“Jean,” she said, “do you know, I think I should pick up the table and these things. Servants are always so in the way. It is a bad example for them too, to see broken china. As for you, Louis, certainly you had better not go to Torialli in that dressing-gown; it is an extraordinarily good one. Your taste in such matters is doubtless infallible. Still I should recommend you to change it; with that difference, and a brandy-and-soda to put you in your usual spirits, you should do very well. Do you know, I think I should go at once, Louis.”
Flaubert groaned, dragged himself up by the table, and with a vicious look at Jean crept sullenly out of the room.
Gabrielle sank into a low chair by the window; she leaned back peacefully, her little feet in slippers of peach blossom crossed at her ankles. She was smoking a very delicately scented cigarette, and she looked like a child holding out a flower. When Jean turned towards her she put down her cigarette, her lips began to curve, a little flame of merriment sprang into her blue, untroubled eyes. She threw back her head and laughed aloud; the music of her laughter shook Jean’s heart; it was like the liquid leaping notes of a blackbird in the spring. She laughed till the tears came into her eyes; then she grew grave again.
“And now, Jean,” she said, “we must have this affair out, you and I. Alas! alas! why will men think a great big stick an inducement in getting what they want? Even you, Jean—who are, in so many ways, so civilized—even you must break a Sèvres vase and upset a table! Why did you not come to me instead?”
“Madame!” stammered Jean. Gabrielle raised her eyebrows; he had not called her “Madame” twenty-four hours ago. “I had to do what I have done, it was an affair of business, a matter that I could not have troubled you with. It was very base.”
“Ah,” said Gabrielle softly, “my dear Jean, you speak as if I was a child. I have lived long enough in Paris to have seen ugliness! Shall I tell you the history of this great affair of yours? Indeed I know it already. In the first place, it began with that stupid bill of which you told me, non?” Jean nodded. “Yes—and then I told you to wait,” Gabrielle continued. “I had my reasons for telling you to wait, Jean. When I say reasons I mean more than reasons—those I would have told you. I had suspicions! It was foolish of me, I see that now, not to have confided those also to you. But I shrank from putting the reputation of an old friend altogether at the mercy of a new one. Torialli and I are not sudden persons; for five years we have known and trusted Louis—we have lived next door to him—with a covered passage; it has been the intimacy of a little household at peace with each other. And suddenly I had these suspicions! I won’t weary you with when they began—I am so ignorant of business that I daresay you, or even a cleverer woman than myself, would have begun to suspect long ago. Little by little I felt the dissatisfaction of the pupils—and above all, Jean, I felt—yours—” Madame paused a moment; then she added very softly: “that meant more to me, perhaps, than any other proof.”
Jean said nothing; he sat at some little distance from Madame, and most of the time he kept his eyes on the floor; he would have kept them there all the time if he could.
“Eh bien!” said Madame, “I waited until you told me of that bill—sent to your poor little friend. I knew then it was time to make sure. Men are human, Jean; it occurred to me that the account was absurdly large, and I guessed the reason. I guessed,” said Madame, leaning forward and touching Jean’s arm with her delicate finger-tips, “I guessed that Flaubert intended to make terms out of his account—she is very pretty, the poor little Selba! Ah Jean! one does not live as I live and keep free from these things; the poison of them is in the air!”
Jean started; he had not expected this; with all his heart he wished that Gabrielle had not guessed the truth.
“And this is why you came here with your big stick, mon cher!” she finished softly. “After all, perhaps you were wisest—I would have used another method for dismissing our old friend—but then I am older than you—I have grown tortuous and worldly wise!” Gabrielle paused a moment; she expected Jean to say that she was not older and that she had not grown worldly wise; but Jean sat there obstinately, with his eyes on the broken vase; and said nothing. He was leaving a great deal for her to do this morning; he had missed several of his cues; still Gabrielle could do a great deal, and she had never in her life missed a single cue.