CHAPTER VI. CONCLUSION
Five years later, on an afternoon in the month of November, Comte Paul de Manerville, wrapped in a cloak, was entering, with a bowed head and a mysterious manner, the house of his old friend Monsieur Mathias at Bordeaux.
Too old to continue in business, the worthy notary had sold his practice and was ending his days peacefully in a quiet house to which he had retired. An urgent affair had obliged him to be absent at the moment of his guest’s arrival, but his housekeeper, warned of Paul’s coming, took him to the room of the late Madame Mathias, who had been dead a year. Fatigued by a rapid journey, Paul slept till evening. When the old man reached home he went up to his client’s room, and watched him sleeping, as a mother watches her child. Josette, the old housekeeper, followed her master and stood before the bed, her hands on her hips.
“It is a year to-day, Josette, since I received my dear wife’s last sigh; I little knew then that I should stand here again to see the count half dead.”
“Poor man! he moans in his sleep,” said Josette.
“Sac a papier!” cried the old notary, an innocent oath which was a sign with him of the despair on a man of business before insurmountable difficulties. “At any rate,” he thought, “I have saved the title to the Lanstrac estate for him, and that of Ausac, Saint-Froult, and his house, though the usufruct has gone.” Mathias counted his fingers. “Five years! Just five years this month, since his old aunt, now dead, that excellent Madame de Maulincour, asked for the hand of that little crocodile of a woman, who has finally ruined him—as I expected.”
And the gouty old gentleman, leaning on his cane, went to walk in the little garden till his guest should awake. At nine o’clock supper was served, for Mathias took supper. The old man was not a little astonished, when Paul joined him, to see that his old client’s brow was calm and his face serene, though noticeably changed. If at the age of thirty-three the Comte de Manerville seemed to be a man of forty, that change in his appearance was due solely to mental shocks; physically, he was well. He clasped the old man’s hand affectionately, and forced him not to rise, saying:—
“Dear, kind Maitre Mathias, you, too, have had your troubles.”
“Mine were natural troubles, Monsieur le comte; but yours—”
“We will talk of that presently, while we sup.”