Part 43

“Have you nothing on your conscience but the fact that you were concerned for both parties?” asked she, looking steadily at Fraisier.

“Mme. la Presidente can see M. Leboeuf; M. Leboeuf was favorable to me.”

“Do you feel sure that M. Leboeuf will give M. de Marville and M. le Comte Popinot a good account of you?”

“I will answer for it, especially now that M. Olivier Vinet has left Mantes; for between ourselves, good M. Leboeuf was afraid of that crabbed little official. If you will permit me, Madame La Presidente, I will go to Mantes and see M. Leboeuf. No time will be lost, for I cannot be certain of the precise value of the property for two or three days. I do not wish that you should know all the ins and outs of this affair; you ought not to know them, Mme. la Presidente, but is not the reward that I expect for my complete devotion a pledge of my success?”

“Very well. If M. Leboeuf will speak in your favor, and if the property is worth as much as you think (I doubt it myself), you shall have both appointments, if you succeed, mind you--”

“I will answer for it, madame. Only, you must be so good as to have your notary and your attorney here when I shall need them; you must give me a power of attorney to act for M. le President, and tell those gentlemen to follow my instructions, and to do nothing on their own responsibility.”

“The responsibility rests with you,” the Presidente answered solemnly, “so you ought to have full powers.--But is M. Pons very ill?” she asked, smiling.

“Upon my word, madame, he might pull through, especially with so conscientious a doctor as Poulain in attendance; for this friend of mine, madame, is simply an unconscious spy directed by me in your interests. Left to himself, he would save the old man’s life; but there is some one else by the sickbed, a portress, who would push him into the grave for thirty thousand francs. Not that she would kill him outright; she will not give him arsenic, she is not so merciful; she will do worse, she will kill him by inches; she will worry him to death day by day. If the poor old man were kept quiet and left in peace; if he were taken into the country and cared for and made much of by friends, he would get well again; but he is harassed by a sort of Mme. Evrard. When the woman was young she was one of thirty Belles Ecailleres, famous in Paris, she is a rough, greedy, gossiping woman; she torments him to make a will and to leave her something handsome, and the end of it will be induration of the liver, calculi are possibly forming at this moment, and he has not enough strength to bear an operation. The doctor, noble soul, is in a horrible predicament. He really ought to send the woman away--”

“Why, then, this vixen is a monster!” cried the lady in thin flute-like tones.

Fraisier smiled inwardly at the likeness between himself and the terrible Presidente; he knew all about those suave modulations of a naturally sharp voice. He thought of another president, the hero of an anecdote related by Louis XI., stamped by that monarch’s final praise. Blessed with a wife after the pattern of Socrates’ spouse, and ungifted with the sage’s philosophy, he mingled salt with the corn in the mangers and forbad the grooms to give water to the horses. As his wife rode along the Seine towards their country-house, the animals bolted into the river with the lady, and the magistrate returned thanks to Providence for ridding him of his wife “in so natural a manner.” At this present moment Mme. de Marville thanked Heaven for placing at Pons’ bedside a woman so likely to get him “decently” out of the way.

Aloud she said, “I would not take a million at the price of a single scruple.--Your friend ought to speak to M. Pons and have the woman sent away.”

“In the first place, madame, Messrs. Schmucke and Pons think the woman an angel; they would send my friend away. And secondly, the doctor lies under an obligation to this horrid oyster-woman; she called him in to attend M. Pillerault. When he tells her to be as gentle as possible with the patient, he simply shows the creature how to make matters worse.”

“What does your friend think of my cousin’s condition?”

This man’s clear, business-like way of putting the facts of the case frightened Mme. de Marville; she felt that his keen gaze read the thoughts of a heart as greedy as La Cibot’s own.

“In six weeks the property will change hands.”

The Presidente dropped her eyes.

“Poor man!” she sighed, vainly striving after a dolorous expression.

“Have you any message, madame, for M. Leboeuf? I am taking the train to Mantes.”

“Yes. Wait a moment, and I will write to ask him to dine with us to-morrow. I want to see him, so that he may act in concert to repair the injustice to which you have fallen a victim.”

The Presidente left the room. Fraisier saw himself a justice of the peace. He felt transformed at the thought; he grew stouter; his lungs were filled with the breath of success, the breeze of prosperity. He dipped into the mysterious reservoirs of volition for fresh and strong doses of the divine essence. To reach success, he felt, as Remonencq half felt, that he was ready for anything, for crime itself, provided that no proofs of it remained. He had faced the Presidente boldly; he had transmuted conjecture into reality; he had made assertions right and left, all to the end that she might authorize him to protect her interests and win her influence. As he stood there, he represented the infinite misery of two lives, and the no less boundless desires of two men. He spurned the squalid horrors of the Rue de la Perle. He saw the glitter of a thousand crowns in fees from La Cibot, and five thousand francs from the Presidente. This meant an abode such as befitted his future prospects. Finally, he was repaying Dr. Poulain.

There are hard, ill-natured beings, goaded by distress or disease into active malignity, that yet entertain diametrically opposed sentiments with a like degree of vehemence. If Richelieu was a good hater, he was no less a good friend. Fraisier, in his gratitude, would have let himself be cut in two for Poulain.

So absorbed was he in these visions of a comfortable and prosperous life, that he did not see the Presidente come in with the letter in her hand, and she, looking at him, thought him less ugly now than at first. He was about to be useful to her, and as soon as a tool belongs to us we look upon it with other eyes.

“M. Fraisier,” said she, “you have convinced me of your intelligence, and I think that you can speak frankly.”

Fraisier replied by an eloquent gesture.

“Very well,” continued the lady, “I must ask you to give a candid reply to this question: Are we, either of us, M. de Marville or I, likely to be compromised, directly or indirectly, by your action in this matter?”

“I would not have come to you, madame, if I thought that some day I should have to reproach myself for bringing so much as a splash of mud upon you, for in your position a speck the size of a pin’s head is seen by all the world. You forget, madame, that I must satisfy you if I am to be a justice of the peace in Paris. I have received one lesson at the outset of my life; it was so sharp that I do not care to lay myself open to a second thrashing. To sum it up in a last word, madame, I will not take a step in which you are indirectly involved without previously consulting you--”

“Very good. Here is the letter. And now I shall expect to be informed of the exact value of the estate.”

“There is the whole matter,” said Fraisier shrewdly, making his bow to the Presidente with as much graciousness as his countenance could exhibit.