Hector’s brows knitted. He mumbled, between burning anger and cold disgust:
“What can he have wanted with all that money? He had enough before!”
“Some men never have enough,” said de Moulny, in his cold, heavy, contemptuous way. “What did he want it for? Perhaps to gamble away on the green cloth or on the Bourse! Perhaps to spend upon his mistresses! Perhaps to make provision for you....”
“I will not have it!” snarled Hector.
“Nor would I in your place,” said de Moulny with one of his slow nods. “I like money well enough, but money with that taint upon it!... Robbed from the dying poor, to—bah!” He spat upon the trodden dust. “Now have you heard enough?” He added with an inflection that plucked at Hector’s heartstrings: “It did not give me pleasure listening to the story, I assure you.”
Hector said:
“Thank you!”
The utterance was like a sob. De Moulny jumped at the sound, looked about him at the staring faces, back at the face of the boy who had been his friend, and to whom he had done an injury that could never be undone, and cried out wildly:
“Why did you challenge me just now for a gaffe—a mere piece of stupid joking—about the bonnet of an old woman who snivels in a pocket-handkerchief? Do you not know that when once I get angry I am as mad as all Bicêtre? I swear to you that when I listened to that story it was with the determination never to repeat it!—to bury it!—to compel myself to forget it! Yet in a few hours....” He choked and boggled, and the shamed blood that dyed his solid, ordinarily dough-colored countenance, obliterated that deepening bruise upon the cheekbone. “I apologize!” he at last managed to get out. “I have been guilty of an unpardonable meanness! I ask you, before all here, to forget it! I beg you to forgive me!”
Hector said, in pain for the pain that was written in de Moulny’s face: