The General’s salute closed the review. The pupils presented arms, a superb effect of a hundred and fifty muskets, not infrequently thrilling parents to the bestowal of five-franc pieces; the six drummers beat the disperse as one overgrown hobbledehoy; the orderly ranks broke up. Discipline gave place to disorder. Boys ran, chasing one another and yelling, boys skylarked, punching and wrestling, boys argued in gesticulatory groups, or whispered in knots of two or three together.... The spectators on the painted benches behind the railing had risen. Now they filed out by a door in the high-spiked wall behind the dusty lime-trees, in whose yellow-green blossoms the brown bees had been humming and droning all through the hot, bright day of June. The bees were also dusty, and the spectators were liberally powdered with dust, for the clumping, wooden-heeled, iron toe-capped School regulation shoes of the young gentlemen had raised clouds which would have done credit to the evolutions of a battery of horse. And the yearning desires of Hector Dunoisse were turning in the direction of a cooling draught of Madame Cornu’s grenadine, or of the thin, vinegary, red ration-wine; when to him says Alain-Joseph-Henri-Jules de Moulny:
“Tell me, Redskin, didst thou twig my respected grand-mamma perched in the front row between a variegated she-cockatoo and a molting old female fowl, who held her head on one side, and cried into a clean starched pocket-hand-kerchief?”
“She did not cry!” warmly contradicted the young gentleman thus assailed. “It is her cold-in-the-head that never gets well until she goes back to England for her holiday once a year; and then she has migraine instead. All the Smithwick family are like that, Miss Smithwick says; it is an inherited delicacy of the constitution.”
“‘Smizzique ... Mees Smeezveek.’ ... There’s a name to go to bed with!...” pursued de Moulny, his thick lips, that were nearly always chapped, curling back and upwards in his good-natured schoolboy’s grin. “And how old is she?—your Sm——. I cannot say it again!... And why does she wear a bonnet that was raked off the top of an ash-barrel, and a shawl that came off a hook at the Morgue?”
Young Hector had been conscious of the antiquated silk bonnet, in hue the faded maroon of pickling-cabbage, sadly bent as to its supporting framework of stiffened gauze and whalebone, by the repeated tumbles of the bonnet-box containing it off the high top-corner of the walnut wardrobe in Miss Smithwick’s fourth-floor sleeping-apartment at home in the Rue de la Chaussée-d’Antin. It had been eating into him like a blister all through the General’s inspection, that venerable wintry headgear, with its limp veil like a sooty cellar-cobweb, depending from its lopsided rim. To say nothing of the shawl, a venerable yellow cashmere atrocity, with long straggling white fringes, missing here and there, where the tooth of Time had nibbled them away. But though these articles of apparel made good Smithwick’s ex-pupil feel sick and hot with shame, they were not to be held up to ridicule. That was perfectly clear....
Hector could not have told you why the thing was so clear; even as he thrust a challenging elbow into the big de Moulny’s fleshy ribs, turning pale under the red Egyptian granite tint of skin that had earned him his nickname from these boys, his comrades—who like other boys all the world over, had recently fallen under Fenimore Cooper’s spell—and said, with a dangerous glitter in his black-diamond eyes:
“I do not know how old she is—it is not possible for a gentleman to ask a lady her age. But she is a lady!” he added, neatly intercepting the contradiction before it could be uttered. “Une femme de bon ton, une femme comme il faut. Also she dresses as a lady should ... appropriately, gracefully, elegantly....” He added grandiloquently, tapping the brass hilt of his little School hanger: “I will teach you with this, M. de Moulny, to admire that bonnet and that shawl!”
“Nom d’un petit bonhomme!” spluttered the astonished de Moulny. But there was no relenting in Hector’s hard young face, though he was secretly sick at the pit of his stomach and cold at heart.
“I will fight you!” he repeated.