Part 2 (1/2)

”Out in the world----” Whether or not it was the tone in which she p.r.o.nounced the word ”world,” I cannot tell, but it has ever since had a strange sound for me,--a sound betokening something grand yet terrible.

Thus I made the discovery that there were nights, and that grown-up people could cry.

Soon afterwards it was winter; the nights grew longer, the days shorter, and it was never really bright in our home again,--the suns.h.i.+ne had vanished.

It was cold, and the trees in the gardens high up in Montmartre, where they took me to walk, grew bare and ugly.

Once, I remember, I asked my mother, ”Mamma, will the trees never be green again?”

”Oh, yes, when the spring comes,” she made answer.

”And then will it be bright here again?” I asked, anxiously.

To this she made no reply, but her eyes suddenly grew so sad that I climbed into her lap and kissed her upon both eyelids.

Papa was rarely with us now, and I was convinced that he had taken the suns.h.i.+ne away from our home.

When at long intervals he came to dine with us, there was as much preparation as if a stranger had been expected. Mamma busied herself in the kitchen, helping the cook, who was also my nurse-maid, to prepare the dinner. She laid the cloth herself, and decorated the table with flowers. To me everything looked magnificent: I was quite awe-stricken by the unwonted splendour.

One day a very beautiful lady paid us a visit, dressed in a velvet cloak trimmed with ermine--I did not know until some time afterwards the name of the fur--and a gray hat. I remember the hat distinctly, I was so delighted with the bird sitting on it. She expressed herself as charmed with everything in our home, stared about her through her eye-gla.s.s, overturned a small table and two footstools with her train, kissed me repeatedly, and begged mamma to come soon to see her. She was a cousin of papa's, a Countess Gatinsky,--the very one for whom, when she was a young girl and papa an elegant young attach, he had been doing the honours of Paris on that eventful afternoon when, while she and her mother were busy and absorbed, shopping in the _Bon March_, he had fallen desperately in love with my pale, beautiful mother.

When the Countess left us, mamma cried bitterly. I do not know whether she ever returned the visit, but it was never repeated, and I never saw the Countess again, save once in the Bois de Boulogne, where I was walking with my mother. She was sitting in an open barouche, and my father was beside her. Opposite them an old man sat crouched up, looking very discontented, and very cold, although the day was quite mild and he was wrapped up in furs.

They saw us in the distance; the Countess smiled and waved her hand; papa grew very red, and lifted his hat in a stiff, embarra.s.sed way.

I remember wondering at his manner: what made him bow to us as if we were two strangers?

Mamma hurried me on, and we got into the first omnibus she could find.

I stroked her hand or smoothed the folds of her gown all the way home, for I felt that she had been hurt, although I could not tell how.

The days grow sadder and darker, and yet the spring has come. Was there really no suns.h.i.+ne in that April and May, or is it so only in my memory?

Meanwhile, the trees have burst into leaf, and the first early cherries have decked our modest table. We have not seen papa for a long time. He is staying at a castle in the neighbourhood of Paris, but only for a few days.

It is a sultry afternoon in the beginning of June,--I learned the date of that wretched day later. The flowers in the balcony before our windows, scarlet carnations and fragrant mignonette, are drooping, because mamma has forgotten to water them, and mamma herself looks as weary as the flowers. Pale and miserable, she moves about the room with the air of one whom the first approach of some severe illness half paralyzes. Her pretty gown, a dark-blue silk with white spots, seems to hang upon her slender figure. She arranges the articles in the room here and there restlessly, and, noticing a soft silken scarf which papa sometimes wore knotted carelessly about his throat in the mornings, and which has been left hanging on the k.n.o.b of a curtain, she picks it up, pa.s.ses it slowly between her hands, and holds it against her cheek.

There!--is not that a carriage stopping before our door? I run out upon the balcony, but can see nothing of what is going on in the street below; our rooms are too high up. I can see, however, that the people who live opposite are hurrying to their windows, and that the pa.s.sers-by stop in the street, and stand and talk together, gathering in a little knot. A strange bustling noise ascends the staircase; it comes up to our landing,--the heavy tread of men supporting some weighty burden.

Mamma stands spellbound for a moment, and then flings the door open and cries out. It is papa whom they are bringing up, deadly pale, covered with blankets, helpless as a child.

There had been an accident in an avenue not far from Bellefontaine, the castle which the Countess Gatinsky had hired for the summer. Papa had been riding with her,--riding a skittish, vicious horse, against which he had been warned. He had only laughed, however, declaring that he knew how to manage the brute. But he could not manage him. As I learned afterwards, the horse, after vainly trying to throw his rider, had reared, and rolled over backwards upon him. He was taken up senseless.

When he recovered consciousness in Bellefontaine, whither they carried him, and the physician told him frankly that he was mortally hurt, he desired to be taken home,--to those whom he loved best in the world.

At first they would not accede to his wishes; Countess Gatinsky wanted to send for mamma and me,--to bring us to Bellefontaine. But he would not hear of it. He was told that to take him to Paris would be an injury to him in his present condition. Injury!--he laughed at the word. He wanted to die in the dear little nest in Paris, and it was a dying man's right to have his way.

I have never talked of this to any one, but I have thought very often of our sorrow, of the shadow that suddenly fell upon my childhood and extinguished all its suns.h.i.+ne.

And I have often heard people whispering together about it when they thought I was not listening. But I listened, listened involuntarily, as one does to words which one would afterwards give one's life not to have heard. And when the evil words stabbed me like a knife, it was a comfort to be able to say to myself, ”It was merely the caprice of a moment,--his heart had no share in it;” it was a comfort to be able to say that mamma sat at his bedside and that he died with his hand in hers.