Paul missed the events of those few days, for Amiens had made him a present, the present that Monsieur Poupart had expected to bring back with him. Brent went down with influenza, an influenza of a particularly virulent type. He was alone in the house, Luce Philipon having returned to her parents, and the disease struck Paul like a dose of poison. He was at work in the morning; that evening he was delirious, with a temperature that had soared.
About nine o’clock in the evening old Prosper Cordonnier, who slept at the château, and acted as Anatole’s “store-guard,” was sent down by Durand to the Café de la Victoire with a message to Brent. Anatole wished him to come up next day and make a rough survey of the château. Cordonnier found the café shut up, but hearing a voice, he knocked at the door. No one answered the knock, so Cordonnier tried the door, and finding it unlocked, walked in.
It was still sufficiently light for Cordonnier to see his way about the house, and he discovered Brent in bed in the little room whose window overlooked the garden. Paul was delirious, and talking all sorts of imaginable nonsense, and he was talking in English. Cordonnier stood and stared at him. This lingo was strange to Prosper, who had passed his refugee years working on a farm in the Gironde.
Cordonnier bent over the bed, and shook Brent by the shoulder.
“Hallo, old chap, what’s the matter?”
Brent pushed him away.
“Bosh,” he said, “bosh! Oh, go to the devil!”
Cordonnier left him, but he stood in the passage for a minute or two, rubbing his chin and listening. Prosper had been known in Beaucourt as “Mutton Head,” a man of slow movements, very stupid, yet touchily conscious of his stupidity. People had laughed at him, and this laughter had bred in Cordonnier a stubborn reticence. He used very few words, and those of the simplest. He talked only of obvious things, and if anyone asked him for an opinion he bolted back into his silence like a rabbit into a hole. He had one failing, a fondness for drink, and he had been heard to argue with a mild recklessness upon the contrasted virtues of farmyard dung and chemical manures.
Cordonnier went back to the château.
“That fellow Paul might have been talking German,” was the thought that entered his head, “but we won’t say anything about that. They always laugh, the fools! A man should keep things to himself.”