It may be judged how readily he accepted, and these evenings were certainly the happiest hours in his life. He used to come early and help Julie to lay the table, and sometimes even to prepare the meal; and if her sleeve chanced to brush against his shoulder as she stooped over the fire or reached up to a shelf he would be reduced to a state of speechless ecstasy, which Madame Querterot found a pleasant change from the usual aggressive torrent of his talk.
In spite of her quiet and demure ways, Julie had a girlish fondness for dress and finery, and the offerings that from time to time Bert laid at her feet, of gloves and trinkets, were a great source of innocent pleasure to her. There was a time when he sallied forth from his lodgings armed with the savings of months, and the intention of buying a ring, which he should present to her accompanied by a speech he prepared for the occasion, in which the secret of his heart was to be imparted, together with the request that the ring should be a token of their engagement. But his courage failed him at the jeweller’s counter; he felt suddenly a conviction, amounting to a certainty, that Julie would refuse; and, rather than risk knowing the worst, he abandoned his project and spent his hoardings on a brooch which he himself did not really admire, and which Julie, when she received it, thought hideous. The only person who was pleased was the jeweller, who had had the thing in his shop two years and simply loathed the sight of it.
It was soon after this that the great plan, of which Madame Querterot had had the elements incubating in her mind for a long while, was hatched, and presented itself to her in a complete and material form. She knew from the first that she could not carry it out alone; and, casting over in her thoughts for the help she required, saw in Bert a tool made ready to her hand. When she broached her idea to him she had her design prepared, down to every detail.
It was on the night when he had treated the two women to the theatre, as has been related in an early page of this narrative. Madame Querterot began by telling the young man that she would never allow her daughter to marry one so poor as himself, and added quickly that she knew of a way by which he could attain both money and the assistance of her influence exerted on his behalf with Julie. Having excited his curiosity and his hopes she bound him to secrecy and disclosed her purpose to him.
“It is yourself who gave me the good idea,” she assured him. “It is your socialistic teaching, is it not, to take from the rich? they have more than is reasonable, those others!”
They were walking up and down before the little house in Pimlico where the Querterots lived in these days of poverty; Julie had left them and gone to bed; the glimmer of a candle came from behind a blind in the room upstairs.
“Of course they have,” Bert grunted. “But it’s no use your thinking you can take their money from them without further legislation. What price the police?”
“Ah, the police,” sighed Madame Querterot, “if only they would not meddle in what is not their affair! But, look you, there are cases which are exceptional. There are cases which ought to receive immediate attention, which cry out for treatment of the most drastic. If the law is slow—and I grant you that the law has great need of alteration—when a matter is exceptionally urgent, I say, the good citizen must take it in his own hands to see justice done. And if while we render a service to humanity we do so with profit to ourselves, it is clear that the ends of justice are doubly served.”
Bert could not help agreeing with these excellent precepts. Indeed, Madame Querterot’s air of supernatural wisdom would have impressed the most sceptical.