And it was just this intimate acquaintance with the life of these two women which rendered the old man so strangely sensitive in respect of them. He had identified himself with them to the extent of being unable to sleep at night when he had left them visibly pre-occupied. This spare man, sunk as it were into himself, in whom everything revealed strict discipline from the stolidity of his look to the regularity of his gait, and the punctilious rigour of his dress, disclosed, when his two friends were in question, all those treasures of feeling which his mode of life had given him little opportunity to expend; and on this evening, in the month of February, 1880, he was in a state of agitation, like that of a lover who has seen his mistress's eyes bathed in tears the cause of which is unknown to him.
"What subject of grief can they have which they would not tell me?" This question passed again and again through the General's head while his carriage drove along, beaten by the wind and lashed by the rain. It was "regular Prussian weather," as the Count's coachman expressed it; but his master never thought of pulling up the open window through which squalls were coming in every five minutes, and he constantly reverted to his question, for his poor friends had been dreadfully dull the whole evening, and the General could see them mentally just as his last glance had caught them. The mother was seated in an easy-chair at the corner of the fireplace, with her white hair, her profile which had not yet lost its pride, and her strangely-black eyes set in a face wrinkled with those long vertical wrinkles which tell of nobleness of life. The extraordinary paleness of her colourless and, as it were, bloodless complexion betrayed at all times the great sorrows of a widowhood which had found nothing to divert or console it. But that evening this paleness had appeared to the Count even more startling, as, too, had the restlessness in the physiognomy of the daughter.
Although Madame Liauran was past forty, not one thread of silver mingled as yet with the bands of black hair crowning the faded yet not withered face, in which all her mother's features were reproduced, but with more emaciation and pain. A nervous complaint kept her always lying on her couch, which, that evening, was exactly opposite to Madame Castel's easy chair, so that the General, on leaving the drawing-room had been able to see both women at once, and to feel confusedly that on the second there was weighing a double widowhood. No, there was nothing left in this creature to enable her to support life without suffering. To Scilly, who knew in what an atmosphere of tenderness and sorrow the second Marie Alice had grown up, before herself entering an atmosphere of new troubles, this sort of intensified widowhood afforded an easy explanation of the existence in the daughter of a sensitiveness that was already keen in the mother.
But then, were there not years in which the melancholy of the two widows was enlivened or rather warded off by the presence of a child, Alexander Hubert Liauran, who had been born a few months before the Italian war—a charming creature, somewhat too frail to suit the taste of his godfather, the General, who was fond of calling him "Mademoiselle Hubert," and as graceful as all young people are who have been brought up only by women? In the circumstances in which his mother and grandmother found themselves, how could this boy have been anything but the whole world to them?
"If they are so downcast, it can only be on his account," said the Count to himself; "yet there is no question of war—" for the old soldier recollected the promise which the young man had made to him to enlist at once if ever a new strife should bring Germany and France into conflict. This one condition had induced him not to dispute the frightened wish of the two women who had been desirous of keeping the son by their side. The young man, in fact, had at first been attracted by the military profession; but the mere idea of seeing their child dressed in uniform had been too stern a martyrdom for Madame Castel and Madame Liauran, and the child had remained with them, unprovided with any career but that of loving and of being loved.
The remembrance of his godson, Hubert, awakened a fresh train of musing in the Count. His brougham had gone down the Rue du Bac, and was now advancing along the quays. A rain-splash fell on the old soldier's cheek and he closed the pane which had remained open. The sudden sensation of cold made him shrink further into the corner of his carriage and into his thoughts. That kind of backset which is produced by physical annoyance often has the strange effect of heightening the power of remembrance within us. Such was the case with the General, who suddenly began to reflect that for several weeks his godson had rarely spent the evening at the Rue Vaneau. He had not been disturbed by this, knowing that Madame Liauran was very anxious that her son should go into society. They were so much afraid lest he should weary of their narrow life.
Scilly was now compelled by a secret instinct to connect this absence with the inexplicable sadness overspreading the faces of the two women. He understood so well that all the keen forces of the grandmother's and of the mother's heart, had their supreme centre in the existence of their child! And he pictured to himself pell-mell the thousand scenes of passionate affection which he had witnessed since the time of Hubert's birth. He remembered Madame Castel's recrudescent paleness, and Madame Liauran's deadly headaches at the slightest uneasiness in the child. He could see again the days of his education, the course of which was followed by the mother herself. How many times had he admired the young woman as, with her elbow resting on a little table, she employed her evening hours in studying the page of a Latin or Greek book, which the boy was to repeat next day?
With a touching, infatuated tenderness such as is peculiar to certain mothers who would be pained by the slightest divorce between their own mind and their son's, Madame Liauran had sought to associate herself hour by hour with the development of her child's intelligence. Hubert had not taken a lesson in the upper room in the little house at which his mother was not present, engaged with some piece of charitable work, such as knitting a coverlet or hemming handkerchiefs for the poor, but listening with all her attention to what the master was saying. She had pushed the divine susceptibility of her soul's jealousy so far as to be unwilling to have a private tutor. Hubert had, therefore, received instruction from different masters whom Madame Liauran had engaged on the recommendations of her confessor, the Vicar of Sainte-Clotilde, and none of them had been able to dispute with her an influence which she would share only with the grandmother.
When it was necessary that the youth should learn how to ride and fence, the poor woman, to whom an hour spent away from her son was a period of ill-dissembled anguish, had taken months and months to make up her mind. At last she had consented to fit up a room on the ground floor as a fencing school. An old regimental instructor, who was settled in Paris, and whom General Scilly had had under him in the service, used to come three times a week. The mother did not venture to acknowledge that the mere noise of the clashing of the swords awakened within her a dread of some accident, and caused her almost insurmountable emotion. The Count had likewise induced Madame Liauran to entrust her son to him to be taken to the riding-school; but she had done so on condition that he would not leave him for a minute, and every departure for this horse-exercise had continued to be an occasion of secret agony.
Foreign as they might be to his own character, all these shades of feeling, which had made the education of the young man a mysterious poem of foolish terror, painful felicity, and continual effusiveness, had been understood by Count Scilly, thanks to the intelligence of the most devoted affection, and he knew that Madame Castel, though outwardly more mistress of herself, was little better than her daughter. How many glances from the pale woman had he not caught, wrapping Marie Alice Liauran and Hubert in too ardent and absolute idolatry?