“No, no; never! I’d far rather die!”
All of a sudden, in the looking-glass in front of her, she caught sight of a ghost with hollow cheeks and narrow shoulders drawn together in front with the gesture of a person shuddering with cold. The spectre looked a little like her, but much more like that poor Princess of Anhalt who had so roused her curiosity and pity at Arvillard that she had described her sad symptoms in a letter. The princess had just died at the opening of winter.
“Why, look—look!” She bent forward, came nearer to the glass and recalled the inexplicable kindness that everybody down there had shown her, the fright her mother evinced, the tenderness of old Bouchereau at her departure—and understood! Now at last she knew what it was, she knew the end of the game! It was here without any one to aid it. Surely it was long enough she had been looking for its coming.
CHAPTER XVI.
“AT THE PRODUCTS OF THE SOUTH.”
“Mlle. Hortense is very ill. Madame will receive nobody.”
For the tenth time during the ten days that had passed Audiberte had received the same answer, motionless before that heavy-timbered door with its knocker, the like of which can scarcely be found except beneath the arcades of the Place Royale, a door which once shut seemed to her to refuse forever an entrance to the old house of the Le Quesnoys.
“Very well,” said she, “I am not coming back; it must be they now who shall call me back.”
In great agitation she set out again through the lively turmoil of that commercial quarter, where drays laden with cases and barrels and iron bars, noisy and flexible, were forever passing the pushcarts that rolled under the porches and back into the courtyards where the coopers were nailing up the cases for export. But the peasant girl was not aware of this infernal row and of the rumbling of labor which shook the high houses to their very topmost floors; in her venomous head a very different kind of row was going on, a clashing of brutal thoughts and a terrible clangor of foiled wishes. So she set forth, feeling no fatigue, and in order to economize the ’bus fare crossed on foot the entire distance from the Marais to Abbaye-Montmartre Street.
After a fierce and lively peregrination from one lodging to the other, hotels and furnished apartments of all kinds, from which they were expelled each time on account of the tabor-playing, they had just recently made shipwreck in that quarter. It was a new house which had allured, at the cheap prices for housewarmers, a temporary horde of girls, Bohemians and business agents, and those families of adventurers such as one sees at the seaports, a floating population which shows its lack of work on the balconies, watching arrivals and departures in hopes that there may be something to be gained for them in the flood. Fortune is here the flood on which they cast their watchful eyes.
The rent was very high for them to pay, especially now that the skating-rink had failed and it was necessary to sue upon government stamped paper for the price of Valmajour’s few appearances. But the tabor did not bother anybody in that freshly-painted barrack whose door was open at every hour of the night for the different crooked businesses of the tenants—not to speak of all the quarrels and rows that were going on. On the contrary, it was the tabor-player who was bothered. The advertising on placards, the many-colored tights and his fine moustaches had aroused perilous interest among the ladies of the skating-rink less coy than that prude of a girl down there in the Marais. He was acquainted with actors at the Batignolles, all that sweet-scented crowd which met in a pot-house on the Boulevard Rochechouart called the Straw-Lair. This same Straw-Lair, where people passed their time in loafing fatly, playing cards, drinking lager beer and passing from one to the other the scandal of the little theatres and the lowest class of gallantry, was the enemy and the horror of Audiberte. It was the cause of savage rages, under the stormy blows of which the two Southerners bent their backs as under a tempest in the tropics, merely revenging themselves by cursing their tyrant in a green skirt and talking about her in that mysterious and hateful tone which schoolboys and servants use: “What did she say? how much did she give you?” and playing into each other’s hands in order to slip away behind her back. Audiberte knew this well and watched them; she did her business outside quickly, impatient to get home; and particularly was it so that day, because she had left them early in the morning. As she ascended the stairs she stopped a moment, hearing neither tabor nor shepherd’s pipe.