“Well, my boy,” said Tante, whose ancient eyes were sparkling with eagerness. “By what appears, thou art a widower since several days.”
“Yes,” said the host, “it appears that thou art a widower.” And added enthusiastically: “I am pretty content to see thee, my old one.”
The hostess smiled at the widower with sympathetic indulgence.
“What! Who has told us? All Paris knows it!”
“Well,” said the cousin, looking at the carpet and apparently communing with himself--he always had an air of self-communing, “I suppose it’s true!” He drank the tenth of a teaspoonful of coffee.
“Eh, well, my friend,” the Tante commented. “I do not know if thou hast done well. That did not cost thee too dear, and she had a good-hearted face.” Tante spoke with an air of special intimacy, because she and the cousin had kept house together for some years at one period.
“Thou hast seen her, Tante?” the hostess asked, surprised a little out of the calm in which she was crocheting.
“Have I seen her? I believe it well! I caught them together once when I was driving in the Bois.”
“It was not Antoinette,” said the Tante. “And thou hast no need to say it. Thou quittedst Antoinette in ‘96, before I had begun to hire that carriage. I recall it to myself perfectly.”
“I suppose now it will be the grand spree,” said the hostess, “during several months.”
“The grand spree!” Tante broke in caustically. “Have no fear. The grand spree--that is not his kind. It is not he who will scatter his money with those birds. He is not so stupid as that.” She laughed drily.
“Is she _rosse_, the Tante, all the same!” the host, flowing over with good nature, comforted his cousin.
“What! The children demand monsieur!” he exploded. “At nine o’clock! It is not possible that they are not asleep!”
“They say that monsieur promised to return to them after dinner.”
“It is true!” he admitted, with a gesture of discovery. “It is true!”
“I pray thee,” said the mother. “Go at once. And do not excite them.”
“My little Bennett,” the mother leaned towards me, “I supplicate you--at this hour--”
“But naturally he will come with me!” the host cried obstreperously.
We went, down a long narrow passage. There they were in their beds, the children, in a small bedroom divided into two by a low screen of ribbed glass, the boy on one side and the girl on the other. The window gave on to a small subsidiary courtyard. Through the half-drawn curtains the lighted windows of rooms opposite could be discerned, rising, storey after storey, up out of sight. A night-light burned on a table. The nurse stood apart, at the door. The children were lively, but pale. They had begun to go to school, and, except the journey to and from school, they seemed to have almost no outdoor exercise. No garden was theirs. The hall and the passages were their sole playground. And all the best part of their lives was passed between walls in a habitation twenty-five or thirty feet above ground, in the middle of Paris. Yet they were very well. The doctor did not romp with them. No! He simply and candidly caressed them, girl and boy, in turn, calling them passionately by the most beautiful names, burying his head in the bedclothes, and fondling their wild hair. He then entreated them, with genuine humility, to compose themselves for sleep, and parted last from the girl.