"Well, my son," said little Mme. de la Vireville, coming in with a smile a few minutes after the visitor had gone. "Did not our guest bring excellent news, both for you and for the little boy?"
"Yes, indeed," replied the invalid. "René's escape was nearly as miraculous as mine. And," he added slowly, "a miracle to more purpose."
There was something so unusual in his voice that she stood with all her gladness—that was mostly for his sake—turning cold.
"Anne will not come and stay with us in Jersey now," said Fortuné, looking out of the window. "There will be no need; thank God again for that."
Was it as strong as that then? Something that was half-hope, half-anguish, leapt up in Mme. de la Vireville's heart. She knelt down beside her son's chair, and looked at his averted profile.
"Fortuné," she began, in a voice that shook, "if only you could put that . . . memory . . . away! My dear, my dear, what is the use of keeping it all these years? You have only to stretch out your hand to grasp what you want. . . ."
"What is it that I want?" asked her son, turning his head and looking at her. He was even paler than Mr. Tollemache had seen him. "There is nothing left for a cripple and a failure like me to want, except rest, and you, ma mère. I have both—too much, God knows, of the first—but of you I can never have too much. There is nothing else that I need." He bent his head and kissed her.
But from the day of the good news which Mr. Tollemache had brought him, he began perceptibly to go downhill again.
He was always, on the surface, his old jesting, courageous, disillusioned self, but underneath was a listlessness which Mme. de la Vireville had never known in him. It terrified her. He had previously looked forward to walking a little with her in the garden one day; now it was enough for him to sit apathetically in the window. Sometimes he seemed to have neither strength nor inclination even for that. The surgeon talked, as he had talked before, of the effects of suffering and exposure on an exceptionally strong and vigorous constitution; the Bishop said to the Grand Vicar that he thought it was something that came very near to being a broken heart—broken, like so much else, at Quiberon; and Mme. de la Vireville, despairing, bewildered, and sometimes even a little wounded, carried her knowledge of the past like a heap of ashes amid her slowly dying hopes for the future. Had Fortuné, who had recked so little of blows and hardships and disappointments, come through so much to end like this?