The other hesitated.
“I could not. I was prevented. … But excuse me for interrupting the secrets which shall be revealed later on, with as many details as you please, to say that I have had nothing to eat since yesterday morning.”
The old man was filled with pity, and quickly holding out his hands, he said: “Oh, my poor child.”
The young man took the outstretched hands, which closed over his thin, moist, feverish fingers, and replied with his habitual flippancy:
“Good! Really, I begin to think we shall get on together in spite of what has happened.”
The curé started walking again.
“Let us go and dine,” he said.
Suddenly he remembered with a vague feeling of pleasure that was odd and confused, the beautiful fish he had caught, which with the chicken and rice would make a good meal for the wretched youngster.
The Arlesian, anxious and beginning to grumble, was waiting for them at the door.
“Marguerite,” cried the Abbé, “take away the table and carry it into the room, quickly, quickly, and set the cloth for two, but quickly.”
The servant did not move, scared at the thought that her master was going to dine with the criminal.
Then, Abbé Vilbois himself began to take the things away and remove what had been set for him into the only room on the ground floor.
Five minutes later he was seated opposite the vagabond before a tureen full of cabbage soup that sent up a faint cloud of boiling steam between their faces.
III
When the plates were full, the tramp started to swallow his soup greedily in quick following spoonfuls. The Abbé was not hungry now, so he trifled with the delicious soup, leaving the bread at the bottom of the plate. He asked suddenly:
“What is your name?”
The man laughed, glad to be satisfying his hunger.
“Unknown father,” said he, “I have no surname except my mother’s family name, which you have probably not forgotten. On the other hand, I have two Christian names, which, by the way, certainly do not suit me: Philippe Auguste.”
The Abbé turned pale and asked with a strangled voice:
“Why were you given those Christian names?”
The vagabond shrugged his shoulders.
“Surely you can guess why. After leaving you, Mamma wanted to make your rival believe that I was his child, and he did believe it until about my fifteenth year. Then I grew too much like you. He repudiated me, the scoundrel! I had been given the two Christian names, Philippe Auguste, and if I had had the luck not to be like anybody, or simply to have been the son of a third unknown ne’er-do-well, I should now be known as the Viscount Philippe-Auguste de Pravallon, the recently acknowledged son of the Count of that name, a senator. As for me, I christened myself ‘No Luck.’ ”
“How do you know all this?”
“Because there were discussions in my presence, and violent they were, you may be sure. Ah! that is the sort of thing that teaches you life.”
A still more painful and stricken feeling than he had yet suffered in the last half-hour oppressed the priest. It was the beginning of a form of suffocation that would grow worse and worse until it killed him, caused not so much by the things he was told as by the way they were told, and by the brutish face of the outcast that gave emphasis to them. Between this man and himself, between his son and himself, he began to feel that swamp of moral filth that works as a deadly poison on certain beings. This was his son? He could not believe it. He wanted every proof, every possible proof; he must learn all, hear all, listen to all, and suffer all. Again he thought of the olive-trees surrounding his little house, again he murmured: “Oh, God help me!”
Philippe-Auguste had finished his soup, and asked:
“Is there no more to eat, Abbé?”
The kitchen being outside the house in an annex, Marguerite could not hear the curé’s voice, so he warned her of his needs by a few strokes on a Chinese gong that hung behind him on the wall.
He picked up a leather hammer and struck the round metal plaque several times. At first a faint sound escaped from it, which grew gradually and, gaining in weight, turned into the vibrating, sharp, violent, horrible, strident clamour of beaten copper.
The servant appeared. Her face was drawn, she glared at the scoundrel as if, with the instinct of a faithful dog, she felt a presentiment of the drama that was hanging over her master. In her hands she held the grilled fish, which sent out a delicious odour of melted butter. The Abbé divided the fish from head to tail and offered the back fillet to the child of his youth.
“I caught it a short time ago,” he said, a remnant of pride hovering in his distress.
Marguerite stayed in the room.
The priest continued:
“Bring some wine, good wine, some of the white wine of Cape Corsica.”
She succeeded in hiding her disgust but he was obliged to repeat sternly:
“Now then, two bottles.” For when he offered wine to a guest—an unusual pleasure—he always offered himself a bottle too.
Philippe-Auguste said, beaming:
“A jolly good idea. I have not had a meal like this for a long time.”
The servant came back in two minutes’ time. Two minutes that had seemed as long as a twofold eternity to the Abbé: the desire to know everything was scorching his blood and consuming it like hellfire.
The bottles were uncorked, and still the servant lingered with eyes fixed on the young man.
“Leave us,” said the curé.
She pretended not to hear.
He repeated, with a certain harshness:
“I ordered you to leave us alone.”
Whereupon she left the room.
Philippe-Auguste ate the fish greedily, while his father, watching him, became more and more surprised and distressed at the degradation he saw in the face so like his own. The morsels that the Abbé Vilbois lifted to his lips refused to pass his contracted throat, and he chewed them slowly, casting about in his
