The housekeeper, giving them a severe look, proceeded to her own snug apartment, followed by the crone, whom she seated in her easiest chair and proceeded to refresh with a glass of cognac, which was swallowed with much relish and wiping of lips, accompanied by a little artificial cough. Dame Tremblay kept a carafe of it in her room to raise the temperature of her low spirits and vapors to summer heat, not that she drank, far from it, but she liked to sip a little for her stomach's sake.
“It is only a thimbleful I take now and then,” she said. “When I was the Charming Josephine I used to kiss the cups I presented to the young gallants, and I took no more than a fly! but they always drank bumpers from the cup I kissed!” The old dame looked grave as she shook her head and remarked, “But we cannot be always young and handsome, can we, Mère Malheur?”
“No, dame, but we can be jolly and fat, and that is what we are! You don't quaff life by thimblefuls, and you only want a stout offer to show the world that you can trip as briskly to church yet as any girl in New France!”
The humor of the old crone convulsed Dame Tremblay with laughter, as if some invisible fingers were tickling her wildly under the armpits.
She composed herself at last, and drawing her chair close to that of Mère Malheur, looked her inquiringly in the face and asked, “What is the news?”
Dame Tremblay was endowed with more than the ordinary curiosity of her sex. She knew more news of city and country than any one else, and she dispensed it as freely as she gathered. She never let her stock of gossip run low, and never allowed man or woman to come to speak with her without pumping them dry of all they knew. A secret in anybody's possession set her wild to possess it, and she gave no rest to her inordinate curiosity until she had fished it out of even the muddiest waters.
The mystery that hung around Caroline was a source of perpetual irritation to the nerves of Dame Tremblay. She had tried as far as she dared by hint and suggestion to draw from the lady some reference to her name and family, but in vain. Caroline would avow nothing, and Dame Tremblay, completely baffled by a failure of ordinary means to find out the secret, bethought herself of her old resource in case of perplexity, Mère Malheur.
For several days she had been brooding over this mode of satisfying her curiosity, when the unexpected visit of Mère Malheur set aside all further hesitation about disobeying the Intendant's orders not to inquire or allow any other person to make inquisition respecting Caroline.
“Mère Malheur, you feel comfortable now!” said she. “That glass of cognac has given you a color like a peony!”
“Yes, I am very comfortable now, dame! your cognac is heavenly: it warms without burning. That glass is the best news I have to tell of to-day!”