he returned on foot to Montigny in the evening, however, he had terrible fits of despair as he thought of Mme de Burne. His heart became a little lighter with the morning sun, but with the night his bitter regrets and fierce jealousy closed in on him again. He had no intelligence; he had written to no one and had received letters from no one.
Then, alone with his thoughts upon the dark road, his imagination would picture the progress of the approaching liaison that he had foreseen between his quondam mistress and the Comte de Bernhaus. This had now become a settled idea with him and fixed itself more firmly in his mind every day. That man, he thought, will be to her just what she requires; a distinguished, assiduous, unexacting lover, contented and happy to be the chosen one of this superlatively delicious coquette. He compared him with himself. The other most certainly would not behave as he had, would not be guilty of that tiresome impatience and of that insatiable thirst for a return of his affection that had been the destruction of their amorous understanding. He was a very discreet, pliant, and well-posted man of the world, and would manage to get along and content himself with but little, for he did not seem to belong to the class of impassioned mortals.
On one of André Mariolle’s visits to Marlotte one day, he beheld two bearded young fellows in the other arbor of the Hotel Corot, smoking pipes and wearing Scotch caps on their heads. The proprietor, a big, broad-faced man, came forward to pay his respects as soon as he saw him, for he had an interested liking for this faithful patron of his dinner-table, and said to him: “I have two new customers since yesterday, two painters.”
“Those gentlemen sitting there?”
“Yes. They are beginning to be heard of. One of them got a second-class medal last year.” And having told all that he knew about the embryo artists, he asked: “What will you take to-day, Monsieur Mariolle?”
“You may send me out a vermouth, as usual.” The proprietor went away, and soon Elisabeth appeared, bringing the salver, the glass, the carafe, and the bottle. Whereupon one of the painters called to her: “Well! little one, are we angry still?”
She did not answer and when she approached Mariolle he saw that her eyes were red.
“You have been crying,” he said.
“Yes, a little,” she simply replied.
“What was the matter?”
“Those two gentlemen there behaved rudely to me.”
“What did they do to you?”
“They took me for a bad character.”
“Did you complain to the proprietor?”
She gave a sorrowful shrug of the shoulders, “Oh! Monsieur — the proprietor. I know what he is now —— the proprietor!”
Mariolle was touched, and a little angry; he said to her: “Tell me what it was all about.”
She told him of the brutal conduct of the two painters immediately upon their arrival the night before, and then began to cry again, asking what she was to do, alone in the country and without friends or relatives, money or protection.
Mariolle suddenly said to her: “Will you enter my service? You shall be well treated in my house, and when I return to Paris you will be free to do what you please.”
She looked him in the face with questioning eyes, and then quickly replied: “I will, Monsieur.
“How much are you earning here?”
“Sixty francs a month,” she added, rather uneasily, “and I have my share of the pourboires besides; that makes it about seventy.”
“I will pay you a hundred.”
She repeated in astonishment: “A hundred francs a month?”
“Yes. Is that enough?”
“I should think that it was enough!”
“All that you will have to do will be to wait on me, take care of my clothes and linen, and attend to my room.”
“It is a bargain, Monsieur.”
“When will you come?”
“Tomorrow, if you wish. After what has happened here I will go to the mayor and will leave whether they are willing or not.”
Mariolle took two louis from his pocket and handed them to her. “There’s the money to bind our bargain.”
A look of joy flashed across her face and she said in a tone of decision: “I will be at your house before midday tomorrow, Monsieur.”
French
XII
ELISABETH came to Montigny next day, attended by a countryman with her trunk on a wheelbarrow. Mariolle had made a generous settlement with one of his old women and got rid of her, and the newcomer took possession of a small room on the top floor adjoining that of the cook. She was quite different from what she had been at Marlotte, when she presented herself before her new master, less effusive, more respectful, more self-contained; she was now the servant of the gentleman to whom she had been almost an humble friend beneath the arbor of the inn. He told her in a few words what she would have to do. She listened attentively, went and took possession of her room, and then entered upon her new service.
A week passed and brought no noticeable change in the state of Mariolle’s feelings. The only difference was that he remained at home more than he had been accustomed to do, for he had nothing to attract him to Mariotte, and his house seemed less dismal to him than at first. The bitterness of his grief was subsiding a little, as all storms subside after a while; but in place of this aching wound there was arising in him a settled melancholy, one of those deep-seated sorrows that are like chronic and lingering maladies, and sometimes end in death. His former liveliness of mind and body, his mental activity, his interests in the pursuits that had served to occupy and amuse him hitherto were all dead, and their place had been taken by a universal disgust and an invincible torpor, that left him without even strength of will to get up and go out of doors. He no longer left his house, passing from the salon to the hammock and from the hammock to the salon, and his chief distraction consisted in watching the current of the Loing as it flowed by the terrace and the fisherman casting his net.
When the reserve of the first few days had begun to wear off, Elisabeth gradually grew a little bolder, and remarking with her keen feminine instinct the constant dejection of her employer, she would say to him when the other servant was not by: “Monsieur finds his time hang heavy on his hands?”
He would answer resignedly: “Yes, pretty heavy.”
“Monsieur should go for a walk.”
“That would not do me any good.”
She quietly did many little unassuming things for his pleasure and comfort. Every morning when he came into his drawingroom, he found it filled with flowers and smelling as sweetly as a conservatory. Elisabeth must surely have enlisted all the boys in the
