The Three Musketeers (The Modern Library) - Alexandre Dumas [173]
“It is my cousin,” Madame Coquenard said. “Come in, do come in, Monsieur Porthos.”
The name of Porthos produced its effect on the clerks who began to laugh; but as Porthos turned around sharply, the faces of the lawyerlings quickly recovered their wonted gravity.
Madame Coquenard led her suitor through the antechamber, where the clerks were, and the office where they were supposed to be—a dark airless room littered with files of all sorts of papers. Emerging from the office they passed the kitchen on the right and entered the drawing room.
These various successively intercommunicating rooms scarcely filled Porthos with optimism. Through all these open doors, voices carried disagreeably, he thought, and the privacy of conversation suffered. Worse, while passing by, he had cast a swift investigating glance into the kitchen; to the shame of Madame Attorney and to his own deep regret, he admitted to himself that it possessed no roaring fire with great spits turning before it, and none of the bustle and animation which generally prevail in that sanctuary of delicious fare when a good meal is in the making.
The attorney must have been warned of a cousinly visit, for he showed no surprise at the sight of Porthos, who approached with an easy air and bowed courteously.
“It seems we are kinsmen, Monsieur Porthos,” he remarked, rising yet supporting his weight on the arms of his cane chair. Swathed in a black doublet in which his slender body was all but lost, the old man was sharp, dry, sallow, and wizened. His little gray eyes, which glittered like carbuncles, and his grimacing mouth seemed to be the only features still alive in his face. Unfortunately for him his legs were beginning to refuse to serve the bony structure of his body; in the last six months of this weakness, he had become virtually a slave to his wife. Her cousin was accepted with resignation, no more. A nimble Maître Coquenard, firm on his legs, would have declined all relationship with Monsieur Porthos.
“Ay, Monsieur, we are cousins,” Porthos confirmed, without losing countenance, for he had never expected an enthusiastic reception in this quarter.
“On the distaff side, I believe?” the attorney asked maliciously.
Porthos missed the point and, taking the query to be a proof of naïveté, chuckled softly under cover of his bushy mustache. Madame Coquenard, who knew that an ingenuous attorney was rare indeed among that species, smiled a whit and blushed a great deal.
From the moment Porthos appeared, Maître Coquenard had been casting anxious glances at a large chest that stood facing his oak desk. Porthos realized that this chest, though not similar in shape to the chest of his reveries, was nevertheless the blessed receptacle he had designs on. “Curious,” he thought, congratulating himself, “curious that the reality stands several feet higher than the object of my dream.”
Maître Coquenard delved no further into his genealogical research. Turning his worried glance from the solid chest to the solid countenance of Porthos, he merely asked:
“Surely our cousin will favor us by dining with us once before he goes off to the wars, eh, my dear?”
This time Porthos registered the thrust full in the pit of his stomach. Apparently Madame Coquenard felt it too, for she replied:
“My cousin will not return if he finds we have treated him poorly. If on the contrary he enjoys himself here, he still has only very little time to spend in Paris and even less time to devote to us. We should therefore beg him to grant us almost every free moment we can spare until he goes away.”
This succour coming to Porthos at the very moment he had been attacked in his gastronomic hopes inspired the musketeer with lively feelings of gratitude toward Madame Coquenard.
“Oh, my legs, my poor legs, where are you?” the attorney groaned, attempting to smile.
Presently the dinner hour arrived and the trio adjourned to the dining room, a large dark room opposite the kitchen.
The clerks,