Martin was deeply moved by the pitifulness of the tale. Poor little Félise, how much she must have suffered.
“Would it not be better,” said he, “to sacrifice a phantom mother—for that’s what it comes to—for the sake of a living father?”
Bigourdin agreed, but Fortinbras expressly forbade such a disclosure. In this he sympathised with Fortinbras, although the mother was his own flesh and blood. Truly he had not been lucky in sisters—one a bigote and the other an alcoolique. He expressed sombre views as to the family of which he was the sole male survivor. Seeing that his wife had given him no children, and that he had not the heart to marry one of the damsels of the neighbourhood, he bewailed the end of the good old name of Bigourdin. But perhaps it were best. For who could tell, if he begat a couple of children, whether one would not be afflicted with alcoholic, and the other with religious mania? To beget brave children for France, a man, nom de Dieu! must put forth all the splendour and audacity of his soul. How could he do so, when the only woman who could conjure up within him the said splendour and audacity would have nothing to do with him? To fall in love with a woman was a droll affair. But if you loved her, you loved her, however little she responded. It was a species of malady which must be supported with courageous resignation. He sighed and poured out a third glass of the brandy of the Brigadier. Martin did likewise, thinking of the woman whose white fingers held the working of the splendour and audacity of the soul of Martin Overshaw. He felt drawn into brotherly sympathy with Bigourdin; but, for the life of him, he could not see how anybody could be dependent for soul provisions of splendour and audacity upon Corinna Hastings. The humbly aspiring fellow moved him to patronising pity.
Martin strove to comfort him with specious words of hope. But Bigourdin’s mental condition was that of a man to whom wallowing in despair alone brings consolation. He had been suffering from a gathering avalanche of misfortunes. First had come his rejection, followed by the unsatisfied longing of the devout lover. It cannot be denied, however, that he had borne himself gallantly. Then the fading of his dream of the Viriot alliance had filled him with dismay. Félise’s adventure in the Rue Maugrabine and its resulting situation had caused him sleepless nights. Lucilla Merriton had taken him up between her fingers and twiddled him round, thereby depriving him of volition, and having put him down in a state of bewilderment, had carried off Félise. And to-day, last accretion that set the avalanche rolling, his old friend Viriot had called him a breaker of honourable understandings and had sent a clerk with his bill. The avalanche swept him into the Slough of Despond, wherein he lay solacing himself with hopeless imaginings and the old brandy of the Brigadier. But human instinct made him beckon to Martin, call him “tu” and bid him to keep an eye on the quagmire and stretch out a helping hand. He also had in view a subtle and daring scheme.
“Mon brave ami,” said he, “when I die”—his broad face assumed an expression of infinite woe and he spoke as though he were seventy—“what will become of the Hôtel des Grottes? Félise will benefit principally, bien entendu, by my will; but she will marry one of these days and will follow her husband, who probably will not want to concern himself with hotel keeping.” He glanced shrewdly at Martin, who regarded him with unmoved placidity. “To think that the hotel will be sold and all its honourable traditions changed would break my heart. I should not like to die without any solution of continuity.”
“But, my dear Bigourdin,” said Martin, “what are you thinking of? You’re a young man. You’re not stricken with a fatal malady. You’re not going to die. You have twenty, thirty, perhaps forty years before you in the course of which all kinds of things may happen.”
Bigourdin leant forward and stretched out his great arm across the fireplace until his fingers touched Martin’s knee.
“Do you know what is going to happen? War is going to happen. Next year—the year after—five years hence—que sais-je, moi?—but it has to come. All these pacifists and anti-militarists are either imbeciles or traitors—those that are not dreaming mad-house dreams of the millennium are filling their pockets—of the latter there are some in high places. There is going to be war, I tell you, and many people are going to die. And when the bugle sounds I put on my old uniform and march to the cannon’s mouth like my fathers before me. And why shouldn’t I die, like my brother in Morocco? Tell me that?”
In spite of his intimacy with the sturdy thought of provincial France, Martin could not realise how the vague imminence of war could affect so closely the personal life of an individual Frenchman.
“No matter,” said Bigourdin, after a short discussion. “I have to die some day. It was not to argue about the probable date of my decease that I have asked you to honour me with this special conversation. I have expressed to you quite frankly the motives which actuate me at the present moment. I have done so in order that you may understand why I desire to make you a business proposition.”