VOLUME II

PRINTED ONLY FOR SUBSCRIBERS BY GEORGE BARRIE & SON PHILADELPHIA

CONTENTS

CHAPTER XXIV. MONSIEUR GALUCHET XXV. THE EXPLOSION XXVI. THE SNARE XXVII. SORROWS AND JOYS OF LOVE XXVIII. CONSOLATION XXIX. AN ADVENTURE XXX. THE IMPROMPTU SUPPER XXXI. UNCERTAINTY XXXII. A WEDDING PRESENT XXXIII. THE STORY OF ONE TOLD BY THE OTHER XXXIV. RESURRECTION XXXV. ABSOLUTION XXXVI. RECONCILIATION LEONE LEONI INTRODUCTION CHAPTER I CHAPTER II CHAPTER III CHAPTER IV CHAPTER V CHAPTER VI CHAPTER VII CHAPTER VIII CHAPTER IX CHAPTER X CHAPTER XI CHAPTER XII CHAPTER XIII CHAPTER XIV CHAPTER XV CHAPTER XVI CHAPTER XVII CHAPTER XVIII CHAPTER XIX CHAPTER XX CHAPTER XXI CHAPTER XXII CHAPTER XXIII CHAPTER XXIV

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS THE SIN OF MONSIEUR ANTOINE LEONE LEONI VOLUME II

EMILE CONFESSES HIS LOVE FOR GILBERTE. GILBERTE AND JAPPELOUP ACCOMPANY THE MARQUIS. THE RECONCILIATION. DON ALEO AND JULIETTE. LEONI TAKES JULIETTE TO HIS PALACE. THE MEETING ON THE CANAL.

EMILE CONFESSES HIS LOVE FOR GILBERTE.

"My dear Janille," he cried at last, with impetuous emotion, "and you, noble and generous Antoine, listen to me and learn my secret at last. I love your daughter."

THE SIN OF MONSIEUR ANTOINE

(Continued)

XXIV MONSIEUR GALUCHET

But, after sleeping twelve hours, Galuchet had only a very confused remembrance of the events of the preceding day, and, when Monsieur Cardonnet sent for him, he retained only a vague feeling of resentment against the carpenter. Moreover, he was little inclined to boast of having cut such an absurd figure at the outset of his diplomatic career, and he attributed his late rising and his sluggish manner to a violent sick-headache. "I did nothing but feel the ground," he replied to his master's questions. "I was feeling so miserable that I could not watch very closely. I can only assure you that they have very vulgar manners in that house, that they live on a footing of equality with peasants, and that the table is very poorly served."

"That is no news to me," said Monsieur Cardonnet; "it is impossible that you can have passed the whole day at Châteaubrun without noticing something more definite. At what hour did my son arrive, at what time did he leave?"

"I can't tell you just what time it was,—their old clock is so far out of the way!"

"That's not an answer. How many hours did he stay there? Come, I don't ask you to be exact to a minute."

"It must have been five or six hours, monsieur; I was horribly bored. Monsieur Emile seemed far from glad to see me; and as for the girl, she's a downright prude. It was fearfully hot on that mountain, and I couldn't say two words without being interrupted by that peasant."

"I can imagine it, for you don't say two words in succession this morning, Galuchet; what peasant do you mean?"

"That carpenter, Jappeloup, a miserable fellow, an animal who presumes to be familiar with everybody, and who speaks of monsieur as Père Cardonnet, as if he were speaking of his equal."

"That doesn't trouble me; but what did my son say to him?"

"Monsieur Emile laughed at his nonsense and Mademoiselle Gilberte thinks he is charming."

"Did you notice any asides between her and my son?"

"No, monsieur, not exactly. The old woman—who is certainly her mother, for she calls her my girl—hardly ever leaves her, and it can't be very easy to pay court to her, especially as she is very high and mighty, and puts on the airs of a princess. That's very becoming in her, on my word, with the dress she wears and not a sou! If they should offer her to me, I wouldn't have her!"

"No matter, Galuchet; you must pay court to her."

"To laugh at her, when the time comes—I agree to that!"

"And also to earn a reward, which you will not get unless you bring me a clearer and more circumstantial report next time; for you are all astray to-day."

Galuchet bent his head over his books and fought all day against the discomfort that follows over-indulgence.

Emile passed the whole week head over ears in hydrostatics; he indulged in no other distraction than to seek out Jean Jappeloup in the evening and chat with him; and, as he always tried to bring the conversation around to Gilberte, the carpenter finally said to him:

"Look you, Monsieur Emile, you never get tired of that subject, that's clear enough. Do you know that Mère Janille thinks you are in love with her child?"

"What an idea!" rejoined the young man, confused by this sudden apostrophe.

"It's a sensible idea enough. Why shouldn't you be in love with her?"

"True, why shouldn't I be in love with her?" echoed Emile, more and more embarrassed. "But can it be that you would speak jestingly of such a possibility, friend Jean?"

"I should say that you were the one, my boy, for you answer me as if we were in jest. Come, why not tell me the truth? out with it or I'll not talk to you any more."

"Jean, if I were really in love with a person for whom I have as much respect as for my own mother, my best friend should know nothing of it."

"I know very well that I am not your best friend, and yet I should like to have you tell me."

"Explain yourself, Jean."

"Explain yourself, rather; I am waiting."

"You will wait a long time; for I have no answer to make to such a question, despite all my esteem and affection for you."

"If that is so, you will have to say adieu forever one of these days to the people at Châteaubrun; for ma mie Janille is not the woman to sleep long when danger is brewing."

"That word offends me; I do not think that I can be accused of bringing danger upon a person whose reputation and dignity are as sacred to me as to her kindred and dearest friends."

"That sounds very well, but it isn't a straight answer to all my questions. Do you want me to tell you something?—early last week I went to Châteaubrun to borrow of Antoine a tool that I needed. I found ma mie Janille there; she was all alone, expecting you. You didn't come and she told me all. And now, my boy, if she didn't frown on you Sunday, and if she allows you to call from time to time to see her girl, you are indebted to me for it."

"How so, my good Jean?"

"Because I have more confidence in you than you have in me. I told ma mie Janille that if you loved Gilberte you would marry her, and that I would answer for you on the salvation of my soul."

"And you were right, Jean," cried Emile, grasping the carpenter's hand; "you never told a greater truth."

"Very good! but the question still remains whether you are in love, and that is what you won't tell me."

"It is what I can tell you alone, since you question me so closely. Yes, Jean, I love her, I love her more than my life, and I mean to marry her."

"I give my consent," replied Jean in a tone of enthusiastic satisfaction, "and so far as I am concerned, I join your hands—One moment! one moment!—provided that Gilberte gives her consent too."

"And if she should ask your advice, my good Jean, who are her friend and second father?"

"I should tell her that she can make no better choice, that you suit me and that I am willing to be your surety."

"Good! now my friend, we only have to obtain the consent of the parents."

"Oh! I'll answer for Antoine, if I take hold of the affair. He has some pride, and he will be afraid that your father may hesitate, but I know what to say to him on that subject."

"What will you say to him, pray?"

"Something that you don't know, something that nobody knows but me. I don't need to speak yet, for the time has not come, and you can't think of marrying for a year or two."

"Jean, confide this secret to me as I confided mine to you. I see but one obstacle to our marriage, my father's obstinacy. I have resolved to overcome it, but I do not conceal from myself that it is very serious."

"Well, as you have been so trustful and frank with old Jean, old Jean will be the same with you. Listen, my boy; before long your father will be ruined and will have no further excuse for putting on airs with the Châteaubrun family."

"If what you say should turn out to be true, I should bless your strange prophecy, notwithstanding my father's inevitable grief and disappointment; for I have many reasons for dreading this great wealth."

"I know it; I know your heart, and I see that you would like to enrich others before enriching yourself. Everything will turn out as you wish, I am sure. I have dreamed of it more than ten times."

"If you have done nothing more than dream, my dear Jean——-"

"Wait, wait. What is that book you always carry under your arm and that you seem to be studying?"

"I have already told you, a scientific treatise on the power and weight of water and the laws of equilibrium."

"I remember—you have told me before; but I tell you that your book lies, or else you have read it wrong; otherwise you would know what I know."

"What is that?"

"That your factory is impossible, and that your father, if he persists in fighting against a stream that snaps its fingers at him, will lose his outlay and will discover his folly too late. That is why I have been so cheerful for some time past. I was depressed and out of temper as long as I thought that your undertaking might succeed; but I had one hope that kept coming to my mind again and again, and I determined to satisfy myself about it. So I walked and worked and used my eyes and studied. Oh! yes, studied, and I didn't read your books and your maps and your figuring; I saw and understood everything. Monsieur Emile, I am only a poor peasant, and your Galuchet would spit on me if he dared; but I can tell you of one thing that you hardly suspect, and that is that your father has no idea of what he is doing, that he has taken bad advice, and that you don't know enough about it to set him right. The coming winter will carry away your works, and every winter will carry off whatever there is, until Monsieur Cardonnet has thrown his last

three-franc piece into the water. Remember what I tell you, and don't try to persuade your father. It would be one more reason for him to persist in ruining himself, and we don't need that to induce him to do it; but you will be ruined, my son, and if not altogether here, you will be somewhere else, for I hold your papa's brain in the hollow of my hand. It is a powerful brain, I admit, but it is a madman's brain. He is a man who works himself into a frenzy for his schemes to such an extent that he considers them infallible, and when a man is built that way he never succeeds in anything. I thought at first that he had played his hand out, but now I see that the game is becoming serious, for he is beginning to rebuild all that the last freshet destroyed. He had had too good luck until then; still another reason—good luck makes a man overbearing and presumptuous. That is the history of Napoléon, whom I saw rise and fall, like a carpenter who climbs to the roof of a house without looking to see if the foundations are solid. However good a

carpenter he may be—however fine a building he may build—if the wall totters, good-bye to the whole work!"

Jean spoke with such conviction, and his black eyes gleamed so bright beneath his grizzly bushy eyebrows, that Emile could not help being moved. He begged him to give his reasons for talking as he did, and the carpenter refused for a long time. At last, conquered by his persistence, and a little irritated by his doubts, he made an appointment with him for the following Sunday.

"You can go to Châteaubrun Saturday or Monday instead," he said, "and on Sunday we will start at daybreak and go up the stream to certain places that I will point out to you. Take all your books and all your instruments if you choose. If they don't confirm me, it's of little consequence; it will be science that lies. But don't expect to make this trip on horseback or in a carriage; and if you haven't good legs, don't expect to make it at all."

On the following Saturday Emile went to Châteaubrun, beginning, as usual, with Boisguilbault, as he dared not appear too early at Gilberte's.

As he approached the ruins he saw a black speck at the foot of the mountain, and that speck soon became Constant Galuchet, in a black coat, black trousers and gloves, black satin cravat and waistcoat. That was his costume in the country, winter and summer alike; and no matter how great the heat or the fatigue which he was about to undergo, he never left the village except in that ceremonious attire. He would have been afraid of resembling a peasant if, like Emile, he had donned a blouse and broad-brimmed gray hat.

If it be true that the bourgeois costume of our generation is the most depressing, the most inconvenient and the most unbecoming that fashion ever invented, it is equally true that all its inconveniences and deformities are most striking in the open country. In the outskirts of the large cities, one's eyes are less offended, because everything there is arranged, aligned, planked, built and walled in symmetrically, so that all the informality and charm of nature are destroyed. We may sometimes admire the beauty and symmetry of those estates which have been subjected to all the refinements of civilization; but it is very hard to imagine oneself loving such a region. The real country is not there, but in the heart of the fields, neglected and untilled to some extent, where agriculture has no thought of paltry embellishments and strict limits, where estates run together and where boundaries are indicated only by a stone or bush, put in place in full reliance upon rustic good faith. There the roads, intended only for foot passengers,

equestrians or heavy carts, present innumerable picturesque irregularities; the hedges, abandoned to their natural vigor, hang in garlands, from leafy arbors, and deck themselves out with the wild climbing plants which are carefully removed in more pretentious regions. Emile remembered that he had walked about within several leagues of Paris without the pleasure of seeing a nettle, and he felt keenly the charm of that rural scenery amid which he now found himself. Poverty did not hide, in shame and degradation, beneath the feet of wealth. On the contrary it made itself manifest, light-hearted and free, on a soil which proudly bore its emblems, wild flowers and vagabond plants, the humble moss and the wood-strawberry, the water-cress on the brink of a stream with no well-defined bed, and the ivy clinging to a rock that had obstructed the path for centuries, without attracting the attention of the police. He loved the branches which overhung the road and were respected by passers-by; the bog-holes in which the frog croaked softly

as if to warn the traveller,—a more vigilant sentinel than he who guards a king's palace; the old crumbling walls around the enclosure, which no one thought of rebuilding, the powerful roots which pushed up the ground and dug holes at the foot of the venerable trees; all that lack of art which makes nature ingenuous and which harmonizes so well with the severe type and grave and simple costume of the peasant.

But let that parasitic insect, that monsieur with the black coat, cleanly shaven chin, gloved hands and shambling legs, appear in the midst of that austere and impressive scene, which carries the imagination back to the epoch of primitive poesy, and that king of society becomes simply a ridiculous blotch, an annoying imperfection in the picture. What business have your funereal garments in this bright sunlight, where their creases seem to laugh scornfully as at a victim? Your offensive, misplaced costume inspires more pity than the poor man's rags; we feel that you are out of place in the fresh air and that your livery crushes you.

Never had these reflections presented themselves so vividly to Emile's mind as when Galuchet appeared before him, hat in hand, climbing the hill with a painful exertion which caused his coat-tails to flutter in laughable fashion, and pausing to brush away with his handkerchief the traces of frequent falls. Emile was strongly inclined to laugh at first; and then he asked himself angrily why the parasite was buzzing around the sacred hive. He urged his horse to a gallop, passed Galuchet without seeming to recognize him, arrived first at Châteaubrun, and announced the other's coming to Gilberte as an unavoidable calamity.

"Oh! father," said she, "don't receive that ill-bred, disagreeable man, I entreat you! let us not spoil our Châteaubrun, our home, our pleasant, unceremonious life, by the presence of this stranger, who never can and never will be in sympathy with us."

"What do you expect me to do with him, for heaven's sake?" said Monsieur de Châteaubrun, sorely embarrassed. "I invited him to come whenever he chose; I could not foresee that you, who are usually so long-suffering and generous, would take such a dislike to a poor devil because of his bad manners and his unattractive face. For my part I pity such people; I see that everyone spurns them and that life is a bore to them."

"Don't believe that," said Emile. "On the contrary they are very well satisfied and imagine that everybody likes them."

"In that case, why rob them of a delusion without which they would probably die of grief? I haven't courage to do it, and I don't believe that my dear Gilberte would advise me to have it."

"My too kind-hearted father!" rejoined Gilberte with a sigh; "I wish that I were as kind-hearted, too; indeed, I believe I am, generally speaking; but that conceited, self-satisfied creature, who seems to me to insult me when he looks at me, and who called me by my Christian name the first day he ever spoke to me!—no, I can't endure him, and I feel that he has a bad effect on me, because the sight of him makes me disdainful and sarcastic, contrary to my instincts and my character."

"It is certain that Monsieur Galuchet will become very familiar with mademoiselle," said Emile to Monsieur Antoine, "and that you will be compelled more than once to remind him of the respect he owes her. If it happens that he forces you to turn him out of the house, you will regret having received him with too much confidence. Wouldn't it be better to give him to understand by a somewhat chilly welcome that you have not forgotten the ungentlemanly way he behaved on his first visit?"

"The best way that I can think of to arrange matters," said Monsieur de Châteaubrun, "is for you two to go out in the orchard with Janille; I will take Galuchet out fishing and you will be rid of him."

This suggestion was not particularly agreeable to Emile. When he was under Monsieur de Châteaubrun's eye, he could almost believe that he was tête-à-tête with Gilberte, whereas Janille was an exceedingly active and keen-eyed third. Moreover Gilberte thought that it would be selfish to compel her father to bear alone the burden of such a visitor.—"No," she said, kissing him, "we will stay here to keep you in bad temper; for if we turn our backs on you, you will be so sweet and good-natured that monsieur will believe that he is welcome, once for all. Oh! I know you, father! you wouldn't be able to refrain from telling him so and from keeping him at the table, and then he will drink again! It will be very wise for me to stay here and force him to keep watch on himself."

"Oh! I'll look out for that," said Janille, who had listened thus far without giving her opinion, and who hated Galuchet ever since the day he had haggled over a ten-sou piece for which she asked him after showing him the ruins. "I like to have monsieur drink his wine with his friends and the people he likes; but I don't approve of wasting it on parasites, and I propose to give Monsieur Galuchet's wine a good baptizing. But you don't like water, monsieur, and that will make you cut short your stay at the table."

"Why, Janille, this is downright tyranny," said Monsieur Antoine. "You say you are going to put me on a water diet? do you want me to die, pray?"

"No, monsieur, your skin will be all the brighter for it, and if yonder little fellow makes a wry face at it, so much the worse for him."