Sleep was out of the question. He could only sit and stare at the fire, and review his past life and its manifold follies.
How lightly had he flung away the treasure of liberty. Without a thought of the future he had bound himself to a woman for whom he had but the transient liking born of a young man’s fancy—of whom he knew so little, that looking back now, he was unable to recall anything beyond the barest outline of her history. Well, he was paying dearly for that brief infatuation—he was paying a heavy forfeit for those careless days in which he had lived among men without principle, and had sunk almost to as low a level as his companions. He tried to remember anything that his wife had ever told him of her childhood and youth; but he could only remember that she had been very silent as to the past. Once, and once only, on a summer Sabbath night, when they two had been driving home alone together from a dinner in the Bois, and when Zaïre’s tongue had been loosened by champagne and curaçoa, she had talked of her journey to Paris; that long, lonely journey, during which she had so little money in her pocket that she could not even afford to give herself an occasional stage in a diligence, but had been content to get a gratuitous lift now and then in an empty wagon, or on the top of a load of buckwheat. She told him how she had entered Paris faint and thirsty, white with dust from head to foot, as if she had come out of a flour-mill; and how the great city—with its myriad lamps and voices, and the thunder of its wheels—had made her dazed and giddy as she stood at the junction of two great boulevards, looking down the endless vista, where the lights dwindled to a point on the edge of the dark sky. She told him of her career in Paris—how she had begun as a laundress on the quay, and how one Sunday night at the Château des Fleurs a man had come up to her after one of the quadrilles—a fat man with a gray moustache and a large white waistcoat—and had asked her where she had learned to dance; and how she had told him, laughingly, that she had never learned at all—that came naturally to her, like eating and drinking and sleeping—and then he had asked her whether she would like to be a dancer at one of the theatres, and wear a petticoat of golden tissue and white satin boots embroidered with gold—such as she might have seen in the last great spectacle of the Hind in the Wood—and she had told him yes, such a life would suit her exactly; whereupon the gentleman in the white waistcoat told her to present herself at eleven o’clock next morning at a certain big theatre on the Boulevard. She obeyed, saw the gentleman in his private room at the theatre, was engaged as one of a hundred and fifty figurantes, at a salary of twenty francs a week. “And from that to the time when I was the rage at the Students’ Theatre, it was easy,” said La Chicot, with an insolent smile upon her full, red lips. “If I had any other man for my husband I should be the rage at one of the Boulevard Theatres, and the Figaro would have an article about me every other week.”
“You have never had any fancy for going back to Auray, to see your old friends?” asked the husband once, wondering at the cold egotism of the creature.
“I never had a friend in Brittany for whom I cared that,” answered Zaïre, snapping her fingers. “Everyone ill-treated me. My father was a perambulating cider-vat, my poor mother—well, I can pity her, because she was so miserable—whined and whimpered. It was a mercy to all of us when the good God took her.”
“And you never had anyone else to care for?” asked Jack, in a speculative mood. “No lover, for instance?”
“Lover,” cried La Chicot, her great eyes flashing upon him angrily. “What had I to do with a lover? I was but nineteen when I left that hole.”
“Lovers have been heard of even at that early age,” suggested Jack, in his quietest tone; and after that his wife said no more about her past history.
Tonight, sitting in idle despondency, looking into the fire, John Treverton, master of Hazlehurst Manor, husband of a wife he adored, utterly dissociated from that reckless, happy-go-lucky Jack Chicot of Bohemian surroundings, for whom the good and evil of each day had been all-sufficient, and who had never dared to look forward to the inevitable tomorrow, let his thoughts slip back to the bygone days, and saw, as in a picture, those scenes of the past which had impressed themselves most vividly upon his mind when they happened.
There was one incident in his married life which had made him wonder, for his wife had not been a woman of a sensitive temper, or easily moved to strong emotion, save when her own pleasure or her own interest was at stake. Yet in this particular instance, she had shown herself as susceptible to pity and terror as a girl of seventeen, fresh from a convent school.
They two, husband and wife, had been strolling one summer afternoon upon the quays and bridges, loitering to look at the traffic on the river, sitting to rest under the trees, or turning over the leaves of the old books upon the stalls, and so sauntering carelessly on till they came to the Pont Neuf.
“Let us go across and look at Notre Dame,” said the husband, for whom the old
