"All those fives! You are really a wonder, Périne!" said Marie happily. "I never could do anything like that, decidedly I am only fit to make soup. Well, every one to his trade—we can't dine upon figures. If we could you would provide us with plenty, eh, my child? But now I have something for you to do while I am away. Here is the stool; I am going to put it before the fire, so, and you shall sit upon it and watch the pot for me. Don't move, and don't look behind you, and then, by-and-by, you shall have a basin of the soup. If only I had something to put into it, something good, for bread and onions are not too fattening. However, there is plenty to be thankful for. Remember, Périne, you must not take your eyes off the soup."
The girl, who seemed to have the faculty of obedience, sat down where she was directed, and fastened her stolid gaze upon the pot. For a time there was absolute silence in the garret, a ray of cold winter sunshine, cold but bright (for this was Paris), streamed in through the little window in the roof, and fell on Périne's slouching figure and coarse hair. Less than five minutes, however, had passed, when the chintz curtains of the alcove shook, parted, and from between them looked out a pale and haggard man's face.
It will be guessed that this third inhabitant of the sixth floor attic was no other than Jean Didier, whose name had been entered in the bureau of police—when they tried to get some imperfect statistics of missing men—as "Jean Didier, glazier; fought with the insurgents, wounded at the barricade of the Rue Soleil d'Or, May 28th, 1871; denounced as Communist by André Fort; executed on the spot." Nevertheless, for once the police were wrong. Jean was not shot, though it was true he was shot at. Fear, or loss of blood, or an instinctive effort at self-preservation, caused him to reel and fall just a second before a couple of bullets which should have found a home in his body, spent themselves in the blood-stained wall over his head. The tide of slaughter ebbed away, leaving ghastly heaps of dead men. From one of these a shadow by-and-by detached itself, and drifted homewards, to the spot where Marie was waiting in terrible anguish.
Her courage came back with the need for it; it took very little to add to the disguise which fire and a wound had brought upon him; the people in the house were at that moment much occupied with dragging down the papers they had pasted over their windows. He crawled upstairs, and when she had hastily bound up his wound, and given him some food, he managed to get out on the roof through the trap-door. There he spent three days, coming down at night, till she was able to put up her new chintz curtains, and here in the garret he had remained ever since, sometimes fairly patient, sometimes finding his lot insupportable, and railing at fate, at Marie, and at Providence. He had had a few narrow escapes, but his wife was as cunning as a fox when he was concerned, and fortune had favoured him.
Périne's presence had a double aspect. The loneliness of the position was so difficult for a man of his temperament to support, that he welcomed it at times as a distraction, and these exercises of the strange ingenuity of brain which she possessed, at the cost, as it seemed, of all other intelligences, would very often interest and amuse him. On the other hand she was quite as valuable as a grievance. If he had no other fault to find with his wife, he could always blame her for suffering the idiot girl to hang about the place, and the relief of this was enormous. On the present occasion he contemplated her broad back with displeasure.
"Wretched creature! There she sits, and will sit till Marie comes back; I wonder what she thinks would happen to her if she were to look round? Lucky for me if she pictures some terrible fate. What sort of confused nonsense is running through her head now? Soup and Marie take a prominent place, I wager. So precious hard up does one become in this rat's hole, that I make her my problem as she makes the soup hers, poor wretch! Yet, my excellent friend, Jean Didier, I would counsel you to keep your compassion for yourself, for, believe me, you want it at least as much. As much? Rather, a hundred times more! For she—she knows nothing of the blessings she has missed, while I—Heavens, I know too well! To be cooped up here, to see no one but Marie and this idiot; to be aware that at any moment any thing, the merest trifle, might betray me to death, or at least transportation to New California,—was ever man so unhappy in this world!"
Jean, who had a turn for the melodramatic, tugged despairingly with both hands at his hair, Périne, meanwhile, intent upon the soup, bent forward and stirred it.
"Soup for mother and Périne," she muttered.
"What red hands she has!" continued Jean with a grimace, "and I hate to hear her call Marie, mother. But it's just Marie all over. She never could see a poor wretch, were it only a hunted rat, but she must take it up, and give herself all the trouble in the world, when she might have left it alone. She was just the same as a little girl, I see her now, in her little round cap and woollen frock, scattering food for the frozen-out birds in the hard winters. Such a pretty, rosy-faced little thing as she was, and they all so fond of her! I recollect taking her to school in my wooden sledge, and she—What's the girl about now? Why—what dog has bitten her! She has taken my tobacco from the shelf—she—not—! Yes, by heaven, she has poured it all into the soup!"
"Périne heard mother say she wanted something to make the soup good," laughed the girl, nodding her head, and quite unconscious that behind her the enraged Jean was violently shaking his fist.