CHAPTER I
All men accustomed to feel through their imaginations are well acquainted with that unique description of melancholy which is inflicted by too complete a likeness between a mother and her daughter, when the mother is fifty years old and the daughter twenty-five, and the one happens thus to exhibit the looked-for spectre of the old age of the other. How fruitful in bitterness for a lover is such a vision of the inevitable withering reserved for the beauty that he loves! To the eye of a disinterested observer such likenesses abound in singularly suggestive reflections. Rarely, indeed, does the analogy between the features of the two faces extend to identity, and still more rarely are the expressions completely alike. There has usually been a sort of onward march in the common temperament from one generation to the next. The predominant quality in the physiognomy has become more predominant still--a visible symbol of a development of character produced by heredity. Already too refined, the face has become still more so; sensual, it has been materialised; wilful, it has grown hard and dry.
But it is especially at the period when life has done its work, when the mother has passed her sixtieth year and the daughter her fortieth, that this gradation in likenesses becomes palpable to the student, and with it the history of the moral circumstances wherein the soul of the race of which the two beings mark two halting-places has striven. The perception of fatalities of blood is then so clear that it sometimes turns to pain. It is in such cases that the implacable, tragical action of the laws of Nature is revealed even to minds which are the most destitute of general ideas, and if this action be at all exercised against creatures who--apart even from love--are dear to us, how it hurts us to admit it!
Although a man who had started formerly as a private soldier and has been retired as General of division, who is seventy-two years old, who has a liver complaint contracted in Africa, five wounds and the experience of fifteen campaigns, is not very prone to philosophical dreamings, it was nevertheless to impressions of this kind that General Count Alexander Scilly resigned himself one evening, on leaving the drawing-room of a small house in the Rue Vaneau, where he had left his old friend Madame Castel, and this friend's daughter, Madame Liauran, alone together. Eleven had just struck from a clock of the purest style of the Empire--a gift from Napoleon I. to Madame Castel's father--which stood on the mantelpiece in this drawing-room, and, as was his custom, the General had risen at precisely the first stroke, to go to his carriage, which had been announced.
Truth to tell, the Count had the strongest reasons in the world to be dimly and profoundly disquieted. After the campaign of 1870, which had won him his last epaulets, but in which the ruin of his health had been completed, this man had found himself at Paris with no relations but distant cousins whom he did not like, having had grounds of complaint against them on the occasion of the succession to a common cousin. Had they not impugned the old lady's will, and made a charge of undue influence against--whom? Against him, Count Scilly, own son to the Leipsic hero! Feeling that desire, which distinguishes bachelors of all ages, to replace, by settled habits, the tranquility of the family that he lacked, the General had been led to create a home external to the rooms of the resting soldier.
Circumstances had thus made him the almost daily guest of the house in the Rue Vaneau, where the two ladies to whom he had long been attached resided. The eldest, Madame Marie Alice Castel, was the widow of his first protector, Captain Hubert Castel, who had been killed at his side in Algeria, when he, Scilly, was as yet only a plain sergeant. The second, Madame Marie Alice Liauran, was the widow of his dearest protégé, Captain Alfred Liauran, who had been killed in Italy.
All those who have given any study to the character of an old bachelor and old soldier--a combination of two celibacies in one--will, from the mere announcement of these facts, understand the place occupied by the mother and daughter in the General's existence. Whenever he left their house, and during the whole of the time which it took his carriage to bring him home again, his one mental occupation was to recur to all the incidents in his visit. This interval was a long one, for the General lived on the Quai d'Orléans on the ground floor of an old house which had been formally bequeathed to him by his cousin. The carriage went but slowly; it was drawn by an old army horse, very aged and very quiet, gently driven by an old orderly soldier, faithful Bertrand, who would not have whipped the animal for a cask of grape-skin brandy, his favourite drink.
The carriage itself did not run easily, low and heavy as it was--a regular dowager's chariot which the General had preserved unaltered, with the pale green leather of its lining and the dark green shade of its panels. Is there any need to add that Scilly had inherited this carriage at the same time as the house? In the ignorance of an old soldier accustomed to the roughness of a profession to which he had taken very seriously, he ingenuously considered this lumbering vehicle as the height of comfort, and seated with his hand in one of the slings, on the edge of those cushions on which his cousin used once to stretch herself voluptuously, he unceasingly saw again before him the drawing-room in the Rue Vaneau, and the two inmates of that calm retreat--oh! so calm; with its lofty closed windows, beyond which extended the princely garden reaching from the Rue Vaneau to the Rue de Babylon; yes, so calm and so well known to him, Scilly, in its slightest details!
On the walls hung three large portraits, witnessing that, since the Revolution, all the men of the family had been soldiers. There was first the grandfather, Colonel Hubert Castel, represented by the painter Gros in the dark uniform of the cuirassiers of the Empire, his head bare, his sturdy neck confined in its blue-black collar, his torso clad in its cuirass, his arms enclosed in the dark cloth of their sleeves, and his hands covered with their white rounded gauntlets. Napoleon had fallen from his throne too soon to reward, as he wished, the officer who had saved his life in the Russian campaign. Next, there was the son of this stern cavalier, a captain in the African army, painted by Delacroix in the blue tunic with its plaited folds, and the wide red trousers, tight fitting at the feet; then the portrait, painted by Flandrin, of Alfred Liauran, in the uniform of an officer of the line, such as Scilly himself had worn. On both sides were miniatures representing Colonel Castel again, but before he had attained to that rank, and also some men and women of the old régime; for Madame Castel was a Mademoiselle de Trans, of the De Transes of Provence, a very numerous and noble family belonging to the district of Aix. Colonel Castel's father, who had been merely the steward of Marie Alice's father, had saved the, in truth, somewhat inconsiderable property of the family during the storm of 1792, and when in 1829 Mademoiselle de Trans had wished to marry this wealthy man's grandson, who happened to be the son of a celebrated soldier, she had met with no opposition.
All Madame Castel's past, and that of her daughter, was, therefore, spread over the walls of this drawing-room, which was at once austere and homely, like all apartments which are much occupied, and occupied by persons who have cherished recollections. The furniture, which was composed of a curious mixture of objects of the First Empire, the Restoration, and the July Monarchy, certainly had no correspondence with the fortune of the two ladies, which had become very large owing to the modesty of their mode of life; but of this furniture there was not a single piece that did not speak of someone dear both to them and to Scilly, who from childhood had found interest in everything belonging to this family. Had not his father been made a Count on the same day that his companion-in-arms, Castel, had been made a Colonel?
And it was just this intimate acquaintance with the life of these two women which rendered the old man so strangely sensitive in respect of them. He had identified himself with them to the extent of being unable to sleep at night when he had left them visibly pre-occupied. This spare man, sunk as it were into himself, in whom everything revealed strict discipline from the stolidity of his look to the regularity of his gait, and the punctilious rigour of his dress, disclosed, when his two friends were in question, all those treasures of feeling which his mode of life had given him little opportunity to expend; and on this evening, in the month of February, 1880, he was in a state of agitation, like that of a lover who has seen his mistress's eyes bathed in tears the cause of which is unknown to him.
"What subject of grief can they have which they would not tell me?" This question passed again and again through the General's head while his carriage drove along, beaten by the wind and lashed by the rain. It was "regular Prussian weather," as the Count's coachman expressed it; but his master never thought of pulling up the open window through which squalls were coming in every five minutes, and he constantly reverted to his question, for his poor friends had been dreadfully dull the whole evening, and the General could see them mentally just as his last glance had caught them. The mother was seated in an easy-chair at the corner of the fireplace, with her white hair, her profile which had not yet lost its pride, and her strangely-black eyes set in a face wrinkled with those long vertical wrinkles which tell of nobleness of life. The extraordinary paleness of her colourless and, as it were, bloodless complexion betrayed at all times the great sorrows of a widowhood which had found nothing to divert or console it. But that evening this paleness had appeared to the Count even more startling, as, too, had the restlessness in the physiognomy of the daughter.
Although Madame Liauran was past forty, not one thread of silver mingled as yet with the bands of black hair crowning the faded yet not withered face, in which all her mother's features were reproduced, but with more emaciation and pain. A nervous complaint kept her always lying on her couch, which, that evening, was exactly opposite to Madame Castel's easy chair, so that the General, on leaving the drawing-room had been able to see both women at once, and to feel confusedly that on the second there was weighing a double widowhood. No, there was nothing left in this creature to enable her to support life without suffering. To Scilly, who knew in what an atmosphere of tenderness and sorrow the second Marie Alice had grown up, before herself entering an atmosphere of new troubles, this sort of intensified widowhood afforded an easy explanation of the existence in the daughter of a sensitiveness that was already keen in the mother.
But then, were there not years in which the melancholy of the two widows was enlivened or rather warded off by the presence of a child, Alexander Hubert Liauran, who had been born a few months before the Italian war--a charming creature, somewhat too frail to suit the taste of his godfather, the General, who was fond of calling him "Mademoiselle Hubert," and as graceful as all young people are who have been brought up only by women? In the circumstances in which his mother and grandmother found themselves, how could this boy have been anything but the whole world to them?
"If they are so downcast, it can only be on his account," said the Count to himself; "yet there is no question of war--" for the old soldier recollected the promise which the young man had made to him to enlist at once if ever a new strife should bring Germany and France into conflict. This one condition had induced him not to dispute the frightened wish of the two women who had been desirous of keeping the son by their side. The young man, in fact, had at first been attracted by the military profession; but the mere idea of seeing their child dressed in uniform had been too stern a martyrdom for Madame Castel and Madame Liauran, and the child had remained with them, unprovided with any career but that of loving and of being loved.
The remembrance of his godson, Hubert, awakened a fresh train of musing in the Count. His brougham had gone down the Rue du Bac, and was now advancing along the quays. A rain-splash fell on the old soldier's cheek and he closed the pane which had remained open. The sudden sensation of cold made him shrink further into the corner of his carriage and into his thoughts. That kind of backset which is produced by physical annoyance often has the strange effect of heightening the power of remembrance within us. Such was the case with the General, who suddenly began to reflect that for several weeks his godson had rarely spent the evening at the Rue Vaneau. He had not been disturbed by this, knowing that Madame Liauran was very anxious that her son should go into society. They were so much afraid lest he should weary of their narrow life.
Scilly was now compelled by a secret instinct to connect this absence with the inexplicable sadness overspreading the faces of the two women. He understood so well that all the keen forces of the grandmother's and of the mother's heart, had their supreme centre in the existence of their child! And he pictured to himself pell-mell the thousand scenes of passionate affection which he had witnessed since the time of Hubert's birth. He remembered Madame Castel's recrudescent paleness, and Madame Liauran's deadly headaches at the slightest uneasiness in the child. He could see again the days of his education, the course of which was followed by the mother herself. How many times had he admired the young woman as, with her elbow resting on a little table, she employed her evening hours in studying the page of a Latin or Greek book, which the boy was to repeat next day?
With a touching, infatuated tenderness such as is peculiar to certain mothers who would be pained by the slightest divorce between their own mind and their son's, Madame Liauran had sought to associate herself hour by hour with the development of her child's intelligence. Hubert had not taken a lesson in the upper room in the little house at which his mother was not present, engaged with some piece of charitable work, such as knitting a coverlet or hemming handkerchiefs for the poor, but listening with all her attention to what the master was saying. She had pushed the divine susceptibility of her soul's jealousy so far as to be unwilling to have a private tutor. Hubert had, therefore, received instruction from different masters whom Madame Liauran had engaged on the recommendations of her confessor, the Vicar of Sainte-Clotilde, and none of them had been able to dispute with her an influence which she would share only with the grandmother.
When it was necessary that the youth should learn how to ride and fence, the poor woman, to whom an hour spent away from her son was a period of ill-dissembled anguish, had taken months and months to make up her mind. At last she had consented to fit up a room on the ground floor as a fencing school. An old regimental instructor, who was settled in Paris, and whom General Scilly had had under him in the service, used to come three times a week. The mother did not venture to acknowledge that the mere noise of the clashing of the swords awakened within her a dread of some accident, and caused her almost insurmountable emotion. The Count had likewise induced Madame Liauran to entrust her son to him to be taken to the riding-school; but she had done so on condition that he would not leave him for a minute, and every departure for this horse-exercise had continued to be an occasion of secret agony.
Foreign as they might be to his own character, all these shades of feeling, which had made the education of the young man a mysterious poem of foolish terror, painful felicity, and continual effusiveness, had been understood by Count Scilly, thanks to the intelligence of the most devoted affection, and he knew that Madame Castel, though outwardly more mistress of herself, was little better than her daughter. How many glances from the pale woman had he not caught, wrapping Marie Alice Liauran and Hubert in too ardent and absolute idolatry?
The days had passed away; their child was reaching his twenty-second year, and the two widows continued to entwine and bind him with the thousand attentions by which impassioned women, whether mothers, wives, or lovers, know how to keep the object of their passion beside them. With a careful minuteness that was fruitful in intimate delight, they had taken pleasure in furnishing for Hubert the most charming bachelor's rooms that could be imagined. They had enlarged a pavilion running out from behind the house into a little garden which was itself contiguous to the immense garden in the Rue de Varenne. From her own bedroom windows Madame Liauran could see those of her son, who had thus a little independent universe to himself. The two women had had the sense to understand that they could keep Hubert altogether with themselves only by anticipating the wish for a personal existence inevitable in a man of twenty.
On the ground floor of this pavilion were two spacious rooms on a level with the garden--one containing a billiard table, and the other every requisite for fencing. It was here that Hubert received his friends, consisting of some people from the Faubourg Saint-Germain; for, although Madame Castel and Madame Liauran did not visit, they had maintained continuous relations with all those in the Faubourg who occupied themselves with works of charity. These formed a distinct society, very different from the worldly clan, and united in a mode all the closer, because its relations were very frequent, serious and personal. But certainly none of Hubert's young friends moved in an establishment comparable to that which the two women had organised on the first story of the pavilion. They who lived in the simplicity of unexpectant widows, and who would not for the world have modified anything in the antique furniture of their house, had had modern luxury and comfort suddenly revealed to them by their feelings towards Hubert.
The young man's bedroom was hung with prettily and coquettishly fantastical Japanese stuffs, and all the furniture had come from England. Madame Castel and Madame Liauran had been charmed with some specimens which they had seen at the house of a furious Anglomaniac and distant relation of their own, and with the caprice of love they had proposed to give themselves the pleasure of affording this original elegance to their child. Accordingly, the room, which looked towards the south and always had the sun upon it, contained a charming, triple-panelled wardrobe, a wooden wainscot and a what-not mirror over the mantlepiece, two graceful brackets, a low square bed, and arm-chairs that one could lounge in for ever--in short, it was really such a _home_ of refined convenience as every rich Englishman likes to obtain. A bath-room and a smoking-room adjoined this apartment.
Although Hubert was not as yet addicted to tobacco, the two women had anticipated even this habit, and it had afforded them a pretext for fitting up a little room in quite an Oriental fashion, with a profusion of Persian carpets and a broad divan draped with Algerian stuffs brought back by the General from his campaigns, while similar stuffs adorned ceilings and walls, upon which might be seen all the weapons which three generations of officers had left behind them. Some Egyptian sabres recalled the first campaign in which Hubert Castel had served in Buonaparte's retinue. The Captain in the African Army had been the owner of these Arab weapons, and those memorials of the Crimea bore witness to the presence of Sub-Lieutenant Liauran beneath the walls of Sebastopol.
On leaving the smoking-room you entered the study, the windows of which were double, those inside being of coloured glass, so that on dull days it was possible not to notice the aspect of the hour. The two women had endured such frightful recurrences of melancholy on gloomy afternoons, and beneath cruel skies! A large writing-table standing in the middle of the room had in front of it one of those revolving arm-chairs which allows the worker to turn round towards the fireplace without so much as rising. A little Tronchin table presented its raised desk, if the young man took a fancy to stand as he wrote, while a couch awaited his idleness. A cottage piano stood in the corner, and a long, low bookshelf ran along the back part of the room.
Perhaps the books with which the shelves of the last-named piece of furniture were provided interpreted even better than all the other details the anxious solicitude with which Madame Castel and Madame Liauran had made every arrangement in order to remain mistresses of the son during those difficult years which intervene between the twentieth and the thirtieth. Having both, as soldiers' widows, preserved a reverence for a life of action while, at the same time, their extreme tenderness for Hubert rendered them incapable of enduring that he should face it, they had found a compromise for their consciences in the dream of a studious life for him. They ingenuously cherished a wish that he should undertake a large and long work of military history, such as one of the De Trans family had left behind him in the eighteenth century. Was not this the best means for ensuring that he would remain a great deal at home--that is to say, with them? Accordingly, thanks to Scilly's advice, they had formed a tolerable collection of books suitable for this project. Some religious works, a small number of novels, and, alone among modern writers, the works of Lamartine completed the equipment of the shelves.
It is right to say that in that corner of the world where no journal was taken in, contemporary literature was completely unknown. The ideas of the General and of the two women were identical on this point. And the case was nearly the same in respect of the whole contemporary world as it was in respect of literature. Astonishing conversations might have been heard in that drawing-room in the Rue Vaneau, in the course of which the Count would explain to his friends that France was governed by the delegates of the secret societies, with other political theories of similar scope. The same causes always produce the same effects. Precisely as happens in very small country towns, monotony of habit had resulted, with the two widows, in monotony of thought. Feelings were very deep and ideas very narrow in that old house the entrance gate of which was opened but rarely. On such occasions the passer-by could see, at the end of a court, a building on the pediment of which might be read a Latin motto, engraved in former times in honour of Marshal de Créquy, the first owner of the house: _Marti invicto atque indefesso_--to unconquered and indefatigable Mars. The lofty windows of the first storey and of the ground floor, the old colour of the stone, the appropriate silence of the court, all harmonised with the characters of the two residents, whose prejudices were infinite.
Madame Castel and her daughter believed in presentiments, double sight, and somnambulists. They were persuaded that the Emperor Napoleon III. had undertaken the Italian war in fulfilment of a carbonaro oath. Never would these divinely good women have bestowed their friendship upon a Protestant or an Israelite. The mere idea that there might be a conscientious Freethinker would have disconcerted them as though they had been told of the sanctity of a criminal. In short, even the General thought them ingenuous. But, as it sometimes happens with officers condemned to fleeting loves by their roving life and the timid feelings hidden beneath their martial appearance Scilly was not well enough acquainted with women to appreciate the reality of this ingenuousness or the depth of the ignorance of evil in which the two Marie Alices lived. He supposed that all virtuous women were similar, and he confounded all others under the term of "queans." When his liver troubled him excessively he would pronounce this word in a tone which gave grounds for suspecting some bitter deception in his past life. But who among the few people that he met at the house of "his two saints," as he called Madame Castel and her daughter, dreamed of troubling themselves about whether he had been deceived by some garrison adventuress or not?
Still lulled by the rolling of his carriage, the General continued to resign himself to the memory-crisis through which he had been passing since his departure from the Rue Vaneau, and which had caused him to review, in a quarter of an hour, the entire existence of his friends. Other faces also were evoked around these two forms, those, for instance, of Madame de Trans, Madame Castel's first cousin, who lived in the country for part of the year, and who used to come with her three daughters, Yolande, Yseult and Ysabeau, to spend the winter at Paris. These four ladies used to take up their abode in apartments in the Rue de Monsieur, and their Parisian life consisted in hearing low mass at seven o'clock in the morning in the private chapel of a convent situated in the Rue de La Barouillère, in visiting other convents, or in busying themselves in workrooms during the afternoon. They went to bed at about half-past eight, after dining at noon and supping at six.
Twice a week "those De Trans ladies," as the General called them, spent the evening with their cousins. On these occasions they returned to the Rue de Monsieur at ten o'clock, and their servant used to come for them with a parcel containing their pattens and with a lantern that they might cross the courtyard of Madame Castel's house without danger. The Countess de Trans and her three daughters had the sunburnt and freckled faces of peasant women, dresses home-made by seamstresses chosen for them by the nuns, parsimonious tastes written in the meanness of their whole existence, and--a detail revealing their native aristocracy--charming hands and delicious feet which could not be disgraced by the ready-made boots purchased in a pious establishment in the Rue de Sèvres.
The most singular contrast existed between these four women and George Liauran, another cousin on the side of the second Marie Alice. He represented all the fashions in the drawing-room in the Rue Vaneau. He was a man of forty-five who had been launched into wealthy society with a fortune that had at first been a moderate one but had increased by clever speculations on the Bourse. He had his rooms in his club, where he used to breakfast, and every evening a cover was laid for him in one of the houses in which he was a familiar guest. He was small, thin, and very brown. Whether or not he maintained the youth of his pointed beard and very short hair by the artifice of a dye, was a question that had long been debated among the three Demoiselles de Trans, who were stupefied at the sight of George's superior appearance, the varnished soles of his dress-shoes, the embroidered clocks of his silk socks, the chased gold studs in his cuffs, the single pearl in his shirt front, by the slightest knick-knacks, in fact, belonging to this man with the shrewd lively eyes, whose toilet represented to them a life of thrilling prodigality. It was agreed among them that he exercised a fatal influence over Hubert.
Such was doubtless not Madame Liauran's opinion, for she had desired George to act as a chaperon to the young man in the life of the world, when she wished her son to cultivate their family relations. The noble woman rewarded her cousin's lengthened attention by this mark of confidence. He had come to the quiet house very regularly for years, whether it was that the security of this affection was pleasing to him amid the falsities of Parisian society, or that he had long conceived a secret adoration for Marie Alice Liauran, such as the purest women sometimes unconsciously inspire in misanthropes--for George had that shade of pessimism which is to be met with in nearly all club-livers. The nature of the character of this man, who was always inclined to believe the worst of everything, was the object of an astonishment on the part of the General that custom had failed to allay; but on this evening he omitted to reflect upon it. The recollection of George only served to heighten that of Hubert still more.
Irresistibly the worthy man came to recognise the obviousness of the fact that his two friends could not be so cruelly downcast except on account of their child. Yes; but why? This point of interrogation, which summed up the whole of his reverie, was more present than ever to the Count's mind as his dowager equipage stopped before his house. Another carriage was standing on the other side of the gateway, and Scilly thought that in it he could recognise the little brougham which Madame Liauran had given to her son.
"Is that you, John?" he cried to the coachman through the rain.
"The Count, sir? . . . ." replied a voice which Scilly was startled to recognise.
"Hubert is waiting for me within," he said to himself; and he crossed the threshold of the door a prey to curiosity such as he had not experienced for years.