The children on the stage were in confusion—Jacques Haret was in despair. Mademoiselle Capello, with her face still wrapped in her mantle, continued her convulsive sobbing. Gaston Cheverny made a lane with his strong arm through the crowd and called to Peter.
“This way, my man. Come and fetch your daughter.”
Peter got through at last, lifted the weeping Francezka down in his arms, and started for the door with her.
I left the hall quickly, in which there was much confusion—the Grand Prieur calling out that the children should have a livre each, except the cobbler’s boy and Francezka, who were to have a gold crown.
Outside in the courtyard under the dark, starlit sky, I found Peter with Mademoiselle Capello and Gaston Cheverny. The young girl had regained her composure, and stood silent, pale as death and like a criminal, before Gaston Cheverny. Like most very young men, he liked to reprove, and to assume authority over others but little younger than himself.
“Mademoiselle,” he was saying, “you have, perhaps, forgotten me and my brother, Monsieur Regnard Cheverny—you were too young to remember us. But we had the honor of knowing you in Brabant when you were little more than an infant—and our houses have always been friendly. For that, as well as other reasons, I must exact a promise of you. Never repeat this performance. You are but a child yet, and this indiscretion may well be forgotten. But Mademoiselle, you will soon be a woman—and a woman’s indiscretions are not forgotten.”
All of which would have been very well from a man of forty, but was slightly ridiculous in this peach-faced youth of twenty.
A gleam of spirit—of Madame Riano’s spirit—flashed into Mademoiselle Capello’s face at this assumption on Gaston Cheverny’s part.
“Monsieur Cheverny,” she said, “I remember you perfectly well—also, your brother, Monsieur Regnard Cheverny. I am older than you think, perhaps. I even remember that I hated one of you—I can not now recall which one—except that he or you annoyed me, when I was a child in Brabant, at my château of Capello”—oh, the grand air with which she brought out “my château of Capello!”—“and—and—if I act—it is none of your business.”