Marc indeed was greatly grieved that he should be thwarted so often by his pupils' parents, when he dreamt of obtaining from them the necessary help to hasten the emancipation of the humble. If on leaving school every day the children had only found in their homes some realisation of their lessons, some practice of the social duties and rights in which they were instructed, how much easier and swifter would have been the march of improvement! Such collaboration was even indispensable; the schoolmaster could not suffice for many things, the most delicate, the most useful, when his pupils' parents did not continue his work in the same spirit and complete it. The master and the parents ought to have gone hand in hand towards the same goal of truth and justice. And how sad it was when, instead of obtaining the parents' help, the master saw them destroying the little good he effected, unconscious for the most part of what they were doing, yielding simply to the incoherence of their ideas and their lives.
But Savin was again speaking. 'Briefly,' said he, 'you will hang up that cross again, Monsieur Froment, if you wish to please us all, and live on good terms with us, which is what we desire, for you are not a bad schoolmaster.'
Marc smiled again. 'Thank you,' he said. 'But why did not Madame Savin accompany you? She, at any rate, would have been playing her proper part, for she follows the observances of the Church—I know it.'
'She is religious, as all respectable women ought to be,' the clerk answered dryly. 'I would rather have her go to Mass than take a lover.'
He looked at Marc suspiciously, consumed as he was by sickly jealousy, regarding every man as a possible rival. Why did the schoolmaster regret that his wife had not accompanied him? Had she not twice called at the school recently under the pretext of explaining to the master why Achille and Philippe had been absent on sundry occasions? For some time past he, Savin, had compelled her to confess regularly once a week to Father Théodose, the Superior of the Capuchins, for it had occurred to him that the shame of avowal might stay her in her course along the road to infidelity. On her side, if in earlier times she had followed the Church observances merely in order to secure peace at home—for she was quite destitute of faith—she now repaired with some alacrity to the tribunal of penitence, for, like the other young devotees who dreamt of Father Théodose, she had rid herself of earlier prejudices, and begun to regard him as a superb and most delightful man.
'As it happens,' said Marc, with some little maliciousness, in response to Savin's declaration, 'I had the pleasure of meeting Madame Savin last Thursday. She was leaving the chapel on the Place des Capucins, and we had a brief chat. As all her words to me were most gracious, I thought I might express my regret at not seeing her with you to-day.'
The husband made a doleful gesture. His everlasting suspicions had reached such a point that he himself now went to Beaumont to deliver the bead work which he allowed his wife to do in secret in order to add a few indispensable coppers to his meagre salary. Their case was one of hidden wretchedness, with all the torments that make hells of the homes of needy employés, burdened with children, the embittered husband becoming an unbearable despot, and the gentle and pretty wife resigning herself in silence until she at last discovers some consolation.
'My wife neither has nor ought to have any opinion but mine,' Savin ended by declaring. 'It is in her name as well as my own, and in the names of many other parents—I repeat it—that I have made this application to you.... It is now for you to decide if you will act upon it. You will think the matter over.'
'I have thought it over, Monsieur Savin,' replied Marc, who had become grave again. 'Before removing that crucifix I understood fully what I was going to do; and since it is no longer there, I shall certainly not put it up again.'