CHAPTER XIV
THE BARRIER
That gift of laughter of his seemed utterly extinguished. For once
there was no gleam of humour in those dark eyes, as they continued
to consider her with that queer stare of scrutiny. And yet, though
his gaze was sombre, his thoughts were not. With his cruelly true
mental vision which pierced through shams, and his capacity for
detached observation—which properly applied might have carried him
very far, indeed—he perceived the grotesqueness, the artificiality
of the emotion which in that moment he experienced, but by which he
refused to be possessed. It sprang entirely from the consciousness
that she was his mother; as if, all things considered, the more or
less accidental fact that she had brought him into the world could
establish between them any real bond at this time of day! The
motherhood that bears and forsakes is less than animal. He had
considered this; he had been given ample leisure in which to consider
it during those long, turbulent hours in which he had been forced to
wait, because it would have been almost impossible to have won across
that seething city, and certainly unwise to have attempted so to do.
He had reached the conclusion that by consenting to go to her rescue at such a time he stood committed to a piece of purely sentimental quixotry. The quittances which the Mayor of Meudon had exacted from him before he would issue the necessary safe-conducts placed the whole of his future, perhaps his very life, in jeopardy. And he had consented to do this not for the sake of a reality, but out of regard for an idea—he who all his life had avoided the false lure of worthless and hollow sentimentality.
Thus thought André-Louis as he considered her now so searchingly, finding it, naturally enough, a matter of extra-
