Page:The Reverberator (2nd edition, American issue, London and New York, Macmillan & Co., 1888).djvu/113

Rh the meantime; Gaston turned so pale at moments that she feared it would all result in a mortal illness for him and Marguerite shed gallons of tears), Mr. Probert went to see the Dossons with his son. Mme. de Brécourt paid them another visit, a kind of official affair as she deemed it, accompanied by her husband; and the Baron de Douves and his wife, written to by Gaston, by his father and by Margaret and Susan, came up from the country full of tension and responsibility. M. de Douves was the person who took the family, all round, most seriously and most deprecated anything in the nature of crude and precipitate action. He was a very small black gentleman, with thick eyebrows and high heels (in the country, in the mud, he wore sabots with straw in them), who was suspected by his friends of believing that he looked like Louis XIV. It is perhaps a proof that something of the quality of this monarch was really recognised in him that no one had ever ventured to clear up this point by a question. "La famille c'est moi" appeared to be his tacit formula, and he carried his umbrella (he had very bad ones), with a kind of sceptral air. Mme. de Brécourt went so far as to believe that his wife, in confirmation of this, took herself in a manner for Mme. de Maintenon: she had lapsed into a provincial existence as she might have harked back to the seventeenth century; the world she lived in seemed about as far away. She was the largest, heaviest member of the family,