Page:Once a Week, Series 1, Volume II Dec 1859 to June 1860.pdf/571

558 indignant glance; but she recovered herself in an instant, and lighting a small hand-lamp, she left the room without remonstrance or remark.

“Ah!” ejaculated the landlord, with a low, hoarse, chuckling laugh, as she disappeared. “Mademoiselle Marie is somewhat of a grande dame, you know, mon voisin; but as pride and poverty pull badly in the same team, she knows that when I command she has only to obey; so that it matters little after all.”

“Elle est belle fille!” said his friend admiringly.

“She might be; she might be, if she had any blood in her veins;” was the cold rejoinder: “but she is not to my taste, though she may suit yours. However, what can’t be mended must be borne: we all know that.”

Whoever could have looked on that young girl as she lighted her lamp, and then returned from the cellar with the wine in her hand, must have been struck by the immobility of her features, and the excessive pallor of her complexion; for no marble statue could have been colder and more impassive in appearance. Beautiful she was in no ordinary degree, and both her face and figure were perfect, but it was a beauty and a perfection which were unearthly in character, and altogether incompatible with the scenes and persons with which she was associated. She was not the daughter of M. Ebrard. Nature could not so far have belied herself. She was the only child of one who had been a merchant of great wealth and high standing, but who, having ruined himself by injudicious speculations, and not being possessed of sufficient moral courage to face his reverses, had terminated his own existence, leaving his penniless widow and helpless orphan to battle with a world by which he, the strong man, had been worsted. Strange cowardice, but not so singular as strange.

Madame Delfour, habituated not only to comfort, but to every luxury of life, and still young and beautiful, was so terrified at the beggary which stared her in the face, that when, after the first few months which followed her husband’s cowardly suicide, she found her remaining francs were rapidly dwindling into sous, she was, after a sharp struggle, prevailed upon to give her hand to the landlord of Le Grand Roi, in order to secure bread for herself and her child; but the sacrifice was too great. Every habit and every association of her youth were opposed to the strange sphere in which she found herself; and although she still clung with almost frantic tenderness to the infant Marie, even a mother’s love failed to counteract the misery and mortification of her new life. She pined and died, and the poor girl was left alone to expiate a father’s crime.

M. Ebrard soon forgot his ailing and melancholy wife, and replaced her by another less beautiful but more congenial to his habits, and better suited to her position; a good, homely, buxom, stirring femme de ménage, almost a match for himself in energy and thrift; but he was fated to be unfortunate in his matrimonial speculations; as, after making him the father of two boys, she too left him a widower; upon which M. Ebrard, who considered himself extremely aggrieved by destiny, and who, moreover, remembered that Marie Delfour was rapidly attaining to a serviceable age, resolved thenceforward to suffice to himself, and to continue the Alpha and Omega of his comfortable establishment.

“I have tried both extremes,” he argued with himself; “I have indulged in the luxury of a dame comme il faut without a penny, who had visited her Paris every year, and had the fashions at her fingers’ ends as I have my wine-merchant’s accounts, and who wound up by dying and leaving me with a child that was not my own; and what profit was she to me? I felt every hour in the day that she was ashamed of me; that she blushed for me; that I could neither talk nor act as she thought right; and that she was too proud to blame me, while she was not too haughty to despise me. Well, and what was the end of that? I found myself a widower, with Marie left upon my hands, who, in a year or two, began to cry if a traveller ventured to tell her that she was pretty, or a more adventurous admirer to talk to her of love. What could I do? Of course I tried again, and this time I did better, for I was not afraid to be master of my own house; but here I am, en garçon once more, with two boys—my own, this time, I suppose—and I may as well not run the risk of increasing the family. I am sick of women; when they are useless they worry out a man’s heart, and when you can turn them to some account, they die.”

M. Ebrard could not be branded as a sentimentalist.

“Come, come, Marie!” he shouted as she returned to the kitchen; “do you want to spend the night in the cellar? You must bestir yourself a little more, for I can’t afford to keep you to be looked at; and if I could, you would not do me any credit, with a face as white as unbaked paste, and your great black eyes staring as though you saw a ghost from morning till night. Did you ever see such a girl?” he continued, turning towards his companion, “wouldn’t you think that she had all the troubles of the world on her back to look at her!—Now then, why don’t you bring the glasses? Do you imagine that we are going to drink out of the palms of our hands?”

“Your health, neighbour,” said the visitor, as he poured out a tumbler-full of wine from the bottle before him, when Marie had silently obeyed. And still the wind roared in the wide chimney, and the rain plashed against the windows, as unremittingly as though the storm had only just commenced, and had, as yet, had no time to exhaust itself. The two boys huddled together in a corner, half-frightened and half-amused by the elemental uproar without, while the pale beautiful girl resumed her seat and her knitting, and fell into another deep fit of abstraction.

Suddenly two distinct blows were heard on the house-door, given apparently with the handle of a riding-whip, and the men removed their pipes from their mouths and listened; the boys sprang up from the floor, and Marie started like a person suddenly awakened from a heavy sleep.

“Who on earth can this be!” exclaimed the landlord, “it can’t be a traveller, unless the diligence is behind its time; and besides”