“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 helped to wait on them, and the fun rose with the number of glasses 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 glass 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 glass 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 jeweller’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 glass 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-humour 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 glass, 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 harassed 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 glass, which was empty; then he filled up all the other glasses, 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 a centre, 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 rose to propose a toast. Having bowed to the company, he began:
“Most gracious ladies and gentlemen, we have met to do honour to a happy event which has befallen one of our friends.