‘I don’t want you to dry my eyes, Monsieur,’ Hervé exploded, bursting from his enemy’s arms. ‘I do not like you, and I always thought you would die soon, and not Madame. It isn’t just, and I will not be friends with you. I shall hate you always, for you are a wicked man, and you were cruel to Madame.’
The count, who was not himself accounted sane by his neighbours, looked at the amused and impassable tutor, and significantly touched his forehead.
‘Hereditary,’ he muttered, and stood to make way for Hervé.
The birds were singing deliciously, the late afternoon sunshine gathered above the quiet trees (made quieter by here and there an unmovable cypress and a melancholy yew, fit symbols of the rest of death) into a pale golden mist shot with slanting rays of light, and the violets’ was the only scent to shake by suggestion the sense of soothing negation of all emotion or remembrance. Out upon the road, running like a broad ribbon to the town, unanimated in the gentle illumination of the afternoon, the tutor and Hervé met the colonel limping along one might imagine, upon the sound of a prolonged boom. Hervé’s tears were dried, but his face looked sorrowful and stained enough to spring tears of sympathy to any kind eyes. The colonel drew up, touched his cap, and uttered his customary signal with more than his customary gruffness. Hervé stood his ground firmly, though he winced, for he was a delicate child unused to rough sounds.
‘How goes it, M. le Marquis? How goes it?’ shouted the colonel.
‘M. le colonel, it goes very badly with me, but I try to bear it. My tutor tells me that men do not fret; I wish I knew how they manage not to do so when they are sad. I did want to grow up soon, and explore the world like my grandpapa, and then I should have married the Countess of Fresney, if her husband were dead. But now everything is different, and I don’t even want to see the tower of William the Conqueror again. I don’t want to grow up. I don’t want anything now.’
‘Poor little man!’ said the colonel, patting his shoulder. ‘You’ve lost a friend, but you will gain others, and perhaps you’ll be a great soldier one of these days, like the little Corporal.’
Hervé shook his head dolorously. He saw nothing ahead but unpleasant lessons varied by sad excursions to the countess’s grave.
The unhappy little marquis was moping and fading visibly. He could not be got to take an interest in his lessons, and he proudly strove to conceal the fact that he was afraid of his tutor’s mocking smile. The news of his ill-health reached M. de Vervainville in Paris, and at once brought that alarmed gentleman down to Falaise. On Hervé’s life depended his town luxuries and his importance as a landed proprietor. Was there anything his son wished for? Hervé reflected a while, then raised his mouse-coloured head, and sighed his own little sigh. He thought he should like to see Colonel Larousse. And so it came that one morning, staring out of the window, the boy saw a familiar military figure limping up the avenue. Hervé’s worried small countenance almost glowed with expectation, as he rushed to welcome his visitor, the sound of whose boom and the tap of his wooden leg upon the parquet, as well as his dreadful shaggy eyebrows, seemed even cheerful.
‘Do you think, Monsieur,’ Hervé asked gravely ‘that you would mind having for a friend such a very little boy as I?’