Upon the following afternoon the Colonel duly escorted Mademoiselle
to the dwelling of Madame Tessier. You may conceive that the portly
little warrior, when panoplied in the full-skirted, black frock-coat,
gray peg-top trousers, black cravat and vest, and curly-brimmed silk
chimney-pot of private life, looked a very gallant gentleman; and
that his daughter, attired in a new and charming costume of fine blue
cloth, trimmed with velvet and loops of black silk cord, and wearing
a sealskin coat and a minute bonnet, consisting of a knot or two of
blue velvet, a froth of lace, and half-a-dozen richly-tinted
oak-leaves on her coils of black hair, conveyed an effect of elegant
simplicity and youthful grace, such as only a well-bred French girl
knows how to combine perfectly.
During the walk, which absorbed the best part of a quarter of an
hour, Juliette occupied herself in the endeavor to glean a few meager
items of information with regard to her destined husband. To her
timidly-cast bait the Colonel barely vouchsafed a rise. One may
imagine a dialogue of timid interrogations and baffling replies,
running somewhat after this fashion:
"Dear father, upon reflection, I find myself unable to recall the
features of M. Charles Tessier with anything approaching clearness.
I pray you be kind enough to describe him to me?"
"My daughter, I myself experience--how shall I phrase it?--a
difficulty in verbally portraying the form and features of that
excellent young man. But his mother carries his image in her heart,
and doubtless has it on her walls and in her albums. Look in the one
before you search the others; it will be wise."
"Assuredly. But, my father----"
"Chut!" The Colonel twirled a waxed end of his magnificent mustache,
and resumed presently: "M. Charles Tessier is a gentleman of honor,
an excellent man of business, and a most desirable _parti_ for any
young girl of good family and limited fortune. Could the most
exacting bride-elect demand more than this? In addition, he has a
fine hand----"
"Indeed, dear father----"
A fine hand was something tangible. The owner of the commended
extremity might in addition be possessor of a good figure, broad
shoulders, a handsome nose.... And yet hunchbacks occasionally have
neat hands, and the Colonel had only testified to one. That idea
might be dismissed as fanciful. Of course, Charles had the proper
complement of legs and arms. Half-smiling at her own terrors,
Juliette murmured:
"Pray go on, dear father! You said--a fine hand..."
"Hah--aha! yes. A fine hand for a stroke at billiards. In addition,
it cannot be denied that Charles has a magnificent head----"
"I am listening, dear father!..."
"A truly magnificent head for figures! Book-keeping by double-entry
is infant's play to this admirable young man. He must teach thee the
logarithms, my child, when thou art married.... Docile and
intelligent as thou art, thou wouldst quickly learn to be his
secretary and head-clerk. It should be a true wife's ambition to
help her husband in business, and this is alone possible when his
avocations are of the strictly civil kind."
It was tragic. In her dreams Juliette Bayard had aided to put on the
casque, and buckle the cuirass of a stately warrior. Now she must
perforce mend the gray goose-quill of a knight of the counting-house.
You might have seen how her slender throat swelled against the
encircling band of velvet. Tears sprang to her eyes. To keep them
back she bit her lip, straightened her back, and shrugged,--one
barely perceptible shrug. The Colonel said,--was his kind glance a
little troubled as it turned on her?--
"The letter of Madame Tessier has made it clear to thee, that
although thou wilt see thy future husband soon, the meeting will not
take place upon the present occasion. Since October M. Charles
Tessier"--the Colonel twisted his mustache--"has been detained by
affairs at Mons-sur-Trouille in Belgium. I understand that at this
country hamlet--near the town of Mons--is situated the manufactory of
his partner, M.--the name for the moment escapes me. He is a wealthy
gentleman of excellent Flemish family. The daughter, I remember, was
called Clémence or Clémentine."
The Colonel cleared his throat. Juliette expressed a preference for
the name of Clémentine. The Colonel begged her pardon. After all,
it was Clémence. That did not matter. Mademoiselle liked the name
of Clémence nearly as well as Clémentine. The Colonel tugged at the
other side of the fiercely-waxed mustache, and changed the subject.
"The pavement rings beneath the heel; I prophesy frost to-night.
Thou art cold, my child, I saw thee shiver. Shall we walk more
quickly? It will be better so."
She quickened her steps at the suggestion. There had already been
frost, and the air was keen and sparkling as champagne. The young
blood in her veins answered to the pleasant stimulus of exercise.
Her cheeks were rose-tinted porcelain, her eyes blue stars, despite
her wretchedness, by the time they reached Madame Tessier's door.
The house of the Widow Tessier was in the Rue de Provence, which runs
north from the Avenue de Saint Cloud, not far from above its junction
with the Carrefour de Montreuil, and ends at the corner of the
Boulevard de la Reine.
A quiet, retiring street, its houses separated by ample gardens,
hidden by high walls of brick faced with fine gray Caen stone,
generally festooned with pretty creepers and overtopped by stately
trees. A noble pine shaded the green glass conservatory, large
enough to be termed a winter-garden, which projected on the south
side, from what was a solidly built villa plastered yellow, with a
raised ground-floor, second story and attic story with Mansard
windows; the short sloping roof, and these--indeed, the whole of the
attic story to the floor-line, where a fine-worked cornice of stone
ran round the building--being covered with grayish-blue slates.
You rang at a gate of open ironwork, white-painted, in which was a
smaller gate to admit pedestrians, and while you were waiting for
someone to answer the bell, you had leisure to admire the heavy
_porte cochère_ upon your left, of solid oak timbers, studded with
iron bolts, surmounted with a fine arch of stone, centered with a
blank lozenge; and the neat balcony railing topping the wall to your
right, in which was a modest little iron-studded door leading to the
kitchen and servants' offices, always secured by a huge lock, and
opened with much groaning of inward bolts.
You are to understand that the roof of the kitchen formed a leaden
terrace upon which the bay of the drawing-room and other ground-floor
windows opened; these, like the windows on the basement and upper
stories, being furnished with outside shutters, the slatted wooden
pattern with which Continental travelers are familiar, yellow-painted
to match the plaster of the walls. The terrace could be gained by a
short flight of stone steps rising upon your right as you entered.
But upon a visit of ceremony you went on to the main entrance, which
was reached by a handsome ascent of five broad, shallow steps of the
Caen stone, continued along the north and east sides of the house, so
that from any of the ground-floor windows, which were all of antique
French door-pattern, you could descend into the garden at will. The
hall-door commanded a view of the stables and the cottage attached to
them, whose tenant combined the office of coachman with the duties of
a gardener. You could not call those buildings unpicturesque,
covered as they were with the now leafless branches of a great vine
and a magnificent wistaria. Beyond there stretched a kitchen-garden,
with beds of flowers and vegetables, under glass and in the open; and
splendid espaliers, whence many a basket of luscious cherries, huge
blue plums, brown Bon Chrétien pears, and melting nectarines, were
gathered for the table in the season of such luscious fruits. And
behind and to the north side of the villa was the pleasance, which
must have formed part of a nobleman's park at one time. For winding
walks bordered with ground-ivy led you in and out and among clumps of
oak and chestnut, and stately limes and acacias stood upon the sunlit
spaces of its velvet-lawns; while near its bounds shrubberies and
thickets of Portugal laurel and lilac, bird-cherry and hawthorn,
syringa and arbutus harbored thrush and blackbird, and in spring
rejoiced the lover of beauty and perfume; and one great tulip tree
opened its crimson-purple chalices beneath the rains and suns of
early June. From the eastern boundary-wall jutted a stone pipe,
ending in a mask, from the mouth of which fell a jet of clear water,
forming a tiny pond, and a brook that ran away between stones covered
with moss and overgrown with ferns and water-plants. But just now
the pond was frozen, and a great icicle hung from the jaws of the
grinning Satyr, and the blackened leaves of the water-loving plants
and club-mosses were hidden under a thin covering of recently-fallen
snow. What strange uses this place was to serve before the terrible
year of 1870 was ended! How many letters signed "Charles" were to be
drawn by the tiny hand of P. C. Breagh's Infanta from that grinning
satyr-mouth.
Entering the house--for you are to see it plainly, serving as it did
for a theater upon whose table the life-blood of France was to flow;
and her body, beneath the steady, skillful hands of a man well fitted
to perform such operations, was fated to undergo a terrible
mutilation--entering the house by the double glass-doors, you found
yourself in a parqueted hall, furnished with Empire consoles and
large mirrors in frames of tarnished gilding. The chief staircase,
covered with striped drugget in gray-and-red, you found immediately
upon your right. Under this was the opening to a servants' stairway
leading down to the kitchen beneath the terrace. Upon your left was
a small door masking another servants' stairway leading to the
attics; and beyond this two large folding-doors, covered with green
baize, led into a medium-sized but lofty apartment, used as the
dining-room, looking out on the garden, and hung with a crimson flock
paper patterned with gilt palm-leaves, against which hung some large
landscapes and antique hunting-scenes in oils. There was a handsome
white marble fireplace, with a high mantel-slab supported by terminal
figures, one a nymph, wanton-lipped and languid-eyed, her full
voluptuous bosom partly veiled by a leopard skin, her disheveled hair
crowned with ivy, like that of her companion; a faun, and young,
judging by his budding horns.
A third pair of folding-doors facing the hall-entrance opened into
the drawing-room; a fourth to the right of these gave entrance to the
billiard-room, from which access might be gained by a low glass door
into the winter-garden, a high-domed glass house full of palms and
tree-ferns, boasting a little fountain, whose leaden dolphin,
balanced almost perpendicularly on his tail in the center of a
moss-stained basin, could spout high enough to wet the green roof
when any charitable hand might set him going. A door at the farther
end of this winter-garden gave access to a small room lined with
books, classical works by standard French authors for the most part,
smelling moldy, and apt, when a curious hand strove to remove them
from their shelves, to stick to their neighbors on either side. And
looking at the conservatory from outside, one perceived, running
along the entire length of the rounded glass roof, a wrought-iron
gangway, or double-sided balcony. From which, according to the
testimony of Madame, the late M. Tessier, from whose dressing-room
this aerial promenade could be gained by a glass door had been,
accustomed to enjoy the prospect and breathe the air.