“My child,” said the Duchess, “a mother should look on life with colder eyes than yours. Love is not the end but the means of family life. Do not imitate that poor little Baronne de Macumer. Excessive passion is barren and fatal. And God sends us our afflictions for reasons of His own. …
“Now that Athénaïs’ marriage is a settled thing, I shall have time to attend to you. I have already discussed the delicate position in which you are placed with your father and the Duc de Chaulieu and d’Ajuda. We shall find means to bring Calyste back to you.”
“With the Marquise de Rochefide there is no cause for despair,” said Clotilde, smiling at her sister. “She does not keep her adorers long.”
“D’Ajuda, my darling, was Monsieur de Rochefide’s brother-in-law. If our good Confessor approves of the little manoeuvres we must achieve to ensure the success of the plan I have submitted to your father, I will guarantee Calyste’s return. My conscience loathes the use of such methods, and I will lay them before the Abbé Brossette. We need not wait, my child, till you are in extremis to come to your assistance. Keep up your hopes. Your grief this evening is so great that I have let out my secret; I cannot bear not to give you a little encouragement.”
“Will it cause Calyste any grief?” asked Sabine, looking anxiously at the Duchess.
“Bless me, shall I be such another fool?” asked Athénaïs simply.
“Oh! child, you cannot know the straits into which Virtue can plunge us when she allows herself to be overruled by Love!” replied Sabine, so bewildered with grief that she fell into a vein of poetry.
The words were spoken with such intense bitterness that the Duchess, enlightened by her daughter’s tone, accent, and look, understood that there was some unconfessed trouble.
“Girls, it is midnight; go to bed,” said she to the two others, whose eyes were sparkling.
“And am I in the way, too, in spite of my six-and-thirty years?” asked Clotilde ironically. And while Athénaïs was kissing her mother, she whispered in Sabine’s ear:
“You shall tell me all about it. I will dine with you tomorrow. If mamma is afraid of compromising her conscience, I myself will rescue Calyste from the hands of the infidels.”
“Well, Sabine,” said the Duchess, leading her daughter into her bedroom, “tell me, my child, what is the new trouble.”
“Oh, mother, I am done for!”
“Why?”
“I wanted to triumph over that horrible woman; I succeeded, I have another child coming, and Calyste loves her so vehemently that I foresee being absolutely deserted. When she has proof of this infidelity to her she will be furious!—Oh, I am suffering such torments that I must die. I know when he is going to her, know it by his glee; then his surliness shows me when he has left her. In short, he makes no secret of it; he cannot endure me. Her influence over him is as unwholesome as she is herself, body and soul. You will see; as her reward for making up some quarrel, she will insist on a public rupture with me, a breach like her own; she will carry him off to Switzerland perhaps, or to Italy. He has been saying that it is ridiculous to know nothing of Europe, and I can guess what these hints mean, thrown out as a warning. If Calyste is not cured within the next three months, I do not know what will come of it—I shall kill myself, I know!”
“Unhappy child! And your son? Suicide is a mortal sin.”
“But do not you understand—she might bear him a child; and if Calyste loved that woman’s more than mine—Oh! this is the end of my patience and resignation.”
She dropped on a chair; she had poured out the inmost thoughts of her heart; she had no hidden pang left; and sorrow is like the iron prop that sculptors place inside a clay figure, it is supporting, it is a power.
“Well, well, go home now, poor little thing! Face to face with so much suffering, perhaps the Abbé will give me absolution for the venial sins we are forced to commit by the trickery of the world. Leave me, daughter,” she said, going to her prie-Dieu; “I will beseech the Lord and the Blessed Virgin more especially for you. Above all, do not neglect your religious duties if you hope for success.”
“Succeed as we may, mother, we can only save the family honor. Calyste has killed the sacred fervor of love in me by exhausting all my powers, even of suffering. What a honeymoon was that in which from the first day I was bitterly conscious of his retrospective adultery!”
At about one in the afternoon of the following day one of the priests of the Faubourg Saint-Germain—a man distinguished among the clergy of Paris, designate as a Bishop in 1840, but who had three times refused a see—the Abbé Brossette was crossing the courtyard of the Hôtel Grandlieu with the peculiar gait one must call the ecclesiastical gait, so expressive is it of prudence, mystery, calmness, gravity, and dignity itself. He was a small, lean man, about fifty years of age, with a face as white as an old woman’s, chilled by priestly fasting, furrowed by all the sufferings he made his own. Black eyes, alight with faith, but softened by an expression that was mysterious rather than mystical, gave life to this apostolic countenance. He almost smiled as he went up the steps, so little did he believe in the enormity of the case for which his penitent had sent for him; but as the Duchess’ hand was a sieve for alms, she was well worth the time her guileless confessions stole from the serious troubles of his parish. On hearing him announced, the Duchess rose and went forward a few steps to meet him, an honor she did to none but cardinals, bishops,
