THE weary weeks passed by with their alternations of hopes and fears. Martin, insignificant speck of blue and red, was in the Argonne. Sergeant Bigourdin of the Armée Territoriale was up in the north. The history of their days is the history of the war which has yet to be written; the story of their personal lives is identical with that of the personal lives of the millions of men who have looked and are looking Death always in the face, cut off as it were from their own souls by the curtain of war. Things went drearily at the H?tel des Grottes. But little manhood remained at Brant?me. Women worked in the fields and drove the carts and kept the shops where so few things were sold. Félise busied herself in the fabrique, her staff entirely composed of women. Fortinbras made a pretence of managing the hotel to which for days together no travellers came. No cars of pleasant motorists were unloaded at its door. Now and then an elderly bagman in vain quest of orders sat in the solitary salle-à-manger, and Fortinbras waited on him with urbane melancholy. Thrown intimately together father and daughter grew nearer to each other. They became companions, walking together on idle afternoons and sitting on mild nights on the terrace, with the town twinkling peacefully below them. They talked of many things. Fortinbras drew from the rich store of his wisdom, Félise from her fund of practical knowledge. There were times when she forgot the harrowing mystery of her mother, and, only conscious of a great and yearning sympathy, unlocked her heart and cried a little in close and comforting propinquity. Together they read the letters from the trenches, all too short, all too elusive in their brave cheeriness. The epistles of Martin and Bigourdin were singularly alike. Each said much the same. They had not the comforts of the H?tel des Grottes. But what would you have? War was war. They were in splendid health. They had enough to eat. They had had a sharp tussle with the Boches and many of their men were killed. But victory in the end was certain. In the meanwhile they needed some warm underclothes as the nights were growing cold; and would Félise enclose some chocolate and packets of Bastos. Love to everybody and Vive la France!
These letters Fortinbras would take to the Café de l’Univers and read to the grey-headed remnant of the coterie, each of whom had a precisely similar letter to read. The Adjoint du Maire was the first to come without a letter. He produced a telegram which was passed from hand to hand in silence. He had come dry-eyed and brave, but when the telegram reached him, after completing its round, he broke down.
“C’est stupide! Forgive me, my friends. I am proud to have given my son to my country. Mais enfin, he was my son—my only son. For the first time I am glad that his mother is no longer living.” Then he raised his head valiantly. “Et toi, Viriot—Lucien, how is he doing?”
Then some one heard of the death of Beuzot, the young professor at the Ecole Normale.
At last, after a long interval of silence came disastrous news of Bigourdin, lying seriously, perhaps mortally wounded in a hospital in a little northern town. There followed days of anguish. Telegrams elicited the information that he had been shot through the lung. Félise went about her work with a pinched face.
In course of time a letter came from Madame Clothilde Robineau at Chartres:
My Dear Niece:
Although your conduct towards me was ungrateful, I am actuated by the teachings of Christianity in extending to you my forgiveness, now that you are alone and unprotected. I hear from a friend of the Abbé Duloup, a venerable priest who is administering to the wounded the consolations of religion, that your Uncle Gaspard is condemned to death. Christian duty and family sentiment therefore make it essential that I should offer you a home beneath my roof. You left it in a fit of anger because I spoke of your father in terms of reprobation. But if you had watched by the death-bed of your mother, my poor sister, as I did, in the terrible garret in the Rue Maugrabine, you would not judge me so harshly. Believe me, dear child, I have at heart your welfare both material and spiritual. If you desire guidance as to the conduct of the hotel I shall be pleased to aid you with my experience.
Your affectionate Aunt,
Clothilde Robineau.
The frigid offer well meant according to the woman’s pale lights, Félise scarcely heeded. Father or no father, uncle or no uncle, protector or no protector, she was capable of conducting a score of hotels. The last thing in the world she needed was the guidance of her Aunt Clothilde. Save for one phrase in the letter she would have written an immediate though respectful refusal and thought nothing further of the matter. But that one phrase flashed through her brain. Her mother had died in the Rue Maugrabine. They had told her she had died in hospital. Things hitherto bafflingly dark to her became clear—on one awful, tragic hypothesis. She shook with the terror of it.
It was the only communication the postman had brought that late afternoon. She stood in the vestibule to read it. Fortinbras engaged in the bureau over some simple accounts looked up by chance and saw her staring at the letter with great open eyes, her lips apart, her bosom heaving. He rose swiftly, and hurrying through the side door came to her side.
“My God! Not bad news?”
She handed him the letter. He read, his mind not grasping at once that which to her was essential.
“The priests are exaggerating. And as for the proposal——”
“The Rue Maugrabine,” said Félise.
He drew the quick breath of sudden realisation, and for a long time they stood silent, looking into each other’s eyes. At last she spoke, deadly white:
“That woman I saw—who opened the door for me—was my mother.”
She had pierced to the truth. No subterfuge he could invent had power to veil it. He made a sad gesture of admission.
“Why did you hide it from me?” she asked.
“You had a beautiful ideal, my child, and it would have been a crime to tear it away.”
She held herself very erect—there was steel in the small body—and advanced a step or so towards him, her dark eyes fearless.
“You know what you gave me to understand when I saw her?”
“Yes, my child,” said Fortinbras.
“You also were an ideal.”
He smiled. “You loved me tenderly, but I was not in your calendar of saints, my dear.”
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 fath............