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Her mother's tenderness might have led her to sympathize with the troubles of a passion called forth by the nobler qualities of a lover, but this was no passion it was coquetry, and the Marquise despised Alfred de Vandenesse, knowing that he had entered upon this flirtation with Moina as if it were a game of chess.
The fortunes of her dead children having been settled, she could devote her savings and her own property to her darling Moina.
So nobody thought of blaming her for coldness or neglect which concerned no one, whereas her quick, apprehensive tenderness for Moina was found highly interesting by not a few who respected it as a sort of superstition. Besides, the Marquise scarcely went into society at all; and the few families who knew her thought of her as a kindly, gentle, indulgent woman, wholly devoted to her family.
"Sister," said the spoiled child, "the doctor " "It is all of no use," said Helene. "Oh! why did I not die as a girl of sixteen when I meant to take my own life? There is no happiness outside the laws. Moina... you..." Her head sank till her face lay against the face of the little one; in her agony she strained her babe to her breast, and died.
I shall always bear in my heart a feeling of gratitude towards one man in the world, and you are that man.... But I could wish that you had showed yourself more generous!" He turned towards the door, but in the same instant Helene leaned to whisper something in her mother's ear. "Ah!..." At the cry that broke from his wife, the General trembled as if he had seen Moina lying dead.
"Oh! let me alone, mother," said Moina; "your fingers are cold." She turned her head round on the pillow as she spoke, pettishly, but with such engaging grace, that a mother could scarcely have taken it amiss. Just then a wailing cry echoed through the next room, a faint prolonged cry, that must surely have gone to the heart of any woman who heard it.
Her darling's pretty face, the sound of Moina's voice, her ways, her manner, her looks and gestures, roused all the deepest emotions that can stir a mother's heart with trouble, rapture, or delight. The springs of the Marquise's life, of yesterday, to-morrow, and to-day, lay in that young heart. Moina, with better fortune, had survived four older children.
At last she said: "Helene, if you have any reproaches to make, I would rather bear them than see you go away with a man from whom the whole world shrinks in horror." "Then you see yourself, madame, that but for me he would be quite alone." "That will do, madame," the General cried; "we have but one daughter left to us now," and he looked at Moina, who slept on.
This instance is one from among very many that must have gone to the mother's heart; and yet nearly all of them might have escaped a close observer, they consisted in faint shades of manner invisible to any but a woman's eyes. Take another example. Mme. d'Aiglemont happened to say one day that the Princesse de Cadignan had called upon her. "Did she come to see you!" Moina exclaimed.
But Helene, when she saw a woman dressed in black, sat upright in bed with a shriek of horror. Then she sank back; she knew her mother. "My daughter," said Mme. d'Aiglemont, "what is to be done? Pauline!... Moina!..." "Nothing now for me," said Helene faintly.
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