His eyes lighted up; he laughed and cried, just as though these events had occurred the day before. From his broken sentences the history of this strange affection could be spun together: his poor, half-witted devotion at the little patient’s bedside, when she had been given up by the doctors, his heart and body devoted to the dying darling, whom he nursed in her nudity with all the tenderness of a mother; his affection and his desires had been arrested there, checked forevermore by this drama of suffering, from the shock of which he never recovered; and, from that time, in spite of the ingratitude which followed the recovery, Berthe remained everything to him, a mistress before whom he trembled, a child and a sister whom he had saved from death, an idol which he worshiped with a jealous adoration. So that he pursued the husband with the furious hatred of a displeased lover, never at a loss for ill-natured remarks as he opened his heart to Octave.
“He’s got his eye bunged up again. His headache’s becoming a nuisance!—You heard him dragging his feet about yesterday—Look, there he is squinting into the street. Eh? isn’t he a fool?—Dirty beast, dirty beast!”
And Auguste could scarcely move without angering the madman. Then would come the disquieting proposals.
“If you like, we’ll bleed him like a pig between us.”
Octave would calm him. Then, on his quiet days, Saturnin would go from Octave to the young woman, with an air of delight, repeating what one had said about the other, doing their errands, and acting like a continual bond of tenderness between them. He would have thrown himself on the floor at their feet, to serve them as a carpet.
Berthe had not again alluded to the present. She did not seem to notice Octave’s trembling attentions, but treated him as a friend, without the least confusion. He had never before been so careful in his dress, and he was ever caressing her with his eyes of the color of old gold, and whose velvety softness he deemed irresistible.
One day, however, she experienced a great emotion. On returning from a dog-show, Octave beckoned to her to descend to the basement; and there handed her a bill, amounting to sixty-two francs, for some embroidered stockings which had been brought during her absence. She turned quite pale, and in a cry that came from her heart, at once asked:
“Good heavens! has my husband seen this?”
He hastened to set her mind at rest, telling her what trouble he had had to get hold of the bill under Auguste’s very nose. Then, in an embarrassed way, he was obliged to add in a low voice:
“I paid it.”