PAGE 7
Captain Burle
by
“Silence!” resumed the major. “You have bamboozled a friend. You palmed off on me a lot of forged receipts which might have sent both of us to the gallows. Do you call that proper behavior? Is that the sort of trick to play a friend of thirty years’ standing?”
Burle, who had fallen back in his chair, was livid; his limbs shook as if with ague. Meanwhile the major, striding up and down and striking the tables wildly with his fists, continued: “So you have become a thief like the veriest scribbling cur of a clerk, and all for the sake of that creature here! If at least you had stolen for your mother’s sake it would have been honorable! But, curse it, to play tricks and bring the money into this shanty is what I cannot understand! Tell me–what are you made of at your age to go to the dogs as you are going all for the sake of a creature like a grenadier!”
“YOU gamble–” stammered the captain.
“Yes, I do–curse it!” thundered the major, lashed into still greater fury by this remark. “And I am a pitiful rogue to do so, because it swallows up all my pay and doesn’t redound to the honor of the French army. However, I don’t steal. Kill yourself, if it pleases you; starve your mother and the boy, but respect the regimental cashbox and don’t drag your friends down with you.”
He stopped. Burle was sitting there with fixed eyes and a stupid air. Nothing was heard for a moment save the clatter of the major’s heels.
“And not a single copper,” he continued aggressively. “Can you picture yourself between two gendarmes, eh?”
He then grew a little calmer, caught hold of Burle’s wrists and forced him to rise.
“Come!” he said gruffly. “Something must be done at once, for I cannot go to bed with this affair on my mind–I have an idea.”
In the front room Melanie and Phrosine were talking eagerly in low voices. When the widow saw the two men leaving the divan she moved toward Burle and said coaxingly: “What, are you going already, Captain?”
“Yes, he’s going,” brutally answered Laguitte, “and I don’t intend to let him set foot here again.”
The little maid felt frightened and pulled her mistress back by the skirt of her dress; in doing so she imprudently murmured the word “drunkard” and thereby brought down the slap which the major’s hand had been itching to deal for some time past. Both women having stooped, however, the blow only fell on Phrosine’s back hair, flattening her cap and breaking her comb. The domino players were indignant.
“Let’s cut it,” shouted Laguitte, and he pushed Burle on the pavement. “If I remained I should smash everyone in the place.”
To cross the square they had to wade up to their ankles in mud. The rain, driven by the wind, poured off their faces. The captain walked on in silence, while the major kept on reproaching him with his cowardice and its disastrous consequences. Wasn’t it sweet weather for tramping the streets? If he hadn’t been such an idiot they would both be warmly tucked in bed instead of paddling about in the mud. Then he spoke of Gagneux–a scoundrel whose diseased meat had on three separate occasions made the whole regiment ill. In a week, however, the contract would come to an end, and the fiend himself would not get it renewed.
“It rests with me,” the major grumbled. “I can select whomsoever I choose, and I’d rather cut off my right arm than put that poisoner in the way of earning another copper.”
Just then he slipped into a gutter and, half choked by a string of oaths, he gasped:
“You understand–I am going to rout up Gagneux. You must stop outside while I go in. I must know what the rascal is up to and if he’ll dare to carry out his threat of informing the colonel tomorrow. A butcher–curse him! The idea of compromising oneself with a butcher! Ah, you aren’t over-proud, and I shall never forgive you for all this.”