"Well, you see, she did and she did not. She got lessons in families, but no posts, no. No posts. Then, of course, she married poor Carmaux. Oh! these snakes--ah! mon Dieu, that coral-snake, and the tommy-goff--there are dreadful creatures for you! It was a tommy-goff that killed poor Jules Carmaux."
"Was it, though? And what was poor Carmaux?"
"Ah!" said Monsieur Lemaire, shaking his head most mournfully, "he was not a solid man, not steady. Oh! no, not at all steady. Carmaux loved pleasure too much: all kinds of pleasure. He loved cards, and--and--excuse me, Miss Spranger--but he loved this also," while as he spoke the old gentleman shook his head reprovingly at the claret jugs. "Also he loved sport--shooting the curassow, hunting the raccoon and the jaguar--ah! he did not love work. Oh, no! Work and he were never the best of friends. Then the tommy-goff killed him in the woods."
"Perhaps," remarked Beatrix with one of her bright smiles, "as a punishment for his not loving work."
"But," said Mr. Spranger, "he must have been a poor husband for that young lady, Mademoiselle Gardelle, as she was then. If he would not work, how did he support a wife?"
"Ah!" said Monsieur Lemaire with a very emphatic shake of his head now, so that Beatrix wondered he did not get quite warm over the exertion, "Ah! they did say that he thought she might earn the money to support him." And still he wagged his head.
"I wonder," exclaimed Julian, who had been listening to all this with considerable interest, "that she should have married him. He seems to have been a useless sort of man."
"Ah! Ah! There were reasons, very sad reasons. You see, she had been in love with another man. Ah! mon Dieu, these love affairs. Another man, Mr. Ritherdon, was supposed to have been the object of her affections."
"Dear! dear," said Mr. Spranger.
"Yes. Only--" and now Monsieur Lemaire made a sort of apologetic, old-court-life-in-France style of bow to Beatrix, as though beseeching pardon for the errors of his own sex--sinking his voice, too, to a kind of pleading one, as well as one reprobating the late Mr. Ritherdon's conduct--"only he jilted her."