“Look here, Colonel,” said he, “I am going to take a great weight off your shoulders. You can do better than marry Sylvie; if you go to work the right way, in two years’ time you may marry little Pierrette Lorrain.”
And he told him the results of the Jesuit’s manoeuvring.
“What a clever stroke—and reaching so far!” said the Colonel.
“Colonel,” said Vinet gravely, “Pierrette is a charming creature; you may be happy for the rest of your days. You have such splendid health, that such a match would not, for you, have the usual drawbacks of an ill-assorted marriage; still, do not imagine that this exchange of a terrible life for a pleasant one will be easy to effect. To convert your ladylove into your confidante is a manoeuvre as dangerous as, in your profession, it is to cross a river under the enemy’s tire. Keen as you are as a cavalry officer, you must study the position, and carry out your tactics with the superior skill which has won us our present position. If I should one day be public prosecutor, you may command the department. Ah! if only you had a vote, we should be further on our way. I might have bought the votes of those two officials by indemnifying them for the loss of their places, and we should have had a majority. I should be sitting by Dupin, Casimir Périer, and—”
The Colonel had for some time past been thinking of Pierrette, but he hid the thought with deep dissimulation; his roughness to Pierrette was only on the surface. The child could not imagine why the man who called himself her father’s old comrade treated her so ill, when, if he met her alone, he put his hand under her chin and gave her a fatherly caress. Ever since Vinet had confided to him Mademoiselle Sylvie’s terror of marriage, Gouraud had sought opportunities of seeing Pierrette alone, and then the rough officer was as mild as a cat; he would tell her how brave her father was, and say what a misfortune for her his death had been.
A few days before Brigaut’s arrival, Sylvie had found Gouraud and Pierrette together. Jealousy had then entered into her soul with monastic vehemence. Jealousy, which is above all passions credulous and suspicious, is also that in which fancy has most power; but it does not lend wit, it takes it away; and in Sylvie jealousy gave birth to very strange ideas. She conceived that the man who had sung the words “Mistress Bride” to Pierrette must be the Colonel; and Sylvie thought she had reason to ascribe this serenade to the Colonel, because during the last week Gouraud’s manner seemed to have undergone a change. This soldier was the only man who, in the solitude in which she had lived, had ever troubled himself about her; hence she watched him with all her eyes, all her understanding; and by dint of indulging in hopes alternately flourishing and blighted, she had given them so much scope that they produced the effect on her of a moral mirage. To use a fine but vulgar expression, by dint of looking she often saw nothing. By turns she rejected and struggled victoriously against the notion of this chimerical rivalry. She instituted comparisons between herself and Pierrette; she was forty, and her hair was gray; Pierrette was a deliciously white little girl, with eyes tender enough to bring warmth to a dead heart. She had heard it said that men of fifty were fond of little girls like Pierrette.
Before the Colonel had sown his wild oats and frequented the Rogrons’ drawing-room, Sylvie had heard at the Tiphaines’ parties strange reports of Gouraud and his doings. Old maids in love have the exaggerated Platonic notions which girls of twenty are apt to profess; they have never lost the hard-and-fast ideas which cling to all who have no experience of life, nor learnt how social forces modify, erode, and coerce such fine and lofty notions. To Sylvie the idea of being deceived by her Colonel was a thought that hammered at her brain.
So from the hour, that morning, which every celibate spends in bed between waking and rising, the old maid had thought of nothing but herself and Pierrette, and the song which had aroused her by the words, “Mistress Bride.” Like a simpleton, instead of peeping at the lover through the Venetian shutters, she had opened her window, without reflecting that Pierrette would hear her. If she had but had the common wit of a spy, she would have seen Brigaut, and the fateful drama then begun would not have taken place.
Pierrette, weak as she was, removed the wooden bars which fastened the kitchen shutters, opened the shutters, and hooked them back, then she opened the passage door leading into the garden. She took the various brooms needed for sweeping the carpet, the dining-room floor, the passage, the stairs, in short, for cleaning everything with such care and exactitude as no servant, not even a Dutch one, would give to her work; she hated the least reproof. To her, happiness consisted in seeing Sylvie’s little blue eyes, colorless and cold, with a look—not indeed of satisfaction, that they never wore—only calm when she had examined everything with the owner’s eye, the inscrutable glance which sees what escapes the keenest observer.
By the time Pierrette returned to the kitchen her skin was moist; then she put everything in order, lighted the stove so as to have live charcoal, made the fire in her cousins’ rooms, and put hot water for their toilet, though she had none for hers. She
