“A horrid man that followed me the length of the street, and made some impudent speech, and asked me where I lived,” sobbed Aline.
“Is it possible!” exclaimed the old woman, aghast, and clasping her hands. “Well, mamzelle does astonish me! I thought young men knew better nowadays than to go on with that sort of tricks; fifty years ago they used to. I remember how I was followed and spoken to every time I went to church or to market; it was a persecution; but now I come and go and nobody minds me. To think of their daring to speak to mamzelle!”
“That's what one must expect when one walks about alone at your age, ma pauvre Aline,” said the générale, rather sharply, with a significant look at Mme. Cléry which that good lady understood, and resented by compressing her lips and bobbing her flaps, as much as to say, “One has a principle or one has not”—principle being in this instance synonymous with particule.
Things remained in statu quo after this for some years. Mme. de Chanoir did not enlighten her sister on the subject of the conference with Mme. Cléry, but she worked as far as she could in favor of the luckless suitor who spelt his name with a capital D. It was of no use, however. Aline continued to snub him so pertinaciously and persistently that Mme. de Chanoir at last gave up his cause as hopeless, and the professor himself, when he saw this, his solitary stronghold, surrender, thought it best to [pg 071] raise the siege with a good grace, and make a friendly truce with the victor. He frankly withdrew from the field of suitors, and took up his position as a friend of the family. This once done, he accepted its responsibilities and prerogatives, and held himself on the qui vive to render any service in his power to Mme. de Chanoir; he kept her concierge in order, and brought bonbons and flowers to No. 13 on every possible occasion. He knew Aline was passionately fond of the latter, and he was careful to keep the flower stand that stood in the pier of the little salon freshly supplied with her favorite plants, and the vases filled with her favorite flowers. He never dared to offer her a present, but under cover of offering them to the générale he kept her informed about every new book which was likely to interest her. Finally, Frenchman-like, having abandoned the hope of marrying her himself, he set to work to find some more fortunate suitor. This was par excellence the duty of a friend of the family, and M. Dalibouze was fully alive to its importance. The disinterested zeal he displayed in the discharge of it would have been comical if the spirit of genuine self-sacrifice which animated him had not touched it with pathos. One by one every eligible parti in the range of his acquaintance was led up for inspection to No. 13. Mme. de Chanoir entered complacently into the presentations; they amused her, and she tried to persuade herself that, sooner or later, something would come of them; but she knew Aline too well ever to let her into the secret of the professor's matrimonial manœuvres. The result would have been to furnish Mlle. de Lemaque with an obus opportunity and nothing more.
But do what she would, the générale could never cheat Mme. Cléry. The old woman detected a prétendant as a cat does a mouse. It was an instinct with her. There was no putting her off the scent. She never said a word to Mme. de Chanoir, but she had a most aggravating way of making her understand tacitly that she knew all about it—that, in fact, she was not born yesterday. This was her system, whenever M. Dalibouze brought a parti to tea in the evening. Mme. Cléry was seized next day with a furious dusting fit, and when the générale testified against the feathers that kept flying out of the broom, Mme. Cléry would observe, in a significant way:
“Mme. la Générale, that makes an impression when one sees a salon well dusted; that proves that the servant is capable—that she attends to her work. Madame does not think of those things, but strangers do.”
It became at length a sort of cabalistic ceremony with the old woman; intelligible only to Mme. de Chanoir. If Aline came in when the fit was on her, and ventured to expostulate, and ask what she was doing with the duster at that time of day, Mme. Cléry would remark stiffly: “Mamzelle Aline, I am dusting.” Aline came at last to believe that it was a modified phase of S. Vitus' dance, and that for want of anything better the old beldame vented her nerves on imaginary dust which she pursued in holes and corners with her feathery weapon.
This went on till Mlle. de Lemaque was six-and-twenty. She was still a bright, brave creature, working hard, accepting the privations and toil of her life in a spirit of sunshiny courage. But the sun was no longer always shining. There were days now when he drew behind a cloud—when toil pressed like a burden, and she beat her wings against it, and hated the cage that cooped her in; and she longed not so much for rest [pg 072] or happiness as for freedom—for a larger scope and higher aims, and wider, fuller sympathies. When these cloudy days came around, Aline felt the void of her life with an intensity that amounted at times to anguish; she felt it all the more keenly because she could not speak of it. Mme. de Chanoir would not have understood it. The sisters were sincerely attached to each other, but there was little sympathy of character between them, and on many points they were as little acquainted with each other as the neighbors on the next street. They knew this, and agreed sensibly to keep clear of certain subjects on which they could never meet except to disagree. The younger sister, therefore, when the sky was overcast, and when her spirits flagged, never tried to lean upon the older, but worked against the enemy in silence, denying herself the luxury of complaint. If her looks betrayed her, as was sometimes the case, and prompted Mme. de Chanoir to inquire if there was anything the matter beyond the never-ending annoyance of life in general, Aline's assurance that there was not was invariably followed by the remark: “Ma sœur, I wish you were married.” To which Aline as invariably replied: “I am happier as I am, Félicité.” It was true, or at any rate Mlle. de Lemaque thought it was. Under all her surface indifference she carried a true woman's heart. She had dreamt her dreams of happiness, of tender fireside joys, and the dream was so fair and beautiful that for years it filled her life like a reality, and when she discovered, or fancied she did, that it was all too beautiful to be anything but a dream, that the hero of her young imagination would never cross her path in the form of a mortal husband, Aline accepted the discovery with a sigh, but without repining, and laid aside all thought of marriage as a guest that was not for her. As to the marriages that she saw every day around her, she would no more have bound herself in one of them than she would have sold herself to an Eastern pasha. Marriage was a very different thing in her eyes from what it was in Mme. de Chanoir's. There was no point on which the sisters were more asunder than on this, and Aline understood it so well that she avoided touching on it except in jest. Whenever the subject was introduced, she drew a mask of frivolity over her real feelings to avoid bringing down the générale's ridicule on what she would stigmatize as preposterous sentimentality.
M. Dalibouze alone guessed something of this under-current of deep feeling in the young girl's character. With the subtle instinct of affection he penetrated the disguise in which she wrapped herself, but, with a delicacy that she scarcely gave him credit for, he never let her see that he did. Sometimes, indeed, when one of those fits of tristesse was upon her, and she was striving to dissemble it by increased cheerfulness towards everybody, and sauciness towards him, the professor would adapt the conversation to the tone of her thoughts with a skill and apropos that surprised her. Once in particular Aline was startled by the way in which he betrayed either a singularly close observation of her character, or a still more singular sympathy with its moods and sufferings. It was on a Saturday evening, the little circle was gathered round the fire, and the conversation fell upon poetry and the mission of poets amongst common men. Aline declared that it was the grandest of all missions; that, after the prophet and priest, the poet did more for the moral well-being, the spiritual redemption of his fellows than any other missionary, whether [pg 073] philosopher, artist, or patriot; he combined them all, in fact, if he wished it. If he was a patriot, he could serve his country better than a soldier, by singing her wrongs and her glories, and firing the souls of her sons, and making all mankind vibrate to the touch of pain, or joy, or passionate revenge, while he sat quietly by his own hearth; she quoted Moore and Krazinski, and other patriot bards who living had ruled their people, and sent down their name a legacy of glory to unborn generations, till warmed by her subject she grew almost eloquent, and broke off in an impulsive cry of admiration and envy: “Oh! what a glorious privilege to be a poet, to be even a man with the power of doing something, of living a noble life, instead of being a weak, good-for-nothing woman!”
The little ring of listeners heard her with pleasure, and thought she must have a very keen appreciation of the beauties of the poets to speak of them so well and so fervently. But M. Dalibouze saw more in it than this. He saw an under-tone of impatience, of disappointment, of longing to go and do likewise, to spread her wings and fly, to wield a wand that had power to make others spread their wings; there was a spirit's war-cry in it, a rebel's impotent cry against the narrow, inexorable bondage of her life.