“Oh, it has cost him a pretty penny, madame. His singing-bird has cost him more than a hundred thousand francs in these two years. Ah, ha! you have not seen the end of it!”
“Have done with all this, Monsieur Crevel. I will not, for your sake, forego the happiness a mother knows who can embrace her children without a single pang of remorse in her heart, who sees herself respected and loved by her family; and I will give up my soul to God unspotted——”
“Amen!” exclaimed Crevel, with the diabolical rage that embitters the face of these pretenders when they fail for the second time in such an attempt. “You do not yet know the latter end of poverty—shame, disgrace.—I have tried to warn you; I would have saved you, you and your daughter. Well, you must study the modern parable of the Prodigal Father from A to Z. Your tears and your pride move me deeply,” said Crevel, seating himself, “for it is frightful to see the woman one loves weeping. All I can promise you, dear Adeline, is to do nothing against your interests or your husband’s. Only never send to me for information. That is all.”
“What is to be done?” cried Madame Hulot.
Up to now the Baroness had bravely faced the threefold torment which this explanation inflicted on her; for she was wounded as a woman, as a mother, and as a wife. In fact, so long as her son’s father-in-law was insolent and offensive, she had found the strength in her resistance to the aggressive tradesman; but the sort of good-nature he showed, in spite of his exasperation as a mortified adorer and as a humiliated National Guardsman, broke down her nerve, strung to the point of snapping. She wrung her hands, melted into tears, and was in a state of such helpless dejection, that she allowed Crevel to kneel at her feet, kissing her hands.
“Good God! what will become of us!” she went on, wiping away her tears. “Can a mother sit still and see her child pine away before her eyes? What is to be the fate of that splendid creature, as strong in her pure life under her mother’s care as she is by every gift of nature? There are days when she wanders round the garden, out of spirits without knowing why; I find her with tears in her eyes——”
“She is one-and-twenty,” said Crevel.
“Must I place her in a convent?” asked the Baroness. “But in such cases religion is impotent to subdue nature, and the most piously trained girls lose their head!—Get up, pray, monsieur; do you not understand that everything is final between us? that I look upon you with horror? that you have crushed a mother’s last hopes——”
“But if I were to restore them,” asked he.
Madame Hulot looked at Crevel with a frenzied expression that really touched him. But he drove pity back to the depths of his heart; she had said, “I look upon you with horror.”