As I spoke, I stood on one side to let her pass. I cannot make up my mind whether her recent fury or her present good humor repelled me more.
“You’d have a fine fool for a wife,” said she, with a jerk of her thumb toward the room where the daughter was.
“I should be compensated by a very clever mother-in-law,” said I.
The old woman paused for an instant at the top of the stairs, and looked me up and down.
“Aye,” said she, “you men think yourselves mighty clever, but a woman gets the better of you all now and then.”
I was utterly puzzled by her evident exultation. The duke could not have consented to accept her society in place of her daughter’s; but I risked the impropriety and hazarded the suggestion to Mme. Delhasse. Her face curled in cunning wrinkles. She seemed to be about to speak, but then she shut her lips with a snap, and suspicion betrayed itself again in her eyes. She had a secret—a fresh secret—I could have sworn, and in her triumph she had come near to saying something that might have cast light on it.
“By the way,” I said, “your daughter did not expect my coming.” It was perhaps a vain hope, but I thought that I might save Marie from a tirade.
The old woman shrugged her shoulders, and observed carelessly:
“The fool may do what she likes;” and with this she knocked at the door.
I did not wait to see it opened—to confess the truth, I felt not sure of my temper were I forced to see her and Marie together—but went downstairs and into my own room. There I sat down in a chair by the window close to a small table, for I meant to write a letter or two to friends at home, in case the duke’s left hand should prove more skillful than mine when we met that evening. But, finding that I could hardly write with my right hand and couldn’t write at all with the other, I contented myself with scrawling laboriously a short note to Gustave de Berensac, which I put in my pocket, having indorsed on it a direction for its delivery in case I should meet with an accident. Then I lay back in my chair, regretting, I recollect, that, as my luggage was left at Avranches, I had not a clean shirt to fight in; and then, becoming drowsy, I began to stare idly along the road in front of the window, rehearsing the events of the last few days in my mind, but coming back to Marie Delhasse.