“You are so comfortable, so happy here. Really, it’s too bad to burden you with my melancholy.”
“Ah! my old friend, you can arrange just such happiness as ours for yourself,” said honest Sigismond with beaming face. “I have my sister, you have your brother. What do we lack?”
Risler smiled vaguely. He fancied himself already installed with Frantz in a quiet little quakerish house like that.
Decidedly, that was an excellent idea of Pere Planus.
“Come to bed,” he said triumphantly. “We’ll go and show you your room.”
Sigismond Planus’s bedroom was on the ground floor, a large room simply but neatly furnished; with muslin curtains at the windows and the bed, and little squares of carpet on the polished floor, in front of the chairs. The dowager Madame Fromont herself could have found nothing to say as to the orderly and cleanly aspect of the place. On a shelf or two against the wall were a few books: Manual of Fishing, The Perfect Country Housewife, Bayeme’s Book-keeping. That was the whole of the intellectual equipment of the room.
Pere Planus glanced proudly around. The glass of water was in its place on the walnut table, the box of razors on the dressing-case.
“You see, Risler. Here is everything you need. And if you should want anything else, the keys are in all the drawers—you have only to turn them. Just see what a beautiful view you get from here. It’s a little dark just now, but when you wake up in the morning you’ll see; it is magnificent.”
He opened the widow. Great drops of rain were beginning to fall, and lightning flashes rending the darkness disclosed the long, silent line of the fortifications, with telegraph poles at intervals, or the frowning door of a casemate. Now and then the footsteps of a patrol making the rounds, the clash of muskets or swords, reminded them that they were within the military zone.
That was the outlook so vaunted by Planus—a melancholy outlook if ever there were one.