The solitary tear fell on his discolored hand. He shook it off, angrily. Somewhere in the middle of that gross bundle of contradictions, absurdities, appetites, vices, resentments, hatreds, calling itself Achille Dunoisse—there beat and bled a suffering human heart. And the distance that separated the father and the son was bridged by a moment of sympathy and understanding. And a pang of envy pierced it through....
For the supreme jewel that Fate can bestow upon mortal, is the love that will even yield up the Beloved for Love’s sake. To this gross old man, his sire, had been given what would never fall to the younger Dunoisse.
By the radiance of this great passion of Marie Bathilde’s, her son saw himself in like case with some penniless student in a Paris garret, crouching, upon a night of Arctic cold, over a fire of paper and straw. When the small fierce flame of Henriette’s slight sensuous fancy should have sunk down into creeping ashes under the starved hands spread above it, what would be left to live for? His heart was sick within him as he went away.
He returned to Madame de Roux with the news that his application to the Marshal had succeeded. She threw her arms about him, in a transport of joy.
“Ah then, so you really love me?” the poor dupe asked, putting the most fatal of all questions. For it sets the interrogated he or she wondering, “Do I?” and hastens the inevitable end.
“How can you doubt it?” she queried, hiding an almost imperceptible yawn behind her tiny fingers. “Did I not send away Eugène for you?”
She passed by gentle degrees to a question possessing much more interest. The amount to be placed upon the books at Rothschild’s to the credit of the Marshal’s son.
XLV
So thickly did the deposit of golden plums lie at the bottom of the pie-dish—so handsomely did the Marshal keep his given word, that at the suggestion of Henriette, Hector did some more shopping at the vast comprehensive mart of the Élysée. General de Roux, puffing a cheroot and sweltering in his cane chair at the Military Club of Algiers, was to read in the official Gazette of the Army—a special copy, thoughtfully forwarded by an anonymous friend—that his late Assistant-Adjutant had received yet further promotion. That the Cross of the Legion of Honor had been conferred upon him by the Prince-President, with his appointment as extra aide-de-camp of the Staff of the Élysée.