All at once he struck the bell and shouted joyfully:
At the end of a brief moment a portly, florid Frenchman slipped through the door and glided to attention, waiting blandly the moment it pleased his employer to speak. Fargus, enjoying the surprise his announcement would bring, feasted his eyes interminably on the victim a flash of genius had suggested to him. The head waiter, who by a miracle had for three years avoided the suspicions of his master, without troubling himself at this savage inspection, shifted his balance, coughed faintly, and fell to studying the clouded tops of his employer's shoes.
"Bastien," Fargus began softly, "do you know why I want you?"
"Why, no, sir," Bastien said, beginning to show some perplexity.
"I sent for you," Fargus said, hanging on each word, "to tell you, Bastien, that I don't need your services any more."
"Me?" exclaimed the head waiter, who could not have been more astonished had a bomb exploded under his legs.
"What for, sir?" he cried all in a gulp. "Haven't I served you three years without your finding a word of fault?"
"Exactly!" said Fargus, whose black eyes under the frowning eyebrows, like threatening muzzles, had been holding in their pent-up rage. "Exactly. For all that time I have never found fault--found--Bastien. There's the trouble. There's where you started my suspicions. You're clever, my man, but there you overreached yourself."
Before the impossibility of such a charge, Bastien for the first time in his life lost his self-possession and remained, desperately fastening his hope on the chances of a joke. Fargus, shaking with malicious, dumb laughter ran on:
"Too sharp, my man, too clever: You forget I know the business from A to Z. If you'd stolen a little I should have said nothing. Don't tell me you don't steal. You steal--all steal--and if I haven't caught you it's because you stole too well, or, OR," he cried, raising his finger theatrically, to confound him with the shrewdness of his guess, "OR, because you thought you'd wait until you were put where you could touch the keys of the safe! Aha, have I hit it--you scoundrel!"
"Before God, Mr. Fargus--" the frightened waiter started to protest, but Fargus, with a contemptuous laugh, waved him off, crying: