Conscious of her domination, she no longer shrank from laying commands upon me. She would ask little services of me,—to buy her a thimble in town, or gold thread and needles to mend her fine robe; and to ask for things used by girls and not by boys made me blush in the shop. If I Had to add some complementary explanations, I didn’t know where to turn to hide myself. She made me help her peel potatoes and delighted in my embarrassment when she saw me casting furtive glances toward the open square.
“Don’t worry, little man; no one is passing,” she would say, robbing me at a blow of all the benefit of my heroism.
Every day, either morning or evening, I would somehow manage to come home from school by way of the Market Place where she was living. What stratagems were mine to avoid suspicion! Sometimes my parents would come to walk home with me, or, the distance not being great, would merely meet me a few steps from the gate. How did I manage not to arouse their misgivings? One or another of my school fellows having discovered my manœuvres tried to make fun of me, but Fernand de Montraut’s intervention spared me the vexation of practical jokes. As the boys urged upon him that I refused to talk about the little horsewoman he pronounced my silence chivalrous; and this opinion, from so competent a judge, filled me with pride.
The same tawny young man who had knocked our heads together, finding me one day in conversation with Nazzarena, jabbered something again in their jargon, pointing his finger at me, and both burst out laughing. As for me, I could have cried.
By degrees this passion, greater than I, and too serious for my fourteen years, made a chasm between me and my family, all unawares to myself. I forgot the elections, and the newspaper article, and Martinod’s slapped face, which had brought about none of the immediate results that mother had dreaded. At the same time I would gladly have made a confidant of grandfather, because of our visits to the pavilion and also because of the lady in white, the memory of whom, until then somewhat vague, was now definitely fixed in my mind. Like a bouquet of fresh flowers I breathed in all the romance of our former walks. Their charm mysteriously affected me—was it not to them that I owed the precocious emotions of my excited sensibilities? But for them I should probably have been thinking only of playing tricks upon my teachers, or at most of enjoying these first days of spring without knowing why.
One Thursday afternoon—our holiday was Thursday—as I had with some difficulty escaped to the circus, to enjoy the performance and gaze upon my horsewoman, who that day did not deign to notice me, not knowing how to go back to the house without attracting attention, I decided to go to the Café of the Navigators, where there was some chance of meeting grandfather. The discussion between him and my father on this subject had already slipped my mind, and my only object was to get home without questionings, with no thought of Martinod and his acolytes. I half opened the door with beating heart; it was the first time that I had entered such a place alone. Grandfather was there; I was saved! So long as I went home under his protection no questions would be asked, and my absence would be justified by the very fact.
I seated myself in a corner to wait until he was ready to go. Near me Martinod was talking with the head of the establishment. I knew him, for he used to mingle familiarly with the patrons, and even in his days of prodigal humour, he would treat them all round.
“You see,” he was saying in a tearful voice, “the bill has been running several years.”
“Send it to the son,” Martinod advised.
“It is not his affair.”