How strangest of the strange, to love a person so nearly a
stranger!... What had Monica's brother been thinking of? In January
they had met, and parted coldly ... in August they had met again, and
had spent together not quite three days.... But what days! to brand
themselves upon the memory. After that morning on the bloody field
of Gravelotte--that night spent in the woodshed behind the cottage of
Madame Guyot--that gray dawn when they had walked, hand clasped in
hand, behind the bearer of the Blessed Sacrament, could He and She be
ever anything but friends?... Close friends ... dear comrades,
linked by indissoluble bonds of memories ... of perils shared, of
experiences unforgettable by both.... What would Life be like when
one had to face it shorn of the sympathy and companionship of
Monica's brother?... Juliette did not dare to question. The thought
of such loneliness was enough to freeze the heart.
Meanwhile, here was Madame Potier, heated and triumphant, proclaiming
Madame served with the best that could be got. A lentil soup--an
omelette with ham, coffee, and fruit from the garden. One would do
better later, let Madame only wait.... The apartment of Madame
Tessier had been got ready for Madame ... the small room usually
occupied by M. Charles might be prepared for the Belgian
gentleman.... Or--since that room was dismantled for cleaning
purposes, and Madame Potier herself occupied the apartment adjoining
... would Monsieur mind sleeping at the garden cottage? She would
guarantee there cleanliness and more than comfort.... Was not the
bedroom hers and her poor Potier's?... Had they not slept in that
bed for ten years past?... Ah, wherever her poor Potier might now be
sleeping, he would never find the equal of his own bed....
The proposal, possibly prompted by discretion on the part of the
excellent Madame Potier, was gratefully accepted by Breagh. And from
that hour, under the sheltering wing of the hectic little caretaker,
began a little idyll of happiness for two young people, who asked
nothing better than that it should last.
It was exquisite autumn weather. They rose early, and passed out of
the iron gate together, and so through the quiet streets to Mass at
the great church of Notre Dame in the Rue St. Genevieve. Or they
would attend it at the Chapel in the Convent of Carmelites that is
now the Petit College in conjunction with a colossal Lycée. Then
they would come back to _déjeuner_, laid on a table under the trees
on the lawn, and afterward they would work in the garden, or read, or
talk. But they read no newspapers, and for the best part of two
months they never exchanged a word about the War.
It was the treatment devised by P. C. Breagh, who had failed of his
practicing degree in Medicine, and under this _régime_ the shadow
that had rested upon Juliette lifted day by day. He had taken Madame
Potier into his confidence, and she entered into a conspiracy for the
better nourishing of one whom she firmly believed to be the wife of
her master. She dragooned Juliette into drinking a vast quantity of
milk, and the girl's haggard outlines began to fill out, and her
dreadful dreams ceased to haunt her. Sleep returned, strength
revived, her grief for the lost father, unassuaged, became less
poignant. She could look back upon the happiness of their old life
together without the anguish that rends the heart.
Daily she doled out to Madame Potier the small sum necessary for
housekeeping. Under the able management of the hectic little woman,
a very little money went a long way. Such butter, such cheese of
Brie, such excellent bread, milk and cream, such country chickens,
such fruit, and vegetables from the garden, were daily set upon the
table, that a honeymooning Prince and Princess could not have been
better served. The reward of Madame Potier was to see her handiwork
vanish under the combined onslaughts of Madame Charles and
Monsieur.... She waited upon them at table, and joined in their
conversation, after the inconvenient habit of her simple kind.
As, still after the habit of her kind, she conceived an affection for
her young mistress, she developed cunning of a wholly lovable sort.
The first time she heard her idol laugh, she clapped her hands with
rapture. Another day, in pursuance of a stratagem she had
elaborated, she placed upon the dinner table a dish, with the blatant
boast:
"My poor Potier used to declare by all that is sacred that no living
woman could cook _ragoût_ of veal except his wife!"
She whipped off the cover. Madame Charles helped Monsieur in
silence, and unwittingly P. C. Breagh played into Madame Potier's
hands. For he sniffed approval, and said, as she set his sizzling
hot plate before him:
"M. Potier was quite right! If the woman lives who can cook a better
_ragoût_, I've never met her, Madame!"
Juliette's eyes sent forth blue sparks as she sat erect at the head
of the table. Her sloping shoulders sloped terribly, her upper lip
was preternaturally long. She helped herself to a very little of the
dish before her, and began to eat without perceptible enthusiasm.
Madame Potier stood back and watched her, her red hands on the hips
that were embraced by her apron of blue stuff. She said:
"Madame Charles will perhaps have forgotten the _menus_ she used to
prepare for Madame Tessier and M. le Colonel." She crossed herself
at the mention of the dead man's name.
Juliette's blue eyes filled, and the stiffness went out of her. She
laid down her knife and fork. P. C. Breagh scowled savage reproof at
Madame Potier. But Madame, at first overwhelmed, recovered herself.
She went on, as though she had never broken off:
"_Menus_ composed of excellent--but excellent dishes!... What a pity
to think that Madame Charles cannot make them now!--Look you, to cook
well is an art that may be easily forgotten!... Hey, Madame is not
eating to-day!"
Madame said in accents that were dignified and frigid:
"There is a little too much sugar in the _ragoût_, dear Madame
Potier; otherwise it is, as Monsieur says--excellent!"
"'Sugar.' ... But one doesn't put sugar----" P. C. Breagh was
beginning, when both the women turned on him and rent him,
figuratively.
"Who does not put sugar? Will Monsieur answer me?"
The piercing shriek was Madame Potier's. And the silvery accents of
Madame Charles took up the burden, saying:
"Dear Monsieur Breagh, the delicate brown of coloring that pleases
you--the suavity that corrects the sharpness of the salt--these are
due to sugar--burnt and added at the last moment. But one should use
it with delicacy, or the effect is absolutely lost!"
"Can you really cook?" he asked, in his senseless, masculine fashion,
smiling rather foolishly and staring at her with his honest gray eyes.
And Juliette answered with a trill of delicate, airy laughter:
"Do you find it so incredible? Well, I will not boast now, but
presently--you shall see!"
Next morning, when Madame Potier returned from market, with an
unusually heavy basket, Madame Charles donned a stuff apron of the
good woman's, and vanished with her into the kitchen, whence their
voices could be heard chattering as though a particularly
shrill-voiced pea-hen were singing a duet with a reed warbler or
crested wren. The twelve o'clock _déjeuner_ was memorable, the five
o'clock dinner a marvel, from the _croûte au pot_ to the _sole au
gratin_, and from the sole to the _filet aux champignons_! There
were _beignets_ afterward--crisp, adorable, light as bubbles. P. C.
Breagh ate hugely, and praised, while the excellent Potier chuckled.
Her work, she told herself, sat at the head of the table, in this
slender creature with the wild-rose cheeks and the beaming, sparkling
eyes.
Juliette had found in a trunk full of garments that had been
committed by her to Madame Tessier's keeping a simple dinner dress of
thin filmy black. Jet gleamed in the trimming of the skirt and
polonaise, and upon the elbow sleeves and about the V-shaped neck of
the bodice, the somber gleam of it threw into marvelous relief the
ivory whiteness of the young, fresh skin. Her dainty slimness was
emphasized by the absence of all ornament. Her marvelous black hair,
fine as cobweb, silky without glossiness, crowned her chiseled
temples with its dusky coils. When she lifted a slender arm to
thrust in a hairpin more firmly, the sunset reflection from the sky
caught the fragile hand and reddened the delicate palm of it, and the
tiny nails that shone like rosy, polished shells.
She did not look as though she had been toiling in a kitchen among
casseroles and stew pots. Rather an elfin Queen of Faerie--a Titania
robed in cobweb and moonbeams, whose smile sent a breeze of happiness
flowing through the sad, empty places in one's heart. For the heart
of the young man who loved her grew the emptier the more her
sweetness filled it, and realized its own sorrow the more she showed
herself to be naturally a daughter of joy.
She belonged to Charles Tessier, and all these sparkling looks and
lovely flushes, these sweet, unconscious provocations of gesture and
tone and inflection were for him--and no other man.... This
remembrance was always alive in Breagh to rear a barrier between him
and his Infanta.... And other knowledge, too, was his, held in
common with Madame Potier and many thousands of other people, that he
had not dared to share with Juliette.
But to-night he had realized that the truth could no longer be kept
from her. She was cured. There could hardly be a relapse into the
old conditions, even when she learned the dreadful truth. And even
if risk there were, she must be told that truth by him to-night, or
hear it from the lips of some stranger. It was a miracle that she
had remained so long in ignorance of the fate of France--her beloved
France.
"For seven weeks we have played together like two children on the
brink of an open grave!" he said to himself. "Have I been right or
wrong? Only Time can tell!"
Madame Potier had clattered out of the room, and across the hall, and
down the kitchen stairs to make the coffee. Behind those little
black beady eyes of hers she hoarded the knowledge of well-nigh
unspeakable things. She had been faithful in guarding them from the
knowledge of Juliette. But now she had said to P. C. Breagh: "You
must speak to-night, Monsieur! We have done our best, but we two
cannot keep from the poor little lady that to-day the King of Prussia
will enter Versailles!"
She had given him a look as she had left the dining room that had
said: "Remember!" P. C. Breagh, nerving himself to the ugly task,
felt like one who seethes the kid in its mother's milk.
As he pondered, something cool and fragrant struck him on the
forehead. He picked up the red carnation that had fallen upon the
dessert plate before him. He inhaled its fragrance lingeringly,
holding it so as to hide his mouth. Over it his troubled gray eyes
scanned the face that was all alight with sparkling gayety. Why had
Juliette thrown the flower? Why had she challenged him? She, who
had up to this moment been decorous and reserved almost to stiffness.
Was it true that in every woman lives a coquette?
She was asking herself the same question, pierced by the conviction
that her grandmother would have been horrified. But it had been
impossible not to hurl the perfumed missile at the brooding face with
its smear of dark-red meeting eyebrows, and the short, square nose
and the pleasant lips.
He had on the shabby suit of brown, for his funds did not permit of a
visit to the tailor. His new linen was spotless, and under the
narrow turned-down collar he wore a loose-ended black silk tie. The
bow was pulled out upon one side so much longer than upon the other
that Mademoiselle's feminine fingers itched to adjust it. How
careless he was in matters of dress, this adorable young Englishman!
She was restless this evening. He had aroused her curiosity. Some
hours after she had retired upon the previous night she had risen,
and stolen barefooted to the open window that looked upon the moonlit
garden, and parted the thin curtains that hung before it, and peeped
out....
There was not a breath of air to bring the autumn leaves down. A
white dew sparkled on the turf that Breagh kept closely cut. The
countless clocks of the white town of royal palaces tinkled and
chimed and belled and boomed out the witching hour of two.
Her room was on the east front, facing the garden.... A downward
glance showed her that Breagh was pacing there.
Up and down, backward and forward, leaving black prints of footsteps
upon the lawn that was all be-gemmed with dewdrops. The presence of
so many reservoirs makes Versailles more than a trifle damp.
How rash!... How unwise! Did the young man desire a fever?
Juliette, accustomed of old to subject her Colonel, for his health's
sake, to a daughterly surveillance, had a lecture ready on the tip of
her tongue. She might have spoken, had not the patroling figure come
to a standstill, and looked up wistfully at her shrouded window, and
said something in a low, dogged, dejected tone, and shaken his head
and gone away.
"I've got to tell!--and I don't want to tell!--and I don't know how
to tell, that's the bother of it!... Give it up!... For another
night!"
Without the muttered words, the glance and the headshake would have
conveyed his doubt and his perplexity, to the subject of his sore
reflections, returning in a flutter of strange, sweet wonder, and
expectation, to her recently vacated couch.
You may imagine how she tossed and turned, seeing his miserable gray
eyes looking at her out of the shadows in the corners. Those eyes
could blaze in tigerish fashion when he was angry, for she had
seen.... When she had crept from under my Cousin Boisset's death
bed, they had flamed with a wonderful light of joy and triumph, and
when he had caught her fiercely to his breast....
Oh! to be snatched again into those strong young arms, and held
against the heart that shook one with its beating.... Was it wicked
to feel that one hated Charles Tessier? Was it unnatural, in these
days of mourning, to think of anyone except her lost Colonel?... Was
it not exceedingly unmaidenly to determine that Monica's brother
should say whatever it was he had got to say, and did not want to
say, and did not know how to say, no later than the following
night?...
True--she had purposefully conveyed to him the impression that she
was married, but she would explain that she had meant that she would
be by and by.... Alas! what would her grandmother, that sainted
woman, have said regarding this lapse from the way of truth?