“This very instant, odds life,” exclaimed M. de Rênal, transported with rage and yet happier than he had been for twelve hours.
“Will you swear to me,” said Madame de Rênal quite gravely, “never to quarrel with the director of the workhouse about these letters?”
“Quarrel or no quarrel, I can take those foundlings away from him, but,” he continued furiously, “I want those letters at once. Where are they?”
“In a drawer in my secretary, but I shall certainly not give you the key.”
“I’ll manage to break it,” he cried, running towards his wife’s room.
He did break in fact with a bar of iron a costly secretary of veined mahogany which came from Paris and which he had often been accustomed to wipe with the nap of his coat, when he thought he had detected a spot.
Madame de Rênal had climbed up at a run the hundred and twenty steps of the dovecot. She tied the corner of a white handkerchief to one of the bars of iron of the little window. She was the happiest of women. With tears in her eyes she looked towards the great mountain forest. “Doubtless,” she said to herself, “Julien is watching for this happy signal.”
She listened attentively for a long time and then she cursed the monotonous noise of the grasshopper and the song of the birds. “Had it not been for that importunate noise, a cry of joy starting from the big rocks could have arrived here.” Her greedy eye devoured that immense slope of dark verdure which was as level as a meadow.
“Why isn’t he clever enough,” she said to herself, quite overcome, “to invent some signal to tell me that his happiness is equal to mine?” She only came down from the dovecot when she was frightened of her husband coming there to look for her.
She found him furious. He was perusing the soothing phrases of M. de Valenod and reading them with an emotion to which they were but little used.