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But one feminine compensation had Ysabel: she was taller; Doña Modeste's slight elegant figure lacked Ysabel's graceful inches, and perhaps she too felt a pang sometimes as the girl undulated above her like a snake about to strike. At the fashionable hour of ten Monterey was gathered for the dance. All the men except the officers wore black velvet or broadcloth coats and white trousers.
About eleven o'clock Butscha, who had come to walk home with Madame Latournelle, whispered in Modeste's ear, "Was I right?" "Alas, yes," she said. "But I hope you have left the door half open, so that he can come back; we agreed upon that, you know." "Anger got the better of me," said Modeste. "Such meanness sent the blood to my head and I told him what I thought of him."
After loving Modeste's wit and intellect and her aggressive frankness, he now joined adoration of her beauty that is to say, love without reason, love inexplicable to all the other reasons which had drawn him ten days earlier, to the church in Havre. He returned to the Chalet, where the Pyrenees hounds barked at him till he was forced to relinquish the pleasure of gazing at Modeste's windows.
During the few moment's of Modeste's absence, about nine o'clock, to prepare for her mother's bedtime, Madame Mignon and her friends spoke openly to one another; but the poor clerk, depressed by the conviction of Modeste's love, which had now seized upon him as upon the rest, seemed as remote from the discussion as Gobenheim had been the night before.
This is indeed punishment too much punishment for me!" So saying, she ran down the many stairs that led up to Modeste's little lodging in the roof, her feet hardly touching them as she ran, while Modeste followed her more slowly, crying: "Wait for me! Wait for me, Mademoiselle!"
"I know what you are capable of, Dumay," she said; "and if you take one step against Monsieur de Canalis, I shall take another out of this house, to which I will never return." "You will kill your mother, mademoiselle," replied Dumay, who left the room and called his wife. The poor mother was indeed half-fainting, struck to the heart by Modeste's words.
"Modeste is saved," said Madame Mignon to her husband; "she wants to revenge herself on the false Canalis by trying to love the real one." Such in truth was Modeste's plan. It was so utterly commonplace that her mother, to whom she confided her griefs, advised her on the contrary to treat Monsieur de La Briere with extreme politeness.
Such was the announcement in a daily paper that met the eyes of Jacqueline, as she lay hidden in Modeste's lodging, like a fawn in its covert, her eyes and ears on the alert, watching for the least sign of alarm, in fear and trembling.
"Yes," said Butscha, and he repeated Modeste's speech about disguises. Poor Ernest flung himself upon a bench and held his head in his hands. He could not keep back his tears, and he did not wish Butscha to see them; but the dwarf was the very man to guess his emotion. "What troubles you?" he asked. "She is right!" cried Ernest, springing up; "I am a wretch."
Modeste thought she had laid that to her father over that to her Melchior, but had, in fact, done exactly the reverse. This mistake, so often made in the little things of life, occasioned the discovery of her secret by Dumay and her mother. The former was talking vehemently to Madame Mignon in the salon, and revealing to her his fresh fears caused by Modeste's duplicity and Butscha's connivance.
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