"And it doesn't make you jump from your chair that I, your son, have reached the point where I could put such a question to that man, and that he refused to answer? You seem to have no suspicion that I am passing through one of the most ghastly hours of my whole life! Don't tell me that you had nothing to do with the disappearance of Monsieur Jaubourg's papers. I know it. Don't tell me that this act of Landri's proves that he and his father are crazy. I know it. But I know something else, by an experience of many, many years! Monsieur de Claviers and Landri, with all their failings and their prejudices and their follies and their absurdities, are perfectly honorable men, incapable of wronging any one knowingly. If they suspected you of this, it was because they believed that they had the right to. It must be that you and the marquis broke off your relations for some reason of which I know nothing. I insist on knowing it. Yes, why did Monsieur de Claviers, who finds it so hard to discharge his employés,—you used to complain of it so often!—why did he part with you so abruptly, so brutally? Ah!" he concluded in a heart-rending tone, "if the reason was what you told us, Landri would never have come here, he would never have left me with that evasive reply, after he had seen how I was suffering, and what I thought—never!"
"I told your mother and sister and you the exact truth," said Chaffin, pretending to be angry at last.
He could not assume any other attitude, but the contrast was too great between this sudden outburst and the carefully guarded attention of a few moments before. They who simulate emotions always miss their imitation of reality in some detail. They exaggerate the symptoms or distort them. For instance, the impostors who feign an attack of vertigo, and who fall with their hands extended to protect themselves. The genuine epileptic, being hurled to the ground as it were, has no time to take that precaution. The error, in this case, was the sudden change from premeditated indifference to extreme rage, without transition. The protest, too emphatic in his too abrupt somersault, was not sincere.
"Yes," the dishonest steward persisted none the less, "I told you the truth, and it is incredible to me that you, my son, should be the one to take sides against me with these great nobles whom you know only by hearsay! I know them, I do, from having undergone innumerable humiliations at their hands which I have always concealed from you. In their eyes a man is of no account when he doesn't belong to their caste. They wouldn't do you a material injury. They are very careful in that respect, from pride. But as to other injuries, no. I expected better things from Landri. Evidently he's no better than his father. Papers are missing from Jaubourg's apartments, certificates of stock, I suppose? They think at once of us, of us, mind you, of you as well as myself! Do I conclude from that that they mean to accuse you of dishonesty? Not at all. But you conclude that they do mean to accuse me! It is incredible! But the dishonesty was in coming here to insult you and your father! And you listened to my gentleman? And when he proved to you, by the mere fact of coming here, his absolute lack of perspicacity, you questioned him about me?—How many times must I tell you that Monsieur de Claviers did not part with me, but I parted with him, and for the reason that Landri admitted: he talked about confusion in my accounts, when there was no confusion in anything but his expenditure, which was insane! What Landri did not tell you is that I warned him personally of the marquis's impending ruin, in order to save his fortune. Just ask him about that. We will see whether he will dare to deny that conversation at Grandchamp when I gave him the exact figures. I swear it, on your mother's head and your sister's. If he had listened to me he wouldn't have lost a sou. And this is how he rewards me! But he isn't my son, and you, Pierre, have been too unjust to me, too ungrateful. I have only lived and worked for you all, for you especially. I have tried to spare you all the miseries of the breadwinner which crushed me at your age. You were intelligent and hard-working. I kept you at home, so that you could give your time to science as you chose, and prepare for your examinations, while your comrades were wearing themselves out with patients; and you have forgotten all my sacrifices!—Ah! it's too horrible!"
"For the very reason that I am living on your benefactions," replied the physician with savage asperity, "I cannot endure certain ideas. And those ideas," he continued still more harshly, "let us admit that it is, as you say, horrible to entertain them. It is a fact that I do entertain them. Would you like me to tell you why? Landri de Claviers' conduct has nothing to do with it. The change in you that I have noticed these last weeks has given them to me, nothing else. Since you left Grandchamp you are not the same man. I see it with my eyes. I see that you are suffering. You are growing thin. You don't eat. You don't sleep. You have some persistent trouble that you cannot hide, and I too am beginning to have one, I feel it growing and taking possession of me—it is suspicion. I do not want it. We must not both play at madness. Let us have more pride. A father and son should not exchange such words as these twice. There is one way of putting an end to them. It is too late to-day," he added, looking at the clock; "but to-morrow, at eleven, after the Hôtel-Dieu, I'll call for you, and we will go together to Rue du Faubourg-Saint-Honoré. We will ask to speak with the marquis. You will tell him, or, if you prefer, I will, that there are rumors abroad. And it is true. Louvet has changed his manner to me since you left the Claviers. These rumors have reached our ears. We have come to ask him to cut them short by declaring publicly, and first of all before me, that he has nothing to reproach you with in your stewardship that affects your honor. I will demand that he put that declaration in writing for me, if necessary."
"I will not do it!" cried Chaffin, his eyes bulging out with terror as, in imagination, they saw M. de Claviers. "I will not do it! You talk about pride, and yet you don't see that you are proposing to me a nameless humiliation, worse than all the rest!"
"What, pray?" his son quickly retorted. "What humiliation is there in going to a man as to whom you have nothing to reproach yourself with, and claiming from him reparation for involuntary injustice? Tell me, when Louvet and I—and how many others that I don't know!—may have received an unfavorable impression of your quarrel with Monsieur de Claviers, is not that an injustice, if the quarrel was a mere caprice on his part? And is he not responsible for it by the exaggerated indignation which you claim that he has shown?"
"People may think what they choose," interposed Chaffin. "I won't go up that man's stairs. I won't go to his house. I won't go."
"Very good," said Pierre, "then I shall go alone."
"You won't put that affront on me?" the father implored. "You shall not go! I forbid you. To humiliate yourself is to humiliate me. We are one as to that. You must obey me."