It was with difficulty that she could be persuaded to appear at table, and she scarcely tasted food. Glancing up at the faded flowers in the hanging baskets suspended before the windows, and to the withered bouquets in the tall vases that stood on either side,—baskets and vases which Madeleine had ever kept freshly supplied,—Bertha could scarcely restrain her tears, as she murmured mournfully,—
"Ah, I know now what the English poet's Ophelia meant, when she said all the violets withered when her father died! All our flowers faded when Madeleine went!"
Baptiste, who was standing beside her chair, rubbed his eyes, and the sigh, that would not be checked, was audible to her quick ears. She turned to give him a glance which recognized his sympathy, and noticed that there was no gay-looking blossom in his button-hole that day. This was an unmistakable expression of sorrow on the part of Baptiste; for he never assumed the compulsory office of butler without asserting his preference for his legitimate vocation of gardener by a flower in his coat. Bertha had never seen him dispense with the floral decoration before, and she comprehended its absence but too well.
Her nervous disquietude increased every hour, and caused her aunt a species of petty martyrdom resembling the torture of perpetual pin-pricking, the incessant buzzing and stinging of a gnat, the endless creaking of rusty door-hinges,—minor miseries often more unendurable than some great mental or physical suffering. But although the patience of the countess was wearied out, Bertha was too great a favorite to be rebuked. Count Tristan discreetly fled the field, and thus avoided his share of the infliction.
Bertha's letter reached Maurice the day after it was written, and found him in a state of such torpid despondency that any summons to action, even the most painful, was a blessing. He had felt that the only chance of combating his sorrow, and preventing its obtaining full mastery over all his faculties, was to work off the sense of depression by hard study,—to battle against it with the arms of some engrossing occupation; but how could he spur himself up to study without an object?—and he was as far as ever from obtaining his father's consent to fitting himself for the bar, or for any other professional pursuit. No,—there was only one pursuit left open to him, the pursuit of pleasure, and he had not sufficiently recovered from his late shock to start off in chase of that illusive phantom. Bertha's letter roused him out of this miserable, mind-paralyzing apathy. In the very next train which left for Rennes he was on his way back to Brittany.
It was the fourth day after Madeleine's departure. Those days had seemed months to Bertha, the weariest months of her brief, glad life. She was standing at a window that commanded the road,—her favorite post, and the only locality where she ever remained quiet for any length of time,—when the carriage in which Maurice was seated drove up the avenue. With a joyful exclamation she rushed out of the room, darted down the stair, through the hall, into the porch, and had greeted Maurice before any one but the old gardener knew that he had arrived.
"You have heard from her?" were her cousin's first words, gaspingly uttered.
"No, not a line. She will never write; she will never come back! O Maurice! I have lost all hope," sighed Bertha.
"Dear Bertha, we will find her! Let her go where she may, I will find her!—be sure of that. I will not rest until I do."
His grandmother, attracted by Bertha's exultant ejaculation, had followed her, though with more deliberate steps, and now appeared. The cruel words the countess had spoken to Madeleine were ringing in the ears of Maurice, and he saluted his noble relative respectfully, but not with his usual warmth.