The colonel cleared his throat and felt his eyes required the same operation, though he concealed that fact from Hervé.
‘Boom! Touchez là, mon brave.’
Never yet had Hervé heard speech so hearty and so republican. It astonished him, and filled him with a sense of perfect ease and trust. It was like a free breath in oppressive etiquette,—the child-prince’s first mud-pie upon the common road of humanity. Hervé became excited, and confided to the colonel that his father had ordered a toy sailing-boat for him, and that there was going to be a ball at Saint-Laurent in honour of his birthday, though he was not quite sure that he would enjoy that so much as the boat, for he had never danced, and could not play any games like other children. Still if Colonel Larousse would come, they could talk about soldiers. Come? Of course the colonel came, looking in his brushed uniform as one of the heroes home from Troy, and Hervé admired him prodigiously.
The birthday ball was a great affair. Guests came all the way from Caen and Lisieux, and Hervé, more bewildered than elated, stood beside his splendid father to receive them. Ladies in lovely robes, shedding every delicate scent, like flowers, petted him, and full-grown men, looking at these ladies, made much of him. They told him that he was charming, but he did not believe them. One cannot be both ugly and charming, little Hervé thought, with much bitterness and an inclination to cry. Their compliments gave him the same singular sensations evoked by the tutor’s smile.
‘I do not know any of these people,’ he said sadly to Colonel Larousse. ‘I don’t think a ball very cheerful, do you? It makes my head ache to hear so many strange voices, and feel so much smaller than anybody else. My papa amuses himself, but I would like to run away to my boat.’
‘Boom! Mon camarade, a soldier sticks to his post.’
Hervé sighed, and thought if the countess had been here that he would have sat beside her all the evening, and have held her hand. And the knowledge that he would never again hold her hand, and that so many long weeks had passed since fond lips had kissed his face, and a sweet voice had called him ‘Little Hervé, little boy,’ brought tears of desperate self-pitying pain to his eyes. In these large illuminated salons, vexed with the mingled odours of flowers and scented skirts, by the scraping of fiddles and the flying feet of laughing dancers, unmindful of him as other than a queer quiet boy in velvet and Alençon lace, with a plain grey little face and owlish eyes that never smiled, Hervé felt more alone than ever he had felt since the countess’s death.
Stealthily he made his escape through the long open window, and ran down the dewy lawn. How gratefully the cool air tasted and the lovely stillness of the night after the aching brilliancy within! Hervé assured himself that it was a pleasant relief, and hoped there would not be many more balls at the castle.
The lake fringed the lawn, and moored against the branches of a weeping willow was his toy-boat, just as he had left it in the afternoon. It would look so pretty, he believed, sailing under the rising moon that touched the water silver and the blue stars that showed so peacefully upon it. He unknotted the string, and gaily the little boat swam out upon his impulsion. If only the countess could come back to him, he thought, with his boat he would be perfectly happy. ‘But I am so alone among them all,’ he said to himself, with his broken sigh. ‘I wished somebody loved me as little children are loved by their mammas.’
The boat had carried away the string from his loose grasp, and he reached out his arm upon the water to recover it. A soft, moist bank, a small eager foot upon it, a frame easily tilted by an unsteady movement, the dark water broken into circling bubbles upon a child’s shrill cry of terror, and closing impassably over the body of poor forlorn little Hervé and his pretty velvet suit and Alençon lace,—this is what the stars and the pale calm moon saw; and over there upon the further shore of the lake floated the toy-boat as placidly as if it had worked no treachery, and had not led to the extinction of an illustrious name and race.