"The devil!" exclaimed Pierre as he sat down. "We are celebrating the accession of Jean the Rich."
After the soup, Madeira was pa.s.sed round, and already every one was talking at once. Beausire was giving the history of a dinner he had eaten at San Domingo at the table of a negro general. Old Roland was listening, and at the same time trying to get in, between the sentences, his account of another dinner, given by a friend of his at Mendon, after which every guest was ill for a fortnight. Mme.
Rosemilly, Jean, and his mother were planning an excursion to breakfast at Saint Jouin, from which they promised themselves the greatest pleasure; and Pierre was only sorry that he had not dined alone in some pot-house by the sea, so as to escape all this noise and laughter and glee which fretted him. He was wondering how he could now set to work to confide his fears to his brother, and induce him to renounce the fortune he had already accepted and of which he was enjoying the intoxicating foretaste. It would be hard on him, no doubt; but it must be done; he could not hesitate; their mother"s reputation was at stake.
The appearance of an enormous shade-fish threw Roland back on fishing stories. Beausire told some wonderful tales of adventure on the Gaboon, at Sainte-Marie, in Madagascar, and above all, off the coasts of China and j.a.pan, where the fish are as queer-looking as the natives. And he described the appearance of these fishes--their goggle gold eyes, their blue or red bellies, their fantastic fins like fans, their eccentric crescent-shaped tails--with such droll gesticulation that they all laughed till they cried as they listened.
Pierre alone seemed incredulous, muttering to himself: "True enough, the Normans are the Gascons of the north!"
After the fish came a vol-au-vent; then a roast fowl, a salad, French beans with a Pithiviers lark-pie. Mme. Rosemilly"s maid-servant helped to wait on them, and the fun rose with the number of gla.s.ses of wine they drank. When the cork of the first champagne bottle was drawn with a pop, father Roland, highly excited, imitated the noise with his tongue and then declared: "I like that noise better than a pistol-shot."
Pierre, more and more fractious every moment, retorted with a sneer:
"And yet it is perhaps a greater danger for you."
Roland, who was on the point of drinking, set his full gla.s.s down on the table again, and asked:
"Why?"
He had for some time been complaining of his health, of heaviness, giddiness, frequent and unaccountable discomfort. The doctor replied:
"Because the bullet might very possibly miss you, while the gla.s.s of wine is dead certain to hit you in the stomach."
"And what then?"
"Then it scorches your inside, upsets your nervous system, makes the circulation sluggish, and leads the way to the apoplectic fit which always threatens a man of your build."
The jeweler"s incipient intoxication had vanished like smoke before the wind. He looked at his son with fixed, uneasy eyes, trying to discover whether he was making game of him.
But Beausire exclaimed:
"Oh, these confounded doctors! They all sing the same tune; eat nothing, drink nothing, never make love or enjoy yourself; it all plays the devil with your precious health. Well, all I can say is I have done all these things, sir, in every quarter of the globe, wherever and as often as I have had the chance, and I am none the worse."
Pierre answered with some asperity:
"In the first place, captain, you are a stronger man than my father; and in the next, all free livers talk as you do till the day when--when they come back no more to say to the cautious doctor: "You were right." When I see my father doing what is worst and most dangerous for him, it is but natural that I should warn him. I should be a bad son if I did otherwise."
Mme. Roland, much distressed, now put in her word: "Come, Pierre, what ails you? For once it cannot hurt him? Think of what an occasion it is for him, for all of us. You will spoil his pleasure and make us all unhappy. It is too bad of you to do such a thing."
He muttered, as he shrugged his shoulders:
"He can do as he pleases. I have warned him."
But father Roland did not drink. He sat looking at his gla.s.s full of the clear and luminous liquor while its light soul, its intoxicating soul, flew off in tiny bubbles mounting from its depths in hurried succession to die on the surface. He looked at it with the suspicious eye of a fox smelling at a dead hen and suspecting a trap. He asked doubtfully: "Do you think it will really do me much harm?" Pierre had a pang of remorse and blamed himself for letting his ill-humor punish the rest:
"No," said he. "Just for once you may drink it; but do not take too much, or get into the habit of it."
Then old Roland raised his gla.s.s, but still he could not make up his mind to put it to his lips. He contemplated it regretfully, with longing and with fear; then he smelt it, tasted it, drank it in sips, swallowing them slowly, his heart full of terrors, of weakness and greediness; and then, when he had drained the last drop, of regret.
Pierre"s eye suddenly met that of Mme. Rosemilly; it rested on him clear and blue, far-seeing and hard. And he read, he knew, the precise thought which lurked in that look, the indignant thought of this simple and right-minded little woman; for the look said: "You are jealous--that is what you are. Shameful!"
He bent his head and went on with his dinner.
He was not hungry and found nothing nice. A longing to be off hara.s.sed him, a craving to be away from these people, to hear no more of their talking, jests, and laughter.
Father Roland meanwhile, to whose head the fumes of the wine were rising once more, had already forgotten his son"s advice and was eyeing a champagne-bottle with a tender leer as it stood, still nearly full, by the side of his plate. He dared not touch it for fear of being lectured again, and he was wondering by what device or trick he could possess himself of it without exciting Pierre"s remark. A ruse occurred to him, the simplest possible. He took up the bottle with an air of indifference, and holding it by the neck, stretched his arm across the table to fill the doctor"s gla.s.s, which was empty; then he filled up all the other gla.s.ses, and when he came to his own he began talking very loud, so that if he poured anything into it they might have sworn it was done inadvertently. And in fact no one took any notice.
Pierre, without observing it, was drinking a good deal. Nervous and fretted, he every minute raised to his lips the tall crystal funnel where the bubbles were dancing in the living, translucent fluid. He let the wine slip very slowly over his tongue, that he might feel the little sugary sting of the fixed air as it evaporated.
Gradually a pleasant warmth glowed in his frame. Starting from the stomach as from a focus, it spread to his chest, took possession of his limbs, and diffused itself throughout his flesh, like a warm and comforting tide, bringing pleasure with it. He felt better now, less impatient, less annoyed, and his determination to speak to his brother that very evening faded away; not that he thought for a moment of giving it up, but simply not to disturb the happy mood in which he found himself.
Beausire presently arose to propose a toast. Having bowed to the company, he began:
"Most gracious ladies and gentlemen, we have met to do honor to a happy event which has befallen one of our friends. It used to be said that Fortune was blind, but I believe that she is only short-sighted or tricksy, and that she has lately brought a good pair of gla.s.ses which enabled her to discover in the town of Havre the son of our worthy friend Roland, skipper of the _Pearl_."
Every one cried bravo and clapped their hands, and the elder Roland rose to reply. After clearing his throat, for it felt thick and his tongue was heavy, he stammered out:
"Thank you, captain, thank you--for myself and my son. I shall never forget your behavior on this occasion. Here"s good luck to you!"
His eyes and nose were full of tears, and he sat down, finding nothing more to say.
Jean, who was laughing, spoke in his turn:
"It is I," said he, "who ought to thank my friends here, my excellent friends," and he glanced at Mme. Rosemilly, "who have given me such a touching evidence of their affection. But it is not by words that I can prove my grat.i.tude. I will prove it to-morrow, every hour of my life, always, for our friendship is not one of those which fade away."
His mother, deeply moved, murmured: "Well said, my boy."
But Beausire cried out:
"Come, Mme. Rosemilly, speak on behalf of the fair s.e.x."
She raised her gla.s.s, and in a pretty voice, slightly touched with sadness, she said: "I will pledge you to the memory of Monsieur Marechal."
There was a few moments" lull, a pause for decent meditation, as after prayer. Beausire, who always had a flow of compliment, remarked:
"Only a woman ever thinks of these refinements." Then turning to father Roland: "And who was this Marechal, after all? You must have been very intimate with him."
The old man, emotional with drink, began to whimper, and in a broken voice he said:
"Like a brother, you know. Such a friend as one does not make twice--we were always together--he dined with us every evening--and would treat us to the play--I need say no more--no more--no more. A true friend--a real true friend--wasn"t he, Louise?"
His wife merely answered: "Yes; he was a faithful friend."
Pierre looked at his father and then at his mother, then, as the subject changed, he drank some more wine. He scarcely remembered the remainder of the evening. They had coffee, then liqueurs, and they laughed and joked a great deal. At about midnight he went to bed, his mind confused and his head heavy; and he slept like a brute till nine next morning.
CHAPTER IV
These slumbers, lapped in champagne and chartreuse, had soothed and calmed him, no doubt, for he awoke in a very benevolent frame of mind.
While he was dressing he appraised, weighed, and summed up the agitations of the past day, trying to bring out quite clearly and fully their real and occult causes, those personal to himself as well as those from outside.