A Second Home | Page 6

Black passed down the Rue du Tourniquet at
the quite unwonted hour of one in the morning. The perfect silence
allowed of his hearing before passing the house the lachrymose voice
of the old mother, and Caroline's even sadder tones, mingling with the
swish of a shower of sleet. He crept along as slowly as he could; and
then, at the risk of being taken up by the police, he stood still below the
window to hear the mother and daughter, while watching them through
the largest of the holes in the yellow muslin curtains, which were eaten
away by wear as a cabbage leaf is riddled by caterpillars. The
inquisitive stranger saw a sheet of paper on the table that stood between
the two work-frames, and on which stood the lamp and the globes filled
with water. He at once identified it as a writ. Madame Crochard was
weeping, and Caroline's voice was thick, and had lost its sweet,
caressing tone.
"Why be so heartbroken, mother? Monsieur Molineux will not sell us
up or turn us out before I have finished this dress; only two nights more
and I shall take it home to Madame Roguin."
"And supposing she keeps you waiting as usual?--And will the money
for the gown pay the baker too?"
The spectator of this scene had long practice in reading faces; he
fancied he could discern that the mother's grief was as false as the
daughter's was genuine; he turned away, and presently came back.
When he next peeped through the hole in the curtain, Madame
Crochard was in bed. The young needlewoman, bending over her frame,
was embroidering with indefatigable diligence; on the table, with the
writ lay a triangular hunch of bread, placed there, no doubt, to sustain
her in the night and to remind her of the reward of her industry. The
stranger was tremulous with pity and sympathy; he threw his purse in
through a cracked pane so that it should fall at the girl's feet; and then,
without waiting to enjoy her surprise, he escaped, his cheeks tingling.
Next morning the shy and melancholy stranger went past with a look of
deep preoccupation, but he could not escape Caroline's gratitude; she
had opened her window and affected to be digging in the square

window- box buried in snow, a pretext of which the clumsy ingenuity
plainly told her benefactor that she had been resolved not to see him
only through the pane. Her eyes were full of tears as she bowed her
head, as much as to say to her benefactor, "I can only repay you from
my heart."
But the Gentleman in Black affected not to understand the meaning of
this sincere gratitude. In the evening, as he came by, Caroline was busy
mending the window with a sheet of paper, and she smiled at him,
showing her row of pearly teeth like a promise. Thenceforth the
Stranger went another way, and was no more seen in the Rue due
Tourniquet.

It was one day early in the following May that, as Caroline was giving
the roots of the honeysuckle a glass of water, one Saturday morning,
she caught sight of a narrow strip of cloudless blue between the black
lines of houses, and said to her mother:
"Mamma, we must go to-morrow for a trip to Montmorency!"
She had scarcely uttered the words, in a tone of glee, when the
Gentleman in Black came by, sadder and more dejected than ever.
Caroline's innocent and ingratiating glance might have been taken for
an invitation. And, in fact, on the following day, when Madame
Crochard, dressed in a pelisse of claret-colored merinos, a silk bonnet,
and striped shawl of an imitation Indian pattern, came out to choose
seats in a chaise at the corner of the Rue du Faubourg Saint-Denis and
the Rue d'Enghien, there she found her Unknown standing like a man
waiting for his wife. A smile of pleasure lighted up the Stranger's face
when his eye fell on Caroline, her neat feet shod in plum-colored
prunella gaiters, and her white dress tossed by a breeze that would have
been fatal to an ill-made woman, but which displayed her graceful form.
Her face, shaded by a rice-straw bonnet lined with pink silk, seemed to
beam with a reflection from heaven; her broad, plum-colored belt set
off a waist he could have spanned; her hair, parted in two brown bands
over a forehead as white as snow, gave her an expression of innocence

which no other feature contradicted. Enjoyment seemed to have made
Caroline as light as the straw of her hat; but when she saw the
Gentleman in Black, radiant hope suddenly eclipsed her bright dress
and her beauty. The Stranger, who appeared to be in doubt, had not