Not one of the many fine gentlemen it has been my fate to meet in my six months' apprenticeship to the "great world," not cousin Rupert himself with all his elaborate politeness (and Rupert has de grandes manières, as Tanty says), could have played the host with a more exquisite courtesy, and more true hospitality. So I thought, at least. Now and again, it is true, while his eyes were fixed on me, I would see how the soul behind them was away, far in the past, and then at a word, even at a movement, back it would come to me, with the tenderest softening I have ever seen upon a human face.
It was only at the end of breakfast that he suddenly adverted to the previous day.
"Of course," he said, hesitatingly, but keeping a frank gaze on mine, "you must have thought me demented when—when you first entered, yesterday."
Now, I had anticipated this apology as inevitable, and I was prepared to put him at his ease.
"I——? Not at all," I said quite gravely; and, seeing the puzzled expression that came upon his face, I hastened to add in lower tones: "I know I am very like my mother, and it was her name you called out upon seeing me." And then I stopped, as if that had explained everything.
He looked at me with a wondering air, and fell again into a muse. After a while he said, with his great simplicity which seems somehow in him the last touch of the most perfect breeding: "Yes, such an apparition was enough to unhinge any one's mind for the moment. You never knew her, child, and therefore never mourned her death. But we—that is, René and I, who tried so hard to save her—though it is so long ago, we have not forgotten."
It was then I asked him to tell me about the mother I had never known. At first it was as if he could not; he fell into a great silence, through which I could feel the working of his old sorrow. So then I said to him quickly, for I feared he thought me an indiscreet trespasser upon sacred ground, that he must remember my right to know more than the vague accounts I had been given of my mother's history.
"No one will tell me of her," I said. "It is hard, for I am her own daughter."
"It is wrong," he said very gently; "you ought to know, for you are indeed, most verily, her own daughter."