“Ah! tell me the truth,” murmured Catherine.
“What?”
“Are you not yet my friend?”
“Alas!” said the poor fellow, who, as yet without experience, began to make love, through confessions which only the skilful know how to manage.
Pitou felt that his secret was rushing to his lips; he felt that the first word Catherine said would place him in her power.
He was aware, though, if he spoke he would die when Catherine confessed to him what as yet he only suspected.
He was silent as an old Roman, and bowed to Catherine with a respect which touched the young girl’s heart, bowed to Madame Billot, and disappeared.
Catherine made a bound as if she would follow him.
Madame Billot said to her daughter:—
“He is a good lad, and has much feeling.”
When alone, Pitou began a long monologue on the following theme:—
“This is what is called love; at certain times it is very sweet, but at others very bitter.”
The poor lad did not know that in love there is both honey and absinthe, and that Monsieur Isidore had all the honey.
From this hour, during which she had suffered horribly, Catherine conceived a kind of respectful fear for Pitou, which a few days before she was far from feeling towards him.
When one cannot inspire love, it is not bad to inspire fear; and Pitou, who had great ideas of personal dignity, would have been not a little flattered had he discovered the existence even of such a sentiment.
As he was not, however, physiologist enough to see what the ideas of a woman a league and a half from him are, he wept and sang a countless number of songs, the theme of which was unfortunate love.
Pitou at last reached his own room, where he found his chivalric guard had placed a sentinel. The man, dead drunk, lay on a bench with his gun across his legs.
Pitou awoke him.
He then learned that his thirty men, good and true, had ordered an entertainment at old Father Tellier’s—the old man was the Vatel of Haramont—and that twelve ladies were to crown the Turenne who had overcome the Condé of the next canton.
Pitou was too much fatigued for his stomach not to have suffered.
Pitou, being led by his sentinel to the banquet-hall, was received with acclamations which made the very walls tremble.
He bowed, sat down in silence, and with his natural coolness attacked the veal and salad.
This state of feeling lasted until his stomach was filled and his heart relieved.
Chapter XL
An Unexpected Dénouement
FEASTING after sorrow is either an increase of grief or an absolute consolation.
Pitou saw, after the lapse of two hours, that his grief was not increased.
He arose when his companions could not.
He made even an oration on Spartan sobriety to them, when they were all dead drunk.
He bade them go away when they were asleep under the table.
We must say that the ladies disappeared during the dessert.
Pitou thought; amid all his glory and honor, the prominent subject was his last interview with Catherine.
Amid the half hints of his memory, he recalled the fact that her hand had often touched his, and that sometimes her shoulder had pressed his own, and that he on certain occasions had known all her beauties.
He then looked around him like a man awaking from a drunken dream.
He asked the shadows why so much severity towards a young woman, perfect in grace, could have been in his heart.
Pitou wished to reinstate himself with Catherine.
But how?
A Lovelace would have said, “That girl laughs at and deceives me. I will follow her example.”
Such a character would have said: “I will despise her, and make her ashamed of her love as of so much disgrace.
“I will terrify and dishonor her, and make the path to her rendezvous painful.”
Pitou, like a good fellow, though heated with wine and love, said to himself, “Sometime I will make Catherine ashamed that she did not love me.”
Pitou’s chaste ideas would not permit him to fancy that Catherine did aught but coquet with Monsieur de Charny, and that she laughed at his laced boots and golden spurs.