"This is cowardly," he said to himself the next moment. "If I can't face suffering of that sort forhim, of what am I capable?"
Having determined upon this interview, the most elementary shrewdness bade him bring it about without warning. The young man was not aware of one fact which was likely to facilitate his task: M. de Claviers, as may be imagined, had shrunk in horror from the thought of putting his foot in Jaubourg's apartment again. Having resolved to return the detestable legacy, and not choosing to order a sale, which would have attracted notice, he had placed the apartment, until further orders, in charge of the old maître d'hôtel. When Landri went to Rue de Solferino to ask his address, the concierge replied with evident surprise, "Why, he's upstairs, Monsieur le Comte!" which proved to the investigator what a delicate affair he had undertaken. The slightest imprudence was likely to arouse a very dangerous curiosity. And so all the efforts of his will were combined to make his face impenetrable while he awaited the maître d'hôtel in the library, into which an old woman who answered his ring had ushered him. She was the "spouse" of "Monsieur Joseph," who acted as laundress to the establishment during Jaubourg's lifetime. The couple had a daughter. Mademoiselle Amélie, whom their indulgent employer had allowed them to keep with them. How was it possible to associate the idea of a criminal conspiracy with the head of a bourgeois family, hungry for respectability?
Madame Joseph had a certain matronly dignity, which she displayed as she opened the windows and explained the music of a piano, which was Mademoiselle Amélie's.
"We had it brought into the apartment," she said, "because we never leave it now, on account of the bric-à-brac."
The pianiste's father appeared, sad and deferential, respectful and curious. The change in the Marquis de Claviers since his master's death had not escaped that sagacious observer. He had guessed its secret cause, but had not been able to divine how his long-abused credulity had been so suddenly enlightened. When he found himself in Landri's presence, his desire to find out gave to his ordinarily expressionless eyes, in spite of himself, a sharpness which was hateful to Landri—less so, however, than another circumstance both ghastly and comical. Joseph was in deep mourning. He was dressed in garments which had belonged to the dead man. The folds of the coat and trousers, which were of English cut, as befitted a man of Jaubourg's pretensions to style, had retained the outlines of their former owner's body, the features, so to speak, of his movements. This evocation of the dead was made to assume a caricaturish aspect by the servant's involuntary mimicry of his master, who had evidently had a hypnotic influence upon him. He regretted him sincerely, and there was genuine grief in his voice when he said to Landri:—
"Ah! Monsieur le Comte, I told Monsieur le Comte at Grandchamp that monsieur would not last two days longer. Such a kind master! Monsieur le Comte knows that he left my wife and me an annuity of thirty-six hundred francs and ten thousand francs for Amélie's marriage portion. I am going to be able to retire to a little place in my province that I had bought already with my savings. People tell me: 'You're going to be happy, Monsieur Joseph.' But that isn't true, Monsieur le Comte. To have watched him go, as I did, spoils everything for me."
"Since you were so devoted to him," rejoined Landri, studying the effect of his words on that face, which was gradually overspread by amazement, "you will certainly assist me in an investigation, which indeed interests you yourself. Some papers have disappeared—letters, to which Monsieur Jaubourg attached the greatest importance. Observe, Joseph, that I do not accuse you. I came here to ask you simply, is it possible that anybody entered the apartment while Monsieur Jaubourg was ill, and took these papers?"
"No, Monsieur le Comte," replied the servant eagerly, "it isn't possible."
The gleam that flashed from his eyes betrayed an alarm that was not feigned. It was not for himself that he was afraid. He had nothing to do with the horrible deed. But, in that case, who was it? as M. de Claviers had said with a groan—who?
"Monsieur kept no papers, on principle," Joseph continued. "I have heard him say many a time: 'When I am gone, there'll be no need to schedule anything. I destroy everything.'—But he had preserved one package of letters. This is how I know. The morning of the day he sent me to Grandchamp—that was Monday—he felt very sick. He insisted on my helping him to get up, in spite of the doctor's orders. He opened a strong-box that he kept in his room. He took out two bundles of papers with his own hands and put them in the fire. He wouldn't go back to bed till he saw that there was nothing left of them but ashes. And as the key of the strong-box never left him—"
"But during the days just before that Monday, he was in bed. Where was the key then?"
"Hanging on his watch-chain, in the drawer of his night-table."
"Couldn't some one have come in, while he was asleep, for instance, and you were not there?"
"One of the other servants, perhaps. I'll answer for them as for myself. I was the one who selected them."
"But the doctor?" queried Landri.
"Monsieur le Docteur Chaffin?" said the maître-d'hôtel. "Of course. But I can't believe it of him," he added, after a few seconds' reflection. "Now, if it was his father—"
"His father?" Landri repeated. "Come, tell me your whole thought."
"I haven't any thought," replied Joseph, "except that I know that monsieur was very suspicious of him."
"And he didn't come here during his illness?"
"Yes, I remember now—on Saturday. But he didn't see monsieur, for I was with him. He sent for me to get late news to carry to Monsieur le Marquis."
Thus Chaffin's image was associated once more in Landri's mind with the mysterious scenes that must have been enacted about that bed of death. Chaffin had wandered around that death-chamber during the last hours. Chaffin had been in the apartment. Once, the servant said. What did he know about it? Notwithstanding that he had lavished the most assiduous attentions on the sick man, he must have been absent at times. It might be that Chaffin, advised of his absence, had seized the opportunity, had entered the sick-room with the doctor's connivance. If at that moment the invalid was asleep, morphine assisting, the theft of the letters was explained.
The young man had not left Joseph ten minutes before this explanation had taken shape in his mind. It rested upon a series of almost fantastic hypotheses: that Chaffin knew of the existence of Madame de Claviers' letters; that he knew where Jaubourg kept them locked up; that Pierre Chaffin was in connivance with his father; that the strong-box had not a combination lock. But nothing appeared fantastic to Landri since the terrible scene during which he had learned the secret of his birth. When everything of which we were certain, which was, as it were, a part of us,—loving regard for a mother's memory, respectful affection for a father, family pride, assurance of social rank,—has crumbled at one stroke, nothing surprises us. The most extraordinary events seem simple to us.
Not one of these difficulties deterred Landri. The one thing that he did not understand was Chaffin's interest in the theft and in the denunciation that followed it. From the moment that he knew that his former tutor was capable of malversation in managing the property of such a man as the marquis, he adjudged him a scoundrel and capable of the worst crimes. He remembered the step he had undertaken at the time of his last visit to Grandchamp, and he interpreted it as being in pursuance of one of his detestable schemes: to precipitate a disaster under cover of which his peculations would pass unnoticed. All this was true, but it came in collision with the further "definite fact," that the denunciatory letter, according to M. de Claviers' own testimony, was sent some time before the dishonest manager was dismissed. So that Chaffin could not have been guided, in sending it, by a desire for revenge. But a man does not act without a motive, especially when the inevitable consequence of his action is the ruin of two lives. At that time Chaffin had no motive for committing that useless and barbarous villainy. No. He must seek elsewhere.
"No motive?" the young man asked himself a few days later. He had exhausted himself in hypotheses and efforts, each more unavailing than the last, even to the point of taking the trouble to interview personally all the people who had been in Jaubourg's service under Joseph, and he returned to the hypothesis to which, in spite of all the objections to it, an unconquerable instinct guided him. "But I know absolutely nothing about that man, whom I thought I knew so well, and in whom I was so deceived. I don't even know why he was dismissed. From whom can I find out? Why, from Métivier, of course. Besides, I shall need him in connection with my marriage."
They had been discussing the date, Valentine and he, during the day. True to their compact of silence, neither of them had mentioned M. de Claviers. Landri continued to avoid explaining why he delayed in making thesommation, which would hasten the longed-for moment of their union, and she continued to avoid questioning him. He foresaw, however, from various indications,—glances, tones of voice, gestures,—that the heroic marquis himself would not endure much longer their too painful relations, and he was beginning to discuss with the dear companion of his life to come the details of their plans. In these discussions she showed herself as he had always known her, delicately judicious, and strong of heart.
The project of living on a large estate in the country gave place more and more definitely to the dream of carrying on a "ranch" in Western Canada—Ontario or Manitoba. A large amount of ready money would be necessary. So that a pretext was at hand for the visit to Métivier.
The apprehension of an overstrained perspicacity is so distressing at critical moments that Landri went several times as far as Place de la Madeleine before he could make up his mind to go up to the notary's office. He succeeded at last, as generally happens with over-sensitive imaginations, in overcoming that apprehension, and realized that it had been entirely subjective.
Métivier greeted him with the simple courtesy of a notary employed to do a certain thing, with whom to think of his client is to think of documents and figures. Of the family tragedy in which the Claviers-Grandchamps were nearing shipwreck he had no suspicion. On the other hand, he had shrewdly unravelled all the threads of the conspiracy entered into by Chaffin and his confederates, and when Landri, after speaking of certain formalities that were indispensable for the final settlement of his mother's estate, in order to account for his visit, touched upon the subject of his former tutor, Métivier exclaimed:—
"What did he do? Why, it's the simplest thing in the world. He came to an understanding with certain people from whom your father had borrowed money, in such wise as to secure a percentage of their profits. I am expecting Altona this very morning. If he should happen to come while you are here, you would see a superb specimen of the usurer of to-day. He is the dealer in curiosities, who sells you a portrait by Velasquez, a Boule cabinet, a bust by Houdon, for a hundred thousand or two hundred thousand francs, and buys them back for fifty or sixty thousand. The amusing feature of it is that the Velasquez and the Boule and the Houdon are genuine, and that the customer wouldn't do a bad bit of business by keeping them. This enables Master Altona to pass himself off as a collector, a dilettante, a connoisseur of art!—This fellow and his gang learned of Monsieur le Marquis de Claviers' financial embarrassment. I am somewhat to blame. I recommended your father to apply to a certain Gruet, whom I thought trustworthy, and he was of the same stripe as they! They knew also what the treasures of Grandchamp were worth. You see the scheme; it's familiar enough: to force the marquis to a sale by getting all his debts in one hand. Chaffin was to have his commission—thirty or forty thousand francs, perhaps more. He undertook to offer Monsieur de Claviers four millions, in Altona's name, for a list catalogued in the notes to your family history! He had the audacity to do that! And Monsieur le Marquis is so kind-hearted that he explained it to me: 'He thought he was doing me a service,' he said.—Luckily we were able to enlighten him by discovering the traces of a most commonplace rascality: bills settled twice, if you please—once to the tradesman, and once, to whom?—to Master Chaffin.—Monsieur de Claviers cut off his head. When I wrote you that he was severe, Cauvet, the advocate I got for you, had found only one of these bills. I said to myself that there was a chance for a mistake. For all a man's a notary, he has difficulty in believing in certain comedies, and this Chaffin played one for me when I questioned him, with your letter in my hand. To dismiss him so summarily was to run the risk of never getting to the bottom of many things. However, we're beginning to see daylight. As I always say to my cousin Jacques Molan, the dramatic author, the true modern comedy is played in our own homes."
"Then," queried Landri, as Métivier complacently mentioned his cousinship to an illustrious writer, of whom he was proud after having been very much ashamed of him, "then you think that Chaffin was interested in the Altona deal?"
"There's no doubt of it!" replied the notary. "By the way,"—one of his clerks had just knocked at the door and handed him a card,—"if you'll allow me to have him shown in here, you will see Altona himself. He is here. You can measure up the man; you will be able to judge whether it is possible that, having chosen the end, he resorted to the means, every means," and going through the motion of counting money, "this included."
Landri did not need this meeting with the usurer-antiquary to know what to think concerning the nature of the conspiracy against the pictures, the tapestries and the furniture of the château of Grandchamp. The recollection of the advice insinuated by Chaffin: "Ask for your property," would have sufficed of itself, without this visit to Métivier, to convince him that the sending of the anonymous letter might be explained simply by a desire for money. At the moment that Jaubourg's legacy fell in, M. de Claviers was in the clutches of the Altona claim. He could free himself only by selling the treasures of the château. Chaffin's disappointment was proportioned, no doubt, to the commission that he lost. His knew his master's temperament. To betray to him his wife's liaison with his false friend was to make that money impossible of acceptance by him. If the rascal had letters of Madame de Claviers in hand, all was explained. This theory was less chimerical than the other, but upon how many hypotheses did even it rest! For a moment it seemed certainty to Landri, ready to collapse, as the first had done, upon examination.
Meanwhile he exchanged a salutation with Master Altona, as the notary had slightingly dubbed the dealer in antiques. One had but to see the two men side by side, to understand that ten years earlier he would have called him "my boy," and ten years later he would call him "monsieur le baron."
Altona had one of those bloodless faces, faded for good and all, which have no age. He was very black-haired, with moustaches and an imperial cut in a fashion to give him the aspect of one of the portraits he dealt in. His brown, velvety eyes, which were like two spots on his pale face, betrayed his Oriental origin, as did the strange mixture of servility and arrogance displayed by his whole person. A little too well-dressed, with too much jewelry, too faultlessly correct, one realized nevertheless that one last touch of "side"—we use the language of the sharpers in his employ—would make of him a passably successful make-believegrand seigneur. Métivier, on the contrary, that highly esteemed notary, well-to-do and well established, but dull and heavy, and made apoplectic at fifty-five by his sedentary profession and by over-indulgence in eating and smoking, would never be anything more than a vulgar French bourgeois. Through the chance that brought them together, in the presence of the heir of a very great name on the eve of disappearing forever, the four walls of that green-box-lined office contained a striking abstract of contemporary history.
Maxwell Altona—although born in Germany he bore that English baptismal name—seemed in no wise embarrassed to find himself in the presence of a son of the debtor he had plotted to rob, and when Métivier had named them to each other, he said calmly, with his shrewdest glance and his most engaging smile:—
"I am the more pleased to have the honor of being presented to you, Monsieur le Comte, because I followed your trial with the deepest interest and greatly admired your action at Hugueville. You have taken your leave."—Here the foreigner betrayed himself, by that little Germanism; no one is perfect.—"You are proposing, no doubt, to devote yourself to your fine château. I am well acquainted with its marvels."—At this point, one of the indescribably ironical expressions that play over the mysterious features of these international tradesmen.—"Allow me to suggest to you an opportunity that is perhaps unique. You have but one of the two Gobelins of the Turkish Embassy. It is the entry of Mehemet Effendi into Paris, in 1721, with the mission of congratulating the King on his accession," he added, addressing Métivier. Then, turning again to the possible purchaser, "I know where the other is."
"Isn't he amazing?" the notary asked Landri as he showed him out. "One affair has failed. He goes about another at once. He was going to strip you. He sells to you. Faith, I advise you to look at the tapestry. I am sure it's genuine. That's his probity, the pirate! He doesn't cheat about his wares. And Cauvet won't have a commission, I promise you."
A commission? Was it possible that Chaffin had in very truth not hesitated to commit the most shocking of private crimes, the betrayal of a dead wife to her husband, of an illegitimate son to the head of a family, after all the benefactions he had received, and all for fear of losing his percentage, as Métivier had said, of the four millions? Was it possible? At all events the objection urged at first by M. de Claviers was removed: the fact that the anonymous letter was sent before Chaffin's dismissal did not prove that he was not guilty. And yet how many things still made it improbable that he was! And in the first place, that he had had Madame de Claviers' letters in his possession! Improbability? Yes. Impossibility? No. Here the son's complicity once more appeared as the essential and sufficient condition.
All these ideas were whirling about in Landri's mind as he returned from Place de la Madeleine toward Rue du Faubourg-Saint-Honoré. They suddenly crystallized in a resolution which caused him to turn his back on his home and walk toward Place de la Concorde, then through the Tuileries toward the Seine, Notre-Dame, and Ile Saint-Louis. How many times he had followed that route, a mere child, on his way from the paternal abode to Quai de Béthune, where Chaffin's family then lived. Having agreed, it will be remembered, to live with his pupil, he often took him on Sunday to pass a few hours with Madame Chaffin, their daughter Louise, and their son Pierre, in the fourth floor apartment, from the balcony of which one commanded such a beautiful view of the Seine, with the chevet of Notre-Dame at the right, the dome of the Panthéon and of the Val-de-Grâce in front, and at the left the thickets of the Jardin des Plantes and the Salpêtrière. In course of time the Chaffins had gone down to the third floor, then to the first, without leaving the house, which was convenient to the young medical student because of the proximity of the Hôtel-Dieu and the Latin Quarter. Louise had never married, and Madame Chaffin was still living.
These recollections of an existence apparently so upright protested in the former pupil's heart against the insulting step he was preparing to take. He was going to question Pierre Chaffin. But great heaven! That virtuous occupant of an old house on a patriarchal quay had actually put his fingers in his master's fortune. Were there but one chance in a thousand, in ten thousand, that he had likewise stolen Madame de Claviers' letters, with the connivance of his son Pierre, that one chance was enough to cause Landri to try, at whatever cost, to find out.
"What do I risk?" he said to himself on the way. "I ask him whether, to his knowledge, any one except himself and the servants entered the sick man's bedroom. If no one went in, he will say no, simply. If some one did go in, and that some one was his father, he will be confused. If it is only for a second, I shall see it. That will be a certain indication, and then I shall act."
How? By what steps? He did not know. But on the other hand he did know that he was on his way to another trying scene in which all the suffering of the last weeks would be revived, on seeing the physician for the first time since that fatal Tuesday. He recalled Pierre's preoccupied expression as he came from his delirious patient's bedside, and the persistence with which he repeated: "It's downright madness." But what then? They were likely to meet at any time, and if Landri really proposed to keep to the compact he had made with M. de Claviers and to defend his mother's memory, guilty though she was, against this witness of Jaubourg's death-agony, it was much better to see him at once and to bear himself in their interview as if the dying man had in truth talked mere nonsense, which was of no consequence.
There was, to be sure, a difficulty of another sort. Pierre was the son of a man dismissed by the marquis for dishonesty. True. But Landri was not making a personal call upon him. He was going to seek information at the hands of a doctor who had been paid by M. de Claviers; for Jaubourg's residuary legatee must have paid all the debts of the deceased, including the expenses of the last sickness. Moreover, if Pierre was not Chaffin's confederate, he certainly did not know the true reason of his father's discharge. His father would never have told him. In that case there was nothing in Landri's procedure to surprise the doctor. In the contrary case, why spare a couple of brigands?
All varieties of grief have their egoism. There was another hypothesis which Madame de Claviers' son did not consider: perhaps, since his father's dismissal, Pierre Chaffin had been passing through a crisis similar to that of which his playmate in childhood was undergoing the terrors. Between ignorance and actual complicity, there is room for suspicion. Let us say at once that such was the plight of the physician, worried to the point of dismay by the visible change that he had observed in his father during the past month.
One afternoon in November Chaffin had appeared, in a state of great agitation. He had told his son that the marquis had made him the scapegoat of his follies. He had inveighed against the ingratitude of thegrand seigneur, in whose service his life had been passed, had declared that he would accept nothing, not even the smallest pension, from that man, and had forbidden his name to be mentioned in his presence. Since then he had been wasting away in a melancholic state, the true causes of which were, on the one hand, terror lest his son should learn the real reason of his disgrace, and on the other hand the most violent and invincible remorse.
Landri's instinct had led him to the right conclusion. Chaffin was the anonymous informer. Enraged by the sudden collapse of his hopes, the loss of a commission which would have rounded out his fortune, and really convinced in his own mind that M. de Claviers would renounce the Jaubourg legacy, Chaffin had gone to Altona to strike another bargain with him, and to demand not one but two per cent of the four millions offered for the list of treasures preserved at Grandchamp. He agreed, in consideration of that sum, to induce the marquis to reopen the negotiations that had been instantly broken off by the legacy. Altona had accepted his offer.
Chaffin had in his possession a letter from Madame de Claviers to Jaubourg. He had opened it when he was only a tutor, nearly eighteen years before. Finding it on a table, in a package prepared for the post, he had yielded to an intense curiosity to learn the real relations between the friend of the family and the marchioness. That was the period at which the process of corruption already described began. Perhaps this discovery of the sin of his pupil's mother was the most virulent element in his moral degeneration. He had not used the paper, as he might have done, as the foundation of a lucrative system of blackmail. He was not ripe for such villainy. But he had not destroyed it, by reason of that sort of vague expectation which, in certain natures, outwardly sound but rotten at the core, is, as it were, the gestation of crime. He had, in fact, supplemented it by adding to it—these were the "other documents"—three notes from Jaubourg, pilfered from Landri's mother's desk. At the time the lovers had discovered, with dismay, the disappearance of Madame de Claviers' letter. They had both made cautious inquiry, and failing to learn anything, had attributed the loss to some irregularity on the part of the mail. The marchioness had not detected the second theft, which would have put her on the scent. Jaubourg had always suspected Chaffin. That was the meaning of the question, "What is he?" uttered in such distress on his death-bed.
That is the sort of man that the former tutor was: a scoundrel who lacked only a tempting opportunity. The bait of eighty thousand francs was the opportunity. He had written the anonymous letter himself, on his typewriter. He had placed it in an envelope with the other, the incriminating one, and despatched them both to the marquis. But although a greedy longing for gain, added to base and pitiless envy of thegrand seigneur, had impelled him to do this disgraceful deed in an hour of madness, when the blow was dealt, his conscience of the earlier days, of the humble giver of lessons to worthy bourgeois, had begun to make itself heard. He could not banish from his thoughts the haunting image of M. de Claviers' face as he had seen it during the fortnight between his crime and his dismissal, so haggard, so ravaged by suffering! His handiwork terrified him, especially as the end sought—at such a price!—was not attained. Contrary to his expectation, the marquis went on paying his debts. Pictures, furniture, hangings, remained at Grandchamp. The eighty thousand francs Altona had promised him would never come to his hands.
There are not many criminals who, in the face of a useless crime, practise the calm philosophy of the assassin in the old story, who found only a single sou in his victim's pocket, and observed: "A hundred like this will make five francs!" The absolute inutility of his murderous villainy did not even afford Chaffin the semi-insensibility which might have come from the possession of that little fortune which, added to the store already accumulated, would have given him a round twenty thousand francs a year.
Tormented by this fixed idea, he was beginning to exhibit symptoms of the acute mental alienation which incessant, poignant regret for an irreparable sin is likely to cause in a man of some education. He could no longer eat or sleep, read or write, attend to any business or remain quiet. This agitation had not escaped the son's notice. The doctor had begun, almost automatically, to watch his father. He soon assured himself that these symptoms, so readily interpreted by an alienist, were caused by no physical disturbance. The cause was entirely mental—the physician said, cerebral. Almost automatically again, he had sought that cause.
One fact aroused his suspicion: he fancied that he observed a certain constraint in Professor Louvet's manner toward himself. As the head of the clinical staff he was in constant communication with the illustrious master of the Hôtel-Dieu. It had seemed to him, during the last weeks, that his chief's handshake was, not less cordial, but less unreserved, less familiar—in a word, that there was "a thorn" in it, as they would have said to each other in neurologists' parlance, in speaking of a common abrasion of the skin on a patient. Under any other circumstances Pierre would not have hesitated to question the professor. He did not do it. He had put together the two symptoms: the change in his master's manner to him, and the change in his father. He had drawn therefrom the conclusion, still automatically,—a profession like his ends by imparting a mechanical method, an instinctive gait, to the mind,—that the same fact was at the root of both. What fact? The quarrel between Chaffin and M. de Claviers, that old and very important patient of Louvet.
Pierre knew the marquis well, and although he had for him the antipathy of one social class for another, his innate sense of justice compelled him to esteem the great nobleman's greatness of soul. No, the châtelain of Grandchamp, who bestowed pensions on scores of old servants,—only two months since, his factotum was bewailing the fact at the family table!—had not parted, without weighty reasons, from one whom he had had in his service so many years.
What were those reasons? This question had been haunting the physician for several days, with such persistent and increasing distress, that it had occurred to him to seek an answer to it from Landri. He had been deterred by very diverse considerations. It will be recalled that their relations had never been perfectly simple. It was hard for the plebeian to ask the titled man if his, the plebeian's, father had been guilty of any offence contrary to honor. It was painful, too, for the physician, who had learned, in the delirium of a death-agony, the secret of an illegitimate birth, to seek a meeting with the son of the patient,—a meeting over which that consciousness would hover like a pall, especially as Pierre knew the terms of Jaubourg's will, and he did the child of that adulterous connection the justice to believe that M. de Claviers' acceptance of the legacy was torture to him.
One can imagine now the shock that it caused him, as he sat at work one afternoon in his little study, littered with books and pamphlets, when the maid handed him a card on which he read: "Comte de Claviers-Grandchamp." Fate, which is wont to teach such lessons, brought those two men face to face, who were born and reared under such widely different conditions, and who were undergoing, unknown to each other, the same universal ordeal of heredity, whereof one of the ancients said: "We shall be punished, either in our own persons or in those of our descendants, for the sins we have committed in this world." This is the principle, at once mysterious and natural, moral and physiological, which, by uniting persons of the same blood, creates the Family and Society.
Pierre's first impulse—so intolerable to him was the thought of his father's possible shame—was to reply: "I am not at home;" the second, to say: "Show him in." For the very reason that he was ignorant of the real reason for the dismissal of the steward of the Claviers-Grandchamps, he was unwilling to appear to dread a conversation with the future head of that house, and he thought:—
"What does he want of me? Doubtless he has come on account of the will. He is going to ask me not to mention what I may have heard and guessed. Those people have no appreciation of the honor of the medical profession. Bah! the honor of a bourgeois in the eyes of a noble!—A noble?" He laughed sneeringly,—"and of an officer with such ideas as this incompetent has, and as he exhibited in that stupid business of the inventory!"
As will be seen, his customary surly humor had already returned to this strange creature, who had always taken life against the grain, if we may so express it, because of his false position on the edge of a society in which he had no well-defined place. The result was that on entering that little room, the aspect of which disclosed the professional and intellectual ardor of its tenant, Landri de Claviers encountered the same armed glance that he had always known, behind the young scientist's gold-bowed spectacles. With his red beard and his irregular features, as if carved by a bill-hook, which gave him the aspect of a Tartar, the younger Chaffin really had, at that moment, the look of a very evil-minded man. This sensation was calculated to impart and did in fact impart a dryness, almost a bitterness of accent to Landri's first words, which were destined instantly to transform that conversation into a brief and fierce duel.
"I shall not detain you long," he began, after they had exchanged a few words of ordinary courtesy. Because of their former companionship and their difference in rank, they never knew how to address each other. They never called each other "monsieur," or by their names simply. "I have come upon a delicate, a very delicate errand. But the question I have come to ask is not put to the man, but to the physician who attended Monsieur Jaubourg."
He had the strength to pronounce those two syllables without removing his eyes from the other, who could not restrain a contraction of his bushy eyebrows and a curl of his lip as he replied:—
"I am at your service so far as this question does not run counter to my duty as a physician. We have a duty of absolute silence, which you do not suspect," he continued with a peculiar bitterness: "nec visa, nec audita, nec intellecta[7]is the old form of the Hippocratic oath. It is still true."
"It is a very simple matter," rejoined Landri. "You are aware that Monsieur de Claviers is Monsieur Jaubourg's legatee. We have obtained proof that some papers of great importance were taken from his apartment during the last days of his illness. Well! I would be glad to have your word—"
"That I didn't take them?" the doctor hastily interrupted. "Don't tell me that you came here to ask me that," he continued with an outburst of anger; "I will not allow it."
"You might have let me finish my sentence," retorted Landri, more calmly, but very little more. Being absolutely ignorant of the inward tragedy—so like his own, alas!—of which Pierre Chaffin was the victim, this outbreak at the bare idea of a suspicion of dishonesty was inexplicable to him. He had said nothing to justify it, and being rendered so sensitive by his own suffering, he could not brook a reply uttered in such a tone. "I finish that sentence. I would be glad to have your word, not that you did not take the papers, but simply that no person, to your knowledge, entered Monsieur Jaubourg's bedroom during his illness,—besides the servants, Professor Louvet, and yourself, of course. It seems to me that there is nothing in that to cause any sensitiveness on your part. It is simply a matter of preventing suspicion from going astray. You should be the first to desire it."
"I have no answer to make to a question of that sort," said Pierre. He did not clearly discern his questioner's object. It was true that he would have no right to take offence at the question, if it had not been couched in terms too imperious and inquisitorial. The conclusion especially had irritated him. But as Landri had affected to speak in a very self-contained tone, almost ceremonious in its stiffness, he determined to meet his coldness with equal coldness. He would have been humiliated to appear less able to control his nerves, or less polished, than the young noble, and he added: "I do not admit that it is the duty of a physician to keep watch over his patient otherwise than professionally. I venture to assert that I treated Monsieur Jaubourg to the best of my ability, and that is all that his heirs have a right to concern themselves about with respect to me."
"It is not a question of keeping watch," Landri replied. "You compel me, in spite of myself, to make my questions more precise. Did you admit no stranger to the invalid's bedroom? For you did receive visitors, I know from Joseph."
"Visitors?" exclaimed the physician. "No one, except my father." He had no sooner pronounced the word, than he ejaculated the "Ah!" of one who suddenly grasps the situation. He was silent for a moment. Then, controlling himself with an effort, he continued, throwing out his breast and walking up to the other, with distorted face and breathing quickly: "I will satisfy you. I give you my word of honor that I admitted no one to Monsieur Jaubourg's bedroom,—no one, you understand; my word of honor, and it's the word of an honest man, again you understand! And that gives me the right to put a question to you, in my turn. For all you call yourself Monsieur le Comte de Claviers-Grandchamp, and I am simple Pierre Chaffin, we are no longer living under the old régime, and I don't know that you are entitled to come here, on your private authority, to question me like an examining magistrate. You told me that some one had stolen papers from Monsieur Jaubourg's, and you asked me if the person from whom I received a visit did not go into the room where the stolen papers were. That was equivalent to saying that you suspected that person of stealing them, and that person was my father. My question is this: Do you suspect my father, or do you not?"
"I will say, as you said just now, that I have no answer to make, having named no one," Landri retorted.
His irritation faded away in the face of evidence: he had before him in very truth an absolutely honest man. He had felt it in the vigor with which Pierre had asserted his honor, in the upheaval of his whole being, above all in his outcry of indignant surprise. And lo! a strange and melancholy sympathy stirred in his heart. The tone in which the son had spoken of his father echoed in the depths of his soul. It was like a sudden repetition of his own inward lament. He observed with dismay that, having come thither to obtain confirmation of one suspicion, his visit had aroused another, not in his own mind, but in that of the very person upon whom he had relied to discover the truth; and already it had ceased to be in his power to allay that suspicion.
"To decline to answer is to answer," said Pierre Chaffin. "So papers are missing from Monsieur Jaubourg's, valuable papers, no doubt, and you, and Monsieur de Claviers, I suppose, with you, accuse my father of the theft!"
"No valuable paper is missing from Monsieur Jaubourg's," replied Landri, "and, once more, we accuse no one."
"If it is not valuable papers that have disappeared," continued the physician, "it must be letters. And why do people steal letters? To sell them, threatening to make them public, for blackmail."
His habit of inductive reasoning began to work anew, and in that moment of supreme agony, he made use of what he knew to guess the rest. Letters had been stolen. What letters? Those which referred to the birth of the child of Jaubourg and Madame de Claviers. They were afraid of blackmail. What sort of blackmail? That which the will suggested. And he said aloud, changing from questioned to questioner, to suppliant rather, he trembled so with anxiety as he made this appeal to his playmate in childhood:—
"I gave you my word just now; give me your word that you did not believe that my father was capable of that.—You don't answer? Then it must be that you did believe it. And yet you and Monsieur de Claviers are not cruel. You believed that? Why? I must know. I must know everything, everything, everything, and first of all the real reason why my father and Monsieur de Claviers parted. I am a man, Landri, and I am addressing another man. What was the reason? Tell me."
"You are well aware that I was not here," Landri replied. "I know nothing positive."
"Yes or no, did you hear any talk of dishonesty?"
"I heard something said of confusion in Monsieur de Claviers' affairs," said Landri. "But I give you my word on this—that this matter of Jaubourg's papers, as to which I wanted to obtain your testimony, had no connection whatever with the reasons that may have led Monsieur de Claviers to dispense with Monsieur Chaffin's services."
He was only too well aware, when he made this indefinite reply, that the craving for knowledge with which the other was consumed demanded a reply of a very different tenor. But he could not answer yes or no. He had suffered too keenly when he learned of his mother's sin to allow his lips to form words which should inform a son of his father's crime. Nor would his sense of honor permit him to be lavish of denials. Indeed, what was the use? When he decided upon this step, he had had no means of divining that Pierre's mind was already disturbed, so that he had immediately read into his question a meaning that was only too dear.
This altogether unforeseen result of their interview created in Landri's mind the impression of an inevitable destiny, which he had felt many times since his visit to his real father's death-bed, and he was, as it were, paralyzed by it. Was that impression shared by the physician, or was the poor fellow afraid of learning more? The evasive reply returned by his interlocutor to so pitilessly precise a question seemed to have overwhelmed him. He questioned him no further.
After a few moments of exceedingly painful silence, Landri rose. The other did not try to detain him, and the young men parted, just touching each other's fingers, and almost afraid to look at each other.
The same impression of Necessity, of a network of events woven by a will stronger than his own, haunted Landri throughout that evening, which he was able to pass alone, by good luck, M. de Claviers having gone to Grandchamp. He found it on his pillow when he awoke, still pursued by the image of that young man with whom he had played as a child, and whom he saw as he had left him, pale and motionless in the grasp of that horrible thought: "My father is a thief." As he said to himself at Saint-Mihiel, "If the Clermont train had only been late!" so he said now, "If only Louvet had not sent him to Rue de Solferino in order to help him along! If only his father had not gone to see him—merely by chance, perhaps!"
But is there such a thing as chance in the world? The triviality of the incidents which had led up, in Pierre's case as well as in his own, to so terrible an ordeal, confounded Landri, especially as that ordeal was merited—by whom? By those of whom they were born.
The vision of the common catastrophe which enveloped the son of the felonious steward and the son of the unfaithful wife, reached the point of absolutely terrifying him when, about half-past nine, his servant handed him a letter of which the handwriting alone made him tremble with excitement. He was preparing to pay Joseph another visit. He had changed his hypothesis since his visit to Quai de Béthune. He desired to talk with Joseph concerning the people who were most intimate with Jaubourg, remembering M. de Claviers' expression: "That smells of the club." As will be seen, he had entirely abandoned the idea of incriminating Chaffin. Now, this letter was from Chaffin!
The young man's heart beat fast, as he tore the envelope open, and yet faster as he read these lines:—
"Landri, your old master implores you, in the name of the past, to receive him instantly. He has a favor to ask of you which will save more than his life, and he can perhaps do you a service which will wipe out many things."
"Admit Monsieur Chaffin," he said to the valet; and almost in the same breath: "Do you know whether Monsieur le Marquis has returned from Grandchamp?"
"Last night, Monsieur le Comte," the servant replied; and while he left the room to summon the discharged steward, Landri said to himself:—
"Do me a service? What if he were really the culprit? What if he has brought the other letters? What if I am able to get them and give them tohim, in a few minutes?"
And the mere thought of M. de Claviers' expression as he thanked him warmed his whole heart!
[7]"A physician should disclose neither what he has seen, nor what he has heard, nor what he has divined."
[7]"A physician should disclose neither what he has seen, nor what he has heard, nor what he has divined."
Chaffin was profoundly preoccupied, and very anxious as he followed the footman who was instructed to usher him into Landri's presence. He would have been even more so if he had glanced through the windows of the long glass gallery that surrounded the courtyard of the hôtel. His legs, trembling already, would have refused further service. He certainly would not have crossed the threshold of the room where his former pupil awaited him.
At the very moment when he was proceeding thus toward an interview of decisive importance to him, the small door on Rue du Faubourg-Saint-Honoré, through which visitors on foot were admitted, opened in response to an impatient ring, and Pierre appeared. His arrival thus on his father's heels, in view of the circumstances under which the two men had parted, was a threat well calculated to check the flow of blood in the unfaithful steward's veins. He had hastened thither to implore a compassion which his son's presence would render unavailing. That implacable Fate, of which Landri had been the craftsman, unwitting at first, then terrified by its working out, continued its work. But what is this Fate if not the internal logic of life, so well summed up, in the words of the poet: "We are the masters of our first step. We are the slaves of the second." This force which thus compels all the consequences of crime is not distinguishable from it. We could not help committing a crime. Once committed it holds us fast. Our very precautions serve only to hasten our punishment. It overtakes us alike through our prudences and our imprudences, through those who love us and those who hate us and those even to whom we are indifferent, so inevitably do our sins unfold their results according to a mathematical ratio.
Landri's visit to Pierre Chaffin was a perfectly natural result of the peculations committed by the steward of the Claviers estate, and that visit had produced this other no less natural result: the doctor had questioned his father. When Chaffin returned to the house on Quai de Béthune on the preceding day, his son opened the door, anticipating his ring, a sign that he had been at the window watching for his return.
"I was waiting for you," he said. "Let us go into my study. I have something to say to you, at once."
"What's going on?" queried Chaffin. As he asked the question his glance expressed more terror than surprise. This singular fact did not escape Pierre. He was conscious of the false ring in the newcomer's laughter as he added, with an impertinent allusion to the very advanced opinions professed by the physician: "There's no question of an anarchist plot, is there? For I am as much of a radical as you please, but still, you know, a landed proprietor."
"Landri de Claviers has just gone from here," Pierre replied, paying no heed to the pleasantry. He had closed the door by way of precaution, and spoke in a low voice. He did not wish his mother and sister, who were looking over the week's laundry in an adjoining room, to suspect that his father and he were closeted together. "Yes," he repeated, "Landri de Claviers." And he gazed steadfastly at the discharged steward. He tried to detect upon that enigmatic face a confusion which did not appear. The thief recovered his self-control, and ventured to reply:—
"He is probably ashamed of the way his father behaved to his old tutor. I don't class them together, Monsieur de Claviers and him. Landri is weak. He doesn't dare to break a lance against the prejudices of a society which he estimates none the less at its real worth. You saw how absurdly he acted in that matter of the inventory. He is not a believer, he adores the army, and still he gets his job taken away from him! He has a poor head, but he's a very good fellow."
"Landri did not come to apologize either for himself or his father," said the doctor. "He came to accuse us."
"Us?" cried Chaffin. "Of what, I should like to know?"
Despite his self-control, that explicit statement made him jump. Among the many suppositions with which his terror-haunted fancy had tormented him, one had been especially persistent of late: he had written the anonymous note, it will be remembered, on his typewriter. Several people in the Claviers household knew that he had the machine. At the moment he had said to himself: "Pshaw! there are thousands of others in Paris!" and had gone ahead. Since then he had lived in deadly fear lest some suggestion should lead the marquis to see whether the characters in the letter did not correspond with those of his machine. It was an extravagant fear. By virtue of what authority could M. de Claviers have claimed such a power? But it is the peculiarity of the fixed idea, that it does not distinguish the possible from the impossible. And then, there was Pierre. To be assailed by an insinuation of that nature in the esteem and affection of his son was to the father a worse punishment than to be sent before the Assizes. Did Landri's accusation relate to that? Did he claim the right to demand a test? But, if so, what was the meaning of that "us?"
"I will tell you about it," rejoined the physician. He began to repeat word for word the conversation he had had with his father's former pupil, ending with the terrible question asked by himself: "Yes or no, did you hear any talk of dishonesty?" and with Landri's evasive reply: "I heard something said of confusion in Monsieur de Claviers' affairs."
As he told the story, which it was exceedingly painful to him to repeat thus, his eyes continued to examine the face of the agent so directly incriminated. Lively emotion was certain to be depicted thereon, even if he were innocent,—especially if he were innocent. The news of Landri's visit, under the existing conditions, could not be indifferent to a man of heart. There was matter therein at which to take offence, to be distressed, to be alarmed, to be indignant. Perhaps, if Chaffin had foreseen this explanation with his son, he would have been shrewd enough to feign agitation. But being attacked unexpectedly, he instinctively feigned absolute impassibility. It is the least hazardous of defences for a culprit taken by surprise. It offers no hold for an investigation, but for that very reason it suggests mastery of self, a premeditated reserve, the possibility of a secret.
Pierre felt this so strongly that, at the end of this painful narration,—this cross-examination, rather, scarcely disguised,—he uttered a cry, a downright appeal to the sense of honor of that father of his, who listened to him with an impassive face which made it impossible to discover a single one of his thoughts:—
"And it doesn't make you jump from your chair that I, your son, have reached the point where I could put such a question to that man, and that he refused to answer? You seem to have no suspicion that I am passing through one of the most ghastly hours of my whole life! Don't tell me that you had nothing to do with the disappearance of Monsieur Jaubourg's papers. I know it. Don't tell me that this act of Landri's proves that he and his father are crazy. I know it. But I know something else, by an experience of many, many years! Monsieur de Claviers and Landri, with all their failings and their prejudices and their follies and their absurdities, are perfectly honorable men, incapable of wronging any one knowingly. If they suspected you of this, it was because they believed that they had the right to. It must be that you and the marquis broke off your relations for some reason of which I know nothing. I insist on knowing it. Yes, why did Monsieur de Claviers, who finds it so hard to discharge his employés,—you used to complain of it so often!—why did he part with you so abruptly, so brutally? Ah!" he concluded in a heart-rending tone, "if the reason was what you told us, Landri would never have come here, he would never have left me with that evasive reply, after he had seen how I was suffering, and what I thought—never!"
"I told your mother and sister and you the exact truth," said Chaffin, pretending to be angry at last.
He could not assume any other attitude, but the contrast was too great between this sudden outburst and the carefully guarded attention of a few moments before. They who simulate emotions always miss their imitation of reality in some detail. They exaggerate the symptoms or distort them. For instance, the impostors who feign an attack of vertigo, and who fall with their hands extended to protect themselves. The genuine epileptic, being hurled to the ground as it were, has no time to take that precaution. The error, in this case, was the sudden change from premeditated indifference to extreme rage, without transition. The protest, too emphatic in his too abrupt somersault, was not sincere.
"Yes," the dishonest steward persisted none the less, "I told you the truth, and it is incredible to me that you, my son, should be the one to take sides against me with these great nobles whom you know only by hearsay! I know them, I do, from having undergone innumerable humiliations at their hands which I have always concealed from you. In their eyes a man is of no account when he doesn't belong to their caste. They wouldn't do you a material injury. They are very careful in that respect, from pride. But as to other injuries, no. I expected better things from Landri. Evidently he's no better than his father. Papers are missing from Jaubourg's apartments, certificates of stock, I suppose? They think at once ofus, ofus, mind you, of you as well as myself! Do I conclude from that that they mean to accuse you of dishonesty? Not at all. But you conclude that they do mean to accuse me! It is incredible! But the dishonesty was in coming here to insult you and your father! And you listened to my gentleman? And when he proved to you, by the mere fact of coming here, his absolute lack of perspicacity, you questioned him about me?—How many times must I tell you that Monsieur de Claviers did not part with me, but I parted with him, and for the reason that Landri admitted: he talked about confusion in my accounts, when there was no confusion in anything but his expenditure, which was insane! What Landri did not tell you is that I warned him personally of the marquis's impending ruin, in order to save his fortune. Just ask him about that. We will see whether he will dare to deny that conversation at Grandchamp when I gave him the exact figures. I swear it, on your mother's head and your sister's. If he had listened to me he wouldn't have lost a sou. And this is how he rewards me! But he isn't my son, and you, Pierre, have been too unjust to me, too ungrateful. I have only lived and worked for you all, for you especially. I have tried to spare you all the miseries of the breadwinner which crushed me at your age. You were intelligent and hard-working. I kept you at home, so that you could give your time to science as you chose, and prepare for your examinations, while your comrades were wearing themselves out with patients; and you have forgotten all my sacrifices!—Ah! it's too horrible!"
"For the very reason that I am living on your benefactions," replied the physician with savage asperity, "I cannot endure certain ideas. And those ideas," he continued still more harshly, "let us admit that it is, as you say, horrible to entertain them. It is a fact that I do entertain them. Would you like me to tell you why? Landri de Claviers' conduct has nothing to do with it. The change in you that I have noticed these last weeks has given them to me, nothing else. Since you left Grandchamp you are not the same man. I see it with my eyes. I see that you are suffering. You are growing thin. You don't eat. You don't sleep. You have some persistent trouble that you cannot hide, and I too am beginning to have one, I feel it growing and taking possession of me—it is suspicion. I do not want it. We must not both play at madness. Let us have more pride. A father and son should not exchange such words as these twice. There is one way of putting an end to them. It is too late to-day," he added, looking at the clock; "but to-morrow, at eleven, after the Hôtel-Dieu, I'll call for you, and we will go together to Rue du Faubourg-Saint-Honoré. We will ask to speak with the marquis. You will tell him, or, if you prefer, I will, that there are rumors abroad. And it is true. Louvet has changed his manner to me since you left the Claviers. These rumors have reached our ears. We have come to ask him to cut them short by declaring publicly, and first of all before me, that he has nothing to reproach you with in your stewardship that affects your honor. I will demand that he put that declaration in writing for me, if necessary."
"I will not do it!" cried Chaffin, his eyes bulging out with terror as, in imagination, they saw M. de Claviers. "I will not do it! You talk about pride, and yet you don't see that you are proposing to me a nameless humiliation, worse than all the rest!"
"What, pray?" his son quickly retorted. "What humiliation is there in going to a man as to whom you have nothing to reproach yourself with, and claiming from him reparation for involuntary injustice? Tell me, when Louvet and I—and how many others that I don't know!—may have received an unfavorable impression of your quarrel with Monsieur de Claviers, is not that an injustice, if the quarrel was a mere caprice on his part? And is he not responsible for it by the exaggerated indignation which you claim that he has shown?"
"People may think what they choose," interposed Chaffin. "I won't go up that man's stairs. I won't go to his house. I won't go."
"Very good," said Pierre, "then I shall go alone."
"You won't put that affront on me?" the father implored. "You shall not go! I forbid you. To humiliate yourself is to humiliate me. We are one as to that. You must obey me."
"Because of that very identity of interest, I shall not obey you," rejoined the son. "Your honor is my honor. I propose to know whether the money I am living on is pure. At eleven o'clock to-morrow I shall be there. I hope you will be there too. But if you are not, I shall go in alone. Nothing on earth, you understand, nothing shall prevent my having an explanation with Monsieur de Claviers, unless—"
"Unless what?" queried Chaffin breathlessly. "Go on."
"Unless you tell me that your leaving his service was for a different reason, and what it was."
"I can't invent one," the father replied.
"Then I can't understand your objections to a step which, I tell you once more, I must take in order to put an end to an intolerable state of mind."
"Well!" said Chaffin, after a pause, "do it, since you no longer believe in your father; but remember this, that I will never forgive you."
An awkward and ill-timed attempt at paternal dignity, which lacked the accent, the expression, the gesture, in a word the inimitable and irresistible reality, which Pierre craved as he craved bread and water, air and light! Chaffin resorted to it, however, as a desperate effort to prevent that visit, the threat of which had sent a stream of fire running through his veins. What an evening and night he passed under the apprehension of that hour, which every minute brought nearer, when his shamefully wronged employer and his idolized son should be face to face!
The young man did not dine at home, in order to avoid meeting his father. The latter heard him come in about midnight. A mad temptation assailed him, as he heard that well-known step, to rise and go to him and confess everything. But no. Pierre's terrible words were still ringing in his ears: "I propose to know whether the money I am living on is pure." How could he bear to tell that boy, whose probity was so absolute, that that money was not pure, that the little fortune, by virtue of which he was pursuing his studies, almost without practising, was, in part, stolen! For that was really one of the motives that had led Chaffin into rascality: his passionate desire to assure his son Pierre immunity from his own laborious life was his revenge for his semi-menial position. He had imagined him physician to the hospitals, professor in the Faculty, member of the Académie de Medicine, perhaps of the Institute.
This excitation of his paternal love was due to the same malevolence, born of his abortive destiny, that filled him with implacable hatred of his noble and magnificent employer. That most excellent sentiments can exist in the same heart with evil sentiments, and criminal resolutions inspired by the latter justify themselves by the former, is a fact of every-day observation, as disconcerting as it is indisputable. It explains why the great legislators, who were also great psychologists, always strove to punish acts in themselves, without seeking the intent with which they were committed. The decadence of civic justice began with this search for the intent, which, in healthy societies, is left to religion to deal with. The Church can still find reasons for pardoning a Chaffin for his crimes, when human tribunals, taking cognizance of his case, owe him naught save the galleys.
"If he ever finds that out," said the guilty father to himself, in that vigil of anguish, "he will leave me. He will go away from the house. His mother and sister will insist on knowing, too. They will guess the truth. At any price, Pierre must remain in ignorance. But how?"
Then it was that in that mind, already exhausted by the stings of conscience, an idea began to take root. It occurred to him to go himself, about nine o'clock, while his son was at the Hôtel-Dieu, and throw himself at the marquis's feet. He would implore him not to dishonor him in Pierre's eyes. M. de Claviers was generous. He would take pity on him. He would promise not to speak. He would not speak. But to appear before Madame de Claviers' husband after he had, like a dastard, dealt him that despicable blow of the anonymous letter, was beyond the Judas's courage. He could not even endure the thought. There had been, in the attitude maintained by that proud man since he had received the letter of his wife, testifying to her liaison with Jaubourg and the illegitimacy of the child, a mystery which terrified Chaffin. He divined therein a bottomless abyss of suffering over which it would be too horrible for him to lean.
Landri's visit to Pierre had intensified that puzzled sensation. His inquiries concerning papers said to have been stolen from Jaubourg implied that the young count was informed of the anonymous letter. Had M. de Claviers shown it to him? If so, why? Why, so that Landri might institute this inquiry, of course! And with what object, if not to unearth the holder of the "other documents"? Chaffin recalled those words in his letter, which was written in the paroxysm of nervous excitement caused by the gratification of long-cherished hate. He had added to it, in pure wantonness, a threat of blackmail which he had never intended to put in execution.
That recollection suggested a second plan: since his threat had produced such an effect on the two men, he had a certain means of obtaining from them a promise of silence with respect to his son. It was to Landri that the marquis had entrusted the mission of seeking those documents. It was to Landri that he must appeal. The anticipation of that interview was painful to the dishonored tutor. But it was not unendurable, like the other. But would Landri give way under that pressure? Would he not, on the other hand, reply: "You threaten us with a scandal? Very good. We propose to apply for a warrant against you."
No, he must not take that risk. Chaffin devised a safer method of procedure. He thought that he was well acquainted with his pupil of so many years. He believed him to be very weak, but he knew his absolute loyalty and the noble elements of his character. The better way was to go to him and say: "It was I who wrote that outrageous denunciation in a moment of insanity. I am sorry for it. I have the other papers. Here they are. I place them in your hands. I ask you, in return, to induce Monsieur de Claviers not to tell Pierre the real reason for my leaving him." The acceptance of that restitution would create the most sacred of obligations in the eyes of the noble-hearted young man.
Such are the disconcerting contradictions of human nature, that, upon representing to himself that scene of confession, although dictated entirely by self-interest, Chaffin had a sense of relief, almost as of rehabilitation. At all events he should have spoken, should have confessed his crime, which was suffocating him.
Once determined upon this course, he was in such feverish haste to carry it out that he left the house before nine o'clock, as soon as his son had started for the Hôtel-Dieu. He had not reckoned upon the working of Pierre's mind in a direction parallel to his own. The physician had said to himself, on leaving his father:—
"To-morrow he will have reflected. He will decide to go to Monsieur de Claviers with me if there's nothing wrong; and if there is anything, he will confess."
When he found, in the morning, that Chaffin did not mention the subject again, he reasoned thus:—
"My father has devised some expedient. What can it be? If he is guilty, there is only one: to go there first, in order to implore the marquis to spare him with regard to me. But is it possible?"
The physician had resolved to go to all lengths now, to put an end to the torture of suspicion, which, to his horror, was already changing from a recurrent to a fixed idea. He dreaded too keenly the form of monomania so well defined by one of his confrères of ancient times:Animi angor in una cogitatione defixus et inhœrens. He had acted at once therefore. Instead of going to the hospital, he had stationed himself at the corner of Rue des Deux-Ponts and Quai de Béthune. He had seen his father leave the house, look about him like one who fears that he is watched, and then bend his steps, with an air of feigned indifference, toward Pont Sully, where he took a cab. Pierre himself hailed the first cab that passed. He gave the driver a five-franc piece, telling him to drive as fast as possible to the corner of Rue d'Aguesseau and Rue du Faubourg-Saint-Honoré, where he arrived in time to see Chaffin's cab stop in front of the hôtel de Claviers. He waited a few moments, then rang and asked the concierge:—
"Is my father with Monsieur le Marquis?"
"No, Monsieur le Docteur," the man replied, "Monsieur Chaffin came to see Monsieur le Comte."
"Very well! I beg you to send and ask Monsieur le Marquis if he can receive me," said Pierre, after a moment's hesitation.
He had fancied that he could read in the concierge's eyes the same constraint that he had noticed of late in Professor Louvet's. He was only partly mistaken. Naturally, the magnanimous M. de Claviers had confided to no one in his entourage his grievances against his secretary. But his servants were well aware of his unalloyed kindness of heart. They had imagined the reason of Chaffin's abrupt dismissal, the more readily because they were not ignorant of his daily peculation. But they were not officially informed. Pierre had sufficient proof of that, for Landri's door was not closed to his father, and he himself was admitted to the presence of M. de Claviers. The concierge called up the speaking-tube that connected his lodge with the house. An affirmative answer was returned. The bell rang, announcing the visitor, and the doctor was ushered into the presence of the marquis five minutes after Chaffin's humble and suppliant figure had passed through Landri's door.
"There may be nothing wrong after all," thought the doctor, "as they receive us both. If it were only true! What a weight would be taken from my heart! However, I shall soon know."
Thegrand seigneur, with whom the son of the unfaithful steward, of the villainous informer, ventured to adopt this tragic step, was in the vast, severe library, which had been the scene, a fortnight before, of a no less tragic explanation, that with Landri. He was seated at his table this time, engaged in a task which would have seemed most strange to one who was not aware of the secret resolutions of his mind. He was transcribing himself, upon detached sheets, the number of which was already very great, a schedule of all the artistic treasures preserved in the château of Grandchamp. He had proceeded methodically, room by room, and he was at that moment, as was indicated by the line written at the top of the sheet, in the apartment of the deceased marchioness. He had kept it till the last. The reason will be only too readily understood.
The work, begun several weeks before, was nearing its end. The old gentleman's handwriting had always resembled himself. It was bold, free and distinct, with an air of the great century. But a slight tremulousness in some letters testified how painful a task it had been to him to write the lines of that page. A box stood open on his desk, containing documents relating to the treasures. The "Genealogy of the House of Claviers-Grandchamp" was also there with a mark at the famous Appendix number 44, upon which Altona had formerly based his offer. The last, in blood, of the magnificent Claviers was drawing up the death-certificate of his family, in a form determined upon by himself. He had, that very morning, been assailed by distressing emotions, the reflection of which made his noble countenance more imposing than ever.
His old-fashioned courtesy brought him to his feet to receive the son of the corrupt steward. He waved him to a chair—without offering him his hand; a slight circumstance which Pierre interpreted as confirming his suspicions: the marquis was punishing his father's sins in him.
Pierre's visit was, in fact, a surprise to M. de Claviers, and a most painful surprise, but for a reason very different from that which the young man imagined. He had been Jaubourg's physician. He had been present during his last moments, when the patient had undoubtedly spoken. Although M. de Claviers knew nothing of the learned theories of modern specialists concerning "ecmnesia" and "onirism," he had seen people die. He knew what confessions the excitation of fever sometimes extorts from lips previously dumb. He explained in that way the declaration of paternity made by Jaubourg. Perhaps Pierre Chaffin had been present at that horrible scene of which the young man had told him. That was the reason that the heroic marquis had consented to receive him. He had not chosen to seem to fear the meeting.
Another detail impressed the doctor—the truly extraordinary change in that imposing countenance. M. de Claviers had aged, within the last few weeks, as much as his ex-secretary. But it was the aging of a man consumed by grief without remorse,—the despair, with undimmed eyes, of him who has naught to blame himself for in the suffering that is killing him; whereas Chaffin had exhibited to his son the mask of the unhappy wretch with sombre, veiled glance, the conscious architect of his own misery. This comparison shaped itself involuntarily in the physician's mind, as he was saying:—
"You will excuse me for disturbing you. Monsieur le Marquis, and at such an early hour. It will not be for very long."
"It is your time that is valuable, doctor, not mine," replied M. de Claviers, now wholly master of himself. He was trying to divine the motive of this unexpected visit. "Probably he isn't satisfied with his fees, as Métivier fixed them," he thought, and the other continued:—
"I shall not try to play at diplomacy with you, Monsieur le Marquis. That is not my style, and I know that it isn't yours, either. I will go straight to the goal. This then, in few words, and very simply, is the object of my visit. You parted with my father after you had had him in your service more than fifteen years. The separation was very sudden. It has caused talk. I myself have had the impression that I do not know the whole truth. My father has refused to explain himself clearly to me thereon. Or, rather, he has explained himself, but in terms which do not satisfy me, and I have come to say to you, knowing your ideas and how high you rank the family spirit, I cannot endure the idea that my father is suspected, still less to suspect him myself. If you parted for reasons which do not involve his honor, as I believe, as I wish to believe, I ask you to say so publicly two or three times, under circumstances which will cut short all rumors, especially before Monsieur le Professeur Louvet, my chief. I ask you to say so to me, too. If, on the other hand—" And in a heart-rending tone: "I must know it."
M. de Claviers had listened to the young man with a more and more distressed expression in his clouded eyes. The resemblance was too striking between the grief of this son who suspected his father and the anguish with which he had seen Landri overwhelmed, in that same place, because of his mother's sin,—the same Landri whom he continued to love so dearly even while hardening his heart against him! He was too entirely, too genuinely religious not to recognize the justice of a higher power in this punishment visited, as the Book promises, on the second generation. This view of the moral side of life harmonized perfectly with his view of its social side. He was too humane not to pity the young man whose toilsome and honorable career he had followed from childhood. On the other hand, his indignation against Chaffin was too fresh, too well-deserved.—And he was still ignorant of the wretched creature's crowning infamy!—He could not give him the certificate of honorable conduct which the son demanded. Moreover, he abhorred falsehood. These diverse feelings were reflected in his reply, which he did not make until he had taken what seemed to his visitor a very long time for reflection.