Captain, you are a coward!
Such was the apostrophe with which the caryatides of the Café Prosper
hereafter greeted the Captain, whose visits became rarer day by day.
For the poor man had not seen all the consequences of his good action.
The suppression of his morning absinthe had been sufficient to cover the
modest expense of Pierette's keeping, but how many other reforms were
needed to provide for the unforeseen expenses of his bachelor
establishment! Full of gratitude, the little girl wished to prove it by
her zeal. Already the aspect of his room was changed. The furniture was
dusted and arranged, the fireplace cleaned, the floor polished, and
spiders no longer spun their webs over the deaths of Poniatowski in the
corner. When the Captain came home the inviting odor of cabbage-soup
saluted him on the staircase, and the sight of the smoking plates on the
coarse but white table-cloth, with a bunch of flowers and polished
table-ware, was quite enough to give him a good appetite. Pierette
profited by the good-humor of her master to confess some of her secret
ambitions. She wanted andirons for the fireplace, where there was now
always a fire burning, and a mould for the little cakes that she knew
how to make so well. And the Captain, smiling at the child's requests,
but charmed with the homelike atmosphere of his room, promised to think
of it, and on the morrow replaced his Londres by cigars for a sou each,
hesitated to offer five points at ecarté, and refused his third glass
of beer or his second glass of chartreuse.
[Illustration]
Certainly the struggle was long; it was cruel. Often, when the hour came
for the glass that was denied him by economy, when thirst seized him by
the throat, the Captain was forced to make an heroic effort to withdraw
his hand already reaching out towards the swan's beak of the café; many
times he wandered about, dreaming of the king turned up and of quint and
quatorze. But he almost always courageously returned home; and as he
loved Pierette more through every sacrifice that he made for her, he
embraced her more fondly every day. For he did embrace her. She was no
longer his servant. When once she stood before him at the table, calling
him "Monsieur," and so respectful in her bearing, he could not stand it,
but seizing her by her two hands, he said to her, eagerly:
"First embrace me, and then sit down and do me the pleasure of speaking
familiarly, confound it!"
And so to-day it is accomplished. Meeting a child has saved that man
from an ignominious age.
He has substituted for his old vices a young passion. He adores the
little lame girl who skips around him in his room, which is comfortable
and well furnished.
He has already taught Pierette to read, and, moreover, recalling his
calligraphy as a sergeant-major, he has set her copies in writing. It is
his greatest joy when the child, bending attentively over her paper, and
sometimes making a blot which she quickly licks up with her tongue, has
succeeded in copying all the letters of an interminable adverb in
_ment_. His uneasiness is in thinking that he is growing old and has
nothing to leave his adopted child.
And so he becomes almost a miser; he theorizes; he wishes to give up his
tobacco, although Pierette herself fills and lights his pipe for him. He
counts on saving from his slender income enough to purchase a little
stock of fancy goods. Then when he is dead she can live an obscure and
tranquil life, hanging up somewhere in the back room of the small shop
an old cross of the Legion of Honor, her souvenir of the Captain.
Every day he goes to walk with her on the rampart. Sometimes they are
passed by folks who are strangers in the village, who look with
compassionate surprise at the old soldier, spared from the wars, and the
poor lame child. And he is moved--oh, so pleasantly, almost to
tears--when one of the passers-by whispers, as they pass:
"Poor father! Yet how pretty his daughter is."
[Illustration]