Chapter 31

And this was the mother of his children, a daughter of the Afchins! Suddenly, at the thought that his fate was in the hands of this woman, that it would only cost her a dress to put on to save him--and that time was flying--that soon it would be too late, a criminal feeling rose to his brain and distorted his features. He came straight to her, his hands contracted, with such a terrible expression that the daughter of the Afchins, frightened, rushed, calling towards the door by which the _masseur_ had just gone out:

“Aristide!”

This cry, the words, this intimacy of his wife with a servant! Jansoulet stopped, his rage suddenly calmed; then, with a gesture of disgust, he flung himself out, slamming the doors, more eager to fly the misfortune and the horror whose presence he divined in his own home, than to seek elsewhere the help he had been promised.

A quarter of an hour later he made his appearance at the Hemerlingues’, making a despairing gesture as he entered to the banker, and approached the baroness stammering the ready-made phrase he had heard repeated so often the night of his ball, “His wife, very unwell--most grieved not to have been able to come--” She did not give him time to finish, rose slowly, unwound herself like a long and slender snake from the pleated folds of her tight dress, and said, without looking at him, “Oh, I knew--I knew!” then changed her place and took no more notice of him. He attempted to approach Hemerlingue, but the good man seemed absorbed in his conversation with Maurice Trott. Then he went to sit down near Mme. Jenkins, whose isolation seemed like his own. But, even while talking to the poor woman, as languid as he was preoccupied, he was watching the baroness doing the honours of this drawing-room, so comfortable when compared with his own gilded halls.

It was time to leave. Mme. Hemerlingue went to the door with some of the ladies, presented her forehead to the old princess, bent under the benediction of the Armenian bishop, nodded with a smile to the young men with the canes, found for each the fitting adieu with perfect ease; and the wretched man could not prevent himself from comparing this Eastern slave, so Parisian, so distinguished in the best society of the world, with the other, the European brutalized by the East, stupefied with Turkish tobacco, and swollen with idleness. His ambitions, his pride as a husband, were extinguished and humiliated in this marriage of which he saw the danger and the emptiness--a final cruelty of fate taking from him even the refuge of personal happiness from all his public disasters.

Little by little the room was emptied. The Levantines disappeared one after another, leaving each time an immense void in their place. Mme. Jenkins was gone, and only two or three ladies remained whom Jansoulet did not know, and behind whom the mistress of the house seemed to shelter herself from him. But Hemerlingue was free, and the Nabob rejoined him at the moment when he was furtively escaping to his offices on the same floor opposite his rooms. Jansoulet went out with him, forgetting in his trouble to salute the baroness, and once on the antechamber staircase, Hemerlingue, cold and reserved while he was under his wife’s eye, expanded a little.

“It is very annoying,” said he in a low voice, as if he feared to be overheard, “that Mme. Jansoulet has not been willing to come.”

Jansoulet answered him by a movement of despair and savage helplessness.

“Annoying, annoying,” repeated the other in a whisper, and feeling for his key in his pocket.

“Come, old fellow,” said the Nabob, taking his hand, “there’s no reason, because our wives don’t agree--That doesn’t hinder us from remaining friends. What a good chat the other day, eh?”

“No doubt” said the baron, disengaging himself, as he opened the door noiselessly, showing the deep workroom, whose lamp burned solitarily before the enormous empty chair. “Come, good-bye, I must go; I have my mail to despatch.”

“_Ya didon, monci_” (But look here, sir) said the poor Nabob, trying to joke, and using the _patois_ of the south to recall to his old chum all the pleasant memories stirred up the other evening. “Our visit to Le Merquier still holds good. The picture we were going to present to him, you know. What day?”

“Ah, yes, Le Merquier--true--eh--well, soon. I will write to you.”

“Really? You know it is very important.”

“Yes, yes. I will write to you. Good-bye.”

And the big man shut his door in a hurry, as if he were afraid of his wife coming.

Two days after, the Nabob received a note from Hemerlingue, almost unreadable on account of the complicated scrawls, of abbreviations more or less commercial, under which the ex-sutler hid his entire want of spelling:

MY DEAR OLD COM_--I cannot accom_ you to Le Mer. _Too bus_ just now. Besid_ y_ will be _bet_ alone to _tal_. Go _th bold_. You are _exp. A_ Cassette, _ev morn_ 8 to 10.

Yours _faith_

HEM.

Below as a postscript, a very small hand had written very legibly:

“A religious picture, as good as possible.”

What was he to think of this letter? Was there real good-will in it, or polite evasion? In any case hesitation was no longer possible. Time pressed. Jansoulet made a bold effort, then--for he was very frightened of Le Merquier--and called on him one morning.

Our strange Paris, alike in its population and its aspects, seems a specimen map of the whole world. In the Marais there are narrow streets, with old sculptured worm-eaten doors, with overhanging gables and balconies, which remind you of old Heidelberg. The Faubourg Saint-Honore, lying round the Russian church with its white minarets and golden domes, seems a part of Moscow. On Montmartre I know a picturesque and crowded corner which is simply Algiers. Little, low, clean houses, each with its brass plate and little front garden, are English streets between Neuilly and the Champs-Elysees while all behind the apse of Saint-Sulpice, the Rue Feron, the Rue Cassette, lying peaceably in the shadow of its great towers, roughly paved, their doors each with its knocker, seem lifted out of some provincial and religious town--Tours or Orleans, for example--in the district of the cathedral or the palace, where the great over-hanging trees in the gardens rock themselves to the sound of the bells and the choir.

It was there, in the neighbourhood of the Catholic Club--of which he had just been made honorary president--that M. Le Merquier lived. He was _avocat_, deputy for Lyons, business man of all the great communities of France; and Hemerlingue, moved by a deep-seated instinct, had intrusted him with the affairs of his firm.

He arrived before nine o’clock at an old mansion of which the ground floor was occupied by a religious bookshop, asleep in the odour of the sacristy, and of the thick gray paper on which the stories of miracles are printed for hawkers, and mounted the great whitewashed convent stairway. Jansoulet was touched by this provincial and Catholic atmosphere, in which revived the souvenirs of his past in the south, impressions of infancy still intact, thanks to his long absence from home; and since his arrival at Paris he had had neither the time nor the occasion to call them in question. Fashionable hypocrisy had presented itself to him in all its forms save that of religious integrity, and he refused now to believe in the venality of a man who lived in such surroundings. Introduced into the _avocat’s_ waiting-room--a vast parlour with fine white muslin curtains, having for its sole ornament a large and beautiful copy of Tintoretto’s Dead Christ--his doubt and trouble changed into indignant conviction. It was not possible! He had been deceived as to Le Merquier. There was surely some bold slander in it, such as so easily spreads in Paris--or perhaps it was one of those ferocious snares among which he had stumbled for six months. No, this stern conscience, so well known in Parliament and the courts, this cold and austere personage, could not be treated like those great swollen pashas with loosened waist-belts and floating sleeves open to conceal the bags of gold. He would only expose himself to a scandalous refusal, to the legitimate revolt of outraged honour, if he attempted such means of corruption.

The Nabob told himself all this, as he sat on the oak bench which ran round the room, a bench polished with serge dresses and the rough cloth of cassocks. In spite of the early hour several persons were waiting there with him. A Dominican, ascetic and serene, walking up and down with great strides; two sisters of charity, buried under their caps, counting long rosaries which measured their time of waiting; priests from Lyons, recognisable by the shape of their hats; others reserved and severe in air, sitting at the great ebony table which filled the middle of the room, and turning over some of those pious journals printed at Fouvieres, just above Lyons, the _Echo of Purgatory_, the _Rose-bush of Mary_, which give as a present to all yearly subscribers pontifical indulgences and remissions of future sins. Some muttered words, a stifled cough, the light whispered prayers of the sisters, recalled to Jansoulet the distant and confused sensation of the hours of waiting in the corner of his village church round the confessional on the eves of the great festivals of the Church.

At last his turn came, and if a doubt as to M. Le Merquier had remained, he doubted no longer when he saw this great office, simple and severe, yet a little more ornate than the waiting-room, a fitting frame for the austerity of the lawyer’s principles, and for his thin form, tall, stooping, narrow-shouldered, squeezed into a black coat too short in the sleeves, from which protruded two black fists, broad and flat, two sticks of Indian ink with hieroglyphs of great veins. The clerical deputy had, with the leaden hue of a Lyonnese grown mouldy between his two rivers, a certain life of expression which he owed to his double look--sometimes sparkling, but impenetrable behind the glass of his spectacles; more often, vivid, mistrustful, and dark, above these same glasses, surrounded by the shadow which a lifted eye and a stooping head gives the eyebrow.

After a greeting almost cordial in comparison with the cold bow which the two colleagues exchanged at the Chamber, an “I was expecting you” in which perhaps an intention showed itself, the lawyer pointed the Nabob into a seat near his desk, told the smug domestic in black not to come till he was summoned, arranged a few papers, after which, sinking into his arm-chair with the attitude of a man ready to listen, who becomes all ears, his legs crossed, he rested his chin on his hand, with his eyes fixed on a great rep curtain falling to the ground in front of him.

The moment was decisive, the situation embarrassing. Jansoulet did not hesitate. It was one of the poor Nabob’s pretensions to know men as well as Mora. And this instinct, which, said he, had never deceived him, warned him that he was at that moment dealing with a rigid and unshakable honesty, a conscience in hard stone, untouchable by pick-axe or powder. “My conscience!” Suddenly he changed his programme, threw to the winds the tricks and equivocations which embarrassed his open and courageous disposition, and, head high and heart open, held to this honest man a language he was born to understand.

“Do not be astonished, my dear colleague,”--his voice trembled, but soon became firm in the conviction of his defence--“do not be astonished if I am come to find you here instead of asking simply to be heard by the third committee. The explanation which I have to make to you is so delicate and confidential that it would have been impossible to make it publicly before my colleagues.”

Maitre Le Merquier, above his spectacles, looked at the curtain with a disturbed air. Evidently the conversation was taking an unexpected turn.

“I do not enter on the main question,” said the Nabob. “Your report, I am assured, is impartial and loyal, such as your conscience has dictated to you. Only there are some heart-breaking calumnies spread about me to which I have not answered, and which have perhaps influenced the opinion of the committee. It is on this subject that I wish to speak to you. I know the confidence with which you are honoured by your colleagues, M. Le Merquier, and that, when I shall have convinced you, your word will be enough without forcing me to lay bare my distress to them all. You know the accusation--the most terrible, the most ignoble. There are so many people who might be deceived by it. My enemies have given names, dates, addresses. Well, I bring you the proofs of my innocence. I lay them bare before you--you only--for I have grave reasons for keeping the whole affair secret.”

Then he showed the lawyer a certificate from the Consulate of Tunis, that during twenty years he had only left the principality twice--the first time to see his dying father at Bourg-Saint Andeol; the second, to make, with the Bey, a visit of three days to his chateau of Saint-Romans.

“How comes it, then, that with a document so conclusive in my hands I have not brought my accusers before the courts to contradict and confound them? Alas, monsieur, there are cruel responsibilities in families. I have a brother, a poor fellow, weak and spoiled, who has for long wallowed in the mud of Paris, who has left there his intelligence and his honour. Has he descended to that degree of baseness which I, in his name, am accused of? I have not dared to find out. All I can say is, that my poor father, who knew more than any one in the family of it, whispered to me in dying, ‘Bernard, it is your elder brother who has killed me. I die of shame, my child.’”

He paused, compelled by his suppressed emotion; then:

“My father is dead, Maitre Le Merquier, but my mother still lives, and it is for her sake, for her peace, that I have held back, that I hold back still, before the scandal of my justification. Up to now, in fact, the mud thrown at me has not touched her; it only comes from a certain class, in a special press, a thousand leagues away from the poor woman. But law courts, a trial--it would be proclaiming our misfortune from one end of France to the other, the articles of the official paper reproduced by all the journals, even those of the little district where my mother lives. The calumny, my defence, her two children covered with shame by the one stroke, the name--the only pride of the old peasant--forever disgraced. It would be too much for her. It would be enough to kill her. And truly, I find it enough, too. That is why I have had the courage to be silent, to weary, if I could, my enemies by silence. But I need some one to answer for me in the Chamber. It must not have the right to expel me for reasons which would dishonour me, and since it has chosen you as the chairman of the committee, I am come to tell you everything, as to a confessor, to a priest, begging you not to divulge anything of this conversation, even in the interests of my case. I only ask you, my dear colleague, absolute silence; for the rest, I rely on your justice and your loyalty.”

He rose, ready to go, and Le Merquier did not move, still asking the green curtain in front of him, as if seeking inspiration for his answer there. At last he said:

“It shall be as you desire, my dear colleague. This confidence shall remain between us. You have told me nothing, I have heard nothing.”

The Nabob, still heated with his burst of confidence, which demanded, it seemed to him, a cordial response, a pressure of the hand, was seized with a strange uneasiness. This coolness, this absent look, so unnerved him that he was at the door with the awkward bow of one who feels himself importunate, when the other stopped him.

“Wait, then, my dear colleague. What a hurry you are in to leave me! A few moments, I beg of you. I am too happy to have a chat with a man like you. Besides, we have more than one common bond. Our friend Hemerlingue has told me that you, too, are much interested in pictures.”

Jansoulet trembled. The two words--“Hemerlingue,” “pictures”--meeting in the same phrase so unexpectedly, restored all his doubts, all his perplexities. He did not give himself away yet, however, and let Le Merquier advance, word by word, testing the ground for his stumbling advances. People had told him often of the collection of his honourable colleague. “Would it be indiscreet to ask the favour of being admitted, to--”

“On the contrary, I should feel much honoured,” said the Nabob, tickled in the most sensible--since the most costly--point of his vanity; and looking round him at the walls of the room, he added with the tone of a connoisseur, “You have some fine things, too.”

“Oh,” said the other modestly, “just a few canvases. Painting is so dear now, it is a taste so difficult to satisfy, a true passion _de luxe_--a passion for a Nabob,” said he, smiling, with a furtive look over his glasses.

They were two prudent players, face to face; but Jansoulet was a little astray in this new situation, where he who only knew how to be bold, had to be on his guard.

“When I think,” murmured the lawyer, “that I have been ten years covering these walls, and that I have still this panel to fill.”

In fact, at the most conspicuous place on the wall there was an empty place, emptied rather, for a great gold-headed nail near the ceiling showed the visible, almost clumsy, trace of a snare laid for the poor simpleton, who let himself be taken in it so foolishly.

“My dear M. Le Merquier,” said he with his engaging, good-natured voice, “I have a Virgin of Tintoretto’s just the size of your panel.”

Impossible to read anything in the eyes of the lawyer, this time hidden under their overhanging brows.

“Permit me to hang it there, opposite your table. That will help you to think sometimes of me.”

“And to soften the severities of my report, too, sir?” cried Le Merquier, formidable and upright, his hand on the bell. “I have seen many shameless things in my life, but never anything like this. Such offers to me, in my own house!”

“But, my dear colleague, I swear to you----”

“Show him out,” said the lawyer to the hang-dog servant who had just entered; and from the middle of his office, whose door remained open, before all the waiting-room, where the paternosters were silent, he pursued Jansoulet--who slunk off murmuring excuses to the door--with these terrible words:

“You have outraged the honour of the Chamber in my person, sir. Our colleagues shall be informed of it this very day; and, this crime coming after your others, you will learn to your cost that Paris is not the East, and that here we do not make shameless traffic of the human conscience.”

Then, after having chased the seller from the temple, the just man closed his door, and approaching the mysterious green curtain, said in a tone that sounded soft amidst his pretended anger:

“Is that what you wanted, Baroness Marie?”

THE SITTING

That morning there were no guests to lunch at 32 Place Vendome, so that towards one o’clock might have been seen the majestic form of M. Barreau, gleaming white at the gate, among four or five of his scullions in their cook’s caps, and as many stable-boys in Scotch caps--an imposing group, which gave to the house the aspect of an hotel where the staff was taking the air between the arrivals of the trains. To complete the resemblance, a cab drew up before the door and the driver took down an old leather trunk, while a tall old woman, her upright figure wrapped in a little green shawl, jumped lightly to the footpath, a basket on her arm, looked at the number with great attention, then approached the servants to ask if it was there that M. Bernard Jansoulet lived.

“It is here,” was the answer; “but he is not in.”

“That does not matter,” said the old lady simply.

She returned to the driver, who put her trunk in the porch, and paid him, returning her purse to her pocket at once with a gesture that said much for the caution of the provincial.

Since Jansoulet had been deputy for Corsica, the domestics had seen so many strange and exotic figures at his house, that they were not surprised at this sunburnt woman, with eyes glowing like coals, a true Corsican under her severe coif, but different from the ordinary provincial in the ease and tranquility of her manners.

“What, the master is not here?” said she, with an intonation which seemed better fitted for farm people in her part of the country, than for the insolent servants of a great Parisian mansion.

“No, the master is not here.”

“And the children?”

“They are at lessons. You cannot see them.”

“And madame?”

“She is asleep. No one sees her before three o’clock.”

It seemed to astonish the good woman a little that any one could stay in bed so late; but the tact which guides a refined nature, even without education, prevented her from saying anything before the servants, and she asked for Paul de Gery.

“He is abroad.”

“Bompain Jean-Baptiste, then.”

“He is with monsieur at the sitting.”

Her great gray eyebrows wrinkled.

“It does not matter; take up my trunk just the same.”

And with a little malicious twinkle of her eye, a proud revenge for their insolent looks, she added: “I am his mother.”

The scullions and stable-boys drew back respectfully. M. Barreau raised his cap:

“I thought I had seen madame somewhere.”

“And I too, my lad,” answered Mme. Jansoulet, who shivered still at the remembrance of the Bey’s _fete_.

“My lad,” to M. Barreau, to a man of his importance! It raised her at once to a very high place in the esteem of the others.

Well! grandeur and splendour hardly dazzled this courageous old lady. She did not go into ecstasies over gilding and petty baubles, and as she walked up the grand staircase behind her trunk, the baskets of flowers on the landings, the lamps held by bronze statues, did not prevent her from noticing that there was an inch of dust on the balustrade, and holes in the carpet. She was taken to the rooms on the second floor belonging to the Levantine and her children; and there, in an apartment used as a linen-room, which seemed to be near the school-room (to judge by the murmur of children’s voices), she waited alone, her basket on her knees, for the return of her Bernard, perhaps the waking of her daughter-in-law, or the great joy of embracing her grandchildren. What she saw around her gave her an idea of the disorder of this house left to the care of the servants, without the oversight and foreseeing activity of a mistress. The linen was heaped in disorder, piles on piles in great wide-open cupboards, fine linen sheets and table-cloths crumpled up, the locks prevented from shutting by pieces of torn lace, which no one took the trouble to mend. And yet there were many servants about--negresses in yellow Madras muslin, who came to snatch here a towel, there a table-cloth, walking among the scattered domestic treasures, dragging with their great flat feet frills of fine lace from a petticoat which some lady’s-maid had thrown down--thimble here, scissors there--ready to pick up again in a few minutes.