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"You have no occasion to thank me, Madame," replied Willan, standing on the threshold of the house, pale with excitement at the prospect of immediate freedom from the presence of the coarse creature. "The coach is your own, and the horses; and if they had not been, I should not have permitted them to remain here."
And it was Victorine who had accidentally brushed the pear-tree boughs as she watered her plants on the roof of the outside stairway. She did not see Willan lying on the ground underneath, and she did not think that Willan might be hearing her song; and yet was her head full of Willan Blaycke as she went down the staircase, and not a little did she quake at the thought of seeing him below.
"But thy husband, Aunt Jeanne," Victorine once ventured to say, "surely thou wert not weary when he was with thee?" Jeanne's face darkened. "Keep a civiller tongue in thy head," she replied, "than to be talking to widows of the husbands they have buried. He was a good man, Willan Blaycke, a good man; but I liked him not overmuch, though we lived not in quarrelling.
Thus we See often hearts of men that by love's glow Are sudden lighted, lifted till they show All semblances of true nobility; The passion spent, they tire of purity, And sink again to their own levels low! The next time Willan Blaycke came to the Golden Pear he did not see Victorine.
Willan looked up; in a second more he had bounded up the staircase, and eagerly said: "Art thou there? Wilt thou never come down?" Victorine was uncertain in her own mind what was the best thing to do next; so she replied evasively: "Thou wert right, after all. I did not feel myself tired, but I have slept until now." "Then thou art surely rested.
No one but thou hast ever walked or ridden with me," she added in a low voice, sighing; "and now after two days or three thou wilt be gone." Willan sighed also, but did not speak. The words, "I will always ride by thy side, Victorine," were on his lips, but he felt himself still withheld from speaking them. The visit at the mill was unsatisfactory.
It is evident that before he died he had come to think coldly of his wife; for his mention of her in his will was of the curtest, and his provision for her during her lifetime, though amply sufficient for her real needs, not at all in keeping with the style in which she had dwelt with him. The exiled Willan had returned to America a year before his father's death.
She watched and listened till she heard the sound of voices and the horses' feet in the courtyard below; then throwing open her casement she leaned out and began to water her flowers on the stairway roof. At the first sound Willan Blaycke looked up and saw her. It was as pretty a picture as a man need wish to see, and Willan gazed his fill at it.
A clear-sighted observer looking on at affairs in the Golden Pear for the next three days would have seen that all the energies of both Victor and Jeanne were bent to one end, namely, leaving the coast clear for Willan Blaycke to fall in love with Victorine.
It was, as Jeanne had said, a sore thing to Willan Blaycke to be forced to seek a night's shelter in the Golden Pear. "Tut, tut!" said the other, "what odds! It is a whimsey, a weakness of yours, boy. What's the woman to you?" Victor Dubois, who had come up now, heard these words, and his swarthy cheek was a shade darker.
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