He raised his head. He had just completed his twenty-seventh year. He also was tall, and very dark. A handsome fellow, with his round face and regular features, which nevertheless were marred by too heavy a jaw. His thick hair curled, as did his moustache, which was so full, so black, that it seemed to add to the pallidness of his complexion. From his delicate skin, carefully shaved on the cheeks, anyone would have taken him for a gentleman, had it not been for the indelible imprint of the workman that he bore on his engine-driver hands, which were already turning yellow with grease, although remaining small and flexible.
"Good evening, Flore," he simply said.
But his large dark eyes, studded with golden sparks, had become troubled with a reddish cloud, which made them dim. The lids were blinking, the eyes turned away in sudden constraint, and he experienced a feeling of uneasiness that went so far as to cause him suffering. His whole frame instinctively made a movement as if to draw back.
She, standing motionless, her eyes looking straight at him, had perceived this involuntary shudder, that came on him, and which he endeavoured to master, each time that he approached a woman. It seemed to make her quite serious and sad. Then, when he asked her, in view of concealing his embarrassment, if her mother was at home, although knowing she was unwell and unable to leave the house, the girl only answered with a nod, standing aside so that he might come in without touching her; and, erect and proud, she returned without a word to the well.
Jacques crossed the small garden at his rapid stride, and entered the dwelling. There, in the centre of the first room, a sort of large kitchen where the family took their meals and lived, Aunt Phasie, as he had called her from infancy, was alone, seated near the table on a rush-bottomed chair, with her legs wrapped in an old shawl. She was a cousin of his father, a Lantier, who had stood godmother to him; and who, when he was no more than six, had taken care of him, at the time when his father and mother had flown off to Paris, and there disappeared. He had then remained at Plassans, where, later on, he had followed the classes at the École des Arts et Métiers. He bore Aunt Phasie great gratitude, and was in the habit of saying that if he had made his way, it was entirely due to her.
When he became a driver of the first class in the Western Railway Company, after passing a couple of years on the Orleans Railway, he had found his godmother married again to a level crossing gatekeeper named Misard, and exiled with the two daughters of her first marriage to this out-of-the-way place, called La Croix-de-Maufras. At the present time Aunt Phasie, although barely forty-five, and who formerly had been so tall and strong, looked sixty. Moreover, she had grown thin and yellow, and was a prey to constant shivers.
She welcomed Jacques with joy.
"What! is it you, Jacques?" she exclaimed. "Ah! my bonny lad, what a surprise!"
He kissed her cheeks, explaining that he had suddenly come into a couple of days' enforced holiday. La Lison, his engine, on reaching Havre in the morning, had broken its connecting-rod; and as the repairs would take four-and-twenty hours, he would not resume duty until the following evening for the 6.40 express. So he had come over to see her. He would sleep there, and catch the 7.26 train from Barentin in the morning. And he kept her poor, withered hands in his own, telling her how anxious her last letter had made him.