“He wants Weiss’s address! that’s odd. Bring the soldier in here.”
Jean entered the room in such an exhausted state that he reeled as if he had been drunk. He started at seeing his captain seated at the table with two ladies, and involuntarily withdrew the hand that he had extended toward a chair in order to steady himself; he replied briefly to the questions of the manufacturer, who played his part of the soldier’s friend with great cordiality. In a few words he explained his relation toward Maurice and the reason why he was looking for him.
“He is a corporal in my company,” the captain finally said by way of cutting short the conversation, and inaugurated a series of questions on his own account to learn what had become of the regiment. As Jean went on to tell that the colonel had been seen crossing the city to reach his camp at the head of what few men were left him, Gilberte again thoughtlessly spoke up, with the vivacity of a woman whose beauty is supposed to atone for her indiscretion:
“Oh! he is my uncle; why does he not come and breakfast with us? We could fix up a room for him here. Can’t we send someone for him?”
But the old lady discouraged the project with an authority there was no disputing. The good old bourgeois blood of the frontier towns flowed in her veins; her austerely patriotic sentiments were almost those of a man. She broke the stern silence that she had preserved during the meal by saying:
“Never mind Monsieur de Vineuil; he is doing his duty.”
Her short speech was productive of embarrassment among the party. Delaherche conducted the captain to his study, where he saw him safely bestowed upon the sofa; Gilberte moved lightly off about her business, no more disconcerted by her rebuff than is the bird that shakes its wings in gay defiance of the shower; while the handmaid to whom Jean had been intrusted led him by a very labyrinth of passages and staircases through the various departments of the factory.
The Weiss family lived in the Rue des Voyards, but their house, which was Delaherche’s property, communicated with the great structure in the Rue Maqua. The Rue des Voyards was at that time one of the most squalid streets in Sedan, being nothing more than a damp, narrow lane, its normal darkness intensified by the proximity of the ramparts, which ran parallel to it. The roofs of the tall houses almost met, the dark passages were like the mouths of caverns, and more particularly so at that end where rose the high college walls. Weiss, however, with free quarters and free fuel on his third floor, found the location a convenient one on account of its nearness to his office, to which he could descend in slippers without having to go around by the street. His life had been a happy one since his marriage with Henriette, so long the object of his hopes and wishes since first he came to know her at Chêne, filling her dead mother’s place when only six years old and keeping the house for her father, the tax-collector; while he, entering the big refinery almost on the footing of a laborer, was picking up an education as best he could, and fitting himself for the accountant’s position which was the reward of his unremitting toil. And even when he had attained to that measure of success his dream was not to be realized; not until the father had been removed by death, not until the brother at Paris had been guilty of those excesses: that brother Maurice to whom his twin sister had in some sort made herself a servant, to whom she had sacrificed her little all to make him a gentleman—not until then was Henriette to be his wife. She had never been aught more than a little drudge at home; she could barely read and write; she had sold house, furniture, all she had, to pay the young man’s debts, when good, kind Weiss came to her with the offer of his savings, together with his heart and his two strong arms; and she had accepted him with grateful tears, bringing him in return for his devotion a steadfast, virtuous affection, replete with tender esteem, if not the stormier ardors of a passionate love. Fortune had smiled on them; Delaherche had spoken of giving Weiss an interest in the business, and when children should come to bless their union their felicity would be complete.
“Look out!” the servant said to Jean; “the stairs are steep.”
He was stumbling upward as well as the intense darkness of the place would let him, when suddenly a door above was thrown open, a broad belt of light streamed out across the landing, and he heard a soft voice saying: