“Now, Denise,” he said, “I won’t have you running away from Toni and treating him like a dog before his mother this afternoon. You have got to be civil to him.”
“Yes, papa,” answered Denise, with the air of a martyr5, “I suppose I shall have to be civil to him before his mother, but Toni really bores me dreadfully.” Oh! Denise, what a story-teller you are!
When they got on the tram it was so crowded that it was impossible for the party to get seats together, so Denise, making a pretty grimace6 on the sly at her father, went and sat with Toni quite at the end of the car, and out of sight of her father and Toni’s mother, and her first speech, whispered softly in his ear, was:
“Oh, Toni, how nice it is to be together like this.”
Toni answered not one word, but he looked at Denise with his whole soul shining out of his lustrous7 black eyes, and Denise thought him the finest young soldier in the world.
It was a warm September afternoon, and their road lay through the beautiful valley of the Seine. There were many family parties on the tram, and when they reached the Golden Lion the large garden and even the orchard8 beyond were full of tables at which people were eating and drinking. There were plenty of soldiers about, and some of Toni’s comrades would have been very much pleased at an introduction to the sergeant’s pretty daughter, but the sergeant would not oblige them, neither would Toni. The party seated themselves at a table under an acacia tree, which reminded Toni and Denise of that other acacia tree at Bienville under which they had sat and munched9 and loved in their childhood. Madame Marcel unpacked10 their lunch basket and they ordered wine and tea from the inn and proceeded to enjoy themselves. Under the combined influence of wine and woman the sergeant grew positively11 lover-like, and, when their tea was over and they got up to walk about the garden, he very soon managed to have Madame Marcel to himself. He was quite unconscious of being assisted in his manœuvers by Toni and Denise and Madame herself, who had a very good mind to give Toni all possible chances with Denise and her ten thousand francs. So presently Toni found himself alone with Denise in a little nook in the orchard, behind a great clump12 of dwarf13 plum trees. The soft light of evening was about them, the air was hushed and the stillness was only broken by the faint and distant sounds of merriment. All the world seemed fair and beautiful and peaceful, and the fairest thing of all to Toni was the blue heaven of Denise’s eyes. She wore a pretty blue gown, and a jaunty14 black hat upon her blond hair. Her eyes, which were as blue as her gown, were usually downcast, but were now upturned to Toni quite frankly15. She had loved Toni as long as he had loved her—indeed, the world without Toni had seemed to her quite an impossible place. He said softly to her:
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“Denise, in all those seven years that I did not see you did you ever think of me?”
“Yes,” replied Denise. She said this with a simple sincerity16 that went to Toni’s heart.
“You know every time I wrote to my mother I always put the most important line at the bottom—my love to D. She knew what I meant.”
“Yes,” said Denise, with a little gasp17 of pleasure, “she always gave me your message.”
“I always felt that sometime or other we should be Denise and Toni as we had been when you were a dear little girl and I was a dirty bad little boy. And Denise, I swear to you, whatever I have done wrong in my life, I have been true to you. I never told any other girl that I loved her, because I never loved any other girl. I took my fling with them, but in every girl I ever saw in my life it seemed to me that I saw something of you, Denise. You need not think that women in the circus are bad just because they are in the circus. There are plenty of them that are just as good in their way as—as Mademoiselle Duval is in hers. They don’t take a religious newspaper, but they stand by each other in their troubles. They help with each other’s children and when a woman’s husband gives her a black eye all the other women fly at him and help to abuse him. Oh, Denise, I think women are very good, and the worst of them is too good for the best of men. Denise, I am not half good enough for you, but I want you to marry me as soon as my time is up. I can get off with one year’s service if I escape punishments, and that I have done and mean to do, for your sake, Denise.” He took Denise’s hand in his—their eyes met and then their lips. A bird in the plum tree above began cooing softly to its mate. The bird seemed, like Toni and Denise, to think the earth was Heaven.
Their love-making was very simple, as were their natures and their lives; they were only a private soldier and a sergeant’s daughter, but they loved each other well and asked nothing better of life than love.
Meanwhile things had not been progressing so favorably with Sergeant Duval and Madame Marcel. The sergeant had been a little too vigorous in his wooing and Madame Marcel, who simply had Toni’s advantage in view, felt called on to repress her lover. The sergeant, who had a big voice in his big frame, had made his wishes concerning his future with Madame Marcel quite audible to all the people surrounding them. Everybody had heard him say:
“Now, Madame, you should think of changing your condition, really. The cares of your shop are too many for you—a great deal too many.”
“I have managed them for the past twenty years,” replied Madame Marcel, who thought herself better qualified18 to keep a candy shop than the sergeant was, and who understood perfectly19 what the sergeant was driving at.
“True,” said the sergeant, floundering a little, “but a woman should not stand alone—she is not able to do it—that’s the truth. She is being taken advantage of at every turn.”
“And sometimes,” calmly responded Madame Marcel, “the advantage is on her side. I have managed, during my twenty years of widowhood to accumulate a competence20. Toni will not be badly off when I die, and when he marries I mean to make him an allowance equal to the income from his wife’s dowry.”
This seemed sinful waste to the sergeant, who thought Toni did not deserve such generosity21. That superfluity of which Madame Marcel spoke22 he considered had much better be expended23 on a worthy24 veteran who had served his country for more than thirty years, and who would like extremely to end his days in affluence25. But it was plain that Madame Marcel had the best of him in the argument that a woman could not take care of herself, so the sergeant changed his tactics.
“But it would be so much more comfortable for you, Madame, to have a protector—a husband I mean. Toni will get married and go off, and that will be the end of him.” The sergeant snapped his fingers. “But a kind and affectionate husband, a man of steady habits—”
“Most men of bad habits are very steady in those habits,” replied Madame Marcel. She was not a satirist26 and her remark was the more telling because of her sincerity.
“You are right, Madame, but I mean a man of good habits, a man who doesn’t spend most of his time at the wine shops, who has some domestic virtues27. I believe, Madame, that the non-commissioned officers in the French army are the finest body of men in the world for domestic life. I never knew a sergeant, or a corporal either for that matter, who was not a good husband.”
“Then I couldn’t go amiss if I should take any one of them,” answered Madame Marcel demurely28. “There is a very nice man, a corporal lately retired30, who has bought out the cigar shop near me at Bienville. Gossip has linked our names together, but I had not thought of marrying him.”
“By no means should you marry him,” cried the sergeant, realizing that he had been too general in his commendations. “He is probably after your shop and after that nice little competence, which, I judge from your words, you have accumulated. No, Madame, you could aspire31 to a sergeant—it would be sinful to throw yourself away on a corporal.”
Madame Marcel smiled mysteriously, but a good many of the listeners smiled quite openly, particularly a party of soldiers near them. One of them behind Madame Marcel’s back undertook to enact
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