The Secret of Toni

by Molly Elliot Seawell

“But, on her last visit to Bienville, before she went to America, her grandmother sent with her a carriage and a retinue of horses and servants, which quite dazzled Bienville. I think Mademoiselle Lucie bullies her grandmother shamefully. And whom do you think she pays most attention to of all the people in Bienville?”

Toni reflected a moment. “Monsieur and Madame Verney?”

Paul’s light blue eyes sparkled. “That’s just it. She has my mother with her all the time, and as for my father, he adores her, and Lucie actually pinches his arms and pulls his whiskers when she wants to be impertinent to him. You know she takes advantage of being half American to do the most unconventional things, and my father quite adores her—almost as much so as his son.”

“It looks to me,” remarked Toni, “as if Mademoiselle Lucie were taking things in her own hands, and meant to marry you whether you will or not. I have often heard that heiresses run great risks of being married for their money and then finding their husbands very unkind. Perhaps Mademoiselle Lucie knows this and wants to marry a man like yourself, who loves her for herself.”

“I think Mademoiselle Lucie has too much sense to marry me,” answered poor Paul quite honestly. “I think it is simply her kindness and generosity that make her kind to me and affectionate to my father and mother. She will marry some great man—a count or a duke perhaps—there are still a few left in France—and not throw herself away on a sublieutenant of dragoons,” and Paul sighed deeply.

The pair spent nearly two hours together. It seemed to Toni as if he could never be satiated with looking at his old friend, as pink and white and blond as ever. Paul felt the same toward Toni, and when, in the old way, Toni took Jacques out of his pocket and showed him, it was as if seven years passed away into mist and they were boys together. But at last Paul was obliged to dismiss Toni, who went back to his quarters with a heart lighter than it had been for seven years.

And he was to see more of Paul than he had dared to hope, for Paul had promised to arrange that Toni should be his soldier servant. The present incumbent was not exactly to Paul’s liking and he was only too glad to replace him with Toni.

There was work waiting for him, and that, too, under Sergeant Duval’s eye, and Toni did it with the energy of a man who is determined on pleasing the father of his beloved. No one would have recognized, in this smart, active, natty trooper, the dirty idle Toni of his boyhood. Sergeant Duval, however, was a skeptic by nature, and he waited to see more of Toni before reversing the notion he had formed of that young man. He had heard something, on his annual visits to Bienville, of Toni’s fondness for Denise, and, when she was in short frocks and pinafores, had sometimes joked her about it, but Denise, who blushed at the least little thing, would hide her head on her father’s shoulder and almost weep at the idea that she had even glanced at a boy.

Toni was longing to ask after Denise, but he dared not. As soon as he had a moment’s time to himself—and a recruit lately joined has not much leisure—he wrote a long letter to his mother. He did not write very well, and was a reckless speller, but that letter carried untold happiness and relief with it to the Widow Marcel at Bienville. His duties as Paul’s servant began at once. Toni was not overindustrious, but if he had to work for any one he would wish to work for Paul.

And then came a radiant time with Toni—a time when life seemed to him all fair. He managed to put that secret horror of Nicolas and Pierre out of his mind as they were out of his sight. He got his mother’s forgiveness by return of post, and he laid aside all the fear he had had of Nicolas and Pierre, and enjoyed the sight and the occasional society of the two beings who, with his mother, were nearest to him of the world—Paul Verney and Denise. He dared not mention Denise’s name to Sergeant Duval, who preserved the most unfeeling reticence about her toward Toni. The sergeant had no mind to encourage the attentions of young recruits, just out of the circus, to his pretty daughter with her splendid dot of ten thousand francs.