“I should think so!” said the worthy man enthusiastically. He was so delighted to hear his friend speak to him in the kindly voice of the old days.
“Here’s a letter someone has written me which I don’t wish to read now. I am sure it would interfere with my thinking and living. You must keep it for me, and this with it.”
He took from his pocket a little package carefully tied, and handed it to him through the grating.
“That is all I have left of the past, all I have left of that woman. I have determined not to see her, nor anything that reminds me of her, until my task here is concluded, and concluded satisfactorily,—I need all my intelligence, you understand. You will pay the Chebes’ allowance. If she herself should ask for anything, you will give her what she needs. But you will never mention my name. And you will keep this package safe for me until I ask you for it.”
Sigismond locked the letter and the package in a secret drawer of his desk with other valuable papers. Risler returned at once to his correspondence; but all the time he had before his eyes the slender English letters traced by a little hand which he had so often and so ardently pressed to his heart.
CHAPTER XXIII. CAFE CHANTANT
What a rare, what a conscientious clerk did that new employe of the house of Fromont prove himself!
Every day his lamp was the first to appear at, and the last to disappear from, the windows of the factory. A little room had been arranged for him under the eaves, exactly like the one he had formerly occupied with Frantz, a veritable Trappist’s cell, furnished with an iron cot and a white wooden table, that stood under his brother’s portrait. He led the same busy, regular, quiet life as in those old days.
He worked constantly, and had his meals brought from the same little creamery. But, alas! the disappearance forever of youth and hope deprived those memories of all their charm. Luckily he still had Frantz and Madame “Chorche,” the only two human beings of whom he could think without a feeling of sadness. Madame “Chorche” was always at hand, always trying to minister to his comfort, to console him; and Frantz wrote to him often, without mentioning Sidonie, by the way. Risler supposed that some one had told Frantz of the disaster that had befallen him, and he too avoided all allusion to the subject in his letters. “Oh! when I can send for him to come home!” That was his dream, his sole ambition: to restore the factory and recall his brother.