“Who knows? I distrust that man, and do not believe he intends any good to the child. It is better sometimes that your enemy should sit with folded arms than trouble himself about you.”
CHAPTER XII.
LIFE IS NOT A ROMANCE.
One Sunday morning, just after the arrival of the train that had brought Labassandre and a noisy band of friends, Jack, who was in the garden busy with his squirrel-net, heard his mother call him. Her voice came from the window of the poet’s room. Something in its tone, or a certain instinct so marked in some persons, told the child that the crisis had come, and he tremblingly ascended the stairs. On the Henri Deux chair D’Argenton sat, throned as it were, while Labassandre and Dr. Hirsch stood on either side. Jack saw at once that there were the tribunal, the judge, and the witnesses, while his mother sat a little apart at an open window.
“Come here!” said the poet, sternly, and with such an assumption of dignity that one was tempted to believe that the Henry Deux chair itself had spoken. “I have often told you that life is not a romance; you have seen me crushed, worn and weary with my literary labors; your turn has now come to enter the arena. You are a man,”—the child was but twelve,—“you are a man now, and must prove yourself to be one. For a year,—the year that I have been supposed to neglect you,—I have permitted you to run free, and, thanks to my peculiar talents of observation, I have been able to decide on your path in life. I have watched the development of your instincts, tastes, and habits, and, with your mother’s consent, have taken a step of importance.” Jack was frightened, and turned to his mother for sympathy. Charlotte still sat gazing from the window, shading her eyes from the sun. D’Argenton called on Labassandre to produce the letter he had received. The singer pulled out a large, ill-folded peasant’s letter, and read it aloud:—
“FOUNDRY D’INDRET.
“My Dear Brother: I have spoken to the master in regard to the young man, your friend’s son, and he is willing, in spite of his youth, to accept him as an apprentice. He may live under our roof, and in four years I promise you that he shall know his trade. Everybody is well here. My wife and Zénaïde send messages.
“Rondic.”
“You hear, Jack,” interrupted D’Argenton; “in four years you will hold a position second to none in the world,—you will be a good workman.”
The child had seen the working classes in Paris; above all, he had seen a noisy crowd of men in dirty blouses leaving a shop at six o’clock in the Passage des Douze Maisons. The idea of wearing a blouse was the first that struck him. He remembered his mother’s tone of contempt,—“Those are workmen, those men in blouses!”—he remembered the care with which she avoided touching them in the street as she passed. But he was more moved at the thought of leaving the beautiful forest, the summits of whose waving trees he even now caught a glimpse of from the window, the Rivals, and above all his mother, whom he loved so much and had found again after so much difficulty.
Charlotte, at the open window, shivered from head to foot, and her hand dashed away a tear. Was she watching in that western sky the fading away of all her dreams, her illusions, and her hopes?
“Then must I go away?” asked the child, faintly.