The Belovéd Traitor

by Frank L. Packard

Marie-Louise drew her cloak a little more closely around her, as she leaned on the casement of her open window—and then remained quite still and motionless again.

Irrelevantly it seemed, her thoughts turned on Hector, the concierge. How very blue Hector's eyes were, and how very red his hair, and altogether how very droll a figure he made with his absurd self-importance; and how fat his wife was, whom he so ridiculously called Mi-mi! And then that conversation between the concierge and his wife in Jean's salon early that morning, at which she had been present, began to run through her mind.

"Tiens!" Hector had said to his wife. "But will she not make the thrifty wife for some lucky fellow, our little Louise Bern, here—eh? She is already waiting an hour in the mornings to be let in. An hour, mind you, ma belle Mi-mi—and we who think we rise so early! It is a lesson that! Would you have her standing out in the cold? Why not a key that she may come in and do her work?"

"But Monsieur Jean," madame had objected mildly, "might be angry if he knew."

"Monsieur Jean," Hector had replied fatuously, and folding his arms with an air, "is very well content to leave such matters to me. I do not pester Monsieur Jean with details. On the night after the reception, even in the exceedingly bad humour in which I found him, when I told him that I had thought the matter over, and that the work was too hard, and that you were wasting away—you see, ma Mi-mi, how I lie for you—and that I had decided—'decided' was the word I used—that I must have some one in the mornings to help with the work, did he not say: 'But assuredly, Hector, assuredly; whatever you think is right. I depend upon you, mon ami.' And does that not show that we understand each other, Monsieur Jean and I—eh?"

"It was Father Anton, not you, whose idea it was," madame had corrected with conscientious earnestness. "It was Father Anton, that evening after we had returned from the Bois and before you had seen Monsieur Jean, who suggested it, and spoke of Louise here. And that was not what Monsieur Jean said, for I was listening outside the door. He said you were a red-headed buffoon, and to go to the devil and not bother him."

"And what then?" Hector, though slightly disconcerted, had rejoined with acerbity. "Your tongue is forever clacking! Do I ever recount an event but that you must put in your word? But that is not the point. It is Father Anton who says Louise is an honest girl and to be trusted—and that is enough!"

It was not so irrelevant after all. She was twisting the key in her fingers now. The key to Jean's house in the Rue Vanitaire. How still the night was! It seemed so strange that in so great a city where there were such multitudes of people it could be so still. It was almost as still as that other night when she had sat at her window in Bernay-sur-Mer, that night when the bon Dieu had made her see that for Jean's sake their ways lay so very wide apart. She was glad, very glad that the bon Dieu had helped her then to put nothing in Jean's way, because Jean had done so very much more even than any one had dreamed of.

But it was so strange, so strange! To hear everybody talking about Jean—on the streets—little snatches of conversation—even here amongst the very poor—even Madame Garneau, who that afternoon had stopped in the scrubbing of the floor, and, waving the scrubbing brush excitedly to point the words, must needs tell her, Marie-Louise, all about the great Laparde! How proud they all were of Jean, because Jean had brought such honour upon their beloved France! But it was so strange, so strange—that they did not know—that they did not know that, oh, for so many, many years it had been just Jean and Marie-Louise, and glad, glad days, with the blue sky above, and the strong arms upon the oars—and—and that she loved Jean, that all her life she had loved him, that all her life until she should come to die she would love Jean. It was strange that all these people did not know, because it seemed that she knew nothing else, because it seemed to be the only thing in all the world. But it was good that they did not know, because otherwise she could not even be here as she was, she could not even be Louise Bern for a little while, and be near Jean, and see the work that she loved because it was Jean's work, and because—and because those marvellous figures that he fashioned seemed somehow now to mean everything that there was in life for her, as though her own life were wrapped up In them, given in exchange for them, as though indeed she were a very part of them, and they were of her blood and flesh.

She pressed her hands very tightly together over the key, and then opened them and let the key lay in her palm to look at it in the moonlight. She had seen so little in the studio, so very little! In the three mornings she had been there, there had always been Madame Mi-mi to fuss around her, to instruct her in her work, or, failing that as an excuse—to gossip. And if it were not madame, then it was Hector—and often it was both. And she had so wanted to be alone there—it was not very much to ask, that—just to be alone there for a little time with Jean's things around her, to be very quiet, to be alone.