"Ha! you here!" said Madame Charles, shaking hands with her brother and nephew, slowly and impressively, in token of the distance between them. Then, turning round, and giving no further heed to such fellows, she added:
"Come in, come in, Monsieur Patoir; the animal is here."
Patoir was the Cloyes veterinary—short, stout, full-blooded, and purple; with the aspect of a trooper, and wearing heavy moustaches. He had just driven up in a mud-splashed gig through the pelting rain.
"This poor darling," she went on, taking out of a warm oven a basket in which an old cat lay in the throes of death; "this poor darling was seized yesterday with a shivering fit, and it was then I wrote to you. Ah! he's not young; he is nearly fifteen. We had him ten years at Chartres, but last year my daughter had to get rid of him, and I brought him here because he misbehaved himself in every corner of the shop."
"Shop" was for Elodie's benefit, she being told that her parents kept a confectionery business, amid such a press of work, that they could not receive her there. The country-folk, however, did not even smile, for the expression was current in Rognes, where people said that "even Hourdequin's farm was not so profitable as Monsieur Charles's shop." The men stared at the shrivelled, old, yellow, mangy, miserable cat; the old cat who had purred in all the beds in the Rue aux Juifs, the cat stroked and fondled by the plump hands of five or six generations of women. Long had he been pampered and petted, the spoiled darling of the saloon and retiring-rooms, licking up unconsidered trifles of pomade, drinking the water in the toilet-glasses, a mute, abstracted spectator of what went on, seeing everything with his slender pupils set in gold.
"Monsieur Patoir, pray cure him," concluded Madame Charles.
The veterinary distended his eyelids, and screwed up his nose and mouth, all his bluff, coarse, bull-dog physiognomy being set in motion. And he cried:
"What? You've brought me all this way for that! I'll cure him for you! Tie a stone round his neck and chuck him into the water!"
Elodie burst into tears, and Madame Charles became purple in the face with indignation.