“Madame—for pity’s sake——”
“Ah bah!” the old lady rejoined with a shrug of the shoulders, “the boy will have to know sooner or later that his father——”
“Madame——!” the younger woman pleaded once more, but this time there was just a thought of menace, and less of humility in her tone.
“There, there!” grandmama rejoined dryly, “calm your fears, my good Marcelle, I won’t say anything to-day. Bertrand goes to-morrow. We shall not see him for two years: let him by all means go under the belief that no de Ventadour has ever committed a dishonourable action.”
Throughout this short passage of arms between his mother and grandmother, Bertrand had remained on his knees, his great dark eyes, with that wistful look of impending tragedy in them, wandering excitedly from one familiar face to the other. This was not the first time that his keen ears had caught a hint of some dark mystery that clung around the memory of the father whom he had never known. Like most children, however, he would sooner have died than ask a direct question, but this he knew, that whenever his father’s name was mentioned, his mother wept, and grandmama’s glance became more stern, more forbidding than its wont. And, now on the eve of his departure for St. Cyr, he felt that mystery encompass him, poisoning the joy he had in going away from the gloomy old château, from old women and girls and senile servitors, out into the great gay world of Paris, where the romance and adventures of which he had dreamt ever since he could remember anything, would at last fall to his lot, with all the good things of this life. He felt that he was old enough now to know what it was that made his mother so perpetually sad, that she had become old before her time, sick and weary, an absolute nonentity in family affairs over which grandmama ruled with a masterful hand. But now he was too proud to ask. They treated him as a child—very well! he was going away, and when he returned he would show them who would henceforth be the master of his family’s destiny. But for the moment all that he ventured on was a renewed protest:
“You can trust me in everything, grandmama,” he said. “I am not a child.”
Grandmama was still gazing into his face, gazing as if she would read all the secrets of his young unsophisticated soul: he returned her gaze with a glance as searching as her own. For a moment they were in perfect communion these two, the old woman with one foot in the grave, and the boy on the threshold of life. They understood one another, and each read in the other’s face, the same pride, the same ambition, and the same challenge to an adverse fate. For a moment, too, it seemed as if the grandmother would speak, tell the boy something at least of the tragedies which had darkened the last few pages of the family chronicles; and Bertrand, quite unconsciously, put so much compelling force into his gaze that the old woman was on the point of yielding. But once more the mother’s piteous voice pleaded for silence:
“Madame!” she exclaimed.
Her voice broke the spell; grandmama rose abruptly to her feet, which caused Bertrand to tumble backwards off the cushion. By the time he had picked himself up again, grandmama had gone.
Bertrand felt low and dispirited, above all cross with his mother for interfering. He went out of the room without kissing her. At first he thought of following grandmama into her room and forcing her to tell him all that he wanted to know, but pride held him back. He would not be a suppliant: he would not beg, there where in a very short time he would command. There could be nothing dishonourable in the history of the de Ventadours. They were too proud, too noble, for dishonour even to touch their name. Instinctively Bertrand had wandered down to the great hall where hung the portraits of those Ventadours who had been so rich and so great in the past. Bertrand was now going out into the world in order to rebuild those fortunes which an unjust fate had wrested from him. He gazed on the portrait of lovely Rixende. She, too, had been rich and brought a splendid dowry to her lord when she married him. He had proved ungrateful and she had died of sorrow. Bertrand marvelled if in truth his cousin Rixende was like her namesake. Anyway she was rich, and he would love her to his dying day if she consented to be his wife.