The dealer did not come as he had promised. It was getting late; Agathe dined that day with Madame Desroches, who had lately lost her husband, and Joseph proposed to Pierre Grassou to dine at his table d’hote. As he went out he left the key of his studio with the concierge.
An hour later Philippe appeared and said to the concierge,—
“I am to sit this evening; Joseph will be in soon, and I will wait for him in the studio.”
The woman gave him the key; Philippe went upstairs, took the copy, thinking it was the original, and went down again; returned the key to the concierge with the excuse that he had forgotten something, and hurried off to sell his Rubens for three thousand francs. He had taken the precaution to convey a message from his brother to Elie Magus, asking him not to call till the following day.
That evening when Joseph returned, bringing his mother from Madame Desroches’s, the concierge told him of Philippe’s freak,—how he had called intending to wait, and gone away again immediately.
“I am ruined—unless he has had the delicacy to take the copy,” cried the painter, instantly suspecting the theft. He ran rapidly up the three flights and rushed into his studio. “God be praised!” he ejaculated. “He is, what he always has been, a vile scoundrel.”
Agathe, who had followed Joseph, did not understand what he was saying; but when her son explained what had happened, she stood still, with the tears in her eyes.
“Have I but one son?” she said in a broken voice.
“We have never yet degraded him to the eyes of strangers,” said Joseph; “but we must now warn the concierge. In future we shall have to keep the keys ourselves. I’ll finish his blackguard face from memory; there’s not much to do to it.”
“Leave it as it is; it will pain me too much ever to look at it,” answered the mother, heart-stricken and stupefied at such wickedness.