“No, monsieur, I am compelled to send you away. Mme. d’Aiglemont wishes to join her children, and I shall have the honor of escorting her.”
“Nine o’clock already! Time goes like a shadow in pleasant company,” said the man of law, who had talked on end for the past hour.
He looked for his hat, planted himself before the fire, with a suppressed hiccup; and, without heeding the Marquise’s withering glances, spoke once more to his impatient client:
“To sum up, my lord Marquis. Business before all things. Tomorrow, then, we must subpoena your brother; we will proceed to make out the inventory, and faith, after that—”
So ill had the lawyer understood his instructions, that his impression was the exact opposite to the one intended. It was a delicate matter, and Vandenesse, in spite of himself, began to put the thickheaded notary right. The discussion which followed took up a certain amount of time.
“Listen,” the diplomatist said at last at a sign from the lady, “You are puzzling my brains; come back tomorrow, and if the writ is not issued by noon tomorrow, the days of grace will expire, and then—”
As he spoke, a carriage entered the courtyard. The poor woman turned sharply away at the sound to hide the tears in her eyes. The Marquis rang to give the servant orders to say that he was not at home; but before the footman could answer the bell, the lady’s husband reappeared. He had returned unexpectedly from the Gaieté, and held both children by the hand. The little girl’s eyes were red; the boy was fretful and very cross.
“What can have happened?” asked the Marquise.
“I will tell you by and by,” said the General, and catching a glimpse through an open door of newspapers on the table in the adjoining sitting-room, he went off. The Marquise, at the end of her patience, flung herself down on the sofa in desperation. The notary, thinking it incumbent upon him to be amiable with the children, spoke to the little boy in an insinuating tone:
“Well, my little man, and what is there on at the theatre?”
“The Valley of the Torrent,” said Gustave sulkily.
“Upon my word and honor,” declared the notary, “authors nowadays are half crazy. The Valley of the Torrent! Why not the Torrent of the Valley? It is conceivable that a valley might be without a torrent in it; now if they had said the Torrent of the Valley, that would have been something clear, something precise, something definite and comprehensible. But never mind that. Now, how is the drama to take place in a torrent and in a valley? You will tell me that in these days the principal attraction lies in the scenic effect, and the title is a capital advertisement.—And did you enjoy it, my little friend?” he continued, sitting down before the child.
When the notary pursued his inquiries as to the possibilities of a drama in the bed of a torrent, the little girl turned slowly away and began to cry. Her mother did not notice this in her intense annoyance.
“Oh! yes, monsieur, I enjoyed it very much,” said the child. “There is a dear little boy in the play, and he was all alone in the world, because his papa could not have been his real papa. And when he came to the top of the bridge over the torrent, a big, naughty man with a beard, dressed all in black, came and threw him into the water. And then Hélène began to sob and cry, and everybody scolded us, and father brought us away quick, quick—”
M. de Vandenesse and the Marquise looked on in dull amazement, as if all power to think or move had been suddenly paralyzed.
“Do be quiet, Gustave!” cried the General. “I told you that you were not to talk about anything that happened at the play, and you have forgotten what I said already.”
“Oh, my lord Marquis, your lordship must excuse him,” cried the notary. “I ought not to have asked questions, but I had no idea—”
“He ought not to have answered them,” said the General, looking sternly at the child.
It seemed that the Marquise and the master of the house both perfectly understood why the children had come back so suddenly. Mme. d’Aiglemont looked at her daughter, and rose as if to go to her, but a terrible convulsion passed over her face, and all that could be read in it was relentless severity.
“That will do, Hélène,” she said. “Go into the other room, and leave off crying.”
“What can she have done, poor child!” asked the notary, thinking to appease the mother’s anger and to stop Hélène’s tears at one stroke. “So pretty as she is, she must be as good as can be; never anything but a joy to her mother, I will be bound. Isn’t that so, my little girl?”
Hélène cowered, looked at her mother, dried her eyes, struggled for composure, and took refuge in the next room.
“And you, madame, are too good a mother not to love all your children alike. You are too good a woman, besides, to have any of those lamentable preferences which have such fatal effects, as we lawyers have only too much reason to know. Society goes through our hands; we see its passions in that most revolting form, greed. Here it is the mother of a family trying to disinherit her husband’s children to enrich the others whom she loves better; or it is the husband who tries to leave all his property to the child who has done his best to earn his mother’s hatred. And then begin quarrels, and fears, and deeds, and defeasances, and sham sales, and trusts, and all the rest of it; a pretty mess, in fact, it is pitiable, upon my honor, pitiable! There are fathers that will spend their whole lives in cheating their children and robbing their wives. Yes, robbing is the only word
