Even before Mme. du Bousquier came back to town, her obliging friend, Mme. du Ronceret, went to fling a dead body down among the roses of her new-wedded happiness, to let her know what a love she had refused. Ever so gently the Présidente squeezed a shower of drops of wormwood over the honey of the first month of married life. And as Mme. du Bousquier returned, it so happened that she met Mme. Granson at the corner of the Val-Noble, and the look in the heartbroken mother’s eyes cut her to the quick. It was a look from a woman dying of grief, a thousand curses gathered up into one glance of malediction, a thousand sparks in one gleam of hate. It frightened Mme. du Bousquier; it boded ill, and invoked ill upon her.
Mme. Granson had belonged to the party most opposed to the curé; she was a bitter partisan of the priest of St. Leonard’s; but on the very evening of the tragedy she thought of the rigid orthodoxy of her own party, and she shuddered. She herself laid her son in his shroud, thinking all the while of the Mother of the Saviour; then with a soul quivering with agony, she betook herself to the house of the perjured priest. She found him busy, the humble good man, storing the hemp and flax which he gave to poor women and girls to spin, so that no worker should ever want work, a piece of wise charity which had saved more than one family that could not endure to beg. He left his hemp at once and brought his visitor into the dining-room, where the stricken mother saw the frugality of her own housekeeping in the supper that stood waiting for the curé.
“M. l’Abbé,” she began, “I have come to entreat you—”
She burst into tears, and could not finish the sentence.
“I know why you have come,” answered the holy man, “and I trust to you, madame, and to your relative Mme. du Bousquier to make it right with his Lordship at Séez. Yes, I will pray for your unhappy boy; yes, I will say masses; but we must avoid all scandal, we must give no occasion to ill-disposed people to gather together in the church. … I myself, alone, and at night—”
“Yes, yes, as you wish, if only he is laid in consecrated ground!” she said, poor mother; and taking the priest’s hand in hers, she kissed it.
And so, just before midnight, a bier was smuggled into the parish church. Four young men, Athanase’s friends, carried it. There were a few little groups of veiled and black-clad women, Mme. Granson’s friends, and some seven or eight lads that had been intimate with the dead. The bier was covered with a pall, torches were lit at the corners, and the curé read the office for the dead, with the help of one little choir boy whom he could trust. Then the suicide was buried, noiselessly, in a corner of the churchyard, and a dark wooden cross with no name upon it marked the grave for the mother. Athanase lived and died in the shadow.
Not a voice was raised against the curé; his Lordship at Séez was silent; the mother’s piety redeemed her son’s impious deed.
Months afterwards, moved by the inexplicable thirst of sorrow which drives the unhappy to steep their lips in their bitter cup, the poor woman went to see the place where her son drowned himself. Perhaps she felt instinctively that there were thoughts to be gathered under the poplar tree; perhaps, too, she longed to see all that his eyes had seen for the last time. The sight of the spot would kill many a mother; while again there are some who can kneel and worship there.—There are truths on which the patient anatomist of human nature cannot insist too much; verities against which education and laws and systems of philosophy are shattered. It is absurd—let us repeat it again and again—to try to lay down hard-and-fast rules in matters of feeling; the personal element comes in to modify feeling as it arises, and a man’s character influences his most instinctive actions.
Mme. Granson, by the riverside, saw a woman at some distance—a woman who came nearer, till she reached the fatal spot, and exclaimed:
“Then this is the place!”
One other woman in the world wept there as the mother was weeping, and that woman was Suzanne. She had heard of the tragedy on her arrival that morning at the Three Moors. If poor Athanase had been alive, she might have done what poor and generous people dream of doing, and the rich never think of putting in practice; she would have enclosed a thousand francs with the words, “Money lent by your father to a comrade who now repays you.” During her journey Suzanne had thought of this angelic way of giving. She looked up and saw Mme. Granson.
“I loved him,” she said; then she hurried away.
Suzanne, true to her nature, did not leave Alençon till she had changed the bride’s wreath of orange flowers to waterlilies. She was the first to assert that Mme. du Bousquier would be Mlle. Cormon as long as she lived. And with one jibe she avenged both Athanase and the dear Chevalier de Valois.
Alençon beheld another and more piteous suicide. Athanase was promptly forgotten by a world that willingly, and indeed of necessity, forgets its dead as soon as possible; but the poor Chevalier’s existence became a kind of death-in-life, a suicide continued morning after morning during fourteen years. Three months after du Bousquier’s marriage, people remarked, not without astonishment, that the Chevalier’s linen was turning yellow, and his hair irregularly combed. M. de Valois was no more, for a disheveled M. de Valois could not be said
