THE NORTH AND THE SOUTH.
There never had been any great sympathy between President Le Quesnoy
and his son-in-law. The lapse of time, frequent intercourse and the
bonds of relationship had not been able to narrow the gap between
these two natures, or to vanquish the intimidating coolness which
the Provençal felt in the presence of this big, silent man, with his
pale and haughty face, from whose height a steely-gray look, which
was the look of Rosalie without her tenderness and indulgence, fell
upon his lively nature with freezing effect. Numa, with his mobile and
floating nature, always overwhelmed by his own conversation, at one
and the same time a fiery and a complicated nature, was in a state of
constant revolt against the logic, the uprightness, the rigidity of his
father-in-law. And while he envied him these qualities, he placed them
to the credit of the coldness of nature in this man of the North, that
extreme North which the President represented to him.
“Beyond him, there’s the wild polar bear--beyond that, nothing at
all--the north pole and death.”
All the same he flattered the President, endeavored to cajole him with
adroit, feline tricks, which were his baits to catch the Gaul. But
the Gaul, subtler than he was himself, would not permit himself to be
taken in, and on Sunday, in the dining-room at the Place Royale, at the
moment when politics were discussed, whenever Numa, softened by the
good dinner, attempted to make old Le Quesnoy believe that in reality
the two were very close to an understanding, because both wanted the
same thing, namely, liberty--it was a sight to see the indignant toss
of the head with which the President penetrated his armor.
“Oh! Not at all, not the same by any means!”
In half-a-dozen clear-cut, hard arguments, he established the distances
between them, unmasked fine phrases and showed that he was not the man
to be taken in by their humbuggery. Then the lawyer got out of the
affair by joking, though extremely angry at bottom and particularly on
account of his wife, who looked on and listened without ever mixing
herself up with political talk. But then in the evening, while going
home in the carriage, he took great pains to prove to her that her
father was lacking in common-sense. Ah! if it had not been for her
presence, how finely he would have put the President to his trumps! In
order not to irritate him, Rosalie avoided taking part with either.
“Yes, it is unfortunate--you don’t understand each other....” But in
her own heart she agreed with the President.
When Roumestan arrived at a Minister’s portfolio the coolness between
the two men only became greater. M. Le Quesnoy refused to show himself
at his son-in-law’s receptions in the Rue de Grenelle and he explained
the matter very precisely to his daughter.
“Now, please tell your husband this--let him continue to visit me here,
and as often as possible; I shall be most delighted. But you must not
expect ever to see me at the Ministry. I know well enough what those
people are preparing for us: I don’t want to have the appearance of
being an accomplice.”
After all, the situation between them was saved in the eyes of
society by that heartfelt sorrow, that mourning of the heart, which
had imprisoned the Le Quesnoys in their own home for so many years.
Probably the Minister of Public Instruction would have been very much
embarrassed to feel the presence in his drawing-room of that sturdy
old contradictor, in whose presence he always remained a little boy.
Still, he made believe to appear wounded by that decision; he struck an
attitude on account of it, a thing which is very precious to an actor,
and he found a pretext for not coming to the Sunday dinners except
very irregularly, making as a plea one of those thousand excuses,
engagements, meetings, political banquets, which offer so wide a
liberty to husbands in politics.
Rosalie, on the contrary, never missed a Sunday, arriving early in the
afternoon, delighted to find again in the home circle of her parents
that taste of the family which her official life hardly permitted her
the leisure to satisfy. Mme. Le Quesnoy being still at vespers and
Hortense at church with her mother, or carried off to some musical
matinée by friends, she was always certain to find her father in his
library, a long room crammed from top to bottom with books. There he
was, shut in with his silent friends, his intellectual intimates, the
only ones with whom his sorrow had never found fault. The President did
not seat himself to read; he passed the shelves in review, stopping
in front of some finely bound books; standing there, unconscious what
he did, he would read for an hour at a time without recognizing the
passage of time or that he was weary. When he saw his eldest daughter
enter, he would give a pale smile. After a few words were exchanged,
because neither one nor the other was exactly garrulous, she also
passed in review her beloved authors, choosing and turning over the
leaves of some book in his immediate neighborhood in that somewhat
dusky light of the big courtyard in the Marais, where the bells,
sounding vespers near by, fell in heavy notes amidst the stillness that
Sunday brings to the commercial quarters of a city. Sometimes he gave
her an open book:
“Read that!” and put his finger under a passage; and when she had read
it:
“That’s fine, is it not?”
There was no greater pleasure for that young woman, to whom life was
offering whatever there was of brilliant and luxuriant things, than
the hour passed beside that mournful and aged father in whom her
daughterly adoration was raised to a double power by other and intimate
bonds altogether intellectual.
It was to him she owed the uprightness of her thought and that feeling
for justice which made her so courageous; to him also her taste for
the fine arts, her love of painting and of fine poetry--because with
Le Quesnoy the continuous pettifoggery of the law had not succeeded in
ossifying the man in him.
Rosalie loved her mother and venerated her, not without some little
revolt against a nature which was too simple, too gentle, annihilated
as it were in her own home; a nature which sorrow, that elevates
certain souls, had crushed to the earth and forced into the most
ordinary feminine occupations--into practical piety, into housekeeping
in its smallest details. Although she was younger than her husband, she
appeared to be the elder of the two, judged by her old woman’s talk;
she was like one rendered old and sorrowful, who searched all the warm
corners of her memory and all the souvenirs of her infancy in a land
hot with the sun of Provence. But above all things the church had taken
possession of her; since the death of her son she was in the habit of
going to church in order to put her sorrow to slumber in the silent
freshness and half-light and half-noise of the lofty naves, as though
it were in the peace of a cloister barred by heavy double gates against
the roar of the outer life. This she did with that devout and cowardly
egotism of sorrows which kneel upon a _prie-Dieu_ and are released
from all anxieties and duties.
Rosalie, who was a young girl already at the moment of their mishap,
had been struck by the very different way in which her parents
suffered. Mme. Le Quesnoy, renouncing everything, was steeped in a
tearful religion, but Le Quesnoy set out to obtain strength from daily
work accomplished. Her tender preference for her father arose in her
through the exercise of her reason. Marriage, life in common with all
the exaggerations, lies and lunacies of her Southerner, caused her to
feel the shelter of the silent library all the more pleasantly because
it was a change from the grandiose, cold and official interior of the
Ministry. In the midst of their quiet chat, the noise of a door was
heard, a rustling of silk, and Hortense would enter.
“Ah, ha! I knew I should find you here!”
She did not love to read, Hortense did not. Even novels bored her; they
were never romantic enough to suit her exalted frame of mind. After
running up and down for about five minutes with her bonnet on, she
would cry:
“How these old books and papers do smell stuffy! Don’t you find it so,
Rosalie? Come on, come a little with me! Papa has had you long enough.
Now it’s my turn.”
And so she would carry her off to her bedroom, their bedroom; for
Rosalie also had used it until she was twenty years old.
There, during an hour of delightful chat, she saw about her all those
things which had been a part of herself--her bed with cretonne
curtains, her desk, her étagère, her library, where a bit of her
childhood still lingered about the titles of the volumes and about the
thousand childish things preserved with all due devotion. Here she
found again her old thoughts lying about the corners of that young
girl’s bedroom, more coquettish and ornamented, it is true, than it was
in her time. There was a rug on the floor; a night lamp in the shape of
a flower hung from the ceiling and fragile little tables stood about
for sewing or writing, against which one knocked at every step; there
was more elegance and less order. Two or three pieces of work begun
were hanging over the backs of the chairs and the open desk showed a
windy scattering of note-paper with monograms. When you entered there
was always a minute or two of trouble.
“O, it’s the wind,” said Hortense with a peal of laughter. “The wind
knows I adore him; he must have come to see if I was at home.”
“They must have left the window open,” answered Rosalie quietly. “How
can you live in such an interior? For my part I am not able to think if
anything is out of place.”
She rose to straighten the frame of a picture fastened to the wall; it
irritated her eyes, which were as exact as her nature.
“O, well! it’s just the contrary with me. It puts me in form. It seems
to me that I am travelling.”
This difference in their natures was reflected on the faces of the two
sisters. Rosalie had regular features with great purity in their lines,
calm eyes of a color changing constantly like that of a deep lake;
the other’s features were very irregular, her expression clever, her
complexion the pale tint of a Creole woman. There were the North and
the South in the father and the mother, two very different temperaments
which had united without merging together; each was perpetuating its
own race in one of the children, and all this, notwithstanding the
life in common, the similar education in a great boarding-school for
young girls, where, under the same masters, and only a few years
later, Hortense was taking up the scholastic tradition which had
made of her sister an attentive, serious woman, always ready to the
minute, absorbed in her smallest acts. That same education had left
her tumultuous, fantastic, unsteady of soul and always in a hurry.
Sometimes, when she saw her so agitated, Rosalie cried out:
“I must say I am very lucky; I have no imagination.”
“As for me, I haven’t anything else,” said Hortense; and she reminded
her how at boarding school, when M. Baudouy was given the task of
teaching them style and the development of thought, during that course
which he pompously termed his imagination class, Rosalie had never had
any success, because she expressed everything in a few concise words,
whereas she, on the other hand, given an idea as big as your nail, was
able to blacken whole volumes with print.
“That’s the only prize I ever got--the imagination prize!”
Despite it all they were a tenderly united couple, bound to each other
by one of those affections between an elder and a younger sister into
which an element of the filial and maternal enters. Rosalie took her
about with her everywhere, to balls, to her friends’ houses, on her
shopping trips in which the taste of Parisian women is exercised; even
after leaving the boarding-school she remained her younger sister’s
little mother. And now she is occupying herself with getting her
married, with finding for her some quiet and trustworthy companion,
indispensable for such a madcap as she is, the powerful arm which is
needed to offset her enthusiasms.
It was plain that the man she meant was Méjean; but Hortense, who at
first did not say no, suddenly showed an evident antipathy. They had a
long talk about it the day following the ministerial reception, when
Rosalie had detected the emotion and trouble of her sister.
“O, he is kind and I like him well enough,” said Hortense, “he is one
of those loyal friends such as one would like to have about one all
one’s life; but that is not the sort of husband that will do for me.”
“Why?”
“You will laugh at me. He does not appeal to my imagination enough;
there it is! A marriage with him--why it makes me think of the house
of a burgher, right-angled and stiff, at the end of an alley of trees
which stand as straight as the letter I; and you know well enough that
I love something else--the unexpected, surprises--”
“Well, who then? M. de Lappara?”
“Thank you! In order that I should be just a wee bit preferred to his
tailor?”
“M. de Rochemaure?”
“What, that model red-tapist?--and I who have a perfect horror of red
tape!”
And when the disquiet which Rosalie showed pushed her to the wall, for
she wished to know everything and interrogated her closely:
“What I should like to do,” said the young girl, while a faint flame
like a fire in straw rose into the pallor of her complexion, “what I
should like to do--” Then in a changed voice and with an expression of
fun:
“I should like to marry Bompard! Yes, Bompard; he is the husband of my
dreams--at any rate he has imagination, that fellow, and some resources
against deadly dulness!”
She rose to her feet and passed up and down the room with that gait, a
little inclined over, which made her seem even taller than her figure
warranted. People did not recognize Bompard’s worth; but what pride and
what dignity of existence were his, and, with all his craziness, what
logic!
“Numa wanted to give him a place in the office close to him; but he
would not take it, he preferred to live in honor of his chimera. And
people actually accuse the South of France of being practical and
industrious!--but there is the man to give that legend the lie. Why,
look here--he was telling me this the other night at the ball--he is
going to brood out ostrich eggs--an artificial brood machine--he is
positive that he will make millions,--and he is far more happy than if
he had those millions! Why, it is a perpetual life in fairy-land with a
man of that sort. Let them give me Bompard; I want nobody but Bompard!”
“Well, well, I see I shall learn nothing more to-day either,” said the
big sister to herself, who divined underneath these lively sallies
something deep down below.
One Sunday when she reached her old home Rosalie found Mme. Le Quesnoy
awaiting her in the vestibule, who told her with an air of mystery:
“There’s somebody in the drawing-room--a lady from the South.”
“Aunt Portal?”
“You shall see--”
It was not Mme. Portal, but a saucy Provençal girl whose deep curtsy in
the rustic way came to an end in a peal of laughter.
“Hortense!”
Her skirt reaching to the tops of her black shoes, her waist increased
by the folds of tulle belonging to the big scarf, her face framed among
the falling waves of hair kept in place by a little bonnet made of cut
velvet and embroidered with butterflies in jet, Hortense looked very
like the _chatos_ whom one sees on Sunday practising their coquetries
on the Tilting Field at Arles, or else walking, two and two, with
lowered lashes, through the pretty columns of St. Trophyme cloisters,
whose denticulated architecture goes very well with those ruddy Saracen
reds and with the ivory color of the church in which a flame of a
consecrated candle trembles in the full daylight.
“Just see how pretty she is!” said her mother, standing in ecstasy
before that lively personification of the land of her youthful days.
Rosalie, on the other hand, shuddered with an inexplicable sadness, as
if that costume had taken her sister far, far away from her.
“Well, that is a fantastic idea! It is very becoming to you, but I like
you far better as a Parisian girl. And who dressed you so well?”
“Audiberte Valmajour. She has just gone out.”
“How often she comes here!” said Rosalie, going into their room to take
off her bonnet. “What a friendship it is! I shall begin to get jealous.”
Hortense excused herself, a little bit embarrassed; this head-dress
from Provence gave so much pleasure to their mother in the sober house.
“Is it not true, mother?” cried she, going from one room into the
other. “Besides, that poor girl feels so outlandish in Paris and is so
interesting with her blind devotion to the genius of her brother.”
“Oh! Genius, is it?” said the big sister, tossing her head a bit.
“What! You saw it yourself the other night at your house, the effect it
produced--everywhere just the same thing!”
And when Rosalie answered that one must estimate at their real value
these successes won in the world of society and due to politeness, a
caprice of an evening, the last fad:
“Well, I don’t care, he is in the opera!”
The velvet band on the little head-dress bristled up in sign of
revolt, as if it were really covering one of those enthusiastic heads
above whose profile it floats, down there in Provence. Besides, the
Valmajours were not peasants like others, but the last remnants of a
reduced family of nobles.
Rosalie, standing in front of the tall mirror, turned about laughing:
“What! You believe in that legend?”
“Why, of course I do. They descend in direct line from the Princes des
Baux. There are the parchments and there are the coats of arms at their
rustic doorway. Any day that they should wish--”
Rosalie shuddered. Behind the peasant who played the flute there was
the prince besides. Given a strong imagination--and that might become
dangerous.
“None of that story is true,” and this time she did not laugh any more.
“In the district of Aps there are ten families bearing that so-called
princely name. Anybody who told you otherwise told a falsehood through
vanity or through--”
“But it was Numa--it was your husband. The other night at the Ministry
he gave us all sorts of details.”
“O! You know how it is with him--you have got to consider the focus, as
he says himself.”
Hortense was not listening. She had gone back into the drawing-room,
and, seated at the piano, she began in a loud voice:
“Mount’ as passa ta matinado,
Mourbieù, Marioun....”
It was an old popular ballad of Provence, sung to an air as grave as
a church recitative, that Numa had taught his sister-in-law; one that
he enjoyed hearing her sing with her Parisian accent, which, sliding
over the Southern articulations, made one think of Italian spoken by an
Englishwoman.
“Où as-tu passé ta matinée, morbleu, Marion?
A la fontaine chercher de l’eau, mon Dieu, mon ami.
Quel est celui qui te parlait, morbleu, Marion?
C’est une de mes camarades, mon Dieu, mon ami.
Les femmes ne portent pas les brayes, morbleu, Marion.
C’est sa robe entortillée, mon Dieu, mon ami.
Les femmes ne portent pas l’épée, morbleu, Marion.
C’est sa quenouille qui pendait, mon Dieu, mon ami.
Les femmes ne portent pas les moustaches, morbleu, Marion.
C’est des mûres qu’elle mangeait, mon Dieu, mon ami.
Le mois de mai ne porte pas de mûres, morbleu, Marion.
C’était une branche de l’automne, mon Dieu, mon ami.
Va m’en chercher une assiettée, morbleu, Marion.
Les petits oiseaux les ont toutes mangées, mon Dieu, mon ami.
Marion! ... je te couperai ta tête, morbleu, Marion.
Et puis que ferez-vous du reste, mon Dieu, mon ami?
Je le jetterai par la fenêtre, morbleu, Marion,
Les chiens, les chats en feront fête....”
She interrupted herself in order to fling out his words with the
gesture and intonation that Numa used when he got excited. “There, look
you, me children! ’tis as foine as Shakespeare.”
“Yes, a picture of manners and customs,” said Rosalie, coming up to
her, “the husband gross and brutal, the wife catlike and mendacious--a
true household in Provence!”
“Oh, my dear child,” said Mme. Le Quesnoy, in a tone of gentle reproof,
the tone that is used when ancient quarrels have become the habit.
The piano-stool whisked quickly around and brought face to face with
Rosalie the cap of the furious little Provence girl.
“’Tis really too much! what harm has it ever done to you, our South?
as for me, I adore it! I did not know it at the time, but that voyage
you made me take revealed to me my real country. It is no use to have
been baptized at St. Paul’s; I belong down there, I do--I am a child
of the ‘little square.’ Do you know, Mamma, some one of these days we
will just leave these cold Northerners planted right here, and we two
will go down to live in our beautiful South, where people sing and
dance--the South of the winds, of the sun, of the mirage, of everything
that makes one poetic and widens one’s life--
‘It is there I would wish to dw-e-e-ll.’”
Her two agile hands fell back upon the piano, scattering the end of her
dream in a tumult of resounding notes.
“And not one word about the tabor-player!” thought Rosalie. “That’s a
serious thing!”
It was a good deal more serious than she imagined.
From the day when Audiberte had seen Mlle. Le Quesnoy fasten a flower
on the tabor of her brother, from that very moment there arose in her
ambitious soul a splendid vision of the future, which had not been
without its effect on their transplantation to Paris. The reception
which Hortense gave her, when she came to complain about her brother’s
obstination in running after Numa, defined and strengthened her in her
still vague hope. And since then, gradually, without opening her mind
to her men-folks otherwise than through half words, she prepared the
path with the duplicity of the peasant woman who is nearly an Italian,
gliding and crawling forward. From her seat in the kitchen in the Place
Royale, where she began by waiting timidly in a corner on the edge of
a chair, she crept into the drawing-room and installed herself, always
neat and trig, in the position of a poor relation.
Hortense was crazy about her, showed her to her friends as if she were
a pretty piece of bric-à-brac brought from that land of Provence which
she always spoke of with enthusiasm. And the other girl played herself
off as more simple than nature allows, exaggerated her savage rages,
her tirades of wrath with clenched fist against the muddy sky of Paris,
and would often use a charming little exclamation, _Boudiou_, the
effect of which she arranged and watched like a kittenish girl on the
stage. The President himself had smiled at this _Boudiou_, and just to
think of having made the President smile!
But it was in the young girl’s bedroom, when they were alone, that she
put all her tricks in play. All of a sudden she would kneel at her
feet, would seize her hand, go into ecstasies over the smallest points
of her toilet, her way of making a bow in a ribbon, her manner of
dressing her hair, letting slip those heavy compliments directly in her
face, which give great pleasure all the same, so spontaneous and naïve
do they appear.
Oh, when the young lady stepped out of the carriage in front of the
_mas_ [the farm-house], she thought she saw the queen of the angels
in person! and she was for a time speechless at the sight, and her
brother, _pécaïré_, when he heard on the stones of the descending
road the noise of the carriage which took back the little Parisian,
he said it was as if those stones, one by one, were falling on his
heart. She played a great rôle with regard to this brother, his pride
and his anxieties--his anxieties, now why? I just ask you why--since
that reception at the “Menistry” he was being talked about in all the
papers and his portrait was seen everywhere and such invitations as
he got in the Faubourg Saint-Germoine--why he couldn’t meet them all!
Duchesses, countesses, wrote him notes on splendid paper--they had
coronets on their letters just like those on the carriages which they
sent to bring him in; and still--well, no, he wasn’t happy, the “pore”
man! All these things whispered in Hortense’s ear gave her some share
of the fever and magnetic will-power of the peasant girl. Then, without
looking at Audiberte, she asked if perhaps Valmajour did not have down
there in Provence a betrothed who was waiting for him.
“He a betrothed?--_avaï!_ you do not know him--he has much too much
belief in himself to desire a peasant girl. The richest girls have been
on his track, the Des Combette girl, and then still another, and a lot
of gay ladies--you know what I mean! He did not even look at them. Who
knows what it is he is revolving in his head? Oh, these artists--”
And that word, a new one for her, assumed on her ignorant lips an
expression hard to define, somewhat like the Latin spoken at mass, or
some cabalistic formula picked up in a book of magic. The heritage
which would come from Cousin Puyfourcat returned again and again during
the course of this adroit gossip.
There are very few families in the South of France, whether artisans
or burghers, who do not possess a Cousin Puyfourcat, an adventurer who
has departed in early youth in search of fortune and has never written
since, whom they love to imagine enormously rich. He is like a lottery
ticket running for an indefinite time, a chimerical vista opening up
fortune and hope in the distance, which at last they end by taking for
a fact. Audiberte believed firmly in the fortune of that cousin and
she talked about it to the young girl, less for the purpose of dazzling
her than in order to diminish the social gap which separated them. When
Puyfourcat should die, her brother was to buy Valmajour back again,
cause the castle to be rebuilt and his patent of nobility acknowledged,
because everybody said that the necessary papers were extant.
At the close of such chats as these, which were sometimes prolonged
deep into the twilight, Hortense remained for a long time silent, her
forehead pressed against the pane, and saw the high towers of that
reconstructed castle as they lifted themselves in the rose-colored
winter sunset, the terrace shining with torches and resounding with
concerts in honor of the chatelaine.
“_Boudiou_, how late it is,” cried the peasant girl, seeing that she
had brought her to the point where she desired, “and the dinner for my
men is not ready yet! I must fly!”
Very often Valmajour came and waited for her downstairs; but she never
allowed him to come upstairs. She felt that he was so awkward and
coarse, and cold, besides, toward any idea of flattering. She had no
use for him yet.
Somebody who was very much in her way, too, but difficult to escape,
was Rosalie, with whom her feline ways and her false innocency did not
take at all. In her presence Audiberte, her terrible black brows knit
across her forehead, did not say a single word; and in that Southern
silence there rose up along with the racial hatred that anger of the
weak person, underhand and vindictive, which turns against the obstacle
most dangerous to its projects. Her real grievance was Rosalie, but
she talked about quite other ones to her little sister. For example,
Rosalie did not like tabor-playing; then “she did not do her religious
duties--and a woman who does not do her religion, you know....”
Audiberte did her religion and in the most tremendous way; she never
missed a single mass and she went to communion on the proper days. But
all that did not hinder in any way her actions; intriguer, liar and
hypocrite as she was, violent to the verge of crime, she drew from the
Bible texts nothing but excuses for vengeance and hatred. Only she kept
her honor in the feminine sense of the word. With her twenty-eight
years and her pretty face, in those low quarters where the Valmajours
were moving nowadays, she preserved the severe chastity of her thick
peasant’s scarf, bound about a heart which had never beat with any
emotion beside ambition for her brother.
* * * * *
“Hortense makes me anxious--look at her there.”
Rosalie, to whom her mother whispered this confidentially in a corner
of the drawing-room at the Ministry, thought that Mme. Le Quesnoy
shared her own anxiety, but the observation made by the mother referred
merely to the physical condition of Hortense, who had not been able to
cure herself of a bad cold. Rosalie looked at her sister; always the
same dazzling complexion, liveliness and gayety; she coughed a little,
but what of that? only as all Parisian girls do after the ball season!
The summer would certainly put her back again in good shape very
quickly.
“And have you spoken to Jarras about her?”
Jarras was a friend of Roumestan, one of the old boys of the Café
Malmus. He assured her that it was nothing and suggested a course at
the waters of Arvillard.
“All right, then; you must get off quickly,” said Rosalie with
vivacity, delighted with this pretext of getting Hortense away.
“Yes, but there is your father, who would be alone--”
“I will go and see him every day--”
Then, sobbing, the poor mother acknowledged the horror which such a
trip with her daughter caused her. During an entire year it had been
necessary for her to run from one watering place to another for the
sake of the child they had already lost. Was it possible that she
would have to begin again the same pilgrimage, with the same frightful
results in prospect? And the other, too,--the disease had seized him at
the age of twenty, in his full health, in his full powers--
“Oh Mamma, do be quiet!”
And Rosalie scolded her gently: Come, now; Hortense was not ill; the
doctor said that the trip would only be a pleasure party; Arvillard,
in the Alps of Dauphiny, was a marvellous country; she herself would
like nothing better than to accompany Hortense in her mother’s place;
unfortunately, she could not do it. Reasons most serious--
“Yes, yes. I understand--your husband, the Ministry--”
“O, no. It isn’t that at all!”
And to her mother, in that nearness of heart which they so seldom found
affecting them: “Listen, then, but for you alone--nobody knows it, not
even Numa ...” she acknowledged a still very fragile hope of a great
happiness which she had quite despaired of, the happiness which made
her wild with joy and fear, the entirely new hope of a baby who might
perhaps be born to them.