CHAPTER I
BY THE DYING MOUNTEBANK
They had sent for the doctor from
Bourron before six. About eight some villagers
came round for the performance, and were told how matters
stood. It seemed a liberty for a mountebank to
fall ill like real people, and they made off again
in dudgeon. By ten Madame Tentaillon was gravely
alarmed, and had sent down the street for Doctor Desprez.
The Doctor was at work over his manuscripts
in one corner of the little dining-room, and his wife
was asleep over the fire in another, when the messenger
arrived.
“Sapristi!” said
the Doctor, “you should have sent for me before.
It was a case for hurry.” And he followed
the messenger as he was, in his slippers and skull-cap.
The inn was not thirty yards away,
but the messenger did not stop there; he went in at
one door and out by another into the court, and then
led the way, by a flight of steps beside the stable,
to the loft where the mountebank lay sick. If
Doctor Desprez were to live a thousand years, he would
never forget his arrival in that room; for not only
was the scene picturesque, but the moment made a date
in his existence. We reckon our lives, I hardly
know why, from the date of our first sorry appearance
in society, as if from a first humiliation; for no
actor can come upon the stage with a worse grace.
Not to go further back, which would be judged too
curious, there are subsequently many moving and decisive
accidents in the lives of all, which would make as
logical a period as this of birth. And here,
for instance, Doctor Desprez, a man past forty, who
had made what is called a failure in life, and was
moreover married, found himself at a new point of
departure when he opened the door of the loft above
Tentaillon’s stable.
It was a large place, lighted only
by a single candle set upon the floor. The mountebank
lay on his back upon a pallet; a large man with a Quixotic
nose inflamed with drinking. Madame Tentaillon
stooped over him, applying a hot water and mustard
embrocation to his feet; and on a chair close by sat
a little fellow of eleven or twelve, with his feet
dangling. These three were the only occupants
except the shadows. But the shadows were a company
in themselves; the extent of the room exaggerated them
to a gigantic size, and from the low position of the
candle the light struck upwards and produced deformed
foreshortenings. The mountebank’s profile
was enlarged upon the wall in caricature, and it was
strange to see his nose shorten and lengthen as the
flame was blown about by draughts. As for Madame
Tentaillon, her shadow was no more than a gross hump
of shoulders, with now and again a hemisphere of head.
The chair-legs were spindled out as long as stilts,
and the boy sat perched a-top of them, like a cloud,
in the corner of the roof.
It was the boy who took the Doctor’s
fancy. He had a great arched skull, the forehead
and the hands of a musician, and a pair of haunting
eyes. It was not merely that these eyes were
large, or steady, or the softest ruddy brown.
There was a look in them, besides, which thrilled the
Doctor, and made him half uneasy. He was sure
he had seen such a look before, and yet he could not
remember how or where. It was as if this boy,
who was quite a stranger to him, had the eyes of an
old friend or an old enemy. And the boy would
give him no peace; he seemed profoundly indifferent
to what was going on, or rather abstracted from it
in a superior contemplation, beating gently with his
feet against the bars of the chair, and holding his
hands folded on his lap. But, for all that, his
eyes kept following the Doctor about the room with
a thoughtful fixity of gaze. Desprez could not
tell whether he was fascinating the boy, or the boy
was fascinating him. He busied himself over the
sick man, he put questions, he felt the pulse, he
jested, he grew a little hot and swore: and still,
whenever he looked round, there were the brown eyes
waiting for his with the same inquiring, melancholy
gaze.
At last the Doctor hit on the solution
at a leap. He remembered the look now. The
little fellow, although he was as straight as a dart,
had the eyes that go usually with a crooked back;
he was not at all deformed, and yet a deformed person
seemed to be looking at you from below his brows.
The Doctor drew a long breath, he was so much relieved
to find a theory (for he loved theories) and to explain
away his interest.
For all that, he despatched the invalid
with unusual haste, and, still kneeling with one knee
on the floor, turned a little round and looked the
boy over at his leisure. The boy was not in the
least put out, but looked placidly back at the Doctor.
“Is this your father?” asked Desprez.
“Oh no,” returned the boy; “my master.”
“Are you fond of him?” continued the Doctor.
“No, sir,” said the boy.
Madame Tentaillon and Desprez exchanged expressive
glances.
“That is bad, my man,”
resumed the latter, with a shade of sternness.
“Every one should be fond of the dying, or conceal
their sentiments; and your master here is dying.
If I have watched a bird a little while stealing my
cherries, I have a thought of disappointment when he
flies away over my garden wall, and I see him steer
for the forest and vanish. How much more a creature
such as this, so strong, so astute, so richly endowed
with faculties! When I think that, in a few hours,
the speech will be silenced, the breath extinct, and
even the shadow vanished from the wall, I who never
saw him, this lady who knew him only as a guest, are
touched with some affection.”
The boy was silent for a little, and appeared to be
reflecting.
“You did not know him,” he replied at
last. “He was a bad man.”
“He is a little pagan,”
said the landlady. “For that matter, they
are all the same, these mountebanks, tumblers, artists,
and what not. They have no interior.”
But the Doctor was still scrutinising
the little pagan, his eyebrows knotted and uplifted.
“What is your name?” he asked.
“Jean-Marie,” said the lad.
Desprez leaped upon him with one of
his sudden flashes of excitement, and felt his head
all over from an ethnological point of view.
“Celtic, Celtic!” he said.
“Celtic!” cried Madame
Tentaillon, who had perhaps confounded the word with
hydrocephalous. “Poor lad! is it dangerous?”
“That depends,” returned
the Doctor grimly. And then once more addressing
the boy: “And what do you do for your living,
Jean-Marie?” he inquired.
“I tumble,” was the answer.
“So! Tumble?” repeated
Desprez. “Probably healthful. I hazard
the guess, Madame Tentaillon, that tumbling is a healthful
way of life. And have you never done anything
else but tumble?”
“Before I learned that, I used
to steal,” answered Jean-Marie gravely.
“Upon my word!” cried
the Doctor. “You are a nice little man for
your age. Madame, when my confrère
comes from Bourron, you will communicate my unfavourable
opinion. I leave the case in his hands; but of
course, on any alarming symptom, above all if there
should be a sign of rally, do not hesitate to knock
me up. I am a doctor no longer, I thank God; but
I have been one. Good-night, madame. Good
sleep to you, Jean-Marie.”
CHAPTER II
MORNING TALK
Doctor Desprez always rose early.
Before the smoke arose, before the first cart rattled
over the bridge to the day’s labour in the fields,
he was to be found wandering in his garden. Now
he would pick a bunch of grapes; now he would eat
a big pear under the trellis; now he would draw all
sorts of fancies on the path with the end of his cane;
now he would go down and watch the river running endlessly
past the timber landing-place at which he moored his
boat. There was no time, he used to say, for
making theories like the early morning. “I
rise earlier than any one else in the village,”
he once boasted. “It is a fair consequence
that I know more and wish to do less with my knowledge.”
The Doctor was a connoisseur of sunrises,
and loved a good theatrical effect to usher in the
day. He had a theory of dew, by which he could
predict the weather. Indeed, most things served
him to that end: the sound of the bells from
all the neighbouring villages, the smell of the forest,
the visits and the behaviour of both birds and fishes,
the look of the plants in his garden, the disposition
of cloud, the colour of the light, and last, although
not least, the arsenal of meteorological instruments
in a louvre-boarded hutch upon the lawn. Ever
since he had settled at Gretz, he had been growing
more and more into the local meteorologist, the unpaid
champion of the local climate. He thought at
first there was no place so healthful in the arrondissement.
By the end of the second year, he protested there
was none so wholesome in the whole department.
And for some time before he met Jean-Marie he had been
prepared to challenge all France and the better part
of Europe for a rival to his chosen spot.
“Doctor,” he would say “doctor
is a foul word. It should not be used to ladies.
It implies disease. I remark it, as a flaw in
our civilisation, that we have not the proper horror
of disease. Now I, for my part, have washed my
hands of it; I have renounced my laureation; I am no
doctor; I am only a worshipper of the true goddess
Hygieia. Ah! believe me, it is she who has the
cestus! And here, in this exiguous hamlet, has
she placed her shrine: here she dwells and lavishes
her gifts; here I walk with her in the early morning,
and she shows me how strong she has made the peasants,
how fruitful she has made the fields, how the trees
grow up tall and comely under her eyes, and the fishes
in the river become clean and agile at her presence. Rheumatism!”
he would cry, on some malapert interruption, “Oh,
yes, I believe we do have a little rheumatism.
That could hardly be avoided, you know, on a river.
And of course the place stands a little low; and the
meadows are marshy, there’s no doubt. But,
my dear sir, look at Bourron! Bourron stands high.
Bourron is close to the forest; plenty of ozone there,
you would say. Well, compared with Gretz, Bourron
is a perfect shambles.”
The morning after he had been summoned
to the dying mountebank, the Doctor visited the wharf
at the tail of his garden, and had a long look at
the running water. This he called prayer; but
whether his adorations were addressed to the
goddess Hygieia or some more orthodox deity, never
plainly appeared. For he had uttered doubtful
oracles, sometimes declaring that a river was the
type of bodily health, sometimes extolling it as the
great moral preacher, continually preaching peace,
continuity, and diligence to man’s tormented
spirits. After he had watched a mile or so of
the clear water running by before his eyes, seen a
fish or two come to the surface with a gleam of silver,
and sufficiently admired the long shadows of the trees
falling half across the river from the opposite bank,
with patches of moving sunlight in between, he strolled
once more up the garden and through his house into
the street, feeling cool and renovated.
The sound of his feet upon the causeway
began the business of the day; for the village was
still sound asleep. The church tower looked very
airy in the sunlight; a few birds that turned about
it seemed to swim in an atmosphere of more than usual
rarity; and the Doctor, walking in long transparent
shadows, filled his lungs amply, and proclaimed himself
well contented with the morning.
On one of the posts before Tentaillon’s
carriage entry he espied a little dark figure perched
in a meditative attitude, and immediately recognised
Jean-Marie.
“Aha!” he said, stopping
before him humorously, with a hand on either knee.
“So we rise early in the morning, do we?
It appears to me that we have all the vices of a philosopher.”
The boy got to his feet and made a grave salutation.
“And how is our patient?” asked Desprez.
It appeared the patient was about the same.
“And why do you rise early in the morning?”
he pursued.
Jean-Marie, after a long silence, professed that he
hardly knew.
“You hardly know?” repeated
Desprez. “We hardly know anything, my man,
until we try to learn. Interrogate your consciousness.
Come, push me this inquiry home. Do you like
it?”
“Yes,” said the boy slowly; “yes,
I like it.”
“And why do you like it?”
continued the Doctor. “(We are now pursuing the
Socratic method.) Why do you like it?”
“It is quiet,” answered
Jean-Marie; “and I have nothing to do; and then
I feel as if I were good.”
Doctor Desprez took a seat on the
post at the opposite side. He was beginning to
take an interest in the talk, for the boy plainly thought
before he spoke, and tried to answer truly. “It
appears you have a taste for feeling good,”
said the Doctor. “Now, there you puzzle
me extremely; for I thought you said you were a thief;
and the two are incompatible.”
“Is it very bad to steal?” asked Jean-Marie.
“Such is the general opinion, little boy,”
replied the Doctor.
“No; but I mean as I stole,”
explained the other. “For I had no choice.
I think it is surely right to have bread; it must
be right to have bread, there comes so plain a want
of it. And then they beat me cruelly if I returned
with nothing,” he added. “I was not
ignorant of right and wrong; for before that I had
been well taught by a priest, who was very kind to
me.” (The Doctor made a horrible grimace at the
word “priest.”) “But it seemed to
me, when one had nothing to eat and was beaten, it
was a different affair. I would not have stolen
for tartlets, I believe; but any one would steal for
baker’s bread.”
“And so I suppose,” said
the Doctor, with a rising sneer, “you prayed
God to forgive you, and explained the case to Him
at length.”
“Why, sir?” asked Jean-Marie. “I
do not see.”
“Your priest would see, however,” retorted
Desprez.
“Would he?” asked the
boy, troubled for the first time. “I should
have thought God would have known.”
“Eh?” snarled the Doctor.
“I should have thought God would
have understood me,” replied the other.
“You do not, I see; but then it was God that
made me think so, was it not?”
“Little boy, little boy,”
said Dr. Desprez, “I told you already you had
the vices of philosophy; if you display the virtues
also, I must go. I am a student of the blessed
laws of health, an observer of plain and temperate
nature in her common walks; and I cannot preserve my
equanimity in presence of a monster. Do you understand?”
“No, sir,” said the boy.
“I will make my meaning clear
to you,” replied the Doctor. “Look
there at the sky behind the belfry first,
where it is so light, and then up and up, turning
your chin back, right to the top of the dome, where
it is already as blue as at noon. Is not that
a beautiful colour? Does it not please the heart?
We have seen it all our lives, until it has grown in
with our familiar thoughts. Now,” changing
his tone, “suppose that sky to become suddenly
of a live and fiery amber, like the colour of clear
coals, and growing scarlet towards the top I
do not say it would be any the less beautiful; but
would you like it as well?”
“I suppose not,” answered Jean-Marie.
“Neither do I like you,”
returned the Doctor roughly. “I hate all
odd people, and you are the most curious little boy
in all the world.”
Jean-Marie seemed to ponder for a
while, and then he raised his head again and looked
over at the Doctor with an air of candid inquiry.
“But are not you a very curious gentleman?”
he asked.
The Doctor threw away his stick, bounded
on the boy, clasped him to his bosom, and kissed him
on both cheeks. “Admirable, admirable imp!”
he cried. “What a morning, what an hour
for a theorist of forty-two! No,” he continued,
apostrophising heaven, “I did not know such boys
existed; I was ignorant they made them so; I had doubted
of my race; and now! It is like,” he added,
picking up his stick, “like a lovers’ meeting.
I have bruised my favourite staff in that moment of
enthusiasm. The injury, however, is not grave.”
He caught the boy looking at him in obvious wonder,
embarrassment, and alarm. “Hullo!”
said he, “why do you look at me like that?
Egad, I believe the boy despises me. Do you despise
me, boy?”
“Oh, no,” replied Jean-Marie
seriously; “only I do not understand.”
“You must excuse me, sir,”
returned the Doctor, with gravity; “I am still
so young. Oh, hang him!” he added to himself.
And he took his seat again and observed the boy sardonically.
“He has spoiled the quiet of my morning,”
thought he. “I shall be nervous all day,
and have a fébricule when I digest. Let
me compose myself.” And so he dismissed
his preoccupations by an effort of the will which
he had long practised, and let his soul roam abroad
in the contemplation of the morning. He inhaled
the air, tasting it critically as a connoisseur tastes
a vintage, and prolonging the expiration with hygienic
gusto. He counted the little flecks of cloud
along the sky. He followed the movements of the
birds round the church tower making long
sweeps, hanging poised, or turning airy somersaults
in fancy, and beating the wind with imaginary pinions.
And in this way he regained peace of mind and animal
composure, conscious of his limbs, conscious of the
sight of his eyes, conscious that the air had a cool
taste, like a fruit, at the top of his throat; and
at last, in complete abstraction, he began to sing.
The Doctor had but one air “Malbrouck
s’en va-t-en guerre”; even
with that he was on terms of mere politeness; and
his musical exploits were always reserved for moments
when he was alone and entirely happy.
He was recalled to earth rudely by
a pained expression on the boy’s face.
“What do you think of my singing?” he inquired,
stopping in the middle of a note; and then, after
he had waited some little while and received no answer,
“What do you think of my singing?” he repeated
imperiously.
“I do not like it,” faltered Jean-Marie.
“Oh, come!” cried the Doctor. “Possibly
you are a performer yourself?”
“I sing better than that,” replied the
boy.
The Doctor eyed him for some seconds
in stupefaction. He was aware that he was angry,
and blushed for himself in consequence, which made
him angrier. “If this is how you address
your master!” he said at last, with a shrug
and a flourish of his arms.
“I do not speak to him at all,” returned
the boy. “I do not like him.”
“Then you like me?” snapped Doctor Desprez,
with unusual eagerness.
“I do not know,” answered Jean-Marie.
The Doctor rose. “I shall
wish you a good-morning,” he said. “You
are too much for me. Perhaps you have blood in
your veins, perhaps celestial ichor, or perhaps you
circulate nothing more gross than respirable air;
but of one thing I am inexpugnably assured: that
you are no human being. No, boy” shaking
his stick at him “you are not a human
being. Write, write it in your memory ’I
am not a human being I have no pretension
to be a human being I am a dive, a dream,
an angel, an acrostic, an illusion what
you please, but not a human being.’ And
so accept my humble salutations and farewell!”
And with that the Doctor made off
along the street in some emotion, and the boy stood,
mentally gaping, where he left him.
CHAPTER III
THE ADOPTION
Madame Desprez, who answered to the
Christian name of Anastasie, presented an agreeable
type of her sex; exceedingly wholesome to look upon,
a stout brune, with cool smooth cheeks, steady,
dark eyes, and hands that neither art nor nature could
improve. She was the sort of person over whom
adversity passes like a summer cloud; she might, in
the worst of conjunctions, knit her brows into one
vertical furrow for a moment, but the next it would
be gone. She had much of the placidity of a contented
nun; with little of her piety, however; for Anastasie
was of a very mundane nature, fond of oysters and
old wine, and somewhat bold pleasantries, and devoted
to her husband for her own sake rather than for his.
She was imperturbably good-natured, but had no idea
of self-sacrifice. To live in that pleasant old
house, with a green garden behind and bright flowers
about the window, to eat and drink of the best, to
gossip with a neighbour for a quarter of an hour, never
to wear stays or a dress except when she went to Fontainebleau
shopping, to be kept in a continual supply of racy
novels, and to be married to Dr. Desprez and have
no ground of jealousy, filled the cup of her nature
to the brim. Those who had known the Doctor in
bachelor days, when he had aired quite as many theories,
but of a different order, attributed his present philosophy
to the study of Anastasie. It was her brute enjoyment
that he rationalised and perhaps vainly imitated.
Madame Desprez was an artist in the
kitchen, and made coffee to a nicety. She had
a knack of tidiness, with which she had infected the
Doctor; everything was in its place; everything capable
of polish shone gloriously; and dust was a thing banished
from her empire. Aline, their single servant,
had no other business in the world but to scour and
burnish. So Doctor Desprez lived in his house
like a fatted calf, warmed and cosseted to his heart’s
content.
The midday meal was excellent.
There was a ripe melon, a fish from the river in a
memorable Béarnaise sauce, a fat fowl in a fricassee,
and a dish of asparagus, followed by some fruit.
The Doctor drank half a bottle plus one glass,
the wife half a bottle minus the same quantity,
which was a marital privilege, of an excellent Côte-Rôtie,
seven years old. Then the coffee was brought,
and a flask of Chartreuse for madame, for the
Doctor despised and distrusted such decoctions; and
then Aline left the wedded pair to the pleasures of
memory and digestion.
“It is a very fortunate circumstance,
my cherished one,” observed the Doctor “this
coffee is adorable a very fortunate circumstance
upon the whole Anastasie, I beseech you,
go without that poison for to-day; only one day, and
you will feel the benefit, I pledge my reputation.”
“What is this fortunate circumstance,
my friend?” inquired Anastasie, not heeding
his protest, which was of daily recurrence.
“That we have no children, my
beautiful,” replied the Doctor. “I
think of it more and more as the years go on, and
with more and more gratitude towards the power that
dispenses such afflictions. Your health, my darling,
my studious quiet, our little kitchen delicacies, how
they would all have suffered, how they would all have
been sacrificed! And for what? Children
are the last word of human imperfection. Health
flees before their face. They cry, my dear; they
put vexatious questions; they demand to be fed, to
be washed, to be educated, to have their noses blown;
and then, when the time comes, they break our hearts,
as I break this piece of sugar. A pair of professed
egoists, like you and me, should avoid offspring,
like an infidelity.”
“Indeed!” said she; and
she laughed. “Now, that is like you to
take credit for the thing you could not help.”
“My dear,” returned the
Doctor solemnly, “we might have adopted.”
“Never!” cried madame.
“Never, Doctor, with my consent. If the
child were my own flesh and blood, I would not say
no. But to take another person’s indiscretion
on my shoulders, my dear friend, I have too much sense.”
“Precisely,” replied the
Doctor. “We both had. And I am all
the better pleased with our wisdom, because because ”
He looked at her sharply.
“Because what?” she asked,
with a faint premonition of danger.
“Because I have found the right
person,” said the Doctor firmly, “and
shall adopt him this afternoon.”
Anastasie looked at him out of a mist.
“You have lost your reason,” she said;
and there was a clang in her voice that seemed to threaten
trouble.
“Not so, my dear,” he
replied; “I retain its complete exercise.
To the proof: instead of attempting to cloak
my inconsistency, I have, by way of preparing you,
thrown it into strong relief. You will there,
I think, recognise the philosopher who has the ecstasy
to call you wife. The fact is, I have been reckoning
all this while without an accident. I never thought
to find a son of my own. Now, last night, I found
one. Do not unnecessarily alarm yourself, my
dear; he is not a drop of blood to me that I know.
It is his mind, darling, his mind that calls me father.”
“His mind!” she repeated,
with a titter between scorn and hysterics. “His
mind, indeed! Henri, is this an idiotic pleasantry,
or are you mad? His mind! And what of my
mind?”
“Truly,” replied the Doctor,
with a shrug, “you have your finger on the hitch.
He will be strikingly antipathetic to my ever beautiful
Anastasie. She will never understand him; he
will never understand her. You married the animal
side of my nature, dear; and it is on the spiritual
side that I find my affinity for Jean-Marie.
So much so, that, to be perfectly frank, I stand in
some awe of him myself. You will easily perceive
that I am announcing a calamity for you. Do not,”
he broke out in tones of real solicitude “do
not give way to tears after a meal, Anastasie.
You will certainly give yourself a false digestion.”
Anastasie controlled herself.
“You know how willing I am to humour you,”
she said, “in all reasonable matters. But
on this point ”
“My dear love,” interrupted
the Doctor, eager to prevent a refusal, “who
wished to leave Paris? Who made me give up cards,
and the opera, and the boulevard, and my social relations,
and all that was my life before I knew you? Have
I been faithful? Have I been obedient? Have
I not borne my doom with cheerfulness? In all
honesty, Anastasie, have I not a right to a stipulation
on my side? I have, and you know it. I stipulate
my son.”
Anastasie was aware of defeat; she
struck her colours instantly. “You will
break my heart,” she sighed.
“Not in the least,” said
he. “You will feel a trifling inconvenience
for a month, just as I did when I was first brought
to this vile hamlet; then your admirable sense and
temper will prevail, and I see you already as content
as ever, and making your husband the happiest of men.”
“You know I can refuse you nothing,”
she said, with a last flicker of resistance; “nothing
that will make you truly happier. But will this?
Are you sure, my husband? Last night, you say,
you found him! He may be the worst of humbugs.”
“I think not,” replied
the Doctor. “But do not suppose me so unwary
as to adopt him out of hand. I am, I flatter
myself, a finished man of the world; I have had all
possibilities in view; my plan is contrived to meet
them all. I take the lad as stable-boy. If
he pilfer, if he grumble, if he desire to change,
I shall see I was mistaken; I shall recognise him
for no son of mine, and send him tramping.”
“You will never do so when the
time comes,” said his wife; “I know your
good heart.”
She reached out her hand to him, with
a sigh; the Doctor smiled as he took it and carried
it to his lips; he had gained his point with greater
ease than he had dared to hope; for perhaps the twentieth
time he had proved the efficacy of his trusty argument,
his Excalibur, the hint of a return to Paris.
Six months in the capital, for a man of the Doctor’s
antecedents and relations, implied no less a calamity
than total ruin. Anastasie had saved the remainder
of his fortune by keeping him strictly in the country.
The very name of Paris put her in a blue fear; and
she would have allowed her husband to keep a menagerie
in the back-garden, let alone adopting a stable-boy,
rather than permit the question of return to be discussed.
About four of the afternoon, the mountebank
rendered up his ghost; he had never been conscious
since his seizure. Doctor Desprez was present
at his last passage, and declared the farce over.
Then he took Jean-Marie by the shoulder and led him
out into the inn garden, where there was a convenient
bench beside the river. Here he sat him down and
made the boy place himself on his left.
“Jean-Marie,” he said
very gravely, “this world is exceedingly vast;
and even France, which is only a small corner of it,
is a great place for a little lad like you. Unfortunately
it is full of eager, shouldering people moving on;
and there are very few bakers’ shops for so many
eaters. Your master is dead; you are not fit to
gain a living by yourself; you do not wish to steal?
No. Your situation then is undesirable; it is,
for the moment, critical. On the other hand, you
behold in me a man not old, though elderly, still enjoying
the youth of the heart and the intelligence; a man
of instruction; easily situated in this world’s
affairs; keeping a good table: a man, neither
as friend nor host, to be despised. I offer you
your food and clothes, and to teach you lessons in
the evening, which will be infinitely more to the purpose
for a lad of your stamp than those of all the priests
in Europe. I propose no wages, but if ever you
take a thought to leave me, the door shall be open,
and I will give you a hundred francs to start the world
upon. In return, I have an old horse and chaise,
which you would very speedily learn to clean and keep
in order. Do not hurry yourself to answer, and
take it or leave it as you judge aright. Only
remember this, that I am no sentimentalist or charitable
person, but a man who lives rigorously to himself;
and that if I make the proposal, it is for my own ends it
is because I perceive clearly an advantage to myself.
And now, reflect.”
“I shall be very glad.
I do not see what else I can do. I thank you,
sir, most kindly, and I will try to be useful,”
said the boy.
“Thank you,” said the
Doctor warmly, rising at the same time and wiping
his brow, for he had suffered agonies while the thing
hung in the wind. A refusal, after the scene
at noon, would have placed him in a ridiculous light
before Anastasie. “How hot and heavy is
the evening, to be sure! I have always had a
fancy to be a fish in summer, Jean-Marie, here in the
Loing beside Gretz. I should lie under a water-lily
and listen to the bells, which must sound most delicately
down below. That would be a life do
you not think so too?”
“Yes,” said Jean-Marie.
“Thank God you have imagination!”
cried the Doctor, embracing the boy with his usual
effusive warmth, though it was a proceeding that seemed
to disconcert the sufferer almost as much as if he
had been an English schoolboy of the same age.
“And now,” he added, “I will take
you to my wife.”
Madame Desprez sat in the dining-room
in a cool wrapper. All the blinds were down,
and the tile floor had been recently sprinkled with
water; her eyes were half shut, but she affected to
be reading a novel as they entered. Though she
was a bustling woman, she enjoyed repose between-whiles
and had a remarkable appetite for sleep.
The Doctor went through a solemn form
of introduction, adding, for the benefit of both parties,
“You must try to like each other for my sake.”
“He is very pretty,” said
Anastasie. “Will you kiss me, my pretty
little fellow?”
The Doctor was furious, and dragged
her into the passage. “Are you a fool,
Anastasie?” he said. “What is all
this I hear about the tact of women? Heaven knows,
I have not met with it in my experience. You address
my little philosopher as if he were an infant.
He must be spoken to with more respect, I tell you;
he must not be kissed and Georgy-porgy’d like
an ordinary child.”
“I only did it to please you,
I am sure,” replied Anastasie; “but I will
try to do better.”
The Doctor apologised for his warmth.
“But I do wish him,” he continued, “to
feel at home among us. And really your conduct
was so idiotic, my cherished one, and so utterly and
distantly out of place, that a saint might have been
pardoned a little vehemence in disapproval. Do,
do try if it is possible for a woman to
understand young people but of course it
is not, and I waste my breath. Hold your tongue
as much as possible at least, and observe my conduct
narrowly; it will serve you for a model.”
Anastasie did as she was bidden, and
considered the Doctor’s behaviour. She
observed that he embraced the boy three times in the
course of the evening, and managed generally to confound
and abash the little fellow out of speech and appetite.
But she had the true womanly heroism in little affairs.
Not only did she refrain from the cheap revenge of
exposing the Doctor’s errors to himself, but
she did her best to remove their ill-effect on Jean-Marie.
When Desprez went out for his last breath of air before
retiring for the night, she came over to the boy’s
side and took his hand.
“You must not be surprised or
frightened by my husband’s manners,” she
said. “He is the kindest of men, but so
clever that he is sometimes difficult to understand.
You will soon grow used to him, and then you will
love him, for that nobody can help. As for me,
you may be sure, I shall try to make you happy, and
will not bother you at all. I think we should
be excellent friends, you and I. I am not clever, but
I am very good-natured. Will you give me a kiss?”
He held up his face, and she took
him in her arms and then began to cry. The woman
had spoken in complaisance; but she had warmed to her
own words, and tenderness followed. The Doctor,
entering, found them enlaced: he concluded that
his wife was in fault; and he was just beginning, in
an awful voice, “Anastasie ,”
when she looked up at him, smiling, with an upraised
finger; and he held his peace, wondering, while she
led the boy to his attic.
CHAPTER IV
THE EDUCATION OF A PHILOSOPHER
The installation of the adopted stable-boy
was thus happily effected, and the wheels of life
continued to run smoothly in the Doctor’s house.
Jean-Marie did his horse and carriage duty in the morning;
sometimes helped in the housework; sometimes walked
abroad with the Doctor, to drink wisdom from the fountainhead;
and was introduced at night to the sciences and the
dead tongues. He retained his singular placidity
of mind and manner; he was rarely in fault; but he
made only a very partial progress in his studies,
and remained much of a stranger in the family.
The Doctor was a pattern of regularity.
All forenoon he worked on his great book, the “Comparative
Pharmacopoeia, or Historical Dictionary of all Medicines,”
which as yet consisted principally of slips of paper
and pins. When finished, it was to fill many
personable volumes, and to combine antiquarian interest
with professional utility. But the Doctor was
studious of literary graces and the picturesque; an
anecdote, a touch of manners, a moral qualification,
or a sounding epithet was sure to be preferred before
a piece of science; a little more, and he would have
written the “Comparative Pharmacopoeia”
in verse! The article “Mummia,”
for instance, was already complete, though the remainder
of the work had not progressed beyond the letter A.
It was exceedingly copious and entertaining, written
with quaintness and colour, exact, erudite, a literary
article; but it would hardly have afforded guidance
to a practising physician of to-day. The feminine
good sense of his wife had led her to point this out
with uncompromising sincerity; for the Dictionary
was duly read aloud to her, betwixt sleep and waking,
as it proceeded towards an infinitely distant completion;
and the Doctor was a little sore on the subject of
mummies, and sometimes resented an allusion with asperity.
After the midday meal and a proper
period of digestion, he walked, sometimes alone, sometimes
accompanied by Jean-Marie; for madame would have
preferred any hardship rather than walk.
She was, as I have said, a very busy
person, continually occupied about material comforts,
and ready to drop asleep over a novel the instant she
was disengaged. This was the less objectionable,
as she never snored or grew distempered in complexion
when she slept. On the contrary, she looked the
very picture of luxurious and appetising ease, and
woke without a start to the perfect possession of
her faculties. I am afraid she was greatly an
animal, but she was a very nice animal to have about.
In this way she had little to do with Jean-Marie; but
the sympathy which had been established between them
on the first night remained unbroken; they held occasional
conversations, mostly on household matters; to the
extreme disappointment of the Doctor, they occasionally
sallied off together to that temple of debasing, superstition,
the village church; madame and he, both in their
Sunday’s best, drove twice a month to Fontainebleau
and returned laden with purchases; and in short, although
the Doctor still continued to regard them as irreconcilably
antipathetic, their relation was as intimate, friendly,
and confidential as their natures suffered.
I fear, however, that in her heart
of hearts madame kindly despised and pitied the
boy. She had no admiration for his class of virtues;
she liked a smart, polite, forward, roguish sort of
boy, cap in hand, light of foot, meeting the eye;
she liked volubility, charm, a little vice the
promise of a second Doctor Desprez. And it was
her indefeasible belief that Jean-Marie was dull.
“Poor dear boy,” she had said once, “how
sad it is that he should be so stupid!” She
had never repeated that remark, for the Doctor had
raged like a wild bull, denouncing the brutal bluntness
of her mind, bemoaning his own fate to be so unequally
mated with an ass, and, what touched Anastasie more
nearly, menacing the table china by the fury of his
gesticulations. But she adhered silently to her
opinion; and when Jean-Marie was sitting, stolid,
blank, but not unhappy, over his unfinished tasks,
she would snatch her opportunity in the Doctor’s
absence, go over to him, put her arms about his neck,
lay her cheek to his, and communicate her sympathy
with his distress. “Do not mind,”
she would say; “I, too, am not at all clever,
and I can assure you that it makes no difference in
life.”
The Doctor’s view was naturally
different. That gentleman never wearied of the
sound of his own voice, which was, to say the truth,
agreeable enough to hear. He now had a listener,
who was not so cynically indifferent as Anastasie,
and who sometimes put him on his mettle by the most
relevant objections. Besides, was he not educating
the boy? And education, philosophers are agreed,
is the most philosophical of duties. What can
be more heavenly to poor mankind than to have one’s
hobby grow into a duty to the State? Then, indeed,
do the ways of life become ways of pleasantness.
Never had the Doctor seen reason to be more content
with his endowments. Philosophy flowed smoothly
from his lips. He was so agile a dialectician
that he could trace his nonsense, when challenged,
back to some root in sense, and prove it to be a sort
of flower upon his system. He slipped out of
antinomies like a fish, and left his disciple
marvelling at the rabbi’s depth.
Moreover, deep down in his heart the
Doctor was disappointed with the ill-success of his
more formal education. A boy, chosen by so acute
an observer for his aptitude, and guided along the
path of learning by so philosophic an instructor,
was bound, by the nature of the universe, to make
a more obvious and lasting advance. Now Jean-Marie
was slow in all things, impenetrable in others; and
his power of forgetting was fully on a level with
his power to learn. Therefore the Doctor cherished
his peripatetic lectures, to which the boy attended,
which he generally appeared to enjoy, and by which
he often profited.
Many and many were the talks they
had together; and health and moderation proved the
subject of the Doctor’s divagations.
To these he lovingly returned.
“I lead you,” he would
say, “by the green pastures. My system,
my beliefs, my medicines, are resumed in one phrase to
avoid excess. Blessed nature, healthy, temperate
nature, abhors and exterminates excess. Human
law, in this matter, imitates at a great distance her
provisions; and we must strive to supplement the efforts
of the law. Yes, boy, we must be a law to ourselves
and for our neighbours lex armata armed,
emphatic, tyrannous law. If you see a crapulous
human ruin snuffing, dash from him his box! The
judge, though in a way an admission of disease, is
less offensive to me than either the doctor or the
priest. Above all the doctor the doctor
and the purulent trash and garbage of his pharmacopoeia!
Pure air from the neighbourhood of a pinetum
for the sake of the turpentine unadulterated
wine, and the reflections of an unsophisticated spirit
in the presence of the works of nature these,
my boy, are the best medical appliances and the best
religious comforts. Devote yourself to these.
Hark! there are the bells of Bourron (the wind is
in the north, it will be fair). How clear and
airy is the sound. The nerves are harmonised and
quieted; the mind attuned to silence; and observe
how easily and regularly beats the heart! Your
unenlightened doctor would see nothing in these sensations;
and yet you yourself perceive they are a part of health.
Did you remember your cinchona this morning?
Good. Cinchona also is a work of nature; it is,
after all, only the bark of a tree which we might gather
for ourselves if we lived in the locality. What
a world is this! Though a professed atheist,
I delight to bear my testimony to the world. Look
at the gratuitous remedies and pleasures that surround
our path! The river runs by the garden end, our
bath, our fish-pond, our natural system of drainage.
There is a well in the court which sends up sparkling
water from the earth’s very heart, clean, cool,
and, with a little wine, most wholesome. The
district is notorious for its salubrity; rheumatism
is the only prevalent complaint, and I myself have
never had a touch of it. I tell you and
my opinion is based upon the coldest, clearest processes
of reason if I, if you, desired to leave
this home of pleasures, it would be the duty, it would
be the privilege, of our best friend to prevent us
with a pistol bullet.”
One beautiful June day they sat upon
the hill outside the village. The river, as blue
as heaven, shone here and there among the foliage.
The indefatigable birds turned and flickered about
Gretz church-tower. A healthy wind blew from
over the forest, and the sound of innumerable thousands
of tree-tops and innumerable millions on millions of
green leaves was abroad in the air, and filled the
ear with something between whispered speech and singing.
It seemed as if every blade of grass must hide a cigale;
and the fields rang merrily with their music, jingling
far and near as with the sleigh-bells of the fairy
queen. From their station on the slope the eye
embraced a large space of poplared plain upon the
one hand, the waving hill-tops of the forest on the
other, and Gretz itself in the middle, a handful of
roofs. Under the bestriding arch of the blue
heavens, the place seemed dwindled to a toy. It
seemed incredible that people dwelt, and could find
room to turn or air to breathe, in such a corner of
the world. The thought came home to the boy,
perhaps for the first time, and he gave it words.
“How small it looks!” he sighed.
“Ay,” replied the Doctor,
“small enough now. Yet it was once a walled
city; thriving, full of furred burgesses and men in
armour, humming with affairs; with tall
spires, for aught that I know, and portly towers along
the battlements. A thousand chimneys ceased smoking
at the curfew-bell. There were gibbets at the
gate as thick as scarecrows. In time of war,
the assault swarmed against it with ladders, the arrows
fell like leaves, the defenders sallied hotly over
the drawbridge, each side uttered its cry as they
plied their weapons. Do you know that the walls
extended as far as the Commanderie? Tradition
so reports. Alas! what a long way off is all
this confusion nothing left of it but my
quiet words spoken in your ear and the
town itself shrunk to the hamlet underneath us!
By-and-by came the English wars you shall
hear more of the English, a stupid people, who sometimes
blundered into good and Gretz was taken,
sacked, and burned. It is the history of many
towns; but Gretz never rose again; it was never rebuilt;
its ruins were a quarry to serve the growth of rivals;
and the stones of Gretz are now erect along the streets
of Nemours. It gratifies me that our old house
was the first to rise after the calamity; when the
town had come to an end, it inaugurated the hamlet.”
“I, too, am glad of that,” said Jean-Marie.
“It should be the temple of
the humbler virtues,” responded the Doctor with
a savoury gusto. “Perhaps one of the reasons
why I love my little hamlet as I do, is that we have
a similar history, she and I. Have I told you that
I was once rich?”
“I do not think so,” answered
Jean-Marie. “I do not think I should have
forgotten. I am sorry you should have lost your
fortune.”
“Sorry?” cried the Doctor.
“Why, I find I have scarce begun your education
after all. Listen to me! Would you rather
live in the old Gretz or in the new, free from the
alarms of war, with the green country at the door,
without noise, passports, the exactions of the soldiery,
or the jangle of the curfew-bell to send us off to
bed by sundown?”
“I suppose I should prefer the new,” replied
the boy.
“Precisely,” returned
the Doctor; “so do I. And in the same way, I
prefer my present moderate fortune to my former wealth.
Golden mediocrity! cried the adorable ancients; and
I subscribe to their enthusiasm. Have I not good
wine, good food, good air, the fields and the forest
for my walk, a house, an admirable wife, a boy whom
I protest I cherish like a son? Now, if I were
still rich, I should indubitably make my residence
in Paris you know Paris Paris
and Paradise are not convertible terms. This
pleasant noise of the wind streaming among leaves changed
into the grinding Babel of the street, the stupid
glare of plaster substituted for this quiet pattern
of greens and greys, the nerves shattered, the digestion
falsified picture the fall! Already
you perceive the consequences: the mind is stimulated,
the heart steps to a different measure, and the man
is himself no longer. I have passionately studied
myself the true business of philosophy.
I know my character as the musician knows the ventages
of his flute. Should I return to Paris, I should
ruin myself gambling; nay, I go further I
should break the heart of my Anastasie with infidelities.”
This was too much for Jean-Marie.
That a place should so transform the most excellent
of men transcended his belief. Paris, he protested,
was even an agreeable place of residence. “Nor
when I lived in that city did I feel much difference,”
he pleaded.
“What!” cried the Doctor.
“Did you not steal when you were there?”
But the boy could never be brought
to see that he had done anything wrong when he stole.
Nor, indeed, did the Doctor think he had; but that
gentleman was never very scrupulous when in want of
a retort.
“And now,” he concluded,
“do you begin to understand? My only friends
were those who ruined me. Gretz has been my academy,
my sanatorium, my heaven of innocent pleasures.
If millions are offered me, I wave them back:
Retro, Sathanas! Evil one, begone!
Fix your mind on my example; despise riches, avoid
the debasing influence of cities. Hygiene hygiene
and mediocrity of fortune these be your
watchwords during life!”
The Doctor’s system of hygiene
strikingly coincided with his tastes; and his picture
of the perfect life was a faithful description of the
one he was leading at the time. But it is easy
to convince a boy, whom you supply with all the facts
for the discussion. And besides, there was one
thing admirable in the philosophy, and that was the
enthusiasm of the philosopher. There was never
any one more vigorously determined to be pleased;
and if he was not a great logician, and so had no right
to convince the intellect, he was certainly something
of a poet, and had a fascination to seduce the heart.
What he could not achieve in his customary humour
of a radiant admiration of himself and his circumstances,
he sometimes effected in his fits of gloom.
“Boy,” he would say, “avoid
me to-day. If I were superstitious, I should
even beg for an interest in your prayers. I am
in the black fit; the evil spirit of King Saul, the
hag of the merchant Abudah, the personal devil of
the mediæval monk, is with me is in
me,” tapping on his breast. “The
vices of my nature are now uppermost; innocent pleasures
woo me in vain; I long for Paris, for my wallowing
in the mire. See,” he would continue, producing
a handful of silver, “I denude myself, I am not
to be trusted with the price of a fare. Take
it, keep it for me, squander it on deleterious candy,
throw it in the deepest of the river I will
homologate your action. Save me from that part
of myself which I disown. If you see me falter,
do not hesitate; if necessary, wreck the train!
I speak, of course, by a parable. Any extremity
were better than for me to reach Paris alive.”
Doubtless the Doctor enjoyed these
little scenes, as a variation in his part; they represented
the Byronic element in the somewhat artificial poetry
of his existence; but to the boy, though he was dimly
aware of their theatricality, they represented more.
The Doctor made perhaps too little, the boy possibly
too much, of the reality and gravity of these temptations.
One day a great light shone for Jean-Marie.
“Could not riches be used well?” he asked.
“In theory, yes,” replied
the Doctor. “But it is found in experience
that no one does so. All the world imagine they
will be exceptional when they grow wealthy; but possession
is debasing, new desires spring up; and the silly
taste for ostentation eats out the heart of pleasure.”
“Then you might be better if you had less,”
said the boy.
“Certainly not,” replied the Doctor; but
his voice quavered as he spoke.
“Why?” demanded pitiless innocence.
Doctor Desprez saw all the colours
of the rainbow in a moment; the stable universe appeared
to be about capsizing with him. “Because,”
said he affecting deliberation after an
obvious pause “because I have formed
my life for my present income. It is not good
for men of my years to be violently dissevered from
their habits.”
That was a sharp brush. The Doctor
breathed hard, and fell into taciturnity for the afternoon.
As for the boy, he was delighted with the resolution
of his doubts; even wondered that he had not foreseen
the obvious and conclusive answer. His faith
in the Doctor was a stout piece of goods. Desprez
was inclined to be a sheet in the wind’s eye
after dinner, especially after Rhone wine, his favourite
weakness. He would then remark on the warmth
of his feeling for Anastasie, and with inflamed cheeks
and a loose, flustered smile, debate upon all sorts
of topics, and be feebly and indiscreetly witty.
But the adopted stable-boy would not permit himself
to entertain a doubt that savoured of ingratitude.
It is quite true that a man may be a second father
to you, and yet take too much to drink; but the best
natures are ever slow to accept such truths.
The Doctor thoroughly possessed his
heart, but perhaps he exaggerated his influence over
his mind. Certainly Jean-Marie adopted some of
his master’s opinions, but I have yet to learn
that he ever surrendered one of his own. Convictions
existed in him by divine right; they were virgin,
unwrought, the brute metal of decision. He could
add others indeed, but he could not put away; neither
did he care if they were perfectly agreed among themselves;
and his spiritual pleasures had nothing to do with
turning them over or justifying them in words.
Words were with him a mere accomplishment, like dancing.
When he was by himself, his pleasures were almost
vegetable. He would slip into the woods towards
Achères, and sit in the mouth of a cave among grey
birches. His soul stared straight out of his
eyes; he did not move or think; sunlight, thin shadows
moving in the wind, the edge of firs against the sky,
occupied and bound his faculties. He was pure
unity, a spirit wholly abstracted. A single mood
filled him, to which all the objects of sense contributed,
as the colours of the spectrum merge and disappear
in white light.
So while the Doctor made himself drunk
with words, the adopted stable-boy bemused himself
with silence.
CHAPTER V
TREASURE TROVE
The Doctor’s carriage was a
two-wheeled gig with a hood; a kind of vehicle in
much favour among country doctors. On how many
roads has one not seen it, a great way off between
the poplars! in how many village streets,
tied to a gate-post! This sort of chariot is affected particularly
at the trot by a kind of pitching movement
to and fro across the axle, which well entitles it
to the style of a Noddy. The hood describes a
considerable arc against the landscape, with a solemnly
absurd effect on the contemplative pedestrian.
To ride in such a carriage cannot be numbered among
the things that appertain to glory; but I have no doubt
it may be useful in liver complaint. Thence,
perhaps, its wide popularity among physicians.
One morning early, Jean-Marie led
forth the Doctor’s noddy, opened the gate, and
mounted to the driving-seat. The Doctor followed,
arrayed from top to toe in spotless linen, armed with
an immense flesh-coloured umbrella, and girt with
a botanical case on a baldric; and the equipage drove
off smartly in a breeze of its own provocation.
They were bound for Franchard, to collect plants,
with an eye to the “Comparative Pharmacopoeia.”
A little rattling on the open roads,
and they came to the borders of the forest and struck
into an unfrequented track; the noddy yawed softly
over the sand, with an accompaniment of snapping twigs.
There was a great, green, softly murmuring cloud of
congregated foliage overhead. In the arcades
of the forest the air retained the freshness of the
night. The athletic bearing of the trees, each
carrying its leafy mountain, pleased the mind like
so many statues; and the lines of the trunk led the
eye admiringly upward to where the extreme leaves
sparkled in a patch of azure. Squirrels leaped
in mid-air. It was a proper spot for a devotee
of the goddess Hygieia.
“Have you been to Franchard,
Jean-Marie?” inquired the Doctor. “I
fancy not.”
“Never,” replied the boy.
“It is a ruin in a gorge,”
continued Desprez, adopting his expository voice;
“the ruin of a hermitage and chapel. History
tells us much of Franchard; how the recluse was often
slain by robbers; how he lived on a most insufficient
diet; how he was expected to pass his days in prayer.
A letter is preserved, addressed to one of these solitaries
by the superior of his order, full of admirable hygienic
advice; bidding him go from his book to praying, and
so back again, for variety’s sake, and when he
was weary of both to stroll about his garden and observe
the honey-bees. It is to this day my own system.
You must often have remarked me leaving the ’Pharmacopoeia’ often
even in the middle of a phrase to come forth
into the sun and air. I admire the writer of that
letter from my heart; he was a man of thought on the
most important subjects. But, indeed, had I lived
in the Middle Ages (I am heartily glad that I did not)
I should have been an eremite myself if
I had not been a professed buffoon, that is.
These were the only philosophical lives yet open:
laughter or prayer; sneers, we might say, and tears.
Until the sun of the Positive arose, the wise man
had to make his choice between these two.”
“I have been a buffoon, of course,” observed
Jean-Marie.
“I cannot imagine you to have
excelled in your profession,” said the doctor,
admiring the boy’s gravity. “Do you
ever laugh?”
“Oh, yes,” replied the
other. “I laugh often. I am very fond
of jokes.”
“Singular being!” said
Desprez. “But I divagate (I perceive in
a thousand ways that I grow old). Franchard was
at length destroyed in the English wars, the same
that levelled Gretz. But here is the
point the hermits (for there were already
more than one) had foreseen the danger and carefully
concealed the sacrificial vessels. These vessels
were of monstrous value, Jean-Marie monstrous
value priceless, we may say; exquisitely
worked, of exquisite material. And now, mark me,
they have never been found. In the reign of Louis
Quatorze some fellows were digging hard by the
ruins. Suddenly tock! the
spade hit upon an obstacle. Imagine the men looking
one to another; imagine how their hearts bounded,
how their colour came and went. It was a coffer,
and in Franchard, the place of buried treasure!
They tore it open like famished beasts. Alas!
it was not the treasure; only some priestly robes,
which, at the touch of the eating air, fell upon themselves
and instantly wasted into dust. The perspiration
of these good fellows turned cold upon them, Jean-Marie.
I will pledge my reputation, if there was anything
like a cutting wind, one or other had a pneumonia
for his trouble.”
“I should like to have seen
them turning into dust,” said Jean-Marie.
“Otherwise, I should not have cared so greatly.”
“You have no imagination,”
cried the Doctor. “Picture to yourself the
scene. Dwell on the idea a great treasure
lying in the earth for centuries: the material
for a giddy, copious, opulent existence not employed;
dresses and exquisite pictures unseen; the swiftest
galloping horses not stirring a hoof, arrested by
a spell; women with the beautiful faculty of smiles,
not smiling; cards, dice, opera singing, orchestras,
castles, beautiful parks and gardens, big ships with
a tower of sailcloth, all lying unborn in a coffin and
the stupid trees growing overhead in the sunlight,
year after year. The thought drives one frantic.”
“It is only money,” replied
Jean-Marie. “It would do harm.”
“Oh, come!” cried Desprez,
“that is philosophy; it is all very fine, but
not to the point just now. And besides, it is
not ‘only money,’ as you call it; there
are works of art in the question; the vessels were
carved. You speak like a child. You weary
me exceedingly, quoting my words out of all logical
connection, like a parroquet.”
“And at any rate, we have nothing
to do with it,” returned the boy submissively.
They struck the Route Ronde at that
moment; and the sudden change to the rattling causeway
combined, with the Doctor’s irritation, to keep
him silent. The noddy jigged along; the trees
went by, looking on silently, as if they had something
on their minds. The Quadrilateral was passed;
then came Franchard. They put up the horse at
the little solitary inn, and went forth strolling.
The gorge was dyed deeply with heather; the rocks
and birches standing luminous in the sun. A great
humming of bees about the flowers disposed Jean-Marie
to sleep, and he sat down against a clump of heather,
while the Doctor went briskly to and fro, with quick
turns, culling his simples.
The boy’s head had fallen a
little forward, his eyes were closed, his fingers
had fallen lax about his knees, when a sudden cry called
him to his feet. It was a strange sound, thin
and brief; it fell dead, and silence returned as though
it had never been interrupted. He had not recognised
the Doctor’s voice; but, as there was no one
else in all the valley, it was plainly the Doctor
who had given utterance to the sound. He looked
right and left, and there was Desprez, standing in
a niche between two boulders, and looking round on
his adopted son with a countenance as white as paper.
“A viper!” cried Jean-Marie,
running towards him. “A viper! You
are bitten!”
The Doctor came down heavily out of
the cleft, and advanced in silence to meet the boy,
whom he took roughly by the shoulder.
“I have found it,” he said, with a gasp.
“A plant?” asked Jean-Marie.
Desprez had a fit of unnatural gaiety,
which the rocks took up and mimicked. “A
plant!” he repeated scornfully. “Well yes a
plant. And here,” he added suddenly, showing
his right hand, which he had hitherto concealed behind
his back “here is one of the bulbs.”
Jean-Marie saw a dirty platter, coated with earth.
“That?” said he. “It is a plate!”
“It is a coach and horses,”
cried the Doctor. “Boy,” he continued,
growing warmer, “I plucked away a great pad of
moss from between these boulders, and disclosed a
crevice; and when I looked in, what do you suppose
I saw? I saw a house in Paris with a court and
garden, I saw my wife shining with diamonds, I saw
myself a deputy, I saw you well, I I
saw your future,” he concluded, rather feebly.
“I have just discovered America,” he added.
“But what is it?” asked the boy.
“The Treasure of Franchard,”
cried the Doctor; and, throwing his brown straw hat
upon the ground, he whooped like an Indian and sprang
upon Jean-Marie, whom he suffocated with embraces
and bedewed with tears. Then he flung himself
down among the heather and once more laughed until
the valley rang.
But the boy had now an interest of
his own, a boy’s interest. No sooner was
he released from the Doctor’s accolade than he
ran to the boulders, sprang into the niche, and, thrusting
his hand into the crevice, drew forth one after another,
encrusted with the earth of ages, the flagons, candlesticks,
and patens of the hermitage of Franchard.
A casket came last, tightly shut and very heavy.
“Oh what fun!” he cried.
But when he looked back at the Doctor,
who had followed close behind and was silently observing,
the words died from his lips. Desprez was once
more the colour of ashes; his lip worked and trembled;
a sort of bestial greed possessed him.
“This is childish,” he
said. “We lose precious time. Back
to the inn, harness the trap, and bring it to yon
bank. Run for your life, and remember not
one whisper. I stay here to watch.”
Jean-Marie did as he was bid, though
not without surprise. The noddy was brought round
to the spot indicated; and the two gradually transported
the treasure from its place of concealment to the boot
below the driving-seat. Once it was all stored
the Doctor recovered his gaiety.
“I pay my grateful duties to
the genius of this dell,” he said. “Oh
for a live coal, a heifer, and a jar of country wine!
I am in the vein for sacrifice, for a superb libation.
Well, and why not? We are at Franchard.
English pale ale is to be had not classical,
indeed, but excellent. Boy, we shall drink ale.”
“But I thought it was so unwholesome,”
said Jean-Marie, “and very dear besides.”
“Fiddle-de-dee!” exclaimed
the Doctor gaily. “To the inn!”
And he stepped into the noddy, tossing
his head with an elastic, youthful air. The horse
was turned, and in a few seconds they drew up beside
the palings of the inn garden.
“Here,” said Desprez “here,
near the table, so that we may keep an eye upon things.”
They tied the horse, and entered the
garden, the Doctor singing, now in fantastic high
notes, now producing deep reverberations from his chest.
He took a seat, rapped loudly on the table, assailed
the waiter with witticisms; and when the bottle of
Bass was at length produced, far more charged with
gas than the most delirious champagne, he filled out
a long glassful of froth and pushed it over to Jean-Marie.
“Drink,” he said; “drink deep.”
“I would rather not,”
faltered the boy, true to his training.
“What?” thundered Desprez.
“I am afraid of it,” said Jean-Marie:
“my stomach ”
“Take it or leave it,”
interrupted Desprez fiercely: “but understand
it once for all there is nothing so contemptible
as a precisian.”
Here was a new lesson! The boy
sat bemused, looking at the glass but not tasting
it, while the Doctor emptied and refilled his own,
at first with clouded brow, but gradually yielding
to the sun, the heady, prickling beverage, and his
own predisposition to be happy.
“Once in a way,” he said
at last, by way of a concession to the boy’s
more rigorous attitude, “once in a way, and at
so critical a moment, this ale is a nectar for the
gods. The habit, indeed, is debasing; wine, the
juice of the grape, is the true drink of the Frenchman,
as I have often had occasion to point out; and I do
not know that I can blame you for refusing this outlandish
stimulant. You can have some wine and cakes.
Is the bottle empty? Well, we will not be proud;
we will have pity on your glass.”
The beer being done, the Doctor chafed
bitterly while Jean-Marie finished his cakes.
“I burn to be gone,” he said, looking at
his watch. “Good God, how slow you eat!”
And yet to eat slowly was his own particular prescription,
the main secret of longevity!
His martyrdom, however, reached an
end at last; the pair resumed their places in the
buggy, and Desprez, leaning luxuriously back, announced
his intention of proceeding to Fontainebleau.
“To Fontainebleau?” repeated Jean-Marie.
“My words are always measured,” said the
Doctor. “On!”
The Doctor was driven through the
glades of paradise; the air, the light, the shining
leaves, the very movements of the vehicle, seemed to
fall in tune with his golden meditations; with his
head thrown back, he dreamed a series of sunny visions,
ale and pleasure dancing in his veins. At last
he spoke.
“I shall telegraph for Casimir,”
he said. “Good Casimir! a fellow of the
lower order of intelligence, Jean-Marie, distinctly
not creative, not poetic; and yet he will repay your
study; his fortune is vast, and is entirely due to
his own exertions. He is the very fellow to help
us to dispose of our trinkets, find us a suitable
house in Paris, and manage the details of our installation.
Admirable Casimir, one of my oldest comrades!
It was on his advice, I may add, that I invested my
little fortune in Turkish bonds; when we have added
these spoils of the mediæval Church to our stake
in the Mahometan empire, little boy, we shall positively
roll among doubloons, positively roll! Beautiful
forest,” he cried, “farewell! Though
called to other scenes, I will not forget thee.
Thy name is graven in my heart. Under the influence
of prosperity I become dithyrambic, Jean-Marie.
Such is the impulse of the natural soul; such was
the constitution of primæval man. And I well,
I will not refuse the credit I have preserved
my youth like a virginity; another, who should have
led the same snoozing, countrified existence for these
years, another had become rusty, become stereotype;
but I, I praise my happy constitution, retain the
spring unbroken. Fresh opulence and a new sphere
of duties find me unabated in ardour and only more
mature by knowledge. For this prospective change,
Jean-Marie it may probably have shocked
you. Tell me now, did it not strike you as an
inconsistency? Confess it is useless
to dissemble it pained you?”
“Yes,” said the boy.
“You see,” returned the
Doctor, with sublime fatuity, “I read your thoughts!
Nor am I surprised your education is not
yet complete; the higher duties of men have not been
yet presented to you fully. A hint till
we have leisure must suffice. Now that
I am once more in possession of a modest competence;
now that I have so long prepared myself in silent
meditation, it becomes my superior duty to proceed
to Paris. My scientific training, my undoubted
command of language, mark me out for the service of
my country. Modesty in such a case would be a
snare. If sin were a philosophical expression,
I should call it sinful. A man must not deny
his manifest abilities, for that is to evade his obligations.
I must be up and doing; I must be no skulker in life’s
battle.”
So he rattled on, copiously greasing
the joint of his inconsistency with words; while the
boy listened silently, his eyes fixed on the horse,
his mind seething. It was all lost eloquence;
no array of words could unsettle a belief of Jean-Marie’s;
and he drove into Fontainebleau filled with pity,
horror, indignation, and despair.
In the town Jean-Marie was kept a
fixture on the driving-seat, to guard the treasure;
while the Doctor, with a singular, slightly tipsy airiness
of manner, fluttered in and out of cafés, where he
shook hands with garrison officers, and mixed an absinthe
with the nicety of old experience; in and out of shops,
from which he returned laden with costly fruits, real
turtle, a magnificent piece of silk for his wife, a
preposterous cane for himself, and a képi of the newest
fashion for the boy; in and out of the telegraph office,
whence he despatched his telegram, and where three
hours later he received an answer promising a visit
on the morrow, and generally pervaded Fontainebleau
with the first fine aroma of his divine good-humour.
The sun was very low when they set
forth again; the shadows of the forest trees extended
across the broad white road that led them home; the
penetrating odour of the evening wood had already arisen,
like a cloud of incense, from that broad field of
tree-tops; and even in the streets of the town, where
the air had been baked all day between white walls,
it came in whiffs and pulses, like a distant music.
Half-way home, the last gold flicker vanished from
a great oak upon the left; and when they came forth
beyond the borders of the wood, the plain was already
sunken in pearly greyness, and a great, pale moon
came swinging skyward through the filmy poplars.
The Doctor sang, the Doctor whistled,
the Doctor talked. He spoke of the woods, and
the wars, and the deposition of dew; he brightened
and babbled of Paris; he soared into cloudy bombast
on the glories of the political arena. All was
to be changed; as the day departed, it took with it
the vestiges of an outworn existence, and to-morrow’s
sun was to inaugurate the new. “Enough,”
he cried, “of this life of maceration!”
His wife (still beautiful, or he was sadly partial)
was to be no longer buried; she should now shine before
society. Jean-Marie would find the world at his
feet; the roads open to success, wealth, honour, and
posthumous renown. “And oh, by the way,”
said he, “for God’s sake keep your tongue
quiet! You are, of course, a very silent fellow;
it is a quality I gladly recognise in you silence,
golden silence! But this is a matter of gravity.
No word must get abroad; none but the good Casimir
is to be trusted; we shall probably dispose of the
vessels in England.”
“But are they not even ours?”
the boy said, almost with a sob it was the
only time he had spoken.
“Ours in this sense, that they
are nobody else’s,” replied the Doctor.
“But the State would have some claim. If
they were stolen, for instance, we should be unable
to demand their restitution; we should have no title;
we should be unable even to communicate with the police.
Such is the monstrous condition of the law. It
is a mere instance of what remains to be done, of
the injustices that may yet be righted by an ardent,
active, and philosophical deputy.”
Jean-Marie put his faith in Madame
Desprez; and as they drove forward down the road from
Bourron, between the rustling poplars, he prayed in
his teeth, and whipped up the horse to an unusual speed.
Surely, as soon as they arrived, madame would
assert her character, and bring this waking nightmare
to an end.
Their entrance into Gretz was heralded
and accompanied by a most furious barking; all the
dogs in the village seemed to smell the treasure in
the noddy. But there was no one in the street,
save three lounging landscape-painters at Tentaillon’s
door. Jean-Marie opened the green gate and led
in the horse and carriage; and almost at the same moment
Madame Desprez came to the kitchen threshold with a
lighted lantern; for the moon was not yet high enough
to clear the garden walls.
“Close the gates, Jean-Marie!”
cried the Doctor, somewhat unsteadily alighting. “Anastasie,
where is Aline?”
“She has gone to Montereau to
see her parents,” said madame.
“All is for the best!”
exclaimed the Doctor fervently. “Here quick,
come near to me; I do not wish to speak too loud,”
he continued. “Darling, we are wealthy!”
“Wealthy!” repeated the wife.
“I have found the treasure of
Franchard,” replied her husband, “See,
here are the first-fruits; a pine-apple, a dress for
my ever-beautiful it will suit her trust
a husband’s, trust a lover’s taste!
Embrace me, darling! This grimy episode is over;
the butterfly unfolds its painted wings. To-morrow
Casimir will come; in a week we may be in Paris happy
at last! You shall have diamonds. Jean-Marie,
take it out of the boot, with religious care, and
bring it piece by piece into the dining-room.
We shall have plate at table! Darling, hasten
and prepare this turtle; it will be a whet it
will be an addition to our meagre ordinary. I
myself will proceed to the cellar. We shall have
a bottle of that little Beaujolais you like, and finish
with the Hermitage; there are still three bottles
left. Worthy wine for a worthy occasion.”
“But, my husband, you put me
in a whirl,” she cried. “I do not
comprehend.”
“The turtle, my adored, the
turtle!” cried the Doctor; and he pushed her
towards the kitchen, lantern and all.
Jean-Marie stood dumfoundered.
He had pictured to himself a different scene a
more immediate protest, and his hope began to dwindle
on the spot.
The Doctor was everywhere, a little
doubtful on his legs, perhaps, and now and then taking
the wall with his shoulder; for it was long since he
had tasted absinthe, and he was even then reflecting
that the absinthe had been a misconception. Not
that he regretted excess on such a glorious day, but
he made a mental memorandum to beware; he must not,
a second time, become the victim of a deleterious
habit. He had his wine out of the cellar in a
twinkling; he arranged the sacrificial vessels, some
on the white table-cloth, some on the sideboard, still
crusted with historic earth. He was in and out
of the kitchen, plying Anastasie with vermouth, heating
her with glimpses of the future, estimating their new
wealth at ever larger figures; and before they sat
down to supper, the lady’s virtue had melted
in the fire of his enthusiasm, her timidity had disappeared;
she, too, had begun to speak disparagingly of the life
at Gretz; and as she took her place and helped the
soup, her eyes shone with the glitter of prospective
diamonds.
All through the meal she and the Doctor
made and unmade fairy plans. They bobbed and
bowed and pledged each other. Their faces ran
over with smiles; their eyes scattered sparkles, as
they projected the Doctor’s political honours
and the lady’s drawing-room ovations.
“But you will not be a Red!” cried Anastasie.
“I am Left Centre to the core,” replied
the Doctor.
“Madame Gastein will present
us we shall find ourselves forgotten,”
said the lady.
“Never,” protested the Doctor. “Beauty
and talent leave a mark.”
“I have positively forgotten how to dress,”
she sighed.
“Darling, you make me blush,”
cried he. “Yours has been a tragic marriage!”
“But your success to
see you appreciated, honoured, your name in all the
papers, that will be more than pleasure it
will be heaven!” she cried.
“And once a week,” said
the Doctor, archly scanning the syllables, “once
a week one good little game of baccarat?”
“Only once a week?” she
questioned, threatening him with a finger.
“I swear it by my political honour,” cried
he.
“I spoil you,” she said, and gave him
her hand.
He covered it with kisses.
Jean-Marie escaped into the night.
The moon swung high over Gretz. He went down
to the garden end and sat on the jetty. The river
ran by with eddies of oily silver, and a low monotonous
song. Faint veils of mist moved among the poplars
on the farther side. The reeds were quietly nodding.
A hundred times already had the boy sat, on such a
night, and watched the streaming river with untroubled
fancy. And this perhaps was to be the last.
He was to leave this familiar hamlet, this green,
rustling country, this bright and quiet stream; he
was to pass into the great city; his dear lady mistress
was to move bedizened in saloons; his good, garrulous,
kind-hearted master to become a brawling deputy; and
both be lost for ever to Jean-Marie and their better
selves. He knew his own defects; he knew he must
sink into less and less consideration in the turmoil
of a city life, sink more and more from the child into
the servant. And he began dimly to believe the
Doctor’s prophecies of evil. He could see
a change in both. His generous incredulity failed
him for this once; a child must have perceived that
the Hermitage had completed what the absinthe had
begun. If this were the first day, what would
be the last? “If necessary, wreck the train,”
thought he, remembering the Doctor’s parable.
He looked round on the delightful scene; he drank deep
of the charmed night-air, laden with the scent of hay.
“If necessary, wreck the train,” he repeated.
And he rose and returned to the house.
CHAPTER VI
A CRIMINAL INVESTIGATION, IN TWO PARTS
The next morning there was a most
unusual outcry in the Doctor’s house. The
last thing before going to bed, the Doctor had locked
up some valuables in the dining-room cupboard; and
behold, when he rose again, as he did about four o’clock,
the cupboard had been broken open, and the valuables
in question had disappeared. Madame and Jean-Marie
were summoned from their rooms, and appeared in hasty
toilets; they found the Doctor raving, calling the
heavens to witness and avenge his injury, pacing the
room barefooted, with the tails of his night-shirt
flirting as he turned.
“Gone!” he said; “the
things are gone, the fortune gone! We are paupers
once more. Boy! what do you know of this?
Speak up, sir, speak up. Do you know of it?
Where are they?” He had him by the arm, shaking
him like a bag, and the boy’s words, if he had
any, were jolted forth in inarticulate murmurs.
The Doctor, with a revulsion from his own violence,
set him down again. He observed Anastasie in tears.
“Anastasie,” he said, in quite an altered
voice, “compose yourself, command your feelings.
I would not have you give way to passion like the
vulgar. This this trifling accident
must be lived down. Jean-Marie, bring me
my smaller medicine-chest. A gentle laxative
is indicated.”
And he dosed the family all round,
leading the way himself with a double quantity.
The wretched Anastasie, who had never been ill in the
whole course of her existence, and whose soul recoiled
from remedies, wept floods of tears as she sipped,
and shuddered, and protested, and then was bullied
and shouted at until she sipped again. As for
Jean-Marie, he took his portion down with stoicism.
“I have given him a less amount,”
observed the Doctor, “his youth protecting him
against emotion. And now that we have thus parried
any morbid consequences, let us reason.”
“I am so cold,” wailed Anastasie.
“Cold!” cried the Doctor.
“I give thanks to God that I am made of fierier
material. Why, madam, a blow like this would set
a frog into a transpiration. If you are cold,
you can retire; and, by the way, you might throw me
down my trousers. It is chilly for the legs.”
“Oh no!” protested Anastasie; “I
will stay with you.”
“Nay, madam, you shall not suffer
for your devotion,” said the Doctor. “I
will myself fetch you a shawl.” And he went
upstairs and returned more fully clad and with an
armful of wraps for the shivering Anastasie. “And
now,” he resumed, “to investigate this
crime. Let us proceed by induction. Anastasie,
do you know anything that can help us?” Anastasie
knew nothing. “Or you, Jean-Marie?”
“Not I,” replied the boy steadily.
“Good,” returned the Doctor.
“We shall now turn our attention to the material
evidences. (I was born to be a detective; I have the
eye and the systematic spirit.) First, violence has
been employed. The door was broken open; and
it may be observed, in passing, that the lock was dear
indeed at what I paid for it: a crow to pluck
with Master Goguelat. Second, here is the instrument
employed, one of our own table-knives, one of our
best, my dear; which seems to indicate no preparation
on the part of the gang if gang it was.
Thirdly, I observe that nothing has been removed except
the Franchard dishes and the casket; our own silver
has been minutely respected. This is wily; it
shows intelligence, a knowledge of the code, a desire
to avoid legal consequences. I argue from this
fact that the gang numbers persons of respectability outward,
of course, and merely outward, as the robbery proves.
But I argue, second, that we must have been observed
at Franchard itself by some occult observer, and dogged
throughout the day with a skill and patience that I
venture to qualify as consummate. No ordinary
man, no occasional criminal, would have shown himself
capable of this combination. We have in our neighbourhood,
it is far from improbable, a retired bandit of the
highest order of intelligence.”
“Good heaven!” cried the
horrified Anastasie. “Henri, how can you?”
“My cherished one, this is a
process of induction,” said the Doctor.
“If any of my steps are unsound, correct me.
You are silent? Then do not, I beseech you, be
so vulgarly illogical as to revolt from my conclusion.
We have now arrived,” he resumed, “at
some idea of the composition of the gang for
I incline to the hypothesis of more than one and
we now leave this room, which can disclose no more,
and turn our attention to the court and garden. (Jean-Marie,
I trust you are observantly following my various steps;
this is an excellent piece of education for you.) Come
with me to the door. No steps on the court; it
is unfortunate our court should be paved. On
what small matters hang the destiny of these delicate
investigations! Hey! What have we here?
I have led you to the very spot,” he said, standing
grandly backward and indicating the green gate.
“An escalade, as you can now see for yourselves,
has taken place.”
Sure enough, the green paint was in
several places scratched and broken; and one of the
panels preserved the print of a nailed shoe. The
foot had slipped, however, and it was difficult to
estimate the size of the shoe, and impossible to distinguish
the pattern of the nails.
“The whole robbery,” concluded
the Doctor, “step by step, has been reconstituted.
Inductive science can no further go.”
“It is wonderful,” said
his wife. “You should indeed have been a
detective, Henri. I had no idea of your talents.”
“My dear,” replied Desprez
condescendingly, “a man of scientific imagination
combines the lesser faculties; he is a detective just
as he is a publicist or a general; these are but local
applications of his special talent. But now,”
he continued, “would you have me go further?
Would you have me lay my finger on the culprits or
rather, for I cannot promise quite so much, point
out to you the very house where they consort?
It may be a satisfaction, at least it is all we are
likely to get, since we are denied the remedy of law.
I reach the further stage in this way. In order
to fill my outline of the robbery, I require a man
likely to be in the forest idling, I require a man
of education, I require a man superior to considerations
of morality. The three requisites all centre
in Tentaillon’s boarders. They are painters,
therefore they are continually lounging in the forest.
They are painters, therefore they are not unlikely
to have some smattering of education. Lastly,
because they are painters, they are probably immoral.
And this I prove in two ways. First, painting
is an art which merely addresses the eye; it does
not in any particular exercise the moral sense.
And second, painting, in common with all the other
arts, implies the dangerous quality of imagination.
A man of imagination is never moral; he outsoars literal
démarcations and reviews life under too many shifting
lights to rest content with the invidious distinctions
of the law!”
“But you always say at
least, so I understood you” said madame,
“that these lads display no imagination whatever.”
“My dear, they displayed imagination,
and of a very fantastic order too,” returned
the Doctor, “when they embraced their beggarly
profession. Besides and this is an
argument exactly suited to your intellectual level many
of them are English and American. Where else should
we expect to find a thief? And now you
had better get your coffee. Because we have lost
a treasure, there is no reason for starving. For
my part, I shall break my fast with white wine.
I feel unaccountably heated and thirsty to-day.
I can only attribute it to the shock of the discovery.
And yet, you will bear me out, I supported the emotion
nobly.”
The Doctor had now talked himself
back into an admirable humour; and as he sat in the
arbour and slowly imbibed a large allowance of white
wine and picked a little bread and cheese with no
very impetuous appetite, if a third of his meditations
ran upon the missing treasure, the other two-thirds
were more pleasingly busied in the retrospect of his
detective skill.
About eleven Casimir arrived; he had
caught an early train to Fontainebleau, and driven
over, to save time; and now his cab was stabled at
Tentaillon’s, and he remarked, studying his watch,
that he could spare an hour and a half. He was
much the man of business, decisively spoken, given
to frowning in an intellectual manner. Anastasie’s
born brother, he did not waste much sentiment on the
lady, gave her an English family kiss, and demanded
a meal without delay.
“You can tell me your story
while we eat,” he observed. “Anything
good to-day, Stasie?”
He was promised something good.
The trio sat down to table in the arbour, Jean-Marie
waiting as well as eating, and the Doctor recounted
what had happened in his richest narrative manner.
Casimir heard it with explosions of laughter.
“What a streak of luck for you,
my good brother,” he observed, when the tale
was over. “If you had gone to Paris, you
would have played dick-duck-drake with the whole consignment
in three months. Your own would have followed;
and you would have come to me in a procession like
the last time. But I give you warning Stasie
may weep and Henri ratiocinate it will
not serve you twice. Your next collapse will be
fatal. I thought I had told you so, Stasie?
Hey? No sense?”
The Doctor winced and looked furtively
at Jean-Marie; but the boy seemed apathetic.
“And then again,” broke
out Casimir, “what children you are vicious
children, my faith! How could you tell the value
of this trash? It might have been worth nothing,
or next door.”
“Pardon me,” said the
Doctor. “You have your usual flow of spirits,
I perceive, but even less than your usual deliberation.
I am not entirely ignorant of these matters.”
“Not entirely ignorant of anything
ever I heard of,” interrupted Casimir, bowing,
and raising his glass with a sort of pert politeness.
“At least,” resumed the
Doctor, “I gave my mind to the subject that
you may be willing to believe and I estimated
that our capital would be doubled.” And
he described the nature of the find.
“My word of honour!” said
Casimir, “I half believe you! But much would
depend on the quality of the gold.”
“The quality, my dear Casimir,
was ” And the Doctor, in default
of language, kissed his finger-tips.
“I would not take your word
for it, my good friend,” retorted the man of
business. “You are a man of very rosy views.
But this robbery,” he continued “this
robbery is an odd thing. Of course I pass over
your nonsense about gangs and landscape-painters.
For me, that is a dream. Who was in the house
last night?”
“None but ourselves,” replied the Doctor.
“And this young gentleman?”
asked Casimir, jerking a nod in the direction of Jean-Marie.
“He too” the Doctor bowed.
“Well; and, if it is a fair
question, who is he?” pursued the brother-in-law.
“Jean-Marie,” answered
the Doctor, “combines the functions of a son
and stable-boy. He began as the latter, but he
rose rapidly to the more honourable rank in our affections.
He is, I may say, the greatest comfort in our lives.”
“Ha!” said Casimir.
“And previous to becoming one of you?”
“Jean-Marie has lived a remarkable
existence; his experience has been eminently formative,”
replied Desprez. “If I had had to choose
an education for my son, I should have chosen such
another. Beginning life with mountebanks and
thieves, passing onward to the society and friendship
of philosophers, he may be said to have skimmed the
volume of human life.”
“Thieves?” repeated the
brother-in-law, with a meditative air.
The Doctor could have bitten his tongue
out. He foresaw what was coming, and prepared
his mind for a vigorous defence.
“Did you ever steal yourself?”
asked Casimir, turning suddenly on Jean-Marie, and
for the first time employing a single eyeglass which
hung round his neck.
“Yes, sir,” replied the boy, with a deep
blush.
Casimir turned to the others with
pursed lips, and nodded to them meaningly. “Hey?”
said he; “how is that?”
“Jean-Marie is a teller of the
truth,” returned the Doctor, throwing out his
bust.
“He has never told a lie,”
added madame. “He is the best of boys.”
“Never told a lie, has he not?”
reflected Casimir. “Strange, very strange.
Give me your attention, my young friend,” he
continued. “You knew about this treasure?”
“He helped to bring it home,” interposed
the Doctor.
“Desprez, I ask you nothing
but to hold your tongue,” returned Casimir.
“I mean to question this stable-boy of yours;
and if you are so certain of his innocence, you can
afford to let him answer for himself. Now,
sir,” he resumed, pointing his eyeglass straight
at Jean-Marie. “You knew it could be stolen
with impunity? You knew you could not be prosecuted?
Come! Did you, or did you not?”
“I did,” answered Jean-Marie,
in a miserable whisper. He sat there changing
colour like a revolving pharos, twisting his fingers
hysterically, swallowing air, the picture of guilt.
“You knew where it was put?” resumed the
inquisitor.
“Yes,” from Jean-Marie.
“You say you have been a thief
before,” continued Casimir. “Now,
how am I to know that you are not one still?
I suppose you could climb the green gate?”
“Yes,” still lower, from the culprit.
“Well, then, it was you who
stole these things. You know it, and you dare
not deny it. Look me in the face! Raise your
sneak’s eyes, and answer!”
But in place of anything of that sort
Jean-Marie broke into a dismal howl and fled from
the arbour. Anastasie, as she pursued to capture
and reassure the victim, found time to send one Parthian
arrow “Casimir, you are a brute!”
“My brother,” said Desprez,
with the greatest dignity, “you take upon yourself
a licence ”
“Desprez,” interrupted
Casimir, “for Heaven’s sake be a man of
the world. You telegraph me to leave my business
and come down here on yours. I come, I ask the
business, you say, ‘Find me this thief!’
Well, I find him; I say ‘There he is!’
You need not like it, but you have no manner of right
to take offence.”
“Well,” returned the Doctor,
“I grant that; I will even thank you for your
mistaken zeal. But your hypothesis was so extravagantly
monstrous ”
“Look here,” interrupted Casimir; “was
it you or Stasie?”
“Certainly not,” answered the Doctor.
“Very well; then it was the
boy. Say no more about it,” said the brother-in-law,
and he produced his cigar-case.
“I will say this much more,”
returned Desprez: “if that boy came and
told me so himself, I should not believe him; and
if I did believe him, so implicit is my trust, I should
conclude that he had acted for the best.”
“Well, well,” said Casimir
indulgently. “Have you a light? I must
be going. And by the way, I wish you would let
me sell your Turks for you. I always told you,
it meant smash. I tell you so again. Indeed,
it was partly that which brought me down. You
never acknowledge my letters a most unpardonable
habit.”
“My good brother,” replied
the Doctor blandly, “I have never denied your
ability in business; but I can perceive your limitations.”
“Egad, my friend, I can return
the compliment,” observed the man of business.
“Your limitation is to be downright irrational.”
“Observe the relative position,”
returned the Doctor, with a smile. “It
is your attitude to believe through thick and thin
in one man’s judgment your own.
I follow the same opinion, but critically and with
open eyes. Which is the more irrational?
I leave it to yourself.”
“Oh, my dear fellow!”
cried Casimir, “stick to your Turks, stick to
your stable-boy, go to the devil in general in your
own way and be done with it. But don’t
ratiocinate with me I cannot bear it.
And so, ta-ta. I might as well have
stayed away for any good I’ve done. Say
good-bye from me to Stasie, and to the sullen hang-dog
of a stable-boy, if you insist on it; I’m off.”
And Casimir departed. The Doctor,
that night, dissected his character before Anastasie.
“One thing, my beautiful,” he said, “he
has learned one thing from his lifelong acquaintance
with your husband: the word ratiocinate.
It shines in his vocabulary like a jewel in a muck-heap.
And, even so, he continually misapplies it. For
you must have observed he uses it as a sort of taunt,
in the sense of to ergotise, implying, as it
were the poor, dear fellow! a
vein of sophistry. As for his cruelty to Jean-Marie,
it must be forgiven him it is not his nature,
it is the nature of his life. A man who deals
with money, my dear, is a man lost.”
With Jean-Marie the process of reconciliation
had been somewhat slow. At first he was inconsolable,
insisted on leaving the family, went from paroxysm
to paroxysm of tears; and it was only after Anastasie
had been closeted for an hour with him, alone, that
she came forth, sought out the Doctor, and, with tears
in her eyes, acquainted that gentleman with what had
passed.
“At first, my husband, he would
hear of nothing,” she said. “Imagine!
if he had left us! what would the treasure be to that?
Horrible treasure, it has brought all this about!
At last, after he has sobbed his very heart out, he
agrees to stay on a condition we are not
to mention this matter, this infamous suspicion, not
even to mention the robbery. On that agreement
only, the poor, cruel boy will consent to remain among
his friends.”
“But this inhibition,”
said the Doctor, “this embargo it
cannot possibly apply to me?”
“To all of us,” Anastasie assured him.
“My cherished one,” Desprez
protested, “you must have misunderstood.
It cannot apply to me. He would naturally come
to me.”
“Henri,” she said, “it does; I swear
to you it does.”
“This is a painful, a very painful
circumstance,” the Doctor said, looking a little
black. “I cannot affect, Anastasie, to be
anything but justly wounded. I feel this I
feel it, my wife, acutely.”
“I knew you would,” she
said. “But if you had seen his distress!
We must make allowances, we must sacrifice our feelings.”
“I trust, my dear, you have
never found me averse to sacrifices,” said the
Doctor very stiffly.
“And you will let me go and
tell him that you have agreed? It will be like
your noble nature,” she cried.
So it would, he perceived it
would be like his noble nature! Up jumped his
spirits, triumphant at the thought. “Go,
darling,” he said nobly, “reassure him.
The subject is buried; more I make an effort,
I have accustomed my will to these exertions and
it is forgotten.”
A little after, but still with swollen
eyes and looking mortally sheepish, Jean-Marie reappeared
and went ostentatiously about his business. He
was the only unhappy member of the party that sat down
that night to supper. As for the Doctor, he was
radiant. He then sang the requiem of the treasure:
“This has been, on the whole,
a most amusing episode,” he said. “We
are not a penny the worse nay, we are immensely
gainers. Our philosophy has been exercised; some
of the turtle is still left the most wholesome
of delicacies; I have my staff, Anastasie has her
new dress, Jean-Marie is the proud possessor of a
fashionable képi. Besides, we had a glass of
Hermitage last night; the glow still suffuses my memory.
I was growing positively niggardly with that Hermitage,
positively niggardly. Let me take the hint:
we had one bottle to celebrate the appearance of our
visionary fortune; let us have a second to console
us for its occultation. The third I hereby dedicate
to Jean-Marie’s wedding breakfast.”
CHAPTER VII
THE FALL OF THE HOUSE OF DESPREZ
The Doctor’s house has not yet
received the compliment of a description, and it is
now high time that the omission were supplied, for
the house is itself an actor in the story, and one
whose part is nearly at an end. Two stories in
height, walls of a warm yellow, tiles of an ancient
ruddy brown diversified with moss and lichen, it stood
with one wall to the street in the angle of the Doctor’s
property. It was roomy, draughty, and inconvenient.
The large rafters were here and there engraven with
rude marks and patterns; the hand-rail of the stair
was carved in countrified arabesque; a stout timber
pillar, which did duty to support the dining-room
roof, bore mysterious characters on its darker side,
runes, according to the Doctor; nor did he fail, when
he ran over the legendary history of the house and
its possessors, to dwell upon the Scandinavian scholar
who had left them. Floors, doors, and rafters
made a great variety of angles; every room had a particular
inclination; the gable had tilted towards the garden,
after the manner of a leaning tower, and one of the
former proprietors had buttressed the building from
that side with a great strut of wood, like the derrick
of a crane. Altogether, it had many marks of
ruin; it was a house for the rats to desert; and nothing
but its excellent brightness the window-glass
polished and shining, the paint well scoured, the
brasses radiant, the very prop all wreathed about
with climbing flowers nothing but its air
of a well-tended, smiling veteran, sitting, crutch
and all, in the sunny corner of a garden, marked it
as a house for comfortable people to inhabit.
In poor or idle management it would soon have hurried
into the blackguard stages of decay. As it was,
the whole family loved it, and the Doctor was never
better inspired than when he narrated its imaginary
story and drew the character of its successive masters,
from the Hebrew merchant who had re-edified its walls
after the sack of the town, and past the mysterious
engraver of the runes, down to the long-headed, dirty-handed
boor from whom he had himself acquired it at a ruinous
expense. As for any alarm about its security,
the idea had never presented itself. What had
stood four centuries might well endure a little longer.
Indeed, in this particular winter,
after the finding and losing of the treasure, the
Desprez had an anxiety of a very different order, and
one which lay nearer their hearts. Jean-Marie
was plainly not himself. He had fits of hectic
activity, when he made unusual exertions to please,
spoke more and faster, and redoubled in attention
to his lessons. But these were interrupted by
spells of melancholia and brooding silence, when the
boy was little better than unbearable.
“Silence,” the Doctor
moralised “you see, Anastasie, what
comes of silence. Had the boy properly unbosomed
himself, the little disappointment about the treasure,
the little annoyance about Casimir’s incivility,
would long ago have been forgotten. As it is,
they prey upon him like a disease. He loses flesh,
his appetite is variable and, on the whole, impaired.
I keep him on the strictest regimen, I exhibit the
most powerful tonics; both in vain.”
“Don’t you think you drug
him too much?” asked madame, with an irrepressible
shudder.
“Drug?” cried the Doctor;
“I drug? Anastasie, you are mad!”
Time went on, and the boy’s
health still slowly declined. The Doctor blamed
the weather, which was cold and boisterous. He
called in his confrère from Bourron, took
a fancy for him, magnified his capacity, and was pretty
soon under treatment himself it scarcely
appeared for what complaint. He and Jean-Marie
had each medicine to take at different periods of
the day. The Doctor used to lie in wait for the
exact moment, watch in hand. “There is
nothing like regularity,” he would say, fill
out the doses, and dilate on the virtues of the draught;
and if the boy seemed none the better, the Doctor
was not at all the worse.
Gunpowder Day, the boy was particularly
low. It was scowling, squally weather. Huge
broken companies of cloud sailed swiftly overhead;
raking gleams of sunlight swept the village, and were
followed by intervals of darkness and white, flying
rain. At times the wind lifted up its voice and
bellowed. The trees were all scourging themselves
along the meadows, the last leaves flying like dust.
The Doctor, between the boy and the
weather, was in his element; he had a theory to prove.
He sat with his watch out and a barometer in front
of him, waiting for the squalls and noting their effect
upon the human pulse. “For the true philosopher,”
he remarked delightedly, “every fact in nature
is a toy.” A letter came to him; but, as
its arrival coincided with the approach of another
gust, he merely crammed it into his pocket, gave the
time to Jean-Marie, and the next moment they were both
counting their pulses as if for a wager.
At nightfall the wind rose into a
tempest. It besieged the hamlet, apparently from
every side, as if with batteries of cannon; the houses
shook and groaned; live coals were blown upon the floor.
The uproar and terror of the night kept people long
awake, sitting with pallid faces giving ear.
It was twelve before the Desprez family
retired. By half-past one, when the storm was
already somewhat past its height, the Doctor was awakened
from a troubled slumber, and sat up. A noise still
rang in his ears, but whether of this world or the
world of dreams he was not certain. Another clap
of wind followed. It was accompanied by a sickening
movement of the whole house, and in the subsequent
lull Desprez could hear the tiles pouring like a cataract
into the loft above his head. He plucked Anastasie
bodily out of bed.
“Run!” he cried, thrusting
some wearing apparel into her hands; “the house
is falling! To the garden!”
She did not pause to be twice bidden;
she was down the stair in an instant. She had
never before suspected herself of such activity.
The Doctor meanwhile, with the speed of a piece of
pantomime business, and undeterred by broken shins,
proceeded to rout out Jean-Marie, tore Aline from
her virgin slumbers, seized her by the hand, and tumbled
downstairs and into the garden, with the girl tumbling
behind him, still not half awake.
The fugitives rendezvoused in the
arbour by some common instinct. Then came a bull’s-eye
flash of struggling moonshine, which disclosed their
four figures standing huddled from the wind in a raffle
of flying drapery, and not without a considerable
need for more. At the humiliating spectacle Anastasie
clutched her night-dress desperately about her and
burst loudly into tears. The Doctor flew to console
her; but she elbowed him away. She suspected
everybody of being the general public, and thought
the darkness was alive with eyes.
Another gleam and another violent
gust arrived together; the house was seen to rock
on its foundation, and, just as the light was once
more eclipsed, a crash which triumphed over the shouting
of the wind announced its fall, and for a moment the
whole garden was alive with skipping tiles and brickbats.
One such missile grazed the Doctor’s ear; another
descended on the bare foot of Aline, who instantly
made night hideous with her shrieks.
By this time the hamlet was alarmed,
lights flashed from the windows, hails reached the
party, and the Doctor answered, nobly contending against
Aline and the tempest. But this prospect of help
only awakened Anastasie to a more active stage of
terror.
“Henri, people will be coming,”
she screamed in her husband’s ear.
“I trust so,” he replied.
“They cannot. I would rather die,”
she wailed.
“My dear,” said the Doctor
reprovingly, “you are excited. I gave you
some clothes. What have you done with them?”
“Oh, I don’t know I
must have thrown them away! Where are they?”
she sobbed.
Desprez groped about in the darkness.
“Admirable!” he remarked; “my grey
velveteen trousers! This will exactly meet your
necessities.”
“Give them to me!” she
cried fiercely; but as soon as she had them in her
hands her mood appeared to alter she stood
silent for a moment, and then pressed the garment
back upon the Doctor. “Give it to Aline,”
she said “poor girl.”
“Nonsense!” said the Doctor.
“Aline does not know what she is about.
Aline is beside herself with terror; and, at any rate,
she is a peasant. Now, I am really concerned
at this exposure for a person of your housekeeping
habits; my solicitude and your fantastic modesty both
point to the same remedy the pantaloons.”
He held them ready.
“It is impossible. You
do not understand,” she said with dignity.
By this time rescue was at hand.
It had been found impracticable to enter by the street,
for the gate was blocked with masonry, and the nodding
ruin still threatened further avalanches. But
between the Doctor’s garden and the one on the
right hand there was that very picturesque contrivance a
common well; the door on the Desprez side had chanced
to be unbolted, and now, through the arched aperture,
a man’s bearded face and an arm supporting a
lantern were introduced into the world of windy darkness,
where Anastasie concealed her woes. The light
struck here and there among the tossing apple boughs,
it glinted on the grass; but the lantern and the glowing
face became the centre of the world. Anastasie
crouched back from the intrusion.
“This way!” shouted the man. “Are
you all safe?”
Aline, still screaming, ran to the
new-comer, and was presently hauled head-foremost
through the wall.
“Now, Anastasie, come on; it
is your turn,” said the husband.
“I cannot,” she replied.
“Are we all to die of exposure, madame?”
thundered Doctor Desprez.
“You can go!” she cried.
“Oh, go, go away! I can stay here; I am
quite warm.”
The Doctor took her by the shoulders with an oath.
“Stop!” she screamed. “I will
put them on.”
She took the detested lendings in
her hand once more; but her repulsion was stronger
than shame. “Never!” she cried, shuddering,
and flung them far away into the night.
Next moment the Doctor had whirled
her to the well. The man was there, and the lantern;
Anastasie closed her eyes and appeared to herself to
be about to die. How she was transported through
the arch she knew not; but once on the other side
she was received by the neighbour’s wife, and
enveloped in a friendly blanket.
Beds were made ready for the two women,
clothes of very various sizes for the Doctor and Jean-Marie;
and for the remainder of the night, while madame
dozed in and out on the borderland of hysterics, her
husband sat beside the fire and held forth to the
admiring neighbours. He showed them, at length,
the causes of the accident; for years, he explained,
the fall had been impending; one sign had followed
another: the joints had opened, the plaster had
cracked, the old walls bowed inward; last, not three
weeks ago, the cellar-door had begun to work with difficulty
in its grooves. “The cellar!” he
said, gravely shaking his head over a glass of mulled
wine. “That reminds me of my poor vintages.
By a manifest providence the Hermitage was nearly
at an end. One bottle I lose but one
bottle of that incomparable wine. It had been
set apart against Jean-Marie’s wedding.
Well, I must lay down some more; it will be an interest
in life. I am, however, a man somewhat advanced
in years. My great work is now buried in the
fall of my humble roof; it will never be completed my
name will have been writ in water. And yet you
find me calm I would say cheerful.
Can your priest do more?”
By the first glimpse of day the party
sallied forth from the fireside into the street.
The wind had fallen, but still charioted a world of
troubled clouds; the air bit like frost; and the party,
as they stood about the ruins in the rainy twilight
of the morning, beat upon their breasts and blew into
their hands for warmth. The house had entirely
fallen, the walls outward, the roof in; it was a mere
heap of rubbish, with here and there a forlorn spear
of broken rafter. A sentinel was placed over
the ruins to protect the property, and the party adjourned
to Tentaillon’s to break their fast at the Doctor’s
expense. The bottle circulated somewhat freely;
and before they left the table it had begun to snow.
For three days the snow continued
to fall, and the ruins, covered with tarpaulin and
watched by sentries, were left undisturbed. The
Desprez meanwhile had taken up their abode at Tentaillon’s.
Madame spent her time in the kitchen, concocting little
delicacies, with the admiring aid of Madame Tentaillon,
or sitting by the fire in thoughtful abstraction.
The fall of the house affected her wonderfully little;
that blow had been parried by another; and in her
mind she was continually fighting over again the battle
of the trousers. Had she done right? Had
she done wrong? And now she would applaud her
determination; and anon, with a horrid flush of unavailing
penitence, she would regret the trousers. No juncture
in her life had so much exercised her judgment.
In the meantime the Doctor had become vastly pleased
with his situation. Two of the summer boarders
still lingered behind the rest, prisoners for lack
of a remittance; they were both English, but one of
them spoke French pretty fluently, and was, besides,
a humorous, agile-minded fellow, with whom the Doctor
could reason by the hour, secure of comprehension.
Many were the glasses they emptied, many the topics
they discussed.
“Anastasie,” the Doctor
said on the third morning, “take an example from
your husband, from Jean-Marie! The excitement
has done more for the boy than all my tonics, he takes
his turn as sentry with positive gusto. As for
me, you behold me. I have made friends with the
Egyptians; and my Pharaoh is, I swear it, a most agreeable
companion. You alone are hipped. About a
house a few dresses? What are they
in comparison to the ’Pharmacopoeia’ the
labour of years lying buried below stones and sticks
in this depressing hamlet? The snow falls; I shake
it from my cloak! Imitate me. Our income
will be impaired, I grant it, since we must rebuild;
but moderation, patience, and philosophy will gather
about the hearth. In the meanwhile, the Tentaillons
are obliging; the table, with your additions, will
pass; only the wine is execrable well, I
shall send for some to-day. My Pharaoh will be
gratified to drink a decent glass; aha! and I shall
see if he possesses that acme of organisation a
palate. If he has a palate, he is perfect.”
“Henri,” she said, shaking
her head, “you are a man; you cannot understand
my feelings; no woman could shake off the memory of
so public a humiliation.”
The Doctor could not restrain a titter.
“Pardon me, darling,” he said; “but
really, to the philosophical intelligence, the incident
appears so small a trifle. You looked extremely
well ”
“Henri!” she cried.
“Well, well, I will say no more,”
he replied. “Though, to be sure, if you
had consented to indue à propos,”
he broke off, “and my trousers! They are
lying in the snow my favourite trousers!”
And he dashed in quest of Jean-Marie.
Two hours afterwards the boy returned
to the inn with a spade under one arm and a curious
sop of clothing under the other.
The Doctor ruefully took it in his
hands. “They have been!” he said.
“Their tense is past. Excellent pantaloons,
you are no more! Stay, something in the pocket,”
and he produced a piece of paper. “A letter!
ay, now I mind me; it was received on the morning
of the gale, when I was absorbed in delicate investigations.
It is still legible. From poor dear Casimir!
It is as well,” he chuckled, “that I have
educated him to patience. Poor Casimir and his
correspondence his infinitesimal, timorous,
idiotic correspondence!”
He had by this time cautiously unfolded
the wet letter; but, as he bent himself to decipher
the writing, a cloud descended on his brow.
“Bigre!” he cried, with a galvanic
start.
And then the letter was whipped into
the fire, and the Doctor’s cap was on his head
in the turn of a hand.
“Ten minutes! I can catch
it, if I run,” he cried. “It is always
late. I go to Paris. I shall telegraph.”
“Henri! what is wrong?” cried his wife.
“Ottoman Bonds!” came
from the disappearing Doctor; and Anastasie and Jean-Marie
were left face to face with the wet trousers.
Desprez had gone to Paris, for the second time in
seven years; he had gone to Paris with a pair of wooden
shoes, a knitted spencer, a black blouse, a country
nightcap, and twenty francs in his pocket. The
fall of the house was but a secondary marvel; the
whole world might have fallen and scarce left his
family more petrified.
CHAPTER VIII
THE WAGES OF PHILOSOPHY
On the morning of the next day, the
Doctor, a mere spectre of himself, was brought back
in the custody of Casimir. They found Anastasie
and the boy sitting together by the fire; and Desprez,
who had exchanged his toilette for a ready-made rig-out
of poor materials, waved his hand as he entered, and
sank speechless on the nearest chair. Madame turned
direct to Casimir.
“What is wrong?” she cried.
“Well,” replied Casimir,
“what have I told you all along? It has
come. It is a clean shave this time; so you may
as well bear up and make the best of it. House
down, too, eh? Bad luck, upon my soul!”
“Are we are we ruined?”
she gasped.
The Doctor stretched out his arms
to her. “Ruined,” he replied, “you
are ruined by your sinister husband.”
Casimir observed the consequent embrace
through his eyeglass; then he turned to Jean-Marie.
“You hear?” he said. “They are
ruined; no more pickings, no more house, no more fat
cutlets. It strikes me, my friend, that you had
best be packing; the present speculation is about worked
out.” And he nodded to him meaningly.
“Never!” cried Desprez,
springing up. “Jean-Marie, if you prefer
to leave me, now that I am poor, you can go; you shall
receive your hundred francs, if so much remains to
me. But if you will consent to stay” the
Doctor wept a little “Casimir offers
me a place as clerk,” he resumed.
“The emoluments are slender, but they will be
enough for three. It is too much already to have
lost my fortune; must I lose my son?”
Jean-Marie sobbed bitterly, but without a word.
“I don’t like boys who
cry,” observed Casimir. “This one
is always crying. Here! you clear out of
this for a little; I have business with your master
and mistress, and these domestic feelings may be settled
after I am gone. March!” and he held the
door open.
Jean-Marie slunk out, like a detected thief.
By twelve they were all at table but Jean-Marie.
“Hey?” said Casimir. “Gone,
you see. Took the hint at once.”
“I do not, I confess,”
said Desprez, “I do not seek to excuse his absence.
It speaks a want of heart that disappoints me sorely.”
“Want of manners,” corrected
Casimir. “Heart he never had. Why,
Desprez, for a clever fellow, you are the most gullible
mortal in creation. Your ignorance of human nature
and human business is beyond belief. You are
swindled by heathen Turks, swindled by vagabond children,
swindled right and left, upstairs and downstairs.
I think it must be your imagination. I thank
my stars I have none.”
“Pardon me,” replied Desprez,
still humbly, but with a return of spirit at sight
of a distinction to be drawn; “pardon me, Casimir.
You possess, even to an eminent degree, the commercial
imagination. It was the lack of that in me it
appears it is my weak point that has led
to these repeated shocks. By the commercial imagination
the financier forecasts the destiny of his investments,
marks the falling house ”
“Egad,” interrupted Casimir:
“our friend the stable-boy appears to have his
share of it.”
The Doctor was silenced; and the meal
was continued and finished principally to the tune
of the brother-in-law’s not very consolatory
conversation. He entirely ignored the two young
English painters, turning a blind eyeglass to their
salutations, and continuing his remarks as if he were
alone in the bosom of his family; and with every second
word he ripped another stitch out of the air-balloon
of Desprez’ vanity. By the time coffee
was over the poor Doctor was as limp as a napkin.
“Let us go and see the ruins,” said Casimir.
They strolled forth into the street.
The fall of the house, like the loss of a front tooth,
had quite transformed the village. Through the
gap the eye commanded a great stretch of open snowy
country, and the place shrank in comparison.
It was like a room with an open door. The sentinel
stood by the green gate, looking very red and cold,
but he had a pleasant word for the Doctor and his
wealthy kinsman.
Casimir looked at the mound of ruins,
he tried the quality of the tarpaulin. “H’m,”
he said, “I hope the cellar arch has stood.
If it has, my good brother, I will give you a good
price for the wines.”
“We shall start digging to-morrow,”
said the sentry. “There is no more fear
of snow.”
“My friend,” returned
Casimir sententiously, “you had better wait till
you get paid.”
The Doctor winced, and began dragging
his offensive brother-in-law towards Tentaillon’s.
In the house there would be fewer auditors, and these
already in the secret of his fall.
“Hullo!” cried Casimir,
“there goes the stable-boy with his luggage;
no, egad, he is taking it into the inn.”
And sure enough, Jean-Marie was seen
to cross the snowy street and enter Tentaillon’s,
staggering under a large hamper.
The Doctor stopped with a sudden, wild hope.
“What can he have?” he said. “Let
us go and see.” And he hurried on.
“His luggage, to be sure,”
answered Casimir. “He is on the move thanks
to the commercial imagination.”
“I have not seen that hamper for for
ever so long,” remarked the Doctor.
“Nor will you see it much longer,”
chuckled Casimir, “unless, indeed, we interfere.
And by the way, I insist on an examination.”
“You will not require,”
said Desprez, positively with a sob; and, casting
a moist, triumphant glance at Casimir, he began to
run.
“What the devil is up with him,
I wonder?” Casimir reflected; and then, curiosity
taking the upper hand, he followed the Doctor’s
example and took to his heels.
The hamper was so heavy and large,
and Jean-Marie himself so little and so weary, that
it had taken him a great while to bundle it upstairs
to the Desprez’ private room; and he had just
set it down on the floor in front of Anastasie, when
the Doctor arrived, and was closely followed by the
man of business. Boy and hamper were both in a
most sorry plight; for the one had passed four months
underground in a certain cave on the way to Achères,
and the other had run about five miles as hard as his
legs would carry him, half that distance under a staggering
weight.
“Jean-Marie,” cried the
Doctor, in a voice that was only too seraphic to be
called hysterical, “is it ?
It is!” he cried. “Oh, my son, my
son!” And he sat down upon the hamper and sobbed
like a little child.
“You will not go to Paris now,”
said Jean-Marie sheepishly.
“Casimir,” said Desprez,
raising his wet face, “do you see that boy, that
angel boy? He is the thief; he took the treasure
from a man unfit to be entrusted with its use; he
brings it back to me when I am sobered and humbled.
These, Casimir, are the Fruits of my Teaching, and
this moment is the Reward of my Life.”
“Tiens,” said Casimir.