"I have nothing to say," Jaubourg replied, "to anyone. To anyone." He had recovered his self-control once more. "I am quite calm. But my head gets so confused! Kiss me, Landri. Bid me adieu. I wanted to see you for that.—Oh! Just once, let me kiss you once as I love you. Oh! my child! my child!"
Tears gushed from his eyes, and rolled down amid the sweat with which his face was bathed. He rested his moist face on the young man's hands. He pressed him to his heart. He touched his hair and his shoulders; and Landri, aghast at the horrible thing that was being disclosed to him, listened as he continued:—
"You have gone back to your kind voice.—Your voice! That was my only joy in you. When you were a little child, at Grandchamp, I used to go into the library to listen to you as you played in the garden under the windows."—He had raised himself to a sitting posture. The dream described by the doctor was beginning.—"You don't see me, nor anyone else. I am looking at you.—You run about, your curly hair floats in the wind—your mother's hair.—She comes to you, along the path, against the yews. The air has colored her cheeks. How lovely she is!—She knows I am there. She smiles at me over our child's head.—Where has she gone?" His eyes had changed their expression. They were fixed on other scenes.—"How tiny she looks in that great bed! She insisted on dressing up. Her pearls sink into the folds in the skin of her neck!—Ah! how she suffers at the thought of death! So young, and that frightful disease!—I am going. You know that if I could stay I would not leave you, Geneviève—tell me that you know it.—I love you! I love you!—They are taking her away.—Look! I do not weep. You can look at me, I shall not betray her.—Geoffroy,—he is weeping. I do not weep. I still have our child. He shall have everything, everything. I have found a way—You sha'n't prevent that! You sha'n't prevent it!"
A terrifying vision had suddenly succeeded the pictures among which Landri had recognized—with ever-increasing horror!—the amusements of his childhood, his sick mother, and the minute detail of the pearl necklace about her fleshless neck; that mother's burial—and the rest! The invalid had raised himself in his bed. He was gazing at the young man, with a stupefied expression in his eyes, evidently mingling the altogether confused impression aroused by his presence with the nightmare that had possession of him.
"You say that he's my son! You have no right to think that," he groaned, "you don't know—Don't say it—I forbid you to say it!"
Then, as the illusion assumed a more definite and more alarming form, he uttered a loud shriek and jumped out of his bed.
This outcry was heard through the partition. It reached the ears of the servant and the doctor, both of whom rushed into the chamber at the same moment, just in time to stop the invalid, who had darted toward the window to escape from the voices that he heard.
"Leave us alone," said the doctor to Landri, who was so horrorstruck by the scene, that he had not even gone to the assistance of the victim of hallucination. "Joseph and I can take care of him."
He pushed the young man into the study, where he remained quarter of an hour, half an hour, completely crushed, as if he himself were in the clutches of a nightmare which paralyzed him with terror. At last the doctor reappeared. His face bore the marks of extraordinary preoccupation.
"I have just given him an injection of morphine, to subdue him," he said. "He will doze now, till the end. But such a paroxysm! That of last night was a mere outline.—Above all things pay no attention to what he may have said to you. It was absolute mental confusion,—madness." He repeated: "madness."
He looked his companion squarely in the face—too squarely—as he emitted that phrase which contradicted so utterly his earlier formulas: "He lives over past events.—The depths of his memory come to the surface." He himself realized, no doubt, the terrible bearing of the antithesis between this second assertion and the former one, for he could not help blushing. What words had Jaubourg uttered, then, in his delirium, that were even more explicit? Had he pronounced, before those witnesses, the horrifying sentence: "I was Madame de Claviers' lover, and Landri is my son?" At all events, that was the ghastly fact that Chaffin had grasped amid the sick man's divagations, as Landri himself had done; and, at this additional evidence, he felt an icy chill run through his whole body.
When a man is suddenly brought face to face with a fact of supremely tragic importance to him, which he cannot honestly doubt, and of which he had no previous suspicion, an interval of semi-stupefaction succeeds, of brief duration, during which he could not himself say what his sensations are. It is not grief, for the man does not comprehend what he has just learned. He does not realize it. Nor is it hesitation. Later he will be able to argue, he will attempt, rather, to argue, against the evidence. For the moment the fact has entered into him, with its irresistible force, as a steel point enters the flesh that it passes through, and there ensues, in the most secret depths of his being, that total upheaval of nature to which the hymn in the liturgy refers:Stupebit et natura. However, life goes on about this man who has been stricken to death and knows it not. It even goes on within him, and he seconds it, and he obeys its behests with an automatism resembling that of an evil suggestion. In this state Landri descended the stairs from Jaubourg's apartment, re-entered the cab he had left at the door, and gave the cabman Maître Métivier's address, almost without being conscious of it. The clock, wound before the terrible shock, performed its functions mechanically.
The notary was not at his office. Of what consequence now to the young man were those financial difficulties which had seemed so formidable to him? What were they in presence of this other horrible thing? He left his letter, and went on, on foot, toward the club on Rue Scribe where he had determined to lunch. A telegraph office that he passed reminded him of his promise to send M. de Claviers a despatch. He went in; and there, as he rested his elbow on the desk of blackened wood, before the printed form, and dipped his pen into the ink, this species of somnambulism suddenly ceased. His consciousness returned, acute and heart-rending. That ghastly hour that he had just lived through was a reality. Jaubourg was really dying. He had really said to him those words which still filled his ears and which had rooted in his mind the most cruel, the most ineradicable of ideas. A sudden evocation showed him M. de Claviers entering that same room, and the dying man, in the throes of the same delirium, uttering the same words.
"That shall not be!" he said, and he crumpled the paper, on which he had not even begun to write the address, with a convulsive gesture of dismay. Feverishly he wrote on another sheet: "Marquis de Claviers-Grandchamp. Château de Grandchamp, Oise.—Don't be alarmed. A decided improvement;" and signed it. Then he handed the untruthful despatch through the wicket.
He was within two steps of the club. The sight of one of the members going in at the door, who, fortunately, did not see him, made him stop short and walk away, almost run, in the opposite direction. That member of the club knew Charles Jaubourg, as all the others did. He would ask him for news of him. The friendship between the sick man and M. de Claviers was legendary.—Friendship!—Suddenly Landri said to himself: "They all know. Such scandals as this the world always knows; it hawks them about and laughs at them. The whole club knows. All Paris knows. There were only two people who didn't know."
He walked on and on,—how long he could not have told,—flying from those witnesses of the family disgrace, flying from himself. He mechanically entered a restaurant for luncheon, but had hardly begun to eat when he rose. Another image sprang up in his mind,—that of Valentine Olier. She too knew. That was the meaning of the exclamation that rushed from her lips: "Monsieur Jaubourg dying? I hope he won't see you"; of her entreaty not to see the sick man. She knew! With a bound as brutally instinctive as the contraction of his fingers on the white telegraphic form just before, Landri left the restaurant. He hailed another cab, to fly to her.
In his unreasoning excitement he had walked heedlessly, from street to street, as far as the network that encompasses the Department of the Interior. He was quite near Rue du Faubourg-Saint-Honoré, where the town mansion of the Claviers-Grandchamps is situated. There his mother had died. There he had lived ever since with—By what name should he call henceforth the man whom he loved and should always love as a son loves his father, and who was nothing at all to him, nothing more than a great-souled honorable man, outraged by the most terrible of affronts, by those of the flesh of which his flesh was the offspring? The thought of seeing that house again was abhorrent to the wretched youth. He had given the cabman Madame Olier's address. As he was preparing to turn into Rue des Saussaies, Landri knocked on the glass as if he would break it. He ordered the man to go by way of Rue de Suresnes, Boulevard Malesherbes, and Rue Royale. The mere aspect of the quarter in which he had passed his childhood was, physically, intolerable to him. He closed his eyes that he might recognize nothing. But in that crisis of his life what impression could he receive that would not make him cry out in pain?
And now he was going to Valentine. To tell her what? To ask her what?—The cab had crossed Place de la Concorde, passed through Rue de Bourgogne and Rue Barbet-de-Jouy, and was rumbling over the pavement of Rue Monsieur; and he was still asking himself that question, without finding any reply thereto. To have conceived that ghastly suspicion, that certainty, alas! concerning Madame de Claviers and his own birth, was such a disgrace to begin with! To put that idea in words, even to Valentine, especially to Valentine, would be a crime! The affection of a son for his mother bears so sacred a character, all the loving energies of our being combine so powerfully to make her a creature apart from all others, purer, more irreproachable, more venerable! Was Landri to overstep the bounds of that respect which he alone could never cease to feel for Madame de Claviers, whatever she might have done? Should he repeat, voluntarily, knowingly, those terrible words torn from a dying man by the approach of the death-agony,—words by which he himself, as soon as he had heard them, was, as it were, stunned, ay, struck dead?
And yet it was absolutely necessary that he should find out whether Valentine knew and what she knew. The nervous shock had been too violent. All power of inhibition was momentarily suspended in him. His thought was certain to become an act the instant that it bore any relation to the overwhelming revelation that he had had to undergo. So that it was impossible for him not to cross the courtyard, not to ring at Madame Olier's door, not to ask if she would receive him. It had not even occurred to him that it was barely half-past twelve, that their appointment was for two o'clock, and that the simple fact of his arriving unexpectedly indicated some extraordinary occurrence. Did he so much as remember the reason that he and the young woman had made the appointment, and the passionate and painful interview of yesterday concerning their marriage? There is a peculiar characteristic of such uncontrollably excited mental states into which we are cast by a too abrupt and too violent shock: our mental equilibrium is temporarily upset. Our most cherished sentiments are arrested as it were, and our power of prevision as well. We seem to be looking on at the throwing out of gear of certain all-powerful sensations which lead us where they choose.
The bell had no sooner rung than Landri would have been glad to flee again as he had been fleeing. He remained.
"Either later, or now," he said to himself, "I must see her. I prefer now, and to know at once the whole extent of this dishonor."
When the servant announced that Monsieur le Comte de Claviers-Grandchamp desired to speak with her, and at once, Valentine was at table, had just finished taking luncheon with her little boy. During the twenty-four hours since the young man had left her upon her promise of a final answer to his offer of marriage, she had been constantly in the throes of the last convulsions of the struggle that had been waged for three years between her love and her duty first, her good sense next. That exclamation with which their interview had ended, that "now I am all his," had been followed by a supreme effort to resist. The serious objections that she had urged had presented themselves anew with a force which Landri's disclosures concerning the secret difficulties of his relations with his father had not lessened—quite the contrary. One thing had grown less: her authority over her friend. By consenting to reconsider her first refusal, she had proved too plainly her weakness before the young man's passion. She realized that, and she was alarmed to observe how sweet the sensation of yielding to that force was to her. Irresistible inward intoxication of the woman who begins to give herself! To give herself! A phrase so simple, yet of such deep meaning, which sums up in itself the whole miracle of love, because it is love! To cease to be one's self, to transform one's self into the ideas, the wishes of another, to become whatsoever he wills, contrary to self-interest, to prudence, sometimes to honor—so that he may be happy! And the man whom Valentine loved wanted nothing from her which she had not the right to give him without remorse.
"What answer shall I give him?" she had asked herself a score of times, without ever arriving at a decision of which she was really, radically sure in her own mind. "How can I persuade him to wait longer? Wait, and for what? Assuming that I impose this further postponement upon him, and he agrees to it, what will our relations be then? If I don't say yes, and instantly, I shall be obliged, after the explanation we had yesterday, to close my door to him. To receive him under such conditions would be mere coquetry, in the worst of all forms. A woman who has let a man tell her that he loves her should never see him again, or should belong to him. Not see him again? Not know what he thinks, what he feels? I should suffer too much. To say yes to him, if ill luck wills that he shall be mixed up in one of these horrible church-burglaries, is to dig still deeper the gulf between him and his father. If I could only make my consent depend on the condition that he should resign rather than obey an order of that sort! No; that would be wrong. He has a conscience of his own which I have no right to exert pressure upon in the name of his love! Ah! how I wish I could be sure that I am deciding only for his real good, and not because I love him and for my own happiness!"
A little incident had added to her uncertainty: a long letter from Saint-Mihiel, written by one of the friends she had retained there, the wife of one of the late Captain Olier's fellow officers. It was all about the uneasiness that prevailed among all the officers on account of the imminence of the two inventories—at Hugueville and Montmartin. The young widow's correspondent related at great length a conversation she had had with her husband, and how she had insisted that he should resign rather than comply with certain orders.
"She is his wife," Valentine had said to herself. "A wife has the right to take part in the most important resolutions of her husband's life. Would she have the right to leave him if he should decide against her advice? That is the sort of pressure I should try to exert if I should demand a promise from Landri as the price of my hand. I will not do it!"
Such were the thoughts that she was turning over in her mind when the bell rang. "Monsieur le Comte de Claviers-Grandchamp?" she could not help asking the servant who transmitted the young man's request; and she made her repeat the name, her surprise was so great. What was the meaning of this call at half after twelve instead of two? Evidently, that Landri had spoken to his father. To make him anticipate their appointment thus, he must have good news to tell her! Would M. de Claviers consent to their marriage? It was mad to hope for such a thing, and yet Valentine's heart was beating fast with that hope when she went into the small salon where the young man was awaiting her.
He had not uttered a word, and already she knew that she was mistaken. And the door had hardly opened, and already he realized that he had come to ask that woman a question which it was impossible for him even to frame in his mind. Just as, a little while before, the trivial, altogether material, necessity of writing a telegram, had roused him from his stupor, so now the necessity of stating in explicit words the ghastly thought roused him from his fit of frenzy. He saw it as clearly as he saw Valentine coming toward him, that to seek to learn the extent of the dishonor, as he had said, was to make himself an accomplice in it, to aggravate it. Whatever Madame Olier might have learned, she had learned it by hearsay only, and with doubts as to its truth. To speak to her would change those doubts into certainty.
Landri suddenly recovered all the energy he had had before the revelation. The mere presence of some one to talk to had caused the tortured youth to realize with crushing force the sacredness of the obligation to hold his peace, to conceal his martyrdom. Such a mighty struggle with himself, and so instantaneous in its conclusion, did not take place without a contraction of the whole being, betrayed by the tension of the motionless features, by the wavering of the glance, by the "white voice"—an admirably expressive popular phrase! What a contrast to the exalted glance, the impassioned lips of yesterday—those glowing eyes, that ardent voice! What had happened? Still engrossed by the anxiety revived by her friend's letter, Valentine thought at once of the ominous tale of inventories to be made.
"You have come at noon instead of two o'clock, Landri," she said, speaking her thought aloud. "I understand. You have to return to Saint-Mihiel by the next train. Have you had a telegram from the colonel?"
"No," he answered in amazement. He was so far away from these professional anxieties that he did not even understand the allusion.
"Then, if it isn't the inventories—" She did not finish the sentence. The question that she had on the end of her lips did not pass them. The perspicacity of a woman who loves made her divine that she must not even ask it. To give herself countenance and to avoid the appearance of interrupting herself, she continued: "The fact is that I have been worried again this morning on your account. I have had a letter on the subject from Julie Despois, the major's wife. In fact, I put it aside to show it to you. Here it is."
She had espied the letter on her writing-table,—it was placed there, in fact, with that purpose. She handed it to Landri, who began to read it, or to pretend to do so. Valentine saw that his eyes followed the lines but that their sense did not reach him. He did not really see the words. When he had finished the fourth page, he refolded the letter and handed it to Madame Olier, who refused it.
"Keep it. I want you to keep it. Read it again when you're back at Saint-Mihiel. She says so well what I said to you so badly."
The meaning of these words did not reach the young man, either. He obeyed, however, and with a mechanical movement slipped the envelope into his coat pocket. They sat for several seconds without speaking. This sort of absence in presence terrified Valentine now. Something had happened, something tragical it must have been to affect him so profoundly. With that occurrence she had nothing to do,—she felt it, she saw it. It was not a question of their marriage, nor of the answer that M. de Claviers might have made. He looked at her no more than he had looked at the letter just now. Something had happened! And had happened since the day before. Since the moment that Landri left that little salon.—Where did he go? To Grandchamp. But he had taken Rue de Solferino on his way. Madame Olier shuddered at the remembrance of the dread that had suddenly seized her when Landri had told her of his purpose. Suppose that, despite the promise she had exacted from him, he had been compelled to go upstairs? Suppose—And overwhelmed by the possibilities of which she caught a glimpse, she asked:—
"Did you get to Grandchamp in good season yesterday?"
"Why, very good," he replied; "in less than two hours."
"And your father wasn't angry? That little détour that you had to take didn't make you too late?"
"No," he said, "I was there at the finish."
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.
"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!
"So it is true," he continued, "that he did not know that he was dying? Ah! Landri, may the good Lord preserve us from ending so, without being able to make our last sacrifice! I dread but one form of death—that is, sudden death. Jaubourg did not deserve it. But Charlus was quite right—he was not religious. Still, if I had been here, I would have sent for a priest; but Joseph did not dare to go beyond his orders. I should have paid no heed to that, and who can say if God would not have granted him the privilege of recovering consciousness for a moment! But God is the nobleman of heaven, as somebody said, I don't know who. I imagine that the amplitude of his indulgence surpasses our poor feeble judgments. He pardons much to one who has always been sincere and kind; and Jaubourg was so kind! How many times your mother has told me of secret charitable deeds of his, and of his considerate words! And she was rather prejudiced against him.—My dear Landri, it does me good to have you here! I understand, you came back on my account. You wanted to be posted, so that you could prepare me for the worst at need. I know that you and Charles didn't always understand each other. However, I assure you that he was very fond of you. But he was of another generation, and he didn't enjoy himself much with the newcomers. 'It makes me feel too old,' he used to say to me.—'It makes me younger,' I always said.—He was never reconciled to being more than thirty years old. You see, he had been such a pretty fellow, such a dandy, and so fashionable! And it didn't spoil him. I can see him now, in '73, when I made his acquaintance. It was at the Élysée, in the poor Marshal's day. That was yesterday, and it was the time of promise. We hoped for so many things that have never come to pass, and we hoped for them joyously, too joyously perhaps.—Too joyously," he repeated, and added: "And now look."
He pointed to the bedroom door, then put his hand over his eyes. But in a moment, manfully shaking his head as if determined not to abandon himself to these melancholy recollections, he continued:—
"I return to Grandchamp by the ten o'clock train. You take the nine o'clock. Our stations are not far apart, and I'll see you on board. We will dine on the way.—Let us walk a little, to recover our equilibrium,—what do you say? How many times I have called for Charles at this time in the afternoon, when chance brought me to this quarter! Why, only last Wednesday he spoke to me about this project of marriage with the Charlus girl. It was in this room that he said to me: 'I am entrusted with a message to you. It's about Landri.'—But let us go. Joseph will let me know the precise hour of the funeral ceremony. It will depend on the distant cousins he has left. You must ask for leave of absence. I must have you with me."
"I don't know whether I can get it," Landri replied. The prospect of that fresh trial, of following that funeral procession under the eyes of so many people who would surely know the truth, made his flesh creep. At all events he had a pretext for avoiding it. "Our new colonel isn't very obliging in that respect. And then, you know, he's of the Left, very strong, and not very well disposed to us."
"When shall you make up your mind to shut the door in the face of those rascals?" asked M. de Claviers. They were going downstairs, he first, so that he could not see the intensity of distress depicted on his companion's face while he persisted: "I am not disturbed; they'll drive you to it, and, it may be, before very long. On the train Bressieux showed me a newspaper in which something was said about resuming the taking of inventories in the Saint-Mihiel region.—'What will Landri do, if he gets into that?' he asked me.—'What you would do,' I replied.—I confess that I should be happy to see you take your leave with a fine gesture. Besides it's high time that a gentleman should say something that hasn't yet been said. Among the officers who have resigned as a protest against shameful orders there have been several of noble birth. They have all talked about their consciences, their religious principles.—Conscience? I don't care much for that word. It has served too often as a solemn label for anarchy.—Religious principles? That's better. That's an appeal to a discipline that does not adapt itself to people's whims. But for the noble there's still another duty, that of not disregarding the call of honor. And one does disregard it when one acts in opposition to the will of the ancestors from whom he is descended, of those deceased ancestors who in their lifetime served a Catholic France. We, their progeny, owe it to them to serve the same France. France without the Church is not the France of which our houses are a part. For a noble to serve this France is to renounce his nobility. Such renunciations are the suicide of honor, of that honor which a great bishop called the safeguard of justice, the glorious supplement of the laws. That is what I would like to hear proclaimed to the faces of those curs, by a Claviers-Grandchamp."
They were in the street now. The marquis gazed at his supposititious son with those piercing blue eyes which were no longer dimmed by a tear. It was the very climax of tragedy,—of the internal tragedy which life evolves simply by the interplay of its secret contrasts,—this quasi-feudal profession of faith, enounced upon that threshold, before the child born of treachery, by the bitterly outraged nobleman who knew nothing of the outrage.
The arrival of one of their club friends, who came to inscribe his name at Jaubourg's, and who stopped a moment on the sidewalk to exchange a few words of condolence with them, enabled Landri to avoid replying. When, three hours later, he at last found himself alone in his compartment of the Saint-Mihiel train, he was sorely exhausted, terribly broken by that murderous day, the hardest of his whole life. Before, during and after the dinner, which they ate tête-à-tête, M. de Claviers had said many other things the unconscious cruelty of which had kept the young man on the rack. But as he lay back in the carriage, lulled by the monotonous clamor of the train, which translated itself into distinct syllables, it was those declarations on the stairway, those words concerning the inventories, which recurred to his mind, endlessly. In them were combined his melancholy premonitions of the hours preceding the terrible crisis and the drama which was already resulting from that crisis itself.
"But wherein has anything changed in my situation, so far as that possibility is concerned?" he asked himself. "Didn't I know how he felt on that point, and that he would be immovable? But yes, there is a difference. Before I learned what I have learned, his theory of the duty of the noble had some meaning to me. It has none now. I am not a Claviers-Grandchamp, I am not a noble. The things that are valuable to them have no value to the son of a Jaubourg! He talked to me about honor! Honor! To me! But what I ought most of all to long for, is to be mixed up in one of these affairs, to have to execute an order contrary to all his ideas, and to act as I had made up my mind to act—before. He will curse me? So much the better! So much the better! We shall never meet again? So much the better! I could not stand such conversations as that of this evening. I should betray myself. Indeed, this one went beyond my strength. I love him too dearly! And who wouldn't love him? He is so worthy of being loved!"
The physical and moral personality of the marquis was reproduced before his mind with the accuracy and distinctness which long-continued familiar intercourse produces. Handsome, intellectual, generous, affectionate, entertaining, so kindly-natured and so perfect a type of thegrand seigneur, the "Émigré" had prestige, he had charm, and he had been subjected to the atrocious outrage! That infamous deed provoked an outburst of revolt from the son of the culprit.
"How could any one betray such a man? And prefer to him—whom? O mother! mother!"
Landri was alone now. He could give free vent to the emotion that was suffocating him. Lying prone on the cushions of the carriage, he wept at last, and for a long, long while. All the tears that he had not shed during the day he shed now,—those that he had forced back in Valentine's presence, by an heroic effort of his will; those that he had forbade himself to display to the indifferent curiosity of the passers-by during his mad rush across Paris, and those that he had not let fall when he was talking with M. de Claviers, within two yards of the death-bed and later at the restaurant. And at the same time that his heart found relief in tears a reaction took place in his mind. For the first time since the dying man had begun to speak to him, he tried to doubt.
"But she is my mother!" he sobbed. "And I believed that of her instantly! Instantly, without inquiry, without proof!"
Inquiry! Alas! is there need of inquiry to make one believe what is visible, what is before one's eyes?—Proof?—But a fact is itself a proof, and the dying man was that evidence, that proof, that fact. His face, his movements, his voice returned to Landri's memory. As plainly as he saw the cushions of that commonplace compartment in their gray coverings, the lamp in the ceiling, and the nocturnal landscape flitting past the windows, he had seen a father die, bidding his son a despairing farewell. He had seen a woman's lover haunted, possessed, deluded by the memory of that woman. The dying man's outcries were not evidence: they were reality, unquestionable, undeniable,—the fact, the indestructible fact.—Doubt? No, Landri could not doubt. One by one he reviewed the details of that scene, which had been so short—as short as the time required to swallow a glass of poison, which, once it has passed into the veins, freezes the very well-spring of life.
Among these details there was one, the threatening nature of which had not made itself manifest to him until that moment, adding a new terror to his agony. "The child shall have everything, everything," the sick man had groaned; and, addressing his imaginary enemies: "You sha'n't prevent that. I have found a way." Did these words mean that Jaubourg had left Landri his whole fortune by his will? It was not possible that that man, prudent as he was, and so intent upon concealing his paternity that he had forbidden himself ever to embrace his son, should have contradicted the whole tenor of his life, in cold blood, by such a step! Was the way that he had found, a gift through a third person?
"Whatever it may be," said the young man to himself, "I shall refuse it, that's all. I, too, shall know how to find a way to avoid touching that money. It's quite enough that I am obliged to share in their falsehood, in spite of myself, quite enough to inflict on a man I love and admire and revere this daily affront. I take his name, his affection, when I am not entitled to either. It is this sort of rebound that makes certain forms of treachery so culpable. They fall too heavily on the innocent. For, after all, I am innocent of this sin, and now it strikes at me after thirty years. And I must deceive as they did, renew and prolong their perfidy, conceal the truth from their victim, even at the price of my blood!"
And as the names of the stations succeeded one another in the darkness, interrupting with their unfeeling summons this inward lamentation—Châlons—Vitry—Bar-le-Duc:—"How unfortunate I deemed myself when I travelled over this road day before yesterday!" he reflected. "And I should be so happy to go back to that night! One would say that I had a presentiment of the catastrophe toward which I was going, when I tried so hard to concentrate all my thoughts, all my reasons for living, upon those two ideas: Valentine and the Army, the Army and Valentine. I did not foresee, however, that I should so very soon have nothing else, really, to live for. Now is the time when I could honestly say to her: 'You and my profession, my profession and you.'—To her, at least, I am bound, from this day, forever. We have exchanged promises. We should be no more firmly bound to each other if we were married.—The Army is my refuge. If I should leave it now, where should I go?"
His refuge! That word, which represented the only succor that he could expect from life at that moment, returned to the poor fellow's lips, when, at the end of that sorrowful night, he saw through the carriage windows about five o'clock the dark and mist-enfolded mass of the houses of Saint-Mihiel against a sky in which the stars shone feebly. They were crowded about the ancient abbey church, where, in the baptismal chapel, may be seen the two children playing with skulls, the chef-d'œuvre wherein Ligier Richier has represented, by that simple symbolism, the whole destiny of man. The flame of the lamps barely lighted the waters of the Meuse, winding rapidly through the damp shadows. The platform of the station, when the young man alighted, was deserted and gloomy. So of the streets through which passed the rickety, jolting vehicle found at the station. But for him there issued from those shuttered houses the sensation which is produced in us by the return to a round of daily habits after a violent moral shock.
As his cab turned into Rue du Rempart he recognized the wall of the garden where, on one of the paths, he had told Madame Olier of his love three years before. His heart, exhausted by excess of grief, was amazed to feel a sort of painful relaxation of its tension at sight of those streets where he had so often fed upon his lover's dreams, had performed for so many months his military duties. So he had guessed aright. He could live—a hard and bitter life, it is true—by fastening himself upon, by clinging desperately to those two last resources, hope and activity, which fate had left to him; and it was with an impatience, not happy surely but very manful, that, having donned his uniform, he awaited the hour to go to headquarters and resume his daily occupations.
Although he had hardly slept during the night, his step was brisk as he walked toward the barracks. If he was no longer conscious of what he had called in his conversation with Valentine the joy of the uniform,—that word joy would have no meaning to him for a long, long time!—he felt its manly courage. He gazed at the high gateway with a strange excitement in his eyes, ringed by tears and sleeplessness.
"I still have this, too," he said, using precisely the same form of words as on the day before, when he left his dear friend on Rue Monsieur; and as if in haste to resume the actual contact with that stern but healthy and manly life, he quickened his pace, to enter the courtyard the sooner.
It was barely eight o'clock. Gusts of a cold wind, the bitter northeast wind that constantly sweeps the high plateaus between the Meuse and the Moselle, lashed the white caps of the men engaged in grooming horses before the stable doors. Subaltern officers, wrapped in their cloaks, were overlooking them. In a corner, at the door of the kitchen, other men, sheltered under an awning, were peeling potatoes. Others were marching off in a squad to perform some task. Everything spoke of the energetic and organized activity which makes a well-ordered barracks a very noble human thing.
There, Landri was no longer, as at Grandchamp, the sole heir of a nobleman on parade, himself a nobleman. He was Lieutenant de Claviers, who was obeyed, but who obeyed. It will be remembered that he had called that sensation too a joy. In what fashion he exerted his authority, the glances of the men who saluted him according to rule, touching the vizor with the open hand, told clearly enough. And he looked at them with the watchful and kindly eye of the leader to whom every detail has its importance. He noticed one whose slightly unhealthy pallor indicated recent illness.
"So you have come back to duty, Teilhard? Since when?"
"Since yesterday, lieutenant."
"You are quite sure it was not too soon? Are you entirely cured of your bronchitis?"
"Entirely cured, lieutenant."
"And your father? Did you spend your furlough with him?"
"Yes, lieutenant. In fact, I meant to come to see you, to tell you that his business has picked up. He expects to pay a little of his debt next month."
"Write him that there's no hurry, my good Teilhard," replied Landri affectionately, motioning to the dragoon to move on. He saw a captain in undress uniform approaching—no other than Despois, the husband of Madame Olier's friend.
"So you were talking with your miraculous work?" said Despois laughingly to his subordinate. "Why, yes—why, yes—it's a genuine miracle. To have made a good soldier out of a blockhead like that animal. Don't blame any one but yourself if I entrust the desperate cases to you. I have taken advantage of your absence to turn over Baudoin to you. He still rides badly. I commend him to your very particular attention."
"I will attend to him at once," said Landri. "I'll take him alone before my drill." And when the captain had passed on, he said to the quartermaster, who was waiting at the door of the riding-school with several men and horses: "Saddle Panther for me, and call Baudoin."
Ten minutes later the mare he had asked for arrived, all saddled, with a simple snaffle in her mouth which she was already champing nervously, and led by the head by a youth of unkempt aspect with very black eyes glowing like coals in a grayish face. Simply from the way in which he wore his képi on one side, one divined in him the insolent vagabond; and from the brusque movement with which he put his hand to it to salute the officer, the smouldering revolt, the mere brute all ready to sing or think the obscene quatrain which we must never weary of citing to the smug optimists who refuse to recognize the ferocities hidden beneath the humanitarian mirage of socialism—those forerunners of a Terror which will be worse than the other, being better organized, and more degraded, being the work of a more degenerate race:—