The apprentice was still calm. “If you want to flourish yourself, don’t mind me,” said he, and picking up the next account, he began reading:
Mademoiselle Landresse, in the matter of the Burial of
the Sieur de Mauprat, to Etienne Mahye, &c. Item—
The first words read by the apprentice had stilled the breaking storm of the Master’s anger. It dissolved in a fragrant dew of proud reminiscence, profit, and scandal.
He himself had no open prejudices. He was an official of the public—or so he counted himself—and he very shrewdly knew his duty in that walk of life to which it had pleased Heaven to call him. The greater the notoriety of the death, the more in evidence was the Master and all his belongings. Death with honour was an advantage to him; death with disaster a boon; death with scandal was a godsend. It brought tears of gratitude to his eyes when the death and the scandal were in high places. These were the only real tears he ever shed. His heart was in his head, and the head thought solely of Etienne Mahye. Though he wore an air of sorrow and sympathy in public, he had no more feeling than a hangman. His sympathy seemed to say to the living, “I wonder how soon you’ll come into my hands,” and to the dead, “What a pity you can only die once—and second-hand coffins so hard to get!”
Item: paid to me, Etienne Mahye,
droned the voice of the apprentice,
for rosewood coffin—
“O my good,” interrupted the Master of Burials with a barren chuckle, and rubbing his hands with glee, “O my good, that was a day in a lifetime! I’ve done fine work in my time, but upon that day—not a cloud above, no dust beneath, a flowing tide, and a calm sea. The Royal Court, too, caught on a sudden marching in their robes, turns to and joins the cortegee, and the little birds a-tweeting-tweeting, and two parsons at the grave. Pardingue, the Lord was—with me that day, and—”
The apprentice laughed—a dry, mirthless laugh of disbelief and ridicule. “Ba su, master, the Lord was watching you. There was two silver bits inside that coffin, on Sieur’s eyes.”
“Bigre!” The Master was pale with rage. His lips drew back, disclosing long dark teeth and sickly gums, in a grimace of fury. He reached out to seize a hammer lying at his hand, but the apprentice said quickly: