And mixed in with this light tone, this air of delight in spicy talk with which the South treats all affairs of the heart, there was a race hatred, the antipathy they felt against the woman of the North, the strange woman and her food cooked with butter. They grew excited, they went into a variety of anédotes, the charms of little Alice and her successes in grand opera.
“Why, I knew Mother Bachellery in the old time of the Fair at Beaucaire,” said old Valmajour. “She used to sing ballads at the Café Thibaut.”
Audiberte listened without breathing, never losing a single word and engraving in her mind names and addresses; her little eyes glittered with a diabolical intoxication in which the Carthagène wine had no part.
CHAPTER XVII.
THE BABY CLOTHES.
At the light knock heard on her chamber door Mme. Roumestan trembled as if she had been caught in a crime, and pushing in again the gracefully moulded drawer of her Louis XV bureau over which she had been leaning almost on her knees, she cried:
“Who’s there? What do you want, Polly?”
“A letter for Madame; there is great haste,” answered the Englishwoman.
Rosalie took the letter and closed the door sharply. The writing was unknown and coarse, traced upon wretched paper, and there was the “urgent and personal” which accompanies begging letters. A Parisian chambermaid would never have disturbed her for such a little thing as that. She pitched it on the bureau, postponing the reading of it till later, and returned quickly to her drawer which contained the marvels of the baby’s old layette. For the last eight years, ever since the tragedy, she had not opened it, fearing to find her tears there again; nor even since her new happiness had she done so owing to a very maternal superstition, fearing lest she should come to grief once more by means of a premature caress given by way of its little layette to the child that was yet to come.
This courageous lady had all the nervous feelings of the woman, all her tremblings, all the shivery drawing-together of the mimosa. The world, which judges without understanding anything, found her cold, just as the dull and stupid suppose that flowers are not endowed with life. But now, her happiness having endured for six months, she must make up her mind to bring all these little articles out from their mourning and enclosure, shake out their pleats, go over and perhaps change them; for even in the case of baby clothes fashion changes and the ribbons are adjusted differently at different times. It was for this most intimate work that Rosalie had carefully locked herself in; throughout that big bustling Ministry, rustling with papers and humming with reports and the feverish flitting hither and thither from offices to departments, there was assuredly nothing quite so serious, nothing quite so moving as that woman on her knees before an open drawer, her heart beating and her hands trembling.
She took up the laces somewhat yellow with time which preserved along with the perfume all this white mass of innocent clothes—baby caps and undershirts arranged according to age and size, the gown for baptism, the robe full of little pleats and the doll stockings. She recalled her life down there at Orsay, gently languid and at work for hours together in the shadow of the big catalpa whose white petals dropped into her work-basket among her spools and delicate embroidery scissors, her entire thought concentrated upon some one point of tailoring which gave her the measure of her dreams and the passage of time. What illusions she had then had, what belief and trust! What a delicious murmuring throughout the foliage above her head and what a rising up of tender and novel sensations in herself! In a single day life had suddenly taken all that from her. And so despair flowed back again to her heart as little by little she pulled forth the layette—the treason of her husband, the loss of her child.