If one
starved you, or had stolen from you, and asked it so earnestly, you
would consent. I only want you to think less bitterly of me. You must
needs have some hard thoughts. I have done wrong, my boy, but you do not
know all the cause, and as what I mean to say cannot make place in your
breast for me now, you will know that it is true, because it has no
design. Oh! _Mon Dieu! Mon Dieu!_ It is so hard to have but one deep
love, and yet find that love the greatest sorrow of one's life. It is so
hard to have loved my boy so well, and to know that to the end of his
days he hated me."
She said this with all the impetuosity of her race; with utter
abandonment of plan or effort, yet with a wild power of love and gesture
which we know only upon the stage, but which in France is life, feeling,
reality.
She sat down and sobbed, raising her voice till it rolled with a shrill
music which made him quiver, through the parted curtain and into the
turbulent street. There were troops passing beneath the balcony, and the
clangor of drums and bugles climbed between the stone walls, as if to
pour all its mockery into the little room.
Ralph Flare hated to see a woman cry; it pained him more than her; so he
lifted her in his arms and carried her to the sofa and placed her head
upon his breast.
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