Part 11

As he pronounced the word "no" his voice hardened a little. His eyelids drooped over his eyes, in which she read distress. He waited, stiffening himself, in order not to shriek, for an allusion which she did not make. A great surgeon probing a wound displays no more skill in holding back the steel instrument at the moment when it would make the patient cry out, than a loving woman has in suspending a painful interrogatory before she has touched the sore spot. But was there need for Valentine to question him now in order to assure herself that the wound was there? Madame Privat was right. Jaubourg had loved Madame de Claviers. And so what she, Valentine, dreaded had really happened. Words had escaped the dying man which had aroused in the son's mind doubts concerning his mother's honor! And she waited, suffocated with emotion, for Landri to go on.

He tried to speak, he did not wish to remain silent, to go away until he had explained his unexpected call. But he could not. He could find only phrases whose very insignificance emphasized their falsity.

"They gave me a great many commissions at the château," he said, "and they'll take the whole afternoon. They disposed of my time without consulting me, and as I wanted to see you again, I came a little earlier."

"If you hadn't come," she replied, "and had sent me no word, I should have been quite sure that it was not your fault. You well know that I have entire faith in your affection, and that I shall never, never, take offence at anything." Then, impelled by immeasurable pity for that too cruelly stricken heart, if in truth a friend of his father, in the delirium of the death-agony, had dishonored his mother's image forever, she added: "I blame myself, Landri, for not having told you plainly enough yesterday how dear you are to me. I didn't show it enough. For you are dear to me, very dear," she repeated. It was as if she were trying to tame with words that pain which she divined to be so savage, so concentrated in itself, to caress it and soothe it. "Say that to yourself sometimes, when I am not present, whatever may happen." And as she saw that face, but now so gloomy, relax, and those veiled eyes look at her once more and see her, the overflow of her affection extorted from her the confession that she had always refused to make: "For you see, Landri, I, too--I love you."

"You love me!" ejaculated the young man. Obeying the instinct of true love, whose double vision borders on the marvellous, she had pronounced the only words capable of pouring balm upon his wound, but causing him to realize its full extent. That confession that he had so ardently craved and begged for, he was suffering too intensely to enjoy. That love which she at last manifested openly, and which, two hours earlier, would have intoxicated him with a very ecstasy of joy, he could no longer rush upon, absorb himself in, engulf himself in--himself and the horrible thing! That thing was there, in his thought, torturing him even at that moment, not to be forgotten even in the radiance of that noble heart, which was his at last! A wave of emotion swept over him, so despairing and so passionate at once, that he was alarmed by it. He trembled lest the hideous disclosure should burst from his too deeply moved heart. But did he need to make it now? Had she not divined everything? And that also touched him, as a more convincing proof of love than the most impassioned words, and overwhelmed him utterly.

"Thanks," he stammered. "But at this moment--surprise--emotion--Leave me."

And motioning to her that his voice failed him, he hid his face in his hands. He passed ten minutes thus, not sobbing, not weeping, not sighing, nor did Valentine attempt to question him or to comfort him. The only assuagement that his sick heart could receive without bleeding from it was the feeling that she existed, that she was by his side, all his. She gazed at him, even holding her breath, to spare him any sensation. There was, in the silent convulsive immobility of that man who was undergoing the most violent inward tempest and who gave no sign of it except that gesture of mute agony, a wild upspringing of energy for which she esteemed and admired him. Never during those three years had they been so near each other in heart as in that silence, which he broke at last. He raised his head. He was deathly pale; but the paroxysm was conquered. He rose, took Madame Olier's hand, and said to her, in a deep voice:--

"Yes. You love me. You have just proved it more clearly than you will ever do again. I believe it. I feel it, and I feel also that I love you, ah! much more dearly than I knew. I am going to leave you. I must. But not until I have asked you again what I asked you yesterday. Valentine, will you be my wife?"

"Yes," she replied, in the same tone.

An inexpressible emotion flashed in Landri's eyes as he drew her to him. Chaste and ardent kiss of betrothal, in which his lips were wet with the tears that she was shedding, now, for his misery, who did not weep! And as those tears disturbed him anew to his inmost depths, he tore himself from her embrace, saying:--

"Don't take away my courage. I need it sorely."

With these words they parted. She did not make a movement, she did not say a word to detain him. She felt that he was hers, as she was his, wholeheartedly, absolutely, and that she could do nothing else for him than let him go, until he should have worn out, alone, that grief for which she pitied him so profoundly. How much greater would her pity have been if she had known the whole truth! She believed that at Jaubourg's death-bed the young man had surprised some denunciatory words, had perhaps found letters which had made him suspect his mother. The proofs that he would soon have to face were far more cruel, and amid them all he must needs find out the path of honor.

V

IN UNIFORM

"I still have her," said Landri to himself, as he left Rue Monsieur. As before, he walked straight ahead, with the automatic, hurried step which indicates, in certain diseases, the beginning of a disturbance of the nerve-centres. But does not a moral shock, of such violence as the one that he had just received, act upon the organism after the fashion of a genuine stroke? Do not people often die of such shocks? Do they not come out from them paralyzed and mentally unhinged? The young man's reason had been very near giving way during the terrible, nervous paroxysm with which he had been attacked in Valentine's presence, and which resulted in the renewed entreaty that she would bind herself to him forever.

"I still have her," he repeated, "and only her!"

That was the ghastly sensation that he had struggled against during those ten minutes of dumb agony--the sudden, the indescribable crash of everything about him.--His mother? The pious memory of her that he had always retained, tarnished forever!--His father? He had no father from the moment that he could no longer give that name to the only man whom he loved with filial affection, to the noble-hearted, the magnanimous Marquis de Claviers. For the other he had had, from childhood, only antipathetic sentiments which his sinister disclosure had suddenly transformed into abhorrence, mingled with remorse and pity.--His name? He no longer had a name. The name that he bore was not his. It was a living lie.--His home? He no longer had a home. In the mansion on Rue du Faubourg-Saint-Honoré, as at Grandchamp, he was an intruder, a usurper. He had no right to be there. A few words uttered by a dying man had sufficed to make his previous existence nothing save a heap of ruins. Of the truth of those words he had no doubt. They had come to him with the tragic sanction of death, against which nothing can prevail. But suppose that it was only the sudden outburst of a madness caused by the fever of the disease? No. Was Jaubourg mad when he sent that message to him at Grandchamp the day before, so that he might embrace him before he died? Was he mad when he followed Landri as a child, and afterward as a young man, with such passionately vigilant watchfulness, carefully concealing his interest? No. Nor was he mad when he pressed him to his heart in that embrace all a-quiver with the grief-stricken fervor of his paternal love. He was not mad in those visions of the past, in that "spoken dream," as the doctor had said, which fitted into their whole life with terrifying exactitude.

All these ideas had rushed at once into the young man's over-excited mind during those very brief moments, as clear and distinct as memories of the past in the mind of a drowning man. He had lost everything, everything, except the sweet, pure woman yonder, who loved him, understood him, pitied him, and did not tell him so--in order to spare him! The unreasoned impulse, by virtue of which, in the throes of that rayless distress, he had asked his only friend to unite their destinies, was also, to follow out a too exact comparison, like the instinctive movement with which the drowning man, whirled away by the current, seizes in a desperate clutch the helping hand extended over the gunwale. How happy Landri would have been to pass that long afternoon with her, at her feet, his head on her knees; to feel descend upon him the only charity that despairing souls welcome--sympathy without words! He had been mortally afraid that he should himself speak if he stayed; and so he had gone away to wrestle anew with the painful going and coming of his thoughts, which tossed him to and fro once more in their resistless surge. One by one the dying man's words repeated themselves in his mind, from the sadly affectionate "You have come" of his first greeting, to the outcries at the end, the imperative "You say that he's my son!"--a supreme confession of the death-agony, followed by a supreme protest which corroborated its truth. It proved the intense determination with which the man had guarded his secret so long as his strength permitted him to do so.

"Jaubourg's son!" Landri exclaimed. "I am Jaubourg's son!" The pitiless revelation regarding his birth was beginning to appear to him in its concrete reality. The social atmosphere in which he had lived nearly thirty years gave to that vision a unique character. He had heard the people of his circle, from the best--a Marquis de Claviers--to the mediocre and the worst,--a Charlus, a Bressieux,--talk so much of "race"; and it was in his race that he found himself suddenly stricken. The blood that flowed in his veins--and he looked tremulously at his hands--was the blood of Jaubourg. The vital force that enabled him to move, to breathe, as he was doing at that moment, came to him from Jaubourg. His very flesh came from that man. In imagination he saw him once more, no longer a pitiable, wasted creature, as he lay stricken with pneumonia on his bed, but young and handsome, as his childish recollections recalled him,--on horseback, following the hunt; in morning costume, walking in the avenues of their park at Grandchamp; in evening dress, seated at their table. These images brought the man before him, physically. The relationship of their faces became, so to speak, visible, palpable, to him, and it gave him a sensation of disgust, of revolt at himself--a detestation of his own body, as it were.

The secret and hidden resemblances which he suddenly discovered between himself and his mother's lover--he was dismayed to find that he dared utter the words--confounded him. How had he failed to detect them? How happened it that all those about him, and the marquis first of all, had not remarked that similarity of temperament and the striking contrast between the offspring of the Parisian bourgeois, distinguished it is true, but in a mediocre way, and the feudal line of the Claviers? Landri was slender, like Jaubourg, refined like him, but with a superficial, almost stunted refinement, compared with the magnificence of those splendidly robust noblemen. They all had light blue eyes. He had Jaubourg's eyes, brown and dark. After so many years he could hear his mother say: "Landri has my eyes." Why? So that no one might recognize the eyes of the other. But he had those eyes, just as he had the chestnut hair, and the lighter, almost tawny, mustache.

From his mother he inherited other features: the straight nose, the haughty mouth, the dimpled chin. These points of resemblance had justified Madame de Claviers in asserting that he was her living portrait--to those who were not aware! Landri was aware now, and he shuddered at the thought that the intimate guests at Grandchamp had certainly detected in him the unmistakable tokens of his descent. He was humiliated in the most secret depths of his being. He had prided himself, throughout his young manhood, upon not being the prisoner of his caste. He had treated as delusions at least, if not as prejudices, the uncompromising convictions of the head of the house of Grandchamp concerning the nobility; and he had a strange sensation of degradation in facing the alloyage of his origin, the blending of other inherited characteristics with the purely aristocratic maternal inheritance. This feeling was most illogical. Had he not proposed, did he not propose, to marry a woman even less aristocratic than a Charles Jaubourg? But does logic ever govern the spontaneous reactions of our pride?

This indescribable impression of essential degradation was intensified by another, more profound and more generous: the affection and admiration that he had always entertained for M. de Claviers made it almost unendurable to think that the sacred bond of parentage between him and that loving, loyal, superior man was broken. Even while struggling against his father's despotism, he had always been so proud that he was his father! And he was not his father! What a heart-breaking thing! It was as if, the very root of his being having suddenly been laid bare, he were bleeding in every fibre that attaches the soul to the body.

And he walked on and on, aimlessly, forgetting the time, regardless of his surroundings, until, at the end of the afternoon, he found himself a long way from his starting-point, at the far end of the Ménilmontant quarter, beyond the cemetery of Père La Chaise. The approaching twilight warned him at last that the day was passing. He looked at a street sign and saw that he was at the corner of Boulevard Mortier and Rue Saint-Fargeau. He consulted his watch. It was almost five o'clock. The train he was to take started at a quarter past five. His servant was waiting for him at the Gare de l'Est. He had just enough time to make it, in a cab.

What mysterious and discomposing impulse of his perturbed heart did he obey in leaving the station at his right and directing his steps towards the Seine, and, from the river, to Rue de Solferino again? The explanation is that, amid the tumult of his chaotic emotions, one image had incessantly besieged his mind--that of the dying man, whose hands, wet with sweat, he seemed still to feel wandering over his face, whose short breath, tearing cough and spasmodic voice he could hear through space. That man had done him a great wrong, but how large a place he filled all of a sudden among his obsessions! That sinful paternity, so brutally disclosed, agitated him without touching him. And yet it was paternity none the less. His flesh quivered at the memory of those farewell caresses. He felt a pang of remorse to think of leaving the city where the unhappy man was breathing his last, without having inquired for him, without having tried to see him once more.

He crossed Pont Royal, walked the length of Quai d'Orsay, and turned into that ill-omened street. This time, men were engaged in taking away the straw from before the house; it was useless now and would deaden no more the loud rumbling of the carriages. Landri's heart contracted, then beat fast again, when, having entered the lodge to ask for details, he was informed by the concierge, with the stilted manner of a man of the people who announces bad news, feeling that he has a share in its importance:--

"Monsieur Jaubourg died about one o'clock, almost immediately after Monsieur le Comte went away. It seems that he did not suffer. He knew nothing at all afterward. His head had gone. To think of that being possible--such an intelligent gentleman! If Monsieur le Comte cares to go up, he will find Monsieur le Marquis de Claviers there."

"My father?" exclaimed the young man. One does not unlearn in a few moments a habit contracted at the awakening of one's earliest affections. He heard himself utter that exclamation, and shuddered, while the other continued:--

"Monsieur le Marquis arrived half an hour ago. He knew nothing. It was I who informed him of the unfortunate event. He was like one thunderstruck. He could not believe it. 'If I had come this morning,' he said, 'I should have seen him. I could have bade him adieu.'--Oh! he was terribly grieved. It will do him good to see Monsieur le Comte."

This perfunctory mourner's chatter might have gone on for a long while. Landri was not listening. He was looking at the foot of the monumental staircase, and at the broad stone stairs which he could no more avoid ascending than a condemned man those of the scaffold. This man who informed him of M. Jaubourg's death knew M. de Claviers and himself too well. The half-familiarity of his speech proved it. To fail to join the marquis at once, under such circumstances and under the watchful eyes of that liveried witness, would be cowardly. It would have been less cowardly to pour his distress into Valentine's ear! On the other hand, would he have the courage to meet M. de Claviers at that moment and in that place, especially if any suspicion had shaken his long-abused confidence? It was a most improbable supposition, but had not Landri himself had his eyes opened by an overwhelming and absolutely unexpected revelation? What was the meaning of this sudden appearance of the châtelain of Grandchamp, after the telegram announcing an improvement in the invalid's condition?

The young man asked himself that question, another source of anxiety added to all the rest, as he climbed the stairs. How he wished that there were more of them!--He was on the landing. He rang. He passed through the reception room and the library. He entered that bedroom where, a few hours earlier, the terrible scene was enacted. On the bed where he had left Jaubourg writhing in pain and uttering unforgettable words, lay a motionless form, prepared for the coffin. The dead man, in evening dress, with white cravat, silk socks, and low shoes, had resumed the conventional mask which the paroxysms of the death-agony had torn from his face in his last moments--and before whom! Mademoiselle de Charlus's epigram was justified by the presence of the crucifix between those hands, joined even then by no prayer, no repentance. The delicate, sad face, with its closed eyes and lips, its yellow forehead, and its cheeks of a waxy pallor, as if smoothed of their wrinkles, no longer told aught of the mystery so many years hidden.

Nor did the impassive countenance of Joseph, the maître-d'hôtel, who was walking about the room on tip-toe, betray any of the secrets that he might have surprised. He was engaged in overlooking the final arrangement of the sick-room, which was to be transformed into a salon for the last visits to be paid to Jaubourg-Saint-Germain, by his "fine friends," before he was laid in the ground.

Pierre Chaffin, whose glance would have been so painful to Landri, was no longer there. The son might have believed that he had dreamed it all, that an hallucination had deceived his eyes and his ears, that he had never seen what he had seen, never heard what he had heard, had it not been for his trembling when he saw another human figure, kneeling at the bedside, and alive. It was the Marquis de Claviers, a truly touching figure in his sincere grief and his childlike faith. He was praying, with all the strength of his old Christian heart, for his friend--for him whom he deemed his friend! His absorption was so complete that he knelt there several minutes without observing the presence of his son--of him whom he deemed his son. And he, one of the two beneficiaries of that magnanimous delusion, stood as if paralyzed by an embarrassment bordering closely on remorse, as if, by keeping silent, he made himself an accomplice in the insult inflicted on that proud man.

At last the marquis raised his head. He showed his imposing face, whereon the tears had left their trace. He rose to his feet, to his full great height, and enveloped in a last glance the dead man, over whom his hand drew the sign of the Cross.--What a gesture from him to that other! When his loyal fingers touched that brow, Landri could have cried out. M. de Claviers espied the young man, and, with another movement no less pathetic, put his arm about his neck, as if to lean upon him in that bitter hour. They passed thus into the study, where the betrayed friend began to speak in an undertone, with the respect which even the most indifferent assume in the presence of death. In his case it was not a pose. He reproached himself for having, on the previous day and again that morning, postponed a last visit to the dying man in favor of his passionate fondness for hunting.

"It was your despatch that made me come," he said. "I divined that you didn't telegraph the truth--from what? From one little detail. It began: 'Don't be alarmed.' I thought: 'My poor Landri is disturbed. He thinks of his old father's grief first of all. Jaubourg is worse.'--And then I wasn't content with myself. I was angry with myself for having enjoyed myself too much yesterday, and again this morning, riding that fine horse and shooting partridges. It is almost criminal, at my age, to love life so dearly!--However, Charlus and Bressieux took the train at Clermont at three o'clock. I had taken them to the station. I jumped into the carriage with them. It was too late.--I should have been so happy to speak to him again!--But you saw him. Did he know you? What did he say?"

"He had already lost his reason," Landri replied, averting his eyes. He had believed that afternoon that he had touched the bottom of the deepest depths of suffering. He had not foreseen this tête-à-tête, nor these confidences, fraught with such heart-rending significance to him now. Each of them was destined to add a new chapter to the shocking tale of deceit. The lover's son recognized therein everything--the heedless, but lofty-minded security of the nobleman; the loyalty which, having placed his honor in the hands of his wife and his friend, had distrusted neither; the wiles of the wife, and the seductive charm of the friend; and, too, the explanation, if not the excuse of their sin. That life of parade and magnificence, in which the "Émigré" had swallowed up his fortune that the glory of the name of Claviers-Grandchamp might not fade, he had not been able to lead without an accompaniment of idle associates. Love is the engrossing occupation of such coteries of luxury and pomp and pleasure. Madame de Claviers was very pretty. She was romantic, too. The stern and manly poesy of the marquis's nature did not satisfy a sentimentalism to which a nature more complex, more subtle, more corrupt perhaps, had appealed more strongly. And Landri was born of that sin, inevitable and deplorable. But what a crying shame that a man of so noble and rare a soul should have been made a mock of at his own fireside!