That consultation was, like all consultations, grim and solemn. Doctors no longer wear the huge wigs of Molière's day, but they still assume the same portentous gravity of priests of Isis or astrologers, bristling with cabalistic formulæ accompanied by movements of the head which lack only the pointed cap of an earlier age to produce a laughable effect. On this occasion the scene borrowed an imposing aspect from the surroundings. In the vast room, transformed, magnified as it were, by the master's immobility, those solemn faces approached the bed upon which the light was concentrated, revealing amid the white linen and the purple curtains a shrivelled face, pale from the lips to the eyes, but enveloped with serenity as with a veil, as with a winding-sheet. The consulting physicians talked in low tones, exchanged a furtive glance, an outlandish word or two, remained perfectly impassive without moving an eyebrow. But that mute, unmeaning expression characteristic of the doctor and the magistrate, that solemnity with which science and justice encompass themselves in order to conceal their weakness or their ignorance, had no power to move the duke.
Sitting on his bed, he continued to talk tranquilly, with that slightly exalted expression in which the thought seems to soar upward as if to escape, and Monpavon coolly replied to him, hardening himself against his emotion, taking a last lesson in breeding from his friend, while Louis, in the background, leaned against the door leading to the duchess's apartments, the type of the silent servitor, in whom heedless indifference is a duty.
The agitated, the feverish member of the party was Jenkins.
Overflowing with obsequious respect for "his illustrious confrères," as he unctuously called them, he prowled about their conference and tried to take part in it; but his confrères kept him at a distance, hardly answered him, or answered him haughtily, as Fagon—Louis the Fourteenth's Fagon—might have answered some charlatan who had been summoned to the royal bedside. Old Bouchereau especially looked askance at the inventor of the Jenkins Pearls. At last, when they had thoroughly examined and questioned their patient, they withdrew for deliberation to a small salon, all in lacquer-work, with gleaming highly-colored walls and ceiling, filled with an assortment of pretty trifles, whose uselessness contrasted strangely with the importance of the discussion.
A solemn moment, the agony of the accused man awaiting the decision of his judges, life, death, reprieve or pardon!
With his long white hand Mora continued to caress his moustache, his favorite gesture, to talk with Monpavon about the club and the green-room at the Variétés, asking for news of the proceedings in the Chamber and what progress had been made in the matter of the Nabob's election—all with perfect coolness and without the slightest affectation. Then, fatigued doubtless, or fearing that his glance, which constantly returned to the portière opposite through which the decree of fate was presently to come forth, should betray the emotion that lurked at the bottom of his heart, he leaned his head back, closed his eyes, and did not open them again until the doctors returned. Still the same cold, ominous faces, veritable faces of judges with the terrible word of human destiny on their lips, the Final word, which the courts pronounce without emotion, but which the doctors, all of whose skill and learning it baffles, evade and seek to convey by circumlocution.
"Well, messieurs, what says the Faculty?" inquired the sick man.
There were a few hypocritical, stammered words of encouragement, vague recommendations; then the three learned men hastily took their leave, eager to be gone, to avoid any responsibility for the impending disaster. Monpavon rushed after them. Jenkins remained by the bedside, overwhelmed by the brutal truths he had heard during the consultation. In vain had he put his hand upon his heart, quoted his famous motto. Bouchereau had not spared him. This was not the first of the Irishman's patients whom he had seen fall suddenly to pieces thus; but he trusted that Mora's death would be a salutary warning to people in society, and that the prefect of police, as the result of this great calamity, would send the "dealer in cantharides," to advertise his aphrodisiacs on the other side of the Channel.
The duke realized that neither Jenkins nor Louis would tell him the real result of the consultation. He did not press them, therefore, but submitted to their assumed confidence, even pretended to share it and to believe all that they told him. But when Monpavon returned, he called him to his bedside, and, undaunted by the falsehood that was visible even under the paint of that wreck, he said:
"Oh! no wry faces, I beg. Between you and me, let us have the truth. What do they say?—I am in a bad way, am I not?"