PAGE 10
Captain Burle
by
Rose, whose heavy tread shook the floor as she paced round the table, had not yet opened her mouth. At last she stopped behind the captain’s chair and asked in a gruff voice: “Cheese, sir?”
Burle started. “What, eh? Oh yes–cheese. Hold the plate tight.”
He cut a piece of Gruyere, the girl watching him the while with her narrow eyes. Laguitte laughed; Rose’s unparalleled ugliness amused him immensely. He whispered in the captain’s ear, “She is ripping! There never was such a nose and such a mouth! You ought to send her to the colonel’s someday as a curiosity. It would amuse him to see her.”
More and more struck by this phenomenal ugliness, the major felt a paternal desire to examine the girl more closely.
“Come here,” he said, “I want some cheese too.”
She brought the plate, and Laguitte, sticking the knife in the Gruyere, stared at her, grinning the while because he discovered that she had one nostril broader than the other. Rose gravely allowed herself to be looked at, waiting till the gentleman had done laughing.
She removed the cloth and disappeared. Burle immediately went to sleep in the chimney corner while the major and Mme Burle began to chat. Charles had returned to his exercises. Quietude fell from the loft ceiling; the quietude of a middle-class household gathered in concord around their fireside. At nine o’clock Burle woke up, yawned and announced that he was going off to bed; he apologized but declared that he could not keep his eyes open. Half an hour later, when the major took his leave, Mme Burle vainly called for Rose to light him downstairs; the girl must have gone up to her room; she was, indeed, a regular hen, snoring the round of the clock without waking.
“No need to disturb anybody,” said Laguitte on the landing; “my legs are not much better than yours, but if I get hold of the banisters I shan’t break any bones. Now, my dear lady, I leave you happy; your troubles are ended at last. I watched Burle closely, and I’ll take my oath that he’s guileless as a child. Dash it–after all, it was high time for Petticoat Burle to reform; he was going downhill fast.”
The major went away fully satisfied with the house and its inmates; the walls were of glass and could harbor no equivocal conduct. What particularly delighted him in his friend’s return to virtue was that it absolved him from the obligation of verifying the accounts. Nothing was more distasteful to him than the inspection of a number of ledgers, and as long as Burle kept steady, he–Laguitte–could smoke his pipe in peace and sign the books in all confidence. However, he continued to keep one eye open for a little while longer and found the receipts genuine, the entries correct, the columns admirably balanced. A month later he contented himself with glancing at the receipts and running his eye over the totals. Then one morning, without the slightest suspicion of there being anything wrong, simply because he had lit a second pipe and had nothing to do, he carelessly added up a row of figures and fancied that he detected an error of thirteen francs. The balance seemed perfectly correct, and yet he was not mistaken; the total outlay was thirteen francs more than the various sums for which receipts were furnished. It looked queer, but he said nothing to Burle, just making up his mind to examine the next accounts closely. On the following week he detected a fresh error of nineteen francs, and then, suddenly becoming alarmed, he shut himself up with the books and spent a wretched morning poring over them, perspiring, swearing and feeling as if his very skull were bursting with the figures. At every page he discovered thefts of a few francs–the most miserable petty thefts–ten, eight, eleven francs, latterly, three and four; and, indeed, there was one column showing that Burle had pilfered just one franc and a half. For two months, however, he had been steadily robbing the cashbox, and by comparing dates the major found to his disgust that the famous lesson respecting Gagneux had only kept him straight for one week! This last discovery infuriated Laguitte, who struck the books with his clenched fists, yelling through a shower of oaths: