CHAPTER XVII.
FIRST LOVE.
M. Boniface's room remained vacant for three or four months, when oneday Bathilde, who was accustomed to see the window closed, on raisingher eyes found that it was open, and at the window she saw a strangeface: it was that of D'Harmental. Few such faces as that of thechevalier were seen in the Rue du Temps-Perdu. Bathilde, admirablysituated, behind her curtain, for seeing without being seen, wasattracted involuntarily. There was in our hero's features a distinctionand an elegance which could not escape Bathilde's eyes. The chevalier'sdress, simple as it was, betrayed the elegance of the wearer: thenBathilde had heard him give some orders, and they had been given withthat inflection of voice which indicates in him who possesses it thehabit of command.
The young girl had discovered at the first glance that this man was verysuperior in all respects to him whom he succeeded in the possession ofthis little room, and with that instinct so natural to persons of goodbirth, she at once recognized him as being of high family. The same daythe chevalier had tried his harpsichord. At the first sound of theinstrument Bathilde had raised her head. The chevalier, though he didnot know that he had a listener, or perhaps because he did not know it,went on with preludes and fantasies, which showed an amateur of no meantalents. At these sounds, which seemed to wake all the musical chords ofher own organization, Bathilde had risen and approached the window thatshe might not lose a note, for such an amusement was unheard of in theRue du Temps-Perdu. Then it was that D'Harmental had seen against thewindow the charming little fingers of his neighbor, and had driven themaway by turning round so quickly that Bathilde could not doubt she hadbeen seen.
The next day Bathilde thought it was a long time since she had played,and sat down to her instrument. She began nervously, she knew not why;but as she was an excellent musician, her fear soon passed away, and itwas then that she executed so brilliantly that piece from Armida, whichhad been heard with so much astonishment by the chevalier and the AbbeBrigaud.
We have said how the following morning the chevalier had seen Buvat, andbecome acquainted with Bathilde's name. The appearance of the young girlhad made the deeper impression on the chevalier from its being sounexpected in such a place; and he was still under the influence of thecharm when Roquefinette entered, and gave a new direction to histhoughts, which, however, soon returned to Bathilde. The next day,Bathilde, who, profiting by the first ray of the spring sun, was earlyat her window, noticed in her turn that the eyes of the chevalier wereardently fixed upon her. She had noticed his face, young and handsome,but to which the thought of the responsibility he had taken gave acertain air of sadness; but sadness and youth go so badly together, thatthis anomaly had struck her--this handsome young man had something toannoy him--perhaps he was unhappy. What could it be? Thus, from thesecond time she had seen him, Bathilde had very naturally meditatedabout the chevalier. This had not prevented Bathilde from shutting herwindow, but, from behind her window, she still saw the outline of thechevalier's sad face. She felt that D'Harmental was sad, and when shesat down to her harpsichord, was it not from a secret feeling that musicis the consoler of troubled hearts?
That evening it was D'Harmental who played, and Bathilde listened withall her soul to the melodious voice which spoke of love in the dead ofnight. Unluckily for the chevalier, who, seeing the shadow of the younggirl behind the drapery, began to think that he was making a favorableimpression on the other side of the street, he had been interrupted inhis concert by the lodger on the third floor; but the most importantthing was accomplished--there was already a point of sympathy betweenthe two young people, and they already spoke that language of the heart,the most dangerous of all.
Moreover, Bathilde, who had dreamed all night about music, and a littleabout the musician, felt that something strange and unknown to her wasgoing on, and, attracted as she was toward the window, she kept itscrupulously closed; from this resulted the movement of impatience,under the influence of which the chevalier had gone to breakfast withMadame Denis.
There he had learned one important piece of news, which was, thatBathilde was neither the daughter, the wife, nor the niece of Buvat;thus he went upstairs joyfully, and, finding the window open, he hadput himself--in spite of the friendly advice of Boniface--incommunication with Mirza, by means of bribing her with sugar. Theunexpected return of Bathilde had interrupted this amusement; thechevalier, in his egotistical delicacy, had shut his window; but, beforethe window had been shut, a salute had been exchanged between the twoyoung people. This was more than Bathilde had ever accorded to any man,not that she had not from time to time exchanged salutes with someacquaintance of Buvat's, but this was the first time she had blushed asshe did so.
The next day Bathilde had seen the chevalier at his window, and, withoutbeing able to understand the action, had seen him nail a crimson ribbonto the outer wall; but what she had particularly remarked was theextraordinary animation visible on the face of the young man. Half anhour afterward she had seen with the chevalier a man perfectly unknownto her, but whose appearance was not re-assuring; this was CaptainRoquefinette. Bathilde had also remarked, with a vague uneasiness, that,as soon as the man with the long sword had entered, the chevalier hadfastened the door.
The chevalier, as is easy to understand, had a long conference with thecaptain; for they had to arrange all the preparations for the evening'sexpedition. The chevalier's window remained thus so long closed thatBathilde, thinking that he had gone out, had thought she might as wellopen hers.
Hardly was it open, however, when her neighbor's, which had seemed onlyto wait the moment to put itself in communication with her, opened inturn. Luckily for Bathilde, who would have been much embarrassed by thiscircumstance, she was in that part of the room where the chevalier couldnot see her. She determined, therefore, to remain where she was, and satdown near the second half of the window, which was still shut.
Mirza, however, who had not the same scruples as her mistress, hardlysaw the chevalier before she ran to the window, placed her front paws onthe sill, and began dancing on her hind ones. These attentions wererewarded, as she expected, by a first, then a second, then a third, lumpof sugar; but this third bit, to the no small astonishment of Bathilde,was wrapped up in a piece of paper.
This piece of paper troubled Bathilde a great deal more than it didMirza, who, accustomed to crackers and sucre de pomme, soon got thesugar out of its envelope by means of her paws; and, as she thought verymuch of the inside, and very little of the wrapper, she ate the sugar,and, leaving the paper, ran to the window; but the chevalier was gone;satisfied, no doubt, of Mirza's skill, he had retired into his room.
Bathilde was very much embarrassed; she had seen, at the first glance,that the paper contained three or four lines of writing; but, in spiteof the sudden friendship which her neighbor seemed to have acquired forMirza, it was evidently not to Mirza that he was writing letters--itmust, therefore, be to her. What should she do? Go and tear it up? Thatwould be noble and proper; but, even if it were possible to do such athing, the paper in which the sugar had been wrapped might have beenwritten on some time, and then the action would be ridiculous in thehighest degree, and it would show, at any rate, that she thought aboutthe letter. Bathilde resolved then, to leave things as they were. Thechevalier could not know that she was at home, since he had not seenher; he could not, therefore, draw any deduction from the fact that thepaper remained on the floor. She therefore continued to work, or ratherto reflect, hidden behind her curtain, as the chevalier, probably, wasbehind his.
In about an hour, of which it must be confessed Bathilde passedthree-quarters with her eyes fixed on the paper, Nanette entered.Bathilde, without moving, told her to shut the window--Nanette obeyed;but in returning she saw the paper.
"What is that?" asked she, stooping down to pick it up.
"Nothing," answered Bathilde quickly, forgetting that Nanette could notread, "only a paper which has fallen out of my pocket." Then, after aninstant's pause, and with a visible eff
ort, "and which you may throw onthe fire," continued she.----"But perhaps it may be something important;see what it is, at all events, mademoiselle." And Nanette presented theletter to Bathilde.
The temptation was too strong to resist. Bathilde cast her eyes on thepaper, affecting an air of indifference as well as she could, and readas follows:
"They say you are an orphan: I have no parents; we are, then, brotherand sister before God. This evening I run a great danger; but I hope tocome out of it safe and sound if my sister--Bathilde--will pray for herbrother Raoul."
"You are right," said Bathilde, in a moved voice, and taking the paperfrom the hands of Nanette, "that paper is more important than Ithought;" and she put D'Harmental's letter in the pocket of her apron.Five minutes after Nanette, who came in twenty times a day without anyparticular reason, went out as she had entered, and left Bathilde alone.
Bathilde had only just glanced at the letter, and it had seemed todazzle her. As soon as Nanette was gone she read it a second time.
It would have been impossible to have said more in fewer words. IfD'Harmental had taken a whole day to combine every word of the billet,instead of writing on the spur of the moment, he could not have done itbetter. Indeed, he established a similarity of position between himselfand the orphan; he interested Bathilde in her neighbor's fate on accountof a menacing danger, a danger which would appear all the greater to theyoung girl from her not knowing its nature; and, finally, the expressionbrother and sister, so skillfully glided in at the end, and to ask asimple prayer, excluded from these first advances all idea of love.
It followed, therefore, that, if at this moment Bathilde had foundherself vis-a-vis with D'Harmental, instead of being embarrassed andblushing, as a young girl would who had just received her firstlove-letter, she would have taken him by the hand and said to him,smiling--"Be satisfied, I will pray for you." There remained, however,on the mind of Bathilde something more dangerous than all thedeclarations in the world, and that was the idea of the peril which herneighbor ran. By a sort of presentiment with which she had been seizedon seeing him, with a face so different from his ordinary expression,nail the crimson ribbon to his window, and withdraw it directly thecaptain entered, she was almost sure that the danger was somehowconnected with this new personage, whom she had never seen before. Buthow did this danger concern him? What was the nature of the dangeritself? This was what she asked herself in vain. She thought of a duel,but to a man such as the chevalier appeared to be, a duel was not one ofthose dangers for which one asks the prayers of women; besides, the hournamed was not suitable to duels. Bathilde lost herself in herconjectures; but, in losing herself, she thought of the chevalier,always of the chevalier, and of nothing but the chevalier; and, if hehad calculated upon such an effect, it must be owned that hiscalculations were wofully true for poor Bathilde.
The day passed; and, whether it was intentional, or whether it was thathe was otherwise employed, Bathilde saw him no more, and his windowremained closed. When Buvat came home as usual, at ten minutes afterfour, he found the young girl so much preoccupied that, although hisperspicacity was not great in such matters, he asked her three or fourtimes if anything was wrong; each time she answered by one of thosesmiles which supplied Buvat with enough to do in looking at her; and itfollowed that, in spite of these repeated questions, Bathilde kept hersecret.
After dinner M. Chaulieu's servant entered--he came to ask Buvat tospend the evening with his master. The Abbe Chaulieu was one of Buvat'sbest patrons, and often came to his house, for he had taken a greatliking for Bathilde. The poor abbe became blind, but not so entirely asnot to be able to recognize a pretty face; though it is true that he sawit across a cloud. The abbe had told Bathilde, in his sexagenariangallantry, that his only consolation was that it is thus that one seesthe angels.
Bathilde thanked the good abbe from the bottom of her heart for thusgetting her an evening's solitude. She knew that when Buvat went to theAbbe Chaulieu he ordinarily stayed some time; she hoped, then, that hewould stop late as usual. Poor Buvat went out, without imagining thatfor the first time she desired his absence.
Buvat was a lounger, as every bourgeois of Paris ought to be. From oneend to the other of the Palais Royal, he stared at the shops, stoppingfor the thousandth time before the things which generally drew hisattention. On leaving the colonnade, he heard singing, and saw a groupof men and women, who were listening to the songs; he joined them, andlistened too. At the moment of the collection he went away, not from abad heart, nor that he would have wished to refuse the admirablemusician the reward which was his due, but that by an old habit, ofwhich time had proved the advantage, he always came out without money,so that by whatever he was tempted he was sure to overcome thetemptation. This evening he was much tempted to drop a sou into thesinger's bowl, but as he had not a sou in his pocket, he was obliged togo away. He made his way then, as we have seen, toward the Barriere desSergents, passed up the Rue du Coq, crossed the Pont-Neuf, returnedalong the quay so far as the Rue Mazarine; it was in the Rue Mazarinethat the Abbe Chaulieu lived.
The Abbe Chaulieu recognized Buvat, whose excellent qualities he hadappreciated during their two years' acquaintance, and with much pressingon his part, and many difficulties on Buvat's, made him sit down nearhimself, before a table covered with papers. It is true that at firstBuvat sat on the very edge of his chair; gradually, however, he gotfurther and further on--put his hat on the ground--took his cane betweenhis legs, and found himself sitting almost like any one else.
The work that there was to be done did not promise a shortsitting; there were thirty or forty poems on the table to beclassified--numbered, and, as the abbe's servant was his amanuensis,corrected; so that it was eleven o'clock before they thought that it hadstruck nine. They had just finished and Buvat rose, horrified at havingto come home at such an hour. It was the first time such a thing hadever happened to him; he rolled up the manuscript, tied it with a redribbon, which had probably served as a sash to Mademoiselle de Launay,put it in his pocket, took his cane, picked up his hat, and left thehouse, abridging his leave-taking as much as possible. To add to hismisfortunes there was no moonlight, the night was cloudy. Buvatregretted not having two sous in his pocket to cross the ferry which wasthen where now stands the Pont des Arts; but we have already explainedBuvat's theory to our readers, and he was obliged to return as he hadcome--by the Quai Conti, the Rue Pont-Neuf, the Rue du Coq, and the RueSaint Honore.
Everything had gone right so far, and except the statue of Henri IV. ofwhich Buvat had forgotten either the existence or the place, and whichhad frightened him terribly, and the Samaritaine, which, fifty stepsoff, had struck the half-hour without any preparation, the noise ofwhich had made poor belated Buvat tremble from head to foot, he had runno real peril, but on arriving at the Rue des Bons Enfants things took adifferent look. In the first place, the aspect of the street itself,long, narrow, and only lighted by two flickering lanterns in the wholelength, was not reassuring, and this evening it had to Buvat a verysingular appearance; he did not know whether he was asleep or awake; hefancied that he saw before him some fantastic vision, such as he hadheard told of the old Flemish sorceries; the streets seemed alive--theposts seemed to oppose themselves to his passage--the recesses of thedoors whispered to each other--men crossed like shadows from one side ofthe street to the other; at last, when he had arrived at No. 24, he wasstopped, as we have seen, by the chevalier and the captain. It was thenthat D'Harmental had recognized him, and had protected him against thefirst impulse of Roquefinette, inviting him to continue his route asquickly as possible. There was no need to repeat the request--Buvat setoff at a trot, gained the Place des Victoires, the Rue du Mail, the RueMontmartre, and at last arrived at his own house, No. 4, Rue duTemps-Perdu, where, nevertheless, he did not think himself safe till hehad shut the door and bolted it behind him.
There he stopped an instant to breathe and to light his candle--thenascended the stairs, but he felt in his legs the effect of theoccurrence,
for he trembled so that he could hardly get to the top.
As to Bathilde, she had remained alone, getting more and more uneasy asthe evening advanced. Up to seven o'clock she had seen a light in herneighbor's room, but at that time the lamp had been extinguished, andhad not been relighted. Then Bathilde's time became divided between twooccupations--one of which consisted in standing at her window to see ifher neighbor did not return; the other in kneeling before the crucifix,where she said her evening prayers. She heard nine, ten, eleven, andhalf-past eleven, strike successively. She had heard all the noises inthe streets die away one by one, and sink gradually into that vague andheavy sound which seems the breathing of a sleeping town; and all thiswithout bringing her the slightest inkling as to whether he who hadcalled himself her brother had sunk under the danger which hung over hishead, or come triumphant through the crisis.
She was then in her own room, without light, so that no one might seethat she was watching, and kneeling before her crucifix for the tenthtime, when the door opened, and, by the light of his candle she sawBuvat so pale and haggard that she knew in an instant that somethingmust have happened to him, and she rose, in spite of the uneasiness shefelt for another, and darted toward him, asking what was the matter. Butit was no easy thing to make Buvat speak, in the state he then was; theshock had reached his mind, and his tongue stammered as much as his legstrembled.
Still, when Buvat was seated in his easy chair, and had wiped hisforehead with his handkerchief, when he had made two or three journeysto the door to see that his terrible hosts of the Rue des Bons Enfantshad not followed him home, he began to stutter out his adventure. Hetold how he had been stopped in the Rue des Bons Enfants by a band ofrobbers, whose lieutenant, a ferocious-looking man nearly six feet high,had wanted to kill him, when the captain had come and saved his life.Bathilde listened with rapt attention, first, because she loved herguardian sincerely, and that his condition showed that--right orwrong--he had been greatly terrified; next, because nothing thathappened that night seemed indifferent to her; and, strange as the ideawas, it seemed to her that the handsome young man was not whollyunconnected with the scene in which Buvat had just played a part. Sheasked him if he had time to observe the face of the young man who hadcome to his aid, and saved his life.
Buvat answered that he had seen him face to face, as he saw her at thatmoment, and that the proof was that he was a handsome young man of fromfive to six and twenty, in a large felt hat, and wrapped in a cloak;moreover, in the movement which he had made in stretching out his handto protect him, the cloak had opened, and shown that, besides his sword,he carried a pair of pistols in his belt. These details were too preciseto allow Buvat to be accused of dreaming. Preoccupied as Bathilde waswith the danger which the chevalier ran, she was none the less touchedby that, smaller no doubt, but still real, which Buvat had just escaped;and as repose is the best remedy for all shocks, physical or moral,after offering him the glass of wine and sugar which he allowed himselfon great occasions, and which nevertheless he refused on this one, shereminded him of his bed, where he ought to have been two hours before.
The shock had been violent enough to deprive Buvat of all wish forsleep, and even to convince him that he should sleep badly that night;but he reflected that in sitting up he should force Bathilde to sit up,and should see her in the morning with red eyes and pale cheeks, and,with his usual sacrifice of self, he told Bathilde that she wasright--that he felt that sleep would do him good--lit his candle--kissedher forehead--and went up to his own room; not without stopping two orthree times on the staircase to hear if there was any noise.
Left alone, Bathilde listened to the steps of Buvat, who went up intohis own room; then she heard the creaking of his door, which he doublelocked; then, almost as trembling as Buvat himself, she ran to thewindow, forgetting even to pray.
She remained thus for nearly an hour, but without having kept anymeasure of time. Then she gave a cry of joy, for through the window,which no curtain now obscured, she saw her neighbor's door open, andD'Harmental enter with a candle in his hand.
By a miracle of foresight Bathilde had been right--the man in the felthat and the cloak, who had protected Buvat, was really the youngstranger, for the stranger had on a felt hat and a cloak; and moreover,hardly had he returned and shut the door, with almost as much care asBuvat had his, and thrown his cloak on a chair, than she saw that he hada tight coat of a dark color, and in his belt a sword and pistols. Therewas no longer any doubt: it was from head to foot the description givenby Buvat. Bathilde was the more able to assure herself of this, thatD'Harmental, without taking off any of his attire, took two or threeturns in his room, his arms crossed, and thinking deeply; then he tookhis pistols from his belt, assured himself that they were primed, andplaced them on the table near his bed, unclasped his sword, took it halfout of the scabbard, replaced it, and put it under his pillow; then,shaking his head, as if to shake out the somber ideas that annoyed him,he approached the window, opened it, and gazed earnestly at that of theyoung girl, who, forgetting that she could not be seen, stepped back,and let the curtain fall before her, as if the darkness which surroundedher were not a sufficient screen.
She remained thus motionless and silent, her hand on her heart, as if tostill its beatings; then she quietly raised the curtain, but that of herneighbor was down, and she saw nothing but his shadow passing andrepassing before it.