“Well, I can’t do two things at once—get your breakfast and wait on you in your room. Aren’t you old enough to dress yourself?”
“Good God! How have I offended her?” the old fellow wondered, on receiving one of these rebuffs, when he called for some hot water to shave himself.
“Védie, take up some hot water to monsieur,” cried Flore.
“Védie?” said the poor man, bewildered by his dread of the wrath impending over him. “Védie, what is the matter with madame this morning?”
Flore insisted on being called madame by her master, by Védie, Kouski, and Max.
“She has heard something seemingly not much to your credit,” replied Védie, putting on a very pathetic air. “You are very foolish, monsieur. There, I am but a poor servant, and you may tell me not to be poking my nose into your concerns; but you may hunt through all the women in the world, like the King in Holy Writ, and you will never find her like. You ought to kiss the place where she has set her foot … I tell you, if you vex her, it will be enough to break your own heart! And there really were tears in her eyes.”
Védie left the poor man quite annihilated; he sank into a chair, gazing into space like a man melancholy mad, and forgot to shave himself. These alternations of hot and cold affected the poor feeble creature, who lived only through his hold on love, like the deadly chill produced by a sudden passage from tropical heat to polar cold. They were moral pleurisies which exhausted him like so many illnesses. Flore only in the whole world could act upon him so, for to her alone he was as kind as he was silly.
“What! You have not shaved yet?” said she, opening the door. She made Père Rouget start violently; from being pale and limp, he suddenly turned red for a moment, but dared not resent this attack.
“Your breakfast is waiting. But you may go down in your dressing-gown and slippers—you will breakfast by yourself.”
And she vanished without waiting for a reply. To make the poor man breakfast alone was one of the punishments which most deeply distressed him; he liked to talk while he was eating. As he reached the bottom of the stairs, Rouget was seized with a fit of coughing, for excitement had stirred his rheum.
“Oh yes, you may cough!” said Flore in the kitchen, not caring whether her master heard her or no. “My word! the old wretch is strong enough to weather it without anyone troubling theirselves about him! If he ever coughs his soul up, it won’t be in our time.”
Such were the amenities with which la Rabouilleuse favored Rouget in her fits of rage. The poor man sat down in deep dejection at a corner of the table in the middle of the room, looking at his old furniture and old pictures with a desolate air.
“You might have put on a necktie!” said Flore, coming in. “Do you think a neck like yours is pretty to see—redder and more wrinkled than a turkey-cock’s.”
“But what have I done?” he asked, raising his pale green eyes full of tears, and confronting Flore’s cold look.
“What have you done?” she echoed. “And you don’t know? What a hypocrite! Why, your sister Agathe—who is as much your sister as I am sister to the Tower of Issoudun, if you can believe your father, and who is nothing on earth to you—is coming from Paris with her son, that wretched tu’penny painter, and they’re coming to see you—”
“My sister and nephews are coming to Issoudun?” said he, quite bewildered.
“Oh yes; you may pretend to be astonished, to make me believe that you did not write to them to come! That is a very thin trick. Don’t be afraid, we won’t interfere with your Paris friends, for we shall have shaken the dust off our feet before they set theirs within these walls! Max and I shall be gone never to return! As to your will—I will tear it in four quarters under your nose, under your beard, do you hear? You may leave your goods to your family, as we are not your family. After that you will see whether you are loved, for your own sake, by people who have not seen you for thirty years, or have never seen you at all! Your sister will not fill my place—a double-distilled bigot!”
“If that is all, my pretty Flore,” said the old man, “I shall see neither my sister nor my nephews. I swear to you solemnly that this is the first word I have heard of their arrival, and it is a got-up thing arranged by Madame Hochon, the old bigot—!”
Max, who had heard Père Rouget’s reply, suddenly came in, saying in a hectoring tone, “What is the matter?”
“My good Max,” the old man went on, only too glad to purchase the Major’s adhesion, for, by agreement with Flore, he was always to take Rouget’s part, “I swear to you, by all that is sacred, that I have only this instant heard the news. I never wrote to my sister; my father made me promise to leave her nothing, to give it rather to the Church—in short, I refuse to see either my sister Agathe or her sons.”
“Your father was wrong, my dear Jean-Jacques, and madame is yet more wrong,” replied Max. “Your father had his own reasons—he is dead, his hatred ought to die with him. Your sister is your sister, your nephews are your nephews. You owe it to yourself to receive them cordially, and you owe it to us too. What would be said in Issoudun? Sss—thunder! I have enough on my shoulders; the only thing wanting is to give rise to a report that we keep
