§ ii
She was just falling asleep that night, after having seen Andrée comfortably settled. She was mortally weary, unable even to think. She had a light burning low, as was her reprehensible custom, and she had a book beside her, in case she could not sleep. But, in spite of her trouble, the murmur of the night wind soothed her, and the air blowing across her face. She had closed her eyes, and a blissful numbness was stealing over her, when she was startled by Andrée’s voice.
“Mother!” she cried. “Mother!”
She was instantly wide awake. Andrée stood beside her, like a spectre in the dim light, in her night dress and her dark hair about her shoulders.
“I want Alfred!” she said. “Oh, Mother ...! I began to think—”
Claudine took her dressing-gown from the foot of the bed and laid it about her child’s shoulders.
“I’ve been so wicked!” she went on. “It frightens me! I want Al back! I want to see his kind face.... He’s so kind and so good! I want to go home to him! I want just him—and this baby. Please, please send for him!”
“I will, pet, as soon as it’s morning!”
“I can’t wait! I’m so unhappy! I want to hear his dear, kind voice!”
“Come in here and lie down beside me, darling. Talk to me!”
With that beloved head on her shoulder, Claudine grew calm and strong again. She would have listened to her all night. What did it matter if this were only a new caprice? It was a good one, a safe one.
She thought of her own life, of how her child had assuaged her bitterness and given her peace. She thought of the hopes she had relinquished—such little hopes compared with Andrée’s inordinate ambitions, and she believed that all that was to happen again. Andrée would be saved, if she would love her child better than herself. And she believed that this would happen. She looked very earnestly into her face; it was imperious, even cruel, but it was the cruelty of blindness, of one who inflicts suffering without knowing what suffering is.
She didn’t care in the least that Andrée’s brilliant future was endangered. She didn’t care how fettered and narrow her life might become. Better narrow and deep, she thought, than broad and shallow.
She listened quite unmoved to her child’s tears and sobs. It didn’t matter. She kissed her with a sublime sort of indifference. She had won; God had helped her, and she had won.