WARS WITHIN THE BREAST
The next morning came in frigid and gray. The unseasonable numerals
which the meteorologist recorded in his tables might have provoked a
superstitious lover of better weather to suppose that Monsieur Danny,
the head imp of discord, had been among the aërial currents. The
passionate southern sky, looking down and seeing some six thousand to
seventy-five hundred of her favorite children disconcerted and
shivering, tried in vain, for two hours, to smile upon them with a
little frozen sunshine, and finally burst into tears.
In thus giving way to despondency, it is sad to say, the sky was closely
imitating the simultaneous behavior of Aurora Nancanou. Never was pretty
lady in cheerier mood than that in which she had come home from Honoré's
counting-room. Hard would it be to find the material with which to build
again the castles-in-air that she founded upon two or three little
discoveries there made. Should she tell them to Clotilde? Ah! and for
what? No, Clotilde was a dear daughter--ha! few women were capable of
having such a daughter as Clotilde; but there were things about which
she was entirely too scrupulous. So, when she came in from that errand
profoundly satisfied that she would in future hear no more about the
rent than she might choose to hear, she had been too shrewd to expose
herself to her daughter's catechising. She would save her little
revelations for disclosure when they might be used to advantage. As she
threw her bonnet upon the bed, she exclaimed, in a tone of gentle and
wearied reproach:
"Why did you not remind me that M. Honoré Grandissime, that precious
somebody-great, has the honor to rejoice in a quadroon half-brother of
the same illustrious name? Why did you not remind me, eh?"
"Ah! and you know it as well as A, B, C," playfully retorted Clotilde.
"Well, guess which one is our landlord?"
"Which one?"
"_Ma foi_! how do _I_ know? I had to wait a shameful long time to see
_Monsieur le prince_,--just because I am a De Grapion, I know. When at
last I saw him, he says, 'Madame, this is the other Honoré Grandissime.'
There, you see we are the victims of a conspiracy; if I go to the other,
he will send me back to the first. But, Clotilde, my darling," cried the
beautiful speaker, beamingly, "dismiss all fear and care; we shall have
no more trouble about it."
"And how, indeed, do you know that?"
"Something tells it to me in my ear. I feel it! Trust in Providence, my
child. Look at me, how happy I am; but you--you never trust in
Providence. That is why we have so much trouble,--because you don't
trust in Providence. Oh! I am so hungry, let us have dinner."
"What sort of a person is M. Grandissime in his appearance?" asked
Clotilde, over their feeble excuse for a dinner.
"What sort? Do you imagine I had nothing better to do than notice
whether a Grandissime is good-looking or not? For all I know to the
contrary, he is--some more rice, please, my dear."
But this light-heartedness did not last long. It was based on an
unutterable secret, all her own, about which she still had trembling
doubts; this, too, notwithstanding her consultation of the dark oracles.
She was going to stop that. In the long run, these charms and spells
themselves bring bad luck. Moreover, the practice, indulged in to
excess, was wicked, and she had promised Clotilde,--that droll little
saint,--to resort to them no more. Hereafter, she should do nothing of
the sort, except, to be sure, to take such ordinary precautions against
misfortune as casting upon the floor a little of whatever she might be
eating or drinking to propitiate M. Assonquer. She would have liked,
could she have done it without fear of detection, to pour upon the front
door-sill an oblation of beer sweetened with black molasses to Papa
Lébat (who keeps the invisible keys of all the doors that admit
suitors), but she dared not; and then, the hound would surely have
licked it up. Ah me! was she forgetting that she was a widow?
She was in poor plight to meet the all but icy gray morning; and, to
make her misery still greater, she found, on dressing, that an accident
had overtaken her, which she knew to be a trustworthy sign of love grown
cold. She had lost--alas! how can we communicate it in English!--a small
piece of lute-string ribbon, about _so long_, which she used for--not a
necktie exactly, but--
And she hunted and hunted, and couldn't bear to give up the search, and
sat down to breakfast and ate nothing, and rose up and searched again
(not that she cared for the omen), and struck the hound with the broom,
and broke the broom, and hunted again, and looked out the front window,
and saw the rain beginning to fall, and dropped into a chair--crying,
"Oh! Clotilde, my child, my child! the rent collector will be here
Saturday and turn us into the street!" and so fell a-weeping.
A little tear-letting lightened her unrevealable burden, and she rose,
rejoicing that Clotilde had happened to be out of eye-and-ear-shot. The
scanty fire in the fireplace was ample to warm the room; the fire within
her made it too insufferably hot! Rain or no rain, she parted the
window-curtains and lifted the sash. What a mark for Love's arrow she
was, as, at the window, she stretched her two arms upward! And, "right
so," who should chance to come cantering by, the big drops of rain
pattering after him, but the knightliest man in that old town, and the
fittest to perfect the fine old-fashioned poetry of the scene!
"Clotilde," said Aurora, turning from her mirror, whither she had
hastened to see if her face showed signs of tears (Clotilde was entering
the room), "we shall never be turned out of this house by Honoré
Grandissime!"
"Why?" asked Clotilde, stopping short in the floor, forgetting Aurora's
trust in Providence, and expecting to hear that M. Grandissime had been
found dead in his bed.
"Because I saw him just now; he rode by on horseback. A man with that
noble face could never _do such a thing_!"
The astonished Clotilde looked at her mother searchingly. This sort of
speech about a Grandissime? But Aurora was the picture of innocence.
Clotilde uttered a derisive laugh.
"_Impertinente_!" exclaimed the other, laboring not to join in it.
"Ah-h-h!" cried Clotilde, in the same mood, "and what face had he when
he wrote that letter?"
"What face?"
"Yes, what face?"
"I do not know what face you mean," said Aurora.
"What face," repeated Clotilde, "had Monsieur Honoré de Grandissime on
the day that he wrote--"
"Ah, f-fah!" cried Aurora, and turned away, "you don't know what you are
talking about! You make me wish sometimes that I were dead!"
Clotilde had gone and shut down the sash, as it began to rain hard and
blow. As she was turning away, her eye was attracted by an object at
a distance.
"What is it?" asked Aurora, from a seat before the fire.
"Nothing," said Clotilde, weary of the sensational,--"a man in the
rain."
It was the apothecary of the rue Royale, turning from that street toward
the rue Bourbon, and bowing his head against the swirling norther.