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Then: “That’s too much, Mrs. Lafirme; too much too much Don’t let Grégoire burn take him from the fire, some one. Thirty day’s credit shipment made on tenth,” he rambled on at intervals in his troubled sleep. Fanny trembled with apprehension as she heard him. Surely he has brain fever she thought, and she laid her hand gently on his burning forehead.
“No, Grégoire,” she said, flinging a rose into his face when he would have seated himself beside her, “go sit by Fanny and do something to make her laugh; only don’t tickle her; David mightn’t like it. And here’s Mrs. Lafirme looking almost as glum. Now, if David would only join us with that ‘pale cast of thought’ that he bears about usually, what a merry go round we’d have.”
It can be readily imagined that Hosmer lost little time in preliminary small talk. He introduced himself vaguely as from the West; then perceiving the need of being more specific as from Saint Louis. She had guessed he was no Southerner. He had come to Mrs. Lafirme on the part of himself and others with a moneyed offer for the privilege of cutting timber from her land for a given number of years.
Lafirme, during their short conversation, had deplored her inability to procure more than two servants for her; and Fanny could not understand why it should require so many to do the work which at home was accomplished by one. But she was tired very tired, and early sought her bed, and Hosmer went in quest of his sister whom he had not yet seen.
Hosmer was noticeably silent; even Joçint as a theme failing to rouse him to more than a few words of dismissal. His will and tenacity were controlling him to one bent. He had made up his mind that he had something to say to Mrs. Lafirme, and he was impatient at any enforced delay in the telling. Grégoire slept now in the office of the mill, as a measure of precaution.
Melicent’s emphasis of speech was a thing so recurrent, so singularly her own, as to startle an unaccustomed hearer. “That opinion might carry some weight, Mel, if I hadn’t heard it scores of times from you, and of as many different women.” “Indeed you have not. Mrs. Lafirme is exceptional.
But time passing, the anticipated folly failed to reveal itself; and the only wonder was that Thérèse Lafirme so successfully followed the methods of her departed husband. Of course Thérèse had wanted to die with her Jérôme, feeling that life without him held nothing that could reconcile her to its further endurance.
Lafirme,” he said, “can’t you understand that it must be a painful thing for a man to disparage one woman to another: the woman who has been his wife to the woman he loves? Spare me the rest.” “Please have no reservations with me; I shall not misjudge you in any case,” an inexplicable something was moving her to know what remained to be told.
Lafirme had rebuilt many rods away from the river and beyond sight of the mutilated dwelling, converted now into a section house. In building, she avoided the temptations offered by modern architectural innovations, and clung to the simplicity of large rooms and broad verandas: a style whose merits had stood the test of easy-going and comfort-loving generations.
Grosse tante, or more properly, Marie Louise, was a Creole Thérèse’s nurse and attendant from infancy, and the only one of the family servants who had come with her mistress from New Orleans to Place-du-Bois at that lady’s marriage with Jérôme Lafirme. But her ever increasing weight had long since removed her from the possibility of usefulness, otherwise than in supervising her small farm yard.