"Pardieu, de Maurel," quoth M. de Courson with a laugh, "I had heard tales of your tenacity and of your self-will, but none of a certainty that do justice to the truth. Come, man! you surely will not allow petty obstinacy in so trifling a matter to interfere with the amity which should exist between your mother and yourself and towards which she hath, you must admit, met you already more than half way."
"But, nom de Dieu!" rejoined de Maurel gruffly, "what do want me to do enfin?"
"Let me take a message to Mme. la Marquise from you," replied M. le Comte, "craving her pardon for your want of respect to her this forenoon.... There is no shame in humbling one's pride before a woman and...."
Then, as de Maurel, moody and wrathful, made no immediate rejoinder to the proposal, M. de Courson added more lightly: "Well, what say you?"
"That I've neither mind nor leisure to lend myself to Mme. la Marquise's whims and fancies," retorted de Maurel, whose obstinacy was growing in proportion with the impatience and arrogance of his kinsmen.
"Nor decent clothes to wear, I warrant," broke in Laurent, as he felt his temper flaring up into fury against this ill-bred creature, who seemed wholly unconscious of his enormities. "Uncle Baudouin," he added, with a sneer, "do not, I pray you, waste your time in trying to instil some semblance of good manners into this oaf. One would think he had sprung out of the gutter...."
"Hold on, boy!" interposed de Maurel, with a sudden hoarseness in his voice, and a clenching of his mighty fist till the knuckles shone like ivory through the flesh. "Have I not said that I am not a man of patience...?"
"'Tis I who am not a man of patience," retorted Laurent. "Think you I can bear much longer the studied insult to us all which your attitude implies? Think you that because we are poor you can treat us as you would hesitate to treat the meanest peasant on your land? Is your apparel a pose or what? You cannot be as ignorant of the usages of good society as you pretend to be. After all, we have all been in exile—we have lived apart from those of our own breeding, of our own caste, but, in spite of our misfortunes we have kept up in our hearts the traditions of courtesy and gentle manners which were handed down to us all by our fathers—aye, to us all!" he added vehemently, "to you as well as to us. You bear one of the noblest names in France, and you pretend to have forgotten the most ordinary elements of respect due to the sex which hath every claim on our chivalry. Where, in Heaven's name have you been, man? Where have you spent your life that you could so far forget the traditions of your race?"
De Maurel had proclaimed himself to be a man devoid of patience. Yet he had listened attentively to every word that his young brother said. He had acquired throughout a hard, self-denying life the supreme virtue of silence; he knew—no one better—how to listen. Therefore he did not break in on Laurent's tirade. He listened to it to the end, and did not even wince at the sneers which his younger brother hurled very freely at him. But now that the latter had finished speaking, Ronnay came a step or two nearer to him, and drawing himself to his full height, he said, with perfect, outward calm: