CHAPTER IV
THE BRIDAL VEIL
The Grandins were perfectly satisfied with Mademoiselle Rose, to Diane’s infinite chagrin. This reconciled them to Diane’s marriage, which, of course, overwhelmed them with its splendor. Grandin let his imagination loose, and told so many lies about the Marquis’ shooting-box, which was magnified first into a large country house, then into a chateau, and finally into a mediæval castle, that he really came to believe the story himself. In vain Madame Grandin corrected him and pointed out amiably that he was lying. But Madame Grandin herself grew capable of believing anything when she saw a real, live marquis sitting in a chair discussing wedding plans with Diane.
Jean Leroux plodded about in the daytime, and at night, like Diane, would say to himself:
“There are but ten more nights; there are but nine more nights.”
Alas, like her, the storm and stress of feeling improved his acting. He conceived a hatred of the innocent and buxom Rose le Roi, and began to dread the idea of making stage love to her. Being an honest fellow, however, he kept this to himself, although in his own mind he called the tall, handsome Rose a great bouncing lummux, and about as impressionable as a Normandy heifer.
François was the only one of them who behaved unconcernedly, or who laughed during those three weeks. He chaffed Diane remorselessly, but always with good nature, and offered to provide her with a pedigree as long as that of the Marquis, and advised her to return to what he declared was the original spelling of her name, D’Orian, and boldly proclaim herself a scion of that noble house. The family, he declared, antedated the Cæsars, and was founded shortly after Romulus and Remus, and asserted that the planet Aurania was named for Diane’s ancestors. At these jokes, all would once have laughed; now, nobody thought them amusing except François himself.
François breakfasted with the Bishop several times in those tumultuous days, and on every occasion, as Mathilde sardonically remarked to the Bishop, something mysteriously disappeared. A handsome muffler of the Bishop’s apparently evaporated, also an excellent umbrella, and several other useful trifles.
“But,” said the Bishop, boldly, to Mathilde, “suppose I gave that scarf to M. le Bourgeois? I never liked it. And as for the umbrella—well, it stood in the anteroom and may have disappeared in any one of a hundred ways, and an umbrella is like innocence—once lost, it is never recovered. Why are you so suspicious, Mathilde? And besides, do you think I can forget that my father was a laborer on the estates of—”