‘I? Why should I? Had I not of my own will dropped out of your existence? If I chose to forget our relationship, what claim on your courtesy could I urge? You are too sensitive, too loyal, too good, Henriette. You were always that. Your father used to say so, and so used Adèle. Ah! they loved you well—those two. I wish now for your sake—I honestly wish you had dealt me the measure I deserved, and my neglect would have stung you less.’
‘It did not sting me, François. I have no pride of that kind. Life is too full of pain. But I was sorry and grieved for Gabrielle’s sake.’
Had she not the right to hide the rest from him—simple-minded lady? who believed she had succeeded—since she so honourably strove to hide it from herself? Dr. Vermont pushed the child away, and came and stood before his sister-in-law. His imperious glance compelled hers, which she lifted timidly, apprehensively.
‘You are an angel, Henriette—oh, I don’t mean in the hackneyed conventional sense, but as a man means it when the goodness of another forces him to face right and wrong, and he feels he cannot undo the wrong and cannot choose the right. It is a miserable position. Ah! if it were not so late? But my tongue is tied. My first mistake was here, in this very room, years ago—twenty, thirty, a lifetime may be. Your father lay on the canapé dying, and I was sitting beside him. He spoke of you; I knew well that he spoke of you, though he did not mention your name. It was you he wished me to marry, and I, following his glance, looked at Adèle instead. Happiness seemed to woo me from that flower-like face, and I believed in happiness then. Now!’ he shrugged in his expressive way, and added, in a softer voice, drooping humbly to her: ‘God forgive me, Henriette, but now I question the wisdom of that choice.’
‘It was a natural choice, François, and it would be anguish for me to think that you could regret it. Spare me that sorrow. Surely I have suffered enough, and have not reproached you. But this indignity would indeed give voice to the pain of silent years, and bid me utter words neither you nor I could forget. I gave her to you,’ she went on, in a dull tone of protest. ‘It was the best I had, my dearest and sole one on earth. But what did it matter if I was the lonelier, so that you and she were happy together? I have asked so little of life. Leave me that remembrance, François. No man had a sweeter wife than my Adèle, and for her I can be satisfied with a loyalty no less from her husband than that which I have given her.’
She glided from the room without another look for him. He stood and stared after her, with a fantastic, almost amused movement of eyebrow, though the heart within him felt heavy to bursting with an odd assortment of sensations.
When they met again, it was at the luncheon table, with his companions and Mademoiselle’s foreign friend.
‘Anatole devours her with his eyes,’ he said to himself. ‘Poor moth! he is sadly burnt, and the fact that she is eight or nine years his senior makes his hurt the graver. There are compensations in a hopeless love when the ages are reversed.’
But his mild sarcastic face wore no look of dejection or dismay as he sat and discoursed upon Shakespeare and Molière with the foreigner, only of intelligent survey and an amiable satisfaction in all things, including the clowns of Shakespeare, from whom most Frenchmen instinctively shrink. After lunch they played chess and discussed, in the usual way, the school of realists, décadents, symbolists, and the recent revival of romanticism in a gentleman, said to combine the melodious style of George Sand with the adventurous spirit of the great Dumas. It was only when the foreigner retired, and the young men went upstairs to study the stars in the friendly odour of tobacco, that the Doctor ventured again to address Henriette.
‘He is an interesting lad, Anatole—eh?’