“What's the matter?” asked Denise, anxiously. “Is Geneviève in danger?”
Madame Baudu did not reply at first. Her eyes filled with tears. Then she stammered: “I don't know; they don't tell me anything. Ah, it's all over, it's all over.”
And she cast a sombre glance around the dark old shop, as if she felt her daughter and the shop disappearing together. The seventy thousand francs, produce of the sale of their Rambouillet property, had melted away in less than two years in this gulf of competition. In order to struggle against The Ladies' Paradise, which now kept men's cloths and materials for hunting and livery suits, the draper had made considerable sacrifices. At last he had been definitely crushed by the swanskin cloth and flannels sold by his rival, an assortment that had not its equal in the market. Little by little his debts had increased, and, as a last resource, he had resolved to mortgage the old building in the Rue de la Michodière, where Finet, their ancestor, had founded the business; and it was now only a question of days, the crumbling away had commenced, the very ceilings seemed to be falling down and turning into dust, like an old worm-eaten structure carried away by the wind.
“Your uncle is upstairs,” resumed Madame Baudu in her broken voice. “We stay with her two hours each. Some one must look out here; oh! but only as a precaution, for to tell the truths——”
Her gesture finished the phrase. They would have put the shutters up had it not been for their old commercial pride, which still propped them up in the presence of the neighbourhood.
“Well, I'll go up, aunt,” said Denise, whose heart was bleeding, amidst this resigned despair that even the pieces of cloth themselves exhaled.
“Yes, go upstairs quick, my girl. She's waiting for you. She's been asking for you all night. She has something to tell you.”
But just at that moment Baudu came down. The rising bile gave his yellow face a greenish tinge, and his eyes were bloodshot. He was still walking with the muffled step with which he had quitted the Sick room, and murmur-ed, as if he might be heard upstairs, “She's asleep.”
And, thoroughly worn out, he sat down on a chair, wiping his forehead with a mechanical gesture, puffing like a man who has just finished some hard work. A silence ensued, but at last he said to Denise: “You'll see her presently. When she is sleeping, she seems to me to be all right again.”
There was again a silence. Face to face, the father and mother stood looking at each other. Then, in a half whisper, he went over his grief again, naming no one, addressing no one directly: “My head on the block, I wouldn't have believed it! He was the last one. I had brought him up as a son. If any one had come and said to me, 'They'll take him away from you as well; he'll fall as well,' I would have replied 'Impossible, it could not be.' And he has fallen all the same! Ah! the scoundrel, he who was so well up in real business, who had all my ideas! And all for a young monkey, one of those dummies that parade at the windows of bad houses! No! really, it's enough to drive one mad!”