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Toward Daguenet and Fauchery Mme Hugon behaved unjustly too. The former especially never left Les Fondettes, for he had given up the idea of renewing the old connection and was busy paying the most respectful attentions to Estelle. Fauchery also stayed with the Muffat ladies.
Why, the girl was a servant, nothing more nor less; she belonged to Gideon Darden, the drunken minister; she was to have married Jean Hugon, the half-breed trader.
It was ten of the clock upon this same night when Hugon left the glebe house. Audrey, crouching in the dark beside her window, heard him bid the minister, as drunk as himself, good-night, and watched him go unsteadily down the path that led to the road. Once he paused, and made as if to return; then went on to his lair at the crossroads ordinary. Again Audrey waited, this time by the door.
She raised her hand, and they fell back, making for her a path. Haward, bewildered, started forward, but her cry was not to him. It was to the figure just behind him, the cloaked figure whose hand grasped the hunting-knife which from the stage, as she had looked to where stood her lover, she had seen or divined. "Jean! Jean Hugon!" she cried.
The red blooms of the columbine being in the way, he took up the bunch and tossed it out of the window. With the light thud of the mass upon the ground eyes of husband and wife met. "Hugon would marry the girl," said the latter, twisting the hem of her apron with restless fingers. Without change of countenance, Darden leaned forward, seized her by the shoulder and shook her violently.
"See, I have brought you a ribbon from the town. Behold!" and he fluttered a crimson streamer. Audrey caught her breath; then gazed, reassured, at the five yards of water between her and the bank. Had Hugon stood there in his hunting dress, she would have felt them no security; but he was wearing his coat and breeches of fine cloth, his ruffled shirt, and his great black periwig.
Mme Hugon, though weary and absent-minded, had caught some phrases of the conversation, and she now intervened and summed up in her tolerant way by remarking to the Marquis de Chouard, who just then bowed to her: "These ladies are too severe. Existence is so bitter for every one of us! Ought we not to forgive others much, my friend, if we wish to merit forgiveness ourselves?"
Haward, after one deep oath and an impetuous, quickly checked movement to follow the flying figure, stood beneath the oak and watched that meeting: Hugon, in his wine-colored coat and Blenheim wig, fierce, inquisitive, bragging of what he might do; the girl suddenly listless, silent, set only upon an immediate return through the fields to the glebe house.
Haward shrugged his shoulders, but would not turn his head, and thereby grant recognition to Jean Hugon, the trader. Did he so, the half-breed might break into speech, provoke a quarrel, make God knew what assertion, what disturbance. To-morrow steps should be taken Ah, the curtain! The silence deepened, and men and women leaned forward holding their breath.
The discrepancy between the stated figures and the actual performance of the engine was a disappointment to the using public, and, as a result, the Lenoir engine got a bad name. Hugon, director of the Parisian gas-works, who, together with Reithmann, a watchmaker of Münich, hotly contested Lenoir's priority to this invention, brought out a modification of this engine.
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