Vandenesse with a terrible word, knowing beforehand that
she should not succeed; knowing that the strong reason which ought to
separate them would carry no weight; that she should humiliate herself
vainly in her daughter's eyes. Alfred was too corrupt; Moina too clever
to believe the revelation; the young Countess would turn it off and
treat it as a piece of maternal strategy. Mme. d'Aiglemont had built
her prison walls with her own hands; she had immured herself only to
see Moina's happiness ruined thence before she died; she was to look on
helplessly at the ruin of the young life which had been her pride and
joy and comfort, a life a thousand times dearer to her than her
own. What words can describe anguish so hideous beyond belief, such
unfathomed depths of pain?

She waited for Moina to rise, with the impatience and sickening dread
of a doomed man, who longs to have done with life, and turns cold at the
thought of the headsman. She had braced herself for a last effort, but
perhaps the prospect of the certain failure of the attempt was less
dreadful to her than the fear of receiving yet again one of those
thrusts that went to her very heart--before that fear her courage ebbed
away. Her mother's love had come to this. To love her child, to be
afraid of her, to shrink from the thought of the stab, yet to go
forward. So great is a mother's affection in a loving nature, that
before it can fade away into indifference the mother herself must die
or find support in some great power without her, in religion or another
love. Since the Marquise rose that morning, her fatal memory had called
up before her some of those things, so slight to all appearance, that
make landmarks in a life. Sometimes, indeed, a whole tragedy grows out
of a single gesture; the tone in which a few words were spoken rends a
whole life in two; a glance into indifferent eyes is the deathblow of
the gladdest love; and, unhappily, such gestures and such words were
only too familiar to Mme. d'Aiglemont--she had met so many glances that
wound the soul. No, there was nothing in those memories to bid her hope.
On the contrary, everything went to show that Alfred had destroyed her
hold on her daughter's heart, that the thought of her was now associated
with duty--not with gladness. In ways innumerable, in things that were
mere trifles in themselves, the Countess' detestable conduct rose
up before her mother; and the Marquise, it may be, looked on Moina's
undut