, wild, haggard change upon her beautiful face, looking her husband fully in the eyes:
“Perhaps, if this were all——”
And had put down the startled child upon a cushion near, and risen, and gone swiftly without a backward look, out of the exquisite luxurious room, into the bedchamber that was beyond, shutting and locking the door behind her, leaving the discomfited Adonis to shrug, and exclaim:
“So much for married happiness!”
Then, turning to the boy who sat upon the rocking-horse, forgetful of the toy, absorbing the scene with wide, grave eyes and curious, innocent ears, Monsieur the Marshal had said abruptly:
“My son, when you grow up, never marry a woman with a religion.”
To whom little Hector had promptly replied:
“Of course I shall not marry a woman. I shall marry a little girl in a pink frock!”
How rife with tragic meaning the little scene appeared, now that the boy who had flogged the red-caparisoned rocking-horse had grown to man’s estate.
Those frozen letters of his mother’s! What a contrast they presented to the gushing epistles of poor old Smithwick, studded with notes of exclamation, bristling with terms of endearment, crammed with affectionate messages, touching reminiscences of happier days indear, dear Paris, always underlined....
The prim sandaled feet of the poor old maiden were set in stony places since the death of the paralytic sister, to nurse whom she had returned to what she invariably termed her “native isle of Britain.”... Even to Hector’s inexperience those letters, in their very reticence upon the subject of poor Smithwick’s need, breathed of poverty. The straitness of his own means galled him horribly when he read in Smithwick’s neat, prim, ladylike calligraphy confessions such as these:
“The annuity originally secured to my beloved sister by purchase havingceased at her death, I am fain to seek employment in genteel families as a teacher of the French language, with which—no one knows better than my dearest Hector—I amthoroughly conversant. I would not willingly complain against the lot which Providence has appointed me. Butso small are the emolumentsto be gained from this profession, that I fear existence cannot be long supported upon thescant subsistencethey afford.”
The pinch of poverty is never more acutely felt than by the open-handed. In Africa Dunoisse had been sensible of the gnawing tooth of poverty. In Paris it had claws as well as teeth.
To have had five thousand francs to send to poor old Smithwick! To have been able to invest a snug sum for her in some solid British concern—those Government Three per Cents, for instance, of which the poor lady had always spoken with such reverence and respect. Or to have bought her a bundle of shares in one of the English Railway Companies, whose steel spider-webs were beginning to spread over the United Kingdom about this time. What would her old pupil not have given! And—it could have been done so easily if only he could have brought himself to fill in one of those checks upon Rothschild. But the thing was impossible.
His gorge rose at it. His religious principles were too deeply rooted, his honor stood too high, or possibly the temptation was not strong enough? There was little of the primal Eve about poor old shabby Smithwick. When white hands, whose touch thrilled to the heart’s core, should be stretched out to him for some of that banked-up gold; when eyes whose luster tears discreetly shed only enhanced should be raised pleadingly to his; when an exquisite mouth should entreat, Hector was to find that one’s own oaths, no less than the oaths of one’s friends, are brittle things; and that in the heat of the passion that is kindled in a young and ardent man by the breath of a beautiful woman, Religion and Principle and Honor are but as wax in flame.