De Moulny’s big jowl dropped. He shot into an erect attitude, dropped his coat-tails and made, rapidly and stealthily, the Sign of the Cross. His widely-open eyes, their distended pupils swallowing up the pale blue irises, seemed to leap at the white shape upon the sofa; and then relief relaxed the tension of his muscles, and his thick lips curled back in an almost good-humored smile. He said, in Alain’s old way:
“Nom d’un petit bonhomme!—but you are mistaken, my excellent Dunoisse!—fortunately most damnably mistaken, as it turns out! Even from where I stand, the quiver of an eyelid,—the stirring of a finger—the faintest heaving of the bosom I am not to touch, may occasionally be perceived. Use your own eyes, and they will convince you.” He went on jeeringly as Dunoisse, shaken by the furious beating of his heart, dizzy with the shock of the unexpected, and dim-eyed with newly-stirred emotion, moved unsteadily to the couch, and, stooping, noted the signs, faint but unmistakable, of reviving vitality in Henriette. “Aha! I am now enlightened as to the secret of your phlegm—your apathy—your air of fatalistic composure!—‘Dead,’ not a bit of it! She will live to dance over de Roux’s grave and yours, my good sir, and possibly mine.... But if she had been,” went on the big, blatant voice, with a scoffing gayety in it that set the still air of the rose-colored bedroom vibrating as though unholy wings had stirred it, “with that solid common-sense which she has found stimulatingly refreshing,—in contrast with the moonstruck vaporings of a person who, being present, shall go unnamed—I should have made myself scarce in double-quick time. For to be compromised with a living woman is sometimes sufficiently embarrassing, but when it comes to a——”
“Be silent—be silent!” said Dunoisse in the thick, quivering voice of overmastering anger. “Have you no sense of decency?—no manhood left in you?” he demanded, “that you mock and jeer at a woman who cannot even answer in her own defense? Our meeting cannot be too soon!—my friends will wait upon you in a few hours. Meanwhile, relieve me of your presence!” He pointed to the open door.
De Moulny, maintaining his position on the hearthrug, hunched his shoulders as though a shrug were too elaborate a method of conveying indifference. His solid jowl was doggedly obstinate, and a red light shone behind his pale blue eyes. He said:
“You have anticipated me—forestalled me, General, in pointing out that—to quote the old adage, ‘Two are company.’... Might I suggest that you should prove your own claim to decency and so forth by effacing yourself from a scene where—to put it obviously—you are de trop...! The equally obvious fact that your presence here will not conduce to Madame’s complete recovery, does not seem to have occurred to you. Face the situation. You took her from me—I won her back from you. A shameful struggle,” said de Moulny brutally, “a paltry triumph.” His thick lips rolled back in the contemptuous smile. “But be that as it may, the fact to be confronted, we have shared a strumpet, you and I!”
The words seemed so like a brutal blow in the white face against the sofa-cushions, that Dunoisse could not restrain an indignant ejaculation. De Moulny resumed, with the same intolerable coolness:
“Since neither of us will give place, one must listen to the other.... Whether Madame there hears matters very little to me.... There is very little of either delicacy or decency in the present situation. We might with truth be likened,” said de Moulny, “to a couple of dogs growling over a bone.”
He threw out his big arms and drew the air into his broad chest greedily.
“’F’ff! There is a certain relief in discarding conventionalities—in being, for the nonce, the natural man. For years, without a spoken word,—as men used before language was invented to swaddle Truth in—we have hated one another cordially, my very good Dunoisse. You had robbed me of a career—and though—when a rogue had come to me babbling the story of that trick of fence that did the business, I had stuffed his jaws with banknotes not to tell—one does not forgive a theft of that nature.... I think you upon your side resented—with a good deal of reason—a silly oath I had exacted—an oath you had at last the common sense to break. Nom d’un petit bonhomme! I should have broken it ages before you did.... But at least you learned the art of succeeding without money.... There is not one man in a million who understands that!...”
He stuck out his hammer-head of a chin in his old way of reflection.