"Yes--she is fading fast. Small women ought not to grow stout."
"Anyhow, I have no patience with her for keeping a girl of fifteen in short skirts."
"You are making her out older than she is."
"How is that?--how is that? She is two years younger than Giselle, who has just entered her eighteenth year."
While the two ladies were exchanging these little remarks, the Baronne de Nailles was saying to the young naval cadet:
"Monsieur Fred, we should be charmed to keep you with us, but possibly you might like to see some of your old friends. Jacqueline can take you to them. They will be glad to see you."
"Tiens!--that"s true," said Jacqueline. "Dolly and Belle are yonder. You remember Isabelle Ray, who used to take dancing lessons with us."
"Of course I do," said Fred, following his cousin with a feeling of regret that his sword was not knocking against his legs, increasing his importance in the eyes of all the ladies who were present. He was not, however; sorry to leave their imposing circle. Above all, he was glad to escape from the clear-sighted, critical eyes of Madame de Nailles.
On the other hand, to be sent off to the girls" corner, after being insulted by being told he had not grown, hurt his sense of self-importance.
Meantime Jacqueline was taking him back to her own corner, where he was greeted by two or three little exclamations of surprise, shaking hands, however, as his former playmates drew their skirts around them, trying to make room for him to sit down.
"Young ladies," said Jacqueline, "I present to you a "bordachien"--a little middy from the practice-ship the Borda."
They burst out laughing: "A bordachien! A middy from the practice-ship!"
they cried.
"I shall not be much longer on the practice-ship," said the young man, with a gesture which seemed as if his hand were feeling for the hilt of his sword, which was not there, "for I am going very soon on my first voyage as an ensign."
"Yes," explained Jacqueline, "he is going to be transferred from the "Borda" to the "Jean-Bart"--which, by the way, is no longer the "Jean-Bart", only people call her so because they are used to it.
Meantime you see before you "C," the great "C," the famous "C," that is, he is the pupil who stands highest on the roll of the naval school at this moment."
There was a vague murmur of applause. Poor Fred was indeed in need of some appreciation on the score of merit, for he was not much to look upon, being at that trying age when a young fellow"s moustache is only a light down, an age at which youths always look their worst, and are awkward and unsociable because they are timid.
"Then you are no longer an idle fellow," said Dolly, rather teasingly.
"People used to say that you went into the navy to get rid of your lessons. That I can quite understand."
"Oh, he has pa.s.sed many difficult exams," cried Giselle, coming to the rescue.
"I thought I had had enough of school," said Fred, without making any defense, "and besides I had other reasons for going into the navy."
His "other reasons" had been a wish to emanc.i.p.ate himself from the excessive solicitude of his mother, who kept him tied to her ap.r.o.n-strings like a little girl. He was impatient to do something for himself, to become a man as soon as possible. But he said nothing of all this, and to escape further questions devoured three or four little cakes that were offered him. Before taking them he removed his gloves and displayed a pair of chapped and h.o.r.n.y hands.
"Why--poor Fred!" cried Jacqueline, who remarked them in a moment, "what kind of almond paste do you use?"
Much annoyed, he replied, curtly: "We all have to row, we have also to attend to the machinery. But that is only while we are cadets. Of course, such apprenticeship is very hard. After that we shall get our stripes and be ordered on foreign service, and expect promotion."
"And glory," said Giselle, who found courage to speak.
Fred thanked her with a look of grat.i.tude. She, at least, understood his profession. She entered into his feelings far better than Jacqueline, who had been his first confidante--Jacqueline, to whom he had confided his purposes, his ambition, and his day-dreams. He thought Jacqueline was selfish. She seemed to care only for herself. And yet, selfish or not selfish, she pleased him better than all the other girls he knew--a thousand times more than gentle, sweet Giselle.
"Ah, glory, of course!" repeated Jacqueline. "I understand how much that counts, but there is glory of various kinds, and I know the kind that I prefer," she added in a tone which seemed to imply that it was not that of arms, or of perilous navigation. "We all know," she went on, "that not every man can have genius, but any sailor who has good luck can get to be an admiral."
"Let us hope you will be one soon, Monsieur Fred," said Dolly. "You will have well deserved it, according to the way you have distinguished yourself on board the "Borda.""
This induced Fred to let them understand something of life on board the practice-ship; he told how the masters who resided on sh.o.r.e ascended by a ladder to the gun-deck, which had been turned into a schoolroom; how six cadets occupied the s.p.a.ce intended for each gun-carriage, where hammocks hung from hooks served them instead of beds; how the chapel was in a closet opened only on Sundays. He described the gymnastic feats in the rigging, the practice in gunnery, and many other things which, had they been well described, would have been interesting; but Fred was only a poor narrator. The conclusion the young ladies seemed to reach unanimously after hearing his descriptions, was discouraging. They cried almost with one voice--
"Think of any woman being willing to marry a sailor."
"Why not?" asked Giselle, very promptly.
"Because, what"s the use of a husband who is always out of your reach, as it were, between water and sky? One would better be a widow. Widows, at any rate, can marry again. But you, Giselle, don"t understand these things. You are going to be a nun."
"Had I been in your place, Fred," said Isabelle Ray, "I should rather have gone into the cavalry school at Saint Cyr. I should have wanted to be a good huntsman, had I been a man, and they say naval officers are never good hors.e.m.e.n."
Poor Fred! He was not making much progress among the young girls. Almost everything people talked about outside his cadet life was unknown to him; what he could talk about seemed to have no interest for any one, unless indeed it might interest Giselle, who was an adept in the art of sympathetic listening, never having herself anything to say.
Besides this, Fred was by no means at his ease in talking to Jacqueline.
They had been told not to "tutoyer" each other, because they were getting too old for such familiarity, and it was he, and not she, who remembered this prohibition. Jacqueline perceived this after a while, and burst out laughing:
"Tiens! You call me "you,"" she cried, "and I ought not to say "thou" but "you." I forgot. It seems so odd, when we have always been accustomed to "tutoyer" each other."
"One ought to give it up after one"s first communion," said the eldest Mademoiselle Wermant, sententiously. "We ceased to "tutoyer" our boy cousins after that. I am told nothing annoys a husband so much as to see these little familiarities between his wife and her cousins or her playmates."
Giselle looked very much astonished at this speech, and her air of disapproval amused Belle and Yvonne exceedingly. They began presently to talk of the cla.s.ses in which they were considered brilliant pupils, and of their success in compositions. They said that sometimes very difficult subjects were given out. A week or two before, each had had to compose a letter purporting to be from Dante in exile to a friend in Florence, describing Paris as it was in his time, especially the manners and customs of its universities, ending by some allusion to the state of matters between the Guelphs and the Ghibellines.
"Good heavens! And could you do it?" said Giselle, whose knowledge of history was limited to what may be found in school abridgments.
It was therefore a great satisfaction to her when Fred declared that he never should have known how to set about it.
"Oh! papa helped me a little," said Isabelle, whose father wrote articles much appreciated by the public in the "Revue des Deux Mondes." "But he said at the same time that it was horrid to give such crack-brained stuff to us poor girls. Happily, our subject this week is much nicer. We have to make comparisons between La Tristesse d"Olympio, Souvenir, and Le Lac". That will be something interesting."
"The Tristesse d"Olympio?" repeated Giselle, in a tone of interrogation.
"You know, of course, that it is Victor Hugo"s," said Mademoiselle de Wermant, with a touch of pity.
Giselle answered with sincerity and humility, "I only knew that Le Lac was by Lamartine."
"Well!--she knows that much," whispered Belle to Yvonne--"just that much, anyhow."
While they were whispering and laughing, Jacqueline recited, in a soft voice, and with feeling that did credit to her instructor in elocution, Mademoiselle X----, of the Theatre Francais:
May the moan of the wind, the green rushes" soft sighing, The fragrance that floats in the air you have moved, May all heard, may all breathed, may all seen, seem but trying To say: They have loved.
Then she added, after a pause: "Isn"t that beautiful?"
"How dares she say such words?" thought Giselle, whose sense of propriety was outraged by this allusion to love. Fred, too, looked askance and was not comfortable, for he thought that Jacqueline had too much a.s.surance for her age, but that, after all, she was becoming more and more charming.
At that moment Belle and Yvonne were summoned, and they departed, full of an intention to spread everywhere the news that Giselle, the little goose, had actually known that Le Lac had been written by Lamartine. The Benedictine Sisters positively had acquired that much knowledge.
These girls were not the only persons that day at the reception who indulged in a little ill-natured talk after going away. Mesdames d"Argy and de Monredon, on their way to the Faubourg St. Germain, criticised Madame de Nailles pretty freely. As they crossed the Parc Monceau to reach their carriage, which was waiting for them on the Boulevard Malesherbes, they made the young people, Giselle and Fred, walk ahead, that they might have an opportunity of expressing themselves freely, the old dowager especially, whose toothless mouth never lost an opportunity of smirching the character and the reputation of her neighbors.
"When I think of the pains my poor cousin de Nailles took to impress upon us all that he was making what is called a "mariage raisonnable"!