Part 6

At that moment, in point of fact, M. de Villemer was by no means pleased with his brother, and listened to him with an impatience which was painful enough. The Duke, having entered the drawing-room with his mother, had come and seated himself near him behind the piano, an isolated and protected place, which was a favorite with the Marquis; here then the Duke began the following conversation, speaking in a low voice but in a very lively manner:--

"Well," he said, "you saw her alone just now; did you speak to her of me?"

"But," replied M. de Villemer, "what singular persistency!"

"There is nothing singular about it," rejoined the Duke, as if he were continuing the details of a confidential disclosure already made. "I am struck, touched, taken. I am in love if you will. Yes, in love with her, upon my honor! It is no joke. Are you going to reproach me, when for the first time in my life I make you my confidant? Was that not agreed upon this morning? Did we not swear to tell each other everything, and to be each other's best friend? I asked you whether you had any feeling for Mlle de Saint-Geneix; you answered me 'No,' very seriously. Do not, therefore, think it extraordinary that I ask you to serve me with her."

"My friend," replied the Marquis, "I have done exactly the contrary of what you would have me to do. I told her to take nothing you said too seriously."

"Ah, traitor!" cried the Duke, with a gayety whose frankness was as a reparation for his former prejudices against his brother, "that is the way you serve your friends. Trust in Pylades! At the first call he resigns; he whistles at my dreams, and gives my hopes to the winds. But what do you suppose will become of me, if you abandon me in this fashion?"

"For that kind of service I have n't even common sense, you see very plainly."

"That's so; at the first difficulty you renounce it. Well, but I am maddened. I have driven from my heart all that is not you, and none but you shall hear of my new flames."

"With regard to the present one at least, will you pledge me your honor?"

"Ah! you are in great fear lest I compromise her?"

"That would give me serious pain."

"Bah! Come now, why?"

"Because she is proud, sensitive perhaps, and would leave my mother, who dotes upon her,--have you not observed that?"

"Yes, and it is that very thing which has turned my head. She must really be a girl of great cleverness and a deal of heart. Our mother has such perfect tact. This evening, in taking me to task a little for what she considered my attempt at teasing, she held the sugarplum very high, saying, 'Your conduct toward Caroline was neither proper nor agreeable. She is a person of whom you are not permitted to think.' The deuce! A fellow always has the right to dream; that certainly harms no one. But see though how pretty she is; how alive in the midst of all those plastered women! One can look at the contour of her face in the nearest and most trying light; one will not see there those dull, sticky lines which make the others look like plaster casts. It is true she is too pretty to be any one's young-lady companion. My mother can never keep her; every one will fall in love with her, and if she continues to be well-behaved some one will want to marry her."

"Then," rejoined the Marquis, "you cannot think of her."

"Why so, pray?" demanded the Duke. "Am I not to-day a poor devil with nothing in the world? Is she not of good birth? Is not her reputation spotless? I should like to know what my mother would find to say against it,--she who already calls the young lady her daughter, and who wishes us to respect her as if she were our own sister."

"You, sir, carry your enthusiasm or your joke to great lengths," said the Marquis, stunned by what he heard.

"Good," thought the Duke, "he has forgotten his brotherly _thee_ and _thou_; he calls me 'you, sir.'"

And he continued to maintain with astonishing seriousness that he was quite capable of marrying Mlle de Saint-Geneix, if there were no other means of winning her. "I should prefer to run away with her," he added; "that would better accord with my usual way of doing things; but I no longer have the means with which to run away with her, and now my laundress herself would not trust herself to my hands. Besides, it is time to break with my entire past. I have said it to you, and it is done, because I have said it. Starting from to-day,--a complete reformation along the whole line. You are going to see a new man,--a man whom I myself do not know, and who indeed is going to astonish me; but that man, I feel now, is capable of all things, all, even to believe, to love, and to marry. So good evening, brother; those are my last words; if you do not repeat them to Mlle de Saint-Geneix, it is because you wish to do nothing to aid me in my conversion."

The Duke withdrew, leaving his brother stupefied,--divided between the necessity of believing him sincere in his momentary passion and the indignity of being solicited as an accomplice in a flagrant libertinism.

"But no," he said to himself, going to his own apartments; "that was all merely his gayety, his trifling, his folly,--or it was still the wine. Nevertheless, this morning in the grove he interrogated me about Caroline with a surprising insistence, and that, too, almost in the midst of my confidences concerning my past, which he received with genuine emotion, with tears in his eyes. What kind of a man then is this brother of mine? Not twelve hours ago, he thought of killing himself. He hated me, he detested himself. Then I believed I had won his heart. He sobbed in my arms. All day long it has been the extreme of impulse and devotion, winning tenderness and goodwill; and to-night I no longer know what it is. Has his reason received some shock in the uncurbed life which he has hitherto led, or did he indeed make sport of me all the fore part of the day? Am I the dupe of my need to love? Shall I have cause for bitter repentance, or have I in fact taken upon myself the task of caring for a diseased brain?"

In his fright the Marquis accepted this latter supposition as the less appalling; but another anguish was mingled with it. The Marquis felt himself bruised and irritated by a sentiment which he did not avow to himself, and to which he would not so much as give a name. He set himself to work and worked badly. He went to bed and slept still worse.

As for the Duke, he innocently rubbed his hands. "I have succeeded," said he to himself; "I have found the proper reaction against his despair. Poor, dear brother! I have turned his head, I have aroused his feelings, I have excited his jealousy. He is in love. He will be cured, and he will live. For passion there is no remedy but passion. It is not my mother who would have found that out, and if she is opposed to so humble a match, she will forgive me for making it on the day when she shall know that my brother would have died of his regrets and of his constancy."

The Duke was not perhaps mistaken, and a wiser man could have been less ingenious. He would have endeavored to lead the Marquis back to an interest in life through the love of letters, through filial affection, through reason and duty,--things which were all excellent, but which the invalid himself had long since vainly called to his aid. Now the Duke, from his point of view, imagined that he had rescued everything, and did not foresee that with an exclusive nature like his brother's, the remedy might soon become worse than the disease. The Duke, knowing human susceptibility through himself, believed in a general susceptibility in women, and admitted no exceptions. According to his ideas, Caroline would not make any struggle at all; he believed her already quite disposed to love the Marquis. "She is a good young woman," he said to himself; "not at all ambitious, and entirely disinterested. I judged her at the first glance, and my mother assures me that I am not mistaken. She will yield through her need to love some one, and through allurement, too, for my brother has great attractions for an intelligent woman. If she resists him awhile, it will be all the better; he will be so much the more attached to her. My mother will see nothing of this, and if she does see it, it will agitate her, it will occupy her too. She will be good, she will preach the requirements of caste, and yield to endearment. These little domestic emotions will rescue her from the tedium which is her greatest torment."

To these heartless calculations the Duke gave himself up with perfect candor. He grew tender himself over this sort of puerility which oftentimes characterizes corruption as an exhaustion. He laughed to himself as he regarded the beautiful victim already immolated, in imagination to his projects; and if any one had questioned him on the subject, he would have answered with a laugh, that he was in the act of arranging a romance after the manner of Florian, as a beginning to his contemplated life of sentiment and innocence.

He remained in the drawing-room the whole evening, and found the means to speak to Caroline without being overheard. "My mother has been scolding me," he said. "It appears that I have been absurd with you. I did not suspect such a thing, I assure you, for I really wanted to prove to you my respect. In a word, my mother has made me pledge my honor that I will not think of making love to you, and I pledged it without hesitation. Are you quieted now?"

"All the more that I have not thought of being disquieted."

"That's fortunate. Since my mother forced me into the rudeness of saying to a woman what we never say, even when we think it, let us be good friends like two well-meaning people as we are, and let us be frank with each other to commence with. Promise me, then, no longer to speak ill of me to my brother."

"No longer? When, pray, have I spoken ill of you to him?"

"You did not complain of my impertinence--there, this evening?"

"I said that I dreaded your raillery, and that, if it continued, I should go away; that is all."

"Indeed," thought the Duke, "they are already on better terms than I had hoped." He rejoined, "If you think of quitting my mother on my account, it will condemn me to go away from her myself."

"That could not be thought of. A son giving place to a stranger!"

"That nevertheless is what I have resolved to do, if I displease you and if I frighten you; but remain, and command me to be and do as you would wish. Ought I never to see you, never speak to you, not even salute you?"

"I exact no affectation in any sense whatever. You are too clever and experienced not to have understood that I am not skilled enough in the artifices of speech to sustain any assault against you."

"You are too modest; but since you do not wish that the prescribed forms of admiration should mingle with those of respect, and since the attention, which it is so difficult for you not to awaken, alarms and afflicts you, be at ease; I consider it said and done: you will have no further cause, of complaint in me. I swear it by all that a man can hold sacred,--by my mother!"

After having thus made reparation for his fault and reassured Caroline, whose going away would have foiled his plan, the Duke began to speak to her of Urbain with a veritable enthusiasm. Upon this point he was so thoroughly sincere, that Mlle de Saint-Geneix laid aside her prejudices. Her mind became calm again, and she hastened to write to Camille that everything was going well, that the Duke was much better than his reputation, and that, at all events, he had engaged upon his honor not to disturb her.

During the month succeeding that day Caroline saw very little of M. de Villemer. He was obliged to be occupied with the details of settling his brother's debts; then he absented himself. He told his mother that he was going to Normandy to see a certain historical castle whose plan was necessary for his work, and he set out in quite an opposite direction, confiding to the Duke alone that he was going in the strictest incognito to see his son.

As for the Duke himself, he was very busy with the change of his pecuniary position. He sold his horses, his furniture and personal property, discharged his lackeys, and came, at the request of his mother, to install himself provisionally, for economy's sake, in a suite of apartments between the ground floor and the first story of her hotel, which was going to be sold also, but with the reservation that the Marquis should remain for ten years the principal tenant, and that nothing should be changed in the apartments of his mother.

Urbain himself had ascended to the third story and piled up his books in a lodging more than modest, protesting that he had never been better off, and that he had a magnificent view of the Champs-Élysées. During his absence the preparations for the departure to the country were made, and Mlle de Saint-Geneix wrote to her sister: "I am counting the days which separate us from the blissful time when I can at last walk to my heart's content, and breathe a pure air. I have enough of flowers which faint and die upon the mantels; I am thirsty for those which bloom in the open fields."

VII

LETTER FROM THE MARQUIS DE VILLEMER TO THE DUKE D'ALÉRIA.

POLIGNAC, _via_ LE PUY (HAUTE-LOIRE), May 1, '45.

The address I give you is a secret which I intrust to you, and which I am happy to intrust to you. If by any unforeseen accident I should chance to die, away from you, you would know that your first duty would be to send hither and see that the child was not neglected by the people in whose charge I have placed him. These people do not know who I am; they know neither my name nor my country; they are not aware even that the child is mine. That these precautions are necessary, I have already told you. M. de G---- clings to suspicions which would naturally lead him to doubt the legitimacy of his daughter,--really his own, nevertheless. This fear was the torture of their unhappy mother, to whom I swore that the existence of Didier should be concealed until Laura's fortune had been assured. I have noticed more than once the uneasy curiosity with which my movements have been watched. I cannot therefore cloud them too much in mystery.

This is my reason for placing my son so far away from me and in a province where having no other interests of any kind, I run less risk than I should elsewhere of being betrayed through some accidental meeting. The people with whom I have to deal give me every possible guaranty of their honesty, goodwill, and discretion, in the single fact that they abstain from questioning or watching me. The nurse is the niece of Joseph, that good old servant whom we lost a year ago. It was he who recommended her to me; but she, too, is in complete ignorance regarding me. She knows me by the name of "Bernyer." The woman is young, healthy, and good-humored, a simple peasant, but comfortably provided for. I should fear that, in making her richer, I could not eradicate the parsimonious habits of the country, which, I perceive, are even more inveterate here than elsewhere; and I have held merely to this, that the poor child, while brought up in the true conditions of rustic development, should not have to suffer from an excess of these conditions; this excess having precisely the same effect upon children that lack of sunlight produces upon plants.

My hosts, for I am writing this in their house, are farmers, having charge of the enclosed grounds, within which rises, from a rocky platform, one of the rudest of mediæval fortresses, the cradle of that family whose last representatives played such an unhappy part in the recent vicissitudes of our monarchy. Their ancestors in this province played no less sad a one, and no less important to an age when the feudal system had made the part of king very insignificant. It is not without interest for the historical work upon which I am engaged, to gather up the traditions here and to study the look and character of the old manor and the surrounding country; so I have not absolutely deceived my mother in telling her that I was going to travel in "search of information."

There is really much to be learned here in the very heart of our beautiful France, which it is not fashionable to visit, and which consequently still hides its shrines of poetry and its mines of science in inaccessible nooks. Here is a country without roads, without guides, without any facilities for locomotion, where every discovery must be conquered at the price of danger or fatigue. The inhabitants know as little about it as strangers. Their purely rural lives confine their ideas of locality to a very limited horizon: on a stroll, then, it is impossible to get any information, if you do not know the names and relative situations of all the little straggling villages; indeed, without a very complete map to consult at every step, although I have been in this country three times in the two years of Didier's life here, I could find my way only in a straight line, a thing entirely out of the question over a soil cut up with deep ravines, crossed in every way by lofty walls of lava, and furrowed by numerous torrents.

But I need not go far to appreciate the wild and striking character of the landscape. Nothing, my friend, can give you an idea of this basin of Le Puy with its picturesque beauty, and I can think of no place more difficult to describe. It is not Switzerland, it is less terrible; it is not Italy, it is more lovely; it is Central France with all its Vesuviuses extinct and clothed with splendid vegetation; and yet it is neither Auvergne nor Limosin, with which you are familiar.

* * * * *

But I have said enough to keep my promise and to give you some general idea of the country. My dear brother, you urged me to write a long letter, foreseeing that, in my lonely, sleepless hours, I should think too much about myself, my sad life, and my painful past, in the presence of this child who is sleeping yonder while I write! It is true that the sight of him reopens many wounds, and that it is doing me a kindness to compel me to forget myself while generalizing my impressions. And yet I find here powerful emotions, too, which are not without sweetness. Shall I close my letter before I have spoken of him? You see I hesitate; I fear I shall make you smile. You pretend to detest children. As for me, without feeling that repugnance I used formerly to shrink from coming in contact with these little beings, whose helpless candor had something appalling to my mind. To-day I am totally changed in this regard, and even if you should laugh at me, I must still open my heart to you without reserve. Yes, yes, my friend, I must do it. That you may know me thoroughly, I ought to conquer my sensitiveness.

Well, then, you must know I worship this child, and I see, that sooner or later, he will be my whole life and my whole aim. It is not duty alone that brings me to him, it is my own heart that cries out for him, when I have gone without seeing him for a certain length of time. He is comfortable here, he wants for nothing, he is growing strong, he is beloved. His adopted parents are excellent souls, and, as to caring for him properly, I can see that their hearts are in the matter as well as their interests. They live in a part of the manor-house which yet remains standing and which has been suitably restored. They are neat and painstaking people, and they are bringing up the child within these ruins, on the summit of the large rock, under a bright sky, and in a pure and bracing atmosphere. The woman has lived in Paris; she has correct ideas as to the amount of energy and also of humoring that it takes to manage a child more delicate, indeed, than her own children, but with as good a constitution; so I need not feel anxious about anything, but can await the age when it will become necessary to care for and form other material than the body. Well! I am ill at ease about him just as soon as I am away from him. His existence then often seems like an anxiety and a deep trouble in my life; but, when I see him again, all fears vanish and all bitterness is allayed. What shall I say then? I love him! I feel that he belongs to me and that I belong equally to him. I feel that he is mine, yes, mine, far more than his poor mother ever was; as his features and disposition become more marked, I seek vainly in him for something which may recall her to me, and this something does not seem to unfold. Contrary to the usual law which makes boys rather than girls inherit the traits of the mother, it is his father that this child will resemble, if he continues, henceforth, to develop in the way he seems to be doing now. He has already my indolence and the unconquerable timidity of my earliest years, which my mother so often tells me about, and my quick, impulsive moments of unreserved confidence, which made her, she says, forgive me and love me in spite of all. This year he has taken notice of my presence near him. He was afraid at first, but now he smiles and tries to talk. His smile and broken words make me tremble; and when he takes my hand to walk, a certain grateful feeling toward him, I cannot tell what, brings to my eyes tears which I conceal with difficulty.

But this is enough, I do not want to appear too much of a child myself: I have told you this that you may no longer wonder why I refuse to listen to your plans for me. My friend, you must never speak to me of love or marriage. I have not store of happiness enough to bestow any upon a being that would be new to my life. My life itself is hardly sufficient for my duties, as I see clearly in the affection I have for Didier, for my mother, and for you. With this thirst for study, which so often becomes a fever in me, what time should I have for enlivening the leisure hours of a young woman eager for happiness and gayety? No, no, do not think of it; and if the idea of such isolation is sometimes fearful at my age, help me to await the moment when it will be perfectly natural. This will be my task for several years to come. Your affection, as you know, will make them seem fewer and shorter. Keep it for me, indulgent to my faults, generous even toward my confidence.

P. S. I presume that my mother has left for Séval with Mlle de Saint-Geneix, and that you have accompanied them. If my mother is anxious about me, tell her you have heard from me and that I am still in Normandy.

VIII

The same day on which the Marquis wrote to his brother Caroline wrote to her sister, and sketched, after her own manner, the country where she was.

SÉVAL, near CHAMBON (CREUSE), May 1, '45.