“I do not know what he is busy about,” he began prudently, as the master said nothing, “but he is not the kind of man to look for capitals in the lower case!”
“Look here, my friend,” said the printer, taking up half-a-dozen sheets of the diocesan prayer-book and holding them out to Cérizet, “if you can correct these for us by to-morrow, you shall have eighteen francs to-morrow for them. We are not shabby here; we put our competitor’s foreman in the way of making money. As a matter of fact, we might let Mme. Séchard go too far to draw back with her Shepherd’s Calendar, and ruin her; very well, we give you permission to tell her that we are bringing out a Shepherd’s Calendar of our own, and to call her attention too to the fact that she will not be the first in the field.”
Cérizet’s motive for working so slowly on the composition of the almanac should be clear enough by this time.
When Eve heard that the Cointets meant to spoil her poor little speculation, dread seized upon her; at first she tried to see a proof of attachment in Cérizet’s hypocritical warning of competition; but before long she saw signs of an over-keen curiosity in her sole compositor—the curiosity of youth, she tried to think.
“Cérizet,” she said one morning, “you stand about on the threshold, and wait for M. Séchard in the passage, to pry into his private affairs; when he comes out into the yard to melt down the rollers, you are there looking at him, instead of getting on with the almanac. These things are not right, especially when you see that I, his wife, respect his secrets, and take so much trouble on myself to leave him free to give himself up to his work. If you had not wasted time, the almanac would be finished by now, and Kolb would be selling it, and the Cointets could have done us no harm.”
“Eh! madame,” answered Cérizet. “Here am I doing five francs’ worth of composing for two francs a day, and don’t you think that that is enough? Why, if I did not read proofs of an evening for the Cointets, I might feed myself on husks.”
“You are turning ungrateful early,” said Eve, deeply hurt, not so much by Cérizet’s grumbling as by his coarse tone, threatening attitude, and aggressive stare; “you will get on in life.”
“Not with a woman to order me about though, for it is not often that the month has thirty days in it then.”
Feeling wounded in her womanly dignity, Eve gave Cérizet a withering look and went upstairs again. At dinner-time she spoke to David.
“Are you sure, dear, of that little rogue Cérizet?”