XI
THE MAN WITH THE LANTERN
Then between Nicole and Barabant began one of those subtle conflicts of the sexes in which the one who loves the more unselfishly is foredoomed to defeat. Until the night of the execution Nicole had combated the very thought of love. Her flight at the staircase was the last spark of resistance. She had drunk of the cup, the poison was in her veins. The next morning she resigned herself to the bitter, determined, cost what it might, to have her hour of happiness.
She gave up the struggle against herself, but began another to safeguard her happiness. Her intuitions told her to resist—that the longer he was compelled to woo, the more he would prize her. In her uneasy doubts she had recourse to coquetry, but that coquetry which is unselfish and pathetic, and is nothing but the instinct of self-preservation.
To Barabant, who neither knew the depth of her longings, nor could have understood them had he known, the hesitation and delays of Nicole were incomprehensible. Resolved to meet her with like tactics, he assumed toward her the attitude of a comrade, avoiding all expression of sentiment.
Nicole readily fathomed the artifice. She countered by an equal show of indifference, leaving him always after a moment's conversation. Barabant retaliated by devoting himself anew to Louison.
The manœuver brought Nicole back. It was the one move she had not foreseen. It threw her into a panic of jealousy. Not that she did not understand his motive, but she feared, from his being thrown with Louison, results of which he had no thought. She admitted her mistake and relinquished the struggle. She returned uneasily to him, showing him from time to time, by a word or gesture, that he had only to ask. Barabant, blind to the extent of the change, though instinctively perceiving its import, redoubled his attentions to Louison; treating Nicole always as a comrade, hailing her joyfully, gay and charming in her company, but saying never a word of what she now impatiently sought.
Meanwhile events had been hurrying on the inevitable conflict between the Commune and the Convention. On the 25th of August the news of the treacherous surrender of Longwy to the Prussian army ran through the arteries of Paris as an inflaming poison. The Nation rose from the fall in the fury of its anger and wounded pride. From the windows of the Hôtel de Ville an immense banner rolled its folds over the city, bearing the inspiring inscription:
"The Fatherland is in danger!"