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For how could he tell, who thought very little about it, his head being always full of some new work? The two old comrades remained on excellent terms, but little by little they began to see less of one another. The war had made Bertin a furious jingo.
In the general mental confusion, Bertin, naturally shocked by Clerambault's ideas, might have remonstrated with him frankly, face to face; but without any warning, he began by a public denunciation.
"Who is that lady?" Annette inquired. "I don't know," said Bertin, at which reply the Duchess and the Countess exchanged a smile.
He remained gasping, and reread the article in order to grasp its every meaning. He and his equals were thrown aside with outrageous disrespect; and he arose murmuring those words, which remained on his lips: "The old-fashioned art of Olivier Bertin."
Then a negro with woolly head, attired only in a girdle, with shining body and muscular limbs, ran before him to raise a curtain at the other end; and Bertin entered the large hot-air room, round, high-studded, silent, almost as mystic as a temple.
Would it not be better, for the sake of appearances, to act, with Olivier Bertin himself, the hypocritical comedy of indifference and forgetfulness, to show him that she had effaced that moment from her memory and from her life? But could she do it?
I could not tell whether Madame Bertin saw it also; she continued to walk, looking straight before her; her face was calm." "'Doubtless he has his occupations here? I ventured presently. 'There are matters in which he interests himself non?" "'That is so, she replied. 'And this evening he tells me he has a letter to write, concerning some matters of importance.
He crushed the paper in his hand and, with a loud groan, of misery, fled over the bridge like one possessed. Madame la Comtesse de Sucy never went to England. She was one of those French women who would sooner endure misery in their own beloved country than comfort anywhere else. She outlived the horrors of the Revolution and speaks in her memoirs of the man Bertin.
The young girl, whose future gay audacity was already apparent under an air of timid playfulness, replied: "It is I who shall not dare to say 'thou' to Monsieur Bertin." Her mother smiled. "Yes, continue the old habit I will allow you to do so," she said. "You will soon renew your acquaintance with him." But Annette shook her head. "No, no, it would embarrass me," she said.
"Doubtless the blessed St. Bertin, beneath whose shadow we repose here in peace," said Hereward, somewhat dryly. "I will go barefoot to his altar to-morrow, and offer my last jewel," said Gunhilda. "You," said Gyda, without noticing her daughter, "are, above all men, the man who is needed."
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