“Here is my father.”
“Well, Madeleine?” said her mother.
The child gave her hand to Monsieur de Chessel when he held out his, and looked at me fixedly after making an astonished little courtesy.
“Are you satisfied with her health?” said Monsieur de Chessel to the Countess.
“She is better,” replied the mother, stroking the little girl’s hair as she sat huddled in her lap.
A question from Monsieur de Chessel taught me the fact that Madeleine was nine years old; I showed some surprise at my mistake, and my astonishment brought a cloud to the mother’s brow. My friend shot me one of those looks by which men of the world give us a second education. This was, no doubt, a mother’s wound which might not be opened or touched. A frail creature, with colorless eyes and a skin as white as porcelain lighted from within, Madeleine would probably not have lived in the air of a town. Country air, and the care with which her mother brooded over her, had kept the flame alive in a body as delicate as a plant grown in a hothouse in defiance of the severity of the northern climate. Though she was not at all like her mother, she seemed to have her mother’s spirit, and that sustained her. Her thin, black hair, her sunken eyes, hollow cheeks, lean arms, and narrow chest told of a struggle between life and death, an unceasing duel in which the Countess had hitherto been victorious. The child made an effort to be gay, no doubt to spare her mother suffering; for now and again, when she was unobserved, she languished like a weeping willow. You might have taken her for a gypsy child suffering from hunger, who had begged her way across country, exhausted but brave, and dressed for her public.
“Where did you leave Jacques?” asked her mother, kissing her on the white line that parted her hair into two bands like a raven’s wings.
“He is coming with my father.”
The Count at this moment came in, leading his little boy by the hand. Jacques, the very image of his sister, showed the same signs of weakliness. Seeing these two fragile children by the side of such a magnificently handsome mother, it was impossible not to understand the causes of the grief which gave pathos to the Countess’ brow and made her silent as to the thoughts which are confided to God alone, but which stamp terrible meaning on the forehead. Monsieur de Mortsauf, as he bowed to me, gave me a glance not so much of inquiry as of the awkward uneasiness of a man whose distrust arises from his want of practical observation and analysis.
After mentioning my name, and what had brought me thither, his wife gave him her seat and left the room. The children, whose eyes centered in their mother’s as if they derived their light from her, wanted to go with her; she said, “Stay here, my darlings,” and laid her finger on her lips.
They obeyed, but they looked sad.
Oh! To hear that word “darling,” what task might one not have undertaken? Like the children, I felt chilled when she was no longer there.
My name changed the Count’s impulses with regard to me. From being cold and supercilious, he became, if not affectionate, at least politely pressing, showed me every mark of consideration, and seemed happy to see me. Long ago my father had devoted himself to play a noble but inconspicuous part for our sovereigns, full of danger, but possibly useful. When all was lost, and Napoleon had climbed to the highest pinnacle, like many secret conspirators, he had taken refuge in the peace of a provincial life and quiet home, bowing before accusations as cruel as they were unmerited—the inevitable reward of gamblers who stake all for all or nothing, and lapse after having been the pivot of the political machine. I, knowing nothing of the fortunes, the antecedents, or the prospects of my own family, was equally ignorant of the details of this forgotten history which Monsieur de Mortsauf remembered. However, if the antiquity of my name, in his eyes the most precious hallmark a man could possess, might justify a reception which made me blush, I did not know the real reason till later. For the moment the sudden change put me at my ease. When the two children saw that the conversation was fairly started among us three, Madeleine slipped her head from under her father’s hand, looked at the open door, and glided out like an eel, followed by Jacques. They joined their mother, for I heard them talking and trotting about in the distance, like the hum of bees round the hive that is their home.
I studied the Count de Mortsauf, trying to guess at his character, but I was so far interested by some leading features to go no further than a superficial examination of his countenance. Though he was no more than five-and-forty, he looked nearly sixty, so rapidly had he aged in the general wreck which closed the eighteenth century. The fringe of hair, like a monk’s, which framed his bald head, ended over his ears in grizzled locks on his temples. His face had a remote resemblance to that of a white wolf with a bloodstained muzzle, for his nose was hot and red, like that of a man whose constitution is undermined, whose digestion is weak, and his blood vitiated by early disease. His fiat forehead, too wide for a face that ended in a point, was furrowed across at unequal distances, the result of an open-air life, and not of intellectual labors, of constant ill-fortune, and not of the effort to defy it. His cheekbones, high and sunburnt, while the rest of his face was sallow, showed that his frame was so strongly built as to promise a long life.
His bright, tawny, hard eye fell
