“You are going to her to-night?” snarled the Marshal, adding: “Tell her from me that she deceives a blackguard for the sake of a booby. For one you are, by the thunder of Heaven! who soil yourself and spoil yourself for such a drab as she!”
“What can you expect,” said Hector, with the same cool offensiveness, “but that your son should follow in your footsteps? I am, as you have said, living with the wife of another man in open adultery. You were bolder, and more daring, who with your master had discrowned kings and humiliated Emperors. You did not hesitate, at the pricking of your desire, to ravish the Spouse of God.”
“Your mother is a Saint!” cried the old Marshal, purple and gnashing with furious indignation. “Do not dare to mention her in the same breath with that—that——”
And the coarse old man plumped out an epithet of the barrack-room, full-flavored, double-barreled, of which Henriette, had she heard it, would have died.
“There is no need to tell me to honor my mother,” said the son. “She is sacred in my eyes. But do not venture to speak to me of Him Whom you have dishonored. I have thought ever since I was a boy that it would be better for me and for you if He did not exist. For the fact of my being is an insult to Him. I am a clod of earth flung in His face by your sacrilegious hand!”
He had often dreamed of speaking such words as these, face to face with his father. Now they poured from him, thick and fast. But pity checked them in mid-torrent, at the sight of the working mouth and nodding head, and trembling hands of unreverend, ignoble age.
The old man capitulated even as the young one relented. He got out, between spasms of wheezing, in quite a conciliatory snarl:
“Well,—well! What if you have spent your mother’s dowry! there is more where that came from. You are my legitimate heir,—and for me, I had rather you were a prodigal than a prig. And blood-horses and Indian shawls, wines, jewelry and cigars and bonnets,—wagers on the Turf and bets on cards, are unavoidable expenses.... I do not wish you to be a niggard. Only it seems to me that with your opportunities you might have invested well. Steel Rails and Zinc, those are the things to put money on. This will be the Age of traveling behind boilers and housing under roofs of metal. Ugh—ugh! Ough, c’r’r—’aah!”
He stopped to have a bout of coughing and hawking, and resumed:
“Do not suppose I blame you for having been extravagant. Though it seems to me you have managed badly. This Bonaparte is one who takes with one hand and gives with the other—is bled or bleeds. He has never tapped my veins yet, nor shall for any hint of his. But I suspect he has had money of you. That woman of yours—never mind! I will not name her, the cockatrice!—but I have had it hinted to me that she is an agent in his pay. And he pays women with compliments and promises—he has probably promised to create her a peeress in her own right when he is Emperor.... Her Grace the Duchess of Trundlemop—that is the title she will get.”