The Colonel, hearing him, now came out of the little low room, close to the dairy, and stood on the threshold of his doorway with indescribable military coolness. He had in his mouth a very finely-colored pipe--a technical phrase to a smoker--a humble, short clay pipe of the kind called "/brule-queule/." He lifted the peak of a dreadfully greasy cloth cap, saw Derville, and came straight across the midden to join his benefactor the sooner, calling out in friendly tones to the boys:
"Silence in the ranks!"
The children at once kept a respectful silence, which showed the power the old soldier had over them.
"Why did you not write to me?" he said to Derville. "Go along by the cowhouse! There--the path is paved there," he exclaimed, seeing the lawyer's hesitancy, for he did not wish to wet his feet in the manure heap.
Jumping from one dry spot to another, Derville reached the door by which the Colonel had come out. Chabert seemed but ill pleased at having to receive him in the bed-room he occupied; and, in fact, Derville found but one chair there. The Colonel's bed consisted of some trusses of straw, over which his hostess had spread two or three of those old fragments of carpet, picked up heaven knows where, which milk-women use to cover the seats of their carts. The floor was simply the trodden earth. The walls, sweating salt-petre, green with mould, and full of cracks, were so excessively damp that on the side where the Colonel's bed was a reed mat had been nailed. The famous box-coat hung on a nail. Two pairs of old boots lay in a corner. There was not a sign of linen. On the worm-eaten table the /Bulletins de la Grande Armee/, reprinted by Plancher, lay open, and seemed to be the Colonel's reading; his countenance was calm and serene in the midst of this squalor. His visit to Derville seemed to have altered his features; the lawyer perceived in them traces of a happy feeling, a particular gleam set there by hope.
"Does the smell of the pipe annoy you?" he said, placing the dilapidated straw-bottomed chair for his lawyer.
"But, Colonel, you are dreadfully uncomfortable here!"
The speech was wrung from Derville by the distrust natural to lawyers, and the deplorable experience which they derive early in life from the appalling and obscure tragedies at which they look on.
"Here," said he to himself, "is a man who has of course spent my money in satisfying a trooper's three theological virtues--play, wine, and women!"
"To be sure, monsieur, we are not distinguished for luxury here. It is a camp lodging, tempered by friendship, but----" And the soldier shot a deep glance at the man of law--"I have done no one wrong, I have never turned my back on anybody, and I sleep in peace."
Derville reflected that there would be some want of delicacy in asking his client to account for the sums of money he had advanced, so he merely said:
"But why would you not come to Paris, where you might have lived as cheaply as you do here, but where you would have been better lodged?"
"Why," replied the Colonel, "the good folks with whom I am living had taken me in and fed me /gratis/ for a year. How could I leave them just when I had a little money? Besides, the father of those three pickles is an old /Egyptian/--"
"An Egyptian!"
"We give that name to the troopers who came back from the expedition into Egypt, of which I was one. Not merely are all who get back brothers; Vergniaud was in my regiment. We have shared a draught of water in the desert; and besides, I have not yet finished teaching his brats to read."
"He might have lodged you better for your money," said Derville.
"Bah!" said the Colonel, "his children sleep on the straw as I do. He and his wife have no better bed; they are very poor you see. They have taken a bigger business than they can manage. But if I recover my fortune . . . However, it does very well."
"Colonel, to-morrow or the next day, I shall receive your papers from Heilsberg. The woman who dug you out is still alive!"
"Curse the money! To think I haven't got any!" he cried, flinging his pipe on the ground.
Now, a well-colored pipe is to a smoker a precious possession; but the impulse was so natural, the emotion so generous, that every smoker, and the excise office itself, would have pardoned this crime of treason to tobacco. Perhaps the angels may have picked up the pieces.
"Colonel, it is an exceedingly complicated business," said Derville as they left the room to walk up and down in the sunshine.
"To me," said the soldier, "it appears exceedingly simple. I was thought to be dead, and here I am! Give me back my wife and my fortune; give me the rank of General, to which I have a right, for I was made Colonel of the Imperial Guard the day before the battle of Eylau."
"Things are not done so in the legal world," said Derville. "Listen to me. You are Colonel Chabert, I am glad to think it; but it has to be proved judicially to persons whose interest it will be to deny it.
Hence, your papers will be disputed. That contention will give rise to ten or twelve preliminary inquiries. Every question will be sent under contradiction up to the supreme court, and give rise to so many costly suits, which will hang on for a long time, however eagerly I may push them. Your opponents will demand an inquiry, which we cannot refuse, and which may necessitate the sending of a commission of investigation to Prussia. But even if we hope for the best; supposing that justice should at once recognize you as Colonel Chabert--can we know how the questions will be settled that will arise out of the very innocent bigamy committed by the Comtesse Ferraud?
