Toni had an object in this. There was a great clump of gooseberry bushes under this window, and Toni loved to gorge himself on Colonel Duquesne’s gooseberries. True, he could have had all the gooseberries he wished from his mother, but they did not have the delicious flavor of those surreptitiously confiscated from Colonel Duquesne’s garden. Toni was afraid of the commandant, as he was afraid of the monument in the public square and of old Marie, and of everybody, in fact, except his mother, and Paul Verney, and little Denise, and Jacques. But he knew the garden much better than the commandant did, and his short legs were quick enough to save him in case any one should come out of the house.
Toni saw, through the window, the two officers, who had separated the other officer and Captain Ravenel, sitting in grave conversation with the colonel.
“It is most unfortunate!” said the colonel, a grave-looking, gray-mustached man. “What could have induced Ravenel to come to Bienville to live? It would seem to be the last place on earth that he and Madame Ravenel would select.”
Then one of the other officers said to the colonel:
“I understand that they came here principally on account of Madame Ravenel’s health, and besides, Ravenel owns the house in which they live. It isn’t much of a house, but I hear that Delorme spent every franc of Madame Ravenel’s money, and they have nothing but this house and Ravenel’s half-pay to live on, which probably accounts for their being in Bienville. But I must say that they have kept themselves as much out of sight as possible.”
“I knew Delorme,” said the colonel, “and a more unprincipled scoundrel never lived. It is a great pity that Ravenel didn’t knock the fellow’s brains out on the day when Madame Delorme left Delorme. Nobody would have been sorry for it. I have known both Ravenel and Madame Ravenel for years, and they are the last people living that I should expect to commit the folly they did, going off together and remaining two or three weeks before they separated. It was a species of madness, but they have paid dearly for it. I understand that Madame Ravenel is tormented by religious scruples about her divorce.”
The colonel got up from his chair and walked up and down two or three times. The vision of Sophie Ravenel in her triumphant beauty ten years before, and the pale conscience-stricken Sophie of to-day, overwhelmed him. He remembered Ravenel, spirited, gay, and caring for no other than a soldier’s life, and now cut off from all comrades, his life-work ended. Surely these two had paid the full price for their three weeks’ desperate folly, of love, shame, rapture and despair. Then awakening suddenly to the madness of what they had done, they had separated, not to see each other again until Delorme had obtained a divorce; and Sophie, after having been branded as a wife who had dishonored her husband, was married to Ravenel, who, for her sake, had sacrificed all his worldly prospects. The colonel was a strict moralist, but in his heart he reckoned that there were many worse people in the world than Sophie and Ravenel. The two officers sat silent while the colonel took a couple of turns about the room, and then he sat down and spoke again:
“But the question is—what are we to do about Creci?”
“Creci swears,” said the older of the two officers, “that Madame Ravenel smiled at him as he passed and gave him an invitation to come and sit by her.”
“I am afraid,” said the colonel, in a very cold voice, as he shook the ash from his cigar, “that Creci is mistaken.”