“And you, my darling, my poor Marie-Anne,” he continued, “you did not understand the insults she heaped upon you. You are wondering why she treated you with such disdain. Ah, well! I will tell you: she imagines that the Marquis de Sairmeuse is your lover.”
Marie-Anne turned as pale as her father, and quivered from head to foot. “Can it be possible?” she exclaimed. “Great God! What shame! What humiliation!”
“Why should it astonish you?” said Lacheneur, coldly. “Haven’t you expected this result ever since the day when, to ensure the success of my plans, you consented to receive the attentions of this marquis, whom you loathe as much as I despise?”
“But Maurice! Maurice will despise me! I can bear anything, yes, everything but that.”
Lacheneur made no reply. Marie-Anne’s despair was heart-rending; he felt that he could not bear to witness it, that it would shake his resolution, and accordingly he re-entered the house.
His penetration was not at fault, in surmising that Blanche’s visit would lead to something new, for biding the time when she might fully revenge herself in a way worthy of her hatred, Mademoiselle de Courtornieu availed herself of a favourite weapon among the jealous—calumny, and two or three abominable stories which she concocted, and which she induced Aunt Medea to circulate in the neighbourhood virtually ruined Marie-Anne’s reputation.
These scandalous reports even came to Martial’s ears, but Blanche was greatly mistaken if she had imagined that they would induce him to cease his visits to Lacheneur’s cottage. He went there more frequently than ever and stayed much longer than he had been in the habit of doing before. Dissatisfied with the progress of his courtship, and fearful that he was being duped, he even watched the house. And then one evening, when the young marquis was quite sure that Lacheneur, his son, and Chanlouineau were absent, it so happened that he perceived a man leave the cottage, descend the slope and hasten across the fields. He followed in pursuit, but the fugitive escaped him. He believed, however, that he had recognized Maurice d’Escorval.
XI.
WHEN Maurice narrated to his father the various incidents which had marked his interview with Marie-Anne in the pine grove near La Reche, M. d’Escorval was prudent enough to make no allusion to the hopes of final victory which he, himself, still entertained. “My poor Maurice,” he thought, “is heart-broken, but resigned. It is better for him to remain without hope than to be exposed to the danger of another possible disappointment.”
But passion is not always blind, and Maurice divined what the baron tried to conceal—and clung to this faint hope in his father’s intervention, as tenaciously as a drowning man clings to the proverbial straw. If he refrained from speaking on the subject, it was only because he felt convinced that his parents would not tell him the truth. Still he watched all that went on in the house with that subtlety of penetration which fever so often imparts, and nothing that his father said or did escaped his vigilant eyes and ears. He heard the baron put on his boots, ask for his hat, and select a cane from among those placed in the hall stand; and a moment later he, moreover, heard the garden-gate grate upon its hinges. Plainly enough M. d’Escorval was going out. Weak as he was, Maurice succeeded in dragging himself to the window in time to ascertain the truth of his surmise. “If my father is going out,” he thought, “it can only be to visit M. Lacheneur; and if he is going to La Reche he has evidently not relinquished all hope.”