Then he got up, lit the candle, and began to walk
up and down, with his arms behind him. She was
cowering on the bed and crying, and suddenly he stopped
in front of her, and said: “Then it is my
fault that you have no children?” She gave him
no answer, and he began to walk up and down again,
and then, stopping again, he continued: “How
old is your child?” “Just six,”
she whispered. “Why did you not tell me
about it?” he asked. “How could I?”
she replied, with a sigh.
He remained standing, motionless. “Come,
get up,” he said. She got up, with some
difficulty, and then, when she was standing on the
floor, he suddenly began to laugh, with his hearty
laugh of his good days, and seeing how surprised she
was, he added: “Very well, we will go and
fetch the child, as you and I can have none together.”
She was so scared that, if she had the strength, she
would assuredly have run away, but the farmer rubbed
his hands and said: “I wanted to adopt
one, and now we have found one. I asked the Cure
about an orphan, some time ago.”
Then, still laughing, he kissed his weeping and agitated
wife on both cheeks, and shouted out, as if she could
not hear him: “Come along, mother, we will
go and see whether there is any soup left; I should
not mind a plateful.”
She put on her petticoat, and they went down stairs;
and while she was kneeling in front of the fire-place,
and lighting the fire under the saucepan, he continued
to walk up and down the kitchen in long strides, and
said:
“Well, I am really glad at this: I am not
saying it for form’s sake, but I am glad, I
am really very glad.”
Tall, slim, looking almost naked under her transparent
dress of gauze, which fell in straight folds as far
as the gold bracelets on her slender wrists, with
languor in her rich voice, and something undulating
and feline in the rhythmical swing of her wrist and
hips. Tatia Caroly was singing one of those sweet
Creole songs which call up some far distant fairy-like
country, and unknown caresses, for which the lips remain
always thirsting.
Footit, the clown, was leaning against the piano with
a blackened face, and with his mouth that looked like
a red gash from a saber cut, and his wide open eyes,
he expressed feelings of the most extravagant emotion,
while some niggers squatted on the ground, and accompanied
the orchestra by strumming on some yellow, empty gourds.
But what made the woman and the children in the pantomime
of the “New Circus” laugh most, was the
incessant quarrel between an enormous Danish hound
and a poor old supernumerary, who was blackened like
a negro minstrel, and dressed like a Mulatto woman.
The dog was always annoying him, followed him, snapped
at his legs, and at his old wig, with his sharp teeth,
and tore his coat and his silk pocket-handkerchief,
whenever he could get hold of it, to pieces. And
the man used positively to allow himself to be molested
and bitten, played his part with dull resignation,
with mechanical unconsciousness of a man who has come
down in the world, and who gains his livelihood as
best he can, and who has already endured worse things
than that.
