Jack by Alphonse Daudet (web ebook reader txt) 📖

assembly, and after a little the table was gay enough. Suddenly the door was thrown open, and Ida de Barancy entered, smiling and charming.
"A thousand pardons, my friends, but I had a carriage that crept."
She wore her most beautiful dress, for she rarely had an opportunity nowadays of making a toilette, and produced a most extraordinary effect. The way in which she took her seat by Belisaire, and put her gloves in a wineglass, the manner in which she signed to one of the waiters to bring her the carte, overwhelmed the assembly with admiration. It was delightful to see her order about those imposing waiters. One of them she had recognized, the one who terrified Belisaire so much. "You are here then, now!" she said carelessly; and shook her bracelets, and kissed her hand to her son, asked for a footstool, some ice, and eau-de-Seltz, and soon knew the resources of the establishment.
"But, good heavens, you are not very gay here!" she cried suddenly. She rose, took her plate in one hand, her glass in the other. "I ask permission to change places with Madame Belisaire; I am quite sure that her husband will not complain."
This was done with much grace and consideration. The little Weber uttered a shout of indignation on seeing his mother rise from her chair, and all this noise and confusion soon changed the previous stiffness and restraint into laughs and gayety. The waiters went round and round the table executing marvellous feats, serving twenty persons from one duck so adroitly carved and served that each one had as much as he wanted. And the peas fell like hail on the plates; and the beans--prepared at one end of the table with salt, pepper, and butter; and such butter!--were mixed by a waiter who smiled maliciously as he stirred the fell combination.
At last the champagne came. With the exception of Ida, not one person there knew anything more of this wine than the name; and champagne signified to them riches, gay dinners, and gorgeous festivals. They talked about it in a low voice, waited and watched for it. Finally, at dessert, a waiter appeared with a silver-capped bottle that he proceeded to open. Ida, who never lost an opportunity of making a sensation and assuming an attitude, put her pretty hands over her ears, but the cork came out like any other cork; the waiter, holding the bottle high, went around the table very quickly. The bottle was inexhaustible; each person had some froth and a few drops at the bottom of the glass, which he drank with respect, and even believed that there was still more in the bottle. It did not matter: the magic of the word champagne had produced its effect, and there is so much French gayety in the least particle of its froth that an astonishing animation at once pervaded the assembly. A dance was proposed; but music costs so much!
"Ah! if we only had a piano," said Ida de Barancy, with a sigh, at the same time moving her fingers on the table as if she knew how to play. Belisaire disappeared for a few moments, but soon returned with a village musician, who was ready to play until morning. Jack and his mother at first felt out of their element in the noisy romp that ensued, but Ida finally organized a cotillon, and the rustling of her silk skirts and the jangling of her bracelets filled the souls of the younger women with admiration and jealousy. Meanwhile the night wore on, the little Weber was asleep wrapped in a shawl on a sofa in the corner. Jack had made many signs to Ida, who pretended not to understand, carried away as she was by the pleasure and happiness about her. Jack was like an old father who is anxious to take his daughter home from a ball.
"It is late," he said.
"Wait, dear," was her answer. At length, however, he seized her cloak, and wrapping it around her, drew her away. There was no train at that hour, and indeed no omnibus; fortunately a fiacre was passing, which they hailed. But the newly married pair decided to return on foot through the Bois de Vincennes. The fresh morning air was delicious after the heat of the restaurant; the child slept sweetly on Belisaire's shoulder, and did not even awake when he was placed in his bed. Madame Belisaire threw aside her wedding-dress, assumed a plainer one, and at once entered on the duties of the day.


CHAPTER XXI.~~EFFECTS OF POETRY.
The first visit of Madame de Barancy at Etoilles gave Jack great pleasure and also great anxiety. He was proud of his mother, but he knew her, nevertheless, to be weak and rash. He feared Cecile's calm judgment and intuitive perceptions, keen and quick as they sometimes are in the young. The first few moments tranquillized him a little. The emphatic tone in which Ida addressed Cecile as "my daughter" was all well enough, but when under the influence of a good breakfast Madame de Barancy dropped her serious air and began some of her extravagant stories, Jack felt all his apprehensions revive. She kept her auditors on the _qui vive_. Some one spoke of relatives that M. Rivals had in the Pyrenees.
"Ah, yes, the Pyrenees!" she sighed. "Gavarni, the Mer de Glace, and all that. I made that journey fifteen years ago with a friend of my family, the Duc de Casares, a Spaniard. I made his acquaintance at Biarritz in a most amusing way!"
Cecile having said how fond she was of the sea, Ida again began,--
"Ah, my love, had you seen it as I have seen it in a tempest off Palma! I was in the saloon with the captain, a coarse sort of man, who insisted on my drinking punch. I refused. Then the wretch got very angry, and opened the window, took me just at the waist, and held me above the water in the lightning and rain."
Jack tried to cut in two these dangerous recitals, but they came to life again, like those reptiles which, however mutilated, still retain life and animation.
The climax of his uneasiness was reached, however, when, just as his lessons were to begin, he heard his mother propose to Cecile to go down into the garden. What would she say when he was not there? He watched them from the window; Cecile's slender figure and quiet movements were those of a well-born, well-bred woman, while Ida, still handsome, but loud in her style and costume, affected the manners of a young girl. For the first time Jack felt his lessons to be very long, and only breathed freely again when they were all together walking in the woods. But on this day his mother's presence disturbed the harmony. She had no comprehension of love, and saw it only as something utterly ridiculous. But the worst of all was the sudden respect she entertained for _les convenances_. She recalled the young people, bade them "not to wander away so far, but to keep in sight," and then she looked at the doctor in a significant way. Jack saw more than once that his mother grated on the old doctor's nerves; but the forest was so lovely, Cecile so affectionate, and the few words they ex-changed were so mingled with the sweet clatter of birds and the humming of bees, that by degrees the poor boy forgot his terrible companion. But Ida wished to make a sensation, so they stopped at the forester's. Mere Archambauld was delighted to see her old mistress, paid her many compliments, but asked not a question in regard to D'Argenton, her keen personal sense telling her that she had best not. But the sight of this good creature, for a long time so intimately connected with their life at Aul-nettes, was too much for Ida. Without waiting for the lunch so carefully prepared by Mother Archambauld, she rose suddenly from her chair, as suddenly as if in answer to a summons unheard by the others, and went swiftly through the forest paths to her old home at Aulnettes.
The tower was more enshrouded than ever in its green foliage, and the blinds were closely drawn. Ida stood in lonely silence, listening to the tale told with silent eloquence by these gray stones. Then she broke a branch from the clematis that threw its sprays over the wall, and inhaled the breath of its starry white blossoms.
"What is it, dear mother?" said Jack, who had hastened to follow her.
"Ah!" she said, with rapidly falling tears, "you know I have so much buried here!"
Indeed the house, in its melancholy silence and with the Latin inscription over the door, resembled a tomb. She dried her eyes, but for that evening her gayety was gone. In vain did Cecile, who had been told that Madame D'Argenton was separated from her husband, try with minor cares to efface the painful impression of the day; in vain did Jack seek to interest her in all his projects for the future.
"You see, my child," she said, on her way home, "that it is not best for me to come here with you. I have suffered too much, and the wound is too recent."
Her voice trembled, and it was easy to see that, after all the humiliations to which she had been subjected by this man, she yet loved him.
For many Sundays after, Jack came alone to Etiolles, and relinquished what to him was the greatest happiness of the day, the twilight walk, and the quiet talk with Cecile, that he might return to Paris in time to dine with his mother. He took the afternoon train, and passed from the tranquillity of the country to the animation of a Sunday in the Faubourg. The sidewalks were covered by little tables, where families sat drinking their coffee, and crowds were standing, with their noses in the air, watching an enormous yellow balloon that had just been released from its moorings.
In remoter streets, people sat on the steps of the doors, and in the courtyard of the large, silent house the concierge was chatting with his neighbors, who had taken chairs out to breathe air a little fresher than they could obtain in their confined quarters within.
Sometimes, in Jack's absence, Ida, tired of her loneliness, went to a little reading-room kept by a certain Madame Leveque. The shop was filled with mouldy books, was literally obstructed by magazines and illustrated papers, which she let for a sou a day.
Here lived a dirty, pretentious old woman, who spent her time in making a certain kind of antiquated trimming of narrow, colored ribbons.
It seems that Madame Leveque had known better days, and that under the first empire her father was a man of considerable importance. "I am the godchild of the Duc de Dantzic," she said to Ida, with emphasis. She was one of the relics of past days, such as one finds occasionally in the secluded corners of old Paris. Like the dusty contents of her shop, her gilt-edged books torn and incomplete, her conversation glittered with stories of past splendors. That enchanting reign, of which she had seen but the conclusion, had dazzled her eyes, and the mere tone in which she pronounced the titles of that time evoked the memory of epaulettes and gold lace. And her anecdotes of Josephine, and of the ladies of the court! One especial tale Madame Leveque was never tired of telling: it was of the fire at the Austrian embassy, the night of the famous ball given by the Princess of Schwartzenberg. All her subsequent years had been lighted by those flames, and by that light she saw a procession of gorgeous marshals, tall ladies in very low dresses, with heads dressed _a la