Then, suddenly, the commonplace sentences changed into utterances of mournful tenderness.An anxious mind, a heart longing for affection, and discontent with the existing state of things, might be discerned in the tone of regret with which the brother dwelt upon his childhood, and the days when his own and his sister's life were passed together.There was a repressed repining in that first letter that immediately astonished and impressed me, for I had always believed my father and mother to have been perfectly happy with each other.Alas! that repining did but grow and also take definite form as I read on.My father wrote to his sister every Sunday, even when he had seen her in the course of the week.As it frequently happens in cases of regular and constant correspondence, the smallest events were recorded in minute detail, so that all our former daily life was resuscitated in my thoughts as I perused the lines, but accompanied by a commentary of melancholy which revealed irreparable division between those whom I had believed to be so closely united.Again I saw my father in his dressing-gown, as he greeted me in the morning at seven o'clock, on coming out of his room to breakfast with me before I started for school at eight.He would go over my lessons with me briefly, and then we would seat ourselves at the table (without a tablecloth) in the dining-room, and Julie would bring us two cups of chocolate, deliciously sweetened to my childish taste.My mother rose much later, and, after my school days, my father occupied a separate room in order to avoid waking her so early.How I enjoyed that morning meal, during which I prattled at my ease, talking of my lessons, my exercises, and my schoolmates! What a delightful recollection Iretained of those happy, careless, cordial hours! In his letters my father also spoke of our early breakfasts, but in a way that showed how often he was wounded by finding out from my talk that my mother took too little care of me, according to his notions--that Ifilled too small a place in her dreamy, wilfully frivolous life.
There were passages which the then future had since turned into prophecies."Were I to be taken from him, what would become of him?" was one of these.At ten I came back from school; by that time my father would be occupied with his business.I had lessons to prepare, and I did not see him again until half-past eleven, at the second breakfast.Then mamma would appear in one of those tasteful morning costumes which suited her slender and supple figure so well.From afar, and beyond the cold years of my boyhood, that family table came before me like a mirage of warm homelife; how often had it become a sort of nostalgia to me when Isat between my mother and M.Termonde on my horrid half-holidays.
And now I found proof in my father's letters that a divorce of the heart already existed between the two persons who, to my filial tenderness, were but one.My father loved his wife passionately, and he felt that his wife did not love him.This was the feeling continually expressed in his letters--not in words so plain and positive, indeed; but how should I, whose boyhood had been strangely analogous with this drama of a man's life, have failed to perceive the secret signification of all he wrote? My father was taciturn, like me--even more so than I--and he allowed irreparable misunderstandings to grow up between my mother and himself.Like me afterwards, he was passionate, awkward, hopelessly timid in the presence of that proud, aristocratic woman, so different from him, the self-made man of almost peasant origin, who had risen to professional prosperity by the force of his genius.Like me--ah!
not more than I--he had known the torture of false positions, which cannot be explained except by words that one will never have courage to utter.And, oh, the pity of it, that destiny should thus repeat itself; the same tendencies of the mind developing themselves in the son after they had developed themselves in the father, so that the misery of both should be identical!
My father's letters breathed sighs that my mother had never suspected--vain sighs for a complete blending of their two hearts;tender sighs for the fond dream of fully-shared happiness;despairing sighs for the ending of a moral separation, all the more complete because its origin was not to be sought in their respective faults (mutual love pardons everything), but in a complete, almost animal, contrast between the two natures.Not one of his qualities was pleasing to her; all his defects were displeasing to her.And he adored her.I had seen enough of many kinds of ill-assorted unions since I had been going about in society, to understand in full what a silent hell that one must have been, and the two figures rose up before me in perfect distinctness.I saw my mother with her gestures--a little affectation was, so to speak, natural to her--the delicacy of her hands, her fair, pale complexion, the graceful turn of her head, her studiously low-pitched voice, the something un-material that pervaded her whole person, her eyes, whose glance could be so cold, so disdainful; and, on the other hand, I saw my father with his robust, workingman's frame, his hearty laugh when he allowed himself to be merry, the professional, utilitarian, in fact, plebeian, aspect of him, in his ideas and ways, his gestures and his discourse.But the plebeian was so noble, so lofty in his generosity, in his deep feeling.He did not know how to show that feeling; therein lay his crime.On what wretched trifles, when we think of it, does absolute felicity or irremediable misfortune depend!
