However he could plainly see his first brother Guillaume, then fourteen
years of age, whom some holiday had brought from college that morning,
and then and even more vividly his mother, so gentle and so quiet, with
eyes so full of active kindliness. Later on he learnt what anguish had
racked that religious soul, that believing woman who, from esteem and
gratitude, had resignedly accepted marriage with an unbeliever, her
senior by fifteen years, to whom her relatives were indebted for great
services. He, Pierre, the tardy offspring of this union, born when his
father was already near his fiftieth year, had only known his mother as a
respectful, conquered woman in the presence of her husband, whom she had
learnt to love passionately, with the frightful torment of knowing,
however, that he was doomed to perdition. And, all at once, another
memory flashed upon the young priest, the terrible memory of the day when
his father had died, killed in his laboratory by an accident, the
explosion of a retort. He, Pierre, had then been five years old, and he
remembered the slightest incidents--his mother's cry when she had found
the shattered body among the remnants of the chemical appliances, then
her terror, her sobs, her prayers at the idea that God had slain the
unbeliever, damned him for evermore. Not daring to burn his books and
papers, she had contented herself with locking up the laboratory, which
henceforth nobody entered. And from that moment, haunted by a vision of
hell, she had had but one idea, to possess herself of her second son, who
was still so young, to give him a strictly religious training, and
through him to ransom her husband--secure his forgiveness from God.
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