Part 10

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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