“Something has vexed him,” reflected Marie, vanishing promptly. “Do what one will for their comfort, those men are always ungrateful.”
She would have made up for his want of communicativeness by listening to the conversation as the two drank vin ordinaire, and munched radishes, but M. Deshoulières was exasperatingly silent. Two or three times the notary glanced at him as if about to speak, but checked himself. He looked troubled, gloomy, abstracted. The companions were very different in appearance; M. Deshoulières, unlike the conventional type of his countrymen, largely built, with a massive head, a quantity of short light hair, and thick moustaches, warmer in tint than his hair. He had blue eyes, very blue, well-opened and quick; a finely shaped mouth; over all a grave expression which somewhat alarmed people. I ought perhaps to say, alarmed people who were well, the sick could never understand their previous fears. He made enemies for himself by his want of sympathy for imaginary complaints, he was too straightforward and truth-telling ever to be entirely popular; but he had a little kingdom of his own where he reigned triumphantly,—a sad little kingdom, perhaps, one in which he was always fighting, helping, cheering,—out of which had grown the grave expression, the abruptness of which others complained, but one which had also its tributes and its victories and its satisfactions, and which was dear to the man’s good heart. In his ears there sounded, it is true, a never-ending din of murmurs, suffering, feeble moans: to balance these, there were glad, grateful looks, patient thanks, a lighting up of faces at his step. Such a life needs compensations, and he found them. He might come away, as I have said, grave and absorbed; but he rarely looked as he looked when he sat in his little salon on this particular morning,—gloomy, worried, and out of sorts.
Monsieur Roulleau noticed the change. Monsieur Roulleau noticed many things for which no one credited his little half-hidden eyes. Somebody once said of him that his face had not the resolution to show its owner’s character, you might look at it for so long a time without finding any thing to read. It was answered that he was indeed a blank, his wife ruled and treated him as a cipher. On the whole, he was supposed to be a little, timid, good-natured creature, no one’s enemy but his own, and urged on to exertion by his wife. Charville half pitied, half laughed at him. M. Deshoulières had known the little man for many years, and did him good turns when they lay in his power. He looked upon him as something of a victim with this wife in the background, and her terribly strong will. The doctor pushed away his tumbler of wine, lit a cigar, and leaned back in his chair, thinking and frowning with all his might. He was quite unconscious that M. Roulleau, with his back to the window and the red curtains, was not letting a look or a sign escape him; but he grew a little worried with Veuve Angelin’s ostentatious service.
“That will do, Marie,” he said sharply. “You can leave us and close the door.”
Veuve Angelin went away in a fume. After enduring the dulness of these men over their food, it was intolerable that she should be excluded from the more sociable condition which cigars were likely to produce. She slammed the door in token of wrath, and stayed close by it, picking up stray words and disconnected sentences which had the effect of adding rather to her bewilderment than her knowledge.
“Bear witness,” said the doctor at length, abruptly, “bear witness always, Roulleau, that I did my utmost to point out to Monsieur Moreau the absurdities, the inconveniences, of such an arrangement.”
The notary bowed and spread open his hands.
“There can be no occasion for M. Deshoulières to speak of witnesses when the world will have his own word.”
“True,” replied M. Deshoulières, simply. “Nevertheless, we both know enough of the world to be aware that it holds no prerogative so dear as that of doubt. You and I understand the matter clearly: there may be a dozen others in Charville who will trust me loyally, some will comprehend the broad fact that, by the law, my quality as the doctor attending M. Moreau in his last illness precludes my receiving any benefit whatever under his will. But for the rest—”
“No one would be capable of cherishing thoughts so base, so detestable,” exclaimed the notary, with a burst of enthusiasm.