Angelot had taken the candlestick from his father as they crossed the hall. He carried it in before the party and set it down in its place, then stepped back into the shadow while Monsieur Urbain brought them in, and his mother, still pale, and a little shy or stiff in manner, went forward to receive them.
"After twenty years!" The Comte de Sainfoy bowed low over the small hand that lay in his, thin, delicate, if not so white and soft as a court lady's hand. His lips touched it lightly; he straightened himself, and looked smiling into her face. He had always admired Anne de Pontvieux. He might himself have thought of marrying her, in those last days of old France, from which so great a gulf now parted them, if her family had been richer and more before the world. As a young man, he had been surprised at Urbain's good fortune, and slightly envious of it.
"Utterly unchanged, belle cousine!" he said. "What does he mean, that discontented man, by finding his lot anything short of perfection! Here you have lived, you and he, in that quietest place that exists in the very heart of the storm. Both of you have kept your youth, your freshness, while as for me, wanderings and anxieties have turned me as grey as a badger."
"Your wife is still young and beautiful, I hear," said Madame de la Marinière. "And your hair, cousin, is the only thing that proves you more than twenty. At any rate, you have not lost a young man's genius for paying compliments."
"My compliments are simple truth, as they always were, even before I lived in more plain-spoken countries than this," said the Comte. "And now let me ask your kindness for this little eldest girl of mine—the eldest child that I have here—you know Georges is with the army."
"I know," said Madame de la Marinière.
Her look had softened, though it was still grave and a little distant. It was with a manner perfectly courteous, but not in the least affectionate, that she drew Hélène towards her and kissed her on the cheek. "She is more like you than her mother," she said. "I am charmed to make your acquaintance, my dear."
Words, words! Angelot knew his mother, and knew that whatever pretty speeches politeness might claim, she did not, and never could rejoice in the return of the cousins to Lancilly. But it amused and astonished him to notice the Comte's manner to his mother. Did it please her? he wondered. Gratitude to his father was right and necessary, but did she care for these airs of past and present devotion to herself, on the part of a man who had outraged all her notions of loyalty? It began to dawn on Angelot that he knew little of the world and its ways.
Standing in the background, he watched those four, and a more interesting five minutes he had never yet known. These were shadows become real: politics, family and national, turned into persons.
There stood his father beside the man to whose advantage he had devoted his life; whom he had loved as that kind of friend who sticks closer than a brother, almost with the adoration of a faithful dog, ever since the boys of the castle and of the old manor played together about the woods of La Marinière and Lancilly.