The two years so eventful to others had not passed without change over the mother and sister Henri de Talmont left sorrowing behind him in the cottage at Brie. That he had joined the corps of recruits instead of making his escape soon became known to them. Both were stricken to the heart; and because this was so, the grief of both was still and silent. Clémence told her mother Henri’s parting words, upon which a mournful light was thrown by what followed. But these brought little comfort, and no tidings since had reached them from the wanderer. As may have been inferred, the letter intrusted to Seppel was never posted; and Henri did not write again.
At length came news of the appalling disasters in Russia. Neither Madame de Talmont nor Clémence indulged the faintest hope that Henri could have survived them. They mourned for the one who “was not,” in an utter desolation, beyond words and beyond tears.
Sometimes they murmured sadly to each other, “If only we knew the truth.” For it was one of the bitterest drops in their full cup of bitterness that they could not tell in what form death had come to their beloved, while they knew but too well how hideous and revolting were some of the forms assumed by the king of terrors. Horrible details reached them, piercing the thick veil of falsehood with which Napoleon sought to hide the disasters of his army; and imagination—that magician so powerful for good and evil—exercised a fearful ingenuity in torturing their aching hearts to the uttermost.
These were pangs they endured in common; but each had besides her solitary burden of pain. That of the mother was tinged with something like the bitterness of remorse. She had been wroth with her boy for deceiving her and betraying the cause she held dearer than life. Pride and anger had kept her back from obeying the first impulse of her heart when she heard of him as amongst the conscripts who left the village. She thought of hastening after him to Paris, that he might not go forth to die without his mother’s pardon and her blessing. But she put the thought aside. The difficulties in her way would have been very great, yet it was not these that deterred her. It was the persuasion that he did not deserve this sacrifice at her hands—that the first step towards a reconciliation ought to come from him. If he wished for it, why had he not written?—But now everything was changed. With vain tears that had no healing in them the broken-hearted mother mourned over “the irrevocable past.”
Clémence too had her lonely sorrow. Deeply thoughtful and truly pious, after the strong, stern, self-sacrificing Jansenist fashion, she knew too well that her brother’s young heart had never truly surrendered itself to its Creator and Redeemer. The “Except ye be converted” of the Divine Teacher held as real a place in the creed of Clémence as in that of any Protestant; nor, under the circumstances, could the Catholic belief in sacramentary grace interpose its soft, misleading glamour between her eyes and the truth. So her soul went down to the depths of a sorrow without hope; depths that few are strong enough to sound, and those who do sound them seldom tell what they find there. Some, it may be, bring back from thence secrets of divine love, “treasures of the deep that lieth under,” worth all they have passed through to learn them. But it was not so with Clémence. She brought no pearls with her from the deeps of ocean. It was much if she herself came back, or rather drifted back, forlorn and weary, because mind and body were no longer strong enough to bear the strain of intense emotion. She said in her heart,—as poor Henri thought she would do all too easily,—“It is the will of God;” but she never truly said, “Thy will be done.” Perhaps she made her heavy burden heavier by asking from herself what God never asked from her; forgetting that it is not his will that any sinner should perish, and that Christ himself wept tears of divine compassion over lost souls. So her own faith grew dim and clouded, until even the sense of personal love to God seemed to vanish away, and with it the trust in his love to her; for, unhappily, her creed did not teach her that his love to his chosen and adopted is “everlasting.”
In the course of time an outward change was mercifully sent to break up the current of those two sorrowful lives. A widowed sister of Madame de Talmont’s mother had been able to retain a portion of her property through all the storms of the Revolution. Madame de Salgues had lost both her sons, and only one grandson remained to her, the object of her passionate devotion. But the agents of Napoleon kept watch over the lad, as a scion of the old noblesse; and when he had attained a suitable age, Madame de Salgues was requested to send him to the Ecole Polytechnique, such a request being too evidently a command. She wept, but had to obey; removing, however, to Paris, in order to be near him. But the superintendent of police, the notorious Savary, had a word to say upon that subject; and the poor old lady was soon forbidden to reside within the city. Remonstrance was useless; so she retired to Versailles, where she was still near enough to receive frequent visits from her grandson. Finding herself alone and lonely, with failing health and depressed spirits, she thought of Madame de Talmont; and very wisely wrote offering a comfortable home to her and her daughter, if they would come and cheer her declining years.
The invitation was accepted with thankfulness; and the first faint gleams of comfort stole unconsciously into the darkened hearts of Madame de Talmont and Clémence as they sought to soothe the sorrows of another. Poor Madame de Salgues had soon a fresh grief to mourn over. Like all her family, she was a stanch Legitimist, and she had brought up her grandson in the same political creed; but he could not long withstand the influence of his new surroundings. Before he had been three months at the Ecole Polytechnique, his teachers and fellow-pupils had wrought a rapid conversion, and made him as fiery and unreasoning a partisan of Napoleon as he had once been of the Bourbons. Emile de Salgues was not a lad whose opinions upon any subject were likely to be of particular importance to the rest of the world, but to Madame de Salgues the apostasy of her grandson from the good cause was a very grievous affliction.
The invasion of France by the Allies, and the attack upon Paris, caused many apprehensions to the household of unprotected ladies; but, as they themselves would have expressed it, they were “quitte pour la peur,” no adversary nor evil of any kind came near them. They all rejoiced at the overthrow of Napoleon, but with trembling, and that for more reasons than one,—they could not yet believe it was real, and they had not the slightest idea of what was to take his place.
On the day following the entry of the conquerors into Paris, Madame de Talmont said to her daughter, “Clémence, the Allies have sent their wounded here.”