“This is how he begins,” she began slowly, striving in vain to steady her voice.
Beautiful and Unforgettable Friend,
“Send your grandson to me! I will provide for him, because he belongs to you, and because in his eyes I shall mayhap find a look which will help me to recapture a memory or so out of the past. Send the boy without delay. I really need a help in my work, and there is a young and beautiful lady who is very dear to me; for whom I would gladly find a well-born and handsome husband. Your grandson appears to be the very man for that attractive office: thus he will have a brilliant career before him as my protégé and an exquisitely sentimental one as the husband of one of the loveliest women in this city where beautiful women abound. See! how right you were to make appeal to my memory. I never forget....”
This was no more than one half of the letter, but old Madame read no more. She glanced round in triumph on the three faces that were turned so eagerly towards her. But nobody spoke. Marcelle was silent, but her eyes were glowing as if new life had been infused into her blood. Micheline was silent because, young as she was, she had had in life such vast experience of golden schemes that had always gone agley! and Bertrand was silent because his very soul was in travail with hope and fear, with anxiety and a wild, mad, bewildering excitement which almost choked him.
Grandmama talked on for awhile: she planned and she arranged and gazed into a future so golden that she and Marcelle and Micheline were dazzled by it all. Bertrand alone remained obstinately silent: neither old Madame’s impatience, nor his mother’s joy dragged him out of his moodiness. In vain did grandmama expatiate on M. de Montaudon’s wealth and influence, or on the array of beautiful and rich heiresses whose amorous advances to Bertrand would make the faithless Rixende green with envy, in vain did his mother murmur with pathetic entreaty:
“Are you not happy, Bertrand?”
He remained absorbed, buried in thoughts, thoughts that he was for the moment wholly incapable of co-ordinating. It seemed to him as if hundreds of thousands of voices were shrieking in his ear: hundreds of thousands that were high-pitched and harsh like the voice of old Madame; they shrieked and they screamed, and they roared, and the words that they uttered all came in a jumble, incoherent and deafening: a medley of words through which he only distinguished a few from time to time:
“Treasurer to the King!” some of the voices shrieked.
“All debts paid in full—in full!” others screamed.
“Wealth—an heiress—a brilliant marriage—Rixende—envy—hatred—chance—career—money—money—money—wealth—a rich heiress—money—money—no debts——”