CHAPTER XVI
After Toni had gone, Paul smoked and looked for a long time at the pretty little note. He got one almost every day. Lucie wished him to come to dinner, or to ride with her, or to send her a book, or to do something which was an excuse to get Paul to the Château Bernard.
And it was impossible that Madame Bernard should not know of all this; but Paul remembered, with a groan, that Lucie had always been able to wrap that imposing-looking person around her little finger. And would it be right—would it be a manly thing—for a poor sublieutenant of dragoons to take advantage of this childish fancy? Paul, resting his blond head in both his hands, remembered that sometimes these youthful attachments, which begin, as it were, with one’s first look at life, last throughout the whole play until the curtain goes down at the end. This puzzled him still more, and he suddenly thrust Lucie’s letter, and her sweet image, and Toni, and Bienville and the whole business out of his head, and, taking up a book on Strategy, studied until midnight.
The note from Lucie was to ask him to ride with her the next afternoon as she had a new horse and Madame Bernard was not quite willing to trust her alone with a groom. No French girl would have sent such an invitation, but Lucie had acquired, during her two years in America, all the directness, the habit of command, the insight into a man’s mind of an American girl. Among the number of things which amazed but charmed Paul was the astonishing invention Lucie displayed in bringing Paul to her side. Of course, there was nothing for him to do but to accept this invitation to protect Lucie’s life, so the next afternoon they were cantering gaily through the park toward the highroad, with a groom in attendance. As they passed the place where Count Delorme’s body had been found, Lucie turned her head away with something like a shudder.
“I always hated him,” she said, “until he was killed, but you can’t hate a dead man.”
“I can hate a scoundrel dead or alive,” replied Paul stoutly. “He ruined your sister’s young life, he deserved to die a bad death.”
“I don’t think Sophie’s life is quite ruined,” said Lucie.
They had brought their horses down to a walk and the groom, who had neither eyes nor ears, had fallen a little way behind.