Part 38

The Marquise went up forthwith to the stranger’s room, without thinking of the shock that the sight of her widow’s weeds might give to a woman who was said to be dying. At the sight of that dying woman the Marquise turned pale. In spite of the changes wrought by fearful suffering in Helene’s beautiful face, she recognized her eldest daughter.

But Helene, when she saw a woman dressed in black, sat upright in bed with a shriek of horror. Then she sank back; she knew her mother.

“My daughter,” said Mme. d’Aiglemont, “what is to be done? Pauline!... Moïna!...”

“Nothing now for me,” said Helene faintly. “I had hoped to see my father once more, but your mourning--” she broke off, clutched her child to her heart as if to give it warmth, and kissed its forehead. Then she turned her eyes on her mother, and the Marquise met the old reproach in them, tempered with forgiveness, it is true, but still reproach. She saw it, and would not see it. She forgot that Helene was the child conceived amid tears and despair, the child of duty, the cause of one of the greatest sorrows in her life. She stole to her eldest daughter’s side, remembering nothing but that Helene was her firstborn, the child who had taught her to know the joys of motherhood. The mother’s eyes were full of tears. “Helene, my child!...” she cried, with her arms about her daughter.

Helene was silent. Her own babe had just drawn its last breath on her breast.

Moïna came into the room with Pauline, her maid, and the landlady and the doctor. The Marquise was holding her daughter’s ice-cold hand in both of hers, and gazing at her in despair; but the widowed woman, who had escaped shipwreck with but one of all her fair band of children, spoke in a voice that was dreadful to hear. “All this is your work,” she said. “If you had but been for me all that--”

“Moïna, go! Go out of the room, all of you!” cried Mme. d’Aiglemont, her shrill tones drowning Helene’s voice.--“For pity’s sake,” she continued, “let us not begin these miserable quarrels again now----”

“I will be silent,” Helene answered with a preternatural effort. “I am a mother; I know that Moïna ought not... Where is my child?”

Moïna came back, impelled by curiosity.

“Sister,” said the spoiled child, “the doctor--”

“It is all of no use,” said Helene. “Oh! why did I not die as a girl of sixteen when I meant to take my own life? There is no happiness outside the laws. Moïna... you...”

Her head sank till her face lay against the face of the little one; in her agony she strained her babe to her breast, and died.

“Your sister, Moïna,” said Mme. d’Aiglemont, bursting into tears when she reached her room, “your sister meant no doubt to tell you that a girl will never find happiness in a romantic life, in living as nobody else does, and, above all things, far away from her mother.”

VI. THE OLD AGE OF A GUILTY MOTHER

It was one of the earliest June days of the year 1844. A lady of fifty or thereabouts, for she looked older than her actual age, was pacing up and down one of the sunny paths in the garden of a great mansion in the Rue Plumet in Paris. It was noon. The lady took two or three turns along the gently winding garden walk, careful never to lose sight of a certain row of windows, to which she seemed to give her whole attention; then she sat down on a bench, a piece of elegant semi-rusticity made of branches with the bark left on the wood. From the place where she sat she could look through the garden railings along the inner boulevards to the wonderful dome of the Invalides rising above the crests of a forest of elm-trees, and see the less striking view of her own grounds terminating in the gray stone front of one of the finest hotels in the Faubourg Saint-Germain.

Silence lay over the neighboring gardens, and the boulevards stretching away to the Invalides. Day scarcely begins at noon in that aristocratic quarter, and masters and servants are all alike asleep, or just awakening, unless some young lady takes it into her head to go for an early ride, or a gray-headed diplomatist rises betimes to redraft a protocol.

The elderly lady stirring abroad at that hour was the Marquise d’Aiglemont, the mother of Mme. de Saint-Héreen, to whom the great house belonged. The Marquise had made over the mansion and almost her whole fortune to her daughter, reserving only an annuity for herself.

The Comtesse Moïna de Saint-Héreen was Mme. d’Aiglemont’s youngest child. The Marquise had made every sacrifice to marry her daughter to the eldest son of one of the greatest houses of France; and this was only what might have been expected, for the lady had lost her sons, first one and then the other. Gustave, Marquis d’Aiglemont, had died of the cholera; Abel, the second, had fallen in Algeria. Gustave had left a widow and children, but the dowager’s affection for her sons had been only moderately warm, and for the next generation it was decidedly tepid. She was always civil to her daughter-in-law, but her feeling towards the young Marquise was the distinctly conventional affection which good taste and good manners require us to feel for our relatives. The fortunes of her dead children having been settled, she could devote her savings and her own property to her darling Moïna.

Moïna, beautiful and fascinating from childhood, was Mme. d’Aiglemont’s favorite; loved beyond all the others with an instinctive or involuntary love, a fatal drawing of the heart, which sometimes seems inexplicable, sometimes, and to a close observer, only too easy to explain. Her darling’s pretty face, the sound of Moïna’s voice, her ways, her manner, her looks and gestures, roused all the deepest emotions that can stir a mother’s heart with trouble, rapture, or delight. The springs of the Marquise’s life, of yesterday, to-morrow, and to-day, lay in that young heart. Moïna, with better fortune, had survived four older children. As a matter of fact, Mme. d’Aiglemont had lost her eldest daughter, a charming girl, in a most unfortunate manner, said gossip, nobody knew exactly what became of her; and then she lost a little boy of five by a dreadful accident.

The child of her affections had, however, been spared to her, and doubtless the Marquise saw the will of Heaven in that fact; for those who had died, she kept but very shadowy recollections in some far-off corner of her heart; her memories of her dead children were like the headstones on a battlefield, you can scarcely see them for the flowers that have sprung up about them since. Of course, if the world had chosen, it might have said some hard truths about the Marquise, might have taken her to task for shallowness and an overweening preference for one child at the expense of the rest; but the world of Paris is swept along by the full flood of new events, new ideas, and new fashions, and it was inevitable the Mme. d’Aiglemont should be in some sort allowed to drop out of sight. So nobody thought of blaming her for coldness or neglect which concerned no one, whereas her quick, apprehensive tenderness for Moïna was found highly interesting by not a few who respected it as a sort of superstition. Besides, the Marquise scarcely went into society at all; and the few families who knew her thought of her as a kindly, gentle, indulgent woman, wholly devoted to her family. What but a curiosity, keen indeed, would seek to pry beneath the surface with which the world is quite satisfied? And what would we not pardon to old people, if only they will efface themselves like shadows, and consent to be regarded as memories and nothing more!

Indeed, Mme. d’Aiglemont became a kind of example complacently held up by the younger generation to fathers of families, and frequently cited to mothers-in-law. She had made over her property to Moïna in her own lifetime; the young Countess’ happiness was enough for her, she only lived in her daughter. If some cautious old person or morose uncle here and there condemned the course with--“Perhaps Mme. d’Aiglemont may be sorry some day that she gave up her fortune to her daughter; she may be sure of Moïna, but how can she be equally sure of her son-in-law?”--these prophets were cried down on all sides, and from all sides a chorus of praise went up for Moïna.

“It ought to be said, in justice to Mme. de Saint-Héreen, that her mother cannot feel the slightest difference,” remarked a young married woman. “Mme. d’Aiglemont is admirably well housed. She has a carriage at her disposal, and can go everywhere just as she used to do--”

“Except to the Italiens,” remarked a low voice. (This was an elderly parasite, one of those persons who show their independence--as they think--by riddling their friends with epigrams.) “Except to the Italiens. And if the dowager cares for anything on this earth but her daughter--it is music. Such a good performer she was in her time! But the Countess’ box is always full of young butterflies, and the Countess’ mother would be in the way; the young lady is talked about already as a great flirt. So the poor mother never goes to the Italiens.”

“Mme. de Saint-Héreen has delightful ‘At Homes’ for her mother,” said a rosebud. “All Paris goes to her salon.

“And no one pays any attention to the Marquise,” returned the parasite.

“The fact is that Mme. d’Aiglemont is never alone,” remarked a coxcomb, siding with the young women.

“In the morning,” the old observer continued in a discreet voice, “in the morning dear Moïna is asleep. At four o’clock dear Moïna drives in the Bois. In the evening dear Moïna goes to a ball or to the Bouffes.--Still, it is certainly true that Mme. d’Aiglemont has the privilege of seeing her dear daughter while she dresses, and again at dinner, if dear Moïna happens to dine with her mother. Not a week ago, sir,” continued the elderly person, laying his hand on the arm of the shy tutor, a new arrival in the house, “not a week ago, I saw the poor mother, solitary and sad, by her own fireside.--‘What is the matter?’ I asked. The Marquise looked up smiling, but I am quite sure that she had been crying.--‘I was thinking that it is a strange thing that I should be left alone when I have had five children,’ she said, ‘but that is our destiny! And besides, I am happy when I know that Moïna is enjoying herself.’--She could say that to me, for I knew her husband when he was alive. A poor stick he was, and uncommonly lucky to have such a wife; it was certainly owing to her that he was made a peer of France, and had a place at Court under Charles X.”

Yet such mistaken ideas get about in social gossip, and such mischief is done by it, that the historian of manners is bound to exercise his discretion, and weigh the assertions so recklessly made. After all, who is to say that either mother or daughter was right or wrong? There is but One who can read and judge their hearts! And how often does He wreak His vengeance in the family circle, using throughout all time children as His instruments against their mothers, and fathers against their sons, raising up peoples against kings, and princes against peoples, sowing strife and division everywhere? And in the world of ideas, are not opinions and feelings expelled by new feelings and opinions, much as withered leaves are thrust forth by the young leaf-buds in the spring?--all in obedience to the immutable Scheme; all to some end which God alone knows. Yet, surely, all things proceed to Him, or rather, to Him all things return.