The girl nodded, and stumbling along towards the place indicated, contrived on her way to knock down and break into atoms a white dish.
"Oh, the unfortunate child!" cried Marie, darting forward. "Another! and it was my last! How many more things will you destroy!"
At this reproach the guilt-stricken Perine covered her face and howled aloud, and Madame Didier"s momentary anger pa.s.sed.
"There, don"t cry!" she said, "crying does no good, and it was an accident. You"ll be more careful another time, won"t you? Try to move gently, and look where you go, or some day you will hurt yourself. At present let me see you stand well against the wall, so! I put on the soup--and we are ready."
As she said these words she went back to the alcove. And then a strange thing happened. For from behind the gaily-figured chintz, there issued a strange hoa.r.s.e whisper, which caused so little astonishment to Madame Didier, that she merely echoed the words aloud. Apparently this was Perine"s lesson.
"Seven six nine, and eight five four," repeated Madame Didier.
The answer from the girl came instantaneously:
"Sixteen hundred and twenty-three."
Her teacher paused for a moment, perhaps to allow the whisperer time for objection, if there were one to make, but as nothing came she said cheerfully:
"Good! Now let me think of another."
"Nine ought three, and fifteen nine seven," prompted the hidden voice.
"Ah, here is a fine one! Nine ought--" she hesitated, "fifteen--"
The voice corrected her impatiently: "Nine ought three, and fifteen nine seven."
In the same whisper she answered "Hush!" warningly, before repeating the figures aloud and correctly. The girl, on her part, returned rapidly and indifferently:
"Twenty-five hundred."
"She seems a different creature when she is doing it!" Marie exclaimed admiringly. "Now one more, and then I must run down and see in what sort of a temper Monsieur Plon finds himself. If it is good, he will lend me his journal. At any rate, I shall only be gone a moment. _Allons!_ Something difficult, something to take away, shall it be?"
As before the whisper responded:
"From thirteen thousand nine hundred and fifty-nine, take eight thousand five hundred and four."
Madame Didier began in a puzzled voice, "From eight thousand five hundred and four, take thirteen--" but, seeing Perine shake her head, caught herself up. "No, no, not that, of course not that!"
"The other way, stupid woman!" said the whisper.
Slowly she started again, "From thirteen thousand," and, interprompted by the mysterious voice, arrived at the end of her sum, "nine hundred and--fifty--nine--take--eight--thousand--five hundred--and--four."
Quick as thought came the answer:
"Five thousand four hundred and fifty-five."
"All those fives! You are really a wonder, Perine!" said Marie happily.
"I never could do anything like that, decidedly I am only fit to make soup. Well, every one to his trade--we can"t dine upon figures. If we could you would provide us with plenty, eh, my child? But now I have something for you to do while I am away. Here is the stool; I am going to put it before the fire, so, and you shall sit upon it and watch the pot for me. Don"t move, and don"t look behind you, and then, by-and-by, you shall have a basin of the soup. If only I had something to put into it, something good, for bread and onions are not too fattening. However, there is plenty to be thankful for. Remember, Perine, you must not take your eyes off the soup."
The girl, who seemed to have the faculty of obedience, sat down where she was directed, and fastened her stolid gaze upon the pot. For a time there was absolute silence in the garret, a ray of cold winter sunshine, cold but bright (for this was Paris), streamed in through the little window in the roof, and fell on Perine"s slouching figure and coa.r.s.e hair. Less than five minutes, however, had pa.s.sed, when the chintz curtains of the alcove shook, parted, and from between them looked out a pale and haggard man"s face.
It will be guessed that this third inhabitant of the sixth floor attic was no other than Jean Didier, whose name had been entered in the _bureau_ of police--when they tried to get some imperfect statistics of missing men--as "Jean Didier, glazier; fought with the insurgents, wounded at the barricade of the Rue Soleil d"Or, May 28th, 1871; denounced as Communist by Andre Fort; executed on the spot."
Nevertheless, for once the police were wrong. Jean was not shot, though it was true he was shot at. Fear, or loss of blood, or an instinctive effort at self-preservation, caused him to reel and fall just a second before a couple of bullets which should have found a home in his body, spent themselves in the blood-stained wall over his head. The tide of slaughter ebbed away, leaving ghastly heaps of dead men. From one of these a shadow by-and-by detached itself, and drifted homewards, to the spot where Marie was waiting in terrible anguish.
Her courage came back with the need for it; it took very little to add to the disguise which fire and a wound had brought upon him; the people in the house were at that moment much occupied with dragging down the papers they had pasted over their windows. He crawled upstairs, and when she had hastily bound up his wound, and given him some food, he managed to get out on the roof through the trap-door. There he spent three days, coming down at night, till she was able to put up her new chintz curtains, and here in the garret he had remained ever since, sometimes fairly patient, sometimes finding his lot insupportable, and railing at fate, at Marie, and at Providence. He had had a few narrow escapes, but his wife was as cunning as a fox when he was concerned, and fortune had favoured him.
Perine"s presence had a double aspect. The loneliness of the position was so difficult for a man of his temperament to support, that he welcomed it at times as a distraction, and these exercises of the strange ingenuity of brain which she possessed, at the cost, as it seemed, of all other intelligences, would very often interest and amuse him. On the other hand she was quite as valuable as a grievance. If he had no other fault to find with his wife, he could always blame her for suffering the idiot girl to hang about the place, and the relief of this was enormous. On the present occasion he contemplated her broad back with displeasure.
"Wretched creature! There she sits, and will sit till Marie comes back; I wonder what she thinks would happen to her if she were to look round?
Lucky for me if she pictures some terrible fate. What sort of confused nonsense is running through her head now? Soup and Marie take a prominent place, I wager. So precious hard up does one become in this rat"s hole, that I make her my problem as she makes the soup hers, poor wretch! Yet, my excellent friend, Jean Didier, I would counsel you to keep your compa.s.sion for yourself, for, believe me, you want it at least as much. As much? Rather, a hundred times more! For she--she knows nothing of the blessings she has missed, while I--Heavens, I know too well! To be cooped up here, to see no one but Marie and this idiot; to be aware that at any moment any thing, the merest trifle, might betray me to death, or at least transportation to New California,--was ever man so unhappy in this world!"
Jean, who had a turn for the melodramatic, tugged despairingly with both hands at his hair, Perine, meanwhile, intent upon the soup, bent forward and stirred it.
"Soup for mother and Perine," she muttered.
"What red hands she has!" continued Jean with a grimace, "and I hate to hear her call Marie, mother. But it"s just Marie all over. She never could see a poor wretch, were it only a hunted rat, but she must take it up, and give herself all the trouble in the world, when she might have left it alone. She was just the same as a little girl, I see her now, in her little round cap and woollen frock, scattering food for the frozen-out birds in the hard winters. Such a pretty, rosy-faced little thing as she was, and they all so fond of her! I recollect taking her to school in my wooden sledge, and she--What"s the girl about now?
Why--what dog has bitten her! She has taken my tobacco from the shelf--she--not--! Yes, by heaven, she has poured it all into the soup!"
"Perine heard mother say she wanted something to make the soup good,"
laughed the girl, nodding her head, and quite unconscious that behind her the enraged Jean was violently shaking his fist.
"Horror! To see tobacco, dinner, everything ruined by that creature without being able to say a word! It is simply atrocious of Marie to go away, leave her to do all this mischief, and then expect me to put up with it! My pipe, my one comfort! Ah-h-h-h! if only I could box her ears and stop her from grinning away as if she had done a clever thing!"
It was at this moment that Marie returned, carrying in her arms a cabbage. At the door, seeing the angry and distracted gesture of her husband, she paused in consternation.
"But what then? Has anything gone wrong? The soup--Perine, you unfortunate child, have you touched the soup?"
The girl pointed with triumph to where the tobacco had been.
"Good stuff, mother," she said, nodding.
"The tobacco! You have it put in!--Oh, my poor friend, no wonder you are angry!" said Madame Didier in an undertone.
"Out with her!" cried her husband in a fierce whisper.
"Perine, Perine, and I have warned you so often to touch nothing without leave! Now you have spoilt the soup, and we can have no dinner."
There was this inconvenience in the quick remorse which seized the girl when Marie reproved her, however gently, that she broke at once into sobs, which were as clumsy and unmanageable as her hands and feet. Jean disliked them intensely, and he now made frantic signs to his wife that she was to be sent away. "But she is as hungry as we are," pleaded Marie, "and see, M. Plon has given me a cabbage, I can manage something."
He was, however, inexorable; and his wife, always afraid of his committing some imprudence, though on the whole Jean might be trusted to take care of himself, said sorrowfully:
"Perine, my poor child, you must go; there is no dinner for you today.
Don"t cry, don"t cry; you meant no harm--you did not know, and Heaven is witness how sorely we sometimes suffer for that!"
Between her sobs the girl jerked out piteously:
"Perine come back?"
Marie looked imploringly at her husband, but he shook his head.