It has been said that the furniture and surroundings were austere. They did not become less so when their owner grew older and weaker. He had always despised luxuries rather than begrudged them; he despised them still. Had he ever derived personal pleasure from them, he might have been more merciful towards Léon, and the fabulous sums M. Charles reported him to have paid for his cigars; but such expenditure, especially personal expenditure, appeared to him a miserable weakness.
Of Léon he never spoke, though M. Charles would have given a good deal to have known what had happened. Without being aware of the exact state of affairs, he was aware of this much: The Poissy estates were—if not hopelessly—deeply embarrassed. Probably in order to make a desperate appeal to his cousin, M. de Beaudrillart had presented himself one day at the hotel, and had an interview. This much he had gathered from the servant. Since that day Léon had, to his knowledge, never reappeared in Paris; but from inquiries he had made, it seemed, was living quietly at Poissy, engaged in the ordinary life of a country gentleman. This, moreover, was five or six years ago.
There might, of course, be one simple explanation. M. de Cadanet might have relented under the pressure of a personal interview, and advanced the large necessary sum of money, extorting at the same time a promise from the young man to give up his Paris extravagances and betake himself to the provinces and economy. But Charles was tolerably certain that this had not happened. To begin with, he thought that his uncle, as he chose to call him, would have told him what he had done, for he was in the habit of speaking pretty frankly to him about Léon. And in the next place there was another point which might almost be taken as proof against the possibility of such an advance. Charles himself had received a gift of one hundred thousand francs, and some six months later another gift of the same sum, with the intimation that they represented an abandoned idea. What this idea might have been he never ventured to ask, but he made many shrewd, guesses, and the guess which seemed the most probable pointed to Léon de Beaudrillart. Why there was that space of months between the gifts he could not think; putting that aside, he felt convinced that M. de Cadanet’s generosity would not have carried him to the length of providing for two relatives in so lavish a fashion.
In spite of his conviction that he had benefited by Léon’s disgrace, Charles did not hate him the less. Possibly it was because he knew that Léon was aware of his true character; and although he had not accused him to M. de Cadanet, there was an unpleasant feeling of insecurity in the knowledge. But that was not all, because as M. de Cadanet grew weaker, and the chances of M. de Beaudrillart ever seeing him again became infinitesimal, he lost nothing of his distrust and dislike. Perhaps from something the old count had once let drop, he had not been without hope of becoming master of Poissy—a hope which had ended in disappointment. Perhaps there still lurked in his mind a fear that when the will was read, Léon might be remembered. Whatever it was, one thing was certain—that his hate had not diminished.
It need not be said that he had grown extremely tired of dancing attendance at the house in the Rue du Bac. The hours spent in the severely-furnished room, reading to or writing for M. de Cadanet, who exacted all his attention, and never fell asleep, were irksome to the last degree. He received few thanks, but often a gift accompanied by a dozen cynical words. The cynicism did not affect him, the gift it was which enabled him to endure the attendance. As often as possible he sent his wife. She was a kindly unimaginative woman; luckily for her own happiness, of very slow perception; and attaching herself readily by little surface roots to those who came in her way. She had liked her aunt and she liked M. de Cadanet, although he treated her with scant civility; as he grew weaker, she was at the house a great deal, and applied herself diligently to feeding him with beef tea, which he detested, and with such small pieces of news as she considered sufficiently unexciting.
M. de Cadanet sat in a straight-backed chair, wrapped in a wadded dressing-gown, for, although the weather was hot, he was now always cold, and young Mme. Lemaire had for the last twenty minutes been engaged in presenting him with such scraps of news from Le Temps as she thought suitable. In the midst he said, with a sudden yawn which would have disconcerted a more sensitive person:
“Amélie, is one permitted to ask how old you are!”
Mme. Lemaire laid the newspaper calmly in her lap, and considered, before answering honestly:
“I was seven-and-twenty last April.”
“Heavens! Only that I sometimes when I listen to you I think I hear my grandmother.”