A Cruel Enigma

by Paul Bourget

"Ah! godfather," returned the young man, visibly relieved; "you do not know the requirements of a life in society. Why, to-day I gave a dinner to three friends at the Café Anglais; that came to very nearly a hundred and fifty francs. I have sent several bouquets, hired carriages to go into the country, and given a few keepsakes. The five bank-notes are so soon at an end! In short, I repeat, I have debts that I want to pay, I have to meet the expenses of my journey, and I do not want to apply to my mother or my grandmother just now. They do not know what a young man's life in Paris is like; I do not want to add a second misunderstanding to the first. With our present relations what they are they would see faults where there have been only inevitable necessities. And, then, I am physically unable to endure a scene with my mother."

"And if I refuse?" Scilly asked.

"I shall apply elsewhere," said Alexander Hubert; "it will be terribly painful to me, but I shall do so."

There was silence between the two men. The whole story was darkening again in the General's eyes, like the smoke which he was sending from his pipe in methodical puffs. But what he did see clearly was the definitive nature of Hubert's resolve, whatever its secret cause might be. To refuse him would be perhaps to send him to a money-lender, or at all events to force him to take some step wounding to his pride. On the other hand, to advance this sum to his godson was to acquire a right to follow out more closely the mystery which lay at the bottom of his excitement, as well as behind the melancholy of the two women. And then, when all is told, the Count loved Hubert with an affection that bordered closely on weakness. If he had been deeply moved by Madame Liauran's and Madame Castel's dull despair, he was now completely upset by the visible anguish written on the face of this child, who was, in his thoughts, an adopted son as dear as any real son could have been.

"My dear fellow," he said at last, taking Hubert's hand, and in a tone of voice giving no further token of the harshness which had marked the beginning of their conversation, "I think too highly of you to believe that you would associate me in any action that could displease your mother. I will do what you wish, but on one condition——"

Hubert's eyes betrayed fresh anxiety.

"It is merely to fix the date on which you expect to repay me the money. I want to oblige you," continued the old soldier, "but it would not be worthy of you to borrow a sum that you believed yourself unable to pay back again, nor of me to lend myself to a calculation of the kind. Will you come back here to-morrow afternoon? You will bring me an account of what you can spare from your allowance every month. Ah! it will not do to offer any more bouquets, or dinners at the Café Anglais, or keepsakes. But, then, have you not lived for a long time past without these foolish expenses?"

This little speech, in which the spirit of order that was essential to the General, his goodness of heart, and his taste for regularity of life were blended in equal proportion, moved Hubert so deeply that he pressed his godfather's fingers without replying, as though crushed by emotions which he had left unexpressed. He suspected that while this interview was taking place at the Quai d'Orléans, the evening was being lengthened out at the house in the Rue Vaneau, and that the two beings whom he loved so deeply were commenting on his absence. He himself suffered from the pain that he was causing, as though a mysterious thread linked him to those two women seated beside their lonely hearth.

And, indeed, the General once gone, the "two saints" had remained silent for a long time in the quiet little drawing-room. Nothing of all the tumult of Parisian life reached them but a vast, confused murmuring analogous to that of the sea when heard a long way off. The seclusion of this retired abode, with the hum of life outside, was a symbol of what had so long been the destiny of Madame Castel and her daughter. Marie Alice Liauran, lying on her couch, and looking very slight in her black attire, seemed to be listening to this hum, or to her thoughts, for she had relinquished the work with which she had been engaged; while her mother, seated in her easy-chair, and also in black, continued to ply her tortoiseshell crochet-hook, sometimes raising her eyes towards her daughter with a look wherein a twofold anxiety might be read. She also experienced the sensation felt by her daughter, on account both of Hubert and of this daughter, whose almost morbid sensitiveness she knew. It was not she, however, who first broke the silence, but Madame Liauran, who suddenly, and as though pursuing her reverie aloud, began to lament:

"What renders my pain still more intolerable is that he sees the wound which he has dealt my heart, and that he is not to be stopped by it—he who, from childhood until within the last six months, could never encounter a shadow in my look or a wrinkle on my forehead without a change of countenance. That is what convinces me of the depth of his passion for this woman. What a passion and what a woman!"