“He may make a martyr of her, or a happy woman,” thought she to herself, as every mother thinks when she sees her daughter married.--“It seems to me,” she said aloud, “that I am miserable enough to hope to see my children happy.”
“Be quite easy, dear mamma,” said Wenceslas, only too glad to see this critical moment end happily. “In two months I shall have repaid that dreadful woman. How could I help it,” he went on, repeating this essentially Polish excuse with a Pole’s grace; “there are times when a man would borrow of the Devil.--And, after all, the money belongs to the family. When once she had invited me, should I have got the money at all if I had responded to her civility with a rude refusal?”
“Oh, mamma, what mischief papa is bringing on us!” cried Hortense.
The Baroness laid her finger on her daughter’s lips, aggrieved by this complaint, the first blame she had ever uttered of a father so heroically screened by her mother’s magnanimous silence.
“Now, good-bye, my children,” said Madame Hulot. “The storm is over. But do not quarrel any more.”
When Wenceslas and his wife returned to their room after letting out the Baroness, Hortense said to her husband:
And she watched his face all through the narrative, interrupting him by the questions that crowd on a wife’s mind in such circumstances. The story made Hortense reflect; she had a glimpse of the infernal dissipation which an artist must find in such vicious company.
“Be honest, my Wenceslas; Stidmann was there, Claude Vignon, Vernisset.--Who else? In short, it was good fun?”
“I, I was thinking of nothing but our ten thousand francs, and I was saying to myself, ‘My Hortense will be freed from anxiety.’”
This catechism bored the Livonian excessively; he seized a gayer moment to say:
“And you, my dearest, what would you have done if your artist had proved guilty?”
“I,” said she, with an air of prompt decision, “I should have taken up Stidmann--not that I love him, of course!”
“Hortense!” cried Steinbock, starting to his feet with a sudden and theatrical emphasis. “You would not have had the chance--I would have killed you!”
Hortense threw herself into his arms, clasping him closely enough to stifle him, and covered him with kisses, saying: