“Pshaw! those are your friends!” retorted Tom with his peculiar sneer. “I’ve said nothing about them because they are dragged about everywhere. Who hasn’t seen them?”
There was a minute of silence, broken by an emphatic “Ah!” breathed not loudly but deeply by the excited listener. Starting from his seat, and thrusting his hands into his pockets, he began hurriedly to pace up and down the room. His friend glanced at him uneasily.
“What’s the matter? What annoys you?” he asked.
“O Tom, Tom!” cried George, still continuing his agitated walk, “I blush when I compare your life with mine. While your heart has counted each pulsation by some noble or beautiful emotion, mine has stupidly gone on ticking off the hours and days and years as calmly as a kitchen clock! Have I really lived, tell me?” He stopped in front of his friend, gesticulating violently. “I was born, and I have slept, and I have eaten; but what else? And what has been the result? My intelligence is extinguished; I have dried up; I have descended in the scale of being, until I have come to be on a level with the idiot of the Alps, with a shellfish, with an oyster!”
“Come, come, George, you’re going too far!” said Rouvière soothingly. “Even supposing that you no longer possess as much freshness of imagination, as much vivacity of wit, as you used to have....”
“I thought so! I knew it!” interrupted Dupuis, resuming his hurried walk backwards and forwards; “you acknowledge that you find me rusty!”
M. Rouvière rose slowly from his seat, and, after lighting a cigar, remained standing with his back against the chimney-piece, his eyes fixed on his friend, who paused in front of him at his first word.
“Listen to me, George,” said he seriously, caressing his moustache with his fingers as he spoke; “I will be frank with you. You know that I always used to be frank with you. The impression your house made on me when I first entered it was, I must confess, a sinister one. I seemed to breathe the air of a cemetery in it. I could have fancied that I was in one of those long-buried dwellings which the patient labor of enthusiastic antiquaries has restored to light and life. While the servant went to call you I could not prevent myself from examining, with a kind of wondering, stupid curiosity, the old-fashioned furniture, and the pictures, and those dismal tapestries worthy of figuring in a museum! I remembered the delicacy of your character, the elegance of your manners, your intelligent taste, your love of art; and positively I could not reconcile the bright memories I retained of you with the dull, insipid existence of which I had the evidence before my eyes. You came to me; I looked at you; you spoke. What was it? Was my sight affected, or my judgment biassed by the thoughts which were literally preying on me at that moment? I can’t tell what it was—I can’t explain—but your language astonished me! Your forehead actually seemed to me to have grown narrower! I wiped away a secret tear, and I sighed as I should have sighed had I been standing by your grave! I even half spoke the words, ‘This, then, is all that remains of my friend!’ You’re not offended, George?” added M. Rouvière, stopping short and looking inquiringly into his victim’s anxious, attentive face.
“Not a bit, Tom; not a bit,” replied George. “I tell you I felt that I had sunk; at least, I suspected it, and the suspicion was intolerable. I prefer the certainty.” He turned away with an attempt at a smile, and resumed his agitated walk up and down the room.
Rouvière applied himself to the fire, put on a new log of wood, shovelled up the glowing embers and ashes and threw them with much care and skill to the back, gazed on his work for a minute, and, finally assuming again his favorite pose, with his back leaning against the chimney-piece, started the conversation afresh in a lively, chatty tone.