There are very few families in the South of France, whether artisans or burghers, who do not possess a Cousin Puyfourcat, an adventurer who has departed in early youth in search of fortune and has never written since, whom they love to imagine enormously rich. He is like a lottery ticket running for an indefinite time, a chimerical vista opening up fortune and hope in the distance, which at last they end by taking for a fact. Audiberte believed firmly in the fortune of that cousin and she talked about it to the young girl, less for the purpose of dazzling her than in order to diminish the social gap which separated them. When Puyfourcat should die, her brother was to buy Valmajour back again, cause the castle to be rebuilt and his patent of nobility acknowledged, because everybody said that the necessary papers were extant.
At the close of such chats as these, which were sometimes prolonged deep into the twilight, Hortense remained for a long time silent, her forehead pressed against the pane, and saw the high towers of that reconstructed castle as they lifted themselves in the rose-colored winter sunset, the terrace shining with torches and resounding with concerts in honor of the chatelaine.
“Boudiou, how late it is,” cried the peasant girl, seeing that she had brought her to the point where she desired, “and the dinner for my men is not ready yet! I must fly!”
Very often Valmajour came and waited for her downstairs; but she never allowed him to come upstairs. She felt that he was so awkward and coarse, and cold, besides, toward any idea of flattering. She had no use for him yet.
Somebody who was very much in her way, too, but difficult to escape, was Rosalie, with whom her feline ways and her false innocency did not take at all. In her presence Audiberte, her terrible black brows knit across her forehead, did not say a single word; and in that Southern silence there rose up along with the racial hatred that anger of the weak person, underhand and vindictive, which turns against the obstacle most dangerous to its projects. Her real grievance was Rosalie, but she talked about quite other ones to her little sister. For example, Rosalie did not like tabor-playing; then “she did not do her religious duties—and a woman who does not do her religion, you know....” Audiberte did her religion and in the most tremendous way; she never missed a single mass and she went to communion on the proper days. But all that did not hinder in any way her actions; intriguer, liar and hypocrite as she was, violent to the verge of crime, she drew from the Bible texts nothing but excuses for vengeance and hatred. Only she kept her honor in the feminine sense of the word. With her twenty-eight years and her pretty face, in those low quarters where the Valmajours were moving nowadays, she preserved the severe chastity of her thick peasant’s scarf, bound about a heart which had never beat with any emotion beside ambition for her brother.
“Hortense makes me anxious—look at her there.”
Rosalie, to whom her mother whispered this confidentially in a corner of the drawing-room at the Ministry, thought that Mme. Le Quesnoy shared her own anxiety, but the observation made by the mother referred merely to the physical condition of Hortense, who had not been able to cure herself of a bad cold. Rosalie looked at her sister; always the same dazzling complexion, liveliness and gayety; she coughed a little, but what of that? only as all Parisian girls do after the ball season! The summer would certainly put her back again in good shape very quickly.
“And have you spoken to Jarras about her?”
Jarras was a friend of Roumestan, one of the old boys of the Café Malmus. He assured her that it was nothing and suggested a course at the waters of Arvillard.