I did not fall or faint, however; I hastened out to the saloon again.
The door of the little room where the coffin stood was open, and
Madame stepping out, looked vaguely about her.
"Madame! Madame!" I cried, "oh, I have seen—I have seen a terrible sight!"
Madame's face grew white, very white. She grasped me harshly by the arm.
"What are you talking about, you crazy woman? You are getting quite wild, I think. Do you imagine you can hide your guilt in that way?" and she shook me with a savage fierceness that made my very bones ache. "This is carrying it with a high hand, to be sure, to flatter yourself that such wilful carelessness will not be discovered. Do you suppose," she cried, pointing to the fragments of glass, "that my nerves could feel a crash like that, and I not come down to see what had happened?"
She spoke so volubly, and kept so firm a grip of my arm, that I could not get breath to utter a word of self-defence,—indeed, what defence could I make? Yet I should say, from my mistress's singular manner, that she had seen that vision too, so wild were her eyes, so haggard her face.
Little Jacques was buried. His attentive parents enjoyed a carriage-ride, with his miniature coffin between them, quite as well as if the little fellow had accompanied them alive and full of mischief.
Outside matters, as Monsieur said, being now off his mind, he could attend to business again.
The mirror belonged to "business." I had been writhing under that knowledge all the morning of their absence.
Monsieur took the sight of his despoiled glass as calmly as Diogenes might have viewed a similar disaster from his tub. Monsieur's philosophy was grounded upon common sense. He knew that the frame was valuable. He knew also that I had saved enough to pay for the accident. I knew it, too, and was well aware that he would exact payment to the uttermost farthing. Monsieur, therefore, was quite cool. He laughed loudly at Madame's excitement, and the feverish account she gave of my fright, my deceitfulness, and pretending to see what nobody else saw.
"Little Jacques!" I heard him exclaim, as I entered the room, shrugging his shoulders with such a contemptuously good-natured sneer as only a Frenchman can manufacture; and raising both his hands derisively, he went off with vivacity to his business.