As a mother she marked his progress, year by year; as a mother, mourning his barren prospects and craving to advance them, she beat her breast that she had made him penniless. It was as a mother that, by parsimonies, protracted and implacable, she garnered the means at last to better his condition. By this time her hair was all grey, and the schoolboy's voice was breaking.
On the day that she was strong enough, she meant to confess to him and see his love turn to contempt. But the day when she was strong enough wouldn't come. When he was sixteen she had said: "I shall tell him in a year from now!" When he was seventeen she had wept: "God couldn't mind his loving me for a year more!"
"Mademoiselle," he would say—for he was a young man and had dropped the other name—"I don't know why you have been so good to me." And she would answer: "Your mother and I were friends, dearest." Only that.
"You work too hard," he would declare, "ever so much too hard; you're always tired. You know, you weren't ambitious enough—that was your great mistake. You shouldn't have gone in for teaching; you ought to have played at concerts—you might have been no end of a swell. Play something to me now, will you? What used my mother to say about your playing?"
"She said once that it made her cry for her baby, Paul. What do you think of when I play?"
But he was shy of admitting what he thought of, because he thought of noble deeds, and his ideal woman, and of the ecstasy it would be to see his name on the cover of a book—and he was doomed to be a clerk.
Yet when the clerk chafed in his bonds, and the conceit of authorship was too mighty to be bridled, it was to her that he first revealed a manuscript. It was she, trembling, who was his first critic. "Your good women are all perfect," she told him, "and your bad women have never a good impulse. We aren't like that." But she was never too weary to talk about the tales; and when they began to wander among august journals that refused them, she used to pray, before the crucifix in her bedroom, that the hearts of editors might be moved.
Now she meant to confess to him before he entered on his military service.
The parting was so bitter that she failed at the last moment. He went far from her. The years of his service were a much greater hardship to her than to him. During the first week she stinted her own diet to send a bon de poste to ameliorate his food; but he wouldn't keep the money. In the avenues of Ivry, never did she see the pitifully garbed conscripts being drilled without picturing the conscript who was dear to her, garbed like that—and closing her eyes with the pain.
And when he was free to return, the meeting was so sweet that she was a coward once more.