"Nicolas ... Monseigneur ... insult ... never pardon!... 'Only a woman of fashion would be capable of such infamy....' Ah, mon Dieu!..."
She cried out, and her eyes opened, staring about wildly. She asked suspiciously as they fell on Juliette:
"Have I been talking?... What was I saying?"
Juliette answered simply and literally:
"That only a woman of fashion would be capable of such infamy."
LIII
They broke their fast on rolls and coffee, dressed and demanded, with the bill, the promised carriage. This was not so quickly forthcoming as the landlord of the Coup d'Épée had prophesied. Indeed, the debilitated conveyance of the wagonette type, drawn by one promoted cart-horse, could only be had by grace of the traveler by whom it had been previously engaged. He proved, when Adelaide swept her charge downstairs, to be a Monsieur Anglais, traveling for pleasure. A middle-sized, clean-shaven, inconspicuous, elderly man, in an ill-fitting suit of drab-color. He sported a sealskin vest in spite of the oppressive heat of the weather, and spoke the French of the conversation-manual with the accent it inculcates. His baldish grizzled head was covered with a straw hat bound with a preposterous light-blue ribbon. His luggage consisted of a brown calfskin bag, a portable easel, sketching-block and color-box, and a violin-case, of which articles he took the most excessive care. Nothing could well be more respectable, or appear more harmless. Juliette breathed more freely at the sight of the elderly drab-clothed man.
He professed himself happy to accommodate the ladies with a share in the wagonette as far as Bazeilles, where he meant to take train for Verdun. Interpreting for Adelaide, who possessed no English, Juliette learned that their own destination was not Metz, but Châlons.
That drive to Bazeilles in the freshness of the morning would have been delightful under other circumstances. The night-mists yet hung white as milk over the valleys, while the breasting rises crowned with woodlands were golden in the sun. Tents of French brigades snowed over the countryside. Bugles and trumpets sometimes drowned the rushing of the Givonne, beside whose stream their road conducted them. The stubbles were full of grain-devouring wood-pigeons, too heavy even to rise and take wing when peasant-lads threw stones. The drab Englishman praised the view in the set terms of the manual, until discovering that Mademoiselle had command of the tongue of Albion, he reverted to that language with evident relief.