for his dark-browed visitor was in haste and he could feel on his face
the wind from the door which he had not closed, he thought of nothing
but making good use of that time and fulfilling all the obligations of
an end like his own, which should leave no devotion unrewarded, should
compromise no friend. He made a list of the few persons whom he wished
to see and to whom messengers were sent at once; then he asked for his
chief clerk, and when Jenkins suggested that he was overtiring himself,
"Will you promise me that I shall wake to-morrow morning? I have a spasm
of strength at this moment. Let me make the most of it."
Louis asked if he should warn the duchess. The duke, before replying,
listened to the strains from the ball that came floating in through the
opened windows, prolonged in the darkness by an invisible bow; then he
said:
"Let us wait a little. I have something to do first."
He bade them move to his bedside the little lacquer table, intending
himself to sort out the letters to be destroyed; but, finding that his
strength was failing, he called Monpavon: "Burn everything," he said to
him in a feeble voice, and added, when he saw him going toward the
fireplace, where a bright fire was burning, notwithstanding the fine
weather:
"No--not here. There are too many of them. Some one might come."
Monpavon lifted the light desk and motioned to the valet to carry a
light for him. But Jenkins darted forward:
"Stay, Louis, the duke may need you."
He took possession of the lamp; and they stole cautiously along the long
corridor, exploring the reception-rooms, the galleries, where the
fireplaces were filled with artificial plants with no trace of ashes,
wandering like ghosts in the silence and darkness of the vast dwelling,
alive only over yonder at the right where pleasure sang like a bird on a
roof that is about to fall.
"There's no fire anywhere. What are we to do with all this stuff?" they
asked each other, sorely perplexed. One would have said they were two
thieves dragging away a safe which they were unable to open. At last
Monpavon, out of patience, walked with an air of resolution to a certain
door, the only one they had not yet opened.
"Faith, we'll do the best we can! As we can't burn them, we'll drown
them. Show me a light, Jenkins."
And they entered.
Where were they? Saint-Simon, describing the downfall of one of these
sovereign existences, the utter confusion of ceremonials, of dignities,
of grandeurs caused by death, especially by sudden death, Saint-Simon
alone could have told you. With his delicate, carefully-kept hands the
Marquis de Monpavon pumped. The other passed him torn letters, bundles
of letters, soft as satin, many-hued, perfumed, adorned with ciphers,
crests, banderoles with mottoes, covered with fine, close, scrawling,
enlaced, persuasive chirography; and all those delicate pages whirled
round and round in the eddying stream of water which crumpled and soiled
them and washed away the pale ink before allowing them to disappear with
a gurgling hiccough at the bottom of the filthy sink.
There were love-letters and love-letters of all sorts, from the note of
the adventuress--"I saw you pass at the Bois yesterday, Monsieur le
Duc,"--to the aristocratic reproaches of the mistress before the last,
the wailing of the abandoned, and the page still fresh with recent
confidences. Monpavon was familiar with all these mysteries, gave a name
to each of them: "That's from Madame Moor"--"Ah! Madame d'Athis." A
confused mass of coronets and initials, passing whims and old habits,
sullied at that moment by being thrown together promiscuously, all
swallowed up in that ghastly place, by lamplight, with a noise as of an
intermittent deluge, going to oblivion by a shameful road. Suddenly
Jenkins paused in his work of destruction. Two letters on pearl-gray
satin paper trembled in his fingers.
"Who's that?" queried Monpavon, at sight of the unfamiliar hand and the
Irishman's nervous excitement. "Ah! doctor, if you mean to read
everything we shall never finish."
Jenkins, with burning cheeks, his two letters in his hand, was consumed
by a fierce longing to carry them away in order to gloat over them at
his leisure, to torture himself with delicious pain by reading them,
perhaps also to use that correspondence as a weapon against the
imprudent creature who had signed it. But the marquis's rigid demeanor
frightened him. How could he divert his attention, get rid of him? An
opportunity presented itself unsought. A tiny sheet, written in a
senile, tremulous hand, had found its way between those same letters,
and attracted the attention of the charlatan, who said with an artless
expression:
"Oho! here's something that doesn't look like a billet-doux. 'My dear
duke, help, I am drowning! The Cour des Comptes has stuck its nose into
my affairs again'--"
"What the devil's that you're reading?" exclaimed Monpavon abruptly,
snatching the letter from his hands. And in an instant, thanks to Mora's
negligence in allowing such private letters to lie around, the terrible
plight in which he would be left by his protector's death came to his
mind. In his grief he had not as yet thought of it. He said to himself
that, amid his preparations for leaving the world, the duke might very
well forget him; and, leaving Jenkins to finish alone the drowning of
Don Juan's casket, he returned hurriedly to the bedroom. As he was about
to enter, the sound of voices detained him behind the lowered portiere.
It was Louis's voice, as whining as that of a pauper under a porch,
trying to move the duke to pity for his distress and asking his
permission to take a few rolls of gold that were lying in a drawer. Oh!
what a hoarse, wearied, hardly audible reply, in which one could feel
the effort of the sick man compelled to turn in his bed, to remove his
eyes from a distant point already clearly distinguished:
"Yes, yes--take them. But for God's sake let me sleep! let me sleep!"
Drawers opened and closed, a hurried, panting breath. Monpavon heard no
more, but retraced his steps without entering the room. The servant's
ferocious greed had given his pride the alarm. Anything rather than
degrade himself to that point.
The slumber for which Mora begged so persistently, the lethargy, to
speak more accurately, lasted a whole night and morning, with partial
awakenings caused by excruciating pain which yielded each time to
soporifics. They did nothing for him except to try to make his last
moments comfortable, to help him over that last step which it requires
such a painful effort to pass. His eyes had opened during that time, but
they were already dim, staring into emptiness at wavering shadows,
indistinct forms, like those which a diver sees quivering in the vague
depths of the water. On Thursday afternoon, about three o'clock, he
recovered consciousness completely, and, recognizing Monpavon,
Cardailhac and two or three other close friends, smiled at them and
betrayed in a word his sole preoccupation:
"What do people say of this in Paris?"
People said many things, diverse and contradictory; but one thing was
certain, that they talked of nothing else, and the report which had been
circulated through the city that morning, that Mora was at death's
door, had put the streets, the salons, the cafes, the studios in a
ferment, revived political questions in the newspaper offices, in the
clubs, and even in porters' lodges and on the omnibuses, wherever open
newspapers furnished a pretext for comment on that startling item of
news.
This Mora was the most brilliant incarnation of the Empire. The part of
a building that we see from afar is not its foundation, be it solid or
tottering, not its architectural features, but the slender, gilded
arrow, fancifully carved and perforated, added for the gratification of
the eye. What people saw of the Empire in France and throughout Europe
was Mora. When he fell, the structure was stripped of all its elegance,
marred by a long irreparable crack. And how many existences were
involved in that sudden fall, how many fortunes shattered by the after
effects of the catastrophe! Not one so completely as that of the stout
man sitting motionless on the monkeys' bench in the reception-room
below.
To the Nabob that man's death meant his own death, his ruin, the end of
everything. He was so thoroughly conscious of it that when he was
informed, on entering the house, of the Duke's desperate condition, he
indulged in no whining or wry faces of any sort, simply the savage
ejaculation of human selfishness: "I am lost!" And the words came
constantly to his lips, he repeated them instinctively each time that
all the horror of his position came over him in sudden flashes,--as in
those dangerous mountain storms, when a sharp flash of lightning
illumines the abyss to the very bottom, with the jagged projections of
the walls and the clumps of bushes scattered here and there to supply
the rents and bruises of the fall.
The rapid keenness of vision that accompanies cataclysms spared him no
detail. He saw that he was almost certain to be unseated now that Mora
would not be at hand to plead his cause; and the consequences of defeat,
bankruptcy, poverty and something worse, for these incalculable
fortunes, when they crumble away, always keep a little of a man's honor
under the ruins. But what thorns, what brambles, what bruises, what
cruel wounds before reaching the end! In a week the Schwalbach notes to
be paid, that is to say eight hundred thousand francs, Moessard's claim
for damages--he demanded a hundred thousand francs or would apply to the
Chamber for authority to institute criminal process against him--another
more dangerous suit begun by the families of two little martyrs of
Bethlehem against the founders of the establishment; and, in addition to
all the rest, the complications of the _Caisse Territoriale_. A single
ray of hope, Paul de Gery's negotiations with the bey, but so vague, so
problematical, so far away!
"Ah! I am lost! I am lost!"
In the vast apartment no one noticed his trouble. That crowd of
senators, deputies, councillors of state, all the leading men in the
government, went and came around him without seeing him, held mysterious
conferences and rested their elbows in anxious importance on the two
white marble mantels that faced each other. So many disappointed,
betrayed, over-hasty ambitions met in that visit _in extremis_, that
selfish anxiety predominated over every other form of preoccupation.
The faces, strangely enough, expressed neither pity nor grief, rather a
sort of wrath. All those people seemed to bear the duke a grudge for
dying, as if for turning his back upon them. Such remarks as this were
heard: "It's not at all strange after such a life!" And, standing at the
long windows, the gentlemen called one another's attention to some
dainty coupe drawing up amid the constant stream of carriages going and
coming outside, while a gloved hand, its lace sleeve brushing against
the door, handed a folded card to the footman who brought her
information of the invalid's condition.
From time to time one of the intimates of the palace, one of those whom
the dying man had sent for, appeared for a moment in the throng, gave an
order, then vanished, leaving the terrified expression of his face
reflected upon a score of others. Jenkins showed himself in that way for
a moment, cravat untied, waistcoat open, cuffs soiled and rumpled, in
all the disarray of the battle he was waging upstairs against a terrible
opponent. He was at once surrounded, pressed with questions. Certainly
the monkeys flattening their short noses against the bars of the cage,
awed by the unusual uproar and very attentive to what was taking place,
as if they were making a careful study of human expression, had a
magnificent model in the Irish doctor. His grief was superb, the noble
grief of a strong man, which compressed his lips and made his breast
heave.
"The death-agony has begun," he said dolefully. "It is only a matter of
hours now."
And, as Jansoulet drew near, he said to him in an emphatic tone:
"Ah! my friend, what a man! What courage! He has forgotten nobody. Only
a little while ago he spoke to me about you."
"Really?"
"'Poor Nabob!'" he said, "'how is his election coming on?'"
And that was all. He had said nothing more.
Jansoulet hung his head. What had he expected, in heaven's name? Was it
not enough that a man like Mora should have thought of him at such a
moment? He returned to his seat on the bench, relapsed into his former
state of prostration, galvanized by a moment of wild hope, sat there
heedless of the fact that the vast apartment was becoming almost
entirely deserted, and did not notice that he was the last and only
visitor remaining until he heard the servants talking aloud in the
fading light.
"I have had enough--my service here is done."
"For my part I shall stay with the duchess."
And those plans, those decisions anticipating the master's death by some
hours, doomed the noble duke even more surely than the Faculty had done.
The Nabob realized then that it was time for him to withdraw, but he
determined first to write his name on the register. He went to the
table and leaned far over in order to see clearly. The page was full. A
blank space was pointed out to him, below a name written in small,
threadlike characters, as if by fingers too stout for the pen, and, when
he had signed, Hemerlingue's name overshadowed his, crushed it,
entangled it in an insidious flourish. Superstitious like the true Latin
that he was, he was impressed by the omen and carried the terror of it
away with him.
Where should he dine? At the club? On Place Vendome? And hear nothing
talked of but this death which engrossed his thoughts! He preferred to
trust to chance, to go straight ahead like all those who are beset by a
persistent idea which they try to escape by walking. It was a warm,
balmy evening. He walked on and on along the quays till he reached the
tree-lined paths of the Cours-la-Reine, then returned to the combination
of freshly-watered streets and odor of fine dust which characterizes
fine evenings in Paris. At that uncertain hour everything was deserted.
Here and there girandoles were lighted for concerts, gas-jets flared
among the foliage. The rattle of plates and glasses from a restaurant
suggested to him the idea of entering.
The robust creature was hungry notwithstanding his anxiety. His dinner
was served under a verandah with walls of glass, lined with foliage and
facing the great porch of the Palais de l'Industrie, where the duke, in
presence of a thousand persons, had saluted him as deputy. The refined
and aristocratic face appeared to his mind's eye in the dark archway,
while at the same time he saw him lying yonder on his white pillow; and,
suddenly, as he stared at the bill of fare the waiter handed him, he
noticed with a sort of stupefaction that it was dated May 20th. So not a
month had passed since the opening of the Salon. It seemed to him as if
it were ten years since that day. Gradually, however, the excellent
repast warmed and comforted his heart. In the passage he heard some of
the waiters talking:
"Is there any news of Mora? It seems he's very sick."
"Nonsense! He'll pull through. Such fellows as he are the only ones who
have any luck."
Hope is anchored so firmly to the human entrails that, despite what
Jansoulet had seen and heard, those few words, assisted by two bottles
of burgundy and divers _petits verres_ sufficed to restore his courage.
After all, people had been known to recover when they were as far gone.
Doctors often exaggerate the danger in order to gain more credit for
averting it. "Suppose I go and see?" He returned to the hotel de Mora,
full of illusions, appealing to the luck that had stood him in good
stead so many times in his life. And in truth there was something in the
appearance of the princely abode to justify his hope. It wore the
tranquil, reassuring aspect of ordinary evenings, from the avenue with
lights burning at equal intervals, to the main doorway, at which an
enormous carriage of antique shape was waiting.
In the reception-room, where there were no signs of excitement, two
great lamps were burning. A footman was asleep in a corner, the usher
was reading in front of the fire. He glanced at the new arrival over his
spectacles, but said nothing to him, and Jansoulet dared ask no
questions. Piles of newspapers lay on the table in wrappers addressed to
the duke, apparently tossed there as useless. The Nabob opened one and
tried to read; but a rapid, gliding step, a sing-song murmuring made him
raise his eyes, and he saw a white-haired, stooping old man, decked out
with finery like an altar, who was praying as he walked with long
priest-like strides, his red cassock spread out like a train over the
carpet. It was the Archbishop of Paris, accompanied by two assistants.
The vision with its murmur as of an icy wind passed swiftly before
Jansoulet, was engulfed by the great chariot and disappeared, carrying
away his last hope.
"A question of propriety, my dear fellow," said Monpavon, suddenly
appearing at his side. "Mora is an epicurean, brought up in the ideas of
What's-his-name--Thingamy--you know whom I mean! Eighteenth century. But
it's very bad for the masses, if a man in his position--ps--ps--ps--Ah!
he was head and shoulders above all of us--ps--ps--irreproachable
breeding."
"So, it's all over, is it?" said Jansoulet desperately. "There's no more
hope?"
Monpavon motioned to him to listen. A carriage rumbled heavily along the
avenue on the quay. The bell rang several times in quick succession.
The marquis counted aloud: "One, two, three, four--" At the fifth he
rose.
"There's no hope now. There comes the other," he said, alluding to the
Parisian superstition to the effect that a visit from the sovereign was
always fatal to the dying. The servants hurried from all directions,
threw the folding-doors wide open and formed a lane, while the usher,
his hat _en bataille_ announced with a resounding blow of his pike upon
the floor the passage of two august personages, of whom Jansoulet caught
only a confused glimpse behind the servants, but whom he saw through a
long vista of open doors ascending the grand staircase, preceded by a
valet carrying a candelabrum. The woman was erect and haughty, enveloped
in her black Spanish mantilla; the man clung to the stair-rail, walked
more slowly and as if fatigued, the collar of his light top-coat
standing up from a back slightly bent, which was shaken by convulsive
sobs.
"Let us be off, Nabob. Nothing more to be done here," said the old beau,
taking Jansoulet by the arm and leading him out. He stopped on the
threshold, raised his hand, and waved a little salute with the tips of
his gloves toward him who lay dying above. "_Bojou_, dea' boy." The tone
and gesture were worldly, irreproachable; but the voice trembled a
little.
The club on Rue Royale, renowned for its card-playing, had rarely seen
so terrible a game as it saw that night. It began at eleven o'clock and
was still in progress at five in the morning. Enormous sums lay on the
green cloth, changed hands and direction, heaped up, scattered,
reunited; fortunes were swallowed up in that colossal game, and at its
close the Nabob, who had started it to forget his fears in the caprices
of luck, after extraordinary alternations, somersaults of fortune
calculated to make a neophyte's hair turn white, withdrew with winnings
of five hundred thousand francs. They said five millions on the
boulevard the next day, and every one cried shame, especially the
_Messager_, which gave up three-quarters of its space to an article
against certain adventurers who are tolerated in clubs, and who cause
the ruin of the most respectable families.
Alas! Jansoulet's winnings hardly represented the amount of the first
Schwalbach notes.
During that insane game, although Mora was its involuntary cause, and,
as it were, its soul, his name was not once mentioned. Neither
Cardailhac nor Jenkins appeared. Monpavon had taken to his bed, more
affected than he chose to have people think. They were without news from
the sick-room.
"Is he dead?" Jansoulet wondered as he left the club, and he was
conscious of an impulse to go and see before returning home. It was no
longer hope that impelled him, but that unhealthy, nervous sort of
curiosity which attracts the poor, ruined, shelterless victims of a
conflagration to the debris of their home.
Although it was still very early, the pink flush of dawn still lingering
in the air, the whole mansion was open as if for a solemn departure. The
lamps were still smoking on the mantels, the air was filled with dust.
The Nabob walked on through inexplicable solitude as far as the first
floor, where he at last heard a familiar voice, Cardailhac's, dictating
names, and the scratching of pens on paper. The skilful organizer of the
fetes for the bey was arranging with the same zeal the funeral
ceremonial of the Duc de Mora. Such activity! His Excellency had died
during the evening; in the morning ten thousand letters were already
printed, and everybody in the house who knew how to hold a pen was busy
with the addresses. Without passing through those extemporized offices,
Jansoulet made his way to the reception-room, usually so thronged,
to-day all the chairs empty. In the centre of the room, on a table, lay
Monsieur le Duc's hat and gloves and cane, always ready in the event of
his going out unexpectedly, to save him the trouble of an order. The
articles that we wear retain something of ourselves. The curve of the
hat-rim recalled the curl of the moustaches, the light gloves were ready
to grasp the flexible, strong Chinese bamboo, everything seemed to
quiver and live, as if the duke were about to appear, to put out his
hand as he talked, take them up and go out.
Oh! no, Monsieur le Duc was not going out. Jansoulet had only to walk to
the bedroom door, which stood ajar, to see lying on the bed, three steps
above the floor--the same platform even after death--a rigid, haughty
form, a motionless, aged profile, transformed by the gray beard that had
grown in a night; kneeling against the sloping pillow, her face buried
in the white sheets, was a woman whose fair hair fell neglected about
her shoulders, ready to fall under the shears of eternal widowhood; a
priest, too, and a nun stood absorbed in meditation in that atmosphere
of the death vigil, wherein the weariness of sleepless nights is blended
with the mumbling of prayers and whispering in the shadow.
That room, in which so many ambitions had felt their wings expand, in
which so many hopes and disappointments had had their day, was given
over to the tranquillity of death. Not a sound, not a sigh. But, early
as it was, over in the direction of Pont de la Concorde, a shrill,
piercing little clarinet soared above the rumbling of the first
carriages; but its vigorous mockery was wasted thenceforth upon the man
who lay sleeping there, revealing to the terrified Nabob the image of
his own destiny, cold, discolored, ready for the grave.
Others than Jansoulet saw that death-chamber under even more dismal
circumstances. The windows thrown wide open. The night air from the
garden entering freely in a brisk current. A form upon trestles; that
form, the body just embalmed. The head hollowed out, filled with a
sponge, the brain in a bucket. The weight of that statesman's brain was
really extraordinary. It weighed--it weighed--The newspapers of the day
gave the figures. But who remembers them to-day?
XIX.
THE OBSEQUIES.
"Don't weep, my fairy; you take away all my courage. Come, you will be
much happier when you no longer have your horrible demon. You are going
back to Fontainebleau to tend your hens. Brahim's ten thousand francs
will be enough to give you a start. And after that have no fear; when I
am once there, I'll send you money. As this bey wants some of my
sculpture, I shall make him pay well for it, be sure of that. I shall
return rich, rich. Who knows? Perhaps a sultana?"
"Yes, you will be a sultana,--but I shall be dead, and I shall never see
you again."
And honest Crenmitz in her despair huddled in a corner of the cab, so
that her companion might not see her weep.