She mastered herself, swallowing a sob, but the tears rolled down her cheeks.
“You are now,” she said.
He laughed uncertainly. “A poor old sinner of a saint,” he said, and gathered her to him.
And later, in the salon, before the fire, for the autumn was damp and cold, he told her the cheerless story of his life, concealing nothing, putting the facts before her so that she could judge. She sat on the rug, her arm about his knee. She felt very tired, as though some part of her had bled to death. But a new wonder filled her heart. In a way she had been prepared for the discovery. In her talks with her uncle and with Martin she had been keen to mark a strange disingenuousness. She had accused them of conspiracy. They were concealing something; what, she knew not; but a cloud had rested on her mother’s memory. If, on that disastrous evening, the frowsy woman of the Rue Maugrabine had revealed herself as her mother, her soul would have received a shock from which recovery might have been difficult. Now the shock had not only been mitigated by months of torturing doubt, but was compensated by the thrill of her father’s sacrifice.
When he had ended, she turned and wept and knelt before him, crying for forgiveness, calling him all manner of foolish names.
He said, stroking her dark hair: “I am only a poor old bankrupt Marchand de Bonheur!”
“You will be Marchand de Bonheur to the end,” she said, and with total want of logical relevance she added: “See what happiness you have brought me to-night.”
“At any rate, my dear,” said he, “we have found each other at last.”
She went to bed and lay awake till dawn looking at a new world of wrong doing, suffering and heroism. Who was she, humble little girl, living her sequestered life, to judge men by the superficialities of their known actions? She had judged her father almost to the catastrophe of love. She had judged Martin bitterly. What did she know of the riot in his soul? Now he was offering his life for a splendid ideal. She felt humble beside her conception of him. And her Uncle Gaspard, great, tender, adored, was lying far, far away in the north, with a bullet through his body. She prayed her valiant little soul out for the two of them. And the next morning she arose and went to her work brave and clear-eyed, with a new hope in God based upon a new faith in man.
A day or two later she received a wild letter from Corinna Hastings. Corinna’s letters were as frequent as blackberries in March. Félise knitted her brows over it for a long time. Then she took it to her father.