She was born in Chauville-le-Vieux. Her mother gave piano lessons at the local Lycée de Jeunes Filles, and her father had been "professeur de violon" at the little Conservatoire. Music was her destiny. As a hollow-eyed, stunted child, who should have been romping in the unfrequented park, she had been doomed to hours of piano practice in the stuffy salon, where during eight months of the year a window was never opened for longer than it took to shake out the rug. Her name was Marie Lamande.
She had accepted her fate passively. If it had not been scales and exercises that made a prisoner of her, she recognised that it would have been fractions, or zoology. In France, schools actually educate, but few children have a childhood. On the first day of a term, when the wan girls reassemble, they sometimes ask one another—curious to hear what novelty the "holidays" may have yielded, amid the home work—"Did you have a little promenade during the vacances?"
Because its Lycée was widely known, English and American families came to stay in Chauville—the English pupils discovering what it was to be taught with enthusiasm—and Marie knew French girls who had been initiated into the pleasures of tea-parties. Open-mouthed, she heard that the extravagant anglaise or américaine must have spent at least five or six francs on the cakes. But all the foreigners successively grew tired of inviting French children whose astonished mothers sent them trooping as often as they were asked, and, in no case, gave an invitation in return, and Marie herself never had the good luck to be asked.
Like her parents, she had been intended for the groove of tuition, and in due course tuition became her lot. But she was a gifted pianist, and ambitious; she dreamed of glory. Some years after she had been left alone, when her age was twenty-seven, she dared to escape from the melancholy town that she had grown to execrate. A slight little woman, without influence or knowledge of life, she aspired to conquer Paris. She attacked it with a sum sufficient to keep her for twelve months.
Her arrival at once frightened and enraptured her. In Chauville, at eight o'clock in the evening, a few of the shopkeepers had sat before their doorways, in the dark, a while; at nine, their crude streets were as vacant as the boulevards of the professional and independent classes, whose covert homes signified, even in the daytime, VISITORS WILL BE PROSECUTED. Behind the shutters of long avenues were over sixty thousand persons—most of them heroically hard-working—of a race that the pleasure-seeking English called "frivolous," content with no semblance of entertainment but the ill-patronised performances provided by a gloomy theatre, which was unbarred on only two days in the week. Paris, spirited and sparkling, in the tourist regions, took her breath away. Music called to her imperiously. She sat, squeezed among crowds, at the recitals of celebrities; and came out prayerful, to wonder: "Will crowds ever applaud me?" But after the first few days she reduced her expenses, and her allowance for concert-going was strict.
She found a lodging now in the rue Honoré-Chevalier, and sought engagements for Soirées d'Art and Matinées Artistiques, writing to many people who made no reply, and crossing the bridge to appeal in person to many others, who were inaccessible, or rude.
Among the few letters of introduction that she had brought from Chauville, one served its purpose. Madame Herbelin, the Directrice of the Lycée, always kindly disposed towards her, had recommended her to an acquaintance as a teacher. Thanks to this, she earned five francs each Thursday by a lesson.
When nine alarming weeks had slipped away she gained an interview with a fat man who had much knowledge, and who was interested in hearing himself talk. He said to her:
"Mademoiselle, it is a question of finances. To rise in the musical world you must give concerts, and to give concerts you must have money. Also, you must have the goodwill of pupils in a position to collect an audience for you, otherwise your concerts will be a heavier loss still. Further, you must have the usual paragraphs and critiques: 'Triumph! Triumph! What genius is possessed by this divine artist, whose enchanting gifts revolutionise Paris! Mademoiselle Lamande is, without question, the virtuosa the most spirituelle, the most troublante of our epoch.' These things do not cost a great deal in the Paris newspapers, but, naturally, they have to be paid for."
She told him: "I am a poor woman, and the only pupil that I have here is a child in Montparnasse."
The fat man, groaning comically, volunteered to "see what he could do."
He forgot her after five minutes.
Practising, in the feeble lamplight of the attic, she used to wait, through the long evenings, for the postman and news that never came. "For me?" she would call over the banisters. "Nothing, mademoiselle!" Then, back to the hired Pleyel, that barely left space for her to wash. Inexorable technique, cascades of brilliance, while her heart was breaking.
After she shut the piano, the dim light looked dimmer. The narrow street was silent. Only, in the distance sometimes, was the jog-trot of a cab-horse and the minor jangle of its bell.
Her siege of Paris made no progress.
Companionship came to her when ten months had gone. A young widow drifted to the house, and now and then, on the stairs, they met. One day they found themselves seated at the same table, in a little crémerie close by, and over their oeufs-sur-le-plat they talked. As they walked home together, the widow said:
"I always leave my door open to hear you play."
The answer was, "Won't you come into my room instead?"
Madame Branthonne was a gentlewoman, employed in the Bernstein School of Languages. She was so free-handed with her sous, so generous in the matter of brioche and chocolate, that Marie thought she must be comparatively rich. But madame Branthonne was not rich; and when Marie knew her well it transpired that she remitted every month, out of her slender salary, for the maintenance of a baby son in Amiens.
"How you must miss him! How old is he?"
"Only eleven weeks. Miss him? Mon Dieu! But I had to leave him, or we should both have starved; if I had brought him with me, who would have looked after him all day while I was out? Besides, in this work, there is no telling how long one may remain in any city—I might be packed off to some other branch of the concern to-morrow."
"Really?"
"Oh yes; one never knows. Last week one of oar professors was sent at a day's notice to Russia. What a life! Of course, one need not consent to go, but it is never prudent to refuse. You used to make me cry in there for my baby, when you played the piano. The poor little soul is called 'Paul,' after his father; he is with a person who used to be my servant; she is married now, and has a little business, a dairy. I know she is good to him, but imagine how I suffer—in less than a year I have lost my husband and my child. Alors, vrai! what an egotist I am! How go your own affairs? Still no luck?"
In the Garden of the Luxembourg on Sundays, the two lonely women sauntered under the chestnut-trees and talked of their sorrows and their hopes. The hopes of the widow were centred upon the lotteries de Bienfaisance, which had lured a louis from her time and again. She was emerging from a period of enforced discretion, and she asked: "What do you say to our buying a ticket between us?"
The present lottery had neared its end; only one drawing remained, and the price of tickets was accordingly much reduced. The friends bought their microscopic chance for five francs each.
The prizes that were dangled varied between a mite and a fortune; and now, in the murky lamplight of the garret, the pianist saw visions. Rebuffed, intimidated, she had suddenly a prospect; chimerical as the prospect was, she might gain the means to buy a hearing for her art!
For the woman seeking recognition, opportunity. For the woman divided from her child, a home. Every night they spoke of it. Often while the lamp burnt low, and a horse-bell jangled sadly, they laughed together in a castle-in-the-air.
But those brats from the Assistance publique, who blindly dispensed destinies at the drawing, dipped their red hands upon the wrong numbers.
"As usual! I am sorry I proposed it to you. It is an imbecility to waste one's earnings in such a fashion—one might as well toss money in the Seine. Well, I have had enough! I have finished. I am determined never to gamble any more," cried madame Branthonne, who had made the same resolve a dozen times.
Marie said less. But her disappointment was black; it was only now that she knew how vivid had been her hope. And in the meanwhile her little hoard had dwindled terribly, and she was seeking other pupils.
"What if you get them—you will be no nearer to renown? In Chauville you have a living waiting for you—why wear out shoe-leather to find bread in Paris? Poverty in Paris is no sweeter than poverty elsewhere."
"If I go back to Chauville, it means the end," she answered. "I shall never have anything to look forward to there—never, to the day of my death. Year after year I shall sit teaching exercises and little pieces to schoolgirls who will never play. The girls will escape, and marry, but I shall sit teaching the same exercises and little pieces to their children. Here, if I can hold out, if only I can hold out long enough, I may batter my way up. I want to get on—I've a right to get on. You don't suppose that no one has ever made a career who couldn't pay for it?"
"No," sighed her confidante; "I don't suppose it's so bad as that—men do help one sometimes." But in her heart she felt, "You aren't the kind of woman that men do things for."
And, to a stranger, even pupils at five francs an hour proved hard to find. A pianist of talent—and she couldn't earn a living in Paris, even by elementary lessons. It was one of those cases which the uninitiated call "improbable," and which are happening all the time.
Yet it fell to madame Branthonne to quit Paris first. When Marie Lamande could no longer sleep at night, or slept only to see the desolation of Chauville in her dreams, the teacher of French was required to go to one of the London branches of the school. It occurred abruptly; the news and the good-bye were almost simultaneous.
A new proclamation of millions to be won, aggrandised "par arrêté ministériel," was blazoned across the pages of the newspapers; and, on impulse, the woman who was "determined never to gamble any more" left a louis with the other, to buy a ticket for her.
"You know you can't spare it," urged Marie. "I wouldn't, if I were you!"
Momentarily the widow hesitated; and then she gave a shrug.
"Oh, of course, I'm an idiot," she exclaimed. "But what else have I got to hope for? Yes, get it and send it to me!"
Early in the journey she vacillated again. But her instructions were not revoked, because soon afterwards no more than a third of the train remained on the rails, and madame Branthonne was among the victims killed.
Her aghast friend heard of the catastrophe twelve hours later than multitudes for whom it had no personal interest. Dazed, she wondered whether the ex-servant in Amiens would see the name of "Branthonne" in the list of the dead, and what would become of the baby now. She had a confused notion that she ought to communicate with the woman, but she was ignorant of the address. She went hysterically to the head office of the school, where the manager undertook to make inquiries at the Amiens branch.
When the sickness of horror passed, her thoughts reverted to the ticket that she had been enjoined to buy; and on the way to fulfil the duty, it was as if the dead woman, as she had seen her last, with her hat and coat on, were close to her again. "What name?" inquired the clerk in the big bank. "Lamande," she answered—and asked herself afterwards if it would have been more businesslike to say "Branthonne." But it didn't seem to matter. The point that perplexed her was, in whose charge ought the ticket to be? It belonged to the baby now, and its possibilities extended through the year. "Série No. 78, Billet No. 19,333." Ought she to post it confidingly to the dairy-keeper when she learnt where she lived?
The question persisted, as she tramped the streets despondently—as daily she drew nearer to defeat. She had discontinued to hire a piano. Everywhere she was humbled with the same reply, banished with the same gestures, maddened by the same callous unconcern. Paris was brutal! She dropped in her purse the last louis that protracted hope. When this was gone, there would be left nothing but the price of her journey to Chauville and despair.
In the first drawing of the lottery, a few days later, the ticket won a prize of twelve thousand francs.
In a crumpled copy of Le Petit Journal, in the crémerie, she read of the drawing, by chance—not having remembered for what date it was announced. And she took a copy of the paper home with her—having forgotten the number of the ticket that she had bought. And when the revelation came to her, there was, blent with her thanksgiving for the child's sake, the human, bitter consciousness that, had she rashly suggested it, half the chance might have been hers. She might have stood here to-night on the threshold of success. So simple it would have been! The knowledge was a taunt. She felt that Fate had robbed and derided her; she felt poor, as she had never felt poor before....
The thought floated across her mind impersonally. It brought no shock, because it did not present itself as a temptation, even the faintest; it was just as if she had been recognising what somebody in a tale might do. Without purpose, without questioning why the thought fascinated her, she sat seeing how easily she could steal the money.
The ticket was on the table; there was nothing to show that she hadn't any right to it—she had merely to claim the prize. There would be a fort-night's delay, at least, before she got it. Well, she could eke out the sum that was put by for her fare. She imagined her sensations on the morning that she walked from the bank with notes for twelve thousand francs in her pocket. If her pocket were picked! Yielding even more intently to the thought, she perceived that the proper course would be to open an account before she left.... It wouldn't be twelve thousand francs—a substantial sum would be deducted for les droits des pauvres. But it would be enough—the price of power! The thought leapt further. She saw herself, gorgeously gowned, on a platform—heard the very piece that she was playing, the plaudits that came thundering; she trembled in the emotion of a visionary fame.
Recalling her, there sounded, in the dark emptiness again, the minor jangle of a cab-horse bell.
Then she understood. It had been no idle supposition, the thought that mastered her. "O divine Vierge Marie!" she wailed on her knees, and knew that she wanted to be a thief.
Through the night, through the morrow, through every waking moment, a voice was saying to her: "You won't be robbing a child; you can do for it all that She did—every month, just the same thing. Long before the child is old enough to need so large a sum you will be in a position to give it to him. What will he have lost? Nothing. You are terrified by the semblance of a sin; it is not a sin really. Dare it, dare it, be bold!"
Nothing could quell the voice. It was whispering while she prayed. And the crashing of orchestras could not drown it, when she fled to music for relief.
She learnt that the woman in Amiens was called Gaillard, and had a shop in the rue Puteaux. But now she shrank from writing to her—she didn't know how she meant to act. Once, in desperation, she did begin a letter, an avowal of the prize that had been drawn; but she hesitated again.
There was an evening when, with steps that wavered, like a woman enfeebled by illness, she packed her things to return to Chauville.... She sat wide-eyed, staring at the trunk.
When she had dragged the things frantically out, she wrote to Amiens, making herself responsible for the monthly payments. "All that his mother did I will do!" she wrote, feeling less criminal for the phrase. And then one morning, tortured, she caught the express to the town to see that all was well. The place was small and poor; and though the baby looked well cared for, and the young woman and her husband seemed kind, the visit was horrible to her. Next day she spent some of the stolen money on a baby's bonnet and pelisse. And as the quality of the gift suggested means, she received, before the date for her second remittance, a scrawl declaring that the cost of provisions had risen dreadfully, and asking for twenty francs a month more.
"RÉCITAL DONNÉ PAR MADEMOISELLE MARIE LAMANDE." A blue-and-white poster, with her name staring Paris in the face. The time came when she saw one on a wall, and stopped, thrilling at it in the rain. A week afterwards she saw one on a wall again, and passed it with a sigh, remembering the half-empty salle, and the cheques that she had drawn.
"Patience, mademoiselle, patience. An artist does not arrive in a day; one must persevere." There were plenty of persons to give her encouragement now that it might be advantageous to them.
But the expense of her début was a warning, and she proceeded slowly. Though they made her feel very shy and cowardly, she did not succumb to the arguments of vehement people who offered "opportunities the most exceptional" at a big price, and whose attitudes of amazement implied that she must be brainless to decline. She did not waste money in bettering her abode. She did not, when she had given a recital again, continue to imagine that the prize had provided a sum abundant for her purpose.
The knowledge obsessed her that she owed this money, that one day she was to repay it. For a year she told herself, "The road is harder than I thought, but I shall reach the end of it in time!" During the second year she struggled in a panic, while the money was melting, melting without result.
To adventure a concert meant such wearisome, such overwhelming preparation. And within a week it was as if it had never been—she was again forgotten. But she saw a little chorus-girl, who had done something more than ordinarily immodest, launch herself into celebrity in a night.
At last, when she realised that she had wrecked her peace of mind for nothing, when to cross the bridge was to eye the river longingly, she knew that she wasn't free to find oblivion like that. Restitution to the child would be impossible, but it was her destiny to support him. She wrote to madame Herbelin, in Chauville, appealing for influence to regain the footing that she had kicked away. Her bent face was wet and ugly as she detailed the story of her failure; she foresaw the greetings, tactful, but galling, of acquaintances, the half-veiled satisfaction of other music-mistresses in the town.
The reply that reached her made it evident that to recover the position would be a slow process. And her means to wait were limited.
Hitherto the acknowledgments from Amiens had varied but slightly: "The remittance had come; the baby was well," or "the baby had had some infantile ailment, and was better." Now, a partially illegible letter informed her suddenly that the little business was to be given up. Circumstances compelled the woman to take a situation again, and she could not keep the orphan in her care. It was explained that "Mademoiselle should arrange to remove him in a month's time."
Already stricken, she was stupefied by this news. It seemed to her the last blow that could be dealt. What was to be done? She marvelled that she had not contemplated the contingency. She had not contemplated it—at most, she had given it a passing glance. She had questioned, agonised, whether she could manage to maintain the payments regularly; she had asked herself what lay before her when the child was older and his needs increased; she had wondered, conscience-racked, how she was to bear her life; but for this new responsibility, hurled on her when she was broken, she had been unprepared.
"Remove him?" To what? She wasn't remaining in Paris; was she blindly to answer some advertisement before she left and leave a baby behind her here, helpless in hands that might misuse him? She shuddered. No; now that he would be at the mercy of a stranger, the place must be near enough for her to visit it—often and unexpectedly. She must find a place near Chauville.
But could she do it? However secretly she arranged, wasn't it sure to be known? What was she to say? It was a misfortune that she had written to madame Herbelin too fully to be able to assert now that she had married. What was she to say? And who would credit what she said?
Hourly, the craven in her faltered that there were hundreds of honest homes in Paris where he would be gently treated, where he would be as safe as he had been in Amiens. And always her better self cried out: "But you'd desert him without knowing that the home you had found was one of them!"
For three weeks she cowered at the crossways. She did not love the little child that she had wronged, as she bore him back with her to Chauville. The journey was long, and he clung to her, whimpering, and she caressed him, white-faced and abject; but there was no love for him in her heart. The dusk, when they arrived, was welcome. She led him down the station steps, her head sunk low. In the street he cried to be carried, and she picked him up—submissive to her burden. She had had to sacrifice her reputation, or the child—and mademoiselle Lamande returned to her native town with a baby in her arms.
She had booked to the Gare du Marché, the station in the poorest quarter. A porter followed, trundling the luggage over the cobbles. In a narrow bed, under a skylight, the child and anxiety allowed her little sleep.
Before she could begin her search for work, it was imperative that she should find someone to shelter him, if only during the day; and in the morning she questioned a servant who was sweeping the stairs. The girl looked as if she had been picked from a dust-bin, and clothed from a rag-bag, but, compared with English girls of her class, she had brilliant intelligence. She thought it probable that the woman at the épicerie across the road might be accommodating.
The woman at the épicerie was unable to arrange, but she suggested a concierge of her acquaintance "là bas." "Là bas" proved to be remote. Chauville had not changed. As of old, the door of the Église Ste. Clothilde was lost in its vast frame of funeral black; as of old, the insistent bell was dinning for the dead. The population was still concealed, except where a cortege of priests, and acolytes, and mourners wound their slow way with another coffin to the cemetery, Chauville's most animated spot.
As a makeshift, the concierge sufficed.
To gain an interview with madame Herbelin strained patience. But after the applicant had sat for a long while, with her feet on the sawdust of the salle d'attente, where an officer, and a marquise drooped resignedly, madame la Directrice told her: "It is a sad pity that you left the town." Marie could not remember that the busy woman said anything more valuable.
There was, however, another occasion. This time the lady said: "Mademoiselle, I knew you when you were a little girl, and I knew your parents, and I have regretted, more than you may suppose, that it was not in my power to offer you an appointment at the Lycée, in your emergency. But I have recently heard something about you that is very grave—something that I trust is not true."
"Madame," said Marie, trembling, "I can guess what you have heard, and it is not true. Only this is true—I have placed a child with a concierge in the rue Lecomte and go to see it there. It is the orphan of a woman who was my friend in Paris, a widow—we lived together."
Madame Herbelin did not speak.
"Madame Branthonne was killed in a railway accident, going to England," Marie went on; "she was a teacher in the Bernstein School. Her baby had been left in Amiens, with a woman called Gaillard. A few weeks ago the woman wrote to me that she was going away, and was unable to keep the child any longer. I couldn't abandon it to the Assistance publique."
"Where is she now, this madame Gaillard?" inquired the Directrice coldly.
"I do not know," said Marie. And then, recognising the lameness of the reply, she burst forth into a torrent of details to corroborate the story.
Her voice, more than the details, carried conviction to the listener. After a long pause she said:
"Mademoiselle, I believe you have done a generous thing." The thief winced. "But it was an imprudent thing, a thing that you could not afford to do. I do not speak of your intention to maintain the child—may le bon Dieu aid you in the endeavour! But you did wrong to bring it to Chauville. You should not expose yourself to calumny. I counsel you most earnestly to place the child somewhere else without delay."
"Madame, it is my duty to have him under my own eyes," she urged. "Apart from me, he might be starved, beaten, corrupted—my friend's boy might be reared as an apache. How could I know? I should risk it all. It would be inhuman of me."
"I think you over-estimate the dangers," sighed madame Herbelin. "In fine, if you put the boy away from you, it is possible he may suffer. But if you keep him near you, it is certain you will suffer. I cannot say more."
"I must suffer," answered Marie.
A permanent home for him, not far from the rue Lecomte, was found at a bonneterie, whose humble little window contained Communion caps, and the announcement "Piqures à la Machine."
To have had him in her lodging would have cost her less. But this child that dishonoured her must be covert from the jeunes filles that she hoped would come there; and if she had to give lessons out, she could not leave him there alone.
She did have to give lessons out. It was a descent for her here to go to the pupils' houses, but she was compelled to do it. And something bitterer—she was compelled to accept a lowered fee, and affect to be unconscious why a reduction was proposed. To obtain the services of a "belle musicienne" for a trifle, there were a few mothers who engaged her, and replied to questioning relatives that she was a "slandered woman." But to her they did not say that she was slandered, and their hard eyes were an insult.
She gave a lesson twice a week for twenty francs a month now, mademoiselle Marie Lamande, who had advertised recitals in Paris, and she went short of food, to meet the charges at the bonneterie. The boy seemed to be amply nourished, and the remembrance sustained her on the days when she was dinnerless.
God! for a chance to get away, to be free of this place, where it was an ordeal to tread the streets. When she could afford to buy a postage stamp she applied for salaried work in some distant school. Once it looked as if the child were not to live; and as she sat, obeying orders, through one endless night, she knew, before she fainted from exhaustion, that if he died, her own escape from Chauville would be made by the same road.
But he recovered—thanks partially to her—and her duty still had to be done.
He recovered, and, as time passed, began to talk like other children on the doorsteps. She recalled the refinement of his mother, and the little child in a black blouse, shrilling kitchen French, avenged himself unknowingly. "As often as we ever meet, when the boy I robbed is a poor, big, common man," she thought, "every note of his voice will be a chastisement!"
Before she accomplished her release, she bore in Chauville-le-Vieux a three-years' martyrdom.
Madame Herbelin had consented to testify to her abilities, and she went far away, to a school at Ivry-St.-Hilaire. She had pleaded that, in the letter of recommendation, she might be referred to as "madame" Lamande, but this entreaty the Directrice would not grant.
"Mademoiselle," she said, "I cannot do it for you; and if you are wise, there is no need. Remember what I told you when you returned, and be guided by me this time. Do not repeat there the blunder that you made here. Leave the child where he is; you have tested the person and you know she is honest. Occasionally, once a year, you can afford to come and see him. If you take him with you, you will not gain much by your removal. Of course, at Ivry-St.-Hilaire your parentage is unknown and there is nothing to hinder you from inventing a relationship; but it isn't worth the trouble—believe me, you would be suspected just the same. Make the most of this opportunity; go unencumbered—do not live your whole life in shadow for the sake of an ideal."
But her conscience would not allow her to see him only once a year, nor to leave him to play on the doorstep, and attend the École Communale. In view of a constant salary, she already foresaw herself alleviating his plight. She was resigned to live her life in shadow, that she might yield a little sunshine to him.
So, when she had sacrificed herself again, madame la Directrice thought: "She is strangely devoted to the child. I wonder if I was wrong to befriend her—perhaps she is a bad woman, after all!"
She did not venture to take the boy with her, however. She was more than three months at Ivry before her furtive arrangements for him were concluded. Then she placed him with priests twenty miles distant from her, in the Etablissement des Frères Eudoxie at Maison-Verte. Small as the annual charges were, they were vast in relation to her salary. Till she succeeded, by slow degrees, in obtaining a few private pupils, her self-denial was severe.
But the little chap was in better hands now. And the woman had procured a respite from disdain. A tinge of colour crept back into her cheeks, and she faced the world less fearfully. By and by, when she could afford the fare, she went to the institution sometimes, on a Sunday, and walked with him in the cour, and noted that gradually his speech improved. As she could afford the fare but seldom, the intervals were long.
Paul looked forward to her rare visits. Some of the boys had visitors more frequently than he, pale women who came to walk beside them in the cour; and the boastful shout of "Ma mère!" was often humiliating to Paul. He had been taught to call her "mademoiselle," but one Sunday, the child, in a triumphant cry, found his own name for her: "Mademoiselle ma mère est venue!"
After that, he called her always "Mademoiselle ma mère"; and, divining something of the little wistful heart, mademoiselle did not reprove him.
At Ivry-St.-Hilaire a thing strange and bewildering happened. For the first time in her life a man sought her society; for the first time in her life she was happier for talking to a man. Two moments were prodigious to her—a moment after she had heard herself laughing merrily; a moment when she realised why she had just plucked out a grey hair.
When they were alone together one day the man said to her:
"Now that I have made a practice in the town at last, I am rooted here—and Ivry isn't amusing. If a woman were to marry me she would have to live here always. I tell you this because I love you."
It was as if God had wrought another miracle. "I can't understand it," she whispered truly.
Then the man laughed and took her in his arms, and it seemed to her that she had never known what it was to be tired.
When he let her go and she came back to the world, her sin was staring at her. And now the voice that decoyed her before was clamouring: "If you degrade yourself in his sight you'll lose him."
Her lover appeared to her no less a hero because, under his imposing presence, he was a cur, and the thing that she feared would revolt him was her dishonesty.
Not on that day, nor on the next, but after many resolutions to do right had melted into terrors, she forced him to listen; and it seemed to her that she was dying while she spoke.
"I stole," she moaned, her face covered.
"Pauvrette!" he exclaimed tenderly.
When she dared to look, he was smiling. The relief and gratitude in her soul were so infinite that she wanted to kneel at his feet.
But when she sobbed out the story of her later struggles and told him how she was devoting her life to the child, his brow grew dark.
"That, of course, would have to be changed," he said.
"Changed?" she stammered.
"Obviously, best beloved. One must consider public opinion. These journeys to Maison-Verte are mad; they must cease. You have not been fair to yourself; and now, more than ever, you need to reflect that——"
"But," she broke in, frightened, "you don't understand. It is not a mere question of my going to Maison-Verte; he will not be there always—he will grow up, and his future will be my care. My responsibility goes on. Oh, I know—you need not tell me—that you have thoroughly the right to refuse, but—but I have no right to alter. Since I have seen that I could never hope to give back what I took, I have seen that he was my charge for life."
"Mon Dieu!" he said, "you exaggerate quixotically. To give back what you took? Remember what you have already done!"
"Counted in francs," she pleaded, "I have done very little. It has been difficult to do, that's all."
Presently, when he perceived that, on this one point, the little weak woman was inflexible, the man made a beautiful speech, declaring that she was worth more than the opinion of Ivry-St.-Hilaire, and of all France. He said that nothing mattered to him but their "divine love." He looked more heroic still, and his eyes were moist with the nobility of the sentiments that he was delivering.
But as he sat in the principal café of the town by and by, among the stacks of swords in the corners, and the elite of the military and civil circles, clearing their throats vociferously on to the floor, he knew that a few days hence he meant to deliver a second lie about the "supplications of his family and his duty as a son." Had her debt been paid, he would have held her absolved from yielding so much as another thought to the boy, and he could have afforded to pay the debt, but it did not even enter his mind to commit such a madness. Yet, in his fashion, he loved her. The "chivalry" of offering marriage to a woman without a dot had proved it.
It would have been kinder to her not to leave her in a fool's paradise; she was to suffer more intensely because of that.
"Some of the facts, sufficient to explain the position, I have confided to my mother," he told her. "She is very old, and the honour of the family is very dear to her. I entreat you, in her name. The boy shall remain in this institution, or be placed in some other. They will teach him a trade. When the time comes for him to earn his living he will be no worse off than the other gosses there. Be guided by me. I assure you, you are morbidly sensitive. There is no reason why you should ever meet him again. My adored one, our happiness is in your hands. Give the child up!"
"I cannot," she repeated hopelessly.
And then, all of a sudden, the imposing presence vanished and she saw the puny man—more clearly than he had ever seen himself.
me