And, thinking that she showed great zeal and interest by her sinister predictions, the good woman, completely bewildered by the arrival of such a visitor, came near setting fire to her mantelpiece.
"No, my good woman," said the marquis, "I am very thickly dressed at all times, and I hardly feel the rain."
"Oh! I should say you are well dressed!" she replied, intending to pay him a compliment which she thought well adapted to flatter him, "for you have money enough to be!"
"I do not refer to that," said the marquis; "I mean to say that you need not put yourself out so much or leave your patients for me. I am very comfortable here, and the life of an old man like me is worth less than that of your young children. Have they been sick long?"
"About a fortnight, monsieur. But the worst has passed, thank God!"
"Why don't you come to see me when you have sickness in the house?"
"Oh! nenny, I should never dare to. I should be afraid of vexing you. We peasants are so stupid! We can't talk very well and we're afraid to ask."
"I ought to come and find out about your troubles," said the marquis with a sigh; "but I see that more active and less selfish hearts do it in my place!"
Gilberte was sitting at the other side of the room. Dumb with fright, and not daring to lend her countenance to the carpenter's ruse, she tried to conceal herself behind the coarse serge curtains of the bed in which the youngest child lay. She would have been glad to say nothing at all, and, as she prepared a potion, she kept her face turned to the wall and pulled her little shawl over her shoulders. A scarf of coarse black lace, tied under her chin, concealed or at all events dimmed the golden sheen of her hair, which the marquis might have recognized if he had ever noticed its brilliancy and luxuriance. But Monsieur de Boisguilbault had met Gilberte only twice, on her father's arm. He had recognized Monsieur Antoine in the distance and had turned his head away. When he had been obliged to pass them at close quarters, he had shut his eyes to avoid seeing the girl's dreaded features. Therefore he had no idea of her figure, her face or her carriage.
Jean had lied with so much self-possession and so aptly that the marquis suspected nothing. The features of Sylvain Charasson, who was lying like a cat in the ashes, sound asleep, could not be so unfamiliar to him, for the page of Châteaubrun, a shameless marauder by nature, must have been caught by him many a time clinging to fruit-laden branches along his hedges; but he asked so few questions and took such painstaking care to avoid seeing or knowing anything of what took place outside his park wall, that he had no idea of the child's name or station in life.