The same evening, Buteau and Lise repaired to Roseblanche, where Monsieur Charles lived, arriving there in the midst of a tragic occurrence.
Monsieur Charles was in his garden, in a state of great agitation. No doubt some violent emotion had come upon him just as he was trimming a climbing rose-tree, for he had his pruning scissors in his hand, and the ladder was still resting against the wall. Controlling himself, however, he showed them into the drawing-room, where Elodie was embroidering with her modest air.
"So you're marrying each other in a week's time. That's quite right, my children," he said. "But we can't be of your party, for Madame Charles is at Chartres, and won't be back for a fortnight."
So saying, he raised his heavy eyelids to glance at the young girl, and then resumed:
"At busy times, during the large fairs, Madame Charles goes over there to lend her daughter a helping hand. Business has its exigencies, you know, and there are days when they are overwhelmed with work at the shop. True, Estelle has taken over the management; but her mother is of great use to her, the more so as our son-in-law Vaucogne certainly doesn't do much. And besides, Madame Charles is glad to see the house again. No wonder! We've left thirty years of our lives there, and that counts for something!"
He was growing sentimental, and his eyes moistened as he vaguely gazed, as it were, into that past of theirs. It was true. In her dainty, snug retirement, full of flowers, birds, and sunshine, his wife was often seized with home-sickness for the little house in the Rue aux Juifs. Whenever she shut her eyes, a vision of old Chartres, sloping down from the Place de la Cathédrale to the banks of the Eure, rose up before her. She saw herself, on her arrival, threading the Rue de la Pie, and the Rue Porte-Cendreuse; then, in the Rue des Ecuyers, she took the shortest cut down the Tertre du Pied-Plat, where just at the bottom—at the corner of the Rue aux Juifs and the Rue de la Planche-aux-Carpes, Number 19 came into sight, with its white frontage and its green shutters, which were always closed. The two streets which it overlooked were wretched ones, and during thirty years she had beheld their miserable hovels and squalid inhabitants, with the gutter in the middle running with filthy water. But, then, how many weeks and months she had spent at home there, in the darkened rooms, without even crossing the threshold! She was still proud of the divans and mirrors of the drawing-room, of the bedding and the mahogany of the sleeping apartments, of all the chaste and comfortable luxury—their creation, their handiwork, to which they owed their fortune. A melancholy faintness came over her at the recollection of certain private corners, the clinging perfume of the toilet-waters, the peculiar scent of the whole house, which she had retained about her own person like a lingering regret. Thus she looked forward to all the periods of heavy work, and set out radiant and joyful, after receiving from her grand-daughter two hearty kisses, which she promised to give mamma that evening in the confectionery shop.
"How disappointing! How disappointing!" said Buteau, really vexed at the idea of Monsieur and Madame Charles not coming to the wedding. "But suppose our cousin wrote to aunt to come back?"
Elodie, who was in her fifteenth year, thin-haired, and so poor-blooded that the fresh air of the country seemed to make her more anæmical still, raised her puffy, chlorotic, virginal face:
"Oh, no!" she murmured, "grandmamma told me the sweetmeats would be sure to keep her more than a fortnight. She is to bring me back a bag of them, if I'm good."
This was a pious fraud. At each journey she was brought some sweetmeats, which, she believed, had been manufactured at her parents' place.