walked very rapidly, far in advance of the others. But it was not Pere
Kontzen's terrace nor his crisp fritters that attracted them. No, the
noble verses they had heard had carried them to a great height, and they
had not yet descended. They walked straight on toward the ever-receding
end of the path, which broadened at its extremity into a luminous glory,
a dust of sunbeams, as if all the sunshine of that lovely day awaited
them at the edge of the woods. Paul had never felt so happy. The light
arm resting on his, the childlike step by which his own was guided,
would have made life as sweet and pleasant to him as that walk upon the
mossy carpet of a green path. He would have told the young girl as much,
in words as simple as his feelings, had he not feared to alarm Aline's
confidence, caused doubtless by the feeling which she knew that he
entertained for another, and which seemed to forbid any thought of love
between them.
Suddenly, directly in front of them, a group of equestrians stood out
against the bright background, at first vague and indistinct, then
taking shape as a man and woman beautifully mounted and turning into the
mysterious path among the shafts of gold, the leafy shadows, the myriad
specks of light with which the ground was dotted, which they displaced
as they cantered forward, and which ran in fanciful designs from the
horses' breasts to the Amazon's veil. They rode slowly, capriciously,
and the two young people, who had stepped into the bushes, could see
perfectly as they passed quite near to them, with a creaking of new
leather, a jangling of bits tossed proudly and white with foam as after
a wild gallop, two superb horses bearing a human couple compelled to
ride close together by the narrowing of the path; he supporting with one
arm the flexible form moulded into a waist of dark cloth, she, with her
hand on her companion's shoulder and her little head, in profile--hidden
beneath the tulle of her half-fallen veil--resting tenderly thereon.
That amorous entwining, cradled by the impatience of the steeds, restive
under the restraint imposed upon their fiery spirits, that kiss, causing
the reins to become entangled, that passion riding through the woods in
hunting costume, in broad daylight, with such contempt of public
opinion, would have sufficed to betray the duke and Felicia, even though
the haughty and fascinating appearance of the Amazon, and the high-bred
ease of her companion, his pallid cheeks slightly flushed by the
exercise and Jenkins' miraculous pearls, had not already led to their
recognition.
It was not an extraordinary thing to meet Mora in the Bois on Sunday.
He, like his master, loved to show himself to the Parisians, to keep his
popularity alive in all public places; and then the duchess never
accompanied him on that day, and he could draw rein without restraint at
the little chalet of Saint-James, known to all Paris, whose pink turrets
peering out among the trees school-boys pointed out to one another with
whispered comments. But only a madwoman, a shameless creature like that
Felicia, would advertise herself thus, destroy her reputation forever.
The sound of hoofs and of rustling bushes dying away in the distance,
bent weeds standing erect, branches thrust aside resuming their
places--that was all that remained of the apparition.
"Did you see?" Paul was the first to ask.
She had seen and she had understood, despite her virtuous innocence, for
a blush overspread her features, caused by the shame we feel for the
sins of those we love.
"Poor Felicia!" she whispered, pitying not only the poor abandoned
creature who had passed before them, but him as well whom that fall from
grace was certain to strike full in the heart. The truth is that Paul de
Gery was in no wise surprised by that meeting, which confirmed some
previous suspicions and the instinctive repulsion he had felt for the
seductive creature at their dinner-party some days before. But it seemed
sweet to him to be pitied by Aline, to feel her sympathy in the
increased tenderness of her voice, in the arm that leaned more heavily
upon his. Like children who play at being ill for the joy of being
petted by their mothers, he allowed the comforter to do her utmost to
soothe his disappointment, to talk to him of his brothers, of the Nabob,
and of the impending journey to Tunis, a beautiful country, so it was
said. "You must write to us often, and write long letters about the
interesting things you see and about the place you live in. For we can
see those who are far away from us better when we can form an idea of
their surroundings."--Chatting thus, they reached the end of the shady
path, at a vast clearing where the tumult of the Bois was in full blast,
carriages and equestrians alternating, and the crowd tramping in a
fleecy dust which gave it, at that distance, the appearance of a
disorderly flock of sheep. Paul slackened his pace, emboldened by that
last moment of solitude.
"Do you know what I am thinking?" he said, taking Aline's hand; "that
any one would enjoy being unhappy for the sake of being comforted by
you. But, precious as your sympathy is to me, I cannot allow you to
expend your emotion upon an imaginary grief. No, my heart is not broken,
but, on the contrary, more alive, more vigorous than before. And if I
should tell you what miracle has preserved it, what talisman--"
He placed before her eyes a little oval frame surrounding a profile
without shading, a simple pencil sketch in which she recognized herself,
surprised to find that she was so pretty, as if reflected in the magic
mirror of Love. Tears came to her eyes, although she knew not why,--an
open spring whose pulsing flood caused her chaste heart to beat fast.
"This portrait belongs to me. It was made for me. But now, as I am on
the point of going away, I am assailed by a scruple. I prefer not to
keep it except from your own hands. So take it, and if you find a
worthier friend, one who loves you with a deeper, truer love than mine,
I authorize you to give it to him."
She had recovered from her confusion, and replied, looking de Gery in
the face with affectionate gravity:
"If I listened to nothing but my heart, I should not hesitate to answer
you; for, if you love me as you say you do, I am sure that I love you no
less. But I am not free, I am not alone in life,--look!"
She pointed to her father and sisters who were motioning to them in the
distance and hurrying to overtake them.
"Even so! And I?" said Paul eagerly. "Have I not the same duties, the
same burdens? We are like two widowed heads of families. Will you not
love mine as dearly as I love yours?"
"Do you mean it? Is it true? You will let me stay with them? I shall be
Aline to you and still be Grandmamma to all our children? Oh! then,"
said the dear creature, beaming with joy and radiance, "then here is my
picture, I give it to you. And, with it, all my heart, and forever."
XVIII.
THE JENKINS PEARLS.
About a week after his adventure with Moessard,--a new complication in
his sadly muddled affairs,--Jansoulet, on leaving the Chamber one
Thursday, ordered his coachman to drive him to the hotel de Mora. He had
not been there since the fracas on Rue Royale, and the idea of appearing
before the duke caused something of the same panicky sensation beneath
his tough epidermis that a schoolboy feels on being summoned before the
master after a scuffle in the class-room. However, it was necessary to
submit to the embarrassment of that first interview. It was currently
reported in the committee rooms that Le Merquier had completed his
report, a masterpiece of logic and ferocity, recommending that Jansoulet
be unseated, and that he was certain to carry his point off-hand unless
Mora, whose power in the Assembly was so great, should himself issue
contrary orders. A serious crisis, as will be seen, and one that caused
his cheeks to burn with fever as he studied the expression of his
features and his courtier-like smiles in the bevelled mirrors of his
coupe, striving to prepare an adroit entry into the presence,--one of
his masterstrokes of amiable impudence which had served him so well with
Ahmed and thus far with the French statesman,--the whole accompanied by
a rapid beating of the heart and the shivering sensation between the
shoulders which precedes decisive steps, even when taken in a carriage
with gilded panels.
When he reached the mansion on the river bank, he was greatly surprised
to see that the footman on the quay, as on the days of great receptions,
ordered the carriages to turn into Rue de Lille in order to leave one
gateway free for exit. He said to himself, a little disturbed in mind:
"What is going on?" Perhaps a concert given by the duchess, a charity
bazaar, or some festivity from which Mora had left him out because of
the scandal caused by his last adventure. And his anxiety augmented
when, after crossing the court of honor amid the tumult of slamming
carriage-doors and a constant, dull rumbling on the gravel, he had
ascended the steps and found himself in the vast reception-room filled
to overflowing with a great throng who were allowed to pass none of the
inner doors, but whose anxious steps centred about the table of the
servant in attendance, where all the famous names of aristocratic Paris
were being inscribed. It seemed as if a sudden blast of disaster had
passed through the house, swept away something of its superb
tranquillity and allowed unrest and danger to creep into its
well-being.
"What a misfortune!"
"Ah! yes, it is terrible."
"And so sudden!"
The people around him exchanged such phrases as they met. A thought
passed swiftly through Jansoulet's mind.
"Is the duke ill?" he asked a servant.
"Ah! monsieur. He is dying. He cannot live through the night."
If the roof of the palace had fallen in upon his head, it would not have
crushed him more completely. He saw red butterflies whirling around
before his eyes, then staggered and fell upon the velvet-covered bench
beside the great cage of monkeys, who, over-excited by all the turmoil,
clung in a bunch to the bars, hanging by their tails or by their little
long-thumbed hands, and in their frightened inquisitiveness assailed
with the most extravagant grimaces of their race the stout bewildered
man, who sat staring at the floor and repeating to himself aloud: "I am
lost! I am lost!"
The duke was dying. He had been taken suddenly ill on Sunday while
returning from the Bois. He had felt an intolerable burning sensation
which seemed to outline, as with a red-hot iron, the whole internal
structure of his body, alternating with chills and numbness and long
periods of drowsiness. Jenkins, being summoned at once, prescribed some
sedative remedies. The next day the pains returned, more intense than
before, and followed by the same icy torpor, also intensified, as if
life were leaving him by fierce leaps and bounds, uprooted. No one in
the household was at all disturbed. "The day after Saint-James," callers
whispered to one another in the reception-room, and Jenkins' handsome
face retained its serenity. He mentioned the duke's indisposition to but
two or three persons in his morning round of visits, and so lightly that
no one thought anything of it.
Mora himself, despite his extreme weakness, and although he felt as if
his head were absolutely empty, "not an idea behind his forehead," as he
expressed it, was very far from suspecting the gravity of his condition.
Not until the third day, when, upon waking in the morning, he saw a
slender thread of blood that had flowed from his mouth over his beard
and reddened his pillow, did that refined dandy shudder, that fastidious
creature who held in horror all forms of human misery, especially
disease, and who saw it creeping upon him stealthily with its
defilement, its weaknesses and with the self-abandonment which is the
first concession to death. Monpavon, entering the room in Jenkins' wake,
caught the suddenly perturbed expression of the great nobleman brought
face to face with the terrible truth, and was at the same time horrified
by the ravages made in a few hours on Mora's emaciated face, where all
the wrinkles belonging to his age, appearing suddenly, mingled with the
wrinkles caused by suffering, with the depression of muscles which
indicates serious internal lesions. He took Jenkins aside while the fine
gentleman's servants were supplying him with what he required to make
his toilet in bed, a whole outfit of silver and crystal in striking
contrast with the yellow pallor of the invalid.
"Look you, Jenkins--the duke is very ill."
"I am afraid so," said the Irishman, in an undertone.
"What's the matter with him?"
"What he apparently wanted, _parbleu_!" exclaimed the other, in a sort
of frenzy. "A man can't be young with impunity at his age. This passion
of his will cost him dear."
Some evil thought triumphed in him for the moment, but he instantly
imposed silence upon it, and, completely transformed, puffing out his
cheeks as if his head were filled with water, he sighed profoundly as he
pressed the old nobleman's hands:
"Poor duke! Poor duke! Ah! my friend, I am in despair."
"Have a care, Jenkins," said Monpavon coldly, withdrawing his hands.
"You are assuming a terrible responsibility. What! the duke is as ill as
you say, ps--ps--ps. See no one? No consultation?"
The Irishman threw up his arms as if to say: "What's the use?"
The other insisted. It was absolutely essential that Brisset, Jousselin,
Bouchereau, all the great men should be called in.
"But you will frighten him to death."
Monpavon inflated his breast, the old foundered charger's only pride.
"My dear fellow, if you had seen Mora and myself in the trenches at
Constantine--ps--ps--Never lowered our eyes--Don't know what fear means.
Send word to your confreres, I will undertake to prepare him."
The consultation took place that evening behind closed doors, the duke
having demanded that it be kept secret through a curious feeling of
shame because of his illness, because of the suffering that dethroned
him and reduced him to the level of other men. Like those African kings
who conceal themselves in the depths of their palaces to die, he would
have liked the world to believe that he had been taken away,
transfigured, had become a god. Then, too, above all, he dreaded the
compassion, the condolence, the emotion with which he knew that his
pillow would be surrounded, the tears that would be shed, because he
would suspect that they were insincere, and because, if sincere, they
would offend him even more by their grimacing ugliness.
He had always detested scenes, exaggerated sentiments, whatever was
likely to move him, to disturb the harmonious equilibrium of his life.
Everybody about him was aware of it and the orders were to keep at a
distance all the cases of distress, all the despairing appeals that were
made to Mora from one end of France to the other, as to one of those
houses of refuge in the forest in which a light shines at night and at
which all those who have lost their way apply for shelter. Not that he
was hard to the unfortunate, perhaps indeed he felt that he was too
readily susceptible to pity, which he regarded as an inferior sentiment,
a weakness unworthy of the strong, and for the same reason that he
denied it to others, dreaded it for himself, lest it impair his courage.
So that no one in the palace, save Monpavon and Louis the valet, knew
the purpose of the visit of those three persons who were mysteriously
ushered into the presence of the Minister of State. Even the duchess
herself was in ignorance. Separated from her husband by all the barriers
that life in the most exalted political and social circles places
between the husband and wife in such exceptional establishments, she
supposed that he was slightly indisposed, ill mainly in his imagination,
and had so little suspicion of an impending catastrophe that, at the
very hour when the physicians were ascending the half-darkened grand
staircase, her private apartments at the other end of the palace were
brilliantly illuminated for an informal dancing-party, one of those
_white balls_ which the ingenuity of idle Paris was just beginning to
introduce.
That consultation was, like all consultations, grim and solemn. Doctors
no longer wear the huge wigs of Moliere's day, but they still assume the
same portentous gravity of priests of Isis or astrologers, bristling
with cabalistic formulae accompanied by movements of the head which lack
only the pointed cap of an earlier age to produce a laughable effect. On
this occasion the scene borrowed an imposing aspect from the
surroundings. In the vast room, transformed, magnified as it were, by
the master's immobility, those solemn faces approached the bed upon
which the light was concentrated, revealing amid the white linen and the
purple curtains a shrivelled face, pale from the lips to the eyes, but
enveloped with serenity as with a veil, as with a winding-sheet. The
consulting physicians talked in low tones, exchanged a furtive glance,
an outlandish word or two, remained perfectly impassive without moving
an eyebrow. But that mute, unmeaning expression characteristic of the
doctor and the magistrate, that solemnity with which science and justice
encompass themselves in order to conceal their weakness or their
ignorance, had no power to move the duke.
Sitting on his bed, he continued to talk tranquilly, with that slightly
exalted expression in which the thought seems to soar upward as if to
escape, and Monpavon coolly replied to him, hardening himself against
his emotion, taking a last lesson in breeding from his friend, while
Louis, in the background, leaned against the door leading to the
duchess's apartments, the type of the silent servitor, in whom heedless
indifference is a duty.
The agitated, the feverish member of the party was Jenkins.
Overflowing with obsequious respect for "his illustrious confreres," as
he unctuously called them, he prowled about their conference and tried
to take part in it; but his confreres kept him at a distance, hardly
answered him, or answered him haughtily, as Fagon--Louis the
Fourteenth's Fagon--might have answered some charlatan who had been
summoned to the royal bedside. Old Bouchereau especially looked askance
at the inventor of the Jenkins Pearls. At last, when they had thoroughly
examined and questioned their patient, they withdrew for deliberation to
a small salon, all in lacquer-work, with gleaming highly-colored walls
and ceiling, filled with an assortment of pretty trifles, whose
uselessness contrasted strangely with the importance of the discussion.
A solemn moment, the agony of the accused man awaiting the decision of
his judges, life, death, reprieve or pardon!
With his long white hand Mora continued to caress his moustache, his
favorite gesture, to talk with Monpavon about the club and the
green-room at the Varietes, asking for news of the proceedings in the
Chamber and what progress had been made in the matter of the Nabob's
election--all with perfect coolness and without the slightest
affectation. Then, fatigued doubtless, or fearing that his glance, which
constantly returned to the portiere opposite through which the decree of
fate was presently to come forth, should betray the emotion that lurked
at the bottom of his heart, he leaned his head back, closed his eyes,
and did not open them again until the doctors returned. Still the same
cold, ominous faces, veritable faces of judges with the terrible word of
human destiny on their lips, the Final word, which the courts pronounce
without emotion, but which the doctors, all of whose skill and learning
it baffles, evade and seek to convey by circumlocution.
"Well, messieurs, what says the Faculty?" inquired the sick man.
There were a few hypocritical, stammered words of encouragement, vague
recommendations; then the three learned men hastily took their leave,
eager to be gone, to avoid any responsibility for the impending
disaster. Monpavon rushed after them. Jenkins remained by the bedside,
overwhelmed by the brutal truths he had heard during the consultation.
In vain had he put his hand upon his heart, quoted his famous motto.
Bouchereau had not spared him. This was not the first of the Irishman's
patients whom he had seen fall suddenly to pieces thus; but he trusted
that Mora's death would be a salutary warning to people in society, and
that the prefect of police, as the result of this great calamity, would
send the "dealer in cantharides," to advertise his aphrodisiacs on the
other side of the Channel.
The duke realized that neither Jenkins nor Louis would tell him the real
result of the consultation. He did not press them, therefore, but
submitted to their assumed confidence, even pretended to share it and to
believe all that they told him. But when Monpavon returned, he called
him to his bedside, and, undaunted by the falsehood that was visible
even under the paint of that wreck, he said:
"Oh! no wry faces, I beg. Between you and me, let us have the truth.
What do they say?--I am in a bad way, am I not?"
Monpavon prefaced his reply by a significant pause; then roughly,
cynically, for fear of showing emotion at the words:
"Damnation, my poor Auguste!"
The duke received it between the eyes without winking.
"Ah!" he said, simply.
He twisted his moustache mechanically; but his features did not change.
And in an instant his resolution was formed.
That the poor wretch who dies in the hospital, without home or kindred,
with no other name than the number of his bed, should accept death as a
deliverance or submit to it as a last trial, that the old peasant who
falls asleep, bent double, worn out and stiff-jointed, in his dark,
smoke-begrimed mole-hole, should go thence without regret, that he
should relish in anticipation the taste of the cool earth he has turned
and returned so many times, one can understand. And yet how many of them
are attached to existence by their very misery, how many exclaim as they
cling to their wretched furniture, to their rags: "I do not want to
die," and go with their nails broken and bleeding from that last wrench!
But there was nothing of the sort here.
To have everything and to lose everything. What an upheaval!
In the first silence of that awful moment, while he listened to the
muffled music of the duchess's ball at the other end of the palace, the
things that still bound that man to life--power, honors, wealth, all the
magnificence that surrounded him--must have seemed to him to be already
far away in an irrevocable past. It required courage of a very
exceptional temper to resist such a blow without the slightest outburst
of self-love. No one was present save the friend, the physician, the
servant, three intimate acquaintances, who were familiar with all his
secrets; the lights being turned low left the bed in shadow, and the
dying man could have turned his face to the wall and given vent to his
emotion unseen. But no. Not a second of weakness, of fruitless
demonstrations. Without breaking a branch of the chestnut trees in the
garden, without withering a flower in the great hall of the palace,
Death, muffling his footsteps in the heavy carpets, had opened that
great man's door and motioned to him: "Come!" And he replied, simply, "I
am ready." A fit exit for a man of the world, unforeseen, swift and
noiseless.
A man of the world! Mora was nothing else. Passing smoothly through
life, arrayed in mask and gloves and breastplate, the breastplate of
white satin worn by fencing-masters on days of great exhibitions,
keeping his fighting costume ever clean and spotless, sacrificing
everything to that irreproachable exterior which served him instead of a
coat of mail, he had metamorphosed himself into a statesman, passing
from the salon to a vaster stage, and made in truth a statesman of the
first order simply by virtue of his qualities as a leader of society,
the art of listening and smiling, knowledge of men, scepticism and
_sang-froid_. That _sang-froid_ did not leave him at the supreme moment.