“But, Father, how can you—!”
“Get out of my sight before I break every bone in your body! Get back to that cold sanctimonious court and to your hot wench!” said Coth.
Yet all the while that he spoke with such fluency Coth’s heart was troubled. Of course, in rearing a son judiciously, one must preserve the proper moral tone. Nevertheless, Coth felt, at heart, that he might be taking the wrong way with the boy, and was being almost brusque.
But Coth was Coth. That was his doom. He had only one way.
31.
Other Paternal Apothegms
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NOW Jurgen went very often to court, since the boy at twenty-one was fathoms deep in love with Count Manuel’s second daughter, whom they called Dorothy la Désirée. Coth saw her but once: and, even over and above his rage at the thought of sharing Jurgen with anybody, Coth was honestly moved, in the light of his considerable boudoir experience, to uncivil prophecy. He was upon this occasion, in the main hall at Bellegarde, with dozens of persons within earshot, most embarrassingly explicit with Jurgen, alike as to the quality of Jurgen’s intelligence and the profession which Coth desired no daughter-in-law of his to practice.
The two quarreled. That nowadays was no novelty. The difference was that into this quarrel Jurgen put all his heart. So the insolent, overbearing, bulldozing young scoundrel was packed off to serve under the Vidame de Soyecourt: and before the year was out Coth heard that this Dorothy la Désirée was married to Guivric’s son Michael.
“This Michael is but the first served at an entertainment preparing for the general public,” was Coth’s epithalamium.