The Irishman, despite his benevolence, agreed that the society was rather mixed at his friend’s. But then! One could hardly blame him for it. The poor fellow, he knew no better.
“Neither knows nor is willing to learn,” remarked Monpavon with bitterness. “Instead of consulting people of experience—ps, ps, ps—first sponger that comes along. Have you seen the horses that Bois l’Hery has persuaded him to buy? Absolute rubbish those animals. And he paid twenty thousand francs for them. We may wager that Bois l’Hery got them for six thousand.”
“Oh, for shame—a nobleman!” said Jenkins, with the indignation of a lofty soul refusing to believe in baseness.
Monpavon continued, without seeming to hear:
“All that because the horses came from Mora’s stable.”
“It is true that the dear Nabob’s heart is very full of the duke. I am about to make him very happy, therefore, when I inform him——”
The doctor paused, embarrassed.
“When you inform him of what, Jenkins?”
Somewhat abashed, Jenkins had to confess that he had obtained permission from his excellency to present to him his friend Jansoulet. Scarcely had he finished his sentence before a tall spectre, with flabby face and hair and whiskers diversely coloured, bounded from the dressing-room into the chamber, with his two hands folding round a fleshless but very erect neck a dressing-gown of flimsy silk with violet spots, in which he was wrapped like a sweetmeat in its paper. The most striking thing about this mock-heroic physiognomy was a large curved nose all shiny with cold cream, and an eye alive, keen, too young, too bright, for the heavy and wrinkled eyelid which covered it. Jenkins’s patients all had that eye.
Monpavon must indeed have been deeply moved to show himself thus devoid of all prestige. In point of fact, with white lips and a changed voice he addressed the doctor quickly, without the lisp this time, and in a single outburst: