"I am quite well aware that Monsieur Jenkins is away, Madame—" he laid particular stress on the words "Monsieur Jenkins,"—"especially as I come from him."
She stared at him in terror.
"From him?"
"Alas! yes, Madame. The doctor—as you are doubtless aware—is in a very embarrassed position for the moment. Unfortunate operations on the Bourse, the downfall of a great financial institution in which he had funds invested, the heavy burden of the Work of Bethlehem now resting on him alone, all these disasters combined have compelled him to form an heroic resolution. He is selling his house, his horses, everything that he owns, and has given me a power of attorney to that end."
He had found at last what he was looking for, one of those stamped papers, riddled with memoranda and words erased and interlined, into which the unfeeling law sometimes crowds so much cowardice and falsehood. Madame Jenkins was on the point of saying: "But I was here. I would have done whatever he wished, carried out all his orders," when she suddenly realized, from the visitor's lack of constraint, his self-assured, almost insolent manner, that she too was involved in that general overturn, in that throwing overboard of the expensive house and useless chattels, and that her departure would be the signal for the sale.
She rose abruptly. The man, still seated, continued:
"What I still have to say, Madame,"—Oh! she knew, she could have dictated what he still had to say—"is so painful, so delicate—Monsieur Jenkins is leaving Paris for a long time, and, fearing to expose you to the perils and hazards of the new life upon which he is entering, to take you away from a son of whom you are very fond, and in whose interest it will be better perhaps—"
She no longer heard or saw him, but, given over to despair, to madness perhaps, while he lost himself in involved sentences, she listened to a voice within persistently singing the air which haunted her in that terrible crash, as the drowning man's eyes retain the image of the last object upon which they rested.
| "Le temps nous enlève Notre enchantement." |
Suddenly her pride returned to her.