He asked nothing
better for his future prosperity than to take up his abode at the
Rouget's, recognizing perfectly the feeble nature of the old bachelor.
Flore's passion necessarily affected the life and household affairs of
her master. For a month the old man, now grown excessively timid, saw
the laughing and kindly face of his mistress change to something
terrible and gloomy and sullen. He was made to endure flashes of angry
temper purposely displayed, precisely like a married man whose wife is
meditating an infidelity. When, after some cruel rebuff, he nerved
himself to ask Flore the reason of the change, her eyes were so full
of hatred, and her voice so aggressive and contemptuous, that the poor
creature quailed under them.
"Good heavens!" she cried; "you have neither heart nor soul! Here's
sixteen years that I have spent my youth in this house, and I have
only just found out that you have got a stone there (striking her
breast). For two months you have seen before your eyes that brave
captain, a victim of the Bourbons, who was cut out for a general, and
is down in the depths of poverty, hunted into a hole of a place where
there's no way to make a penny of money! He's forced to sit on a stool
all day in the mayor's office to earn--what? Six hundred miserable
francs,--a fine thing, indeed! And here are you, with six hundred and
fifty-nine thousand well invested, and sixty thousand francs' income,
--thanks to me, who never spend more than three thousand a year,
everything included, even my own clothes, yes, everything!--and you
never think of offering him a home here, though there's the second
floor empty! You'd rather the rats and mice ran riot in it than put a
human being there,--and he a lad your father always allowed to be his
own son! Do you want to know what you are? I'll tell you,--a
fratricide! And I know why, too.
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