She raised her eyes to his inquiringly, but was too generous to demand a secret in exchange for what she had done. Only, as she went with him to the dining-room, she let these words slip out quietly, like a prayer:
“Be nice to father, and I shall love you still more.”
Dinner passed without incident, thanks to the presence of Raymond Bercy, which made the meeting of father and son less trying. In the evening Maurice withdrew at an early hour, making the excuse of a headache. He went to his mother’s room, where she lay in bed still suffering. In his soul’s anguish he embraced the invalid in the darkness. She knew him by his kiss, and feebly called him by his name, patting his face with her hands. He stifled a sob and went out. Love condemned him to such cruelties.
He packed his valise lightly, so that he might carry it himself to the station, and put all the money he had in a pocket-book. With the loans he had raised that night, and Margaret’s, it made altogether a little more than five thousand francs, a total which seemed to him in his inexperience an important sum of money. Next he packed up the few pieces of jewelry that belonged to him and might be turned to account, and then, his toilette for the execution made, sat down and waited like a criminal condemned to death for the hour that should deliver him to his beloved. His reason, his infallible reason, sustained him in his resolve, represented to him the beauty of living his life freely and in his own way, rather than taking his place as the last of his class in the uninterrupted line of the Roquevillards.
... Reassured by Maurice’s attitude, and by a half confidence on the part of Margaret, Mr. Roquevillard went to bed and asleep without any immediate concern, deciding first, however, that he would send his son away from Chambéry. He would write to an old friend that he had done various good turns for at one time and another, who had knocked about the world a good deal and squandered his inheritance, but who was now settled in Tunis as a lawyer, and had prospered there. He had lately expressed in his letters a desire to retire from practice, or at least to take in an assistant. At twenty-four such a voyage, such a life, with all its novelty, might mean forgetfulness, salvation, for Maurice.
In the night he thought he heard a door open and shut, but silence descending on the house again, he fancied he must have been mistaken, and tried to get to sleep once more. After a rather long struggle, he lighted a match, and looked at his watch, which showed half an hour past midnight. He rose and left his room. At the end of the hall a ray of light appeared beneath Maurice’s door. He went up to it, listened, and hearing no sound, he knocked. There was no response, and after some hesitation he went in.
“He must have forgotten to put out his lamp,” he tried to persuade himself, anxiety already beginning to torment him.
With one glance he saw that the bed was untouched, that a drawer had been emptied. He went back to his own room, dressed in haste and ran like a young man, despite his sixty years, to the railway station. The time for the express to Italy must have passed, but there was still a last train in the direction of Geneva. An employee, who recognised him, gave him his information. Maurice had gone away with her. They had taken their tickets for Turin.
Alone there in the night he gave a groan, like some oak straining at the first blow of the axe. But, like the oak, too, he was full of resistance, and stiffened himself against fate.
It was not possible that a whole race, a family, not possible even that one life, could be compromised by a single youthful fault. He would find his son again, sooner or later, and bring him home. Or else fate would take charge of him as of the prodigal son; and as in the parable, too, he would be weak enough to kill the fatted calf on his return, instead of loading him with reproaches. The paternal hearth: there one comes back to dress one’s wounds, certain of not being turned away. A husband may desert his wife, a woman her husband, ungrateful children may desert their father and mother: a father and mother can never abandon their child, even if the whole world should give him up.