Pierre replied:
"What does that matter? Is that a reason for living as fools do? If my fellow-townsmen are stupid and ill-bred, need I follow their example?
A woman does not misconduct herself because her neighbor has a lover."
Jean began to laugh.
"You argue by comparisons which seem to have been borrowed from the maxims of a moralist."
Pierre made no reply. His mother and his brother reverted to the question of stuffs and armchairs.
He sat looking at them, as he had looked at his mother in the morning before starting for Trouville; looking at them as a stranger who would study them, and he felt as though he had really suddenly come into a family of which he knew nothing.
His father, above all, amazed his eye and his mind. That flabby, burly man, happy and besotted, was his own father! No, no; Jean was not in the least like him.
His family!
Within these two days an unknown and malignant hand, the hand of a dead man, had torn asunder and broken, one by one, all the ties which had held these four human beings together. It was all over, all ruined. He had now no mother--for he could no longer love her now that he could not revere her with that perfect, tender, and pious respect which a son"s love demands; no brother--since his brother was the child of a stranger; nothing was left him but his father, that coa.r.s.e man whom he could not love in spite of himself.
And he suddenly broke out:
"I say, mother, have you found that portrait?"
She opened her eyes in surprise.
"What portrait?"
"The portrait of Marechal."
"No--that is to say--yes--I have not found it, but I think I know where it is."
"What is that?" asked Roland. And Pierre answered:
"A little likeness of Marechal which used to be in the drawing-room in Paris. I thought that Jean might be glad to have it."
Roland exclaimed:
"Why, yes, to be sure; I remember it perfectly. I saw it again last week. Your mother found it in her desk when she was tidying the papers. It was on Thursday or Friday. Do you remember, Louise? I was shaving myself when you took it out and laid it on a chair by your side with a pile of letters of which you burnt half. Strange, isn"t it, that you should have come across that portrait only two or three days before Jean heard of his legacy? If I believed in presentiments I should think that this was one."
Mme. Roland calmly replied:
"Yes, I know where it is. I will fetch it presently."
Then she had lied! When she had said that very morning to her son, who had asked her what had become of the miniature: "I don"t exactly know--perhaps it is in my desk"--it was a lie! She had seen it, touched it, handled it, gazed at it but a few days since; and then she had hidden it away again in the secret drawer with those letters--his letters.
Pierre looked at the mother who had lied to him; looked at her with the concentrated fury of a son who had been cheated, robbed of his most sacred affection, and with the jealous wrath of a man who, after long being blind, at last discovers a disgraceful betrayal. If he had been that woman"s husband--and not her child--he would have gripped her by the wrists, seized her by the shoulders or the hair, have flung her on the ground, have hit her, hurt her, crushed her! And he might say nothing, do nothing, show nothing, reveal nothing. He was her son; he had no vengeance to take. And he had not been deceived.
Nay, but she had deceived his tenderness, his pious respect. She owed to him to be without reproach, as all mothers owe it to their children. If the fury that boiled within him verged on hatred it was that he felt her to be even more guilty toward him than toward his father.
The love of man and wife is a voluntary compact in which the one who proves weak is guilty only of perfidy; but when the wife is a mother her duty is a higher one, since nature has intrusted her with a race.
If she fails then she is cowardly, worthless, infamous.
"I do not care," said Roland suddenly, stretching out his legs under the table, as he did every evening while he sipped his gla.s.s of black-currant brandy, "You may do worse than live idle when you have a snug little income. I hope Jean will have us to dinner in style now.
Hang it all! if I have an indigestion now and then I cannot help it."
Then turning to his wife he added:
"Go and fetch that portrait, little woman, as you have done your dinner. I should like to see it again myself."
She rose, took a taper, and went. Then, after an absence which Pierre thought long, though she was not away more than three minutes, Mme.
Roland returned smiling, and holding an old-fashioned gilt frame by the ring.
"Here it is," said she, "I found it at once."
The doctor was the first to put forth his hand; he took the picture, and holding it a little away from him, he examined it. Then, fully aware that his mother was looking at him, he slowly raised his eyes and fixed them on his brother to compare the faces. He could hardly refrain, in his violence, from saying: "Dear me! How like Jean!" And though he dared not utter the terrible words, he betrayed his thought by his manner of comparing the living face with the painted one.
They had, no doubt, details in common; the same beard, the same brow; but nothing sufficiently marked to justify the a.s.sertion: "This is the father and that the son." It was rather a family likeness, a relationship of physiognomies in which the same blood courses. But what to Pierre was far more decisive than the common aspect of the faces, was that his mother had risen, had turned her back, and was pretending, too deliberately, to be putting the sugar basin and the liqueur bottle away in a cupboard. She understood that he knew, or at any rate had his suspicions.
"Hand it on to me," said Roland.
Pierre held out the miniature and his father drew the candle toward him to see it better; then he murmured in a pathetic tone:
"Poor fellow! To think that he was like that when we first knew him!
Cristi! How time flies! He was a good-looking man, too, in those days, and with such a pleasant manner--was not he, Louise?"
As his wife made no answer he went on:
"And what an even temper! I never saw him put out. And now it is all at an end--nothing left of him--but what he bequeathed to Jean. Well, at any rate you may take your oath that that man was a good and faithful friend to the last. Even on his deathbed he did not forget us."
Jean, in his turn, held out his hand for the picture. He gazed at it for a few minutes and then said regretfully:
"I do not recognize it at all. I only remember him with white hair."
He returned the miniature to his mother. She cast a hasty glance at it, looking away again as if she were frightened; then in her usual voice, she said:
"It belongs to you now, my little Jean, as you are his heir. We will take it to your new rooms." And when they went into the drawing-room she placed the picture on the chimney-shelf by the clock, where it had formerly stood.
Roland filled his pipe; Pierre and Jean lighted cigarettes. They commonly smoked them, Pierre while he paced the room, Jean, sunk in a deep armchair, with his legs crossed. Their father always sat astride on a chair and spit from afar into the fireplace.
Mme. Roland, on a low seat by a little table on which the lamp stood, embroidered, or knitted, or marked linen.
This evening she was beginning a piece of worsted work, intended for Jean"s lodgings. It was a difficult and complicated pattern, and required all her attention. Still, now and again, her eye, which was counting the st.i.tches, glanced up swiftly and furtively at the little portrait of the dead as it leaned against the clock. And the doctor, who was striding to and fro across the little room in four or five steps, met his mother"s look at each turn.
It was as though they were spying on each other; and acute uneasiness, intolerable to be borne, clutched at Pierre"s heart. He was saying to himself--at once tortured and glad:
"She must be in misery at this moment if she knows that I guess!" And each time he reached the fireplace he stopped for a few seconds to look at Marechal"s fair hair, and show quite plainly that he was haunted by a fixed idea. So that this little portrait, smaller than an opened palm, was like a living being, malignant and threatening, suddenly brought into this house and this family.
Presently the street-door bell rang. Mme. Roland, always so self-possessed, started violently, betraying to her doctor son the anguish of her nerves. Then she said: "It must be Mme. Rosemilly"; and her eye again anxiously turned to the mantelshelf.
Pierre understood, or thought he understood, her fears and misery. A woman"s eye is keen, a woman"s wit is nimble, and her instincts suspicious. When this woman who was coming in should see the miniature of a man she did not know, she might perhaps at the first glance discover the likeness between this face and Jean. Then she would know and understand everything.