He stopped abruptly, and passing from his mad rage to the chilly manner which was habitual to him:--
"Go up to your room," he said; "I will consider what remains to be done."
"What remains to be done, my dear D'Argenton, I will soon tell you."
But Jack did not hear the end of Monsieur Rivals's phrase, D'Argenton with a shove having thrust him out.
The noise of the discussion reached him in his room, like the various parts in a great orchestra. He distinguished and recognized all the voices, but they melted one into the other, united by their resonance, and made a discordant uproar through which some bits of phrases were alone intelligible.
At last old Rivals's voice could be heard thundering as he crossed the threshold:--
"May I be hanged if ever I put my foot in your house again!"
Then the door was violently slammed, and a great silence fell on the dining-room, broken only by the clatter of knives and forks.
"You wish to degrade him, to make him something lower than yourself." The child remembered that phrase, and he felt that this was indeed his enemy's intention.
Well, no; a thousand times no--he would not be a workman.
She had cried a great deal, had shed real tears, tears such as furrow the cheek. For the first time, a mother showed herself in that pretty woman's face, an afflicted and sorrowing mother.
"Listen to me, Jack," she said, striving to appear severe; "I must speak very seriously to you. You have made me very unhappy by putting yourself in open rebellion against your real friends, and by refusing to accept the situation they offer you. I am well aware that there is in the new existence--"
While she spoke, she carefully avoided meeting the child's eyes, for they had such an expression of desperate grief and heartfelt reproach that she would not have been able to resist their appeal.
"--That there is, in the new existence we have chosen for you, an apparent inconsistency with the life you have hitherto been leading. I confess that I was myself at first rather startled by it, but you heard, did you not, what was said to you? The position of a workman is no longer what it used to be; oh no! not at all the same thing, not at all. You must know that the time of the working-man has now come. The middle classes have had their day, the aristocracy likewise. Although, I must say, the aristocracy--Moreover, is it not more natural at your age, to allow yourself to be guided by those who love you, and who are experienced?"