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 addition to 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 in _dear,
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 having
_ceased 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 am _thoroughly conversant_. I would not
willingly complain against the lot which Providence has appointed me.
But _so small are the emoluments_ to be gained from this profession,
that I fear existence cannot be long supported upon the _scant
subsistence_ they 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.