They could not marry: he had nothing but famine for his wedding-gift, and all the little that she made was taken for the food and wine of the bedridden old grandam in that religious execution of a filial duty which is so habitual in the French family-life that no one dreams counting it as a virtue.
But they spent their leisure time together: they passed their rare holiday hours in each other’s society in the woods which they both loved or in the public galleries of art; and when the autumn came on apace, and they could no longer sit at their open casements, he still watched the gleam of her pale lamp as a pilgrim the light of a shrine, and she, ere she went to her rest, would push ajar the closed shutter and put her pretty fair head into the darkling night, and waft him a gentle good-night, and then go and kneel down by her bed and pray for him and his future before the cross which had been her dead mother’s.
On that bright summer a hard winter followed. The poor suffered very much; and I in the closed lattice knew scarcely which was the worse—the icy, shivering chills of the snow-burdened air, or the close, noxious suffocation of the stove.
I was very sickly and ill, and cared little for my life during that bitter cold weather, when the panes of the lattice were all blocked from week’s end to week’s end with the solid, silvery foliage of the frost.
René and Lili both suffered greatly: he could only keep warmth in his veins by the stoves of the public libraries, and she lost her work in the box trade after the New Year fairs, and had to eke out as best she might the few francs she had been able to lay back in the old brown pipkin in the closet. She had, moreover, to sell most of the little things in her garret; her own mattress went, though she kept the bed under her grandmother. But there were two things she would not sell, though for both was she offered money; they were her mother’s reliques and myself.
She would not, I am sure, have sold the picture, either. But for that no one offered her a centime.
One day, as the last of the winter solstice was passing away, the old woman died.
Lili wept for her sincere and tender tears, though never in my time, nor in any other, I believe, had the poor old querulous, paralytic sufferer rewarded her with anything except lamentation and peevish discontent.
“Now you will come to me?” murmured her lover, when they had returned from laying the old dead peasant in the quarter of the poor.
Lili drooped her head softly upon his breast.