All Bedlam Courses Past (part fifty-seven)

All Bedlam Courses Past

Chapter Three

An Object in Motion

(part fifty-seven) 

“You are not much changed, Honoré.”

“No, madame.”

And if the most truthful person he knew saw no improvement, could not invest a syllable of surprise towards the bolstering of an invalid nephew’s spirits, still…if he had seemed nearer the grave, Mme Sartain would say instead, “Why don’t you exercise?” Or, “Does M. Ebrach give you tonics, at all?”

She had been wont to produce them from her reticule.

“How does he get along?” She spoke to Clotilde.

“Will you like to call me Papa?” Honoré said, low-voiced, to Bertrand.

Bertrand’s shy, “Yes”, found his wife’s ear, and she faltered, in recounting their midday meals, Honoré’s nap, their three o’clock strolls in Ebrach’s garden. Her hand made blind stabs at the handkerchief her aunt’s made to press into it.

Honoré coughed, and this put a stop to it all.

He ought to have been lying down anyway at that time of day.

Under the bed shawl, he conveyed a shrug. “Amédée never saw fit to hire me. He has hired you. You are the better writer. You tiptoe, Gilbert, as though…well, what? Do I have reason to be sorry, is my work somehow…”

“No! No, Honoré…”

Gilbert shrank in his chair, fingering a patch of scalp. “I do have a thing to tell you. And then, I haven’t made up my mind, your cousin advised me… I don’t think, really, that I can tell this to Clotilde. I had forgotten Clotilde. Would I call on Ebrach, send my card to him in…”

He mumbled, now, whatpartofthehousehelives…

Wanting to laugh, still cross, Honoré said: “Gilbert! If there is anything Ebrach has not got out of you…very much assuredly, do not call on him. My cousin has given you bad advice. She’s a girl, why would you listen?”

“And Madame would like me to tell you…the other thing. She expects it.” Gilbert glanced at the closed door. “I can’t sort them.”

“Amédée must be a fool. This is how you report your news. There are two articles of business, and I am not to like either? One, you think, is likelier than the other to kill me? Give me that first.”

“Honoré, your father is dead.”

And what was to be said to this?

He wished it were not so…he had not accomplished all those proofs he’d planned, to fling back at his father’s opinion. He had believed in love, that on the day of reconciliation, being right, he would also be forgiven. And if his father had died suffering at all…

He would not have wanted love to go unspoken. He could tell this lie, I love you, Papa. If he had been there.

63

Bedlam

All Bedlam Courses Past (part fifty-eight)

(2023, Stephanie Foster)