These pleasant words were exchanged as they walked through a long corridor where their sententious phrases were repeated by the echoes; but suddenly a horrible uproar arrested their conversation and their footsteps. It was like the miaouwing of frantic cats, the bellowing of wild bulls, the howling of savages dancing the war-dance—a frightful tempest of human yells, repeated and increased in volume and prolonged by the high, resonant arches. It rose and fell, stopped suddenly, then began again with extraordinary intensity. The manager was disturbed, and started to make inquiries. Jenkins' eyes were inflamed with rage.
"Let us go on," said the manager, really alarmed this time; "I know what it is."
He did know what it was; but M. de La Perrière proposed to know, too, and before Pondevèz could raise his hand, he pushed open the heavy door of the room whence that fearful concert proceeded.
In a vile kennel which the grand scouring had passed by, for they had no idea of exhibiting it, some half score little monstrosities lay stretched on mattresses laid side by side on the floor, under the guardianship of a chair unoccupied save by an unfinished piece of knitting, and a little cracked kettle, full of hot wine, boiling over a smoking wood fire. They were the leprous, the scrofulous, the outcasts of Bethlehem, who had been hidden away in that retired corner—with injunctions to their dry nurse to amuse them, to pacify them, to sit on them if necessary, so that they should not cry—but whom that stupid, inquisitive countrywoman had left to themselves while she went to look at the fine carriage standing in the courtyard. When her back was turned the urchins soon wearied of their horizontal position; and all the little, red-faced, blotched croûte-levés lifted up their robust voices in concert, for they, by some miracle, were in good health, their very disease saved and nourished them. As wild and squirming as cockchafers thrown on their backs, struggling to rise with the aid of knees and elbows,—some unable to recover their equilibrium after falling on their sides, others sitting erect, bewildered, their little legs wrapped in swaddling-clothes, they spontaneously ceased their writhings and their cries when they saw the door open; but M. de La Perrière's shaking beard reassured them, encouraged them to fresh efforts, and in the renewed uproar the manager's explanation was almost inaudible: "Children that are kept secluded—contagion—skin diseases." Monsieur le Secrétaire inquired no farther; less heroic than Bonaparte when he visited the plague-stricken wretches at Jaffa, he rushed to the door, and in his confusion and alarm, anxious to say something and unable to think of anything appropriate, he murmured, with an ineffable smile: "They are cha-arming."
The inspection concluded, they all assembled in the salon on the ground floor, where Madame Polge had prepared a little collation. The cellars of Bethlehem were well stocked. The sharp air of the high land, the going upstairs and downstairs had given the old gentleman from the Tuileries such an appetite as he had not had for many a day, so that he talked and laughed with true rustic good-fellowship, and when they were all standing, the visitors being about to depart, he raised his glass, shaking his head the while, to drink this toast: "To Be-Be-Bethlehem!"
The others were much affected, there was a clinking of glasses, and then the carriage bore the party swiftly along the avenue of lindens, where a cold, red, rayless sun was setting. Behind them the park relapsed into its gloomy silence. Great dark shadows gathered at the foot of the hedges, invaded the house, crept stealthily along the paths and across their intersections. Soon everything was in darkness save the ironical letters over the entrance gate, and, at a window on the ground-floor, a flickering red glimmer, the flame of a taper burning by the pillow of the dead child.
"By decree of March 12, 1865, promulgated at the recommendation of the Minister of the Interior, Monsieur le Docteur Jenkins, founder and president of the Work of Bethlehem, is appointed chevalier of the Imperial Order of the Legion of Honor. Exemplary devotion to the cause of humanity."
When he read these lines on the first page of the Journal Officiel, on the morning of the 16th, the poor Nabob had an attack of vertigo.
Was it possible?
Jenkins decorated and not he!