Part 20

"What do I risk?" he said to himself on the way. "I ask him whether, to his knowledge, any one except himself and the servants entered the sick man's bedroom. If no one went in, he will say no, simply. If some one did go in, and that some one was his father, he will be confused. If it is only for a second, I shall see it. That will be a certain indication, and then I shall act."

How? By what steps? He did not know. But on the other hand he did know that he was on his way to another trying scene in which all the suffering of the last weeks would be revived, on seeing the physician for the first time since that fatal Tuesday. He recalled Pierre's preoccupied expression as he came from his delirious patient's bedside, and the persistence with which he repeated: "It's downright madness." But what then? They were likely to meet at any time, and if Landri really proposed to keep to the compact he had made with M. de Claviers and to defend his mother's memory, guilty though she was, against this witness of Jaubourg's death-agony, it was much better to see him at once and to bear himself in their interview as if the dying man had in truth talked mere nonsense, which was of no consequence.

There was, to be sure, a difficulty of another sort. Pierre was the son of a man dismissed by the marquis for dishonesty. True. But Landri was not making a personal call upon him. He was going to seek information at the hands of a doctor who had been paid by M. de Claviers; for Jaubourg's residuary legatee must have paid all the debts of the deceased, including the expenses of the last sickness. Moreover, if Pierre was not Chaffin's confederate, he certainly did not know the true reason of his father's discharge. His father would never have told him. In that case there was nothing in Landri's procedure to surprise the doctor. In the contrary case, why spare a couple of brigands?

All varieties of grief have their egoism. There was another hypothesis which Madame de Claviers' son did not consider: perhaps, since his father's dismissal, Pierre Chaffin had been passing through a crisis similar to that of which his playmate in childhood was undergoing the terrors. Between ignorance and actual complicity, there is room for suspicion. Let us say at once that such was the plight of the physician, worried to the point of dismay by the visible change that he had observed in his father during the past month.

One afternoon in November Chaffin had appeared, in a state of great agitation. He had told his son that the marquis had made him the scapegoat of his follies. He had inveighed against the ingratitude of the _grand seigneur_, in whose service his life had been passed, had declared that he would accept nothing, not even the smallest pension, from that man, and had forbidden his name to be mentioned in his presence. Since then he had been wasting away in a melancholic state, the true causes of which were, on the one hand, terror lest his son should learn the real reason of his disgrace, and on the other hand the most violent and invincible remorse.

Landri's instinct had led him to the right conclusion. Chaffin was the anonymous informer. Enraged by the sudden collapse of his hopes, the loss of a commission which would have rounded out his fortune, and really convinced in his own mind that M. de Claviers would renounce the Jaubourg legacy, Chaffin had gone to Altona to strike another bargain with him, and to demand not one but two per cent of the four millions offered for the list of treasures preserved at Grandchamp. He agreed, in consideration of that sum, to induce the marquis to reopen the negotiations that had been instantly broken off by the legacy. Altona had accepted his offer.

Chaffin had in his possession a letter from Madame de Claviers to Jaubourg. He had opened it when he was only a tutor, nearly eighteen years before. Finding it on a table, in a package prepared for the post, he had yielded to an intense curiosity to learn the real relations between the friend of the family and the marchioness. That was the period at which the process of corruption already described began. Perhaps this discovery of the sin of his pupil's mother was the most virulent element in his moral degeneration. He had not used the paper, as he might have done, as the foundation of a lucrative system of blackmail. He was not ripe for such villainy. But he had not destroyed it, by reason of that sort of vague expectation which, in certain natures, outwardly sound but rotten at the core, is, as it were, the gestation of crime. He had, in fact, supplemented it by adding to it--these were the "other documents"--three notes from Jaubourg, pilfered from Landri's mother's desk. At the time the lovers had discovered, with dismay, the disappearance of Madame de Claviers' letter. They had both made cautious inquiry, and failing to learn anything, had attributed the loss to some irregularity on the part of the mail. The marchioness had not detected the second theft, which would have put her on the scent. Jaubourg had always suspected Chaffin. That was the meaning of the question, "What is he?" uttered in such distress on his death-bed.

That is the sort of man that the former tutor was: a scoundrel who lacked only a tempting opportunity. The bait of eighty thousand francs was the opportunity. He had written the anonymous letter himself, on his typewriter. He had placed it in an envelope with the other, the incriminating one, and despatched them both to the marquis. But although a greedy longing for gain, added to base and pitiless envy of the _grand seigneur_, had impelled him to do this disgraceful deed in an hour of madness, when the blow was dealt, his conscience of the earlier days, of the humble giver of lessons to worthy bourgeois, had begun to make itself heard. He could not banish from his thoughts the haunting image of M. de Claviers' face as he had seen it during the fortnight between his crime and his dismissal, so haggard, so ravaged by suffering! His handiwork terrified him, especially as the end sought--at such a price!--was not attained. Contrary to his expectation, the marquis went on paying his debts. Pictures, furniture, hangings, remained at Grandchamp. The eighty thousand francs Altona had promised him would never come to his hands.

There are not many criminals who, in the face of a useless crime, practise the calm philosophy of the assassin in the old story, who found only a single sou in his victim's pocket, and observed: "A hundred like this will make five francs!" The absolute inutility of his murderous villainy did not even afford Chaffin the semi-insensibility which might have come from the possession of that little fortune which, added to the store already accumulated, would have given him a round twenty thousand francs a year.

Tormented by this fixed idea, he was beginning to exhibit symptoms of the acute mental alienation which incessant, poignant regret for an irreparable sin is likely to cause in a man of some education. He could no longer eat or sleep, read or write, attend to any business or remain quiet. This agitation had not escaped the son's notice. The doctor had begun, almost automatically, to watch his father. He soon assured himself that these symptoms, so readily interpreted by an alienist, were caused by no physical disturbance. The cause was entirely mental--the physician said, cerebral. Almost automatically again, he had sought that cause.

One fact aroused his suspicion: he fancied that he observed a certain constraint in Professor Louvet's manner toward himself. As the head of the clinical staff he was in constant communication with the illustrious master of the Hôtel-Dieu. It had seemed to him, during the last weeks, that his chief's handshake was, not less cordial, but less unreserved, less familiar--in a word, that there was "a thorn" in it, as they would have said to each other in neurologists' parlance, in speaking of a common abrasion of the skin on a patient. Under any other circumstances Pierre would not have hesitated to question the professor. He did not do it. He had put together the two symptoms: the change in his master's manner to him, and the change in his father. He had drawn therefrom the conclusion, still automatically,--a profession like his ends by imparting a mechanical method, an instinctive gait, to the mind,--that the same fact was at the root of both. What fact? The quarrel between Chaffin and M. de Claviers, that old and very important patient of Louvet.

Pierre knew the marquis well, and although he had for him the antipathy of one social class for another, his innate sense of justice compelled him to esteem the great nobleman's greatness of soul. No, the châtelain of Grandchamp, who bestowed pensions on scores of old servants,--only two months since, his factotum was bewailing the fact at the family table!--had not parted, without weighty reasons, from one whom he had had in his service so many years.

What were those reasons? This question had been haunting the physician for several days, with such persistent and increasing distress, that it had occurred to him to seek an answer to it from Landri. He had been deterred by very diverse considerations. It will be recalled that their relations had never been perfectly simple. It was hard for the plebeian to ask the titled man if his, the plebeian's, father had been guilty of any offence contrary to honor. It was painful, too, for the physician, who had learned, in the delirium of a death-agony, the secret of an illegitimate birth, to seek a meeting with the son of the patient,--a meeting over which that consciousness would hover like a pall, especially as Pierre knew the terms of Jaubourg's will, and he did the child of that adulterous connection the justice to believe that M. de Claviers' acceptance of the legacy was torture to him.

One can imagine now the shock that it caused him, as he sat at work one afternoon in his little study, littered with books and pamphlets, when the maid handed him a card on which he read: "Comte de Claviers-Grandchamp." Fate, which is wont to teach such lessons, brought those two men face to face, who were born and reared under such widely different conditions, and who were undergoing, unknown to each other, the same universal ordeal of heredity, whereof one of the ancients said: "We shall be punished, either in our own persons or in those of our descendants, for the sins we have committed in this world." This is the principle, at once mysterious and natural, moral and physiological, which, by uniting persons of the same blood, creates the Family and Society.

Pierre's first impulse--so intolerable to him was the thought of his father's possible shame--was to reply: "I am not at home;" the second, to say: "Show him in." For the very reason that he was ignorant of the real reason for the dismissal of the steward of the Claviers-Grandchamps, he was unwilling to appear to dread a conversation with the future head of that house, and he thought:--

"What does he want of me? Doubtless he has come on account of the will. He is going to ask me not to mention what I may have heard and guessed. Those people have no appreciation of the honor of the medical profession. Bah! the honor of a bourgeois in the eyes of a noble!--A noble?" He laughed sneeringly,--"and of an officer with such ideas as this incompetent has, and as he exhibited in that stupid business of the inventory!"

As will be seen, his customary surly humor had already returned to this strange creature, who had always taken life against the grain, if we may so express it, because of his false position on the edge of a society in which he had no well-defined place. The result was that on entering that little room, the aspect of which disclosed the professional and intellectual ardor of its tenant, Landri de Claviers encountered the same armed glance that he had always known, behind the young scientist's gold-bowed spectacles. With his red beard and his irregular features, as if carved by a bill-hook, which gave him the aspect of a Tartar, the younger Chaffin really had, at that moment, the look of a very evil-minded man. This sensation was calculated to impart and did in fact impart a dryness, almost a bitterness of accent to Landri's first words, which were destined instantly to transform that conversation into a brief and fierce duel.

"I shall not detain you long," he began, after they had exchanged a few words of ordinary courtesy. Because of their former companionship and their difference in rank, they never knew how to address each other. They never called each other "monsieur," or by their names simply. "I have come upon a delicate, a very delicate errand. But the question I have come to ask is not put to the man, but to the physician who attended Monsieur Jaubourg."

He had the strength to pronounce those two syllables without removing his eyes from the other, who could not restrain a contraction of his bushy eyebrows and a curl of his lip as he replied:--

"I am at your service so far as this question does not run counter to my duty as a physician. We have a duty of absolute silence, which you do not suspect," he continued with a peculiar bitterness: "nec visa, nec audita, nec intellecta[7] is the old form of the Hippocratic oath. It is still true."

"It is a very simple matter," rejoined Landri. "You are aware that Monsieur de Claviers is Monsieur Jaubourg's legatee. We have obtained proof that some papers of great importance were taken from his apartment during the last days of his illness. Well! I would be glad to have your word--"

"That I didn't take them?" the doctor hastily interrupted. "Don't tell me that you came here to ask me that," he continued with an outburst of anger; "I will not allow it."

"You might have let me finish my sentence," retorted Landri, more calmly, but very little more. Being absolutely ignorant of the inward tragedy--so like his own, alas!--of which Pierre Chaffin was the victim, this outbreak at the bare idea of a suspicion of dishonesty was inexplicable to him. He had said nothing to justify it, and being rendered so sensitive by his own suffering, he could not brook a reply uttered in such a tone. "I finish that sentence. I would be glad to have your word, not that you did not take the papers, but simply that no person, to your knowledge, entered Monsieur Jaubourg's bedroom during his illness,--besides the servants, Professor Louvet, and yourself, of course. It seems to me that there is nothing in that to cause any sensitiveness on your part. It is simply a matter of preventing suspicion from going astray. You should be the first to desire it."

"I have no answer to make to a question of that sort," said Pierre. He did not clearly discern his questioner's object. It was true that he would have no right to take offence at the question, if it had not been couched in terms too imperious and inquisitorial. The conclusion especially had irritated him. But as Landri had affected to speak in a very self-contained tone, almost ceremonious in its stiffness, he determined to meet his coldness with equal coldness. He would have been humiliated to appear less able to control his nerves, or less polished, than the young noble, and he added: "I do not admit that it is the duty of a physician to keep watch over his patient otherwise than professionally. I venture to assert that I treated Monsieur Jaubourg to the best of my ability, and that is all that his heirs have a right to concern themselves about with respect to me."

"It is not a question of keeping watch," Landri replied. "You compel me, in spite of myself, to make my questions more precise. Did you admit no stranger to the invalid's bedroom? For you did receive visitors, I know from Joseph."

"Visitors?" exclaimed the physician. "No one, except my father." He had no sooner pronounced the word, than he ejaculated the "Ah!" of one who suddenly grasps the situation. He was silent for a moment. Then, controlling himself with an effort, he continued, throwing out his breast and walking up to the other, with distorted face and breathing quickly: "I will satisfy you. I give you my word of honor that I admitted no one to Monsieur Jaubourg's bedroom,--no one, you understand; my word of honor, and it's the word of an honest man, again you understand! And that gives me the right to put a question to you, in my turn. For all you call yourself Monsieur le Comte de Claviers-Grandchamp, and I am simple Pierre Chaffin, we are no longer living under the old régime, and I don't know that you are entitled to come here, on your private authority, to question me like an examining magistrate. You told me that some one had stolen papers from Monsieur Jaubourg's, and you asked me if the person from whom I received a visit did not go into the room where the stolen papers were. That was equivalent to saying that you suspected that person of stealing them, and that person was my father. My question is this: Do you suspect my father, or do you not?"

"I will say, as you said just now, that I have no answer to make, having named no one," Landri retorted.

His irritation faded away in the face of evidence: he had before him in very truth an absolutely honest man. He had felt it in the vigor with which Pierre had asserted his honor, in the upheaval of his whole being, above all in his outcry of indignant surprise. And lo! a strange and melancholy sympathy stirred in his heart. The tone in which the son had spoken of his father echoed in the depths of his soul. It was like a sudden repetition of his own inward lament. He observed with dismay that, having come thither to obtain confirmation of one suspicion, his visit had aroused another, not in his own mind, but in that of the very person upon whom he had relied to discover the truth; and already it had ceased to be in his power to allay that suspicion.

"To decline to answer is to answer," said Pierre Chaffin. "So papers are missing from Monsieur Jaubourg's, valuable papers, no doubt, and you, and Monsieur de Claviers, I suppose, with you, accuse my father of the theft!"

"No valuable paper is missing from Monsieur Jaubourg's," replied Landri, "and, once more, we accuse no one."

"If it is not valuable papers that have disappeared," continued the physician, "it must be letters. And why do people steal letters? To sell them, threatening to make them public, for blackmail."

His habit of inductive reasoning began to work anew, and in that moment of supreme agony, he made use of what he knew to guess the rest. Letters had been stolen. What letters? Those which referred to the birth of the child of Jaubourg and Madame de Claviers. They were afraid of blackmail. What sort of blackmail? That which the will suggested. And he said aloud, changing from questioned to questioner, to suppliant rather, he trembled so with anxiety as he made this appeal to his playmate in childhood:--

"I gave you my word just now; give me your word that you did not believe that my father was capable of that.--You don't answer? Then it must be that you did believe it. And yet you and Monsieur de Claviers are not cruel. You believed that? Why? I must know. I must know everything, everything, everything, and first of all the real reason why my father and Monsieur de Claviers parted. I am a man, Landri, and I am addressing another man. What was the reason? Tell me."

"You are well aware that I was not here," Landri replied. "I know nothing positive."

"Yes or no, did you hear any talk of dishonesty?"

"I heard something said of confusion in Monsieur de Claviers' affairs," said Landri. "But I give you my word on this--that this matter of Jaubourg's papers, as to which I wanted to obtain your testimony, had no connection whatever with the reasons that may have led Monsieur de Claviers to dispense with Monsieur Chaffin's services."

He was only too well aware, when he made this indefinite reply, that the craving for knowledge with which the other was consumed demanded a reply of a very different tenor. But he could not answer yes or no. He had suffered too keenly when he learned of his mother's sin to allow his lips to form words which should inform a son of his father's crime. Nor would his sense of honor permit him to be lavish of denials. Indeed, what was the use? When he decided upon this step, he had had no means of divining that Pierre's mind was already disturbed, so that he had immediately read into his question a meaning that was only too dear.

This altogether unforeseen result of their interview created in Landri's mind the impression of an inevitable destiny, which he had felt many times since his visit to his real father's death-bed, and he was, as it were, paralyzed by it. Was that impression shared by the physician, or was the poor fellow afraid of learning more? The evasive reply returned by his interlocutor to so pitilessly precise a question seemed to have overwhelmed him. He questioned him no further.

After a few moments of exceedingly painful silence, Landri rose. The other did not try to detain him, and the young men parted, just touching each other's fingers, and almost afraid to look at each other.

The same impression of Necessity, of a network of events woven by a will stronger than his own, haunted Landri throughout that evening, which he was able to pass alone, by good luck, M. de Claviers having gone to Grandchamp. He found it on his pillow when he awoke, still pursued by the image of that young man with whom he had played as a child, and whom he saw as he had left him, pale and motionless in the grasp of that horrible thought: "My father is a thief." As he said to himself at Saint-Mihiel, "If the Clermont train had only been late!" so he said now, "If only Louvet had not sent him to Rue de Solferino in order to help him along! If only his father had not gone to see him--merely by chance, perhaps!"

But is there such a thing as chance in the world? The triviality of the incidents which had led up, in Pierre's case as well as in his own, to so terrible an ordeal, confounded Landri, especially as that ordeal was merited--by whom? By those of whom they were born.

The vision of the common catastrophe which enveloped the son of the felonious steward and the son of the unfaithful wife, reached the point of absolutely terrifying him when, about half-past nine, his servant handed him a letter of which the handwriting alone made him tremble with excitement. He was preparing to pay Joseph another visit. He had changed his hypothesis since his visit to Quai de Béthune. He desired to talk with Joseph concerning the people who were most intimate with Jaubourg, remembering M. de Claviers' expression: "That smells of the club." As will be seen, he had entirely abandoned the idea of incriminating Chaffin. Now, this letter was from Chaffin!

The young man's heart beat fast, as he tore the envelope open, and yet faster as he read these lines:--

"Landri, your old master implores you, in the name of the past, to receive him instantly. He has a favor to ask of you which will save more than his life, and he can perhaps do you a service which will wipe out many things."

"Admit Monsieur Chaffin," he said to the valet; and almost in the same breath: "Do you know whether Monsieur le Marquis has returned from Grandchamp?"

"Last night, Monsieur le Comte," the servant replied; and while he left the room to summon the discharged steward, Landri said to himself:--

"Do me a service? What if he were really the culprit? What if he has brought the other letters? What if I am able to get them and give them to _him_, in a few minutes?"

And the mere thought of M. de Claviers' expression as he thanked him warmed his whole heart!

[Footnote 7: "A physician should disclose neither what he has seen, nor what he has heard, nor what he has divined."]

IX

SEPARATION