The apprentice took up the account again, and prepared to read it. The Master, however, had been roused to a genial theme. “Poor fallen child of Nature!” said he. “For what is birth or what is looks of virtue like a summer flower! It is to be brought down by hand of man.” He was warmed to his text. Habit had long made him so much hypocrite, that he was sentimentalist and hard materialist in one. “Some pend’loque has brought her beauty to this pass, but she must suffer—and also his time will come, the sulphur, the torment, the worm that dieth not—and no Abraham for parched tongue—misery me! They that meet in sin here shall meet hereafter in burning fiery furnace.”
The cackle of the apprentice rose above the whining voice. “Murder, too—don’t forget the murder, master. The Connetable told the old Sieur de Mauprat what people were blabbing, and in half-hour dead he is—he.”
“Et ben, the Sieur’s blood it is upon their heads,” continued the Master of Burials; “it will rise up from the ground—”
The apprentice interrupted. “A good thing if the Sieur himself doesn’t rise, for you’d get naught for coffin or obs’quies. It was you tells the Connetable what folks babbled, and the Connetable tells the Sieur, and the Sieur it kills him dead. So if he rised, he’d not pay you for murdering him—no, bidemme! And ‘tis a gobbly mouthful—this,” he added, holding up the bill.
The undertaker’s lips smacked softly, as though in truth he were waiting for the mouthful. Rubbing his hands, and drawing his lean leg up till it touched his nose, he looked over it with avid eyes, and said: “How much—don’t read the items, but come to total debit—how much she pays me?”
Ma’m’selle Landresse, debtor in all for one hundred and twenty livres, eleven sols and two farthings.
“Shan’t you make it one hundred and twenty-one livres?” added the apprentice.
“God forbid, the odd sols and farthings are mine—no more!” returned the Master of Burials. “Also they look exact; but the courage it needs to be honest! O my grief, if—”
“‘Sh!” said the apprentice, pointing, and the Master of Burials, turning, saw Guida pass the window. With a hungry instinct for the morbid they stole to the doorway and looked down the Rue d’Driere after her. The Master was sympathetic, for had he not in his fingers at that moment a bill for a hundred and twenty livres odd? The way the apprentice craned his neck, and tightened the forehead over his large, protuberant eyes, showed his intense curiosity, but the face was implacable. It was like that of some strong fate, superior to all influences of sorrow, shame, or death. Presently he laughed—a crackling cackle like new-lighted kindling wood; nothing could have been more inhuman in sound. What in particular aroused this arid mirth probably he himself did not know. Maybe it was a native cruelty which had a sort of sardonic pleasure in the miseries of the world. Or was it only the perception, sometimes given to the dullest mind, of the futility of goodness, the futility of all? This perhaps, since the apprentice shared with Dormy Jamais his rooms at the top of the Cohue Royale; and there must have been some natural bond of kindness between the blank, sardonic undertaker’s apprentice and the poor beganne, who now officially rang the bell for the meetings of the Royal Court.
The dry cackle of the apprentice as he looked after Guida roused a mockery of indignation in the Master. “Sacre matin, a back-hander on the jaw’d do you good, slubberdegullion—you! Ah, get go scrub the coffin blacking from your jowl!” he rasped out with furious contempt.