The cafe proprietor looked around him carefully, and then lowered his voice significantly:--"A lover!"
"A what?" said Dick, with a gasp.
"A lover!" repeated Ribaud."You comprehend! Mademoiselle has no dot,--the property is nothing,--the brother has everything.AMademoiselle de Fontonelles cannot marry out of her class, and the noblesse are all poor.Mademoiselle is young,--pretty, they say, of her kind.It is an intolerable life at the old chateau;mademoiselle consoles herself!"
Monsieur Ribaud never knew how near he was to the white road below the railing at that particular moment.Luckily, Dick controlled himself, and wisely, as Monsieur Ribaud's next sentence showed him.
"A romance,--an innocent, foolish liaison, if you like,--but, all the same, if known of a Mademoiselle de Fontonelles, a compromising, a fatal entanglement.There you are.Look! for this, then, all this story of cock and bulls and spirits! Mademoiselle has been discovered with her lover by some one.This pretty story shall stop their mouths!""But wot," said Dick brusquely, "wot if the girl was really skeert at something she'd seen, and fainted dead away, as she said she did,--and--and"--he hesitated--"some stranger came along and picked her up?"Monsieur Ribaud looked at him pityingly.
"A Mademoiselle de Fontonelle is picked up by her servants, by her family, but not by the young man in the woods, alone.It is even more compromising!""Do you mean to say," said Dick furiously, "that the ragpickers and sneaks that wade around in the slumgallion of this country would dare to spatter that young gal?""I mean to say, yes,--assuredly, positively yes!" said Ribaud, rubbing his hands with a certain satisfaction at Dick's fury."For you comprehend not the position of la jeune fille in all France!
Ah! in America the young lady she go everywhere alone; I have seen her--pretty, charming, fascinating--alone with the young man.But here, no, never! Regard me, my friend.The French mother, she say to her daughter's fiance, 'Look! there is my daughter.She has never been alone with a young man for five minutes,--not even with you.Take her for your wife!' It is monstrous! it is impossible!
it is so!"
There was a silence of a few minutes, and Dick looked blankly at the iron gates of the park of Fontonelles.Then he said: "Give me a cigar."Monsieur Ribaud instantly produced his cigar case.Dick took a cigar, but waved aside the proffered match, and entering the cafe, took from his pocket the letter to Mademoiselle de Fontonelles, twisted it in a spiral, lighted it at a candle, lit his cigar with it, and returning to the veranda held it in his hand until the last ashes dropped on the floor.Then he said, gravely, to Ribaud:--"You've treated me like a white man, Frenchy, and I ain't goin'
back on yer--though your ways ain't my ways--nohow; but I reckon in this yer matter at the shotto you're a little too previous! For though I don't as a gin'ral thing take stock in ghosts, I BELIEVEEVERY WORD THAT THEM FOLK SAID UP THAR.And," he added, leaning his hand somewhat heavily on Ribaud's shoulder, "if you're the man I take you for, you'll believe it too! And if that chap, Armand de Fontonelles, hadn't hev picked up that gal at that moment, he would hev deserved to roast in hell another three hundred years! That's why I believe her story.So you'll let these yer Fontonelles keep their ghosts for all they're worth; and when you next feel inclined to talk about that girl's LOVER, you'll think of me, and shut your head! You hear me, Frenchy, I'm shoutin'! And don't you forget it!"Nevertheless, early the next morning, Monsieur Ribaud accompanied his guest to the railway station, and parted from him with great effusion.On his way back an old-fashioned carriage with a postilion passed him.At a sign from its occupant, the postilion pulled up, and Monsieur Ribaud, bowing to the dust, approached the window, and the pale, stern face of a dignified, white-haired woman of sixty that looked from it.
"Has he gone?" said the lady.
"Assuredly, madame; I was with him at the station.""And you think no one saw him?"
"No one, madame, but myself."
"And--what kind of a man was he?"
Monsieur Ribaud lifted his shoulders, threw out his hands despairingly, yet with a world of significance, and said:--"An American."
"Ah!"
The carriage drove on and entered the gates of the chateau.And Monsieur Ribaud, cafe proprietor and Social Democrat, straightened himself in the dust and shook his fist after it.
