"Pierre," he said at last, addressing him in the familiar tone that he had formerly used with him, "give me your hand." And he suited the action to the word. "You are a very noble fellow. I have always known it. I felt it more profoundly than ever while you were speaking to me. But for the very reason that you are a very noble fellow, how could you fail to realize the enormity of this appeal you are making to me? And you say that you know my ideas! Remember, my boy, a son doesn't judge his father. He does not institute an investigation concerning his father. I shall not, by answering you, associate myself with what I consider a deplorable mistake on your part, an aberration of the mind. If I had spoken to any person whomsoever of my reasons for depriving myself of your father's services, I might, by straining a point, permit you to come and ask me to explain my words. But I have said nothing. Your father left me because he mismanaged my affairs. That is all. It is all that I have said or shall ever say about him, to you or to any one else."
"Mismanage has two meanings, Monsieur le Marquis," rejoined the physician nervously; and, anticipating M. de Claviers' protest, "if I insist it is because you have acknowledged my right to do so. Yes. You say that you would permit my question if you had spoken to any one. You meant by that, any stranger. You forgot your son. Monsieur le Comte de Claviers came to my house yesterday afternoon to question me, in his own name and yours, concerning certain papers which have been stolen, it seems, from Monsieur Charles Jaubourg's apartment. He accused my father of the theft, with my assistance. He probably knows now that he was mistaken. But it is none the less true that such a suspicion justified me in finding out upon what ground he could have conceived it. It must have been upon what you had told him. He was under arrest when the thing happened. He confronted me with that alibi when I questioned him. There was nothing left for me to do but to apply to you. Tell me what you have told him about my father. Is it unfair to ask you?"
"My son is another myself," M. de Claviers replied. To learn, even in this vague way, of the scene of the day before between the two young men wounded him where his susceptibility was tenderest. What indications had led Landri to invite an explanation which might well have been so dangerous? It might arouse suspicions concerning the nature and importance of the papers stolen at Jaubourg's. To maintain to the end the rôle of a father on perfectly cordial terms with his child, the marquis must neither ask a question upon that subject, nor seem to disavow the young man's act. But the news affected him profoundly, and his voice trembled as he continued: "You surely do not claim that I must detail to you my interviews with Landri alone? Nor that I should take you to my new man of affairs and inform you as to the details of my receipts and expenditure? And observe that that is exactly what you presume to demand of me! I excuse you because of the motive that impels you. But let us stop here."
He had risen, with contracted eyebrows and haughty bearing, thus constraining his interlocutor to do likewise, and he pressed the electric button on his desk.
"I have told you that Monsieur Chaffin had mismanaged my affairs. Wherein? How? That concerns him and myself, and us alone. I shall not add a word. So that it is useless for us to prolong a discussion which henceforth would have no meaning. You have your patients, and I"—he pointed to the table—"have to finish this urgent task.—Garnier," he added, as the maître d'hôtel for whom he had rung entered the room, "show Monsieur le Docteur Chaffin to the door.—Monsieur, I have the honor to salute you."
"No, we will not stop here," said Pierre to himself, while yielding, in spite of himself, to the extraordinary authority that emanated from the old noble when he was in a certain state of concentrated irritation.—"I am to go to Monsieur le Comte's apartments and get my father," he said to the servant; "will you take me there?"
As he followed the maître d'hôtel through the glass gallery which his father had passed through a quarter of an hour before, another person was on his way, by an interior passage, to that same room in which Landri was talking with Chaffin. It was the Marquis de Claviers. He wished to learn, and without loss of time, Landri's reasons for going to Quai de Béthune, and whether he had at last discovered a way to solve the mystery of the anonymous denunciation which had been a constant source of anxiety to him for so many days. Thus it was that he knocked at one door of the young man's smoking-room, at almost the same instant that Pierre entered at the other door.
This simultaneous double appearance, which had the air of being concerted, almost extorted a shriek from the two occupants of the room, between whom a scene had just taken place almost more distressing than that between the marquis and Pierre. Their arrival brought about a terrible dénouement.
At the moment that they entered, Chaffin was seated at a table. He had just laid aside a pen with which he had written upon an envelope before him the following address: "Monsieur le Marquis de Claviers-Grandchamp." He was about to rise. The sight of his son caused him to fall back upon his chair, and that of the marquis, the next instant, to spring up again. He retreated backward, so demoralized by terror that his legs gave way and he had to lean against the wall.
M. de Claviers, thunderstruck himself by the presence of his former secretary, and of his son, whom he had just left, gazed at them both and at Landri. Then, addressing the latter,—
"I have to talk with you," he said, "when you have finished with these gentlemen."
At that moment his eye fell on the envelope lying on the desk. He recognized his own name. He took it up and opened it. Chaffin had not had time to seal it, a circumstance which made more striking the exact parallel between that moment and another, when the betrayed husband had compelled the adulterine son to read the proof of their common shame. The envelope contained the three letters from Jaubourg to Madame de Claviers stolen by the tutor, and, on a separate sheet, these lines in his hand, written at Landri's dictation:—
"The wretch who, in a moment of insanity, sent an anonymous letter to M. le Marquis de Claviers-Grandchamp, restores to him the other papers mentioned in that letter, and, while asking his forgiveness, appeals to his generosity not to dishonor him in the eyes of his son."
The marquis read the note. He recognized on the other sheets the detested handwriting of his wife's lover, his villainous friend. He looked at Chaffin and said: "So it was you!"—Then he took two steps towards him with an expression so threatening that the unhappy wretch—ah! he well deserved that title at that cruel moment!—fell on his knees, crying, "Pardon!"
The doctor rushed between his father and M. de Claviers. The marquis stopped, plainly struggling against himself, to refrain from revenging himself with his own hands. At last, pointing to the door, he commanded: "Go! go, I say!" in so imperative a tone that his former secretary, still on his knees, crawled towards the door. His nerveless fingers had difficulty in opening it. He escaped at last, while Landri said to the horrified Pierre, who no longer needed to have any one tell him the truth about his father:—
"Follow him. Do not leave him alone."
"You're afraid that he'll kill himself," said M. de Claviers, when the door had closed on the two men. "I suppose that he played that comedy for you," he continued with a bitter smile. "It is not he, but his son, who should not be left alone. Cowards live. It's the men of courage who think of suicide in the presence of disgrace. And when one does not believe in God! On that boy's account, I tried to control myself. I could not do it.—But no," he continued, with a fierce energy wherein the stern inheritance of a warlike race reappeared. "We are too much afraid of suffering and of causing others to suffer. The grief of the sons is the redemption of the fathers in this world and the next. We must learn to atone for the sins that we did not commit, as we profit by virtues that we never had."
He had spoken as if to himself, and he seemed to have forgotten the existence of Landri, who watched him pace the floor, silent now. Chaffin's note and Jaubourg's three letters still lay on the table, where he had left them when he rushed upon the traitor. The young man trembled lest, when he emerged from that fit of excited meditation, the sight of those sheets should increase the smart of the wound from which his noble heart was bleeding. So that he was amazed by the calm tone in which M. de Claviers, upon returning to himself and spying the papers, said to him, pointing to them as he spoke: "Do as you did before!" He resumed his walk while the proofs of the terrible secret were being consumed. At last, halting in front of Landri, he said to him:—
"You have done what you promised. It is well. It is very well. I am relieved of a horrible weight. We are entitled to think that all the letters are destroyed. The Chaffins will not talk. They cannot talk. Our honor is safe, thanks to you. Once more, it is well, and I thank you."
"You thank me? O monsieur!" exclaimed Landri; and he continued, choking with emotion: "If you really think that I have at least tried to satisfy you, allow me to implore one favor—that you will hasten the time when this pretence of intimacy that you have imposed upon me, that you have rightly imposed upon me, shall come to an end. This life in society, among all those indifferent people, is too hard. I haven't the strength for it any longer. You must have seen that I have not shirked it. I venture to say that no one can have guessed what I have suffered these last weeks. But I am at the end. I can do no more."
"And I?" said the marquis; "do you think that I am not weary of it, too?—But it is true: the test has been a severe one. The world will never dream now of supposing that we parted on a pretence. Your marriage will suffice to explain everything. The author of that infamous anonymous letter is unmasked and disarmed. We have nothing more to fear now. We can put an end to it.—These are my wishes," he continued after another pause: "You will write me a letter that I can show. You will inform me of your purpose to marry Madame Olier, despite my prohibition, and to employ such legal measures as the Code places at your disposal. I don't know what they are, so you will specify them. You will leave the house this very day, and let me know your address, so that I can communicate with you at once in case of urgent need. I do not anticipate such a contingency. Métivier, in conformity with my orders, should have turned into cash by this time the property that you inherit from your mother. It is fully understood that the share that she left me by her will is to be added to it. I ask you to deposit the money at the Bank of France, until further orders. In that way it will be easier for me to turn over to your account, without intermediary, another fortune, which you know about and which you accept. You have pledged yourself to do it. Last of all, I ask you not to settle in Paris, so long as I last. It won't be very long."
"I will repeat what I said the first day," Landri replied: "I have no wish but to obey you. As to the last point, I propose, not only not to live in Paris, but to leave France, to undertake the farming business in Canada. On my return from Saint-Mihiel, you said to me—I remember your exact words: 'It is a horrible thing to me that the family you will found will bear the name of mine.' It would be no less horrible to me, knowing that that name is not my own. I cannot change it in France, without causing people to seek the cause of such a resolution. By expatriating myself, to engage in a new business in an absolutely new country, I shall escape all comments. I intend to adopt one of the names which belonged to my mother's family, and which no one has borne for more than a hundred years. You spoke of legal measures. If there is any possible means by which the title of Marquis de Claviers-Grandchamp can pass, after you, to some one of your young kinsmen, I will assent to it, in whatever form you prefer."
"You would do that?" cried M. de Claviers. The trembling born of an emotion stronger than all his resolutions strangled his voice in his throat. "You would change your name? But she—that woman—"
"Madame Olier?" Landri interrupted. "I have told her of my plan. She assented to it in advance, without asking for any explanation."
"Yes," continued the marquis. "It is the truth. That is the true remedy." He was no longer able to control himself, and his words echoed his thoughts. "I saw it, from the first moment. But the suggestion could not come from me.—Adopt another son,—who is not you? Never!—Ah!" he continued, with increasing excitement, "I can truly say, like that widow of the Middle Ages: 'You were stolen from me.'—No, I will have no other son. The Claviers-Grandchamps will die with me. I shall be the last of the name, as I am the last of the race. It is what they would have wished, if they could have looked ahead. Our house will end, as it has lived, nobly. By assisting therein, you have wiped out the insult. For your sake, I can forgive.—We must do our duty to the end," he added, at the conclusion of another pause, during which Landri waited, hoping for a different word, a gesture, an embrace, a kiss. But the old nobleman considered, doubtless, that he had said too much already, and, too, he was doubtless afraid of himself, of that wave of affection which was rushing from his heart, drowning every other sentiment; for he concluded abruptly: "Go you to your goal. I go to mine. Adieu!"
"Adieu," Landri replied.
The marquis hesitated another second. He had his hand on the door-knob. He opened the door and disappeared, without even turning his head. He walked with the inert step that had characterized him since the ghastly discovery had stricken him in his magnificent vitality—his head bent forward, his back slightly bowed. When he was in his library once more, and alone, his prostration was so complete that he let himself drop into the first arm-chair within his reach and sat there an indefinite time, gazing at—what? a portrait of Landri as a child that he had had in that room for years. All that past of paternal love throbbed in his heart, and he reflected that at that very moment the young man, who was the object of his passionate affection, was preparing to go away, and forever.
But when he roused himself from that savage immobility, it was not to return to the apartment where Landri undoubtedly still was. No. He took from the table once more the bulky volume in which he had written the history of his family, and opened it at the genealogical tree. He had to unfold the enormous sheet on which were inscribed more than four hundred names. The first two, Geoffroy and Aude, had above them the date 1060. The blue eyes of Geoffroy IX, of 1906, embraced with a burning glance that table which was, as it were, the imaginary cemetery of all his dead. When he closed the book, he was calm. His hand traced, this time without a tremor, the lines of a note which evidently represented a decisive episode in a fully matured resolution. For he read it twice before sealing it and writing the address on the envelope.
"Is the automobile in the courtyard?" he asked Garnier, who appeared in answer to another ring. "Let Auguste take this line to Monsieur le Comte de Bressieux at once. If Monsieur de Bressieux is at home, let him bring him back. If not, let him leave the note."—And, alone once more, "If any one can resume the negotiations for the sale of the furniture of Grandchamp with that Altona, he is the man," he said to himself. "Altona will give four millions merely for the articles enumerated in Appendix number 44. If I add all the rest, he will give five."—And he put in order the papers on his desk, which were nothing less than a schedule prepared by him of "the rest": plate, Dresden ware, weapons, books, linen—in a word, all the furniture of the château.—"That wretched money is to be returned. Suppose that, while I am waiting for Bressieux, I write to Charlus to announce the marriage? Poor Marie! She loved Landri. It's fortunate, however, that he did not love her as well. I should have had to prevent their union. Should I have had the strength? One has strength for anything when the honor of the name is at stake. And all the great names stand together. The Claviers would not have inflicted upon the Charluses, by my hand, the outrage of vitiating their blood."
As the suddenly evoked vision of the treachery restored his energy, he began the letter to Marie's father which should justify his quarrel with his supposititious son, in the eyes of the world; and this new upheaval of resentment neutralized for a moment his misery at that parting.
In the early days of March of this year, 1907, several of the guests who had taken part, some months' before, in the last hunting dinner that the châtelain of Grandchamp was destined ever to give, were assembled after luncheon in one of the small salons of the hôtel Charlus. There were Florimond de Charlus himself, and his daughter Marie, who had done the honors of the repast, in the absence of her mother, who was perennially ill, to the Sicards and Louis de Bressieux. With the coffee had appeared little de Travers, the too intimate friend of little Madame de Sicard, and thealter egoof her diminutive husband. You will remember the wretched pun on the size and names of the members of this family of three: "The Three Halves."
Elzéar de Travers, with his pink pug-nose, his pointed mustache, and his great blue eyes on a level with his face, was a finished exemplar of the peddler of scandal, who runs from club to club, from salon to salon, with a "Have you heard the news?" ordinarily followed by the most insignificant of tales. On the afternoon in question, he did not abandon that habit.
"Guess whom I met last night, on his way to England, at the Gare du Nord, where I went to escort Lady Semley, who told me to give you her compliments?"—He turned to Simone de Sicard, who smiled at him.—"Geoffroy de Claviers, who is going there to buy horses!"
"Doesn't he think himself sufficiently ruined, for Heaven's sake?" said Sicard. "It seems that with the Jaubourg inheritance and the sale of the pictures and furniture at Grandchamp, he still owes ten millions."
"You ought to know all about it, Monsieur de Bressieux," observed Marie de Charlus insolently, addressing the fashionable broker, whom she hated twice over. As a young woman of noble birth and very proud of her rank, she was, despite her "modernism," in a constant state of irritation against those of her own caste who fell away either socially or morally; and then too everybody who was involved, closely or distantly, in Landri's marriage to Madame Olier, was insufferable to her. Now there was a rumor, partly justified indeed, that, but for the subtle mediation of the Seigneur de la Rochebrocante, the Marquis de Claviers would have been unable to turn over to his son his mother's fortune. With the slanderous imagination of a rival, Marie believed that, if that payment had been delayed, the scheming Madame Olier would certainly have preferred to delay the ceremony until the final settlement of the accounts. She said to herself that Landri's eyes would have been opened by such base conduct, that the marriage would not have taken place—in short, all the follies of frantic jealousy. Bressieux had to pay the bill.
"I?" he replied, without irritation. He was not sensitive except when he chose to be, and he was too dependent on the Charluses not to lower his flag before the witty Marie. "It is true that I had the good fortune to prevent poor Geoffroy from being robbed too outrageously in the sale of the wonders of Grandchamp. Thanks to my advice, he got six millions in all. Altona offered four, and he wanted to ask five. The tapestries alone were worth eighteen hundred thousand francs.—This talk about ten millions of debts is all fable. If you want my opinion, he is absolutely free from debt, and has a good hundred thousand francs a year. Evidently the blow was a hard one."
"It seems that Landri, by that woman's advice, demanded interest on interest," said Madame de Sicard.
"I will never believe that of him," said Marie de Charlus hastily. "As to her, it's true enough that she doesn't take very well. It's well deserved. She'll have to work hard to get into society."
"And so she won't try," rejoined Bressieux. "Geoffroy told me that the couple were going to settle in America."
"Aha! so Landri plays thecoup du 'ranch'on us!" said little Sicard. "We know all about that. You'll see them coming back within a year, to Paris-les-Bains, where life is so happy, even under the Republic. And he'll present his wife, and we shall receive her, and we shall be jolly well in the right. Between ourselves, the excellent Claviers has shown no common sense in this whole business. One can't live in opposition to his time to that extent."
"Would you prefer that he should live in opposition to his name?" interposed Charlus. To him, too, Landri's marriage had been an over-bitter disappointment. "Upon my word!" he continued, "it's most astonishing to me that Claviers' conduct, judicious and wise and legitimate as it has been, should be criticized. And among ourselves! But everything is going the same way, from great to small. Dine out, no matter where: people to-day don't even know how to place their guests at table. Claviers set a superb example."
"I agree with you," said Bressieux. "If we do not defend our names, what shall we defend?"—Then, with his characteristic dissembled irony: "Evidently Geoffroy is ruining the market. But don't be alarmed, Sicard. The title-exchange isn't in danger of being closed yet—even under the Republic, to adopt your expression."
"All the same," said Elzéar de Travers, coming to the rescue of Simone's husband, "there's one pack of hounds less! And such a pack! How it was kept up!"
"And what a table!" said Sicard.
"For my part," said Simone, "I am for the lovers. If I had been in Monsieur de Claviers' place, I'd have scolded a little, on principle, and then I'd have given one of those parties that he knew how to give."
"Look you, my dear," interposed Charlus angrily, "when I hear you and Jean talk like this, I wonder whether we oughtn't to long for another '93, to bring you all to a realizing sense of what you are and what you should be."
"Oh!" laughed Madame de Sicard, "now you're just like my grandmother de Prosny, who used to prophesy the guillotine every night."
"I know," Marie de Charlus broke in, "and you replied: 'You hope for the staircase of the nobles, but you'll get the wall.'—Wall or staircase, it's always blood that flows, and I agree with old Claviers, let us try to see to it that it's pure blood; and his grandchildren's won't be that. He did all he could to prevent it, and he did well. That's what I callchicand notchiqué."
And upon this conclusion of the "emancipatedgratin," the conversation took another turn, Bressieux having asked Simone, with an air of indifference, whether she had seen the new play at the Français, in order not to prolong the discussion of such dangerous topics. They talked in undertones of a proposed marriage between Sicard's brother and a Demoiselle Mosé, and the satirical personage almost regretted having yielded to the temptation to bury his poisonous fang in the self-esteem of the happiest of the "Three Halves." The commission he had received in the second Altona deal—two hundred thousand francs, for the Chaffins who are in society are more expensive than the others—had put him on his feet for some time. But who could say? The future Sicard-Mosé ménage might need advice about furnishing their abode. And so he tried to repair with the young wife the bad turn he had done himself with her husband by his epigram. He tried without energy, however. Contradictory as it may appear, Geoffroy de Claviers' misfortune saddened him, despite the two hundred thousand francs so quickly earned. He had pocketed the money, but had actually made Sieur Altona pay another million. Moreover, as there was in him a man of race, compared with the dealer, he had admired the demeanor of the châtelain of Grandchamp during a trial of which he alone understood the hidden side. In fact it was Jean de Sicard's little attack on the chivalrous marquis that had drawn hismotfrom him; and while the salon discussed the actors on Rue Richelieu, he was elsewhere in thought.
"Claviers in England?" he said to himself. "To buy horses? Nonsense! He probably wanted to see Landri once more. How he loved him! No one will ever make me believe that he was not told the truth by that Chaffin,—to whom the infamous performance didn't bring luck, however, for Altona tells me he has had a paralytic shock. It's another piece of luck for me, that shock. The rascal would have claimed a percentage, on the ground that he baited the hook!"
Observers of the type of Bressieux, those disguised tradesmen, who earn their bread—or their luxuries—by studying the characters of their dupes or their rivals, really do possess a second sight. At the very moment when these comments, neither very intelligent nor very foolish, very kindly or very unkindly, were being exchanged in the Charlus salon, another scene was taking place many miles away; and that scene was the veritable conclusion of this tale.
This dénouement had for its stage one of those spots where it seems least likely that words of a certain sort can be spoken: a room in a hotel at Liverpool, that city on the bank of the Mersey, the immense mart of England's commerce, one of the extremities of a vast moving street of steamships and sailing vessels, of which the other ends are Boston and New York! City of docks and railway-stations, of smoke and speed, panting with the travail of a world, with its irregular and chaotic structures of brick and stone, built in haste, above which the finest days spread only a mistily blue sky, dimmed by clouds of vapor.
It was such a veiled, uncertain sky that Landri and Valentine saw through the bow-window of a small parlor in that hotel, at which they had alighted the day before. They were awaiting the time to go on board the boat that was to take them in six days to New York, whence they were to journey, via Montreal, to Ottawa, to prepare for their permanent establishment. Little Ludovic had insisted upon going with his tutor on board the steamer, which the husband and wife—they had been married ten days—could see at the dock, within a few rods of the hotel. The huge vessel was called the Cambria, the Latin name of the principality of Wales. She was of thirty-two thousand five hundred tons, with engines of seventy thousand horse-power; seven hundred and eighty feet long and eighty-eight feet beam. Her vast black hull towered above the gray water of the river, swollen by the rising of the tide. A floating palace, pierced by innumerable port-holes, and dominated by four huge smoke-stacks, reared its white walls above the waterline. Locomotives whistled. Tram-cars ran along their electric wires, with a snapping noise. Between the hotel and the landing-stage were travellers going to and fro, giving orders, looking after their trunks, or hailing porters.
Valentine had sent her maid on before, so that not even a package was left in that empty parlor whose dark mahogany furniture emphasized its depressing commonness. How far away they were, she from her homelike little sanctuary on Rue Monsieur, he from the magnificence of Grandchamp and Rue du Faubourg-Saint-Honoré! That contrast was the anticipatory reflection of the exile that Landri had desired and she had agreed to. The melancholy aspect of their surroundings intensified the distress with which the young man was weighed down. He was thinking of M. de Claviers, and he said to his wife:—
"You see, he has not even given me a sign of life. If he had intended to write he would have written to London. He knew my whole route, day by day, hour by hour, but not a word, not a sign that he retains even a little of the old affection!"
"He retains it all," Valentine replied. She had taken her husband's hand, and pressed it gently, as if to make the compassion with which she was overflowing pass into his heart to whom she had given her whole life. She saw him bleeding from a deep, deep wound, even in his happiness, and she loved him with a love that was the more profound and passionate therefor. "There is still an hour and a half before we sail," she added. "Let us wait."
"Wait?" rejoined Landri. "I have done nothing but that since that horrible moment when he went out of the door without glancing at me, without turning his head. I ought to have gone to his house and asked for him, tried to see him."
"Mon Dieu!" she exclaimed. "If only I didn't give you bad advice when I advised you simply to write! I had such a strong belief that we should let him return of his own motion! But I shall hope till the last second. You'll get a letter, a message,—something."
They said no more, listening intently to the faintest sounds on the staircase, echoing with the hurried footsteps of the guests of the hotel, where people live after the fashion of a railway station—between the swift ocean steamers like the Cambria, and the boat-trains—"specials" as they are called in England—that run constantly from Liverpool to London and from London to Liverpool. At every such sound Landri had a convulsive shudder which Valentine soothed with a warmer pressure. The steps did not stop at the door, and all the visions of the past two months rushed back into Landri's mind, to increase twofold the craving for another farewell from him whom, in his thoughts, he still called his father.
He saw himself once more, leaving the mansion on Rue de Faubourg-Saint-Honoré, after their last, distressing interview, and his quest of a furnished apartment in which to take up his abode for a few weeks. He lived through the days which had followed, when he was arranging the preliminaries of his marriage and his departure, avoiding familiar streets and faces. Several episodes stood out more clearly than the rest: visits to Métivier, one especially, when the notary, gazing at him with such inquisitive eyes, despite professional discretion, had spoken of the sale at Grandchamp—of a chance meeting with Pierre Chaffin, who had turned his face away, an innocent victim of his father's shame;—another with Altona, when the future baron had saluted him with a familiar, almost patronizing,coup de chapeau, as from one gentleman to another!
He saw himself receiving an envelope directed in the marquis's well-known hand, which contained a receipt for nearly three million francs deposited to his account in the Bank of France. It was Jaubourg's fortune. And he felt again the beating of the heart that he had had when, after much reflection, he went to a priest at the church of Saint-François Xavier, who was Madame Olier's confessor. What a contrast to the morning when, jumping from his automobile, he ascended the steps of the same church, to throw the chauffeur off the scent! He entered the church on this second occasion, beset by more serious anxieties than that of assuring the secrecy of his visits to Rue Monsieur! He had gone thither to request the priest to be his intermediary in an anonymous gift of that money to the "Society for the Relief of Soldiers Wounded in the Armies of Sea and Shore." How proud he had been and how hopeful, when, a week later, that difficult project once realized, he had been able to send with his own hand to M. de Claviers, in a letter, the documents which attested that investment! This "French Red Cross" was still the army. How sad he had been when the marquis did not reply!
Nor had he replied to a second letter, in which Landri informed him of his wedding and the date of his sailing. And the young man saw himself, too, in one of the chapels of the same church of Saint-François, kneeling before the altar with Madame Olier, in the presence of no others than his wife's two witnesses, relations from the provinces, and his own two, Captain Despois and Lieutenant Vigouroux. Last of all, he saw himself writing to the Marquis de Claviers a last letter, in which he set down the details of his journey: the date of his arrival at London, the length of his stay and the address of his hotel; the date of his arrival at Liverpool and the address of his hotel there, and the day and hour of sailing; and he told him also the name he had chosen among the ancient patronymics of the Candales—Saint-Marc.
When he signed "M. and Mme. de Saint-Marc" on the hotel register at London, for the first time, what a strange emotion had assailed him, made up of relief and of sorrow together! And he had said to himself, possessed still by the persistent image of the man whose son he had for so many years believed himself to be: "The word of farewell that he denied to Landri de Claviers, who was not a Claviers, he will not deny to Landri de Saint-Marc, who, through his mother, is a genuine Saint-Marc."
Vain reasoning! That supreme sacrifice had not triumphed over inexpiable resentment. And in the excess of suffering caused by that silence, now evidently final, Landri looked at Valentine, who was looking at him. In her travelling costume she was very slender and youthful. Her fathomless eyes expressed such boundless devotion! Her fragile grace seemed to appeal so for protection! And, drawing her to him, he held her long in a close embrace, with the sensation that he could still live, for her and through her.
Strange mystery of memory! While his lips were pressed upon his dear wife's, he remembered M. de Clavier's remarks concerning those exiles who leave their city, "carrying their gods with them." In his imagination he heard the "Émigré's" loud, clear voice saying those words in his room at Saint-Mihiel.—Suddenly—was it an illusion?—he thought that he heard that voice, in very truth, speaking in the corridor.
"Listen!" he said, grasping Valentine's arm. "Some one is coming. Why, it's he!"
"It is he!" she repeated, turning pale; and, as some one knocked at the door, "I will leave you alone. It's better so." And, on the threshold of the adjoining room, she turned, with her hand on her heart, to repress its throbbing: "I told you to hope."
She had hardly left the room when the door opened and, behind the bell-boy, appeared the form of the Marquis de Claviers. Aged even more in the last two months, his face more haggard and more hollow, he was more than ever the Seigneur, the man of lofty lineage, who, wherever he goes, is a Master. He was profoundly moved at that moment, when he was taking a step so directly contrary, it seemed, to his recent attitude; but he found a way to maintain, in his whole person, that species of haughty bonhomie which was characteristic of him. He saw Landri, and simply, without a word, held out his arms. The young man responded to that gesture, which betrayed such deep affection, and they embraced, as if they were still in those days when, as they rode together through the forest of Hez, they believed themselves of the same blood, offshoots of the same trunk, a father and son who might differ in ideas, but who were bound together by a chain as indissoluble as their own persons. A father and son! They had not ceased to be so in heart, and in that moment of passionate impulse, after they had forbidden themselves to show their affection during so many days, they listened to naught save that heart.
"Ah!" said M. de Claviers, "you have not gone! I have come in time!—No. I could not let you go away so. I could not. I wrote you. I prepared a despatch. I sent neither. It was the sight of you that I craved—to hear your voice, to speak to you once more. I resisted up to the last moment. I knew that it would cost me so dear to lose you again! And then, when I saw the hour for the last train for England draw near, after which it would be too late, I held out no longer. I went to your hotel in London, thinking that you might have postponed your departure.—However, here I am and here you are. You have behaved so admirably! That very last act, too—your refusal to keep that money! I shall at least have told you again that I thank you. I shall have told you that I have never ceased to love you."
"I am the one who has to thank you," replied Landri, "for understanding the appeal of my letters. It is true: to go so far away without seeing you again was very hard. I would have endured that grief, like the others, without rebelling. But I think that I did not deserve it. I, too, have always loved you so dearly, revered you so—"
"You deserved no grief at all," the marquis hastily interrupted. Then, dropping into a chair, and in an attitude of utter dejection, "none at all," he repeated, "and you were justified in thinking me terribly cruel."
"Cruel?" cried the young man. "Don't say that. Don't think it."
"I do think it," M. de Claviers replied. "I felt that you were wretchedly unhappy when we parted. You stood there, I saw, loving me with all your heart, awaiting a word from me. I did not say it, because I too loved you too well. If I had spoken to you then, I should not have had the strength to go on to the end of what I had to do. That money must be repaid. I must sell the treasures of Grandchamp. I must place an indestructible barrier between you and myself, in the eyes of the world, so that it might suspect nothing. I was obliged to stifle that paternal feeling which I could not succeed in destroying. But it was I who formed your character! If I had not been the heir of the Claviers-Grandchamps, the depositary of the name, the representative of the race, I should have held my peace for love of you when I received that anonymous letter. If I alone had been involved, I would have swallowed the insult. You would never have known what I knew. Because of them, in the interest of their house, I had to act as I did. But I was able to measure your grief by my own. And I had my dead to encourage me, while you—"
"I had you," interrupted Landri. "I had your example. You say that you formed my character. That is much truer than you have any idea; and I myself did not know myself, did not understand to what degree I thought as you think concerning matters of moment, until I was taught by this sorrow. You remember that, in that conversation after the hunt, the last afternoon of intimacy that we ever had, you spoke of the indestructible connections, the unbreakable tie between ourselves and those from whom we descend. And I argued with you. I maintained the right of the individual to live his own life, to seek his own happiness. The instant that I learned the secret of my birth, I realized how entirely in the right you were in that discussion. Your right to demand satisfaction from me, although I was not personally culpable, appeared to me so clearly established! And so of my duty to give you that satisfaction, entire, complete. I felt that the very quintessence of man is in this solidarity between the present and a past which was his before he himself existed. I realized all that nobility meant. All your ideas, against which I had fought so long, revealed themselves to me in their living truth. I made them my guide in the conduct which you are kind enough to approve. When you said to me, 'For your sake I can forgive,' what a healing balm you poured into my heart, and upon what an aching wound! Even in my misery, I felt a peace of mind which has not abandoned me. That is what has upheld me."
"Ah, my child!" returned the marquis. "Yes, I can call you my child! You talk of balm poured upon wounds, but who, pray, allayed the pain of my wound a little, if not you? Your thoughts, your resolutions, your actions—I have loved everything that came from you, and everything has helped to prove to me that this at least had not been wasted—my efforts during so many years, to inculcate my opinions in you, to make you a man. Ah! I too have learned many things through this suffering. You say that you fought a long while against my ideas. That was because, in prosperity, they were mixed up with too many other things. Yes, I yielded to too many temptations. I was too proud of my name, and too fond of life. You might well have thought that there was more pride than reflection, more emotion than reason in the principles whose real force you discovered when the test came. I did not derive from them, when I was fortunate, all that I should have done. In the rank in which Providence had placed me, I did not see clearly enough the good that one might do. Because of that I deserved to be punished, and, no doubt, my dear ones through me. In a race which has endured for centuries, many secret sins must have been committed, which demand expiation. I interpreted this terrible misfortune in that sense. I accepted it and offered it to God; and, as I told you, I forgave. And now," in a tone of infinite melancholy, "I must offer Him my solitary old age.—How solitary it will be without you! Without you!" he repeated; and, with more and more emotion, "and yet, if we chose!—You spoke the other day of my adopting a son. There have been families on the point of becoming extinct that have prolonged their existence in that way!—I am dreaming.—Suppose I should adopt you? Then you would not leave me. The world, having known nothing of what has happened, would not know of the secret compact between us. People would say: 'Claviers is crazy. It wasn't worth while to make such an outcry, only to give way finally.'—What do I care? I should have you. You would close my eyes."
"No," the young man replied with extraordinary decision, "it is impossible. One adopts a stranger, a kinsman, but not one like me." Lowering his eyes, the child of sin repeated: "Not one like me! At this moment it is your affection that is stirring and that speaks, not your mind. These are not your—I make bold to say, our—convictions. To-day I represent to you some one who is dear to you, and whom you are about to lose. To-morrow, day after to-morrow, if we should be so weak, the thing that I should soon come to represent to you again, would horrify you, and me as well. I cannot consent. That name to which I have no right, and which I bore so long, that stolen name, I will not take again, not even from your hands." And, sorrowfully, he added: "Besides, even if I had a right to it, I could not bear to live in France, now that I have left the service. You say that you did not see clearly enough the good that one in your station might do. The real truth is that, because of that very station, you are condemned to inaction. But when you were of my age, could a Claviers hope to see a government established in France in which he could find employment? Such an expectation to-day would be insane. And I need to be doing something. I long to work, to exert my faculties. Where I am going, in that new country, I shall begin my life anew, I shall found a family, without having to undergo the social ostracism which seemed so cruel to me when I believed myself to be what I was not. That again would prevent me from accepting, even if there were not that falsehood, which you would never be able to endure. I appeal to you yourself, to the head of the family, whom I have always known as so unyielding, so irreconcilable, so hostile to any compromise."
"You are right," said M. de Claviers in a broken voice. "The Spirit is strong and the Heart is weak! Let us say adieu then, Landri. If I miss you too much, and if I live, nothing will prevent my joining you, wherever you may be. And if I do not live!" He shook his aged head with an air of supreme weariness. Then, as firmly as the other had spoken a moment earlier: "Yes, I must learn to consider myself the last of the line, to close the list worthily. You are right," he repeated, "too wofully right! I shall have worn out my life in one long expectation, always unfulfilled: the King come again, the Revolution driven out, our houses restored, the Church triumphant, France regenerated, and resuming her place in Europe, with her traditions and her natural frontiers—what empty dreams! And nothing has happened, nothing, nothing, nothing! I shall have been one of the vanquished. I shall have defended naught but tombs. You told me so, justly enough; and, to end it all, this tragedy in which my last hope is wrecked!—No, I cannot adopt you—that is true. The Claviers-Grandchamps will die with me, and it is better so. They will die as all the great families of France are dying, one after another. We are passing away, like the old monarchy that made us and that we made. But there will be no stain on the shield. I shall know how to make a fitting end.—And now," he added after a pause, in the tone of one who has made up his mind, manfully, and will lament no more, "let us part. At what time does your boat sail?"
"At half-past four," said Landri.
"It is nearly four," exclaimed the marquis. "You must go aboard. Adieu!"
He took the young man in his arms again and pressed him to his heart with extraordinary force, but without a tear. Then, he seemed to hesitate a second. An indescribable light of affection shone in his eyes, and he said, almost in a whisper:—
"I should not like to go away without seeing your wife."
"I will go and call her," said Valentine's husband, likewise almost in a whisper, so profoundly moved was he by that last proof of an affection which he thought that he had lost forever. To measure its depth, was to measure the depth of the abyss of bitter sorrow into which that man had descended, and where he was preparing to make a fitting end, as he had said with sublime simplicity.
When Landri reappeared, holding his young wife's hand, he was actually unable to utter a word of introduction. She was very pale, very tremulous, and with her noble, straightforward glance, as if to say, "Read my heart," she looked at thegrand seigneur, who was unknown to her even in his physical aspect, but whose whole soul she knew. He gazed at her for some moments, likewise without speaking. How could he not feel the charm of that delicate, proud creature, whose every feature, every movement, every breath revealed a nature ardent and refined, loving and pure? And how could he not feel, in her presence, a reopening of the secret, incurable wound? How could he not compare her with another? But no. Those eyes could not lie. The graceful, trembling woman, whose blue eyes were raised to his with such fervor and purity, would be to him who had chosen her the faithful companion, the friend of every hour, she who divines and soothes all cares, who supports every noble effort. He could let Landri go away with her, without any apprehension. She would know how to assist him in the heroic rebuilding of a home, amid such a mass of ruins, which he was about to attempt! Such was the thought that the old man expressed aloud, incapable at that solemn moment of uttering conventional phrases, and obliged to refrain from uttering others which would have been too true.
"I was most anxious to salute you, madame, before you sailed. The past is past. I see in you now only the wife of the man whom I love best on earth. I desired to know to what sort of hands he had entrusted his happiness. I know now, and it is a great joy to me, the last of my life. I owe it to you."
"And I, monsieur," said Valentine, "shall never forget this moment. We should have missed your blessing too sadly! You bring it to us. That too is a very great joy, and one which I needed, as Landri did."
She had taken the marquis's hand in hers, and, with filial respect, was about to put it to her lips. He drew her to him and kissed her on the forehead—a kiss of respect, of affection, of blessing, as she had said. He gave a last glance at Landri, a friendly wave of the hand, and left the room, where the young people remained, side by side, stirred to the lowest depths of their being by all that there was of human suffering and loftiness of soul in that despairing but uncomplaining adieu.
"What a great thing is a great heart!" said Valentine at last.
"You understand now how hard it was for me to contend against his influence in the old days, don't you?" said Landri. "And to think that I shall never see him again on earth, perhaps!"
"He'll be there to see you off," she replied.
Three quarters of an hour later, in fact, when the Cambria began to move, and as Valentine and Landri, leaning on the rail near the stern, were watching the crowd on the pier, already some distance away, of those who had come to take leave of the passengers, they espied at the end of the pier a man standing apart from the rest, with his face turned towards them, and in that haughty countenance they recognized the marquis. He had stationed himself there to obtain a last glimpse of Landri, and to be seen by him. At that distance, and in the misty twilight, it was impossible to distinguish his features. The sea breeze blew his dark cloak about him as he stood there motionless, in an almost superhuman immobility; and although Valentine was by his side, breathing, living, loving, Landri felt the chill of death creep into his heart at the sight. The last of the Claviers-Grandchamps, standing there on English soil, alone, on that foggy evening, watching all that he had loved and had sacrificed to the honor of his name sail away into the darkness, was in very truth the "Émigré," he who is not of his country or of his epoch. The private drama, of which this station of the old French gentleman on the planks of the Liverpool pier, was the crowning episode, expanded into a broader and more pathetic symbolism. Behind that living phantom arose the phantoms of all his ancestors. That heir of a long line of nobles, whose race would die out with him, became for a moment, in Landri's eyes, the incarnation of all the melancholy of a vanquished caste. And what was he himself but another "Émigré"? Was not he about to try to reconstruct, beyond the sea, an existence which, with his fortune and with the name which the law recognized as his, he should have passed upon his native soil peacefully and happily? He had sacrificed that destiny, so enviable in the eyes of many people,—to what? To a principle. It was to uphold that principle that he was leaving his fatherland, ceasing to bear a name which was not his, and at the same time to safeguard his mother's memory. Another remark made by M. de Claviers in their discussion at Saint-Mihiel, after his refusal to assist in taking the inventory, came to his mind: "One must sometimes lay down one's life in order to keep intact the germ of the future!" Landri realized all its force, and what a store-house of honor is represented by a genuine aristocrat like him whose form was becoming more and more indistinct in the distance.
Bringing his mind back to his country, he reflected with much sadness that France no longer employs those exemplars of an unchanging and superior type. She paralyzes them by persecution. She degrades them by idleness. She ruins them by her laws concerning inheritance. All her efforts are directed toward destroying the conditions in which others might grow great.
The Cambria was about to leave the Mersey. The great swell of the Channel rose and fell about the steamship's mighty hull. The Channel lights pierced the thickening mist with a duller gleam. Around the exile voices arose in a strange tongue, that of the rivals of centuries, who have been wise enough to retain all of the past, the better to control the present; and the ex-lieutenant mingled pity for that France which he should never again make his home, perhaps, with pity for the old nobleman for whom he should never cease to feel the affection of a son; and he strained his eyes in a vain effort to see once more, across the space that lay between them, the haughty and motionless figure that had disappeared in the darkness—doubtless forever!