"What have we done?" rejoined the mother. "What good will it do me to have separated him from this woman if I have lost his heart?"
"To-morrow," replied Scilly, "you will see him returning to you more tender than ever. Just at first, it is too much for you. He has been seeking proofs for what we have told him, and he has found them. This is the explanation of his absence and his behaviour."
"And he has not come to grieve with me!" said the mother. "Alas! can it be that I have loved him for myself alone, while believing that I loved him for his own sake? Will you ring, General, for them to take me to my room?"
And when the easy chair, which she never left now, had been wheeled into the next room, and she was in bed:
"Mamma," she said to Madame Castel, "draw back the curtain that I may look at his windows."
Then, as Hubert had not closed his shutters, and his shadow could be seen passing to and fro, "Ah! mamma," she said again, "why do children grow up? Formerly, he never had a trouble that he did not come and cry over it on my shoulder, as I do on yours, and now——"
"Now he is as unreasonable as his mother," said the old lady, who had scarcely spoken during the whole evening, and who, printing a kiss upon her daughter's hair, silenced her by letting fall these words, which revealed her own martyrdom: "My heart aches for you both."
[CHAPTER X]
In the morning, when Madame Liauran sent to ask for her son, the latter replied that he would be down for luncheon. He appeared, in fact, at noon. His mother and he exchanged merely a look, and she at once understood the extent of the suffering which he had undergone, simply by the kind of shiver with which he was affected on seeing her again. She was associated with this suffering as its occasion, if not its cause, and he could never forget the fact. His eyes had something so particularly distant in them, and his mouth so close a curve of lip, his whole face was so expressive of a determination to permit no explanation of any kind, that neither Madame Liauran nor Madame Castel ventured to question him.
For a year past these three persons had had many silent meals in the antiquely-wainscoted dining-room—an apartment so spacious as to make the round table placed in the centre appear small. But all three had never been sensible of an impression, as they were on this day, that, even when speaking to one another, there would henceforth be a silence between them impossible to break, something which could not be put into words, and which, for a very long time, would create a background of muteness, even behind their most cordial expansions.