It was impossible to Sylvie to define to her brother’s ward with accuracy and decency what she meant by a lover; instead of regarding the question as the result of adorable innocence, she treated it as mendacious.
“A lover, Pierrette, is a man who loves you and wishes to marry you.”
“Ah!” said Pierrette. “In Brittany when two persons are agreed, we call the young man a suitor!”
“Well, understand that there is not the smallest harm in confessing your feeling for a man, my child. The harm is in secrecy. Have you, do you think, taken the fancy of any man who comes here?”
“I do not think so.”
“You do not love one of them?”
“No one.”
“Quite sure?”
“Quite sure.”
“Look me in the face, Pierrette.”
Pierrette looked at her cousin.
“And yet a man spoke to you from the Square this morning?”
Pierrette looked down.
“You went to your window, you opened it, and spoke to him.”
“No, cousin; I wanted to see what the weather was like, and I saw a countryman in the Square.”
“Pierrette, since your first Communion you have improved greatly, you are obedient and pious, you love your relations and God; I am pleased with you, but I never have told you so for fear of inflaming your pride.”
The horrible woman mistook the dejection, the submission, the silence of wretchedness for virtues! One of the sweetest things that brings comfort to the sufferer, to martyrs, to artists, in the midst of the Divine wrath roused in them by envy and hatred, is to meet with praise from some quarter whence they have always had blame and bad faith. So Pierrette looked up at her cousin with attentive eyes, and felt ready to forgive her all the pain she had caused her.
“But if it is all mere hypocrisy, if I am to find in you a serpent I have cherished in my bosom, you would be an infamous, a horrible creature!”
“I do not think I have anything to blame myself for,” said Pierrette, feeling a dreadful pang at her heart on this sudden transition from unexpected praise to the terrible accent of the hyena.
“You know that lying is a mortal sin?”
“Yes, cousin.”
“Well, then, you stand before God!” said the old maid, pointing with a solemn gesture to the gardens and the sky, “Swear to me that you do not know that countryman.”
“I will not swear,” said Pierrette.
“Ah! he was not a countryman! Little viper!”
Pierrette fled across the garden like a startled fawn, appalled by this moral dilemma. Her cousin called to her in an awful voice.
“The bell,” she replied.
“What a sly little wretch!” said Sylvie to herself. “She has a perverse nature, and I am sure now that the little serpent has twisted herself round the Colonel. She has heard us say that he is a Baron. A Baroness, indeed! Little fool! Oh! I will be rid of her by placing her as an apprentice, and pretty soon too!”
Sylvie was so lost in thought that she did not see her brother coming down the walk and contemplating the mischief done by the frost to his dahlias.
“Well, Sylvie, what are you thinking about there? I thought you were looking at the fishes; sometimes they jump out of the water.”
“No,” said she.
“Well, how did you sleep?” and he proceeded to tell her his dreams of the past night. “Do not you think that my face looks patchy?” a favorite word with the Rogrons. Since Rogron had loved—nay, we will not profane the word—had desired Mademoiselle de Chargeboeuf, he had been very anxious about his appearance and himself.
At this moment Pierrette came down the steps and called to them that breakfast was ready. On seeing her little cousin, Sylvie’s complexion turned green and yellow; all her bile rose. She examined the passage, and said that Pierrette ought to have polished it with foot-brushes.
“I will polish it if you wish,” replied the angel, not knowing how injurious this form of labor is to a young girl.
The dining-room was above blame. Sylvie sat down, and all through breakfast affected to want things that she never would have thought of in a calmer frame of mind, seeking for them simply to make Pierrette rise to fetch them, and always just as the poor child was beginning to eat. But mere nagging was not enough; she sought some subject for faultfinding, and fumed with internal rage at finding none. If they had been eating eggs, she would certainly have complained of the boiling of hers. She hardly replied to her brother’s silly talk, and yet she looked only at him; her eyes avoided Pierrette, who was keenly aware of this behavior.
Pierrette brought in the coffee for her cousins in a large silver cup, which served to heat the milk in, mixed with cream, in a saucepan of hot water. The brother and sister then added, to their taste, the black coffee which was made by Sylvie. When she had carefully prepared this dainty, Sylvie detected in it a faint cloud of coffee dust; she carefully skimmed it off the tawny mixture and looked at it, leaning over it to examine it more minutely. Then the storm burst.
“What is the matter?” asked Rogron.
“The matter! Miss, here, has put ashes in my coffee. Ashes in coffee are so nice! … Well, well! It is not astonishing; no one can do two things at once. Much she was thinking of the coffee! A blackbird might have flown through the kitchen, and she would not have heeded it this morning! How should she see the ashes flying? And then—only her cousin’s!—Much she cares about it!”
She went on in this way, while she elaborately laid on the edge of her plate some fine coffee that had passed through the filter, mixed with some grains of sugar that had not melted.
“But, cousin, that is coffee,” said Pierrette.
“So I am a liar now?” exclaimed Sylvie, looking at Pierrette, and scorching her by a fearful flash that
