"'Mademoiselle' and 'Mademoiselle,' when she is no more 'Mademoiselle' than I am! ... Why not 'Madame'? ... Call things and folks by their right names!"
There was a terrible pause. Juliette was enduring agonies. The Curé pursed his mouth, and rounded his mild eyes behind their iron-rimmed spectacles. Mère Catherine went on triumphantly:
"It was her father's dearest wish that she should marry his old friend's only son. She told me that when we were washing up the coffee bowls, out in the kitchen there.... When the Prussians came to France, she went to Belgium with the young man's mother. 'To celebrate my marriage,' she told me, 'because M. What's-his-name was there!'"
P. C. Breagh had a sensation as of a weight of cold lead in the stomach. His feet seemed shod with lead, his arms hung down inertly. His tongue might have been turned to lead, so impossible was utterance. "Married!..." kept on ticking inside his head. "Married!..." and with maddening iteration, slowly as the clapper of a tolling bell. "You knew it ... She knew it ... Married all the time!"
His dull stare was set upon the face that had smiled on him so wooingly. It was snow-white now, and the eyes were hidden beneath their heavy fringes of black. The eyebrows were knitted, the pale lips set rigidly. The Curé looked at them a moment, and then asked, plump and plain:
"You are really married? My good Mère Catherine is not deceiving herself?"
Juliette shut down her stern upper lip upon its little neighbor, and raised clear, sorrowful eyes.
"As she says, I went to Belgium to celebrate my marriage. Now that I have returned, I shall await my husband here in France. My father esteemed him highly. He is M. Charles Tessier. He lives in the Rue de Provence, in the town of Versailles."
Whether the good Curé scented the quibble, we are not at all inclined to ask. We are concerned with P. C. Breagh, whose enchanted castle had crashed into dust and brickbats. One glance at his face, sharp as a wedge of cheese, and bleached under its wholesome freckles and sun-tan, told his Infanta what ruin she had wrought. But if he had seized and shaken her and cried: "You lie!" she would have lied again, defiantly. Was she not married, when her Colonel had believed so.... She would be, from now, in thought and word, the wife of Charles Tessier. Ah, Heaven!... The thought was more unwelcome than ever it had been.
Ah, Heaven! if that dear dead father could but have known this brave young Englishman. Would he have been in such haste to break his daughter's heart?... And—ah, Heaven!—again, if this burning of her boats meant parting, how could one live without one's comrade now?