Well-bred people, and women especially, only betray their feelings by imperceptible touches; but those who can look back over their own experience on such bruises as this mother’s heart received, know also how the heartstrings vibrate to these light touches. Overcome by her memories, Mme. d’Aiglemont recollected one of those microscopically small things, so stinging and so painful was it that never till this moment had she felt all the heartless contempt that lurked beneath smiles.
At the sound of shutters thrown back at her daughter’s windows, she dried her tears, and hastened up the pathway by the railings. As she went, it struck her that the gardener had been unusually careful to rake the sand along the walk which had been neglected for some little time. As she stood under her daughter’s windows, the shutters were hastily closed.
“Moïna, is it you?” she asked.
No answer.
The Marquise went on into the house.
“Mme. la Comtesse is in the little drawing-room,” said the maid, when the Marquise asked whether Mme. de Saint-Héreen had finished dressing.
Mme. d’Aiglemont hurried to the little drawing-room; her heart was too full, her brain too busy to notice matters so slight; but there on the sofa sat the Countess in her loose morning-gown, her hair in disorder under the cap tossed carelessly on her head, her feet thrust into slippers. The key of her bedroom hung at her girdle. Her face, aglow with color, bore traces of almost stormy thought.
“What makes people come in!” she cried, crossly. “Oh! it is you, mother,” she interrupted herself, with a preoccupied look.
“Yes, child; it is your mother—”
Something in her tone turned those words into an outpouring of the heart, the cry of some deep inward feeling, only to be described by the word “holy.” So thoroughly in truth had she rehabilitated the sacred character of a mother, that her daughter was impressed, and turned towards her, with something of awe, uneasiness, and remorse in her manner. The room was the furthest of a suite, and safe from indiscreet intrusion, for no one could enter it without giving warning of approach through the previous apartments. The Marquise closed the door.
“It is my duty, my child, to warn you in one of the most serious crises in the lives of us women; you have perhaps reached it unconsciously, and I am come to speak to you as a friend rather than as a mother. When you married, you acquired freedom of action; you are only accountable to your husband now; but I asserted my authority so little (perhaps I was wrong), that I think I have a right to expect you to listen to me, for once at least, in a critical position when you must need counsel. Bear in mind, Moïna that you are married to a man of high ability, a man of whom you may well be proud, a man who—”
“I know what you are going to say, mother!” Moïna broke in pettishly. “I am to be lectured about Alfred—”
“Moïna,” the Marquise said gravely, as she struggled with her tears, “you would not guess at once if you did not feel—”
“What?” asked Moïna, almost haughtily. “Why, really, mother—”
Mme. d’Aiglemont summoned up all her strength. “Moïna,” she said, “you must attend carefully to this that I ought to tell you—”
“I am attending,” returned the Countess, folding her arms, and affecting insolent submission. “Permit me, mother, to ring for Pauline,” she added with incredible self-possession; “I will send her away first.”
She rang the bell.
“My dear child, Pauline cannot possibly hear—”
“Mamma,” interrupted the Countess, with a gravity which must have struck her mother as something unusual, “I must—”
She stopped short, for the woman was in the room.
“Pauline, go yourself to Baudran’s, and ask why my hat has not yet been sent.”
Then the Countess reseated herself and scrutinized her mother. The Marquise, with a swelling heart and dry eyes, in painful agitation, which none but a mother can fully understand, began to open Moïna’s eyes to the risk that she was running. But either the Countess felt hurt and indignant at her mother’s suspicions of a son of the Marquis de Vandenesse, or she was seized with a sudden fit of inexplicable levity caused by the inexperience of youth. She took advantage of a pause.
“Mamma, I thought you were only jealous of the father—” she said, with a forced laugh.
Mme. d’Aiglemont shut her eyes and bent her head at the words, with a very faint, almost inaudible sigh. She looked up and out into space, as if she felt the common overmastering impulse to appeal to God at the great crises of our lives; then she looked at her daughter, and her eyes were full of awful majesty and the expression
