"I?" cried Landri. "You cannot believe—"
The names of Chaffin and Métivier had suddenly reminded him of the financial catastrophe the imminence of which had so alarmed him. He had asked the notary to say nothing, and he was quite sure that his correspondence with him was unknown to the marquis. So that he could not have interpreted it as a step suggested by Valentine to obtain possession of his fortune. But what if Métivier had been lacking in professional discretion? What if that last little sentence signified such a suspicion?
"I believe nothing," rejoined M. de Claviers, "except that on certain roads one does not stop."—Then, to prove that he proposed to be just, even in the execution of his sentence upon his rebellious son: "But as you haven't yet reached that point, and as you may still have some scruples, considering that I spoke to you about my burdens,—let me tell you that my difficulties are all at an end, thanks to the devotion of a friend. Charles Jaubourg had none but distant relations, of whom he had reason to complain. He has left me his whole fortune by his will. I came to tell you this news also," he added with a sigh, "and to read you the provisions of the will. Nothing could be more lofty in sentiment, more delicately expressed. I have accepted the legacy, in the first place, because it's absolutely honest money: Charles's father was probity itself; secondly, because I do not injure any one—his cousins are all rich and he never saw them; and finally because I loved him as much as he loved me. One can count the attachments in life that do not deceive one.—However I need not tell you that, without this legacy, your fortune was intact. I will order Métivier to communicate with you about the settlement. As for me, when the day comes that you desire to recover a father, you know the conditions.—Adieu."
Landri had listened with, an indescribable mixture of fear and disgust—fear of betraying his excessive emotion, disgust at the infamy of which he was the helpless witness. This then was the ghastly means devised by Jaubourg to leave his whole fortune to his son! And should he, the son, permit that money to be accepted thus, with such touching and confiding gratitude, by that nobleman, so proud and of such magnificent moral integrity? If, by his silence concerning what he knew, he should make himself an accomplice in that final act of treachery, would he not cap the climax of the outrage by his false generosity? The cry of protest was on his lips, and he did not utter it. There was something more atrocious than the failure to warn that honorable and terribly abused man, and that was for his wife's child to tell him what that wife had been.
M. de Claviers had walked to the door. He seemed to await a word, a gesture, a glance; and Landri stood silent, with downcast eyes. The marquis himself started to turn back. Then, in face of the young man's obstinate immobility, his dense eyebrows contracted, his eyes became stern. He repeated:—
"Adieu. Do you understand that I am bidding you adieu?"
"Adieu," said Landri, without raising his eyes, while the dispenser of justice, with a shrug of his powerful shoulders, left the room to avoid giving way to the fresh wave of indignation that swept over his great heart.
[5]In French law, asommation respectueuseis an extrajudicial document, which a young man of twenty-five or a young woman of twenty-one, proposing to marry without parental consent, is required to serve upon his or her parents, requesting advice concerning the marriage.
[5]In French law, asommation respectueuseis an extrajudicial document, which a young man of twenty-five or a young woman of twenty-one, proposing to marry without parental consent, is required to serve upon his or her parents, requesting advice concerning the marriage.
[6]Merlin,Répertoire de Jurisprudence, "Puissance Paternelle," Sect. III, § 1:—"Basset mentions a sentence pronounced by a father in person, by the advice of his family, against his son. He declared him to be unworthy to succeed, and sentenced him to the galleys for twenty years. The procureur-général of the Parliament of Grenoble appealed from this sentence as too light, and by decree of September 19, 1663, the son was sentenced to the galleys for life."
[6]Merlin,Répertoire de Jurisprudence, "Puissance Paternelle," Sect. III, § 1:—"Basset mentions a sentence pronounced by a father in person, by the advice of his family, against his son. He declared him to be unworthy to succeed, and sentenced him to the galleys for twenty years. The procureur-général of the Parliament of Grenoble appealed from this sentence as too light, and by decree of September 19, 1663, the son was sentenced to the galleys for life."
Four weeks had passed since the young man had listened to the Marquis de Claviers-Grandchamp's wrathful stride through the reception-room of his apartment, without calling him back to cry out the truth, to prevent that deplorable injustice: the debts incurred by his imprudent but generous and chivalrous prodigality paid with the money of his wife's lover! After those twenty-nine days Landri found himself once more, in the same place and at the same hour, surrounded by the same familiar objects amid which his period of arrest had passed.
He was free now. On the preceding day he had been sentenced by the court-martial at Châlons, by five votes against two, to a fortnight's imprisonment, to date back to his original arrest. On his return from Châlons to Saint-Mihiel, he had found in his room an official communication, stating that "by presidential order, under date of this day, Lieutenant de Claviers-Grandchamp is retired from active service on half-pay." That sheet of paper was the veritable "Here lies" of the soldier, rather than the letter that he had received from the colonel on his return from the Hugueville expedition. Landri had crumpled it up and thrown it aside, paying no further heed to it. All his attention was given to a telegram which he read again and again, an indefinite number of times, seated, with his head in his hands, at the same table and in the same attitude as the marquis the other day, while his valet and the orderly went in and out, packing his trunks.
Landri was to return to Paris by the night train. The telegram in which he was so absorbed was from M. de Claviers' maître d'hôtel. It was a reply to the only letter that he had written the marquis since their interview. He had sent it on the adjournment of the court-martial, to inform him of the verdict. It contained a careful but very distinct allusion to his proposed marriage, and stated that he proposed to go to Paris unless his "father"—he continued to call him by that name—should see any objection to his doing so. He read and reread the despatch acknowledging the receipt of that letter.
"Monsieur le Marquis, being obliged to leave for Grandchamp, instructs me to say to Monsieur le Comte, in reply to his letter, that he will expect him at Rue du Faubourg-Saint-Honoré to-morrow.GARNIER."
"Monsieur le Marquis, being obliged to leave for Grandchamp, instructs me to say to Monsieur le Comte, in reply to his letter, that he will expect him at Rue du Faubourg-Saint-Honoré to-morrow.
GARNIER."
That M. de Claviers had not put aside his severity, this missive, so deliberately impersonal and at such a time, was a sufficient proof.
"However, he is willing to see me!" said Landri to himself. "This interview will be another very painful one, but I must not shirk it."
Upon receipt of the despatch he had devoted all the energy of his mind to looking at the impending meeting from the point of view that he had constantly maintained during that month of almost absolute solitude. He had passed the whole of it in trying to define his duty, and he had always come at last to the twofold necessity: silence and separation, separation and silence. During those interminable hours of reflection he had not had one moment's doubt. Not for a moment, either, had he ceased to suffer at the thought of Jaubourg's will, of the shocking abuse of confidence committed for his benefit by his real father, and in which he could not avoid being an accomplice, rather than commit a still more shocking crime by breaking the heart of the most loyal of men, by dishonoring his own mother. His grief finally took the shape of remorse for his compulsory participation in this vilest of falsehoods. Every time that he had remembered, during those four weeks, the petrifying revelation, he had thought instantly of the method resorted to by the dead man to leave him his fortune, and had shuddered with impotent abhorrence.
Nothing that had happened had diverted his mind from that obsession: neither the questions asked during the official inquiry, nor the consultations with his counsel, nor his appearance before the judges, nor the manifestations called forth by his act. Expressions of sympathy had come to him by hundreds from every part of France, from superior officers and comrades, even from privates. He had received also a great number of letters and postal cards filled with low-lived insults. This was a proof that the Marquis de Claviers was right, and that the fine gesture of refusal before the door of the church to be burglarized, since it exasperated the enemies of the army, evidently answered a deep-rooted craving of the military conscience. But alas! it was only a gesture, only a pretence. The officer had obeyed a sentiment which none of his admirers or his insulters could even suspect. Praise and criticism affected him no more than other impressions of the external world. Madame Olier's letters alone had discovered the secret of communicating to him a little of their tenderness. He had received one each day. Evidently the dear woman realized that she had hurt him the first day by speaking of M. de Claviers. Never after that, in the course of those chats with pen in hand, did she so much as hint at the marquis's existence. "Somebody has told her about the legacy," was Landri's conclusion, "and she understands."
He had guessed aright. Madame Privat, who had come to Paris for Jaubourg's funeral, had paid Valentine a visit. She had told her, with the acerbity of a disinherited relation, about her cousin's will.
"You remember what I told you about his passion for Madame de Claviers-Grandchamp? Now he leaves Monsieur de Claviers all his property! Privat insists that he can't see anything wrong. He claims that it's the surest proof that nothing ever happened.—You must confess, my dear friend, that it has an evil look."
Madame Olier had made no reply. But her heart had overflowed with pity. She had seen Landri as he was at their last meeting, in turn paralyzed and convulsed by grief, and she had divined the terrible truth. Her affection had assumed a gentler, more caressing phase, across the distance, and on that afternoon preceding his return to Paris, as he bent over that enigmatical despatch, the certain precursor of fresh struggles, the convicted officer, to exorcise his troubles, evoked the image of his only friend, his betrothed and his comforter.
"I shall see her to-morrow," he said to himself. "I shall be able to keep the secret that honor commands me to keep, and she will read my heart and pity me. She loves me!Heis going to ask me to give her up. I had the strength to resist the first attack. I am sure of having still more against the second.—But is that really what he wants to talk to me about?—What else can it be?"
In this question which Landri asked himself, or rather, which asked itself in his mind, in his own despite, another supposition was comprised. If it were true that Madame Olier had heard of Jaubourg's attentions to Madame de Claviers,—and of that he had no doubt,—others must have heard of them, too, others would be talking of them. In the first shock of the revelation that had been the son's first thought. The reader will remember that, after he had started for his club on Rue Scribe, after the scene on Rue de Solferino, he had fled wildly, like a madman, with the terror of a culprit flying from a witness of his shame, simply because he saw a member of the club cross the threshold. Charles Jaubourg's will must have revived all the gossip, aroused anew the slumbering malevolence. Who could say that the marquis had not received anonymous letters, that his suspicions had not been awakened?
One fact had surprised Landri more than all the other incidents of those four weeks. As he dwelt upon the hidden meaning of the despatch, his mind reverted to that fact which suddenly assumed very great importance. How was it that M. de Claviers had done nothing in respect to one of the matters discussed in their interview—the choice of an advocate? The motives that made him irreconcilable on the subject of the marriage to Valentine were respect, worship, idolatry of his name. Would not those same motives naturally have led him to persevere in his original purpose? The heir to that name was summoned before a court-martial. That was a public fact which had no connection with their private disagreement. How was it that the "Émigré" had not insisted that the accused should be defended—that was his own word—on the ground of the principle to which he devoted his life: the honor of the noble? It was not necessary to communicate with his son for that. It would have been enough to send the young man a defender duly "instructed," according to another expression of his. He had not done so. Why? Landri had had to apply to Métivier the notary, who had sent down a kinsman of his, a distinguished practitioner, but purely professional. The marquis and the counsel had never met. Why? Did it mean that some new event had intervened? What was it? The awakening of suspicion? Or was the wrath of outraged paternal authority sufficient to explain his abstention?
Landri was so desirous to believe the latter that he went to the trunk in which his books were already packed, and took out the work wherein the marquis's ideas were collected and marshalled: "The History and Genealogy of the House of Claviers-Grandchamp." The mere title made Landri tremble, but he remembered having read a note, which he must find at any price. When he had found it, he spelled out all the syllables, word by word, in a low voice. He longed to read therein an explanation of the attitude of the Feudalist, thwarted in one of his most firmly rooted convictions. It was a fragment of a discourse delivered by the eloquent Duveyrier before the Parliament of Paris, in 1783. M. de Claviers had cited the passage apropos of the severity of one of his ancestors toward a younger son, with enthusiastic approval and emphasizing the last lines as if to make them his own.
In this argument Duveyrier was supporting a father's denunciation of his own daughter to the authorities.
"Can we," he said, "can we, without distress, reflect upon the immense interval that separates us from those who handed our laws down to us? By what steps of progressive enfeeblement we have substituted for that mental energy, for the power of genuine virtue, a factitious sensibility which takes fright at the slightest effort; not the healthy sensibility, inseparable from kindness of heart, which has compassion for the criminal while punishing the crime, but that flexibility of character, that flabbiness of heart which leads us to purchase the indulgence of others by our own indulgence, and which we call sensibility in order to legitimize our weakness, to ennoble it, indeed, if that were possible! In the last days of the Republic, when discord was ushering in depravity, Aulus Fulvius deserted Rome to follow Catiline. His father called him back. That citizen, a rebel against his country, was still a dutiful son. He obeyed. He submitted to the sentence of death pronounced by his father. Our ancestors admired this example of sublime virtue. We deem it harsh. Our grandsons will call it barbarous.We are beginning to be surprised that a father should exercise the right that the law gives him, to avenge his betrayed honor, his contemned authority. We shall end by depriving him of that right. From the impossibility of punishing the children will result contempt for the father, insubordination rebellion, and universal anarchy."
"That's his way of thinking, and he's profoundly in earnest about it," thought Landri, as he closed the bulky volume. "That's enough to make my opposition exasperate him, so that he won't have anything more to do with me until I have given way.—Where were my wits? He wants to see me to-morrow about those same matters that he had Métivier write me about. Must I imagine, too, that he has mysterious reasons for dividing our property? He told me in this very room of his purpose to do that. That alone proves how much weight he attaches to my offence against him. In his eyes it's a crime. I ought to congratulate myself that he is so rigid in his convictions."
This explanation was very plausible. But it did not allay the vague anxiety that the telegram had caused Landri. For this reason: Maître Métivier had sent him numerous papers to sign, about a fortnight before, accompanying them with a long letter, of a more personal sort. He said in it that he strongly approved of this segregation of the property of the father and son, and that he saw therein good augury for the future. He added that M. de Claviers had, upon his advice, entrusted the liquidation of his indebtedness to a former clerk of his, Métivier's, one M. Cauvet, an advocate who made a specialty of notarial practice. This Cauvet had discovered a serious irregularity almost immediately. Chaffin had been dismissed. "Perhaps Monsieur le Marquis was a little severe," observed the cautious Métivier. "Although the fraud was highly probable, it was not absolutely certain."
"So I was right," was Landri's instant thought, "Chaffin too was a traitor." And he had gone no farther. In his present reflections matters assumed a different aspect. Such violence under excitement was certainly a pronounced feature of M. de Claviers' temperament. No other reason was necessary to explain it than the discovery of a breach of trust. But the consequences? Landri remembered that the son of the steward thus summarily dismissed was Pierre Chaffin, the physician who had watched at the bedside of the dying Jaubourg. Suppose that that fellow had repeated to his father what he had unquestionably overheard? And suppose that the father, to revenge himself, had in his turn repeated that secret? Suppose that he had written to the person most interested?
"No," Landri answered his own questions, "Chaffin may have been tempted by the money that passed through his hands, and have become a thief. But he is not a monster. And Pierre is a physician. There are still some of them, yes, a great many, who keep professional secrets. No; nothing can have happened in that direction, nor in any other. Our conversation of the other day is quite enough."
Despite these arguments, the return to Paris, under such conditions and in obedience to that telegram, inspired the young man with an apprehension that he could not overcome.
"It's being shut up in this apartment, where I have too many sorrowful thoughts to disturb me," he said to himself; and he went out, to try to conquer his weakness by walking.
He employed the last hours of the afternoon in paying farewell visits. But they did not give him, after such a succession of violent shocks, the peace of mind which he was very near requiring physically. He might have measured the extent of the change wrought in him during those few weeks, by this trivial fact: during that last walk from one end to the other of the town where he had done his last garrison duty, he did not feel a moment's nostalgia for the profession to which he had been so attached. One anxiety overtopped everything else, of the same nature as that which he had undergone before the telegram came, and had tried to shake off: to ascertain whether the news of the infamous will had reached the ears of his comrades, and what they thought of it.
Landri had heard vaguely long ago that Major Privat was a distant cousin of Jaubourg. He had no sooner set foot on the sidewalk than he remembered it. That officer had retired the previous winter. He had certainly continued to correspond with some of his comrades in arms. Had he written them the news, and if so, with what comments? In that case what interpretation would those straightforward, simple hearts, whose uncompromising loyalty he knew, place upon M. de Claviers' acceptance?
Such an idea was not of the sort that permits the intrusion of others. In vain did the pictures of military activity on the streets of Saint-Mihiel multiply themselves about the cashiered lieutenant, as if to remind him of his youthful dreams and their destruction. He paid no heed to them. Thus he was able to pass, without being suffocated with despair, the headquarters gate, which he had entered only the other day with the firm determination to retain his uniform. He met, without a tearing at his heart-strings, several troopers of his former command, led by his successor, who was mounted on Panther herself, become in those few weeks a docile and spirited cavalry mare. He recognized Baudoin's insolent and sneering profile, and Teilhard's face, already less frank and open, evidently recaptured by anarchistic influences. That is one of the bitterest pangs that a real leader of men can feel,—to see the living tool that he has hoped, and has begun, to shape, go astray in other hands. Landri was hardly moved by it. On the other hand, he was intensely relieved to find that neither Despois nor Vigouroux, the first two officers whom he called upon, had the slightest suspicion of the legacy left to the Claviers by Privat's cousin. He had the courage to mention the former major's name to both of them. Plainly, they had not thought of him for months. They had many other cares in their heads, which they both poured into his ears, each after his manner.
"So you are lost to the army," said Despois. "Such an excellent officer—what a pity! I blame most the wretches who are governing us, for not understanding that, especially among us, a man cannot be replaced. A man! When they have one who wants to serve, they ought to do everything to keep him. In a campaign, one man is worth ten, twenty, thirty, a hundred, yes, a thousand others! One would think that our tyrants were afflicted with a vertigo that impels them to eliminate from the army the men of heart, that is to say, the loyalists, the men from whom their Republic has least to fear. The officer who refuses, as you did, to break down a chapel door, is the officer who doesn't conspire, because he has scruples, and those fools don't comprehend it!—I, too," he added, "I shall leave, and very soon. I don't think that I can stand it. Yesterday they made us march against the churches, to-morrow we shall be called upon for a campaign against the strikers. That is no more a soldier's work than the other. The army may be employed, in exceptional cases, to see that the laws are executed. But it must be one of the exceptional cases. The reason for the existence of the army is war, not police duty. Our politicians have a horror of war, of that manly and sanctified school of heroism. They have the degraded taste for armed demonstrations in the streets. Look you, they are talking of sending us next week to adjust matters at the forges of Apremont.—For heaven's sake, gentlemen, give us a policy of internal peace and of proud dignity externally!—Adieu, Claviers. I wish that we may meet again, you can guess where; foot to foot, charging the enemy. But will there still be any cavalry to follow us?—I am wrong. We have no right to despair, so near Vaucouleurs. What can you expect? It breaks your old captain's heart to see you go away."
"Well! so they've slit your ears, my dear Claviers!" Such was Vigouroux's first exclamation. "Ah! the—" And the lieutenant of dragoons, who adhered to the great traditions of the Klébers and Cambronnes, hurled a mess-room epithet at his comrade's persecutors. "Do you know that the same thing came near happening to me? And why? Because I exchanged two or three words with you when we dismounted on our return from Hugueville. Gad! they didn't waste any time. That same afternoon the colonel sent for me.—'Is it true that you congratulated Monsieur de Claviers in public?' he asked me.—'I did talk with Claviers,' I replied, 'but privately, when we were off duty; and if anybody claims to have been present at our interview, he lies.'—Charbonnier hesitated a moment. For all that he has the ideas that you know of, he's a good fellow. And then, Vigouroux, Charbonnier—those names have a similar sound, whereas Claviers-Grandchamp—However, 'I'll let it pass this time,' he said. 'But be less talkative, young man. You may fall in with another colonel than me.'—That's all there was to it. You see, two minutes' conversation, and we were spied upon. It poisons life. Claviers, to be surrounded by blackguards. It spoils the cooking at the mess, which really hasn't been so bad this year. I can't eat without talking, and no one dares to speak at the table now. If all the good men like you, the staunch ones, should disappear, what would become of us? But no matter, Charbonnier and his curs may say what they please, I congratulate you again, and I authorize you to say everywhere that Vigouroux cried 'bravo' twice over."
So Privat had not written! That was the whole significance, to their former comrade, of the words of the two officers, one so distinguished by nature, the other so simple-hearted, both equally attached to the service and wounded to the quick in their military honor by abominable orders. Later Landri was destined to see very often in his thoughts the sad and honest glance of Despois in its deeply lined mask, and the jovially disgusted lip—if one may say so—of the ruddy-visaged Vigouroux. At the moment there was no place in his heart for sensations of that sort.
His other visits passed off with the same alternations of painful curiosity and comparative—but only momentary—relief.
The anticipation of the interview with M. de Claviers—the third since he had known what he knew—consumed him with too fierce a fever. It increased constantly as the minutes passed that brought him nearer to the time when he would find himself face to face with him. Again, as in the ride at the head of his dragoons to Hugueville-en-Plaine, he seemed to see him and only him—only him on the railway platform, where very few of his friends had the courage to come to bid him adieu; only him in the carriage, where, lulled by the monotonous rumbling of the train, he tried to imagine the words he was about to hear and those that he would say in reply, endlessly and anxiously; only him, finally, in Paris, where, as he stood in Rue du Faubourg-Saint-Honoré, before the door of their house, his suffering acquired fresh intensity. He had not crossed the threshold since the day when, coming from Saint-Mihiel by train, he had gone there to dress, before going to Valentine's to ask for her hand. That was the day before Charles Jaubourg's death!
Everything indicated that the manner of life in that seignorial mansion was still as he had always known it. The old concierge saluted him from his doorway with the same deferential and familiar expression. The same stablemen, with the same gestures, were splashing pails of water on the wheels of the same carriages. Garnier, the maître-d'hôtel, whose white hair gave him a powdered aspect, received him with the same ceremony at the top of the steps, when his arrival had been announced by the same bell.
"Is Monsieur le Marquis well?" Landri inquired; and his heart gave a great throb of relief, as on the day before with Despois and Vigouroux, when the servant replied:—
"Why, yes, Monsieur le Comte, very well. Monsieur le Marquis went to Grandchamp yesterday to hunt, with several friends."
"He hunts!" thought the young man. "Then nothing extraordinary is happening! Evidently I was right. He wishes to talk with me about money matters only." And he said, aloud: "Ask him if he can see me about ten o'clock."
This touch of ceremoniousness was no novelty in the relations between the father and son. Although the conventional courtesy which is traditionary in old-fashioned families creates something like embarrassment at certain times, at other times it reveals itself as singularly beneficent in its operation. It ensures anonymity, if necessary, when one is suffering. No one of the household suspected that there was impending between the marquis and Landri one of those scenes which mark a solemn epoch in two lives.
But did Landri himself suspect to what sort of an interview he was proceeding when, at the appointed hour, he went down from his apartment to the library, where M. de Claviers had sent word that he was awaiting him? That large, high-studded room was on the same level with the garden, which was fresh and bright-colored in summer, but so severely bare and leafless on that dark December morning. The gloomy setting was only too appropriate to the words that were to be exchanged there.
The marquis was standing in front of the vast fireplace, with his back to the fire, whose bright flame twined about a veritable tree-trunk. It was another of the old nobleman's manias, that huge fire of the olden time. Standing before that monumental chimneypiece, he was himself at that moment, despite his modern costume, more of an "ancient portrait" than ever. But it was the portrait of one who was living through hours of frightful martyrdom. The master of the hunt of the forest of Hez, whose tall erect figure Landri had so admired in the group of sportsmen watching the kill, was scarcely fifty years of age, despite the sixty-five years that the genealogical tree of the Claviers-Grandchamps gave him. The head of the family, who was at that moment awaiting the heir to his name in the immense room lined with wainscotings and books, was an old man. His ruddy complexion mottled with white spots, his heavy eyelids, the wrinkles on his brow, told the story of the long sleepless nights of those four weeks. The jovial gleam of his deep blue eyes was replaced by an expression of feverish ardor, wherein one could divine his secret agony—at that moment! For the undiminished pride of the whole physiognomy said plainly enough that the nobleman had not surrendered, and that before any other witness he would have found a way to conceal his wound.
What was the wound? To know, Landri had no need to question him. What he had foreseen had happened. M. de Claviers suspected the truth. To what extent? How had he been warned? The young man instinctively collected all his strength, in order to undergo without faltering an interview in which his own secret might escape him. He was about to realize once more the superiority of Race, and what a powerful and resolute character it bestows upon its authentic representatives.
M. de Claviers was infinitely affectionate and sensitive, but he was above all else a man. In him, character was in very truth nourished upon and permeated by those principles upon which he declaimed with a fervor which was sometimes so discordant, even—especially, perhaps—in his own circle. At supremely critical moments he was certain to manifest the energy born of an unchangeable resolution, which scorns equivocation, and which has the unswerving decision of the surgeon's knife. He, too, was unaware exactly how much his son—in name—knew of a situation of which he had never dreamed before he had had overwhelming and indisputable proof of it. He was justified in thinking that the young man was altogether ignorant. That was enough to justify, in a weaker nature, the temptation to hold his peace, which Landri assuredly would not have escaped. In the marquis's eyes one duty overshadowed everything else,—the duty of saving, in this shipwreck of all his confidence and all his affections, so much as he could save of the honor of the Claviers-Grandchamps. He was the depositary of the name, and he proposed to impose his will on the intruder,—justifiably, indeed,—without concern for aught save that honor. And so when the young man, immediately on entering the room, began to speak, alluding to their last interview, he cut him short with a word.
"I did not send for you," he said; and the failure to address him by the familiartuseemed strangely harsh in his mouth, for never before, since his childhood, had Landri known him to address him thus, even in his sternest moments;—"I did not send for you to resume a discussion which, henceforth, has no interest or even any pretext. Something has happened during the month since we last met. It is destined to change our relations forever, and in every respect. It has seemed to me that I owed it to myself and to you to make it known to you. Prepare to receive a very painful blow, as I received it, bravely."
"I am prepared, father, to receive anything from you," Landri replied, "for I am sure that you will never do anything except for what you believe to be my good."
This ambiguous sentence was a final effort to conceal—to what avail now?—what he on his side had learned. At the word "father" the marquis, firm as he was, could not help closing his eyes for a second. But his voice, full and deep, did not falter as he continued:—
"Look over those two letters first; then we will talk."
With outstretched finger he pointed to an envelope lying on the desk, unsealed. On opening it the young man saw that it did in fact contain two letters. One, type-written, was thus conceived:—
"Monsieur le Marquis de Claviers-Grandchamp doubtless is unaware of the reasons that led one of his friends (?) very recently deceased, to make him his residuary legatee. The accompanying document will enlighten him. If Monsieur le Marquis is not satisfied, we have other documents to furnish him." And this denunciation was signed: "An admirer of the house of Claviers-Grandchamp"!
The other letter—Ah! his recognition of the handwriting stopped the beating of Landri's heart. The paper, slightly yellowed by time, still gave forth a vague, musty sweetness, the faint, evaporated odor of Geneviève de Claviers' favorite perfume,—the perfume that hovered about the kisses of which the child was born who unfolded the sheet with hands that trembled so that he tore it across the middle. It was a love letter, written without precaution, in the perilous sense of security which a long-continued liaison finally imparts even to those who are most closely watched. The first three words,—"My beloved Charles,"—the "tu" that came next—news of "our dear little Landri,"—and other phrases, no less explicit, would have made it impossible for the most obstinate to doubt.
From whom had the letter been stolen? From the lover after he received it? Or had villainous hands intercepted it, hands which the careless mistress deemed faithful? Why had they waited for years before using this formidable weapon, and why was it produced to-day, when the two culprits were protected forever by the tomb against the vengeance of the outraged husband? That the will which made M. de Claviers sole legatee had induced this revolting denunciation, the other letter needed not to assert with such insulting cynicism. It was sufficient evidence in itself. The motive was of little importance. The effect had been produced, as complete as the most implacable animosity could wish.
Landri stood as one stricken dumb before the man whose name he bore, by virtue of the sin of the dead woman who had insanely written those lines with her impassioned fingers. When he ventured at last to raise his eyes, he saw that the marquis pointed to the fire on the hearth. He threw the two papers, laden with deadly meaning, into the flames. A minute later a few charred fragments, whirling about in the smoke, alone testified that those letters had ever existed. Doubtless the young man's face had exhibited an extraordinary poignancy of suffering during that silent scene, for, even at that moment, M. de Claviers could not help pitying him.
"I could not perform the task incumbent upon me," he said, "except with your aid and with you aware of the facts."
"Do not reproach yourself, monsieur," said Landri. "Those letters have told me nothing. I knew it all before."
The blood rushed suddenly to the old man's face, attesting the burst of passion that this unexpected reply aroused in him. His blue eyes flashed fire, and as his former habit of speech returned to his lips in that explosion, he cried:—
"You (tu) knew it all! And you did not speak to me! You knew all, and your conscience didn't say to you: 'That man who brought me up, who has always loved me like the most affectionate of fathers, was betrayed in his conjugal honor! He is betrayed to-day in his probity! He accepts that abominable legacy in good faith! He is grateful for it! He is going to use it to pay his debts, to release his patrimony! His patrimony,'" he repeated. "'At any price I must prevent that!'—You knew all, and you allowed me to go away the other day without uttering the cry that you owed me! Yes, you owed it to me, for what I have given you with all my heart for so many years, for what I was still giving you a few moments ago.—I was just about to apologize to you for not being able to conceal the shameful truth from you! And you betrayed me, you, too! You made yourself an accomplice in the supreme outrage!—Ah! villain, you are indeed of their blood, the child of—"
He checked himself. Even in that outburst of his rage his great heart recoiled from the barbarity of insulting a mother, however unworthy, in the presence of a son. But the paroxysm was too violent to pass off thus. His clenched fists opened and closed. He seized the first thing that offered itself, a silver paper-knife lying on the table beside an uncut review. He broke in two the blade, which snapped like glass. Then, brought to himself by the very frenzy of the act, he addressed Landri again in a tone in which the tempest still rumbled:—
"But explain yourself, unhappy boy! Explain your silence! Why did you keep silent?"
"Because I loved you," said Landri, "and because my mother was concerned."
A heart-rending cry, so simple and poignant in its humanness, of the sort that the heart emits when it is touched to its lowest depths! M. de Claviers had loved the young man too long and too deeply, that affection was still too largely mingled in the horror which his existence inspired in him, for him not to be moved to the very entrails. He made a gesture which he instantly checked; and, as if he were angry with himself for that weakness, his face clouded anew as he inquired:—
"And from whom did you learn of this thing?"
"On Rue de Solferino—on that Tuesday. Oh! don't compel me to live through that frightful scene again!"
"He spoke to you!" roared M. de Claviers. "To you! to you! He dared!"
"He is dead," replied, nay, rather, implored the young man.
Again his innate generosity carried the day in the nobleman's heart; he placed his hand over his eyes, the same hand with which he had traced over the remains of his false friend the great sign of pardon. These sudden outbursts of his speech and his passion frightened him, no doubt. This interview which he had sought affected him too profoundly. He collected himself thus for a few seconds, and when he began again to speak his tone had changed. He uttered his words now with a sort of haughty coldness, hurried and harsh, which made his interlocutor feel even more keenly perhaps the utter hopelessness of their situation.
"It is useless to prolong an interview that must be as painful to you as to me. Listen to me, I beg, without interrupting me. In my capacity of head of the Claviers family, so long as you bear its name, I consider myself as having with respect to you both duties and rights. My duty is to treat you ostensibly as if you were my son!" His eyelids drooped once more over his eyes, as he said this. "I shall not fail in that duty.—My right is to demand that you abide by my decision in everything that concerns the defence of my family's honor. That honor is threatened. Such villainies as this are a sign." He pointed to the place on the desk where the envelope had been. He still saw it there! "They prove that people have talked about it, and that they are talking. We know enough of the world, you and I, to know that its fickleness exceeds its ferocity. We know, too, that it has, in spite of everything, a sort of justice of its own. There is nobody, I say nobody, who can honestly believe that Geoffroy de Claviers-Grandchamp accepted a legacy knowing it to be infamous. If, therefore, he retains it, it must be because he does not believe that it is infamous; because he is convinced that his wife has been slandered. I propose,—understand me,—I propose that people shall say, I propose that people shall think, that Madame de Claviers has been slandered. Consequently I shall not renounce this legacy after I have publicly agreed to accept it. Need I tell you that that money fills me with horror, and that I shall keep none of it? It is your money. I propose that you shall have it all. But this restitution must be made between you and me. Unfortunately I have already given orders that I cannot cancel without causing comment, to Métivier's man, Cauvet, that miserable Chaffin's successor. So that restitution cannot be made for some little time. In fact, I must have time to carry out my plans.—There's one point settled between us, is it not?"
"It is for you to command," said Landri, "and for me to obey."
"I come to the second point. We can no longer, I do not say live together, but see each other. We must part, and forever, while adhering faithfully to the programme I have outlined. The avowed reason must be one of those that our set will accept without looking beyond it. That reason is all ready—it is the mésalliance which you proposed to make and which you must make. A month ago the mere thought of it was intolerable to me. I showed you that plainly enough. To-day—" he shook his head with a bitter smile. "It is a horrible thing to me that the family you will found will bear the name of mine. But then I can do nothing. The Code would not allow me even to compel recognition of the circumstances. Besides, I have no right to demand that you should not make the most of your life. I cannot prevent that. I cannot prevent you from existing. No. You will marry therefore, ostensibly against my will. You will give me your word not to live in the same city with me, not to present your wife in our circle. I do not wish to meet you or to meet her.—Wait," he exclaimed imperiously, as Landri was about to reply. "If I were not certain, I say again, that people are talking, things would take care of themselves. You would leave this house this morning, never to return. But people are talking, and as neither you nor I have taken anybody into our confidence concerning our two discussions,—at Hez and at Saint-Mihiel,—the abrupt announcement of your marriage at this moment might be taken for a pretext. No matter how well everybody knows that I am not a man of these times, this theory of mésalliances is so weakened of late years, that people might say and would say: 'He has seized this opportunity; there's something else.'—Now, I propose that the reply shall be, as with one voice: 'No, there was nothing else.'—You have left the army under circumstances that have aroused the sympathy of everybody about you—about us, I should say, since no human power can prevent our interests being mutual. It is natural that I should take this time to receive, to bring people about you. I will receive—we will receive, together. I shall find the strength to maintain this attitude, and so will you. It will last as long as we make it, but we must arrange it so that, on the day when the news of your marriage and our rupture becomes known, everybody who is intimate with us shall say: 'Poor Claviers! he was so fond of his son!'—I doubt not that there will be those who will add: 'What a fool!'—One's vanity is not to be wounded when one thinks of honor, and the only way for me to defend Madame de Claviers' honor is to seem to believe in it. In that our interests are really mutual, with a mutuality which is not a falsehood. She was, she still is my wife, and she is your mother."
"I repeat that I will obey you in everything," said the young man.
"It remains for me to touch upon two other points," continued the marquis. "I have reflected much, during these last days, upon the character of the person you are going to marry. You love her. Yes, you must love her dearly to have spoken to me as you did when we were together at Saint-Mihiel. You see, I do not underrate your affection for me. You will be tempted to open your heart to her. If she doesn't deserve to be loved as you love her, do not do it; and if she does deserve it, do not do it. I ask you to give me your word that she shall never learn this ghastly secret from you."
"I give it to you, instantly," Landri replied. He added, in a low voice, so much in dread was he of another outburst of that rage which, he felt, was still smouldering: "But if I should allow myself to tell her the whole truth, I think—that I should tell her nothing new."
"You have spoken to her already!" ejaculated M. de Claviers in a threatening tone. "Confess it. Ah! if you have done that—"
"I have not done it," Landri protested; and with tears in his eyes, he added: "I entreat you, never believe that I could have acted otherwise than you have taught me to act all your life and are still teaching me at this moment. I will tell you everything. Then you can pass judgment on me."
And he began by describing the first indication—her sudden entreaty to him not to go up to the invalid's apartment on Rue de Solferino, on his way from Paris to Grandchamp; and how, after the visit to Jaubourg and the revelation, he had said to himself: "Madame Olier knows all,"—and in what a state of feverish excitement he had arrived at her house, and the horror he had had of speaking, and his silence in the face of her grief, and that grief itself, and their betrothal in that moment of supreme emotion. Then he told of the letter he had received from her immediately after the Hugueville affair, and of the others, in which she had not made a single allusion to M. de Claviers.
That gentleman listened to the confession with an impassive face, which did, however, betray something like wonder. Never had Landri opened his heart to him in this wise when he believed himself to be his son. Never had he ventured to show to his father that charming, quivering sensibility, so passionate and so delicate, so easily wounded and so loving. He disclosed himself in all the loyalty of his refined and affectionate nature, at the moment that the marquis and he were exchanging the words of their final conversation. What more could they say to each other? M. de Claviers felt that impossibility more than all the rest. His old love for his son stirred him anew, and the more it assailed him the more obstinately he stiffened himself against it. Furthermore, throughout that narrative he caught glimpses of Valentine's charming character, and it was intolerably bitter to him to recall another betrothal—his own—forty years before, so superb and splendid, to end in—what? In this heart-rending inquisition about a deadly shame!
"You are right," he said at last, "it is only too evident. She knows all. But how?" His features assumed an expression of deeper chagrin as he added: "For a month I have been constantly confronted by this question, without reaching even a suggestion of a reply: Who can have stolen those letters?—'We have other documents to furnish!'" He repeated the informer's words, in such a grief-stricken tone. "'Other documents!'—Is it the heirs? But I saw them at the funeral. There was an ex-major there, one Monsieur Privat, who spoke to me about you. I can never believe in such hypocrisy! They knew about the will, and they behaved admirably. No, the blow does not come from them. From a servant? With what object? Blackmail. Oh! let him unmask then! I will pay him whatever he wants for those other letters!—But no. A servant would never have devised the devilish irony of the signature: 'an admirer of the house of Claviers-Grandchamp'! That smells of the club, does that dastardly insult, of low-lived envy of those who do not palter with the cowardly customs of these days."—He uttered another roar. "Ah! If I could only find out who it was! If I could!" And, shaking his head: "This is not a question of myself at all. Once more I say, the honor of Madame de Claviers is at stake, and this is the last promise I propose to demand from you, that you would seek what I cannot seek—the hand that dealt the blow. You may find it and you may not. But you must try, so that they may not repeat it."
"Have you no suspicion of anybody?" inquired Landri, "Chaffin, whom you dismissed—"
"Chaffin? Why, I had had the letter ten days when I settled with him. No. Chaffin's a thief. He has never wanted anything but money. He'd have tried to sell the papers. Let us not go astray in suppositions as useless as my lamentations. Perhaps by questioning Madame Olier you may learn something. Too much, perhaps."—A pause.—"No. That is not possible, either."
What was the shocking idea to which that "No" was an answer, and the "But if it were?" that he added?
"You are aware of my desires now," he concluded.
"I will comply with them," said the young man. He had understood the wicked and atrocious suspicion that had suddenly suggested itself to the cruelly betrayed husband, and he pitied him the more for it. "I promise you."
"That is well," rejoined M. de Claviers. "I accept your promise. Each day I will write you my instructions concerning what I wish you to do. It is unnecessary for us to be alone together again unless you have some information to give me as to the inquiry you are to undertake. I do not hope very much from it.—I forgot. I asked the Charluses and Bressieux to luncheon. Be here at quarter past twelve. Now, go."
"Shall I have the strength to keep that promise of mine?" Landri asked himself as he went down at the appointed hour to the small salon where the marquis received his guests when he gave a luncheon. To reach it he had to pass through a succession of magnificent apartments, and at a distance he could hear the ringing tones of the loud voice that was associated with all the memories of his childhood and youth. Was the man who, but a short time before, by turns stoical and desperate, cold as ice and aflame with passion, accused, commanded, groaned, suspected, in such a frenzy of grief and indignation, really the same as he who greeted him with these words, in a jovial tone, as he waved his hand toward the friends whose coming he had announced:—
"Well, well! So you keep us waiting, master hero! You have no right to, being new at the game! But you have credit for some time to come, after what you have done. Hasn't he, Mademoiselle Marie?"
"Oh! a big bunch of it," said Marie de Charlus, laughing with her beautiful white teeth. "Ah! you tease me. Monsieur de Claviers, and I'll revenge myself by talking slang. But that won't prevent my going back to the French of your old France to say to your son that we are all, men and women alike, very, very proud of him."
"Very proud," echoed Charlus. "To see a fine thing finely done always gives pleasure. But when the one who does it belongs to thecomme il faut, class, the pleasure is doubled."
"It is indeed," said Bressieux, shaking Landri's hand in his turn. "We are not spoiled in that way."
"It's becausecomme il fautfolk think too much of their cakes and ale," retorted Marie, glancing at the Seigneur de la Rochebrocante with the laughing insolence that was peculiar to her.
"It is principally because thecomme il fautfolk are not what they should be [comme il faudrait]," said the marquis. "It's so easy to be of one's own party, nothing more, whereas nowadays no one is of his own opinion even; and I see none but people who, on the pretext of broad and liberal ideas, admit that their enemies are in the right. Landri was of his own party, that's the whole story, without talk and without parade. You must tell them about it, my boy, and how those excellent peasants applauded you and your dragoons when you turned on your heel in the teeth of the disgusted prefect.—But luncheon is served. Will you allow me to offer you my arm, mademoiselle? Lardin has promised to surpass himself, and we shall have, to drink this tall fellow's health, a certain Musigny of a royal year. For we still drink, and drink Burgundy too, we old fellows, just as we still eat, and with a good appetite, in that old France that you make sport of. A sweet thing your new France is! All mineral waters and diet!"
Liveried servants held the chairs for the guests around the table, the dark wood of which had no cloth, according to the old ceremonial ofdéjeuners à la française. The great garden imparted an almost rural atmosphere of peace to that room, which the host enlivened with his cordiality. To one who observed him closely the contagious warmth of his joviality was in too striking contrast with the feverish gleam of his eyes, and the traces of suffering on his face. But the pride of defending his name sustained him; and, forestalling himself any possible observation of that sort, he, who had never lied, said:—
"I was very anxious for Landri to return. 'That's the true remedy for me.' I told Louvet, when he talked about diet, apropos of those two or three attacks of vertigo I told you of, Charlus. But it seems to me that this young man doesn't seem glad enough to see us. You'll see that he'll regret the army."
And, not to fall behind the tragic heroism of that comedy, Landri, who was being served at that moment with eggs à la Grandchamp, one of the accomplished Lardin's thousand and one creations, remarked, laughing in his turn:—
"I certainly sha'n't regret the cuisine of the mess. It is true that your chef has outdone himself to celebrate my fall from grace."
He put his fork to his lips with the respectful manner of a gourmand to whom eating is a solemn affair, which drew from Bressieux the exclamation:—
"You are coming to it! The table is the least deceitful of all things, and when one of Lardin's chefs-d'œuvre is put before one, in Chantilly of such delicacy as this," he added, pointing to his plate,—and one could not tell from the twinkling of his eye whether he was giving vent to his enthusiasm for antiques or was indulging in secret sarcasm,—"one may well say, despite the famousmot, that one knows the joy of living!"
Landri had not been mistaken—those phrases that had escaped M. de Claviers, to be instantly interrupted:—the "too much, perhaps," and the "but if it were!"—signified that for an instant at least that man, formerly so entirely a stranger to all the meannesses of suspicion, had harbored the unfortunate suspicion that Madame Olier was the denouncer of Madame de Claviers. An utterly insane idea even from a physical standpoint! How could Valentine ever have obtained the letter?—And even more insane morally. It attributed to a young woman, gratuitously, without the slightest evidence, the most shameless of schemes: to separate Landri forever from the man who had hitherto believed him to be his son! And with what object? To marry him with less difficulty?—That theory would not stand a single instant. The wound must in truth have been very deep, that the great-souledgrand seigneurshould have come so quickly to such a transformation of character.
On leaving the house on Rue du Faubourg-Saint-Honoré, at the end of that luncheon which had left him with the impression of a nightmare, Landri recalled those words among all the rest, and that insinuation so insulting to his Valentine. He found therein an additional reason for desiring to know who had committed that two-fold private crime, unpunishable by law, yet truly ferocious: that theft of a correspondence, aggravated by an anonymous denunciation. In that interview, the strain of which was almost beyond human endurance, he had seen distinctly that only that knowledge could relieve in any degree the agony with which the marquis was suffocating. He himself realized the necessity of the destruction of those "other documents," as the anonymous writer had said, in heartless official phraseology. Such letters, if retained, constituted a too formidable menace against the dead wife's honor, which the betrayed husband was generously determined to save. How could the son have failed to feel that his self-esteem required him to take part in that work of salvation? And how could Valentine's lover not have it at heart that not even the shadow of the shade of that most unreasonable suspicion should be let hover above the woman whom he was to marry and whom M. de Claviers would never know?
That he could have thought so of her, even in a moment of suffering and frenzy, was enough to intensify the young man's longing to see the light in that abhorrent darkness. But what scent was he to follow, and upon what indications? He asked himself this question, set free at last from that constraint against his natural instincts to which he whom he had so long called the "Émigré" had condemned him—while condemning himself thereto through a sense of honor worthy of another age.
He bent his steps to Valentine's house, to seek in her soft eyes, in her dear smile, in her loved presence, strength to endure this test, the end of which it was not for him to fix. Would he question her, as M. de Claviers had not hesitated to advise him to do? To learn what? That the disinherited relations had told her of Jaubourg's will, and that she had drawn therefrom a conclusion only too evident to one already informed? That she was informed, Landri knew only too well. In the long solitary meditations of his weeks of arrest at Saint-Mihiel, he had succeeded in piecing together the whole story, and in understanding why the Privats had always treated him with a coolness which he had noticed only at a distance.—Yes, what was the use of trying to learn anything more? If it were the Privats from whom the anonymous letter came, Valentine did not know it, and what purpose would it serve to introduce her to such villainy? True lovers have a passionate and rapturous respect for that fine flower of delicacy and of illusion which constitutes the spotless charm of the feminine heart, when it has not been prematurely brutalized by the blighting realities of life. This sentiment alone would have deterred Landri from questioning his sweetheart, even if he had not felt a sort of spasm of horror at the thought of accusing his mother to her. Silence is the pious charity of the son to whom reverence is forbidden. And then, too, even if he had essayed to speak, the young woman would have arrested the blasphemous words on his lips.
He had no sooner crossed the threshold of the little salon on Rue Monsieur, where she awaited him, than from the glance with which she greeted him he became aware that she too dreaded a painful explanation. And how could he mar the delight of their meeting by such a hideous disclosure, finding her as he found her, so youthful and lovely, still in black—although the approaching end of her mourning could already be detected!
Valentine wore a gown of crêpe de Chine and lace, the soft fabrics admirably in harmony with the slender grace of her whole person. On her neck a string of pearls glistened softly, a bunch of violets bloomed at her waist, and on the light curls of her ash-colored hair was atorsadeof black tulle. It was, as it were, the rebirth of the woman,—those jewels and flowers, and that evident yet artless desire to please which imparted a flush as of a rose-petal to her thin cheeks, a gleam to her blue eyes, a quiver to her smile.
She had her son with her, and was feverishly smoothing his hair, of a golden shade like the pale gold of her own. She pushed him gently toward Landri as he entered the room, as if he were a symbol of the union of which she dreamed—a union in which nothing of the child's happiness should be sacrificed, in which he should always remain with her and his second father.
"Give Monsieur de Claviers a kiss, Ludovic," she said, "and tell him that you and your mother prayed for him while he was in prison, so unjustly."
"It's true," said the child, "and I am glad you've come out! They won't put you in again, will they, monsieur?" he added apprehensively.
"No," replied Landri; and he, too, caressed the golden curls, while the mother said:—
"I kept you here only because you wanted to see Monsieur de Claviers. You have seen him, so go to your lessons.—He is fond of you," she continued, when the door had closed behind the little fellow, "and that is so sweet to me!" And, taking the young man's hand in her own, she added: "Yes, I prayed so earnestly for you,—but before your arrest,—that you would do what you did do, and I am so proud, so proud! When I read in the newspapers what happened at Hugueville, I felt so proud of you!"
"And I," he said, "it is so sweet to be with you once more!"
And it was true that the affectionate welcome of that passionately loved woman, after the heart-rending scenes of the morning, which had themselves followed upon a succession of racking and corroding emotions, was like the divine coolness of the oasis between two wearisome journeys over the scorching sand of the desert—a feast of the heart almost too intoxicating, so that it seemed as if the contrast could not be true, that that rapture was a lie and on the point of vanishing.
"Yes," he continued, "so sweet. For, you see, I have no one but you in all the world."
"Have you spoken to Monsieur de Claviers of your plans?" she asked. "You have never written me about it."
She interpreted Landri's words only in part in their real meaning, not wishing to seem to have divined the other part. Keen as was her intuition, she had not discerned the whole of the drama in which her dearly loved friend was involved. She had guessed that he was Jaubourg's son and that he knew it. She had no idea that the marquis also knew it.
"I have spoken to him."
"And he has refused his consent?"
"He has refused it."
"Landri," she resumed after a pause, "you know now that I love you, and how dearly! When I answered yes to your question five weeks ago, I did so without any illusions. I was certain that Monsieur de Claviers would never agree to our marriage. I disregarded that, because I saw, I thought I saw, that you really could not live without me, and because I loved you. Do not seek in what I say something that is not there. I love you still. I am, I shall always be, ready to give you my life. But if you must face difficulties that are too great, engage in a contest that is too painful, I want you to know that you are free. I will wait for you one year, two years, ten years, twenty years, if necessary—forever." She repeated: "Forever."
"After what Monsieur de Claviers and I have said to each other," Landri replied, "everything is at an end between us, whether I marry you or not."
She looked at him while he uttered these words in so melancholy a tone that she shuddered at it. He turned a little pale, realizing that she understood; and in an outrush of pity like that of the other day she drew him to her, pressing his hand against her heart.
"I will try to wipe that out, too," she said, quivering with emotion.
It was his part to seem not to comprehend all that that protestation signified, and he rejoined:—
"He was not content with refusing. He insists that, when I am married, I shall not live in Paris."
"I will answer you like Ruth," she said. "'Whither thou goest, I will go, and where thou lodgest I will lodge.'"
"Even if I do not simply leave Paris—even away from France?"
"Even away from France."
A little sign disclosed the intensity of the emotion with which she was overflowing. The pupils of her eyes dilated so that her blue eyes seemed to be black; and enveloping, caressing, embracing Landri in that sombre glance, she said:—
"You have no idea of the affection that I have been heaping up for you in my heart during these three years when I have hidden from you so much of what I felt, in order not to ruin you. That love has burrowed into me to such a depth that it would make me tremble if you were not you, if I were not sure that you will never expect of me anything except my duty, that you will never ask me to live under such conditions that my son would not be brought up, as he must be, so as to remain, even away from his country, a child of France!" She repeated: "Even away from his country;" then asked, timidly: "Does Monsieur de Claviers really demand it?"
"He demands nothing," Landri replied.
"But you think that that's the only way to reconcile him in some degree to the idea of our marriage, eh?" she asked; and, as he bowed: "Then we must not hesitate," she added. "You do not know either how much you have taught me to love him, even without knowing him; how grateful I am to him for the influence he has had on you, for the traces of his wonderful sense of delicacy which I find in yours. When I said yes to you the other day, I had a feeling of remorse for taking you from your duty and from his affection. You tell me that there is no occasion for it, that all is at an end between you. That takes away my remorse but makes me so sorry for you. Remember at all events that to part is not to forget each other. You may retain an image of each other against which you have no reproach to make. I hope that it may be so between Monsieur de Claviers and you, and that when he thinks of you he will realize that you loved him, that you still love him, as he deserves, and that there is only this life between you."
The trees in the little garden beyond the door-window were as desolate as those which spread their leafless branches outside the high windows of the dining-room on Rue du Faubourg-Saint-Honoré. The leaden sky of that winter's day was as depressing. The young woman's words, albeit not especially significant, and so considerately vague, affirmed none the less, by their very reticences, the same ghastly and incontrovertible fact which had weighed so heavily upon Landri's heart during the agonizing formal luncheon an hour earlier. But once more Valentine had the miraculous double sight of love. She had appealed to the only sentiment in that suffering heart which could assist him to live through the far too trying period that was to precede the ostensible rupture with the marquis. He could find the requisite strength only in his passionate craving to prove to him the depth of an affection which had never been more intensely alive.
At those words of his compassionate friend and loving monitress, Landri's heart, always so susceptible to affection, was once more inspired with a genuine purpose, and when he left Rue Monsieur, he was conscious, even in his distress, of that species of inward satisfaction which one derives from a determined plan of action, when it is based upon a courageous acceptance of circumstances, even the most hostile, and upon the most deep-rooted attachments of our being. Yes, although the rôle of dissimulation imposed upon him by M. de Claviers was most painful, he would summon strength to go on with it as long as it should be necessary. Difficult as was the task of discovering the anonymous informer, he would devote himself to it. He was able to offer that reparation to the great and noble-hearted victim of the falsehood of which he himself was born. He would offer it to him before leaving Paris—and, perhaps, other reparation too. When he had spoken to Valentine of the project of making their home far away from France, he had given voice to one of the ideas that had been most constantly in his mind during those last weeks. In a voluntary exile to the western part of the United States,—or perhaps of Canada; there he would still be at home!—he saw a possibility of laying aside, without exciting comment, that name of Claviers-Grandchamp, which was not his own. With what emotion he had heard the dear woman's reply: "Even away from France!"—And that assurance added to his courage.
He needed that reinforcement of courage to endure the dinner which he was obliged to eat that evening at the club on Rue Scribe, sitting opposite M. de Claviers. The latter had transmitted to him his commands to that effect, as had been agreed, in a note which contained this line only: "Dinner at the club, at eight o'clock."—He needed it again, and more, the next day, to consent to take his seat beside the marquis, at ten o'clock, in the box at the Opéra which had been Madame de Claviers'. Charles Jaubourg had passed so many evenings there gazing at his mistress enthroned in all the splendor of her social royalty. Something of that liaison floated still about the hangings of the box, which the châtelain of Grandchamp had retained in pious regard for her memory.
And what courage again, on the days that followed, to appear at banquet after banquet, at reception after reception, always beside that companion, who, in the presence of witnesses, continued to treat him with the old-time warmth and cordiality! And as soon as they were alone, in the automobile which took them from or to the house, not a word, not a glance; and upon that face, more haggard and more aged from day to day, was the stamp of the haughty grief that will never complain or forgive.
How many times, as they drove home thus, Landri was tempted to ask: "Are you satisfied with me?"
Satisfied! What a word to be uttered between them! Would the time ever come when he could utter a different word? when he could say to him: "I know the name of the anonymous villain who wrote that infamous letter. Here are the other documents that he threatened you with?"
Between the moments that he passed in this way, in this heart-rending attitude of dissimulation before the world, and the hours which he had at once adopted the delicious habit of devoting, every afternoon, to the comforter of Rue Monsieur, his only preoccupation was this: to find a scent and follow it. But what scent? But how?
"I must proceed upon the definite facts," he said to himself the first day. Now, what were these "definite facts?" That the sending of Madame de Claviers' letter to her husband was coincident with the publication of Jaubourg's will. What could the sender have hoped? That M. de Claviers would refuse to accept the property. Who would have profited by his refusal? The heirs-at-law. It was advisable therefore to investigate in that direction, leaving Privat out of the question. Landri knew that officer too well to suppose for an instant that he, who was rich in his own right and through his wife, would have been guilty of so base an action. For whose benefit, indeed? The Privats had no children.
Certain inquiries, cautiously instituted, convinced him that the other three heirs were no more open to suspicion. One was a wholesale tradesman on Rue du Sentier, Paris; another, the owner of extensive vineyards near Lectoure, where the Jaubourgs originally came from; the third, a magistrate of distinction, held the office of procureur-général in one of the courts of appeal in the Nord.
There was a whole course of social philosophy in this list of Charles Jaubourg's cousinships. He himself had been the fashionable bourgeois who becomes an aristocrat. He had, unconsciously, in a liaison with a great lady, gratified the craving for being ennobled which is the natural instinct, and if well directed, perfectly legitimate and praiseworthy, of the best representatives of the middle classes. To Landri's mind the stations occupied by the dead man's relations were simply a guaranty that no one of them was the denouncer he sought. These first "definite facts" suggested no tenable hypothesis.
Another "definite fact" was the theft of Madame de Claviers' letter. A letter may be stolen only from the person who sends it or the person to whom it is sent. The Marquise de Claviers-Grandchamp had been dead fifteen years. It was possible that the letter had been stolen fifteen years before, and that the thief had let all that time pass without using it, but it was most improbable. Now, when one is pursuing an investigation of this sort, the rule is not to turn to the improbable until one has followed all the probable clues. The wisest course therefore was to assume that it had been stolen at Jaubourg's apartment. What a contradiction it was that a man so prudent, so on his guard, who had worked so hard to conceal his fatherhood should preserve such terribly condemnatory pages! It might be explained by the ardor of a passion that must have been very great. Did he not sacrifice his whole life to it? Precisely because he knew the danger of not destroying such a correspondence, Madame de Claviers' lover must have multiplied his precautions. That letter and the others referred to by the anonymous writer could have been stolen therefore only by a person familiar with all his habits, and at a time when he was incapable of keeping watch on them. The theft must have been committed either during his sickness or immediately after his death. What was the meaning of those words, "other documents?" Evidently, the rest of the correspondence. But why was that single letter sent, unaccompanied by any demand for money, and followed by several weeks of silence? That was an enigma. But it did not explain away the "definite fact."
That fact seemed to require that a wisely conducted inquiry should begin with an interview with Joseph, the confidential servant of whom Jaubourg had said on his death-bed: "You can believe him. He is reliable, perfectly reliable." Landri had not seen him since the time in the chamber of death when the marquis was kneeling at the bedside, praying. In imagination he saw that figure, in black coat and white cravat, making the final arrangements—that impassive face of a close-mouthed witness or confederate. Joseph had been in his master's service thirty years. He must inevitably have discovered Jaubourg's liaison with Madame de Claviers. He knew the secret of Landri's birth. The young man recalled his singular expression when he brought him a message, at Grandchamp, on the day before his master's death. Moreover, was not Joseph there, assisting Dr. Pierre Chaffin, when the invalid, in his delirium, said so many terribly incriminating things? That thought made the prospect of a conversation with the man so painful that Landri recoiled at first.