The Celibates

laid the table for breakfast and lighted the dining-room stove. For all these various tasks she had to go to the cellar to fetch brushwood, leaving a cool place to go to a hot one, or a hot place to go into the cold and damp. These sudden changes, made with the reckless haste of youth, merely to avoid a hard word, or to obey some order, aggravated the state of her health beyond remedy. Pierrette did not know that she was ill. Still she felt the beginnings of sufferings; she had strange longings, and hid them; a passion for raw salad, which she devoured in secret. The innocent child had no idea that this state meant serious disease, and needed the greatest care. Before Brigaut’s arrival, if Néraud, who might accuse himself of her grandmother’s death, had revealed this mortal peril to the little girl, she would have smiled; she found life too bitter not to smile at death. But within these last few minutes, she, who added to her physical ailments the Breton homesickness⁠—a moral sickness so well known, that colonels of regiments reckon on it in the Bretons who serve in their regiments⁠—she loved Provins. The sight of that gold-colored flower, that song, the presence of the friend of her childhood, had revived her as a plant long deprived of water recovers after hours of rain. She wanted to live; she did not believe that she had suffered!

She timidly stole into Sylvie’s room, lighted the fire, left the hot-water pot, spoke a few words, went to awake her guardian, and then ran downstairs to take in the milk, the bread, and the other provisions supplied by the tradesmen. She stood for some time on the doorstep, hoping that Brigaut would have the wit to return; but Brigaut was already on the road to Paris. She had dusted the drawing-room and was busy in the kitchen, when she heard her cousin Sylvie coming downstairs. Mademoiselle Rogron made her appearance in a Carmelite gray silk dressing-gown, on her head a tulle cap decorated with bows, her false curls put on askew, her nightdress showing above the wrapper, her feet slipshod in her slippers. She inspected everything, and came to her little cousin, who was waiting to know what they would have for breakfast.

“So there you are, Miss Ladylove!” said Sylvie to Pierrette, in a half-merry, half-mocking tone.

“I beg your pardon, cousin?”

“You crept into my room like a sneak and out again in the same way; but you must have known that I should have something to say to you.”

“To me?”

“You have had a serenade this morning like a princess, neither more nor less.”

“A serenade?” exclaimed Pierrette.

“A serenade?” echoed Sylvie, mimicking her. “And you have a lover.”

“Cousin, what do you mean by a lover?” Sylvie evaded the question, and said:

“Do you dare to say, mademoiselle, that a man did not come under our windows and talk to you of marriage!”

Persecution had taught Pierrette the cunning indispensable to slaves; she boldly replied, “I do not know what you mean⁠—”

“Dog⁠—” added the old maid in vinegar tones.

“Cousin,” said Pierrette humbly.

“And you did not get up, I suppose, and did not go barefoot to your window? Enough to give you some bad illness. Well, catch it, and serve you right!⁠—And I suppose you did not talk to your lover?”

“No, cousin.”

“I knew you had a great many faults, but I did not know you told lies. Think of what you are about, mademoiselle. You will have to tell your cousin Denis and me all about the scene of this morning, and explain it too; otherwise your guardian will have to take strong measures.”

The old maid, devoured by jealousy and curiosity, was trying intimidation. Pierrette did as all people must who are enduring beyond their strength⁠—she kept silence. Silence is to all creatures thus attacked the only means of salvation; it fatigues the Cossack charges of the envious, the enemy’s savage rushes; it results in a crushing and complete victory. What is more complete than silence? It is final. Is it not one of the modes of the Infinite?

Sylvie looked stealthily at Pierrette. The child colored; but instead of flushing all over, the red lay in patches on her cheeks, in burning-spots of symptomatic hue. On seeing these signals of ill-health, a mother would at once have changed her note; she would have taken the child on her knee, have questioned her, have acquired long since a thousand proofs of Pierrette’s perfect and beautiful innocence, have suspected her weakness, and understood that the blood and humors diverted from their course were thrown back on the lungs after disturbing the digestive functions. Those eloquent scarlet patches would have warned her of imminent and mortal danger. But an old maid to whom the feelings that guard the family, the needs of childhood, the care required in early womanhood were all unknown, could have none of the indulgence and the pity that are inspired by the thousand incidents of married and maternal life. The sufferings of misery, instead of softening her heart, had made it callous.

“She blushes⁠—she has done wrong!” thought Sylvie. So Pierrette’s silence received the worst construction.

“Pierrette,” said she, “before your cousin Denis comes down we will have a little talk.⁠—Come,” she went on in a milder tone. “Shut the door to the street. If anyone comes, they will ring; we shall hear.”

In spite of the damp fog rising from the river, Sylvie led Pierrette along the graveled path that zigzagged between the grass-plots, to the edge of the terrace built in a so-called picturesque style of broken rockwork planted with flags and other water-plants. The old cousin now changed her tactics; she would try to catch Pierrette by gentleness. The hyena would play the cat.

“Pierrette,” said she, “you are no longer a child; you will soon set foot in your fifteenth year, and it would not be at all astonishing if you had a lover.”

“But, cousin,” said Pierrette, raising her eyes of angelic sweetness to