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He smiled as he pursued his way along the walk before the house, and reflected: "Deuce take it! this is a nice place." Suddenly, a young rogue of five or six made his appearance, starting out of a shrubbery, and remained standing at the side of the path, staring at the gentleman with eyes wide open. Mordiane came over to him: "Good morrow, my boy." The brat made no reply.
The child he had met in the avenue appeared before the open door, exclaiming: "Dada!" There was no answer. Mordiane had risen up with a longing to escape, to run off, which made his legs tremble. This "dada" had hit him like a bullet. It was to him that it was addressed, it was intended for him, this "dada," smelling of garlic this "dada" of the South.
She had loved him passionately, madly, for three months; then, becoming pregnant in the absence of her husband, who was a governor of a colony, she had run away and concealed herself, distracted with despair and terror, till the birth of the child, which Mordiane carried off one summer's evening, and which they had not laid eyes on afterwards.
And he drew across his chair, in order to chat with his client. "So then you are looking out for a piece of ground in the neighborhood of Marseilles?" His breath, though not close to the baron, carried towards the latter that odor of garlic which the people of the South exhale as flowers do their perfume. Mordiane asked: "Is it your son that I met under the plane-trees?" "Yes. Yes, the second."
The Baron de Mordiane accordingly knew merely that a child of his was living somewhere in the neighborhood of Marseilles, that he was looked upon as intelligent and well-educated, that he had married the daughter of an architect and contractor, to whose business he had succeeded. He was also believed to be worth a lot of money.
Mordiane then saw a young woman, who appeared already old, as women look old at twenty-five in the provinces, for want of attention to their persons, regular washing, and all the little cares bestowed on feminine toilet which make them fresh, and preserve, till the age of fifty, the charm and beauty of the sex.
The little boy, who remained on the threshold, kept still exclaiming, though at some distance away from them: "Dada!" Mordiane, shaking with a shivering fit, seized with panic, fled as one flies away from a great danger. "He is going to guess who I am, to recognize me," he thought. "He is going to take me in his arms, and to call out to me, 'Dada, while giving me a kiss perfumed with garlic."
The train rushed on past the Rhone with its sandbanks, then through yellow plains, bright villages, and a wide expanse of country, shut in by bare mountains, which rose on the distant horizon. The Baron de Mordiane, waking up after a night spent in a sleeping compartment of the train, looked at himself, in a melancholy fashion, in the little mirror of his dressing-case.
And Mordiane recalled the other voice, light as the touch of a gentle breeze, as it used to murmur: "My darling, we shall never part " And he remembered that soft, deep, devoted glance in those eyes of blue, as he watched the round eye, also blue, but vacant, of this ridiculous little man, who, for all that, bore a resemblance to his mother.
While descending the wide staircase of the club heated like a conservatory by the stove the Baron de Mordiane had left his fur-coat open; therefore, when the huge street-door closed behind him he felt a shiver of intense cold run through him, one of those sudden and painful shivers which make us feel sad, as if we were stricken with grief.
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