With difficulty, and shaking all over, Madame Guibert tore open the envelope. She could never open one of those little blue papers without trembling for they might have a message of death in them. But her face cleared immediately. As she read, Alice was looking round her mechanically at the simple and modest, almost conventional, furniture. Her eyes fell on the enlarged photograph of Marcel. She went up to it. The Commander wore his disdainful, impassive air in the picture, which dated from his return from the Sahara.
Madame Guibert turned round and saw her contemplating her son’s photograph. She regretted having brought her into the room. But as she went up to her, Alice looked at her and burst into tears.
“What is the matter?” asked Madame Guibert.
“Oh! Madame, Madame!” cried the young woman, and she sobbed out her secret to Marcel’s mother. “I loved him! If only you knew how I loved him!”
In profound pity, Madame Guibert gazed on the woman who had given her son his distaste for life. She knew from Paule that at the time of Marcel’s death the photograph of a little girl had been found in the breast-pocket of his tunic. Of a “little girl” indeed! How true it was that he had set his affections on a child.
“Poor little one,” she said, stroking Alice’s cheek as she sat drooping in a chair. In face of this sorrow waiting to be consoled, she forgot her own misery and immediately recovered her presence of mind and her courage.
“Alice, my dear, calm yourself,” she repeated. But Madame de Marthenay still sobbed. She finished with those words which she had uttered already, the words which summed up her distress: “Why am I not his widow? I should be less miserable.”
“But you did not wish to be his wife,” Madame Guibert murmured gently.
“Oh yes, I did, for I loved him. It was my people.” She did not accuse her mother only. But the old lady shook her head and in a lower voice she said, quite close to her ear, as she continued to stroke her cheek: “Poor little girl—you did not know how to love.”
Alice attempted to protest.