Page:Georges Eekhoud - Escal Vigor, a novel.djvu/135

Rh style of talking was thick and bantering; his hips rolling, his legs crooked. A free-liver of a low class, he concealed under an appearance of rough honesty and an affected air of goodfellowship, a rapacious and crafty spirit.

His scurrilous manners, his vulgar and sarcastic sallies, had, however, the power of amusing and diverting the ever pensive and pre-occupied master of Escal-Vigor, just as the court jesters and buffoons in former days beguiled and dissipated the melancholy, or latent remorse, of tyrants. A vicious wanton, who had wallowed in the gutters of debauchery, a stable-boy from head to foot, his morals smelling as much of the dunghill as his cloth over-all and high boots, the fellow reeked of the very dregs of the populace. The cap stuck on the side of his head resembled the cap of a trooper. Ever with his hands thrust deep in his breeches' pockets, a short clay-pipe stuck in the corner of his mouth, or a quid of tobacco wandering from one cheek to the other, he would surround himself with acidulous streams of saliva, or suffocating volumes of smoke, from which his vocabulary seemed to derive its lively flavour and vivid colour.

No kindness would have touched, or