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Updated: June 10, 2025
Madame was pale and sad, and for the first time Felicita thought of her as being a sufferer by Roland's crime. Her husband's mother had been little more to her than a superior housekeeper, who had been faithfully attached to her and her children.
She had come up the valley as Jean Merle had done, with vague, dim hopes, stretching vainly forward to some impossible good that might come to him when he and Felicita stood face to face once again. But now all was over. A boat was ready at Stans, and here the friendly curé bade her farewell, leaving her to go on her way alone.
Spite of this, there were among those feminine voices, some so very sweet that, there is no use in denying it, they were dear to me. One in particular surpassed the rest; I heard it more seldom, and it uttered nothing unworthy of its fascinating tone. She sung little and mostly kept repeating these two pathetic lines: Chi rende alla meschina La sua felicita?
She could not soothe or comfort him, for she knew his grief was wasted on a falsehood; but she looked down on her son's face with a feeling of terror. "Oh, my father! my beloved father!" he sobbed at last. "Is he dead, mother? You never told me anything that wasn't true. He can't be dead, though Phebe says so. Is it true, mother?" Felicita bent her head till it rested on the boy's uplifted face.
Clifford was gone as one of the mourners to follow Felicita to the grave; and all the servants had asked to be present at the funeral. There was nothing to demand his attention or to distract his thoughts. The house was as silent as if it had been the house of death and he himself but a phantom in it.
As Felicita looked back on the long line of her distinguished ancestry with an exaltation of feeling which, if it was pride, was a legitimate pride, so had Felix looked back upon the line of good men from whom his own being had sprung. He had felt himself pledged to a Christian life by the eminently Christian lives of his forefathers.
She could not command her voice to speak again. "I must go," said Felicita, at last. "I wish I had not invited visitors for to-night." "I cannot come in this evening," Phebe answered; "but Felix is there, and Canon Pascal is coming. You will do very well without me." She breathed more freely when Felicita was gone.
The long years had reconciled her to Roland's death, and made the memory of him sacred and sorrowfully sweet, to be brooded over in solitary hours in the silent depths of her loyal heart. But he was alive again, with no right to be alive, having no explanation to give which could reinstate him in his old position. And Felicita? Oh! what a cruel, unwomanly wrong Felicita had been guilty of!
If his thoughts, so dazed and bewildered usually, became clear for a little while, it was always Felicita whose image stood out most distinctly before him. He had loved her passionately; surely never had any man loved a woman with the same intensity so he said to himself. Even now the very crime he had committed seemed as nothing to him, because he had been guilty of it for her.
Roland's prolonged and mysterious absence had been a sore trial to his mother, though her placid and trustful nature had borne it patiently. Surely, she thought, the trial was coming to an end. Felicita reached their lodgings utterly exhausted and worn out.
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