ANOTHER CUSTOMER.
“Will you sell me a flower?”
Marguerite started, with a thrill of surprise. “Was it Count Mirabeau
come back with the money he had forgotten? Or was it—”
The girl lifted her eyes to the face of her questioner. It was the man
who had twice told her of his love in the ruins of the Bastille—who had
helped her wreathe those pretty garlands in her attic-room, which, since
that day, had been the brightest corner in Paradise to her.
“Will I sell flowers to you?” she faltered, blushing brightly as her own
roses. “Yes! No! Pray help yourself! Dame Doudel would be angry if I
took money.”
“And I should hardly know how to give it—so we will arrange that with
the good dame. Only you must make up my little bouquet with your own
hands.”
Marguerite slid the handle of the basket back on her arm, and went to
work robbing different bouquets of their choicest flowers.
“Dear me! how my hands shake, the basket is so heavy,” she said.
“Let me hold the basket.”
“What, you? Well, there, hold it, I will not be long; but my hands have
got such a trick of trembling.”
With an amused smile St. Just watched those fluttering hands as the girl
plucked the most fragrant flowers from her store, robbing her prettiest
merchandise for his sake.
“The dew is all off them,” she said, regretfully. “If I had only known
this morning; but the jasmines are all gone; and I had some lovely white
roses, pink at the heart, as if a red rose had left its shadow there;
but I put the last into Monsieur Mirabeau’s bouquet.”
“Who? What name was that?”
“Monsieur la Count Mirabeau!”
“And you know _him_?”
“Know him? Oh, yes! It was the count who would have me go before the
king and queen.”
“And you gave him flowers to-day?”
“Gave? Well, I suppose so, for he forgot to pay my poor little sous.”
The young man laughed.
“Yes, yes; there is no doubt of its being Mirabeau. He usually does
forget to pay!”
“But he meant to. Only I would not take the Louis d’or he offered, for
that was worth more than I had in my basket.”
“So he offered you a Louis d’or; the last he had, I dare say. Oh, yes!
it was sure to be Mirabeau; there was no necessity of telling his name.
So he ran away with your flowers, thinking his pretty speeches payment
enough. Oh! you blush. May I ask——But no, that would not be quite fair.”
Marguerite stood before him, downcast and blushing with the unfinished
bouquet in her hands.
“You seem to know citoyen Mirabeau better than I thought of,” said the
young man, so coldly that the girl looked up with a guilty and startled
expression in her eyes.
“But I know him so little,” faltered the poor girl, thinking guiltily of
the conversation she had just held.
Still the young man fixed his eyes on Marguerite’s face, where it was
not difficult to read the restless secret which disturbed her. He saw
those frank blue eyes sink under his scrutiny. In order to hide her
embarrassment, she searched with both hands among the flowers.
“Oh! here is one left. See! it blushes clear through the heart.”
“Yes, I see it blushes,” said the young man, coldly.
Marguerite twisted a bit of grass around the little tuft of blossoms she
had arranged, and held it up timidly.
“Does it please you?” she said, with a glance of lovelight breaking
through all her timidity.
No one on earth could have resisted that look. Before he was aware of
it, this young man had the blossoms in his hand, and was smiling down
upon the sweet face, turned with such childlike appeal to his.
“I think you are good and honest,” he said, speaking his thoughts aloud.
“_You_ should not doubt me,” answered the girl, drawing herself up with
the grace and dignity of a queen.
“I never do—I never will,” he answered, fixing his deep earnest eyes
upon her.
She smiled, and took her basket from his hands.
“Now I must be going. Good-day.”
The young man was hiding her little bouquet in the snowy frill on his
bosom, taking from there a tuft of dead blossoms, which had been
concealed next his heart.
“See, I have not parted with this,” he said, blushing almost as rosily
as the girl had done. “Even now I do not like to throw it away.”
“Oh! do not throw it down—that is, people might trample on it, you
know.”
Marguerite, unconscious of the action, held out her basket, and the
young man laid his tuft of dead flowers among its blossoming contents.
She looked into his face with a sweet, grateful smile, and buried the
treasure he had given her deep down in her basket, for those poor dead
blossoms had spent their breath on _his_ bosom, and were more dear to
her than a whole wilderness of breathing roses.
They parted then. The young man moved away in one direction, sighing
dreamily as the fragrance of those flowers stole up from his bosom, and
the girl wandered off into elysium, feeling as if every step she planted
on the pavement sunk into the mosses of fairy-land, and wondering in her
happiness why all the faces she saw looked so haggard and careworn.
Could they not comprehend that _he_ had cared enough for her flowers to
let them perish on his heart?
Louison saw Mirabeau when he paused to speak with Marguerite, and
watched him with a glitter of hate in her eyes, as he placed the little
bouquet in his bosom. There was something in his air and manner that
enraged her more than an insult would have done. She could understand
the homage which even a bad man unconsciously pays to entire innocence,
and felt with bitterness that it could never, on this earth, be hers. In
every way this young creature had thwarted and disappointed her. When
she struggled, with fierce ambition, for a place on the committee of
women, sent before the king that memorable day at Versailles, this girl
had been selected in her place by Mirabeau himself. This was her first
accusation against him. But he had neither feared her anger or cared to
appease her reproaches; on the contrary, treated both with careless
laughter and annihilating contempt.
While the count tolerated, in any degree, Louison’s ambition or
caprices, she put up with this, and smothered the resentment smouldering
in her bad heart, for she knew well enough that all the power she had,
and more that was adroitly, simulated, sprang entirely from the favor of
this man, whose popularity with the people was unparalleled. But of
late, even this frail hold had begun to slacken. While swerving warily
round from intense radicalism to a limited monarchy, he had made few
confidants, and among them Louison found herself completely ignored. But
what he refrained from telling her, she had in many underhanded ways
discovered for herself, and was weaving all her threads of information
together, in hopes of meshing this lion in her own net.
This girl _was_ in the Bastille, and _not_ of the people. Some one among
the men who fell that day was near to her, I can swear! Did I not see
her wring her hands and cry out when that guard fell, headlong, from the
tower? I wish it were possible to get at the man’s name, then I might
trace her; but old Doudel would lie her through anything, and swear that
she was her own child, if one attempted to find her out. There is no use
in quarreling with these market women, they cling together like bees of
one hive. Why this morning they almost hooted me from the market—me,
whom they would flock around, open-mouthed, when I came to them as a
messenger from Mirabeau. When I denounced that girl, they protected her.
Why? That scene in the street answers one.
Louison went home with bitter jealousy in her heart that swept aside her
wonderful patience. Mirabeau had avoided her pointedly of late. She
would endure this no longer. Women of every grade and class were
preferred to her, from the queen, whom it was rank treason to know, down
to the fallen Du Berry; every one, any one, could claim consideration
from Mirabeau rather than herself. Yes, yes, but she was not quite
ready. Some tangible proof of Mirabeau’s treason to his party must be
obtained before she might dare accuse him, even to his enemies.
For days and nights Louison kept herself in-doors, brooding over these
thoughts, afraid to trust herself at her usual haunts, lest she should
again betray her cause, as she had done in the market-place. At last
this restraint became irksome. Louison was a person who craved
excitement of some kind so keenly that it was necessary to her life.