"Yes, yes," he says, tamely.
His face is devoid of expression.
His movements are uncertain. He adds, jabbing his fork into a soft spot in the ground near the hedge:
"Especially as I cannot get along without anybody."
I insist upon Rose's domestic virtues.
"You will not easily replace her, Captain."
Decidedly, he is not touched at all.
One would say even, from looking at his eyes that have suddenly become brighter and from watching his movements, now more alert, that he has been relieved from a great weight.
"Bah!" says he, after a short silence, "everything can be replaced."
This resignation astonishes me, and even scandalizes me a little.
To amuse myself, I try to make him understand all he has lost in losing Rose.
"She knew so well your habits, your tastes, your manias! She was so devoted to you!"
"Well, if she had not been, that would have been the last straw," he growled.
And, making a gesture by which he seems to put aside all sorts of objections, he goes on:
"Besides, was she so devoted to me?
Oh! I may as well tell you the truth. I had had enough of Rose. Yes, indeed!
After we took a little boy to help us, she attended to nothing in the house, and everything went badly, very badly. I could not even have an egg boiled to my taste. And the scenes that went on, from morning to night, apropos of nothing.
If I spent ten sous, there were cries and reproaches. And, when I talked with you, as I am doing now,—well, there was a row, indeed; for she was jealous, jealous.
Oh! no. She went for you; you should have heard her. In short, I was no longer at home in my own house."
He breathes deeply, noisily, and, with the new and deep joy that a traveler feels on returning from a long journey, he contemplates the sky, the bare grass-plots in the garden, the violet interlacings of the branches of the trees against the light, and his little house.
This joy, so offensive to Rose's memory, now seems to me very comical.
I stimulate the captain to further confidences. And I say to him, in a tone of reproach:
"Captain, I think you are not just to Rose."
"Egad!" he rejoins, quickly.
"You do not know; you don't know anything about it. She did not go to tell you of all the scenes that she made, her tyranny, her jealousy, her egoism. Nothing belonged to me here any longer. Everything in my house was hers.
For instance, you would not believe it, my Voltaire arm-chair was never at my disposition. She had it all the time. She had everything, for that matter. To think that I could no longer eat asparagus with oil, because she did not like it!
Oh! she did well to die. It was the best thing that could happen to her, for, in some way or other, I should have gotten rid of her. Yes, yes, I should have gotten rid of her. She was becoming too much for me.
I had had enough. And let me tell you; if I had died before her, Rose would have been prettily trapped. I had a bitter pill in store for her. My word for it!"
His lip curls in a smile that ends in an atrocious grimace.
He continues, chopping each of his words with moist little puffs of laughter:
"You know that I made a will, in which I gave her everything,—house, money, dividends, everything.
She must have told you; she told everybody.
Yes, but what she did not tell you, because she did not know it, is that, two months later, I made a second will, cancelling the first, in which I did not leave her anything,—not a sou."
Unable to contain himself longer, he bursts out laughing, a strident laugh that scatters through the garden like a flight of scolding sparrows.
And he cries: "Ah! that's an idea, hey?
Oh! her head,—you can see it from here,—on learning that I had left my little fortune to the French Academy. For, my little Celestine, it is true; I had left my fortune to the French Academy. Ah! that's an idea!"
I allow his laughter to become quieter, and then I gravely ask him:
"And now, Captain, what are you going to do?"
The captain gives me a long, sly, amorous look, and says:
"Well, that depends on you."
"On me?"
"Yes, on you; on you alone."
"And how is that?"
A moment of silence follows, during which, straightening up and twisting his pointed beard, he seeks to envelop me in a seductive fluid.
"Come," he says, suddenly, "let us go straight to the point. Let us speak squarely,—soldier-fashion. Do you wish to take Rose's place?"
I was expecting the attack.
I had seen it coming from the depth of his eyes. It does not surprise me. I receive it with a serious and unmoved expression.
"And the wills, Captain?"
"Oh! I tear them up."
I object: