'Ha!' said Casimir.  'And previous to becoming one of you?'

'Jean-Marie has lived a remarkable existence; his experience his been
eminently formative,' replied Desprez.  'If I had had to choose an
education for my son, I should have chosen such another.  Beginning life
with mountebanks and thieves, passing onward to the society and
friendship of philosophers, he may be said to have skimmed the volume of
human life.'

'Thieves?' repeated the brother-in-law, with a meditative air.

The Doctor could have bitten his tongue out.  He foresaw what was coming,
and prepared his mind for a vigorous defence.

'Did you ever steal yourself?' asked Casimir, turning suddenly on Jean-
Marie, and for the first time employing a single eyeglass which hung
round his neck.

'Yes, sir,' replied the boy, with a deep blush.

Casimir turned to the others with pursed lips, and nodded to them
meaningly.  'Hey?' said he; 'how is that?'

'Jean-Marie is a teller of the truth,' returned the Doctor, throwing out
his bust.

'He has never told a lie,' added madame.  'He is the best of boys.'

'Never told a lie, has he not?' reflected Casimir.  'Strange, very
strange.  Give me your attention, my young friend,' he continued.  'You
knew about this treasure?'

'He helped to bring it home,' interposed the Doctor.

'Desprez, I ask you nothing but to hold your tongue,' returned Casimir.
'I mean to question this stable-boy of yours; and if you are so certain
of his innocence, you can afford to let him answer for himself.  Now,
sir,' he resumed, pointing his eyeglass straight at Jean-Marie.  'You
knew it could be stolen with impunity?  You knew you could not be
prosecuted?  Come!  Did you, or did you not?'

'I did,' answered Jean-Marie, in a miserable whisper.  He sat there
changing colour like a revolving pharos, twisting his fingers
hysterically, swallowing air, the picture of guilt.

'You knew where it was put?' resumed the inquisitor.

'Yes,' from Jean-Marie.

'You say you have been a thief before,' continued Casimir.  'Now how am I
to know that you are not one still?  I suppose you could climb the green
gate?'

'Yes,' still lower, from the culprit.

'Well, then, it was you who stole these things.  You know it, and you
dare not deny it.  Look me in the face!  Raise your sneak's eyes, and
answer!'

But in place of anything of that sort Jean-Marie broke into a dismal howl
and fled from the arbour.  Anastasie, as she pursued to capture and
reassure the victim, found time to send one Parthian arrow--'Casimir, you
are a brute!'

'My brother,' said Desprez, with the greatest dignity, 'you take upon
yourself a licence--'

'Desprez,' interrupted Casimir, 'for Heaven's sake be a man of the world.
You telegraph me to leave my business and come down here on yours.  I
come, I ask the business, you say "Find me this thief!"  Well, I find
him; I say "There he is!"  You need not like it, but you have no manner
of right to take offence.'

'Well,' returned the Doctor, 'I grant that; I will even thank you for
your mistaken zeal.  But your hypothesis was so extravagantly monstrous--'

'Look here,' interrupted Casimir; 'was it you or Stasie?'

'Certainly not,' answered the Doctor.

'Very well; then it was the boy.  Say no more about it,' said the brother-
in-law, and he produced his cigar-case.

'I will say this much more,' returned Desprez: 'if that boy came and told
me so himself, I should not believe him; and if I did believe him, so
implicit is my trust, I should conclude that he had acted for the best.'

'Well, well,' said Casimir, indulgently.  'Have you a light?  I must be
going.  And by the way, I wish you would let me sell your Turks for you.
I always told you, it meant smash.  I tell you so again.  Indeed, it was
partly that that brought me down.  You never acknowledge my letters--a
most unpardonable habit.'

'My good brother,' replied the Doctor blandly, 'I have never denied your
ability in business; but I can perceive your limitations.'

'Egad, my friend, I can return the compliment,' observed the man of
business.  'Your limitation is to be downright irrational.'

'Observe the relative position,' returned the Doctor with a smile.  'It
is your attitude to believe through thick and thin in one man's
judgment--your own.  I follow the same opinion, but critically and with
open eyes.  Which is the more irrational?--I leave it to yourself.'

'O, my dear fellow!' cried Casimir, 'stick to your Turks, stick to your
stable-boy, go to the devil in general in your own way and be done with
it.  But don't ratiocinate with me--I cannot bear it.  And so, ta-ta.  I
might as well have stayed away for any good I've done.  Say good-bye from
me to Stasie, and to the sullen hang-dog of a stable-boy, if you insist
on it; I'm off.'

And Casimir departed.  The Doctor, that night, dissected his character
before Anastasie.  'One thing, my beautiful,' he said, 'he has learned
one thing from his lifelong acquaintance with your husband: the word
_ratiocinate_.  It shines in his vocabulary, like a jewel in a muck-heap.
And, even so, he continually misapplies it.  For you must have observed
he uses it as a sort of taunt, in the sense of to _ergotise_, implying,
as it were--the poor, dear fellow!--a vein of sophistry.  As for his
cruelty to Jean-Marie, it must be forgiven him--it is not his nature, it
is the nature of his life.  A man who deals with money, my dear, is a man
lost.'

With Jean-Marie the process of reconciliation had been somewhat slow.  At
first he was inconsolable, insisted on leaving the family, went from
paroxysm to paroxysm of tears; and it was only after Anastasie had been
closeted for an hour with him, alone, that she came forth, sought out the
Doctor, and, with tears in her eyes, acquainted that gentleman with what
had passed.

'At first, my husband, he would hear of nothing,' she said.  'Imagine! if
he had left us! what would the treasure be to that?  Horrible treasure,
it has brought all this about!  At last, after he has sobbed his very
heart out, he agrees to stay on a condition--we are not to mention this
matter, this infamous suspicion, not even to mention the robbery.  On
that agreement only, the poor, cruel boy will consent to remain among his
friends.'

'But this inhibition,' said the Doctor, 'this embargo--it cannot possibly
apply to me?'

'To all of us,' Anastasie assured him.

'My cherished one,' Desprez protested, 'you must have misunderstood.  It
cannot apply to me.  He would naturally come to me.'

'Henri,' she said, 'it does; I swear to you it does.'

'This is a painful, a very painful circumstance,' the Doctor said,
looking a little black.  'I cannot affect, Anastasie, to be anything but
justly wounded.  I feel this, I feel it, my wife, acutely.'

'I knew you would,' she said.  'But if you had seen his distress!  We
must make allowances, we must sacrifice our feelings.'

'I trust, my dear, you have never found me averse to sacrifices,'
returned the Doctor very stiffly.

'And you will let me go and tell him that you have agreed?  It will be
like your noble nature,' she cried.

So it would, he perceived--it would be like his noble nature!  Up jumped
his spirits, triumphant at the thought.  'Go, darling,' he said nobly,
'reassure him.  The subject is buried; more--I make an effort, I have
accustomed my will to these exertions--and it is forgotten.'

A little after, but still with swollen eyes and looking mortally
sheepish, Jean-Marie reappeared and went ostentatiously about his
business.  He was the only unhappy member of the party that sat down that
night to supper.  As for the Doctor, he was radiant.  He thus sang the
requiem of the treasure:--

'This has been, on the whole, a most amusing episode,' he said.  'We are
not a penny the worse--nay, we are immensely gainers.  Our philosophy has
been exercised; some of the turtle is still left--the most wholesome of
delicacies; I have my staff, Anastasie has her new dress, Jean-Marie is
the proud possessor of a fashionable kepi.  Besides, we had a glass of
Hermitage last night; the glow still suffuses my memory.  I was growing
positively niggardly with that Hermitage, positively niggardly.  Let me
take the hint: we had one bottle to celebrate the appearance of our
visionary fortune; let us have a second to console us for its
occultation.  The third I hereby dedicate to Jean-Marie's wedding
breakfast.'



CHAPTER VII.  THE FALL OF THE HOUSE OF DESPREZ.


The Doctor's house has not yet received the compliment of a description,
and it is now high time that the omission were supplied, for the house is
itself an actor in the story, and one whose part is nearly at an end.  Two
stories in height, walls of a warm yellow, tiles of an ancient ruddy
brown diversified with moss and lichen, it stood with one wall to the
street in the angle of the Doctor's property.  It was roomy, draughty,
and inconvenient.  The large rafters were here and there engraven with
rude marks and patterns; the handrail of the stair was carved in
countrified arabesque; a stout timber pillar, which did duty to support
the dining-room roof, bore mysterious characters on its darker side,
runes, according to the Doctor; nor did he fail, when he ran over the
legendary history of the house and its possessors, to dwell upon the
Scandinavian scholar who had left them.  Floors, doors, and rafters made
a great variety of angles; every room had a particular inclination; the
gable had tilted towards the garden, after the manner of a leaning tower,
and one of the former proprietors had buttressed the building from that
side with a great strut of wood, like the derrick of a crane.  Altogether,
it had many marks of ruin; it was a house for the rats to desert; and
nothing but its excellent brightness--the window-glass polished and
shining, the paint well scoured, the brasses radiant, the very prop all
wreathed about with climbing flowers--nothing but its air of a
well-tended, smiling veteran, sitting, crutch and all, in the sunny
corner of a garden, marked it as a house for comfortable people to
inhabit.  In poor or idle management it would soon have hurried into the
blackguard stages of decay.  As it was, the whole family loved it, and
the Doctor was never better inspired than when he narrated its imaginary
story and drew the character of its successive masters, from the Hebrew
merchant who had re-edified its walls after the sack of the town, and
past the mysterious engraver of the runes, down to the long-headed, dirty-
handed boor from whom he had himself acquired it at a ruinous expense.  As
for any alarm about its security, the idea had never presented itself.
What had stood four centuries might well endure a little longer.

Indeed, in this particular winter, after the finding and losing of the
treasure, the Desprez' had an anxiety of a very different order, and one
which lay nearer their hearts.  Jean-Marie was plainly not himself.  He
had fits of hectic activity, when he made unusual exertions to please,
spoke more and faster, and redoubled in attention to his lessons.  But
these were interrupted by spells of melancholia and brooding silence,
when the boy was little better than unbearable.

'Silence,' the Doctor moralised--'you see, Anastasie, what comes of
silence.  Had the boy properly unbosomed himself, the little
disappointment about the treasure, the little annoyance about Casimir's
incivility, would long ago have been forgotten.  As it is, they prey upon
him like a disease.  He loses flesh, his appetite is variable and, on the
whole, impaired.  I keep him on the strictest regimen, I exhibit the most
powerful tonics; both in vain.'

'Don't you think you drug him too much?' asked madame, with an
irrepressible shudder.

'Drug?' cried the Doctor; 'I drug?  Anastasie, you are mad!'

Time went on, and the boy's health still slowly declined.  The Doctor
blamed the weather, which was cold and boisterous.  He called in his
_confrere_ from Bourron, took a fancy for him, magnified his capacity,
and was pretty soon under treatment himself--it scarcely appeared for
what complaint.  He and Jean-Marie had each medicine to take at different
periods of the day.  The Doctor used to lie in wait for the exact moment,
watch in hand.  'There is nothing like regularity,' he would say, fill
out the doses, and dilate on the virtues of the draught; and if the boy
seemed none the better, the Doctor was not at all the worse.

Gunpowder Day, the boy was particularly low.  It was scowling, squally
weather.  Huge broken companies of cloud sailed swiftly overhead; raking
gleams of sunlight swept the village, and were followed by intervals of
darkness and white, flying rain.  At times the wind lifted up its voice
and bellowed.  The trees were all scourging themselves along the meadows,
the last leaves flying like dust.

The Doctor, between the boy and the weather, was in his element; he had a
theory to prove.  He sat with his watch out and a barometer in front of
him, waiting for the squalls and noting their effect upon the human
pulse.  'For the true philosopher,' he remarked delightedly, 'every fact
in nature is a toy.'  A letter came to him; but, as its arrival coincided
with the approach of another gust, he merely crammed it into his pocket,
gave the time to Jean-Marie, and the next moment they were both counting
their pulses as if for a wager.

At nightfall the wind rose into a tempest.  It besieged the hamlet,
apparently from every side, as if with batteries of cannon; the houses
shook and groaned; live coals were blown upon the floor.  The uproar and
terror of the night kept people long awake, sitting with pallid faces
giving ear.

It was twelve before the Desprez family retired.  By half-past one, when
the storm was already somewhat past its height, the Doctor was awakened
from a troubled slumber, and sat up.  A noise still rang in his ears, but
whether of this world or the world of dreams he was not certain.  Another
clap of wind followed.  It was accompanied by a sickening movement of the
whole house, and in the subsequent lull Desprez could hear the tiles
pouring like a cataract into the loft above his head.  He plucked
Anastasie bodily out of bed.

'Run!' he cried, thrusting some wearing apparel into her hands; 'the
house is falling!  To the garden!'

She did not pause to be twice bidden; she was down the stair in an
instant.  She had never before suspected herself of such activity.  The
Doctor meanwhile, with the speed of a piece of pantomime business, and
undeterred by broken shins, proceeded to rout out Jean-Marie, tore Aline
from her virgin slumbers, seized her by the hand, and tumbled downstairs
and into the garden, with the girl tumbling behind him, still not half
awake.

The fugitives rendezvous'd in the arbour by some common instinct.  Then
came a bull's-eye flash of struggling moonshine, which disclosed their
four figures standing huddled from the wind in a raffle of flying
drapery, and not without a considerable need for more.  At the
humiliating spectacle Anastasie clutched her nightdress desperately about
her and burst loudly into tears.  The Doctor flew to console her; but she
elbowed him away.  She suspected everybody of being the general public,
and thought the darkness was alive with eyes.

Another gleam and another violent gust arrived together; the house was
seen to rock on its foundation, and, just as the light was once more
eclipsed, a crash which triumphed over the shouting of the wind announced
its fall, and for a moment the whole garden was alive with skipping tiles
and brickbats.  One such missile grazed the Doctor's ear; another
descended on the bare foot of Aline, who instantly made night hideous
with her shrieks.

By this time the hamlet was alarmed, lights flashed from the windows,
hails reached the party, and the Doctor answered, nobly contending
against Aline and the tempest.  But this prospect of help only awakened
Anastasie to a more active stage of terror.

'Henri, people will be coming,' she screamed in her husband's ear.

'I trust so,' he replied.

'They cannot.  I would rather die,' she wailed.

'My dear,' said the Doctor reprovingly, 'you are excited.  I gave you
some clothes.  What have you done with them?'

'Oh, I don't know--I must have thrown them away!  Where are they?' she
sobbed.

Desprez groped about in the darkness.  'Admirable!' he remarked; 'my grey
velveteen trousers!  This will exactly meet your necessities.'

'Give them to me!' she cried fiercely; but as soon as she had them in her
hands her mood appeared to alter--she stood silent for a moment, and then
pressed the garment back upon the Doctor.  'Give it to Aline,' she
said--'poor girl.'

'Nonsense!' said the Doctor.  'Aline does not know what she is about.
Aline is beside herself with terror; and at any rate, she is a peasant.
Now I am really concerned at this exposure for a person of your
housekeeping habits; my solicitude and your fantastic modesty both point
to the same remedy--the pantaloons.'  He held them ready.

'It is impossible.  You do not understand,' she said with dignity.

By this time rescue was at hand.  It had been found impracticable to
enter by the street, for the gate was blocked with masonry, and the
nodding ruin still threatened further avalanches.  But between the
Doctor's garden and the one on the right hand there was that very
picturesque contrivance--a common well; the door on the Desprez' side had
chanced to be unbolted, and now, through the arched aperture a man's
bearded face and an arm supporting a lantern were introduced into the
world of windy darkness, where Anastasie concealed her woes.  The light
struck here and there among the tossing apple boughs, it glinted on the
grass; but the lantern and the glowing face became the centre of the
world.  Anastasie crouched back from the intrusion.

'This way!' shouted the man.  'Are you all safe?'  Aline, still
screaming, ran to the new comer, and was presently hauled head-foremost
through the wall.

'Now, Anastasie, come on; it is your turn,' said the husband.

'I cannot,' she replied.

'Are we all to die of exposure, madame?' thundered Doctor Desprez.

'You can go!' she cried.  'Oh, go, go away!  I can stay here; I am quite
warm.'

The Doctor took her by the shoulders with an oath.

'Stop!' she screamed.  'I will put them on.'

She took the detested lendings in her hand once more; but her repulsion
was stronger than shame.  'Never!' she cried, shuddering, and flung them
far away into the night.

Next moment the Doctor had whirled her to the well.  The man was there
and the lantern; Anastasie closed her eyes and appeared to herself to be
about to die.  How she was transported through the arch she knew not; but
once on the other side she was received by the neighbour's wife, and
enveloped in a friendly blanket.

Beds were made ready for the two women, clothes of very various sizes for
the Doctor and Jean-Marie; and for the remainder of the night, while
madame dozed in and out on the borderland of hysterics, her husband sat
beside the fire and held forth to the admiring neighbours.  He showed
them, at length, the causes of the accident; for years, he explained, the
fall had been impending; one sign had followed another, the joints had
opened, the plaster had cracked, the old walls bowed inward; last, not
three weeks ago, the cellar door had begun to work with difficulty in its
grooves.  'The cellar!' he said, gravely shaking his head over a glass of
mulled wine.  'That reminds me of my poor vintages.  By a manifest
providence the Hermitage was nearly at an end.  One bottle--I lose but
one bottle of that incomparable wine.  It had been set apart against Jean-
Marie's wedding.  Well, I must lay down some more; it will be an interest
in life.  I am, however, a man somewhat advanced in years.  My great work
is now buried in the fall of my humble roof; it will never be
completed--my name will have been writ in water.  And yet you find me
calm--I would say cheerful.  Can your priest do more?'

By the first glimpse of day the party sallied forth from the fireside
into the street.  The wind had fallen, but still charioted a world of
troubled clouds; the air bit like frost; and the party, as they stood
about the ruins in the rainy twilight of the morning, beat upon their
breasts and blew into their hands for warmth.  The house had entirely
fallen, the walls outward, the roof in; it was a mere heap of rubbish,
with here and there a forlorn spear of broken rafter.  A sentinel was
placed over the ruins to protect the property, and the party adjourned to
Tentaillon's to break their fast at the Doctor's expense.  The bottle
circulated somewhat freely; and before they left the table it had begun
to snow.

For three days the snow continued to fall, and the ruins, covered with
tarpaulin and watched by sentries, were left undisturbed.  The Desprez'
meanwhile had taken up their abode at Tentaillon's.  Madame spent her
time in the kitchen, concocting little delicacies, with the admiring aid
of Madame Tentaillon, or sitting by the fire in thoughtful abstraction.
The fall of the house affected her wonderfully little; that blow had been
parried by another; and in her mind she was continually fighting over
again the battle of the trousers.  Had she done right?  Had she done
wrong?  And now she would applaud her determination; and anon, with a
horrid flush of unavailing penitence, she would regret the trousers.  No
juncture in her life had so much exercised her judgment.  In the meantime
the Doctor had become vastly pleased with his situation.  Two of the
summer boarders still lingered behind the rest, prisoners for lack of a
remittance; they were both English, but one of them spoke French pretty
fluently, and was, besides, a humorous, agile-minded fellow, with whom
the Doctor could reason by the hour, secure of comprehension.  Many were
the glasses they emptied, many the topics they discussed.

'Anastasie,' the Doctor said on the third morning, 'take an example from
your husband, from Jean-Marie!  The excitement has done more for the boy
than all my tonics, he takes his turn as sentry with positive gusto.  As
for me, you behold me.  I have made friends with the Egyptians; and my
Pharaoh is, I swear it, a most agreeable companion.  You alone are
hipped.  About a house--a few dresses?  What are they in comparison to
the "Pharmacopoeia"--the labour of years lying buried below stones and
sticks in this depressing hamlet?  The snow falls; I shake it from my
cloak!  Imitate me.  Our income will be impaired, I grant it, since we
must rebuild; but moderation, patience, and philosophy will gather about
the hearth.  In the meanwhile, the Tentaillons are obliging; the table,
with your additions, will pass; only the wine is execrable--well, I shall
send for some to-day.  My Pharaoh will be gratified to drink a decent
glass; aha! and I shall see if he possesses that acme of organisation--a
palate.  If he has a palate, he is perfect.'

'Henri,' she said, shaking her head, 'you are a man; you cannot
understand my feelings; no woman could shake off the memory of so public
a humiliation.'  The Doctor could not restrain a titter.  'Pardon me,
darling,' he said; 'but really, to the philosophical intelligence, the
incident appears so small a trifle.  You looked extremely well--'

'Henri!' she cried.

'Well, well, I will say no more,' he replied.  'Though, to be sure, if
you had consented to indue--_A propos_,' he broke off, 'and my trousers!
They are lying in the snow--my favourite trousers!'  And he dashed in
quest of Jean-Marie.

Two hours afterwards the boy returned to the inn with a spade under one
arm and a curious sop of clothing under the other.

The Doctor ruefully took it in his hands.  'They have been!' he said.
'Their tense is past.  Excellent pantaloons, you are no more!  Stay,
something in the pocket,' and he produced a piece of paper.  'A letter!
ay, now I mind me; it was received on the morning of the gale, when I was
absorbed in delicate investigations.  It is still legible.  From poor,
dear Casimir!  It is as well,' he chuckled, 'that I have educated him to
patience.  Poor Casimir and his correspondence--his infinitesimal,
timorous, idiotic correspondence!'

He had by this time cautiously unfolded the wet letter; but, as he bent
himself to decipher the writing, a cloud descended on his brow.

'_Bigre_!' he cried, with a galvanic start.

And then the letter was whipped into the fire, and the Doctor's cap was
on his head in the turn of a hand.

'Ten minutes!  I can catch it, if I run,' he cried.  'It is always late.
I go to Paris.  I shall telegraph.'

'Henri! what is wrong?' cried his wife.

'Ottoman Bonds!' came from the disappearing Doctor; and Anastasie and
Jean-Marie were left face to face with the wet trousers.  Desprez had
gone to Paris, for the second time in seven years; he had gone to Paris
with a pair of wooden shoes, a knitted spencer, a black blouse, a country
nightcap, and twenty francs in his pocket.  The fall of the house was but
a secondary marvel; the whole world might have fallen and scarce left his
family more petrified.



CHAPTER VIII. THE WAGES OF PHILOSOPHY.


On the morning of the next day, the Doctor, a mere spectre of himself,
was brought back in the custody of Casimir.  They found Anastasie and the
boy sitting together by the fire; and Desprez, who had exchanged his
toilette for a ready-made rig-out of poor materials, waved his hand as he
entered, and sank speechless on the nearest chair.  Madame turned direct
to Casimir.

'What is wrong?' she cried.

'Well,' replied Casimir, 'what have I told you all along?  It has come.
It is a clean shave, this time; so you may as well bear up and make the
best of it.  House down, too, eh?  Bad luck, upon my soul.'

'Are we--are we--ruined?' she gasped.

The Doctor stretched out his arms to her.  'Ruined,' he replied, 'you are
ruined by your sinister husband.'

Casimir observed the consequent embrace through his eyeglass; then he
turned to Jean-Marie.  'You hear?' he said.  'They are ruined; no more
pickings, no more house, no more fat cutlets.  It strikes me, my friend,
that you had best be packing; the present speculation is about worked
out.'  And he nodded to him meaningly.

'Never!' cried Desprez, springing up.  'Jean-Marie, if you prefer to
leave me, now that I am poor, you can go; you shall receive your hundred
francs, if so much remains to me.  But if you will consent to stay'--the
Doctor wept a little--'Casimir offers me a place--as clerk,' he resumed.
'The emoluments are slender, but they will be enough for three.  It is
too much already to have lost my fortune; must I lose my son?'

Jean-Marie sobbed bitterly, but without a word.

'I don't like boys who cry,' observed Casimir.  'This one is always
crying.  Here! you clear out of this for a little; I have business with
your master and mistress, and these domestic feelings may be settled
after I am gone.  March!' and he held the door open.

Jean-Marie slunk out, like a detected thief.

By twelve they were all at table but Jean-Marie.

'Hey?' said Casimir.  'Gone, you see.  Took the hint at once.'

'I do not, I confess,' said Desprez, 'I do not seek to excuse his
absence.  It speaks a want of heart that disappoints me sorely.'

'Want of manners,' corrected Casimir.  'Heart, he never had.  Why,
Desprez, for a clever fellow, you are the most gullible mortal in
creation.  Your ignorance of human nature and human business is beyond
belief.  You are swindled by heathen Turks, swindled by vagabond
children, swindled right and left, upstairs and downstairs.  I think it
must be your imagination.  I thank my stars I have none.'

'Pardon me,' replied Desprez, still humbly, but with a return of spirit
at sight of a distinction to be drawn; 'pardon me, Casimir.  You possess,
even to an eminent degree, the commercial imagination.  It was the lack
of that in me--it appears it is my weak point--that has led to these
repeated shocks.  By the commercial imagination the financier forecasts
the destiny of his investments, marks the falling house--'

'Egad,' interrupted Casimir: 'our friend the stable-boy appears to have
his share of it.'

The Doctor was silenced; and the meal was continued and finished
principally to the tune of the brother-in-law's not very consolatory
conversation.  He entirely ignored the two young English painters,
turning a blind eyeglass to their salutations, and continuing his remarks
as if he were alone in the bosom of his family; and with every second
word he ripped another stitch out of the air balloon of Desprez's vanity.
By the time coffee was over the poor Doctor was as limp as a napkin.

'Let us go and see the ruins,' said Casimir.

They strolled forth into the street.  The fall of the house, like the
loss of a front tooth, had quite transformed the village.  Through the
gap the eye commanded a great stretch of open snowy country, and the
place shrank in comparison.  It was like a room with an open door.  The
sentinel stood by the green gate, looking very red and cold, but he had a
pleasant word for the Doctor and his wealthy kinsman.

Casimir looked at the mound of ruins, he tried the quality of the
tarpaulin.  'H'm,' he said, 'I hope the cellar arch has stood.  If it
has, my good brother, I will give you a good price for the wines.'

'We shall start digging to-morrow,' said the sentry.  'There is no more
fear of snow.'

'My friend,' returned Casimir sententiously, 'you had better wait till
you get paid.'

The Doctor winced, and began dragging his offensive brother-in-law
towards Tentaillon's.  In the house there would be fewer auditors, and
these already in the secret of his fall.

'Hullo!' cried Casimir, 'there goes the stable-boy with his luggage; no,
egad, he is taking it into the inn.'

And sure enough, Jean-Marie was seen to cross the snowy street and enter
Tentaillon's, staggering under a large hamper.

The Doctor stopped with a sudden, wild hope.

'What can he have?' he said.  'Let us go and see.'  And he hurried on.

'His luggage, to be sure,' answered Casimir.  'He is on the move--thanks
to the commercial imagination.'

'I have not seen that hamper for--for ever so long,' remarked the Doctor.

'Nor will you see it much longer,' chuckled Casimir; 'unless, indeed, we
interfere.  And by the way, I insist on an examination.'

'You will not require,' said Desprez, positively with a sob; and, casting
a moist, triumphant glance at Casimir, he began to run.

'What the devil is up with him, I wonder?' Casimir reflected; and then,
curiosity taking the upper hand, he followed the Doctor's example and
took to his heels.

The hamper was so heavy and large, and Jean-Marie himself so little and
so weary, that it had taken him a great while to bundle it upstairs to
the Desprez' private room; and he had just set it down on the floor in
front of Anastasie, when the Doctor arrived, and was closely followed by
the man of business.  Boy and hamper were both in a most sorry plight;
for the one had passed four months underground in a certain cave on the
way to Acheres, and the other had run about five miles as hard as his
legs would carry him, half that distance under a staggering weight.

'Jean-Marie,' cried the Doctor, in a voice that was only too seraphic to
be called hysterical, 'is it--?  It is!' he cried.  'O, my son, my son!'
And he sat down upon the hamper and sobbed like a little child.

'You will not go to Paris now,' said Jean-Marie sheepishly.

'Casimir,' said Desprez, raising his wet face, 'do you see that boy, that
angel boy?  He is the thief; he took the treasure from a man unfit to be
entrusted with its use; he brings it back to me when I am sobered and
humbled.  These, Casimir, are the Fruits of my Teaching, and this moment
is the Reward of my Life.'

'_Tiens_,' said Casimir.

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Footnotes


{5}  Boggy.

{15}  Clock

{16}  Enjoy.

{140}  To come forrit--to offer oneself as a communicant.

{144}  It was a common belief in Scotland that the devil appeared as a
black man.  This appears in several witch trials and I think in Law's
_Memorials_, that delightful store-house of the quaint and grisly.

{263}  Let it be so, for my tale!