“Good, simple, good people!” Phil thought. “Perhaps it is from you that Caracal takes his studies for ‘The House of Glass’—wolf in the sheepfold that he is!”
The thought increased his anger. He went up and up. At last he was going to see that apartment of Caracal’s which no one ever entered. No doubt it would be insolent in its luxury and have a big valet in the anteroom and invaluable pictures which this grafter of the press must have extorted for his collection of art works, of which he was always talking in his articles.
Seventh floor, last door! It must be there. Phil had reached it. There was no bell! Phil knocked, but there was no reply. The key had been forgotten in the door, and he entered. On a table a small lamp shed its light over papers and books. There were other books on the ground and on chairs—perhaps the encyclopedia from which Caracal drew his weekly erudition. In the half-obscurity, farther back, Phil saw a brass bedstead like a child’s couch. Beside it, on a chest of drawers, there were garments carefully folded and a hat protected from the dust by a newspaper. On the floor were shoes beside a blacking-brush. On the chimneypiece there was a photograph in which an old lady held the hand of an old gentleman. Everything in the room was neatly ordered and touching in its simplicity.
“I must have mistaken the floor,” Phil said to himself. “This is not the apartment of an arbiter of society elegance.”
He was on the point of retreating when, on a sofa near him in the shadow, some one moved, and he seemed to hear a sob. Phil started back and the figure on the sofa came into full light. It was Caracal asleep. There was an expression of sadness on his face and tears were on his cheeks—the cheeks which Phil had always seen smirking with a convulsive sneer.
Caracal, when he came home, must have thrown himself on the sofa worn out with his day’s work. The calm which had come over his features showed that he had dropped off to sleep in some sad and gentle dream. Phil, in spite of himself, looked up to the chimneypiece where the old lady and the old gentleman seemed watching over their child—yes, yes, Phil was sure of it now, from the sadness on the face of Caracal. He must have gone back to his childhood; perhaps, in his dreams, he heard the beloved voices which had long since become silent. A sob from Caracal made Phil tremble again—a dull, deep sob like the sigh of a dying man. One would have said that his whole life was rising up before him—his heart’s bitterness, humiliations undergone and illusions fled, the success of others and regrets for his own ill-doing.
Phil felt his anger fade away. He divined all the wretchedness of his life, so full of meanness and bluff. Asleep, the poor creature, overcome by his distress, seemed sacred to him. He went out without noise.
“Old Caracal,” he murmured, “I’ll leave you to your dream—that shall be your punishment.”
CHAPTER VIII
A QUEEN FOR KINGS
Poufaille, seated on a high stool, was copying in the Louvre Gallery. Since his share of glory had been stolen from him, he had become as downcast as a caged lion from whom his quarter of meat has been taken. Poor Poufaille! Everything fell to pieces in his hands. His studio had been dispersed at auction; “Liberty” and “Fraternity” had been sold for nothing, not even for enough to pay up the garlic- and potato-seller. And his cows were in the Luxembourg under another name! What reasons for sadness! He did not even listen to Suzanne, babbling near him on a lower seat. He was timidly copying the goat and kids of Paul Potter. The company of such good animals consoled him a little for that of men.