Chapter 16

"It's to be to-day at four, as you wished," said Denoisel.

"Good!" said Henri, giving his pistol to the man. "Look here," he continued, putting his fingers over two holes on the cardboard which were rather far away from the others; "if it were not for these two flukes this would be fit to frame. Oh, I'm glad it's arranged for to-day." He lifted his arm with the gesture of a man accustomed to shooting and just about to take aim, and then shook his hand about to get the blood into it again.

"Only imagine," he continued, "that it had quite an effect on me--the idea of this affair--when I was in bed this morning. It's that deuced horizontal position; I don't fancy it's good for one's courage."

They all lunched together at Denoisel's and then proceeded to smoke. Henri was cheerful and communicative, talking all the time. The surgeon arrived at the hour appointed, and they all four got into the carriage and drove off.

They had been silent until they were about half way, when Henri suddenly threw his cigar out of the window impatiently.

"Give me a cigar, Denoisel, a good one. It's very important to have a good cigar when you are going to shoot, you know. If you are to shoot properly you mustn't be nervous; that's the principal thing. I took a bath this morning. One must keep calm. Now, driving is the most detestable thing; the reins saw your hand for you. I'd wager you couldn't shoot straight after driving; your fingers would be stiff. Novels are absurd with their duels, where the man arrives and flings his reins to his groom. What should you think if I told you that one ought to go in for a sort of training? It's quite true, though. I never knew such a good shot as an Englishman I once met; he goes to bed at eight o'clock; never drinks stimulants and takes a short walk every evening like my father does. Every time that I have driven in a carriage without springs to the shooting-gallery, my targets have shown it. By-the-bye, this is a very decent carriage, Denoisel. Well, with a cigar it's the same thing. Now a cigar that's difficult to smoke keeps you at work, you have to keep lifting your hand to your mouth, and that makes your hand unsteady; while a good cigar--you ask any good shot, and he'll tell you the same thing--it's soothing, it puts your nerves in order. There's nothing better than the gentle movement of the arm as you take the cigar out of your mouth and put it in again. It's slow and regular."

* * * * *

On arriving, they found M. de Villacourt and his seconds waiting between the two lakes. The ground was white with the snow that had fallen during the morning. In the woods the trees stretched their bare branches towards the sky, and in the distance the red sunset could be seen between the rows of dark trees. They walked as far as the Montalet road. The distances were measured, Denoisel's pistols loaded, and the opponents then took their places opposite each other. Two walking-sticks, laid on the snow, marked the limits of the ten paces they were each allowed. Denoisel walked with Henri to the place which had fallen to his lot, and as he was pushing down a corner of his collar for him which covered his necktie, Henri said in a low voice: "Thanks, old man; my heart's beating a trifle under my armpit, but you'll be satisfied----"

M. de Villacourt took off his frock-coat, tore off his necktie, and threw them both some distance from him. His shirt was open at the neck, showing his strong, broad, hairy chest. The opponents were armed, and the seconds moved back and stood together on one side.

"Ready!" cried a voice.

At this word M. de Villacourt moved forward almost in a straight line. Henri kept quite still and allowed him to walk five paces. At the sixth he fired.

M. de Villacourt fell to the ground, and the witnesses watched him lay down his pistol and press his thumbs with all his strength on the double hole which the bullet had made on entering his body.

"Ah! I'm not done for--Ready, monsieur!" he called out in a loud voice to Henri, who, thinking all was over, was moving away.

M. de Villacourt picked up his pistol and proceeded to do his four remaining paces as far as the walking-stick, dragging himself along on his hands and knees and leaving a track of blood on the snow behind him. On arriving at the stick he rested his elbow on the ground and took aim slowly and steadily.

"Fire! Fire!" called out Dardouillet.

Henri, standing still and covering his face with his pistol, was waiting. He was pale, and there was a proud, haughty look about him. The shot was fired; he staggered a second, then fell flat, with his face on the ground and with outstretched arms, his twitching fingers grasping for a moment at the snow.

XXXIX

M. Mauperin had gone out into the garden as he usually did on coming downstairs in the morning, when, to his surprise, he saw Denoisel advancing to meet him.

"You here, at this hour?" he said. "Why, where did you sleep?"

"M. Mauperin," said Denoisel, pressing his hand as he spoke.

"What is it? What's the matter?" asked M. Mauperin, feeling that something had happened.

"Henri is wounded."

"Dangerously? Is it a duel?"

Denoisel nodded.

"Wounded? Ah, he is dead!"

Denoisel took M. Mauperin's two hands in his for a second, without uttering a word.

"Dead!" repeated M. Mauperin mechanically, and he opened his hands as though something had slipped from their grasp. "His poor mother, Henri!" and the tears came with the words. "Oh, God--We don't know how much we love them till this comes--and only thirty years old!" He sank down on a garden-seat, choked with sobs.

"Where is he?" he asked at last.

"There," and Denoisel pointed to the window of Henri's room.

From Ville-d'Avray he had taken the corpse straight to M. Dardouillet's, and during the evening had found a pretext for sending for M. Bernard, who had a key of the Mauperins' house. In the middle of the night, while the family were asleep, the three men had taken off their shoes, carried Henri's dead body upstairs, and laid it on the bed in his own room.

"Thank you," said M. Mauperin, and making a sign to him that he could not talk he got up.

They walked round the garden four or five times in silence. The tears came every now and then into M. Mauperin's eyes, but they did not fall. Words, too, seemed to come to his lips and die away again. Finally, in a deep, crushed voice, breaking the long silence by a desperate effort, and not looking at Denoisel, M. Mauperin asked an abrupt question.

"Was it an honourable death?"

"He was your son," answered Denoisel.

The father lifted his head at these words, as if strength had come to him with which to fight against his grief. "Well, well; I must do my duty now. You have done your part," and he drew Denoisel nearer to him, his tears falling freely at last.

XL

"Murder is the name for affairs of this kind," M. Barousse was saying to Denoisel as they followed the hearse to the cemetery. "Why didn't you arrange matters between them?"

"After that blow?"

"After or before," said M. Barousse, peremptorily.

"You'd better say that to his father!"

"He's a soldier--but you, hang it all--you've never served in the army, and you let him get killed! I consider you killed him."

"Look here, I've had enough, M. Barousse."

"You see, I reason things out; I've been a magistrate."--Barousse had been a judge on the Board of Trade.--"You have the law courts and you can demand justice. But duels are contrary to all laws, human or divine; remember that. Why, just fancy--a scoundrel comes and gives me a blow in the face; and he must needs kill me as well. Ah, I can promise you one thing: if ever I'm on a jury, and there's a case of a duel--well, I look upon it as murder. Duellists are assassins. In the first place it's a cowardly thing----"

"A cowardly thing that every one hasn't the courage to carry through, M. Barousse; it's like suicide."

"Ah, if you are going to uphold suicide," said Barousse, and leaving the discussion he continued in a softened tone: "Such a fine fellow too, poor Henri! And then Mauperin, and his wife, and his daughter--the whole family plunged into this grief. No, it makes me wild when I think of it. Why, I had known him all his life." Barousse pulled his watch half out of his waistcoat-pocket as he spoke. "There!" he said, breaking off suddenly; "I know it will be sold; I shall have missed _The Concert_, a superb proof, earlier than the one with the dedication."

* * * * *

Denoisel returned to Briche with M. Mauperin, who, on arriving, went straight upstairs to his wife. He found her in bed, with the blinds down and the curtains drawn, overwhelmed and crushed by her terrible sorrow.

Denoisel opened the drawing-room door and saw Renée, seated on an ottoman, sobbing, with her handkerchief up to her mouth.

"Renée," he said, going to her and taking her hands in his, "some one killed him----"

Renée looked at him and then lowered her eyes.

"That man would never have known; he never read anything and he did not see any one; he lived like a regular wolf; he didn't subscribe to the _Moniteur_, of course. Do you understand?"

"No," stammered Renée, trembling all over.

"Well, it must have been an enemy who sent the paper to that man. Ah, you can't understand such cowardly things; but that's how it all came about, though. One of his seconds showed me the paper with the paragraph marked----"

Renée was standing up, her eyes wide open with terror; her lips moved and she opened her mouth to speak--to cry out: "I sent it!"

Then all at once she put her hand to her heart, as if she had just been wounded there, and fell down unconscious and rigid on the carpet.

XLI

Denoisel came every day to Briche to inquire about Renée. When she was a little better, he was surprised that she did not ask for him. He had always been accustomed to seeing her when she was not well, even when she was lying down, as though he had been one of the family. And whenever she had been ill, he was always one of the first she had asked for. She expected him to entertain and amuse her, to enliven her during her convalescence and bring back her laughter. He was offended and kept away for a day or two, and then when he came again he still could not see her. One day he was told that she was too tired, another day that the Abbé Blampoix was talking to her. Finally, at the end of a week, he was allowed to see her.

He expected an effusive welcome, such as invalids give their friends when they see them again for the first time. He thought that after an illness she would, in her impulsive way, be almost ready to embrace him. Renée held out her hand to him and just let her fingers lie in his for a second; she said a few words such as she might have said to any one, and after about a quarter of an hour closed her eyes as though she were sleepy. This coldness, which he could not understand in the least, irritated Denoisel and made him feel bitter. He was deeply hurt and humiliated, as his affection for Renée was pure and sincere and of such long standing. He tried to imagine what she could possibly have against him, and wondered whether M. Barousse had been instilling his ideas into her. Was she blaming him, as a witness of the duel, for her brother's death? Just about this time one of his friends who had a yacht at Cannes invited him for a cruise in the Mediterranean, and he accepted the invitation and went away at once.

Renée was afraid of Denoisel. She only remembered the commencement of the attack that she had had in his presence, that terrible moment which had been followed by her fall and a fit of hysterics. She had had a sensation of being suffocated by her brother's blood, and she knew that a cry had come to her lips. She did not know whether she had spoken, whether her secret had escaped her while she was unconscious. Had she told Denoisel that she had killed Henri, that it was she who had sent that newspaper? Had she confessed her crime?

When Denoisel entered her room she imagined that he knew all. The embarrassment which he felt and which was the effect of her manner to him, his coldness, which was entirely due to her own, all this confirmed her in her idea, in her certainty that she had spoken and that it was a judge who was there with her.

Before Denoisel's visit was over, her mother got up to go out of the room a minute, but Renée clung to her with a look of terror and insisted on her staying. It occurred to her that she might defend herself by saying that it was a fatality; that by sending the newspaper she had only meant to make the man put in his claim; that she had wanted to prevent her brother from getting this name and to make him break off his engagement; but then she would have been obliged to say why she had wished to do this--why she had wished to ruin her brother's future and prevent him from becoming a rich man. She would have had to confess all; and the bare idea of defending herself in such a way, even in the eyes of the man she respected more than any other, horrified and disgusted her. It seemed to her that the least she could do would be to leave to the one she had killed his fair fame and the silence of death.

She breathed freely when she heard of Denoisel's departure, for it seemed to her, then, as though her secret were her own once more.

XLII

Renée gradually recovered and in a few months' time seemed to be quite well again. All the outward appearances of health came back to her, and she had no suffering at all. She did not even feel anything of the disturbance which illness leaves in the organs it has touched and in the life it has just attacked.

All at once the trouble began again. When she went upstairs or walked uphill she suddenly felt suffocated. Palpitation became more frequent and more violent, and then just as suddenly all this would stop again, as it happens sometimes with these insidious diseases which at intervals seem to entirely forget their victims.

At the end of a few weeks the doctor from Saint-Denis, who was attending Renée, took M. Mauperin aside.

"I don't feel satisfied about your daughter," he said. "There is something not quite clear to me. I should like to have a consultation with a specialist. These heart affections are very treacherous sometimes."

"Yes, these heart affections--you are quite right," stammered M. Mauperin.

He could not find anything else to say. His former notions of medicine, the desperate doctrines of the old school, Corvisart, the epigraph in his famous book on the subject of heart affections: "_Hæret lateri lethalis arundo_"; all these things came suddenly back to his mind, clearly and distinctly. He could see the pages again of those books so full of terror.

"You see," the doctor went on, "the great danger of these diseases is that they are so often of long standing. People send for us when the disease has made great headway. There are symptoms that the patient has not even noticed. Your daughter must have been very impressionable always, from her very childhood, I should say; isn't that so? Torrents of tears for the least blame, her face on fire for nothing at all, and then her pulse beating a hundred a minute, a constant state of emotion with her, very excitable, tempers like convulsions, always slightly feverish. She would put a certain amount of passion into everything, I should say, into her friendship, her games, her likes and dislikes; am I not right? Oh yes, this is generally the way with children in whom this organ predominates and who have an unfortunate predisposition to hypertrophy. Tell me now, has she lately had any great emotion--any great grief?"

"Yes, oh yes; her brother's death."

"Her brother's death. Ah yes, there was that," said the doctor, not appearing to attach any great importance, nevertheless, to this information. "I meant to ask you, though, whether she had been crossed in love, for instance."

"She? Crossed in love? Oh, good heavens!" and M. Mauperin shrugged his shoulders, and half joining his hands looked up in the air.

"Well, I'm only asking you that for the sake of having my conscience clear. Accidents of this kind only develop the germ that is already there and hasten on the disease. The physical influence of the passions on the heart is a theory--It has been studied a great deal the last twenty years; and quite right, too, in my opinion. The thesis that the heart is lacerated in a burst of temper, in any great moral----"

M. Mauperin interrupted him:

"Then, a consultation--you fancy--you think--don't you?"

"Yes, M. Mauperin, that will be quite the best thing. You see, it will be more satisfactory for every one; for you, and for me. We should call in M. Bouillaud, I suppose. He is considered the first authority."

"Yes--M. Bouillaud," repeated M. Mauperin, mechanically nodding his head in assent.

XLIII

It was just five minutes past twelve, and M. Mauperin was seated by Renée's bed, holding her two hands in his. Renée glanced at the time-piece.

"He'll be here soon," said M. Mauperin.

Renée answered by closing her eye-lids gently, and her breathing and the beating of her heart could be heard like the ticking of a watch in the silence of the room at night.

Suddenly a peal of the door-bell rang out, clearly and imperiously, vibrating through the house. It seemed to M. Mauperin as though it had been rung within him, and a shudder passed through him to his very finger-tips like a needle-prick. He went to the door and opened it.

"It is some one who rang by mistake, sir," said the servant-man.

"It's very warm," said M. Mauperin to his daughter as he took his seat again, looking very pale.

Five minutes later the servant knocked. The doctor was waiting in the drawing-room.

"Ah!" said M. Mauperin, getting up once more.

"Go to him," murmured Renée, and then calling him back, she asked, looking alarmed: "Is he going to examine me?"

"I don't know; I don't think so. There'll be no need, perhaps," answered M. Mauperin, playing with the knob of the door.

* * * * *

M. Mauperin had fetched the doctor and left him with his daughter. He was in the drawing-room waiting the result. He had walked up and down, taken a seat, and gazed mechanically at a flower on the carpet, and had then gone to the window and was tapping with his fingers on the pane.

It seemed to him as though everything within himself and all round had suddenly stopped. He did not know whether he had been there an hour or a minute. It was one of those moments in life for him, the measure and duration of which cannot be calculated. He felt as though he were living again through his whole existence, and as though all the emotions of a lifetime were crowded into a moment that was eternal.

He turned dizzy, like a man in a dream falling from a height and enduring the anguish of falling. All kinds of indistinct ideas, of confused anxieties and vague terrors, seemed to rise from the pit of his stomach and buzz round his temples. Yesterday, to-day, to-morrow, the doctor, his daughter, her illness, all this whirled round in his head, perplexing him, mingled as it all was with a physical sensation of uneasiness, anxiety, fear, and dread. Then all at once one idea became distinct. He had one of those clear visions that cross the mind at such times. He saw the doctor with his ear pressed against his daughter's back and he listened with him. He thought he heard the bed creak as it does when any one turns on it. It was over, they would be coming now; but no one came. He began pacing up and down again, as he could not keep still. He grew irritable with impatience and thought the doctor was a very long time, but the next minute he said to himself that it was a good sign, that a great specialist would not relish wasting his time, and that if there had been nothing he could do, he would already have been back. Fresh hope came to him with this thought: his daughter was saved; when the doctor came in he should see by his face that his daughter was saved. He watched the door, but no one came. Then he began to say to himself that they would have to take precautions, that perhaps she would always be delicate, that there were plenty of people who went on living in spite of palpitation of the heart. Then the word, the terrible word, _death_, came to him and haunted him. He tried to drive it away by thinking over and over again the same thoughts about convalescence, getting well, and good health. He went over in his mind all the persons he had known, who had been ill a long time, and who were not dead. And yet in spite of all his efforts the same question kept coming back to him: "What would the doctor tell him?"

He repeated this over and over again to himself. It seemed to him as though this visit were never going to finish and never would finish. And then at times he would shudder at the idea of seeing the door open. He would have liked to remain as he was forever, and _never_ know. Finally hope came back to him once more, just as the door opened.

"Well?" said M. Mauperin to the doctor as he entered the room.

"You must be brave," said the doctor.

M. Mauperin looked up, glanced at the doctor, moved his lips without uttering a word--his mouth was dry and parched.

The doctor began to explain in full his daughter's disease, its gravity, the complications that were to be feared: he then wrote out a long prescription, saying to M. Mauperin at each item:

"You understand?"

"Perfectly!" answered M. Mauperin, looking stupefied.

* * * * *

"Ah, my dear little girl, you are going to get well!"

These were M. Mauperin's words to his daughter when he went back to her room.

"Really?" she asked.

"Kiss me."

"What did he tell you?"

"Well, you need only look at my face to know what he said," answered M. Mauperin, smiling at her. He felt as though it would kill him, though, that smile; and turning away under the pretence of looking for his hat, he continued, "I must go to Paris to get the prescription made up."

XLIV

At the railway station M. Mauperin saw the doctor getting into the train. He got into another compartment, as he did not feel as though he had the strength to speak to him or even look at him.

On arriving in Paris he went to a chemist's and was told that it would take three hours to make up the prescription. "Three hours!" he exclaimed, but at heart he was glad that it would be so long. It would give him some time before returning to the house. When once he was in the street he walked fast. He had no consecutive ideas, but a sort of heavy, ceaseless throbbing in his head like the throb of neuralgia. His sensations were blunted, as though he were in a stupor. He saw nothing but the legs of people walking and the wheels of the carriages turning round. His head felt heavy and at the same time empty. As he saw other people walking, he walked too. The passers-by appeared to be taking him with them, and the crowd to be carrying him along in its stream. Everything looked faint, indistinct, and of a neutral tint, as things do the day after any wild excitement or intoxication. The light and noise of the streets he seemed to see and hear in a dream. He would not have known there was any sun if it had not been for the white trousers the policemen were wearing, which had caught his eye several times.