He now went there more frequently than he had been used to do. When he returned he found his wife and the Abbé still in the same place on the terrace, while Madame Faujas, a few yards away from them, preserved the demeanour of a blind and dumb guardian.
When anyone in the town spoke to Mouret of the new Curé he still continued to sound his praises. Faujas, said he, was decidedly a superior sort of man, and he himself had never felt any doubt of his great abilities. Madame Paloque could never succeed in drawing a hostile word from him on the subject of the priest, in spite of the malicious way in which she would ask him after his wife in the midst of his remarks about Abbé Faujas. Old Madame Rougon had no better success in her attempts to unveil the secret troubles which she thought she could detect beneath Mouret's outward show of cheerfulness. She laid all sorts of traps for him as she watched his face with her sharp shrewd smile; but that inveterate chatterer, whose tongue was a regular town-crier's bell, now showed the greatest reserve when any reference was made to his household.
'So your husband has become reasonable at last?' Félicité remarked to her daughter one day. 'He leaves you free.'
Marthe looked at her mother with an air of surprise.
'I have always been free,' she said.
'Ah! my dear child, I see that you don't want to say anything against him. You told me once that he looked very unfavourably upon Abbé Faujas.'
'Nothing of the kind, I assure you! You must have imagined it. My husband is upon the best terms with Abbé Faujas. There is nothing whatever to make them otherwise.'
Marthe was much astonished at the persistence with which everybody seemed to imagine that her husband and the Abbé were not good friends. Frequently at the committee-meetings at the Home of the Virgin the ladies put questions to her which made her quite impatient. She was really very happy and contented, and the house in the Rue Balande had never seemed pleasanter to her than it did now. Abbé Faujas had given her to understand that he would undertake her spiritual direction as soon as he should be of opinion that Abbé Bourrette was no longer sufficient, and she lived in this hope, her mind full of simple joy, like a girl who is promised some pretty religious pictures if she keeps good. Every now and then indeed she felt as though she were becoming a child again; she experienced a freshness of feeling and child-like impulses that filled her with gentle emotion. One day, in the spring-time, as Mouret was pruning his tall box plants, he found her sitting at the bottom of the garden beneath the young shoots of the arbour with her eyes streaming with tears.
'What is the matter, my dear?' he asked anxiously.
'Nothing,' she said, with a smile, 'nothing at all, really; I am very happy, very.'