And the shop shook under his heavy fist which he banged on the counter; he made the umbrellas and the parasols dance again. Denise, bewildered, could not get in a word. She stood there, motionless, waiting for the end of his tirade; whilst Pépé, very tired, had fallen asleep on a chair. At last, when Bourras became a little calmer, she resolved to deliver Mouret's message. No doubt the old man was irritated, but the excess even of his anger, the blind alley in which he found himself, might determine an abrupt acceptance.
“I've just met some one,” she commenced. “Yes, a person from The Paradise, very well informed. It appears that they are going to offer you eighty thousand francs to-morrow.”
“Eighty thousand francs!” interrupted he, in a terrible voice; “eighty thousand francs! Not for a million now!” She tried to reason with him. But at that moment the shop door opened, and she suddenly drew back, pale and silent. It was her uncle Baudu, with his yellow face and aged look. Bourras seized his neighbour by the button-hole, and roared out in his face without allowing him to say a word, as if goaded on by his presence:
“What do you think they have the cheek to offer me? Eighty thousand francs! They've got so far, the brigands! they think I'm going to sell myself like a prostitute. Ah! they've bought the house, and think they've now got me. Well! it's all over, they sha'n't have it! I might have given way, perhaps; but now it belongs to them, let them try and take it!”
“So the news is true?” said Baudu in his slow voice. “I had heard of it, and came over to know if it was so.”
“Eighty thousand francs!” repeated Bourras. “Why not a hundred thousand at once? It's this immense sum of money that makes me indignant Do they think they can make me commit a knavish trick with their money! They sha'n't have it, by heavens! Never, never, you hear me?”
Denise gently observed, in her calm, quiet way: “They'll have it in nine years' time, when your lease expires.”
And, notwithstanding her uncle's presence, she begged of the old man to accept. The struggle was becoming impossible, he was fighting against a superior force; he would be mad to refuse the fortune offered him. But he still replied no. In nine years' time he hoped to be dead, so as not to see it “You hear, Monsieur Baudu,” resumed he, “your niece is on their side, it's her they have employed to corrupt me. She's with the brigands, my word of honour!”
Baudu, who up to then had appeared not to notice Denise, now raised his head, with the morose movement that he affected when standing at his shop door, every time she passed. But, slowly, he turned round and looked at her, and his thick lips trembled.
“I know it,” replied he in a half-whisper, and he continued to look at her.