“Never,” protested the Doctor. “Beauty and talent leave a mark.”
“I have positively forgotten how to dress,” she sighed.
“Darling, you make me blush,” cried he. “Yours has been a tragic marriage!”
“But your success—to see you appreciated, honoured, your name in all the papers, that will be more than pleasure—it will be heaven!” she cried.
“And once a week,” said the Doctor, archly scanning the syllables, “once a week—one good little game of baccarat?”
“Only once a week?” she questioned, threatening him with a finger.
“I swear it by my political honour,” cried he.
“I spoil you,” she said, and gave him her hand.
He covered it with kisses.
Jean-Marie escaped into the night. The moon swung high over Gretz. He went down to the garden end and sat on the jetty. The river ran by with eddies of oily silver, and a low monotonous song. Faint veils of mist moved among the poplars on the farther side. The reeds were quietly nodding. A hundred times already had the boy sat, on such a night, and watched the streaming river with untroubled fancy. And this perhaps was to be the last. He was to leave this familiar hamlet, this green, rustling country, this bright and quiet stream; he was to pass into the great city; his dear lady mistress was to move bedizened in saloons; his good, garrulous, kind-hearted master to become a brawling deputy; and both be lost for ever to Jean-Marie and their better selves. He knew his own defects; he knew he must sink into less and less consideration in the turmoil of a city life, sink more and more from the child into the servant. And he began dimly to believe the Doctor’s prophecies of evil. He could see a change in both. His generous incredulity failed him for this once; a child must have perceived that the Hermitage had completed what the absinthe had begun. If this were the first day, what would be the last? “If necessary, wreck the train,” thought he, remembering the Doctor’s parable. He looked round on the delightful scene; he drank deep of the charmed night-air, laden with the scent of hay. “If necessary, wreck the train,” he repeated. And he rose and returned to the house.