CHAPTER XIV.THE VICTIMS.
A morning at ten o’clock. The antechamber at the Ministry of Public Instruction; a long corridor badly lighted, with dark hangings and an oaken wainscot. The gallery is full of a crowd of office-seekers, seated or sauntering about, who from minute to minute become more numerous; each new arrival gives his card to the solemn clerk wearing his chain of office, who receives it, examines and without a word deposits it by his side on the slab of the little table where he is writing; all this in the haggard light from a window dripping from a gentle October rain.
One of the last arrivals, however, has the honor of stirring the august impassiveness of this clerk. He is a great big man, weather-beaten, sunburned and of a tarry aspect, with two little silver anchors in his ears for rings and with the voice of a seal that has caught a cold—just such a voice as one hears in the transparent early morning mists in the seaports of Provence.
“Let him know that it is Cabantous, the pilot—he knows what is up; he expects me.”
“You are not the only one,” answers the clerk, who smiles discreetly at his own joke.
Cabantous does not appreciate the delicacy of the joke; but he laughs in good humor, his mouth opening back as far as the silver anchors; and, making use of his shoulders, he pushes through the crowd, which falls aside before his wet umbrella, and installs himself on a bench alongside a sufferer who is almost as weather-beaten as himself.
“Té! vé!—why, it is Cabantous. Hello, how are you?”
The pilot begs his pardon—cannot recall who it is.
“Valmajour, you remember; we used to know each other down there in the arena.”
“That is true, by gad.—Bé, my good fellow, you at least can say that Paris has changed you—”
The tabor-player has now become a gentleman with very long black hair pushed behind his ears in the manner of the musical person, and that, along with his swarthy complexion and his blue-black moustache, at which he is constantly pulling, makes him look like one of the gypsies at the Ginger-bread Fair. On top of all this a constant look of the village cock with its crest up, a conceit like that of village beau and musician combined, in which the exaggeration of his Southern origin betrays itself and slops over, notwithstanding his tranquil and ungarrulous appearance.
His lack of success at the opera has not frightened him off; like all actors in such cases he attributes his failure to a cabal, and for his sisterand himself that word “cabal” has taken on barbaric and extraordinary proportions, and moreover a Sanscrit spelling—thekhabbala—a mysterious monster which combines the traits of the rattlesnake and the pale horse of the Apocalypse.
And so he relates to Cabantous that he is about to appear in a few days at a great variety show in a café on the boulevard—“Aneskating-rinkI would have you understand!” where he is to figure in some living pictures, at two hundred francs the evening.
“Two hundred francs an evening!” The eyes of the pilot roll in his head.
“And besides that, they will cry mybographyin the street and my portrait in life size will be on all the walls of Paris,widmy costume of a troubadour of the old times, which I shall put on every evening when I do my music.”
What flatters him most in all of this is the costume. What a bore that he is not able to put on his crenelated cap and his long-pointed shoes in order that he might show the Minister what a splendid engagement he has, and this time on good government stamped paper which was signed without Roumestan’s aid! Cabantous looks at the stamped paper, smudged on both its faces, and sighs.
“You are mighty lucky; why, look at me—it’s more than a year that I am’opingfor my medal. Numa told me to send my papers on here and I did send my papers here—after that I never heard anything more about the medal, nor about the papers, nor about anything else. I wrote to theMinistry of Marine; they don’t know me at the Marine. I wrote to the Minister himself; the Minister did not answer. And what beats me is this, that now, when I haven’t my papers with me and a discussion arises among the mercantile captains as to pilotage, the port councilmen won’t listen to my arguments. So, finding that was the way of it, I put my ship in dry dock and says I to myself: Come, let’s go and see Numa.”
He was almost in tears about it, was this wretched pilot. Valmajour consoles and reassures him and promises to speak for him with the Minister; he does this in an assured tone, his finger on his moustache, like a man to whom people can refuse nothing. But after all the haughty attitude is not peculiar to him; all these people who are waiting for an audience—old priests of pious manners in their visiting cloaks; methodical and authoritative professors; dudish painters with their hair cut Russian fashion; thick-set sculptors with broad ends to their fingers—they all have this same triumphant air—special friends of the Minister and sure of their business. All of them, as they came in, have said to the clerk: “He expects me.”
Each one is filled with a conviction that if only Roumestan knew that he was there!—This it is that gives a very particular physiognomy to the antechamber of the Ministry of Public Instruction, without a trace of those feverish pallors, of those trembling anxieties, which one perceives in the waiting-rooms at other Ministries.
“Who is he engaged with?” asks Valmajour in a loud voice, going up to the little table.
“The Director of the Opera.”
“Cadaillac—all right, I know—it is about my business!”
After the failure made by the tabor-player in his theatre Cadaillac had refused to let him appear again. Valmajour wished to bring suit, but the Minister, who was afraid of the lawyers and the little newspapers, had begged the musician to withdraw his plea, guaranteeing him a round sum as damages. There is no doubt whatever with Valmajour that they are at this moment discussing these damages and not without a certain animation, too, for every few moments the clarion voice of Numa penetrates the double door of his sitting room, which at last is rudely torn open.
“She is not my protegée, she is yours!”
Big fat Cadaillac leaves the room, hurling this taunt, crosses the antechamber with an angry gait and passes the clerk who is coming up between two lines of solicitors.
“You have only to give my name.”
“Let him only know that I am here.”
“Tell ’im it’s Cabantous.”
The clerk listens to nobody, but marches very solemnly on with a few visiting cards in his hand and the door which he leaves partly open behind him shows the Minister’s sitting-room filled with light from its three windows overlooking the garden, all of one panel of the wall covered bythe cloak turned up with ermine of M. de Fontanes, painted standing at full length.
A trace of astonishment showing on his cadaverous face, the clerk comes back and calls:
“Monsieur Valmajour.”
The musician is not at all astonished at passing in this way over the heads of the others.
Since early morning his portrait has appeared placarded on all the walls of Paris. Now he is a personage and hereafter the Minister will no longer cause him to languish among the draughts in a railway station. Conceited and smiling, there he stands in the centre of the luxurious bureau where secretaries are occupied in pulling out drawers and cardboard pigeon-holes in a frantic search for something. Roumestan in a terrible rage scolds, thunders and curses, both hands in his pockets:
“Come now, be done with it! those papers, what the devil!—So they have been lost, have they, that pilot’s papers?... Really, gentlemen, there is an absence of order here!...”
He catches sight of Valmajour: “Ha, it’s you, is it?” and he springs upon him with one leap, the while the backs of the secretaries are disappearing by the side doors in a state of terror, each carrying off an armful of boxes.
“Now look here, are you never going to stop persecuting me with your dog-at-the-fair music? Haven’t you had enough with one chance at it? How many do you require? Now they tell me that there you are on all the walls in your hybridcostume. And what is all this bosh that they have brought me here?—that your biography? A mass of blunders and lies. You know perfectly well that you are no more a Prince than I am and that those parchments which are talked about here have never existed save in your own imagination!”
With the brutal gesture of the man who loves argument he grabbed the wretched fellow by the flap of his jacket with both hands and as he talked kept shaking him. In the first place this “eskating-rink” didn’t have a penny—perfect fakirs! They would never pay him and all he would get would be the shame of this dirty advertisement on the strength ofhisname, the name of his protector. Now the newspapers could begin their jokes again—Roumestan and Valmajour the fifer for the Ministry; and, growing excited at the memory of these attacks, his big cheeks quivering with the anger hereditary in his family, with a fit of rage like those of Aunt Portal, more scaring in the solemn surroundings of an office where the personality of a man should disappear before the public situation, he screamed at the top of his voice:
“But for God’s sake get out of here, you wretched creature, get out of here! We have had enough of your shepherd’s fife!”
Stunned and silly, Valmajour let the flood go on, stuttering, “All right, all right,” and appealed to the pitying face of Méjean, the only man whom the Master’s rage had not sent into headlong flight,and then gazed piteously on the big portrait of Fontanes, who looked scandalized at excesses of this sort and seemed to accentuate his grand Ministerial air the more, in proportion as Roumestan lost his own dignity. At last, escaping from the powerful fist which clutched him, the musician was able to reach the door and fly half-crazed with his tickets for the “eskating.”
“Cabantous, pilot!” said Numa, reading the name which the impassive clerk presented to him, “There’s another Valmajour! But no, I won’t have it; I have had enough of being their tool—enough for to-day—I am no longer in....”
He continued to march up and down his office, trying to get rid of what remained of that furious rage, the shock of which Valmajour had very unfairly received. That Cadaillac, what impudence! daring to come and reproach him about the little girl, in his own office, in the Ministry itself, and before Méjean, before Rochemaure! “Well, certainly, I am too weak; the nomination of that man to the directorship of the opera was a terrible blunder!”
His chief clerk was entirely of that opinion but he would have taken good care not to say so; for Numa was no longer the good fellow he used to be, who was the first to laugh at his own embarrassments and took railleries and remonstrances in good part. Having become the practical chief of the cabinet in consequence of his speech at Chambéry and a few other oratorical triumphs, the intoxication that comes with heightsgained, that royal atmosphere where the strongest heads are turned, had changed him quite, had made him nervous, splenetic and irritable.
A door beneath a curtain opened and Mme. Roumestan appeared, ready to go out, her hair fashionably dressed and a long cloak concealing her figure. With that serene air which for five months back lit up her pretty face: “Have you your council to-day, my dear? Good-morning, Monsieur Méjean.”
“Why, yes, council—a meeting—everything!”
“I wanted to ask you to come as far as Mamma’s house; I am breakfasting there; Hortense would have been so glad!”
“But you see it is impossible.” He looked at his watch: “I ought to be at Versailles at noon.”
“Then I will wait for you and take you to the station.”
He hesitated a second, not more than a second:
“All right, I will put my signature here and then we will go.”
While he was writing Rosalie was giving Méjean news of her sister in a low tone. The coming of winter affected her spirits; she was forbidden to go out. Why did he not call upon her? She had need of all her friends. Méjean gave a gesture of discouragement and woe: “Oh, so far as I am concerned....”
“But I tell you yes, there is a good deal more chance for you. It is only caprice on her part; I am sure that it cannot last.”
She saw everything in a rosy light and wantedto have all the world about her as happy as she was—O, how happy! and glad with so perfect a joy that she indulged in a certain superstition never to acknowledge the fulness of her joy to herself. As for Roumestan, he talked about his affair everywhere with a comical sort of pride, to indifferent people as well as to his intimates:
“We are going to call it the child of the Ministry!” and then he would laugh at his joke till the tears came.
And of a truth those who knew about his existence outside, the household in the city impudently established with receptions and an open table, this husband who was so sensitive and tender and who talked of his coming fatherhood with tears in his eyes, appeared a character not to be defined, perfectly at peace in his lies, sincere in his expansiveness, putting to the rout the conclusions of those who did not understand the dangerous complications of Southern natures.
“Certainly, I will take you there,” said he to his wife as they got into the carriage.
“But if they are waiting for you?”
“Well, so much the worse for them; let them wait for me—we shall be together all the longer.”
He took Rosalie’s arm under his own and pressing against her as if he were a child:
“Té!do you know that I am happy only in this place? Your gentleness rests me, your coolness comforts me. That Cadaillac put me into such a state of rage! He’s a fellow without any conscience, he’s a fellow without any morality—”
“You didn’t know his character, then?”
“The way he is carrying on that theatre is a burning shame!”
“It is true that the engagement of that Mlle. Bachellery ... why did you let him do it? A girl who is false in everything, her youth, her voice, even her eyelashes.”
Numa felt his cheeks reddening; it was he himself who fastened them on, now, with his own great big fingers, those eyelashes! The little girl’s mamma had taught him how to do it.
“Whom does this little good-for-nothing belong to, anyhow? TheMessengerwas talking the other day of influences in high circles, of some mysterious protection—”
“I don’t know; to Cadaillac, undoubtedly.”
He turned away in order to conceal his embarrassment and suddenly threw himself back horrified.
“What is it?” asked Rosalie, looking out of the window too.
There was the placard of the skating-rink, enormous, printed in crying colors which showed out under the rainy and gray sky, repeating itself at every street corner, on every vacant space of a naked wall and on the planks of temporary fences. It showed a gigantic troubadour encircled with living pictures as a border—all blotches in yellow, green and blue, with the ochre color of the tabor placed across the figure. The long hoarding which surrounded the new building of the city hall, past which their carriage was going at themoment, was covered with this coarse and noisy advertisement, which was stupefying even to Parisian idiocy.
“My executioner!” said Roumestan with an expression of comic dismay. Rosalie found fault with him gently.
“No—your victim! and would that he were the only one! But somebody else has caught fire from your enthusiasm—”
“Who can that be?”
“Hortense.”
Then she told him what she had finally proved to be a certainty, notwithstanding the mysteries made by the young girl—namely, her affection for this peasant, a thing which at first she had believed a mere fancy, but which worried her now like a moral aberration in her sister.
The Minister was in a state of indignation.
“How can it be possible? That hobnail, that bog-trotter!”
“She sees him with her imagination, and especially in the light of your legends and inventions which she has not been able to put in the right focus. That is why this advertisement and grotesque coloring which enrage you fill me on the contrary with joy. I believe that her hero will appear so ridiculous to her that she will no longer dare to love him. If it were not for that, I hardly know what would become of us. Can you imagine the despair of my father; can you imagine yourself the brother-in-law of Valmajour?—oh, Numa, Numa! poor involuntary maker of dupes.”
He did not put up any defence, but indulged in anger against himself, against his “cussed Southernism” which he was not able to overcome.
“Look here, you ought to stay always just as you are, right up against my side as my beloved councillor and my holy protection. You alone are good and indulgent, you alone understand and love me.”
He held her little gloved hand to his lips and said this with such a firm conviction that tears, real tears, reddened his eyelids: then, warmed up and refreshed by this effusion, he felt better; and so, when they reached the Place Royale and with a thousand tender precautions he had helped his wife out of the carriage, it was with a joyous tone and one free of all remorse that he threw the address to his coachman: “London Street, hurry, quick!”
Moving slowly, Rosalie vaguely caught this address and it gave her pain. Not that she had the slightest suspicion; but he had just said that he was going to the Saint-Lazare station. Why was it that his acts were never in accordance with his words?
In her sister’s bedroom another cause for anxiety met her: she felt on entering that there had been a sudden stoppage of a discussion between Hortense and Audiberte, who still kept the traces of fury on her face while her peasant’s head-dress still quivered on her hair bristling with rage. Rosalie’s presence kept her in bounds, that was clear enough from her lips and eyebrowsviciously drawn together. Still, as the young wife asked her how she did, she was forced to answer and so began to talk feverishly of theeskating, of the advantageous terms which were offered them, and then, surprised at Rosalie’s calm, demanded in an almost insolent tone:
“Aren’t you coming to hear my brother? It is something that is at least worth while, if for nothing more than to see him in his costume!”
This ridiculous costume as it was described by her in her peasant dialect, from the dents in the cap down to the high curving points of the shoes, put poor Hortense in a state of agony; she did not dare raise her eyes to her sister’s face. Rosalie asked to be excused from going; the state of her health did not permit her to visit the theatre. Besides, in Paris there were certain places of entertainment where all women could not go. The peasant woman stopped her short at the first suggestion.
“Beg your pardon, I go perfectly well and I hope I am as good as anybody else—I have never done any wrong, I have not;Ihave always fulfilled my religious duties.”
She raised her voice without a trace of her old bashfulness, just as if she had acquired rights in the house. But Rosalie was much too kind and far too superior to this poor ignorant thing to cause her humiliation, particularly as she was thinking about the responsibility that rested on Numa. So, with the entire intelligence of her heart and revealing as usual the uncommon delicacy ofher mind, in those truthful words that heal although they may sting a little, she endeavored to make Audiberte understand that her brother had not succeeded and never would succeed in Paris, the implacable city, and that rather than obstinately continue a humiliating struggle, falling into the mire and mud of artistic existence, it would be far better for them to return to their Provence and buy their farm back again, the means to accomplish which would be furnished them, and so, in their laborious life surrounded by nature, forget the unhappy results of their trip to Paris.
The peasant girl let her talk to the very end without interrupting her a single moment, merely darting at Hortense a look of irony from her wicked eyes as though to challenge her to make some reply. At last, seeing that the young girl did not wish to say anything more, she coldly declared that they would not go, because her brother had all kinds of engagements in Paris—all kinds which it was impossible for him to break. Upon that she threw over her arm the heavy wet cloak which had been lying on the back of a chair, made a hypocritical curtsy to Rosalie, “Wishing you a very good day, Madame, and thanking you very much, I am sure,” and left the room, followed by Hortense.
In the antechamber, lowering her voice on account of the servants:
“Sunday evening,qué?half past ten without fail!” And in a pressing, authoritative voice: “Come now, you certainly owe that to yourporefriend! Just to give him a little heart ... and to start with, what do you risk, anyhow? I am coming to get you and I am going to bring you back!”
Seeing that Hortense still hesitated, she added almost aloud in a tone of menace: “Come now, I would like to know: are you his betrothed or not?”
“I’ll come, I’ll come,” said the young girl greatly alarmed.
When she returned to the room, seeing that she looked worried and sad, Rosalie asked her:
“What are you thinking about, my dear girl? are you still dreaming the continuation of your novel? It ought to be getting pretty well forward in all these months,” added she, taking her gayly around the waist.
“Oh, yes, pretty well forward—”
After a silence Hortense continued in an obscure tone of melancholy: “But the trouble is, I can’t see my way to the close of the novel.”
She didn’t care for him any more: it may be that she never had loved him. Under the transforming power of absence and that “tender glory” which misfortune gave to the Moor Abencerage he had appeared to her from a distance as her man of destiny. It seemed a proud act on her part to knit her own existence with that of one who was abandoned by everything, success and protectors together. But when she got back to Paris, what a pitiless clearness of things! Whata terror to perceive how absolutely she had made a mistake!
To start with, Audiberte’s first visit had shocked her because of the new manners of the girl, too familiar and free and easy, and because of the look of an accomplice which she gave when telling her in whispers: “Hush, don’t say anything! he’s coming to get me....”
That kind of action seemed to her rather hasty and rather bold, more especially the idea of presenting this young man to her parents. But the peasant girl wanted to hurry things. And then, all at once, Hortense perceived her error when she looked upon this artist of the variety stage with his long hair behind his ears, full of stage movements, denting in and shifting his sombrero of Provence on his characteristic head—always handsome, of course, but full of a plain preoccupation to appear so.
Instead of taking a lowly manner in order to make her forgive him for that generous spirit of interest which she had felt for him, he preserved his air of a conqueror, his silly look of the victor, and without saying a word—for he would hardly have known what to say—he treated this finely organized Parisian girl just as he would in similar conditions have treatedher, the Des Combette girl—took her by the waist with the motion of a soldier and troubadour and wanted to press her to his breast. She disengaged herself with a sudden repulsion and a letting go of all her nerves, leaving him there looking foolish and astonished, whileAudiberte quickly intervened and scolded her brother violently. What kind of manners had he, anyhow? It must have been in Paris that he learned such manners, in the Faubourg SaintGermoyne, without a doubt, among his duchesses?
“Come now, wait at least until she is your wife!”
And turning to Hortense:
“O, he is so in love with you; his blood is parching with his love,pécaïré!”
From that time on, when Valmajour came to get his sister he considered it necessary to assume the sombre and desperate air of an illustration to a ballad: “‘The ocean waits for me,’ the Knighthadjured.” In other conditions the young girl might have been touched, but really the poor fellow seemed too much of a nullity. All he knew how to do was to smooth the nap of his soft hat while reciting the list of his successes in the faubourg of the nobles, or else the rivalries of the stage. One day he talked to her for a whole hour about the vulgarity of handsome Mayol, who had refrained from congratulating him at the end of a concert; and all the while he kept repeating:
“There you are with your Mayol!...Bé!he is not very polite, your Mayol isn’t!”
And all this was accompanied by Audiberte’s attitudes of watchfulness, her severity of a policeman of morals, and this in the face of these very cold lovers! O, if she had been able to divine what a terror possessed the soul of Hortense, what a loathing for her frightful mistake!
“Ho! what a capon—what a capon of a girl—” she would sometimes say to her, trying to laugh, with her eyes brimming with rage, because she considered that this love-affair was dragging too much and believed that the young girl was hesitating for fear of meeting the reproaches and anger of her parents. Just as if that would have weighed a straw in the balance for such a free and proud nature, had there been a real love in her heart; but how can one say: “I love him,” and buckle on one’s armor, rouse one’s spirits and fight, when one does not love at all?
However, she had promised, and every day she was harassed by new demands. For instance there was that first night at the skating-rink, to which the peasant girl insisted upon taking her, whether or no, counting upon the singer’s success and the sympathy of the applause to break down the last objections. After a long resistance the poor little girl ended by consenting to skip out secretly for that one night behind the back of her mother, making use of lies and humiliating complications. She had given way through fear and weakness, perhaps also with the hope of getting her first impression back again at the theatre—that mirage which had vanished; of lighting up again, in fact, that flame of love which was so desperately quenched.