The shop door had opened and closed again, and Schaunard leaving his office came out to see who the visitor might be.
He found himself face to face with Adams. He knew him by his size, but he would scarcely have recognized him by his face, so brown, so thin and so different in expression was it from the face of the man with whom he had parted but a few months ago.
“Good day,” said Adams. “I have come to pay you for that gun.”
“Ah, yes, the gun,” said Schaunard with a little laugh, “this is a pleasant surprise. I had entered it amidst my bad debts. Come in, monsieur, come into my office, it is cooler there, and we can talk. The gun, ah, yes. I had entered that transaction in Ledger D. Come in, come in. There, take that armchair, I keep it for visitors. Well, and how did the expedition go off?”
“Badly,” said Adams. “We are only back a week. You remember what you said to me when we parted? You said, ‘Don’t go.’ I wish I had taken your advice.”
“Why, since you are back sound and whole, it seems to me you have not done so badly—but perhaps you have got malaria?”
The old man’s sharp eyes were investigating the face of the other. Schaunard’s eyes had this peculiarity, that they were at once friendly to one and cruel, they matched the eternal little laugh which was ever springing to his lips—the laugh of the eternal mocker.
Schaunard made observations as well as telescopic sights and wind-gauges—he had been making observation for sixty years—he took almost as much interest in individual human beings as in rifles, and much more interest in Humanity than in God.
He was afflicted with the malady of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries—he did not believe in God, only instead of hiding his disease under a cloak of mechanical religion, or temporizing with it, he frankly declared himself to be what he was, an atheist.
This fact did not interfere with his trade—a godly gunmaker gets no more custom than an atheistical one; besides, Schaunard did not obtrude his religious opinions after the fashion of his class, he was a good deal of a gentleman, and he was accustomed to converse familiarly with emperors and kings.