Part 3

"I love him and admire him still," replied the young man in a tone of the utmost earnestness; "yes, I admire him. No one knows better than I his great qualities and what he might have been. What a soldier! He proved it during the war. What a diplomatist! What an administrator! What a Councillor of State! And he is nothing. Nothing, nothing, nothing! Why, it is the whole tragedy of my thoughts, the evidence of my father's magnificent gifts, paralyzed by his name, solely by his name! Since I have become observant, I have seen that he, intelligent, generous, straightforward as he is, makes no use of his energies, takes part in none of the activities of his time. And yet there is a contemporaneous France. He is in it, but not of it. It will have none of him, who will have none of it. He will have passed his youth, his maturity, his old age, in what? In taking part in a pompous parade of the _ancien régime_, what with his receptions at Paris and Grandchamp, his stag-hunting, and the playing the patron to an enormous and utterly unprofitable clientage, of low and high estate, who live on his luxury or his income. I felt the worthlessness of all that too soon; he will never feel it. He is deceived by a mirage. He is close to a time when the nobility was still an aristocracy. My grandfather was twenty-six years old in 1827, when he succeeded to my great-grandfather's peerage, and my great-grandfather was colonel of the dragoons of Claviers before '89. For there were dragoons of Claviers-Grandchamp as there were of Custine and Jarnac, Belzunce and Lanan. They are far away. But in my father's eyes all those things so entirely uprooted and done away with are still realities. He is in touch with them. He has known those who saw them. As a little boy he played on the knees of old ladies who had been at court at Versailles. One would say that that past fascinates him more and more as it recedes. To me it is death, and I desired to live. That was the motive that led me to enter the army. Indeed, I had no choice. All other careers were closed to the future Marquis de Claviers-Grandchamp.--These are the privileges you spoke of just now. I let you have your say.--Yes, closed. Foreign affairs? Closed. My father would have been welcomed by the Empire at least. To-day they no longer want us. The Council of State? Closed. The government? Closed. Can you imagine a nobleman as a prefect? They were under Napoleon and the Restoration. The liberal professions? Closed. Though a noble had the genius of a Trosseau, a Berryer, or a Séguin, no one would have him to treat a cold in the head, to try a case about a division fence, or to build a foot-bridge. Commerce? Closed. Manufacturing? Closed, or practically so. To succeed in it we nobles must have a superior talent of which I, for my part, have never been conscious. Politics? That is like all the rest. People blame nobles for not taking up a profession! They forget that they are excluded from almost all, and the others are made ten times more difficult by their birth. And you would have me not call them pariahs! I say again, I resolved not to be one. The army was left. I prepared at Saint-Cyr, not without a struggle. There at least I knew the pleasure of not being a creature apart, of feeling that I was a Frenchman like the others, of not being exiled from my time, from my generation, from my fatherland; the delight of the uniform, of touching elbows with comrades, of obeying my superiors and of commanding my inferiors. That uniform no one shall tear from me except with my life. In losing it I should lose all my reasons for living.--All, no, since I love you. I wanted to speak to you to-day to learn whether I shall keep you in the trial that is in store for me. It will have its painful sides!--Now that you know what the crisis is that I am on the point of passing through," he added, "will you still answer no as you did a moment ago? I have no pride and I ask you again, will you be my wife? Not the wife of the Comte de Claviers-Grandchamp, whose father and whose environment you dread, but of a soldier with whom that environment will have no more to do, whom his father will have spurned? If I should ever have superintended the taking of a church inventory, it will arouse in the mothers another sort of indignation than for a mésalliance, as you call it, and as I do not call it. If I have you, the wound will bleed, doubtless, but I shall have you. You and my profession, my profession and you, those are enough to make me very strong."

"You have disturbed me too profoundly," said Valentine. "I no longer know anything. I do not see clear within myself. I have felt your suffering too keenly. Mon Dieu! when I received your letter, I did guess what you wanted to speak to me about. I did not guess everything. I had taken a resolution. I believed that I was sure of keeping to it. In the face of your trouble I can not.--Listen. Be generous Do not urge me any further. Give me credit for the answer that you ask. I told you just now that I could not receive you any more after this. I have no pride, either. I withdraw that also. As you will pass through Paris again to-morrow, returning to Saint-Mihiel, come again to see me. I shall have reflected meanwhile. I shall be in a condition to answer otherwise than under the impulse of an emotion which discomposes me. Oh! why, in all the talks we have had together in these last three years, have you never told me so much about all these intimate details of your life? I would have helped you--I would have tried, at all events."

"That is another of the misfortunes of the noble," Landri replied. "There is one subject that he can never broach first, the precise subject of his nobility. But calm yourself, I implore you, as I do myself. See. It is enough that you do not repeat the 'never' of a few moments ago, for me to recover my self-control. I will be here to-morrow, and if you still cannot answer me, I will wait. I have seen that you pity me, understand me. That is one piece of good fortune which wipes out many disappointments! Am I as you would have me? Do I speak to you as you wish?"

"Yes," she replied, more touched than she chose now to betray, by this sudden softening, this return of submissive affection after his bursts of passion. "But," she insinuated, "if you were really as I would have you, you would let me give you some advice."

"What is it?" he inquired anxiously.

"To confide in your father. Yes, to talk with him of your plans,--of me if you think best,--but first of all, and at any cost, of your apprehension on the subject of these impending inventories. You owe it to him," she insisted at a gesture from the young man. "I say nothing of the bond that binds together the members of the same family, in order not to return to that question of the name, although bourgeois and nobles are equal when the common honor is involved. You owe it to him from respect for his noble heart. He loves you. A determination so opposed to his wishes is likely to cause him very deep sorrow. He must not learn it first from another than you, so that he may not misconstrue your motives. You must tell him what they are, and even if he blames them, at all events he will know that you deserve his esteem. I know it well, I who am a believer, and to whom that proceeding will be so grievous if you carry it out. Ah! how earnestly I will pray God to spare us, your father and me, that trial! But you must speak to Monsieur de Claviers. You realize yourself that you must, don't you?"'

"I will try," replied the young man, whose eyes once more expressed genuine distress. "You do not know him, and what an imposing effect he has, even on me. I ought to say, especially on me, since I can read his heart so well. But you are right, and I will obey you."

"Thanks," she said, rising. "And now think that you must not prepare him to receive in bad part what you have to say, by displeasing him. Since he was urgent that you should come to Grandchamp for this hunt, you must go. You must do it for my sake, too, for I need a little rest and solitude. Besides you still have to lunch, and it is quarter to twelve."--The clock of a near-by convent struck three strokes, whose tinkling cadence reached the little parlor over the trees of the garden. The clock on the mantel-piece also emitted three shrill notes.--"You have just time."

"With the automobile I shall be at Grandchamp in an hour and a half," he replied. "But I mean to continue to be obedient, as obedient as I have been rebellious." He had taken the young woman's hand and he pressed it to his lips as he added: "I forgot. I have to stop on Rue de Solferino to inquire for a friend of my father who is very ill. It won't take very long."

Valentine Olier withdrew her fingers with such a nervous movement that Landri could not help exclaiming:--

"Why, what's the matter?"

"Nothing," said she. "Rue de Solferino? Then it's Monsieur Jaubourg, this sick friend? it is to Monsieur Jaubourg's that you are going?"

"Yes. How do you know his name?" And then, answering his own question, "To be sure, I have been to his house several times on leaving you. I have talked about him to you, and rather unkindly. I am sorry now. He has never shown much liking for me, and when I wanted to enter Saint-Cyr, he did much to excite my father against me. I bore him a grudge for it. But that was long ago, and he is mixed up in so many memories of my childhood! The news of his illness touched me. According to my father's despatch which I found at the house, asking me to go to see him, he is dying."

"He is dying!" she echoed. "Mon Dieu! I hope you will not be admitted. In your present state of wounded sensibility, that visit will be too trying, and it's of no use. Promise me that you won't try to see him!"

"Dear, dear friend!" exclaimed Landri, bestowing a second kiss on Valentine's clenched hand, "I tell you again that you do not know how completely you have restored my tranquillity, nor how brave I should be at this moment before the worst trials. And this visit would not be a trial to me. But I will manage to do what you wish, even in so unimportant a matter. I shall deserve no credit for it. I prefer not to place any too painful image between what I feel here"--he pointed to his heart--"and my return--to-morrow. How far away it is, and yet so near!"

"Until to-morrow, then," she rejoined with a half smile, as to which he could not divine that it was forced. "Come at two o'clock as usual,--and now, adieu."

"Adieu!" he said. Instinctively he drew near to her. In his eyes blazed a gleam of passion instantly subdued by her eyes. He repeated "Adieu!" in a voice stifled by the effort he made to control himself and not to give way to his ardent longing to cover with kisses that fair hair, that pure brow, that quivering mouth.

He rushed from the salon. She listened to the young man's step as he passed through the adjoining room, then through the reception-room and the street door, which opened and closed. When he had gone from the house, and doubtless from the street, a long while, she was still on the same spot and in the same attitude, steadfastly contemplating her thoughts. What she saw was not the refined and soldierly profile of the young man whom she loved, who loved her, and whose wife she _knew_ now that she would be. No, she saw herself at Saint-Mihiel, a very long time before. She fancied that she was living through that hour again. Landri had just joined the regiment. Valentine had a friend, one Madame Privat, the wife of one of the officers of the garrison. On several occasions she had fancied that that friend was extraordinarily cold to the newcomer. Inconsiderately enough she had asked her--she could hear herself putting the question: "Monsieur de Claviers-Grandchamp seems so antipathetic to you. Why is it?" And she could hear Marguerite Privat reply:--

"I admit it, but it's an old, a very old story. We have a distant cousin, a Monsieur Jaubourg, of whom we used to see a great deal. I say we; I should say my parents. They had a little plan for having him marry one of my aunts. Suddenly the relations between us lost their warmth. The marriage didn't take place. This coldness dates from the day that he became intimate with the Claviers. He had, at all events my parents thought so, a passion for Madame de Claviers. They even believed that there was a liaison. In families many things are known that the public doesn't understand. He seemed to avoid us. My parents did not seek a reconciliation which would have seemed to be based on self-interest. Monsieur Jaubourg is the son of a broker and very rich. I witnessed my father's grief from this rupture, which was the cause of a very unhappy union contracted by my aunt out of spite. I have always blamed Madame de Claviers for it, perhaps unjustly. The sight of her son stirs those memories and is painful to me."

Yes, that was long, long ago, and lo! Madame Olier found anew in her heart the melancholy sensation with which Madame Privat's words had suddenly oppressed her. Must it be that she loved Landri even then, unconsciously? The truth of that confidence was guaranteed both by the character of her who made it and by the chance that led to it. But perhaps it was all a matter of chance. So that Madame Olier did not believe in it altogether. However, she had retained an ineradicable doubt. How often she had wondered whether the young man's mother had really made a misstep, and whether he was in danger of ever hearing of it! She had had a little shiver every time that he had mentioned the name of Jaubourg, by chance, in their conversations; and deeply stirred as she was, all those complex and confused sensations had suddenly reawakened when he had spoken of his proposed visit to Rue de Solferino. She had fancied him at the bedside of a sick man who, in his last moments, would perhaps let a terrible secret escape his lips! Her apprehension had been so great that an impulsive entreaty had followed, most imprudent if the relations between Jaubourg and the late Marquise de Claviers-Grandchamp had really been culpable!

"I am mad," she said, rousing herself from the sort of waking dream, which had reproduced with the detail of an hallucination that brief scene, her apartment at Saint-Mihiel, Madame Privat's face, her voice, her very words. "If Monsieur Jaubourg had been Madame de Claviers' lover, he would not have continued to be Monsieur de Claviers' friend after her death. If only my movement and my exclamation did not arouse suspicion in Landri's mind! I should never forgive myself. No. He is so honest, so straightforward. He has too noble a heart to imagine in others the evil that it would be a horror to him to commit. If he will only speak to his father about that possibility of an expedition against a church! He promised. He will speak to him. His father will prevent him from following out that shocking purpose. For my part, I cannot. I love him too well. Mon Dieu! how I love him! how I love him! I defended myself too long. Ah! I feel that I am all his, now!"

And as, at that moment, she heard laughter through the partition, announcing little Ludovic's return, she opened the door to call her child, and, pressing him to her heart, she embraced him frantically, to prove to herself that this love to which she was on the point of abandoning herself, by promising to become the wife of a second husband, would take nothing from the son of the first; and she said to him:--

"You know that your mother loves you, you know it, tell me that you know it."

II

A GRAND SEIGNEUR

Madame Olier's prevision was just: that little unthinking gesture, as of a hand extended to prevent a fall, was destined to be one of the signs which should arouse in Landri the most painful of ideas, but not until later. That youthful heart--Valentine had read it accurately in this respect, as well--was too noble not to entertain an instinctive repugnance for suspicion, that calumny of the mind. How could he have made an exception in his mother's case? He had never ascribed a criminal motive, even for a second, nor imagined that any one could ascribe such a motive to the assiduities of one of the intimate friends of their family. The tears that he had shed on Madame de Claviers-Grandchamp's death had been the loving, sincere tears of a son, with no alloy in his veneration. And so, while he returned from Rue Monsieur to Place Saint-François, to get his automobile, no suspicion entered his mind. The imprudent entreaty that his friend had addressed to him not to see the invalid on Rue de Solferino was only a proof of an affection a little too easily disturbed, and he was the more touched by it.

"How I love her!" he exclaimed, echoing, and conscious of it, the passionate sigh which she, on her side, was breathing toward him. "And she loves me, too. She fights against it still, but I understood it, I saw it, I know it. I know that she will be my wife.--My wife!" he repeated, with an intimate quiver of his whole being which made him close his eyes. Suddenly Valentine's image brought before his eyes that of his father, and the memory of the undertaking he had entered into abruptly crushed that outburst of joy. "She is right," he said to himself, without transition, mentally repeating the very words that she had used. "I owe it to him to speak both of her and of all the rest. I owe it to him from respect for his noble heart. I will do it."

The bare thought of that explanation oppressed the young man with an agony of timidity. He had always suffered from it in the presence of that man whose name he bore, whose heir he was, whom he loved, and by whom he was loved, and he had never been able to open his heart to him fully, to explain himself concerning his inmost thoughts. His character, which was very manly in respect to important decisions, but extremely sensitive, and consequently easily disconcerted in its outward manifestations, had always been taken by surprise as it were by that of the marquis, so unhesitating, so dominating, so impervious to argument. His resistance to this moral despotism was not altogether conscious. It was that which incited him in his constant effort not to be an "émigré," as he said, to make himself useful, to belong to his own time, "to do his duty"--another of his phrases. We must repeat it. There are none more just. Many another young man of his class has felt, as he did, that magnanimous and praiseworthy appetite for efficient and beneficent action. Many have, like him, tried to rebel against the ostracism which France, the offspring of the Revolution, practises, by her customs as well as by her laws, against the old families. They have, like him, stumbled over obstacles. They have rarely felt them, as he did, as tragedies. This excessive and morbid view of his destiny betrayed in Landri a lack of equilibrium, of certainty. In truth, if, in certain directions, his ideas were absolutely opposed to those of his father, in others he underwent a veritable hypnotism at the hands of that powerful personality, and he was very near the point of doubting himself before an irreconcilability which he had not dared really to face but once, when it was a question of entering Saint-Cyr. His mind had been developed by reading, observation, reflection, all solitary, constantly held in check by the loud speech, the imperious intelligence, the steadfast and logical convictions, in a word, the decision, of the marquis. Landri, too, had decision, but by fits and starts, and when he had provided himself with very well-considered reasons therefor. His father had it always, gaily, buoyantly, as he walked, as he breathed, by an unfolding of his inward energy, if one may say so, which was as natural in him as the muscular development is in a lion. The prestige of that opulent and powerful nature maintained so complete a domination over the temperament, more refined perhaps, but less masterful, of his son, that he had been on the point of equivocating when Valentine asked him for that promise. He had given it, however. His lover's pride would have been too deeply humiliated to confess a weakness of which he was now sensible once more.

"Yes," he repeated, "I must speak to him--but how? Of her? That will be very difficult, but let him once see her and my cause will be won. She is so refined, so pretty, such a lady!--Of the inventories? It is impossible. She understood me at once, devout as she is. Their religion is not the same. To her the Church is the faith. Those who haven't it are simply to be pitied. To him the Church is like the monarchy, like the nobility, the essential condition of public order. It is the hierarchy that guarantees all the others. What answer can I make? I should think as he does if our time were not our time."

Soliloquizing thus he reached the side of the Church of Saint-François-Xavier, at the spot where he had left his automobile. His chauffeur, when he did not return, had left his car in the care of one of the numerous idlers who transform that isolated square into a club of bicyclists and tennis-players, and had gone to refresh himself at one of the wine-shops in the neighborhood.

"Deuce take it!" said the young man ill-humoredly, "Auguste isn't here! I shall never get to Grandchamp. I sha'n't have any lunch, that's all," he concluded. "But how is the machine?" and while the small boy who had been left in charge of the vehicle ran off to fetch the conscienceless chauffeur, he began to examine the different parts of the machine with a connoisseur's eye. That too was one of the small points upon which he had based his self-esteem as a "modernist." He understood how to repair and handle his automobile as well as a professional. "Everything is in order," he said. "I will drive myself. We shall go faster, and I shall not irritate my nerves by thinking." He began therefore to put on the cloak and cap and goggles and gloves of the profession, and Auguste had no sooner joined him, than he started his heavy machine with as much precision as if he had not borne the name of Landri, which denoted in the family of Claviers-Grandchamp pretensions more or less justified--but they date back to the twelfth century--of descending from the kings of the first race. And this car of the latest model bore on its panels the curious arms which, with the device, _E tenebris inclarescent_, symbolize that legendary origin: three frogs _or_ on a field _sable_. These were, according to some authorities in heraldry, the arms of our first kings. Géliot waxed wroth over it long ago, in his "Vraye et parfaite science des armoiries."[1] He saw therein only three roughly executed fleurs-de-lys. He would have enjoyed maintaining that opinion before the choleric marquis. "And to think," reflected the heir of the pseudo-Merovingian, "that it took years to make my father admit the mere idea of the telephone, of electricity and the automobile! But at last we have one, and of an excellent make. I shall be there before the hunt is over."

He had, in obedience to a childish whim in which all young men will recognize themselves, instead of driving straight along the boulevard, the Esplanade and the quay, taken Rue de Babylone, in order to pass Rue Monsieur. He longed to see once more the outside of the little hôtel of the time of Louis XVI. Valentine became once more so present to his mind that he was absorbed anew in that inward vision when he reached the house in which Jaubourg lived. Lovers, even the most affectionate,--especially the most affectionate,--are almost savagely insensible to what does not concern, either nearly or distantly, the object of their passion. He had no need to remember his promise, in order to avoid trying to see the invalid.