It was November. For three or four days Germinie had not fallen in with
Jupillon. She went to hover about his lodgings, watching for him. When
she reached the street on which he lived, she saw a broad beam of light
struggling out through the closed shutters. She approached and heard
bursts of laughter, the clinking of glasses, women's voices, then a song
and one voice, that of the woman whom she hated with all the hatred
of her heart, whom she would have liked to see lying dead before
her, and whose death she had so often sought to discover in the
coffee-grounds,--the cousin!
She glued her ear to the shutter, breathing in what they said, absorbed
in the torture of listening to them, pasturing her famished heart upon
suffering. It was a cold, rainy winter's night. She did not feel the
cold or rain. All her senses were engaged in listening. The voice she
detested seemed at times to grow faint and die away beneath kisses, and
the notes it sang died in her throat as if stifled by lips placed upon
the song. The hours passed. Germinie was still at her post. She did not
think of going away. She waited, with no knowledge of what she was
waiting for. It seemed to her that she must remain there always, until
the end. The rain fell faster. The water from a broken gutter overhead
beat down upon her shoulders. Great drops glided down her neck. An icy
shiver ran up and down her back. The water dripped from her dress to the
ground. She did not notice it. She was conscious of no pain in any of
her limbs except the pain that flowed from her heart.
Well on toward morning there was a movement in the house, and footsteps
approached the door. Germinie ran and hid in a recess in the wall some
steps away, and from there saw a woman come out, escorted by a young
man. As she watched them walk away, she felt something soft and warm on
her hands that frightened her at first; it was a dog licking her, a
great dog that she had held in her lap many an evening, when he was a
puppy, in the _cremiere's_ back shop.
"Come here, Molosse!" Jupillon shouted impatiently twice or thrice in
the darkness.
The dog barked, ran back, returned and gamboled about her, and at last
entered the house. The door closed. The voices and singing lured
Germinie back to her former position against the shutter, and there she
remained, drenched by the rain, allowing herself to be drenched, as she
listened and listened, till morning, till daybreak, till the hour when
the masons on their way to work, with their dinner loaf under their
arms, began to laugh at her as they passed.