"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 Célestine, it is true; I had left my fortune to the French
Academy. Ah! that's an idea!"