It represented a dance of Bacchantes. Fenwick looked at it in silence. Watson replaced it with a patient sigh. 'Theophile Gautier said of some other fellow's Bacchantes that they had got drunk on "philosophical" wine. He might, I fear, have said it of mine. Anyway, I felt I was not made for Bacchantes—so I fell back on the usual thing.'
And he showed an 'Execution of a Witch'—filled with gruesome and poignant detail—excellent in some of its ideas and single figures, but as a whole crude, horrible, and weak.
'I don't improve,' he said, abruptly, turning away—'but it keeps me contented—that and my animals. Anatole!—vaurien!—où es-tu?'
A small monkey, in a red jacket, who had been sitting unnoticed on the top of a cabinet since Fenwick's entrance, clattered down to the floor, and, running to his master, was soon sitting on his shoulder, staring at Fenwick with a pair of grave, soft eyes. Watson caressed him;—and then pointed to a wicker cage outside the window in which a pigeon was pecking at some Indian-corn. The cage door was wide open. 'She comes to feed here by day. In the morning I wake up and hear her there—the darling! In the evening she spreads her wings, and I watch her fly toward Saint-Cloud. No doubt the jade keeps a family there. Oh! some day she'll go—like the rest of them—and I shall miss her abominably.'
'You seem also to be favoured by mice?' said Fenwick, idly looking at two traps on the floor beside him.
Watson smiled.
'My femme de service sets those traps every night. She says we are overrun—the greatest nonsense! As if there wasn't enough for all of us! Then in the night—I sleep there, you see, behind that screen—I wake, and hear some little fool squeaking. So I get up, and take the trap downstairs in the dark—right away down—to the first floor. And there I let the mouse go—those folk down there are rich enough to keep him. The only drawback is that my old woman is so cross in the morning, and she spends her life thinking of new traps. Ah, ben!—Je la laisse faire!'
'And this place suits you?'
'Admirably—till the cold comes. Then I march. I must have the sun.'
He shivered again. Fenwick, struck by something in his tone, looked at him more closely.