Chapter IV

THE TRAGIC UNDERSIDE OF A GRAND EXISTENCE (_Concluded_)

This sweet and tender image of the adorable woman upon whom Landri had formed the pious habit of letting his thoughts rest every night, for years past, before closing his eyes, was there again when he woke. Such is the sorcery of a passionate love in youth. To be sure, he was much engrossed by the step he was arranging to take with respect to Maître Métivier; the confusion in their financial affairs disclosed by Chaffin was most serious, and brought with it threatening consequences in the future. Moreover, none of the obstacles against which he had bruised himself the night before had disappeared. He was still likely to receive, before the end of the week, an order to proceed to take one of the two church inventories announced as about to be taken in the neighborhood of Saint-Mihiel. He knew too well, despite the sophistical reasoning of his desire, that his father's opposition to a mésalliance would not readily give way. But he was to see Valentine Olier at two o'clock, and in spite of everything, an intimate joy had possession of him. While he was dressing and breakfasting, he constantly interrupted himself to gaze admiringly at the depths of the blue sky, at the forest bronzed by the autumn, at the garden _à la française_ spreading beneath his windows, and at the statues, whose white lines stood out against the dense dark foliage of the yews, trimmed in the shape of balls and pyramids.

That same blue sky enveloped the château as with an aureole when he turned to look at it once more, in the carriage that was taking him to the Clermont station. He had had the good fortune not to fall in with Chaffin as he was leaving,--he had dreaded such a meeting a little,--and he had the additional good fortune to meet his father in person at a turn in the road, mounted, as he had said, on his new horse.

"I was determined to introduce him to you," cried the old nobleman as soon as his son was within earshot, "and also to bid you good-morning. Did you rest well? Good!--My farmer has hoodwinked me--he was sure to. He'll have his repairs. Chaffin will scold me.--As for this old fellow," and he patted the arched neck of the powerful Irish horse which was dancing nervously, "he tried hard to unseat his new rider.--Whoa! whoa! I am not in favor of divorce, my boy.--I have taken him down a little all the same, by giving him a chance to gallop. As for the trot, we shall not say anything about that for some time. But I'll show you what he can do."

Riding at a ditch near-by, he raised the beast, which leaped readily to the other side. There was a low stone wall a short distance away, at which M. de Claviers drove the roan straight, with no less daring and grace than if he had been five-and-twenty instead of five-and-sixty. The horse leaped the obstacle. The marquis waved his hat triumphantly.

"A second Toby!" he cried exultantly to his son. "And he's shrewd too, the beast! Oh, he is!--Adieu, my son, and don't forget Jaubourg. A despatch at once!"

He disappeared. How often Landri was destined to see again in memory that horseman, so proud of mien, riding away across the fields! "Adieu, father!" he cried in response; and it was indeed an adieu that they exchanged,--although they were to meet again,--adieu of the father to the son, of the son to the father. And neither knew it!

"He is too anxious about his friend," said Landri to himself as he left the train, an hour later, on the platform of the Gare du Nord. "I will go there first. Then to Métivier's. Place de la Madeleine--that's on my way to luncheon at the club. My father will have his telegram all the earlier. Mon Dieu! if only I have no terrible news to send him!"

As so often happens, the unhappy youth dreaded the very thing that he ought most earnestly to have desired. He had a slight sense of relief when he noticed, on reaching Rue de Solferino, that the straw was still spread in front of the house. M. de Claviers' friend was still alive. But the bulletin, posted in the concierge's lodge, contained one line, more ominous than that of the preceding day: "A very restless night. Increasing weakness." Beside it was a register on which were inscribed long columns of signatures "with currents of air," as the free-mason-colonel was wont to say in his coarse and picturesque "_fichards_'" slang. Our death-beds and our burials sum up, in a synopsis, as it were, our whole social individuality.

"Jaubourg-Saint-Germain" was taking his departure as if he really deserved that biting epigram. Who, pray, in Paris is sufficiently interested in the real motives of our actions to seek them beyond our gestures? The son of a stock-broker, Jaubourg had frequented a circle very different from that of his birth, for reasons which were not vanity. All his shrewdness had exerted itself to dissemble them. Moreover, if he had been a great lover he had been this also,--the social status makes itself felt even in the tender passion,--a wealthy bourgeois training among patricians. All sorts of little indications adjusted themselves to that rôle in his case. He had chosen for his abode the first floor of an old parliamentary house, spared when Boulevard Saint-Germain was laid out. The immeasurably high-studded rooms presented a seignorial aspect, in harmony with the very beautiful furniture and the tapestries that Charles Jaubourg had collected therein,--as at Grandchamp. But the furniture and tapestries did not constitute a true ensemble. The aristocratic stage-setting, which was so alive in the château de Claviers, took on here the factitious aspect of a museum. It was the work of a man who had employed the leisure acquired by the toil of his parents in not resembling them. He proceeded thus from the small to the great.

The servant who opened the door to Landri was the old maître-d'hôtel who had carried the dying man's message the night before. Jaubourg's relations with him were very analogous to those of M. de Claviers with the Mauchaussées and their like. But the châtelain knew his men "plant and root," to use again one of his favorite expressions. They were of the soil, of the neighborhood of Grandchamp; their fathers and mothers doffed their caps on the road to the defunct marquis, as they called Landri's grandfather; whereas Joseph, Jaubourg's servant, had entered his service by chance, on the recommendation of the secretary of a club. He had become attached to his master, however, with the affection that shrewd servants conceive for bachelors. He had made himself a home there. His devotion was genuine, but to a master whom he could not replace. This sentiment, composed largely of selfishness, bore no resemblance whatever to the familiar and hereditarily feudal deference with which the marquis's retainers enveloped him. There was something of the confederate in Joseph, of the safe witness, who has entered into a tacit contract of discreet silence with a rich and independent Parisian.

Jaubourg had never said a word or made a motion which authorized any person whomsoever, especially his servant, even to suspect the nature of the interest that Landri aroused in him; and yet it was with a semi-reproachful air that the wily and zealous Joseph greeted the young man. He had anticipated the ringing of the bell, a sign that he was watching for his arrival.

"Ah! how much Monsieur would have liked to see Monsieur le Comte yesterday! To-day--" He compressed his lips and touched his forehead. "Will Monsieur le Comte allow me to ask him not to contradict Monsieur in anything? Monsieur was so sick last night! The head! the head! I was afraid he'd go mad! He's better since morning. But if Monsieur le Comte would like to speak with Monsieur le Docteur Chaffin, while I go to prepare Monsieur for his visit--"

The son of the ex-tutor, who had been since the conversation of the preceding evening an object of such suspicion to Landri, occupied the room that Jaubourg, a gentleman of leisure, used for a study. A library of some size justified that title. It exhibited on its shelves the backs of rare volumes, which the collector had bought for the editions and for the bindings, and seldom opened. Pierre Chaffin had seated himself in front of a magnificent Riesener desk. The morocco top of that regal piece had certainly never before been used for such tasks as those in which he was engaged. He was correcting the proofs of a medical pamphlet, in order not to waste his time in the interval between his sittings by the bedside of the invalid, who, for his part, had written nothing at that desk, for many years, except notes accepting or declining invitations to dinner!

Between the doctor and Landri de Claviers-Grandchamp the relations had always been rather peculiar. As children they played together. Then the difference in their ranks had separated them. Old Chaffin's surly temperament--which he turned to account as knaves do their failings, by exaggerating it--reappeared in Pierre, without artifice or hidden motive. Very intelligent and energetic, taking life by its only good side, work, the head of the clinical staff affected the rough manner of the pure professional who is incessantly irritated by incompetence and pretentiousness. In his eyes all the people in society--and Landri was included in that category--were useless and incapable. Strange as such an anomaly may seem, many physicians, albeit very shrewd observers in respect to physiological symptoms, form such judgments of matters relating to the life of the mind, with the simplicity of primary-school children. Literally, they do not see it. Never had Pierre Chaffin suspected the inward drama through which the young noble was passing, torn asunder between his caste and his epoch. As his proud uncourtliness kept him away from the luxury and the festivities of Grandchamp, he was wholly ignorant of the reverse side of a society of which his father never spoke except in phrases of the most conventional and the most hypocritical respect. He was equally ignorant that he inspired in Landri a deep interest blended with generous envy. Yes, ever since their youth, the heir of the Claviers-Grandchamps had envied the student his independence in the struggle of life, and the reality of his activity. Unknown to his playmate, he had followed him through the successes of his service as intern, recommending him again and again to the illustrious Professor Louvet, his family physician. To these advances, to that regard which goes forth to meet friendship half-way, Pierre Chaffin never responded save by a stubborn coldness, in which there was some embarrassment, a defence, at once brutal and alarmed, against a sympathy of which he could not fathom the cause. There entered into it also a little of another, less generous, sort of envy,--that of the son of a salaried employee for the son of the employer, of the plebeian for the aristocrat.

He displayed no more amenity than usual on this occasion, in acknowledging Landri's greeting and his questions concerning Jaubourg's illness.

"It's acute pneumonia in its classic form," he said, raising from his proofs his broad face, surrounded by a reddish beard, to which a pair of gold-bowed spectacles imparted the expression of a German scholar. "A cold contracted by imprudence, fatigue for several days, lame back, headache. Then the peculiar chill, so characteristic of the disease, that cry of agony of the whole organism attacked, and, immediately after, thirty-nine degrees of fever. That's the first day. The second, a hundred and ten pulsations a minute, and forty respirations, instead of fourteen or eighteen. Last night, delirium. This evening or to-morrow, judgment will be pronounced on the pneumonia, and I fear it will be very harsh, considering the patient's age."

"Do you think that he will still know me?" asked Landri. "Joseph used the word madness."

"Joseph doesn't know what that word means," interposed the physician abruptly, with a shrug of the shoulders which was not far from signifying, "Nor you, either."--"I myself," he continued, "used almost the same word, which one should never do. It was not delirium that Monsieur Jaubourg had last night, it was subdelirium. The upper parts of the brain were under the influence of toxins, and the others, the unconscious parts, were free and wandering. It's a sort of poisoning peculiar to pneumonia, and which sometimes indicates its coming. It is very analogous to alcoholic poisoning. It manifests itself by a dream which expresses itself in speech and is incoherent to us. Probably, if we knew the past life of a person intoxicated in this way, we should discover that his incoherence is logical and true. Most frequently, he lives over past events. It's a phenomenon that has been carefully observed. We have given it one of those names of which society folk make sport, I know, I know. Since Molière's time we are used to such sarcasms. We call it an _ecmnésique_ state, when the depths of the memory come to the surface, as we call this delirious dream _onirique_. Why does a certain microbe produce this effect when it attacks the meninges? This problem would lead us on to define what the mind is, and it is probable that you and I would not agree!--But let us drop this, which is scarcely interesting to you. I wanted simply to explain to you that Monsieur Jaubourg has never been mad, and that he has all his wits this morning. You can see him. Not for very long, and don't tire him."

Once more, in the persistently technical tone of this dry and unfeeling speech, Landri detected that instinctive hostility, unintelligible to him, which he had always encountered in Pierre. The physician had lectured in order to avoid having to talk. And not a word of inquiry as to his own father, when they had not met for more than a year! Not a word about M. de Claviers-Grandchamp, who had always been so kind to him! Pierre Chaffin had an excuse--the ill-humor in which his master, Professor Louvet, had put him by asking him not to leave Rue de Solferino. The head of the clinic obeyed his "grand pontiff,"--the students irreverently give that title to the masters on whom their futures depend,--and he relieved himself by being ungracious to one who, more than all others, represented that fashionable society to the prestige of which his chief sacrificed him. There was not the slightest failure of professional duty. A physician must not cavil at his science,--with the friends of a patient. That was nothing--that theory concerning the dreams of delirium--except a slightly pedantic excursus. It was sufficient to cause the words extorted from Jaubourg by the intoxication of his disease, if the crisis should come on in Landri's presence, to assume an entirely different meaning in the young man's mind. Alas! he had no need of that scientific "key." Unaided he would have deciphered only too easily the dying man's words! They carried their terrifying clearness with them. Nevertheless, the hypothesis of a death-bed insanity would have left room for a doubt which the scientist's lucid diagnosis had made untenable.

When Madame de Claviers' son entered his chamber, the dying man seemed to be exhausted by the high fever of the night, and to be more calm. He lay on a bed in the middle of the room, himself a curiosity for exhibition, like all the articles of furniture of that room, brought together during many years, with the painstaking zeal of a collector. This elegance of stage-setting rendered more painful the last hours of the old man, whose appearance shocked Landri, warned though he had been. The cheeks were burning, the whole face hyperæmic; the eyes shone with the unnatural brilliancy of suffering, and the hurried, almost spasmodic, dilatation of the nostrils told of the struggle against suffocation.

In his lifetime--it was already permissible to speak thus of him--Jaubourg had been the typical society man, who does not surrender; the worldling whose courageous courtesy spares others the contact and the spectacle of his degeneration. That degeneration was complete to-day, ominously undeniable and irreparable. But as a matter of habit the Parisian had mustered energy to make a last toilet. His face was washed and shaved, his sparse gray locks brushed, his hands cared for. He had put on a dressing-jacket of soft silk. Puerile yet pathetic details, which indicated his desire not to leave a too perverted image of himself in the memory of his visitor, the only one whom he had admitted during the last half-week. He had expressly forbidden Joseph to notify the few relations--very distant they were--that he still possessed. He had trembled lest they should suspect a condition of affairs which he had made it a point of honor to conceal for twenty-nine years. Yes, every effort of his life had had but one aim: to leave his fortune to the son he had had by another man's wife, without causing the world or that other man to wonder. The world--he had succeeded in hoodwinking it almost absolutely by such prodigies of diplomacy! The stories told by two or three members of his family, such as Madame Privat, had not gone outside a very small circle, and intimates with the perspicacity of a Bressieux are rare. The friendship which Jaubourg had manifested for M. de Claviers since his widowhood, and which, by a strange but very human anomaly, was sincere, would have put that noble-minded man's suspicions to sleep, if he had conceived any. But that great heart did not know what it was to distrust! It was he whom Jaubourg by his will had made his sole legatee, without informing him or anyone else. His reflections had led him to this roundabout method of assuring to Landri his three millions at least. He had, as we have seen, carried his scrupulosity to the point of being persistently cold in his treatment of the young man, who, like everybody else, must never know the truth.

The adulterine father had anticipated everything, everything except the death-agony among the hallucinations of memory! On his death-bed he was to destroy this masterpiece of his prudence, and, we must add, of a chivalry instigated perhaps by a tacit rivalry with the magnanimous friend whom his passion had caused him to betray. He had failed therein, for the first time, in yielding to the unspeakable craving to see once more, before taking his departure forever, that son who bore another's name and who was so dear to him.

Few men have the strength to die absolutely alone. Jaubourg had alleged to himself the pretext of talking to the young man of the project of marriage with Mademoiselle de Charlus, to which he attached very great importance. He had not foreseen the loss of energy under the attacks of his malady, or the animal cry of nature in rebellion.

"You have come, my friend," he said in a short, jerky voice, in which there was already a hint of the death-rattle. "You have come," he repeated; "thanks." And he pressed the hand that the other held out, in a passionate grasp. What a contrast to the guarded and quickly withdrawn clasp that he had always given him, as if unwillingly and with the ends of his fingers! This had been one of the most painful to the sensitive Landri of all the indications of his antipathy. "I wanted to speak to you--before I die--For I am going to die." And, as the other protested: "What's the use of lying? I feel death coming. I haven't much strength. Every word tears me apart." He pointed to both sides of his chest. "I must speak quickly--I wanted to talk to you," he insisted,--"about your marriage--"

"To Mademoiselle de Charlus?" rejoined the young man. He had noticed that Jaubourg, like Chaffin a moment earlier, did not mention M. de Claviers. "He doesn't really care for him, either," he thought, recalling the last words that the marquis had shouted after him as they parted. "It's the disease," he reflected further. "And I had thought of consulting him about the tricks of our creditors--and I find him in this state!"--He added, aloud: "My father told me how deeply you had interested yourself for me in that matter, and I thank you heartily, you understand,--heartily."

"Claviers mentioned it to you?" rejoined the dying man; and added, with feverish anxiety, "and you replied?"

"That I shall never marry a woman I do not love, and that I do not love Mademoiselle de Charlus."

"I was sure of it!" groaned Jaubourg, leaning forward sorrowfully. A hoarse cough shook him, which he tried to check with his handkerchief, upon which spots like rust appeared. "Don't call," he summoned strength to say to Landri, who was putting out his hand to touch the button of the electric bell. In face of the manifest terror of that appeal, he remembered the doctor's recommendations. He obeyed. The invalid, exhausted by the paroxysm of coughing, smoothed his hand to signify his gratitude. He had thrown himself back, with his eyes closed. He reopened them, to resume: "But _she_ loves _you_! And she is charming! And then, there's the future--I don't know what you will find when Claviers is no longer there. I have never been able to make him talk about his money matters. He doesn't know where he stands himself. Ah! I tremble for you. I have done what I could. But this Charlus marriage--everything would be straightened out, everything. This Chaffin, in whom he has such blind confidence, what is he? I have never been able to find out that, either. Oh! my poor, poor Landri!"

His excitement increased. The young man did not yet interpret in their true meaning words which, however, clothed with a new aspect that strange nature; did they not betray a preoccupation wholly intent upon him, in a man whom he regarded as a friend of his father exclusively? On the other hand these words of distrust in connection with Chaffin corresponded too nearly with the feeling aroused in his own mind for him not to follow them up.

"Do you, too, look upon Chaffin with suspicion?"

"For a very long time," Jaubourg replied. "You will ask me: 'In that case, why do you place yourself in his son's care?' Louvet forced him on me. I did not refuse. I didn't think that I was so seriously ill! And then, the son isn't the same sort as the father. But you don't know what it is, to feel at times that you are going off, that you are speaking, that you have spoken. And then you don't remember what you have said--not a word. Everything is black before the mind. How I suffered from that impression last night! Joseph swore that I didn't say anything. You can believe him. He is reliable, perfectly reliable.--My God! that feeling is coming back!--My head!--it aches. Oh! how it aches! It's as if I had a pain in my mind!"--He took his head in his hands and pressed it. Another paroxysm of coughing bent him double; he came out of it repeating: "No! no! no! no!" Then, as if that almost convulsive denial had renewed his strength, he added, speaking more jerkily than ever: "I know why you won't marry this girl, who is so rich, who would rescue you if Claviers has squandered everything! I know why. You still love the other."

"What other?" queried Landri. The overmastering compassion that he felt for the invalid's evident agony did not prevent him from starting at that direct allusion. One fact stood out in his memory: Valentine imploring him not to go up to Jaubourg's room, not to see him. Were they acquainted, then? His surprise was so great that he insisted almost harshly: "What other, I say? Whom are you referring to?"

"To that Madame Olier," said Jaubourg. "Oh! Landri, not those eyes, not that voice! I can't stand that!--Look you,--I say nothing against her. I know that no one ever spoke ill of her. But at Saint-Mihiel you saw her constantly--I know that. She is a widow. I know that too, and where she lives. I should have found a way to know her, if it had been necessary. I know everything that concerns you, you see. I have always found a way to know it, day by day, ever since you were born. You mustn't think of marrying her. If she loves you for yourself, she ought not to think of it, either. In the first place, Claviers will never consent. And secondly you must be rich. I want you to be rich--I want it.--You don't understand. You must not understand.--Ah! I have always loved you so dearly, you know, Landri, and I have never been able to show it. It was my duty not to. It's my duty now.--My head is getting confused again, like yesterday.--But I don't want--I don't want--No. No. No. I won't say anything.--Go away, Joseph. Go away, Chaffin. They're looking at me. They shall not know. They shall not know.--My Landri! my own Landri!"

"Neither Joseph nor Chaffin is here," said the young man. "Calm yourself, Jaubourg. Calm yourself."

He made him lie down again, very gently. Those few sentences from the dying man's lips had moved him to the inmost depths of his being. With what a passionate interest the man must have followed him in order to have obtained such detailed information concerning incidents of so private a nature! M. de Claviers did not even suspect Madame Olier's existence before their conversation in the forest, and Jaubourg knew everything about her! He knew everything about him, he had said, "day by day, ever since he was born." What did those enigmatic words mean, and uttered, too, in such a tone? And those other words: "I have always loved you so dearly! I have never been able to show it. _It was my duty not to_!"

And, already disturbed even to anguish, Landri repeated: "They are not here. I am alone with you, all alone;" and, almost in a tone of entreaty: "Before me you can say anything; speak, if that will calm you. For you must calm yourself. You must."

"I have nothing to say," Jaubourg replied, "to anyone. To anyone." He had recovered his self-control once more. "I am quite calm. But my head gets so confused! Kiss me, Landri. Bid me adieu. I wanted to see you for that.--Oh! Just once, let me kiss you once as I love you. Oh! my child! my child!"

Tears gushed from his eyes, and rolled down amid the sweat with which his face was bathed. He rested his moist face on the young man's hands. He pressed him to his heart. He touched his hair and his shoulders; and Landri, aghast at the horrible thing that was being disclosed to him, listened as he continued:--

"You have gone back to your kind voice.--Your voice! That was my only joy in you. When you were a little child, at Grandchamp, I used to go into the library to listen to you as you played in the garden under the windows."--He had raised himself to a sitting posture. The dream described by the doctor was beginning.--"You don't see me, nor anyone else. I am looking at you.--You run about, your curly hair floats in the wind--your mother's hair.--She comes to you, along the path, against the yews. The air has colored her cheeks. How lovely she is!--She knows I am there. She smiles at me over our child's head.--Where has she gone?" His eyes had changed their expression. They were fixed on other scenes.--"How tiny she looks in that great bed! She insisted on dressing up. Her pearls sink into the folds in the skin of her neck!--Ah! how she suffers at the thought of death! So young, and that frightful disease!--I am going. You know that if I could stay I would not leave you, Geneviève--tell me that you know it.--I love you! I love you!--They are taking her away.--Look! I do not weep. You can look at me, I shall not betray her.--Geoffroy,--he is weeping. I do not weep. I still have our child. He shall have everything, everything. I have found a way--You sha'n't prevent that! You sha'n't prevent it!"

A terrifying vision had suddenly succeeded the pictures among which Landri had recognized--with ever-increasing horror!--the amusements of his childhood, his sick mother, and the minute detail of the pearl necklace about her fleshless neck; that mother's burial--and the rest! The invalid had raised himself in his bed. He was gazing at the young man, with a stupefied expression in his eyes, evidently mingling the altogether confused impression aroused by his presence with the nightmare that had possession of him.

"You say that he's my son! You have no right to think that," he groaned, "you don't know--Don't say it--I forbid you to say it!"

Then, as the illusion assumed a more definite and more alarming form, he uttered a loud shriek and jumped out of his bed.

This outcry was heard through the partition. It reached the ears of the servant and the doctor, both of whom rushed into the chamber at the same moment, just in time to stop the invalid, who had darted toward the window to escape from the voices that he heard.

"Leave us alone," said the doctor to Landri, who was so horrorstruck by the scene, that he had not even gone to the assistance of the victim of hallucination. "Joseph and I can take care of him."

He pushed the young man into the study, where he remained quarter of an hour, half an hour, completely crushed, as if he himself were in the clutches of a nightmare which paralyzed him with terror. At last the doctor reappeared. His face bore the marks of extraordinary preoccupation.

"I have just given him an injection of morphine, to subdue him," he said. "He will doze now, till the end. But such a paroxysm! That of last night was a mere outline.--Above all things pay no attention to what he may have said to you. It was absolute mental confusion,--madness." He repeated: "madness."

He looked his companion squarely in the face--too squarely--as he emitted that phrase which contradicted so utterly his earlier formulas: "He lives over past events.--The depths of his memory come to the surface." He himself realized, no doubt, the terrible bearing of the antithesis between this second assertion and the former one, for he could not help blushing. What words had Jaubourg uttered, then, in his delirium, that were even more explicit? Had he pronounced, before those witnesses, the horrifying sentence: "I was Madame de Claviers' lover, and Landri is my son?" At all events, that was the ghastly fact that Chaffin had grasped amid the sick man's divagations, as Landri himself had done; and, at this additional evidence, he felt an icy chill run through his whole body.

When a man is suddenly brought face to face with a fact of supremely tragic importance to him, which he cannot honestly doubt, and of which he had no previous suspicion, an interval of semi-stupefaction succeeds, of brief duration, during which he could not himself say what his sensations are. It is not grief, for the man does not comprehend what he has just learned. He does not realize it. Nor is it hesitation. Later he will be able to argue, he will attempt, rather, to argue, against the evidence. For the moment the fact has entered into him, with its irresistible force, as a steel point enters the flesh that it passes through, and there ensues, in the most secret depths of his being, that total upheaval of nature to which the hymn in the liturgy refers: _Stupebit et natura_. However, life goes on about this man who has been stricken to death and knows it not. It even goes on within him, and he seconds it, and he obeys its behests with an automatism resembling that of an evil suggestion. In this state Landri descended the stairs from Jaubourg's apartment, re-entered the cab he had left at the door, and gave the cabman Maître Métivier's address, almost without being conscious of it. The clock, wound before the terrible shock, performed its functions mechanically.

The notary was not at his office. Of what consequence now to the young man were those financial difficulties which had seemed so formidable to him? What were they in presence of this other horrible thing? He left his letter, and went on, on foot, toward the club on Rue Scribe where he had determined to lunch. A telegraph office that he passed reminded him of his promise to send M. de Claviers a despatch. He went in; and there, as he rested his elbow on the desk of blackened wood, before the printed form, and dipped his pen into the ink, this species of somnambulism suddenly ceased. His consciousness returned, acute and heart-rending. That ghastly hour that he had just lived through was a reality. Jaubourg was really dying. He had really said to him those words which still filled his ears and which had rooted in his mind the most cruel, the most ineradicable of ideas. A sudden evocation showed him M. de Claviers entering that same room, and the dying man, in the throes of the same delirium, uttering the same words.

"That shall not be!" he said, and he crumpled the paper, on which he had not even begun to write the address, with a convulsive gesture of dismay. Feverishly he wrote on another sheet: "Marquis de Claviers-Grandchamp. Château de Grandchamp, Oise.--Don't be alarmed. A decided improvement;" and signed it. Then he handed the untruthful despatch through the wicket.

He was within two steps of the club. The sight of one of the members going in at the door, who, fortunately, did not see him, made him stop short and walk away, almost run, in the opposite direction. That member of the club knew Charles Jaubourg, as all the others did. He would ask him for news of him. The friendship between the sick man and M. de Claviers was legendary.--Friendship!--Suddenly Landri said to himself: "They all know. Such scandals as this the world always knows; it hawks them about and laughs at them. The whole club knows. All Paris knows. There were only two people who didn't know."

He walked on and on,--how long he could not have told,--flying from those witnesses of the family disgrace, flying from himself. He mechanically entered a restaurant for luncheon, but had hardly begun to eat when he rose. Another image sprang up in his mind,--that of Valentine Olier. She too knew. That was the meaning of the exclamation that rushed from her lips: "Monsieur Jaubourg dying? I hope he won't see you"; of her entreaty not to see the sick man. She knew! With a bound as brutally instinctive as the contraction of his fingers on the white telegraphic form just before, Landri left the restaurant. He hailed another cab, to fly to her.

In his unreasoning excitement he had walked heedlessly, from street to street, as far as the network that encompasses the Department of the Interior. He was quite near Rue du Faubourg-Saint-Honoré, where the town mansion of the Claviers-Grandchamps is situated. There his mother had died. There he had lived ever since with--By what name should he call henceforth the man whom he loved and should always love as a son loves his father, and who was nothing at all to him, nothing more than a great-souled honorable man, outraged by the most terrible of affronts, by those of the flesh of which his flesh was the offspring? The thought of seeing that house again was abhorrent to the wretched youth. He had given the cabman Madame Olier's address. As he was preparing to turn into Rue des Saussaies, Landri knocked on the glass as if he would break it. He ordered the man to go by way of Rue de Suresnes, Boulevard Malesherbes, and Rue Royale. The mere aspect of the quarter in which he had passed his childhood was, physically, intolerable to him. He closed his eyes that he might recognize nothing. But in that crisis of his life what impression could he receive that would not make him cry out in pain?

And now he was going to Valentine. To tell her what? To ask her what?--The cab had crossed Place de la Concorde, passed through Rue de Bourgogne and Rue Barbet-de-Jouy, and was rumbling over the pavement of Rue Monsieur; and he was still asking himself that question, without finding any reply thereto. To have conceived that ghastly suspicion, that certainty, alas! concerning Madame de Claviers and his own birth, was such a disgrace to begin with! To put that idea in words, even to Valentine, especially to Valentine, would be a crime! The affection of a son for his mother bears so sacred a character, all the loving energies of our being combine so powerfully to make her a creature apart from all others, purer, more irreproachable, more venerable! Was Landri to overstep the bounds of that respect which he alone could never cease to feel for Madame de Claviers, whatever she might have done? Should he repeat, voluntarily, knowingly, those terrible words torn from a dying man by the approach of the death-agony,--words by which he himself, as soon as he had heard them, was, as it were, stunned, ay, struck dead?

And yet it was absolutely necessary that he should find out whether Valentine knew and what she knew. The nervous shock had been too violent. All power of inhibition was momentarily suspended in him. His thought was certain to become an act the instant that it bore any relation to the overwhelming revelation that he had had to undergo. So that it was impossible for him not to cross the courtyard, not to ring at Madame Olier's door, not to ask if she would receive him. It had not even occurred to him that it was barely half-past twelve, that their appointment was for two o'clock, and that the simple fact of his arriving unexpectedly indicated some extraordinary occurrence. Did he so much as remember the reason that he and the young woman had made the appointment, and the passionate and painful interview of yesterday concerning their marriage? There is a peculiar characteristic of such uncontrollably excited mental states into which we are cast by a too abrupt and too violent shock: our mental equilibrium is temporarily upset. Our most cherished sentiments are arrested as it were, and our power of prevision as well. We seem to be looking on at the throwing out of gear of certain all-powerful sensations which lead us where they choose.

The bell had no sooner rung than Landri would have been glad to flee again as he had been fleeing. He remained.

"Either later, or now," he said to himself, "I must see her. I prefer now, and to know at once the whole extent of this dishonor."

When the servant announced that Monsieur le Comte de Claviers-Grandchamp desired to speak with her, and at once, Valentine was at table, had just finished taking luncheon with her little boy. During the twenty-four hours since the young man had left her upon her promise of a final answer to his offer of marriage, she had been constantly in the throes of the last convulsions of the struggle that had been waged for three years between her love and her duty first, her good sense next. That exclamation with which their interview had ended, that "now I am all his," had been followed by a supreme effort to resist. The serious objections that she had urged had presented themselves anew with a force which Landri's disclosures concerning the secret difficulties of his relations with his father had not lessened--quite the contrary. One thing had grown less: her authority over her friend. By consenting to reconsider her first refusal, she had proved too plainly her weakness before the young man's passion. She realized that, and she was alarmed to observe how sweet the sensation of yielding to that force was to her. Irresistible inward intoxication of the woman who begins to give herself! To give herself! A phrase so simple, yet of such deep meaning, which sums up in itself the whole miracle of love, because it is love! To cease to be one's self, to transform one's self into the ideas, the wishes of another, to become whatsoever he wills, contrary to self-interest, to prudence, sometimes to honor--so that he may be happy! And the man whom Valentine loved wanted nothing from her which she had not the right to give him without remorse.

"What answer shall I give him?" she had asked herself a score of times, without ever arriving at a decision of which she was really, radically sure in her own mind. "How can I persuade him to wait longer? Wait, and for what? Assuming that I impose this further postponement upon him, and he agrees to it, what will our relations be then? If I don't say yes, and instantly, I shall be obliged, after the explanation we had yesterday, to close my door to him. To receive him under such conditions would be mere coquetry, in the worst of all forms. A woman who has let a man tell her that he loves her should never see him again, or should belong to him. Not see him again? Not know what he thinks, what he feels? I should suffer too much. To say yes to him, if ill luck wills that he shall be mixed up in one of these horrible church-burglaries, is to dig still deeper the gulf between him and his father. If I could only make my consent depend on the condition that he should resign rather than obey an order of that sort! No; that would be wrong. He has a conscience of his own which I have no right to exert pressure upon in the name of his love! Ah! how I wish I could be sure that I am deciding only for his real good, and not because I love him and for my own happiness!"

A little incident had added to her uncertainty: a long letter from Saint-Mihiel, written by one of the friends she had retained there, the wife of one of the late Captain Olier's fellow officers. It was all about the uneasiness that prevailed among all the officers on account of the imminence of the two inventories--at Hugueville and Montmartin. The young widow's correspondent related at great length a conversation she had had with her husband, and how she had insisted that he should resign rather than comply with certain orders.

"She is his wife," Valentine had said to herself. "A wife has the right to take part in the most important resolutions of her husband's life. Would she have the right to leave him if he should decide against her advice? That is the sort of pressure I should try to exert if I should demand a promise from Landri as the price of my hand. I will not do it!"

Such were the thoughts that she was turning over in her mind when the bell rang. "Monsieur le Comte de Claviers-Grandchamp?" she could not help asking the servant who transmitted the young man's request; and she made her repeat the name, her surprise was so great. What was the meaning of this call at half after twelve instead of two? Evidently, that Landri had spoken to his father. To make him anticipate their appointment thus, he must have good news to tell her! Would M. de Claviers consent to their marriage? It was mad to hope for such a thing, and yet Valentine's heart was beating fast with that hope when she went into the small salon where the young man was awaiting her.

He had not uttered a word, and already she knew that she was mistaken. And the door had hardly opened, and already he realized that he had come to ask that woman a question which it was impossible for him even to frame in his mind. Just as, a little while before, the trivial, altogether material, necessity of writing a telegram, had roused him from his stupor, so now the necessity of stating in explicit words the ghastly thought roused him from his fit of frenzy. He saw it as clearly as he saw Valentine coming toward him, that to seek to learn the extent of the dishonor, as he had said, was to make himself an accomplice in it, to aggravate it. Whatever Madame Olier might have learned, she had learned it by hearsay only, and with doubts as to its truth. To speak to her would change those doubts into certainty.

Landri suddenly recovered all the energy he had had before the revelation. The mere presence of some one to talk to had caused the tortured youth to realize with crushing force the sacredness of the obligation to hold his peace, to conceal his martyrdom. Such a mighty struggle with himself, and so instantaneous in its conclusion, did not take place without a contraction of the whole being, betrayed by the tension of the motionless features, by the wavering of the glance, by the "white voice"--an admirably expressive popular phrase! What a contrast to the exalted glance, the impassioned lips of yesterday--those glowing eyes, that ardent voice! What had happened? Still engrossed by the anxiety revived by her friend's letter, Valentine thought at once of the ominous tale of inventories to be made.

"You have come at noon instead of two o'clock, Landri," she said, speaking her thought aloud. "I understand. You have to return to Saint-Mihiel by the next train. Have you had a telegram from the colonel?"

"No," he answered in amazement. He was so far away from these professional anxieties that he did not even understand the allusion.

"Then, if it isn't the inventories--" She did not finish the sentence. The question that she had on the end of her lips did not pass them. The perspicacity of a woman who loves made her divine that she must not even ask it. To give herself countenance and to avoid the appearance of interrupting herself, she continued: "The fact is that I have been worried again this morning on your account. I have had a letter on the subject from Julie Despois, the major's wife. In fact, I put it aside to show it to you. Here it is."

She had espied the letter on her writing-table,--it was placed there, in fact, with that purpose. She handed it to Landri, who began to read it, or to pretend to do so. Valentine saw that his eyes followed the lines but that their sense did not reach him. He did not really see the words. When he had finished the fourth page, he refolded the letter and handed it to Madame Olier, who refused it.

"Keep it. I want you to keep it. Read it again when you're back at Saint-Mihiel. She says so well what I said to you so badly."

The meaning of these words did not reach the young man, either. He obeyed, however, and with a mechanical movement slipped the envelope into his coat pocket. They sat for several seconds without speaking. This sort of absence in presence terrified Valentine now. Something had happened, something tragical it must have been to affect him so profoundly. With that occurrence she had nothing to do,--she felt it, she saw it. It was not a question of their marriage, nor of the answer that M. de Claviers might have made. He looked at her no more than he had looked at the letter just now. Something had happened! And had happened since the day before. Since the moment that Landri left that little salon.--Where did he go? To Grandchamp. But he had taken Rue de Solferino on his way. Madame Olier shuddered at the remembrance of the dread that had suddenly seized her when Landri had told her of his purpose. Suppose that, despite the promise she had exacted from him, he had been compelled to go upstairs? Suppose--And overwhelmed by the possibilities of which she caught a glimpse, she asked:--

"Did you get to Grandchamp in good season yesterday?"

"Why, very good," he replied; "in less than two hours."

"And your father wasn't angry? That little détour that you had to take didn't make you too late?"

"No," he said, "I was there at the finish."

As he pronounced the word "no" his voice hardened a little. His eyelids drooped over his eyes, in which she read distress. He waited, stiffening himself, in order not to shriek, for an allusion which she did not make. A great surgeon probing a wound displays no more skill in holding back the steel instrument at the moment when it would make the patient cry out, than a loving woman has in suspending a painful interrogatory before she has touched the sore spot. But was there need for Valentine to question him now in order to assure herself that the wound was there? Madame Privat was right. Jaubourg had loved Madame de Claviers. And so what she, Valentine, dreaded had really happened. Words had escaped the dying man which had aroused in the son's mind doubts concerning his mother's honor! And she waited, suffocated with emotion, for Landri to go on.

He tried to speak, he did not wish to remain silent, to go away until he had explained his unexpected call. But he could not. He could find only phrases whose very insignificance emphasized their falsity.

"They gave me a great many commissions at the château," he said, "and they'll take the whole afternoon. They disposed of my time without consulting me, and as I wanted to see you again, I came a little earlier."

"If you hadn't come," she replied, "and had sent me no word, I should have been quite sure that it was not your fault. You well know that I have entire faith in your affection, and that I shall never, never, take offence at anything." Then, impelled by immeasurable pity for that too cruelly stricken heart, if in truth a friend of his father, in the delirium of the death-agony, had dishonored his mother's image forever, she added: "I blame myself, Landri, for not having told you plainly enough yesterday how dear you are to me. I didn't show it enough. For you are dear to me, very dear," she repeated. It was as if she were trying to tame with words that pain which she divined to be so savage, so concentrated in itself, to caress it and soothe it. "Say that to yourself sometimes, when I am not present, whatever may happen." And as she saw that face, but now so gloomy, relax, and those veiled eyes look at her once more and see her, the overflow of her affection extorted from her the confession that she had always refused to make: "For you see, Landri, I, too--I love you."

"You love me!" ejaculated the young man. Obeying the instinct of true love, whose double vision borders on the marvellous, she had pronounced the only words capable of pouring balm upon his wound, but causing him to realize its full extent. That confession that he had so ardently craved and begged for, he was suffering too intensely to enjoy. That love which she at last manifested openly, and which, two hours earlier, would have intoxicated him with a very ecstasy of joy, he could no longer rush upon, absorb himself in, engulf himself in--himself and the horrible thing! That thing was there, in his thought, torturing him even at that moment, not to be forgotten even in the radiance of that noble heart, which was his at last! A wave of emotion swept over him, so despairing and so passionate at once, that he was alarmed by it. He trembled lest the hideous disclosure should burst from his too deeply moved heart. But did he need to make it now? Had she not divined everything? And that also touched him, as a more convincing proof of love than the most impassioned words, and overwhelmed him utterly.

"Thanks," he stammered. "But at this moment--surprise--emotion--Leave me."

And motioning to her that his voice failed him, he hid his face in his hands. He passed ten minutes thus, not sobbing, not weeping, not sighing, nor did Valentine attempt to question him or to comfort him. The only assuagement that his sick heart could receive without bleeding from it was the feeling that she existed, that she was by his side, all his. She gazed at him, even holding her breath, to spare him any sensation. There was, in the silent convulsive immobility of that man who was undergoing the most violent inward tempest and who gave no sign of it except that gesture of mute agony, a wild upspringing of energy for which she esteemed and admired him. Never during those three years had they been so near each other in heart as in that silence, which he broke at last. He raised his head. He was deathly pale; but the paroxysm was conquered. He rose, took Madame Olier's hand, and said to her, in a deep voice:--

"Yes. You love me. You have just proved it more clearly than you will ever do again. I believe it. I feel it, and I feel also that I love you, ah! much more dearly than I knew. I am going to leave you. I must. But not until I have asked you again what I asked you yesterday. Valentine, will you be my wife?"

"Yes," she replied, in the same tone.

An inexpressible emotion flashed in Landri's eyes as he drew her to him. Chaste and ardent kiss of betrothal, in which his lips were wet with the tears that she was shedding, now, for his misery, who did not weep! And as those tears disturbed him anew to his inmost depths, he tore himself from her embrace, saying:--

"Don't take away my courage. I need it sorely."

With these words they parted. She did not make a movement, she did not say a word to detain him. She felt that he was hers, as she was his, wholeheartedly, absolutely, and that she could do nothing else for him than let him go, until he should have worn out, alone, that grief for which she pitied him so profoundly. How much greater would her pity have been if she had known the whole truth! She believed that at Jaubourg's death-bed the young man had surprised some denunciatory words, had perhaps found letters which had made him suspect his mother. The proofs that he would soon have to face were far more cruel, and amid them all he must needs find out the path of honor.