Free The Catalans: A Novel by Patrick O'Brian Page A

reunite it with the Fajals’ land) I think I should burst in my grave. Hercule had such difficulty in getting it from old Pou-naou, and the whole family thought it such a triumph when he succeeded. It took him twenty years.”
    “Yet what can one do about it? Xavier is not a minor, nor a lunatic.”
    “Oh but he is, Alain. Far madder—Alain, could you not certify him? Do: it would give us all such pleasure.”
    “It would hardly improve his reputation.”
    “At least it would safeguard his property.”
    “But, seriously, what can one do?”
    “You should use your influence with Xavier. You should go to him and say—”
    “No. I mean seriously. You said just now that we must deal with things as they are: very well: we both know how much my eloquence is likely to do. Have you any clear idea of a way of stopping Xavier from making a fool of himself?”
    “No,” she said, a little ruffled, “if you put it like that, I cannot say that I have. But you underestimate your influence with Xavier, I assure you.”
    “Is it so great that he would stop doing what he very much wants to do just for my sake?”
    “Perhaps not. No: I do not suppose that it is, really. But I had been relying on you to do something, Alain.”
    “I am sorry for that. You will be disappointed, and then you will think me a tiresome fellow, you know.” He walked to the window and looked across the road to Xavier’s house; for a few moments of silence he looked at the house with a steady, critical gaze, trying to assess it as a stranger might—a stranger with a difficult interview awaiting him inside. It was a substantial house, three sides of a square, with iron railings, tall ones, finishing the square on the pavement side; a flagged court with oleanders and bushy lemon trees in tubs, a stone bench with a table in the shade of the lemons. The court was rather crowded with all this vegetation and in the winter it would no doubt look somewhat dank and somber; but now in the sunlight it looked well enough; indeed, to a passer-by on the dusty, reverberating road it stood as an inviting oasis of shade and coolness. The tall windows, one on each side of the front door, a row of three above; they, and the flanking windows in the wing that met the sun, were all shuttered against the flood of light; long, gray shutters that gave the house a reserved and noncommittal air. Only the inside angle on the left escaped the sun, and there the windows were open.
    For a moment it seemed to him that he was about to seize the meaning of the house’s look in spite of its reserve, but then, almost while the thought was forming into a pattern of words, the impression dissolved and was lost in the soft, easy lines of familiarity. He knew the place too well to see it whole, and now he had lost the power that his absence had given him. For an instant it vexed him so much that he was on the point of unhanging the big looking-glass on the wall, walking with it to the window and standing there with his back to the street to look at the house, but the house reflected, to recapture in the unfamiliar change of balance that sense of comprehension that he had lost, to recapture it as one may recapture the freshness of a picture in a mirror or the outside world’s view of your lover’s face, seen daily to obliteration. But it would have startled his aunt; and what exactly did he hope to gain? She would ask him that, and he would find it impossible to answer.
    From one of the open windows in the shade there came a steady high tapping. “She is there now,” said the old lady, standing at Alain’s side and looking over the road with him.
    “Oh, she still goes there?”
    “Yes; she goes there still. Did you suppose that she did not?”
    “It was stupid of me, but I think I did. I had thought of it as a closed chapter, a part of history; and the present state of affairs appeared to be proceeding on different lines. I am not sure what I supposed exactly, but I do not think that