“Why, you must do all that can be done for her,” cried the Marquise. “Good heavens! perhaps it is not too late! I will pay for everything that is necessary——”
“Ah! my lady, she looks to me uncommonly proud, and I don’t know that she would allow it.”
“I will go to see her at once.”
The Marquise went up forthwith to the stranger’s room, without thinking of the shock that the sight of her widow’s weeds might give to a woman who was said to be dying. At the sight of that dying woman the Marquise turned pale. In spite of the changes wrought by fearful suffering in Hélène’s beautiful face, she recognized her eldest daughter.
But Hélène, when she saw a woman dressed in black, sat upright in bed with a shriek of horror. Then she sank back; she knew her mother.
“My daughter,” said Mme. d’Aiglemont, “what is to be done? Pauline!... Moïna!...”
“Nothing now for me,” said Hélène faintly. “I had hoped to see my father once more, but your mourning—” she broke off, clutched her child to her heart as if to give it warmth, and kissed its forehead. Then she turned her eyes on her mother, and the Marquise met the old reproach in them, tempered with forgiveness, it is true, but still reproach. She saw it, and would not see it. She forgot that Hélène was the child conceived amid tears and despair, the child of duty, the cause of one of the greatest sorrows in her life. She stole to her eldest daughter’s side, remembering nothing but that Hélène was her firstborn, the child who had taught her to know the joys of motherhood. The mother’s eyes were full of tears. “Hélène, my child!...” she cried, with her arms about her daughter.
Hélène was silent. Her own babe had just drawn its last breath on her breast.
Moïna came into the room with Pauline, her maid, and the landlady and the doctor. The Marquise was holding her daughter’s ice-cold hand in both of hers, and gazing at her in despair; but the widowed woman, who had escaped shipwreck with but one of all her fair band of children, spoke in a voice that was dreadful to hear. “All this is your work,” she said. “If you had but been for me all that—”
“Moïna, go! Go out of the room, all of you!” cried Mme. d’Aiglemont, her shrill tones drowning Hélène’s voice.—“For pity’s sake,” she continued, “let us not begin these miserable quarrels again now——”