‘Only a couple of nights?’ Mademoiselle exclaimed.
‘Yes. By the dawn of New Year’s Day we shall be far from Beaufort, so we will leave you on New Year’s Eve after dinner. What accommodation have you here?’
‘You have forgotten that, too! There is your old room—the large one opposite, which a friend of mine has been using. There is a canapé, which one of the gentlemen can sleep on. And then there is my sister’s room, and in the little dressing-room off it, another bed could be put up. I think you can manage.’
‘Capitally. We shall be lodged like kings. Gaston and Julien in my old room—yes, I quite remember it now. Yellow hangings, and an engraving of Da Vinci’s “Last Supper,” and a picture of Madame Lebrun. Not so? Anatole will sleep in the dressing-room, and I in the blue room. Is it still so blue? There used to be a photograph of my favourite Del Sarto, “The Madonna with St John.” Poor Adèle! What would I not give to be the same enamoured young fellow of ten years ago, violently combating death? But I have lived twenty years since, and everything is dead for me.’
He thrust his hands into his pockets, and went toward the door in search of his friends, without troubling to note the effect of his heartless words upon Henriette.
These he found trotting unconcernedly up and down the broken pavement. With all eternity before them, a few minutes more or less outside a particular door could not affect them. And when they were ushered into the house by the Doctor, and presented to his sister-in-law, they cast a glance of pity upon her that she should be at so much pains to welcome doomed, indifferent men. They listened politely to her apologies for the insufficiencies of their installation, and to her prayers for indulgence in the matter of cuisine; and shook their heads in despondent wonder. As for Anatole, he was as lugubrious as a funeral mute, and the Doctor’s cynical animation at table completely mystified him.
When once the fumes of punch had abated, poor Anatole saw his mad engagement in quite a novel light. The thought of that pistol held by his own hand to his own brains drove him to panic. He looked wan with fear, and fierce from desire to conceal his fear. He was a coward in both senses: without courage to stand out against a foolish engagement, and equally without courage to face death. Despite his boasted conviction that one death is as good as another, and any possibly better than life, he entertained a very private notion that suicide is a social as well as a moral crime, hardly justifiable by the most abject blunder and excesses—and by nothing less than absolute dishonour.
Besides, at heart he loved life, and he only played at pessimism not to look less jaded and cynical than the rest of the century. It was the fashion not to be gay, to have no belief, to have exhausted all emotions, and reached the end of all things. Now what would those around him say if it were known that Anatole Buzeval relished in the privacy of his own chamber Alexandre Dumas, and shed tears at the death of Porthos? What self-respecting Parisian of his day would associate with a youth, whose favourite hero was D’Artugnan, and who loved the great optimist Scott, whose novels he studied stealthily in an indifferent translation, and knew by heart.
He was abashed by contemplation of his own spuriousness as member of an effete circle, where death was regarded as the best of all things; and Mademoiselle Lenormant was seriously distressed by the wretchedness of his appetite and the misery of his boyish face. She forgot herself in another, and left the Doctor to entertain her friend, who had been invited to join them at dinner, while she set herself the task of rescuing the poor lad from his own reflections. Anatole was an affectionate and grateful young fellow, and the way to his heart was inconveniently easy of access. When he went to bed that night, to his other woes was added the delightful misfortune of being head and ears in love with the Doctor’s sister-in-law.
This was a complication not unnoted by Dr. Vermont or his companions. The Doctor calmly stroked his beard, and watched Anatole between the pauses of his conversation on matters English with the foreign lady. The foreigner, he was pleased afterwards to describe, as intelligent, but as she had already touched the rim of the arid plain of middle-age, with equal dulness, far from the hills of youth and from the valley of old age, he saw no reason to pursue her thoughts or shades of speech upon her face—by the way, he did not like English women; they lacked atmosphere, and were born without any natural grace, or coquetry, or any desire to please—and hence he had the more leisure to devote to inspection of Mademoiselle Lenormant and his susceptible comrade. He understood all the boy thought hidden of the struggle within him. He contemplated a magnanimous turn at the last moment, and caressed it in all its dramatic details. Meanwhile, it amused him to follow the conflict, and watch the childish eagerness with which Anatole, thinking his last hour at hand, abandoned himself to this new fancy, with a volume of eloquent declaration on the edge of his eyelids.