CHAPTER XII.A WATERING-PLACE (continued).
The morning on which theBathers’ Gazetteannounced that his Excellency, the Minister of Public Instruction, with his secretary Bompard and staff, had taken quarters in the Alpes Dauphinoises, great was the demoralization in the surrounding hotels. It just happened that La Laita had been keeping dark for two days a Catholic bishop from Geneva in order to produce him at the proper moment, as well as a Councillor-General from the Department of the Isère, a Lieutenant-Judge from Tahiti, an architect from Boston—in fact, a whole cargo; La Chevrette was on the point of receiving also a “Deputy from the Rhône and family.” But the Deputy, the Lieutenant-Judge and all disappeared, lost in the illustrious mass of flame, the flame of glory, which followed Numa Roumestan everywhere!
People talked only of him, occupied themselves about him only. Any pretext was good enough to introduce oneself into the Alpes Dauphinoises in order to pass before the little drawing-room on the ground floor looking into the garden where the Minister took his meals with his ladies and his secretary; to see him taking a hand in a game ofbowls, dear to Southern Frenchmen, with Father Olivieri of the Missions, a holy man and terribly hairy, who, along of having lived among savages, had taken unto himself their manners and customs, uttering terrible cries when taking aim and brandishing the balls above his head when letting fly as if they were tomahawks.
The Minister’s handsome features, the oiliness of his manners, won him all hearts, but more especially his sympathy for the poor. The day after his arrival the two waiters who served on the first floor announced at the hotel office that the Minister was going to take them to Paris for his personal servants. Now, as they were good workmen, Mme. Laugeron pulled a very wry face, but allowed nothing to be seen by his Excellency, whose presence was of such great importance and honor to her hotel. The prefect and the rector made their appearance from Grenoble in full fig to present their respects to Roumestan. The Abbot of La Grande Chartreuse—for Roumestan made a pleading on their side against the Prémontrés and their liqueur—sent him with the greatest pomp a case of extra-fine chartreuse; and finally the Prefect of Chambéry came to get his orders for the laying of the corner-stone for the new college, a good occasion for a manifesto in a speech and for a revolution in the methods at the universities.
But the Minister asked for a little rest. The labors of the session had wearied him; he wanted to have a chance to get a breath, to live quietly in the midst of his family and prepare at leisure thisChambéry speech, which had such a considerable importance. And the prefect understood that perfectly well; he only asked to be notified forty-eight hours before in order that he might give the necessary brilliancy to the ceremony. The corner-stone had been waiting for two months and would naturally wait longer for the good-will of the illustrious orator.
As a matter of fact, what kept Roumestan at Arvillard was neither the necessity for rest nor the leisure needed by that marvellous improvisator—upon whom time and reflection had the same effect as humidity upon phosphorus—but the presence of Alice Bachellery. After five months of an impassioned flirtation, Numa had got no further with his little one than he was on the day of their first meeting. He haunted the house, enjoyed the savory bouillabaisse cooked by Mme. Bachellery, listened to the songs of the former director of the Folies Bordelaises, and repaid these slight favors with a flood of presents, bouquets, Ministerial theatre boxes, tickets to meetings of the Institute and the Chamber of Deputies, and even with the diploma of Officer of Academy for the song-writer—all this without getting his love affair one bit ahead.
Nevertheless, he was not one of those fresh hands who are ready to go fishing at every hour without having tried the water beforehand and thoroughly baited it; only he was engaged in an affair with the cleverest kind of trout, who amused herself with his precautions, now and then nibbled at thebait and sometimes gave him the impression that she was caught; but then, all of a sudden, with one of her bounds she would skip away, leaving him with his mouth dry with longing and his heart shaken by the motions of her undulating, subtle and tempting spine.
Nothing was more enervating than this little game. Numa could have caused it to stop at any minute by giving the little girl what she demanded, namely, a nomination as prima donna at the opera, a contract for five years, large extras, allowance for fire, the right to have her name displayed—all that stipulated on paper bearing the government stamp, and not merely by a simple clasp of the hand, or by Cadaillac’s “Here’s my hand on it!” She believed no more in that than she did in the expressions, “You may depend upon me for it”—“It’s just the same as if you had it”—phrases with which for the past five months Roumestan had been trying to dupe her.
Roumestan found himself between two pressing demands. “Yes,” said Cadaillac, “all right—if you will renew my own lease.” Now Cadaillac was used up and done with; his presence at the head of the first musical theatre was a scandal, a blot, a rotten heritage from the Imperial administration. The press would certainly raise an outcry against a gambler who had failed three times and was not allowed to wear his officer’s cross, against a cynicalposeurwho dissipated the public money without any shame.
Finally, wearied out with not being able to allowherself to be captured, Alice broke the fish-line and skipped away, carrying the fish-hook with her.
One day the Minister arrived at the Bachellery house and found it empty, except for the father, who, in order to console him, sang his last popular refrain for his benefit:
“Donne-moi d’quoi q’t’as, t’auras d’quoi qu’ j’ai.”(Gimme a bite o’ yourn, my boy, I’ll gi’ you a bite o’ mine.)
“Donne-moi d’quoi q’t’as, t’auras d’quoi qu’ j’ai.”(Gimme a bite o’ yourn, my boy, I’ll gi’ you a bite o’ mine.)
“Donne-moi d’quoi q’t’as, t’auras d’quoi qu’ j’ai.”(Gimme a bite o’ yourn, my boy, I’ll gi’ you a bite o’ mine.)
“Donne-moi d’quoi q’t’as, t’auras d’quoi qu’ j’ai.”
(Gimme a bite o’ yourn, my boy, I’ll gi’ you a bite o’ mine.)
He forced himself to be patient for a month, and then went to see the fertile song-writer again, who was good enough to sing him his new songbeginning—
“Quand le saucisson va, tout va,”(Sausage gone, all is gone,)—
“Quand le saucisson va, tout va,”(Sausage gone, all is gone,)—
“Quand le saucisson va, tout va,”(Sausage gone, all is gone,)—
“Quand le saucisson va, tout va,”
(Sausage gone, all is gone,)—
and let him know that the ladies, finding themselves delightfully situated at the baths, had announced their intention to double the term of their sojourn.
Then it was that Roumestan remembered that he was expected for the laying of the corner-stone of the college at Chambéry, a promise he had made off-hand and which probably would have remained off-hand if Chambéry had not been in the neighborhood of Arvillard, whither, by a providential piece of chance, Jarras, the doctor and friend of the Minister, had just sent Mlle. Le Quesnoy.
Immediately upon his arrival they met each other in the garden of the hotel. She was tremendously surprised to see him, just as if that very morning she had not read the pompousannouncement of his coming in the daily gazette, just as if for eight days past, through the thousand voices of its forests, its fountains, its innumerable echoes, the whole valley had not been announcing the arrival of his Excellency.
“What! you here?”
Roumestan, with his Ministerial air, imposing and stiff:
“I am here to see my sister-in-law.”
Moreover he was surprised to find that Miss Bachellery was still at Arvillard; he had thought her gone this long while.
“Well, come now, I have got to take care of myself, haven’t I? since Cadaillac pretends that my voice is so sick!”
Then she gave him a little Parisian nod with the ends of her eyelashes and waltzed off, uttering a clear roulade, a delicious undersong like the note of a blackbird, which one hears long after one loses the bird from sight.
Only from that day on she changed her manner. It was no longer the precocious child forever bouncing about the hotel, roqueting Master Paul, playing with the swing and other innocent games; it was no longer the girl who was only happy with the children, disarmed the most severe mammas and most morose ecclesiastics by the ingenuousness of her laugh and her promptness at the sacred services. In place of that appeared Alice Bachellery, the diva of the Bouffes, the pretty tomboy, lively in manners and setting the pace, who surrounded herself with young whipper-snappers,got up impromptu festivities, picnics and suppers, whose doubtful reputation her mother, who was always present, only partly succeeded in making respectable.
Every morning a basket-wagon with a white canopy bordered with fringed curtains drew up to the front door an hour before these fine ladies came downstairs in their light-toned gowns. Meanwhile about them pranced and caracoled a jolly cavalcade consisting of everybody in the way of a free and unmarried person in the Alpes Dauphinoises and the neighboring hotels—the Assistant Justice, the American architect and more especially the young man on springs, whom the young diva seemed no longer to be driving to despair by her innocent infantilities. The carriage well-crammed with cloaks against their return, a big basket of provisions on the box, they swept through the country at a sharp rate on the road for the Chartreuse of St. Hugon. Three hours were spent on the mountain along zigzag, precipitous roads on a level with the black tops of pines that scramble down precipices toward torrents all white with foam; or else in the direction of Brame-farine, where one breakfasts on mountain cheese washed down by a little claret very lively in its nature, which makes the Alps dance before one’s eyes—Mont Blanc and all that marvellous horizon of glaciers and blue peaks which one discovers up there, together with little lakes, fragments shining at the foot of the crags like so many broken pieces of sky.
Then they came down “à la ramasse,” seated upon sledges of branches without any backs to lean against, which made it necessary to grasp the branches frantically, launched headlong as they were down the declivities, steered by a mountaineer who goes straight ahead over the velvet of the upland pastures and the pebbly bed of dry torrents, and passing with the same swiftness a section of rock or the big gap of a river. At last it lands you down below overwhelmed, bruised and suffocated, your whole body in a quiver and your eyes rolling with the sensation of having survived a most horrible earthquake.
And the day’s trip was not complete unless the entire cavalcade had been drenched on the way by one of those mountain storms, bright with lightning flashes and streaks of hail, which frighten the horses, make the landscape dramatic and prepare a sensational return. Little Bachellery would be seated on the box in some man’s overcoat, the tassel of her cap decorated with a feather of the Pyrennean partridge. She would hold the reins, whip the horses hard in order to warm herself and, when once landed from the coach, recount all the dangers of the excursion with the greatest vivacity, a high sharp voice and brilliant eyes, showing the lively reaction of her youthful body against the cold downpour—all with a little shudder of fear.
It would have been well if then at least she had felt the need of a good sleep, one of those leaden slumbers which trips in the mountains produce.Not at all; till early morning, in the rooms of these women, there were goings on without end—laughter, songs, popping bottles, meals brought up at improper hours, card-tables pushed around for baccarat—and all this over the head of the Minister, whose room happened to be just underneath.
Several times he complained of it to Mme. Laugeron, who was very much torn between her desire to be agreeable to his Excellency and fear of causing clients with such good paying qualities discontent. And besides, has any one the right to be very exacting in these hotels at the baths which are always being turned upside down by departures and arrivals in the midst of the night, by trunks that are dragged about, by big boots and iron-bound Alpine sticks of mountain climbers, who are engaged in making ready for the ascent long before daybreak? And then, besides, the fits of coughing of the sick people, those horrible, incessant coughs which seem to tear people in spasms, appearing to combine the elements of a sob, a death rattle and the crowing of a husky cock.
These giddy nights, heavy July nights, which Roumestan passed turning and twisting on his bed, filled with pressing thoughts, while upstairs sounded clear in the night the laughter of his neighbors, broken by single notes and snatches of song—these nights he might have employed writing his speech for Chambéry; but he was too much agitated and too angry. He had to controlhimself not to run upstairs to the next floor and drive off at the tips of his boots the young man on springs, the American and that shameless Assistant Justice, that dishonor to French jurisprudence in the colonies, so as to be able to seize that naughty little scoundrel by the neck, by her turtle-dove’s neck puffed out with roulades, and at the same time say to her just once for all:
“Isn’t it about time that you ceased making me suffer in this way?”
In order to quiet himself and drive off these dreams and other visions even more vivid and painful he lit his candle again, called to Bompard, asleep in the adjoining room—his comrade, his echo, always ready at command—and then the two would talk about the girl. It was for that very purpose he had brought him along, having torn him away with no little trouble from the business of establishing his artificial hatcher. Bompard consoled himself by talking of his venture to Father Olivieri, who was thoroughly acquainted with the raising of ostriches, having lived at Cape Town a long while. The tales told by the priest interested the imaginative Bompard very much more than Numa’s affair with little Bachellery—the Father’s voyages, his martyrdom, the different ways in which the robust body of the man had been tortured in different countries—that buccaneer’s body burnt and sawed and stretched on the wheel, a sort of sample card of refinements in human cruelty—and all that along with the cool fan of silky and tickly ostrich plumes dreamtof by the promoter. But Bompard was so well trained to his business of shadow that even at that time of night Numa found him ready to warm up and be indignant in sympathy with him and to express, with his magnificent head under the silken ends of a night scarf, the emotions of anger, irony or sorrow, according as the talk fell upon the false eyelashes of the artificial little girl, on her sixteen years, which certainly were equal to twenty-four, or on the immorality of a mother who could take part in such scandalous orgies. Finally, when Roumestan, having declaimed and gesticulated well and laid bare the weakness of his amorous heart, put out his candle, saying “Let’s try to sleep, come on,” then Bompard would use the advantage of the darkness to say to him before going to bed:
“Well, in your place, I know well enough what I would do.”
“What?”
“I would renew the contract with Cadaillac.”
“Never!”
And then he would plunge violently under the bed-clothes in order to protect himself from the rowdy-dow overhead.
One afternoon at the time for music, that hour during life at the baths which is given over to coquetry and gossip, whilst all the bathers, crowded in front of the establishment as if on the poop of a ship, came and went, slowly circled about, or took their seats on the camp-chairs arranged in three rows, the Minister had darted into an emptyalley in order to avoid Mlle. Bachellery, whom he saw coming clad in a stunning toilet of blue and red, escorted by her staff. There, all alone, seated in the corner of a bench and with his pre-occupation strong upon him, infected by the melancholy of the hour and that distant music, he was mechanically stirring about with his umbrella the spots of fire with which the alley was strewn by the setting sun, when a slow shade passing across his sunlight made him raise his eyes. It was Bouchereau, the celebrated doctor, very pale and puffy, dragging his feet after him. They knew each other in the way that all Parisians at a certain height of society know each other. It chanced that Bouchereau, who had not been out for several days, felt in a sociable frame of mind; he took a seat; they fell to talking: “Is it true that you are ill, Doctor?”
“Very ill,” said the other with his manner of a wild boar, “a hereditary disease—a hypertrophy of the heart. My mother died of it and my sisters also. Only, I shall last less long than they, because of my horrible business; I have about a year to live—or two years at the most.”
There was nothing except useless phrases with which to answer this great scientist, this infallible diagnoser who was talking of his death with such quiet assurance. Roumestan understood it, as in silence he pondered that there indeed were sorrows a good deal more serious than his own. Bouchereau went on without looking at him, having that vague eye and that relentless sequence ofideas which the habit of the professorial chair and his lectures give to a professor:
“We physicians, you see, are supposed not to feel anything because we have such an air with us. They think that in the sick person we are taking care of the sickness only, never the being, the human creature suffering pain. What an error! I have seen my master Dupuytren, who was supposed to be a pretty tough chicken, weeping hot tears before a poor little sufferer from diphtheria who told him very quietly that it was an awful bore to die ... and then those heart-breaking appeals from anguished mothers, those passionate hands which clasp your arm: ‘My child, save my child!’ ... and then the fathers who stiffen themselves up and say to you in a very masculine voice, but with great big tears running down their cheeks: ‘You will pull him through, won’t you, Doctor?’ It is all very well to harden oneself, but such despairs break your heart, and that is a nice thing, isn’t it, when one’s own heart is already attacked? Forty years of practice and every day becoming more nervous and sensitive—it is my patients who have killed me! I am dying from the sufferings of other people!”
“But I thought you did not accept patients any more, Doctor,” said the Minister, who was deeply moved.
“Oh, no; never any more, for nobody’s sake! I might see a man fall dead to the ground there in front of me and I wouldn’t even bend down. You understand? It is enough to turn one’s bloodat last, this sickness of mine, which I have increased by all the sicknesses of others! Why, I want to live; there is nothing else but life!”
With all his pallor he excited himself and his nostrils, pinched with a look of morbidness, drank in the light air filled with lukewarm aromas, vibrating musical instruments and cries of birds. He continued with a heart-broken sigh:
“I do not practise any more, but I always remain the doctor. I preserve that fatal gift of diagnosis, that horrible second sight for the latent symptom, for suffering which the sufferer hopes to conceal, and which at a mere glance at the passer-by I perceive in the person who walks and talks and acts in the full force of his being, showing me the man about to die to-morrow, the motionless corpse. And all that just as clearly as I seeitadvancing towards me, the fit which is going to do for me, that last fainting-fit from which nothing can ever bring me back.”
“It is frightful!” murmured Numa, who felt himself turning pale. A poltroon in the face of sickness and death, like all Provençal people, those people so crazy to live, he turned his face away from the redoubtable scientist and did not dare look him in the face for fear he might read on his own rubicund features the warning signs of his, Numa’s, approaching end.
“Oh! this terrible skill at diagnosis, which they all envy me, how sad it makes me, how it ruins the little remnant of life which remains to me! Why, look here: I know a luckless woman here whoseson died of laryngeal consumption ten or twelve years ago. I had seen him twice and I alone among all the physicians gave warning of the seriousness of the malady. Well, to-day I come across that same mother with her young daughter; and I may say that the presence of those unfortunate ones destroys the good of my sojourn at the baths and does me more harm than my treatment will ever do me good. They pursue me, they wish to consult me, and as for me I absolutely refuse to do it. No good of auscultating that child in order to read her condemnation! It was enough the other day to have seen her voracity while seizing a bowl of raspberries, and during the inhalation to have seen her hand lying on her knees, a thin hand, the nails of which are puffed up and rise above the fingers as if they were ready to detach themselves. That girl has the consumption her brother had; she will die before the year is out. But let other people tell them that; I have given enough of those dagger-stabs which have turned again to stab me. I want no more.”
Roumestan had got up, very much frightened.
“Do you know the name of those ladies, Doctor?”
“No; they sent me their card and I would not even see them. I only know that they are at our hotel.”
And all of a sudden, looking down the alley, he cried:
“By George, there they are!—I am off—”
Away down there at the end of the alley, on the little gravelled circle whence the band was sending its last note, there was a movement of umbrellas and light-colored gowns among the foliage, just as the first strokes of the dinner bells were heard from the hotels. The ladies Le Quesnoy detached themselves from a group of lively, chatting people, Hortense tall and slender in the sunlight, in a toilet of muslin and valenciennes, a hat trimmed with roses and in her hand a bouquet of the same kind of rose bought in the park.
“With whom were you talking just now, Numa? We thought it was Dr. Bouchereau.”
There she was before him, dazzling in her youth and so brilliant, on that happy day, that her mother herself began to lose her fears and allowed a little of that infectious gayety to be reflected on her ancient face.
“Yes, it was Bouchereau, who was recounting to me his miseries; he’s pretty low, poor fellow!”
And Numa, looking at her, reassured himself.
“The man is crazy; it is not possible; it’s his own death he is dragging about with him and prognosticates everywhere.”
At that moment Bompard appeared, walking very quickly and brandishing a newspaper.
“What is up?” asked the Minister.
“Great news! The tabor-player has made his début—”
They heard Hortense murmur: “At last!” and Numa was radiant.
“Success, was it not?”
“Do you think so? I have not read the article; but here are three columns on the front sheet of theMessenger!”
“There’s one more whom I discovered!” said the Minister, who had seated himself again with his thumbs in the armholes of his waist-coat. “Come on, read it to us.”
Mme. Le Quesnoy having called attention to the fact that the dinner-bell had sounded, Hortense hastily answered that it was only the first bell, and, her cheek resting on her hand, she listened in a pretty attitude of smiling expectancy. Bompard read:
“Is it due to the Minister of the Fine Arts or to the Director of the Opera that the Parisian public suffered such a grotesque mystification as that with which it was victimized last night?—”
They all started, with the exception of Bompard, who, under the impetus of his gait as a fine reader, lulled by the sonorous sound of his own voice and without taking in what he was reading, looked from one to the other, surprised at their astonishment.
“Well,” said Numa, “go on, go on!”
“In any case, it is the Honorable Roumestan who must shoulder the responsibility. He it is who has lugged up from his province this savage and odd-looking piper, this goat-whistler—”
“Well, there certainly are some people who are very mean,” interrupted the young girl, who had turned quite pale under her roses. The reader continued, with eyes staring in horror at the dreadful things he saw coming:
“—this goat whistler; to him is due that our Academy of Music appeared for the space of an evening like the return from the fair at Saint Cloud. In truth it would take a very crack fifer indeed to believe that Paris—”
The Minister rudely dragged the newspaper from his hand.
“I hope you don’t intend to read us that idiocy to the bitter end, do you? it is quite enough to have brought it to us at all.”
He ran down the article with his eye, with one of those quick glances of the public man who is used to reading the invectives of the daily press. “A provincial Minister—a pretty clog-dancer—Valmajour’s own Roumestan—hissed the Ministry and smashed his tabor—”
He had enough of it, thrust the virulent paper down into the bottom of his pocket, then rose, puffing with the rage that swelled his face, and taking Mme. Le Quesnoy by the arm:
“Come, let’s go to dinner, Mamma—this should teach me not to fret myself for the sake of a parcel of nobodies.”
All four marched along together, Hortense with her eyes upon the ground in a state of consternation.
“This is a matter concerning an artist of great talent,” said she, trying to strengthen her voice, a little veiled in its tone. “One ought not to hold him responsible for the injustice done him by the public nor for the irony of the newspapers.”
Roumestan came to a dead stop.
“Talent—talent!—bé, yes—I don’t deny that—but much too exotic—” and, raising his umbrella:
“Let us beware of the South, little sister, let’s beware of the South—don’t work it too hard—Paris will grow weary.”
And he resumed his walk with measured steps, quiet and cool as if he were a citizen of Copenhagen. The silence was unbroken save for the crackling of the gravel under his feet, which in certain circumstances seems to indicate the crushing or crumbling effect of a fit of rage or of a dream.
When they reached the front of the hotel, from the ten windows of whose enormous dining-room there came the noise of hungry spoons clattering on bottoms of plates, Hortense stopped, and, raising her head:
“So then, this poor boy—you’re going to abandon him?”
“What is to be done?—there is no use fighting against it—since Paris doesn’t care for him.”
She gave him an indignant glance which was almost one of disdain.
“Oh, it is horrible, what you are saying; well, as for me, I am prouder than you are; I am true to my enthusiasms!”
She crossed the porch of the hotel with two skips.
“Hortense, the second bell has sounded!”
“Yes, yes, I know—I am coming down.”
She ran up to her room and locked the door inorder not to be interfered with. Opening her desk, one of those natty trifles by the aid of which a Parisian woman can make personal to herself even the chamber of an inn, she pulled out one of the photographs of herself which she had had taken in the head-dress and scarf of an Arles woman, wrote a line underneath it and affixed her name. Whilst she was putting on the address the bell in the tower of Arvillard sounded the hour across the sombre violet that filled the valley, as if to give solemnity to what she had dared to do.
“Six o’clock.”
From the torrent the mist was rising in wandering and flaky masses of white. In the amphitheatre of forests and mountains and the silver plume of the glacier, in the rose-colored evening, she took note of the smallest details of that silent and reposeful moment, just as on the calendar one marks some single date among all others; just as in a book one underscores a passage which has caused one emotion; dreaming aloud she said:
“It is my life, my entire life I am risking at this moment.”
She took as witness the solemnity of the evening, the majesty of nature, the tremendous repose of everything about her.
Her entire life that she was engaging? Poor little girl! if she had only known how little that was!
A few days after this the Le Quesnoy ladies left the hotel, Hortense’s treatment having ended.Although reassured by the healthy look of her child and by what the little doctor said concerning the miracle performed by the nymph of the waters, her mother was only too glad to have done with that life, which in its smallest details recalled to her a past martyrdom.
“And how about you, Numa?”
O, as for him, he intended to stay a week or two longer, finish a bit of medical treatment and take advantage of the quiet which their departure would afford him in order to write that famous speech. It would make a tremendous row, the news of which they would get at Paris. By George! Le Quesnoy would not like it much!
Then all of a sudden, Hortense, though ready to leave, and notwithstanding she was happy at returning home to see the beloved absent ones whom distance made even more dear to her—for her imagination reached even to her heart—Hortense suddenly felt sorrow at leaving this beautiful country and all the hotel society and her friends of three weeks, to whom she had no idea she had become so much attached. Ah, ye loving natures! how you give yourselves out! how everything grasps you and then what pain ensues when breaking these invisible yet sensitive threads!
People had been so kind to her, so full of attention; and at the last hour so many outstretched hands pressed about the carriage, so many tender expressions! Young girls would kiss her: “We shall have no more fun without you.” Then they promised to write to each other and exchangedmementos, sweet-smelling boxes and paper-cutters made of mother-of-pearl with this inscription in a shimmering blue like the lakes: “Arvillard, 1876.” And while M. Laugeron slipped a bottle of superfine Chartreuse into her travelling-sack, she saw, up there behind the pane of her chamber window, the mountaineer’s wife who had been her servant dabbing her eyes with an enormous handkerchief of the color of wine-lees and heard a husky voice murmur in her ear: “Plenty of spring, my dear young lady, always plenty of spring!” It was her friend the consumptive, who, having jumped up on the wheel, poured out upon her a look of good-bye from two haggard and feverish eyes, but eyes sparkling with energy, will and a bit of emotion besides. O, what kind people! what kind people!...
Hortense could not speak for fear of crying.
“Good-bye, good-bye, all!”
The Minister accompanied the ladies as far as the distant railway station and took his seat in front of them. Crack goes the whip, jingle go the bells! All of a sudden Hortense cries out:
“Oh, my umbrella!” She had had it in her hand not a moment before. Twenty people rush off to find it: “The umbrella, the umbrella”—not in the bedroom, not in the drawing-room; doors slam; the hotel is searched from top to bottom.
“Don’t look for it; I know where it is.”
Always lively, the young girl jumps out of the carriage and runs to the garden, toward the groveof walnuts, where even that morning she had been adding several chapters to the romance that was being written in her crazy little head. There lay the umbrella, thrown across the bench, a bit of herself left in that favorite spot, something which was very like her. What delicious hours had been passed in this nook of rich verdure! what confidences had gone off on the wings of the bees and butterflies! Without a doubt she would never return thither again. This thought caused her heart to contract and kept her there. At that moment she found everything charming, even the long grinding sound of the swing.
“Get out! you make me weary—”
It was the voice of Mlle. Bachellery who was furious at being left because of this departure and, believing herself alone with her mother, was talking to her in her habitual tongue. Hortense thought of the filial flatteries which had so often jarred upon her nerves and laughed to herself while returning to the carriage. Then, at the turn of an alley, she found herself face to face with Bouchereau. She stepped aside, but he laid hold of her arm.
“So you are going to leave us, my child?”
“Why, yes, sir.”
She hardly knew what to answer, startled by this meeting and surprised because it was the first time that he had ever spoken to her. Then he took her two hands in his own and held her that way in front of him, his arms wide apart, and gazed upon her fixedly from his piercing eyes undertheir brushy white brows. Then his lips and hands, his whole body trembled, while a rush of blood colored deeply his pallid face.
“Well, then, good-bye, happy journey!” And without another word he drew her to him and pressed her to his breast with the tenderness of a grandfather and then hastened away with both hands pressed against his heart, which seemed about to break.