halt, under the influence of an old habit, but the thought of his
infamous conduct, of all the injury he had inflicted on the Nabob and
was still attempting to inflict on him, suddenly came to his mind with a
horrible fear, amounting to frenzy, when a hand of iron brought him
abruptly to a standstill. The sweat of cowardice drenched his limp and
nerveless limbs, his face turned still yellower, his eyes winked in
anticipation of the terrible blow he expected to receive, while his
great arms were raised instinctively to ward it off.
"Oh! don't be afraid. I have no evil designs on you," said Jansoulet
sadly. "I come simply to ask you to cease your designs on me."
[Illustration: "'_Don't be afraid. I have no evil designs on you._'"]
He paused to take breath. The banker, stupefied and dismayed, opened his
round owl's eyes to their fullest extent in face of that suffocating
emotion.
"Listen, Lazare, you are the stronger in this war we have been carrying
on so long. I am on the ground at your feet. My shoulders have touched.
Now be generous, spare your old chum. Have mercy on me, I say, have
mercy on me."
That Southerner, subdued and softened by the pomp of the funeral
ceremony, trembled in every limb. Hemerlingue, facing him, was hardly
more courageous. The dismal music, the open tomb, the orations, the
cannonading, and the lofty philosophy of inevitable death, all had
combined to move the stout baron to the depths of his being. His former
comrade's voice completed the awakening of such human qualities as still
remained in that bundle of gelatine.
His old chum! It was the first time in ten years, since their falling
out, that he had seen him at such close quarters. How many things those
swarthy features, those powerful shoulders ill-suited to an
embroidered coat, recalled to his mind! The thin woollen blanket, full
of holes, in which they both rolled themselves up to sleep on the deck
of the _Sinai_, the rations fraternally shared, the long walks through
the scorched country about Marseille, where they stole great onions and
ate them on the bank of a ditch, the dreams, the projects, the sous put
into the common purse, and, when fortune began to smile on them, the
antics they played together, the dainty little suppers at which they
told each other everything, with their elbows on the table.
How can two people ever fall out when they know each other so well, when
they have lived like twins clinging to a thin, strong nurse, poverty,
sharing her soured milk and her rough caresses! Such thoughts, long to
analyze, passed through Hemerlingue's mind like a flash of lightning.
Almost instinctively he let his heavy hand fall into the hand the Nabob
held out to him. Something of the animal nature stirred in them both,
stronger than their antipathy, and those two men, who had been trying
for ten years to ruin and dishonor each other, began to talk together
heart to heart.
Generally, when friends meet after a long separation, the first effusive
greetings at an end, they remain silent as if they had nothing to tell
each other, whereas it is the very abundance of things, their
precipitate struggle for utterance that prevents their coming forth. The
two former partners had reached that stage; but Jansoulet held the
banker's arm very tight, fearing that he might escape him, might resist
the kindly impulses that he had aroused in him.
"You are in no hurry, are you? We might walk a moment or two if you
choose. It has stopped raining, it will do us good--we shall be twenty
years younger."
"Yes, it's a pleasant thing," said Hemerlingue; "but I can't walk long,
my legs are heavy."
"True, your poor legs. See, there's a bench yonder. Let's go and sit
down. Lean on me, old fellow."
And the Nabob, with brotherly solicitude, led him to one of the benches
placed at intervals against the tombs, for the convenience of those
inconsolable mourners who make the cemetery their usual resort. He
arranged him comfortably, encompassed him with a protecting glance,
sympathized with him in his infirmity, and, the conversation following a
course very natural in such a place, they talked of their health, of the
approach of old age. One was dropsical, the other subject to rushes of
blood to the head. Both were taking the Jenkins Pearls,--a dangerous
remedy, witness Mora's sudden taking off.
"Poor duke!" said Jansoulet.
"A great loss to the country," rejoined the banker, in a grief-stricken
tone.
Whereupon the Nabob ingenuously exclaimed:
"To me, above all others to me, for if he had lived--Ah! you have all
the luck, you have all the luck! And then, you know, you are so strong,
so very strong," he added, fearing that he had wounded him.
The baron looked at him and winked, so drolly that his little black
lashes disappeared in his yellow flesh.
"No," he said, "I'm not the strong one. It's Marie!"
"Marie?"
"Yes, the baroness. At the time of her baptism she dropped her old name,
Yumina, for Marie. She's a real woman. She knows more about the bank
than I do, and about Paris and business generally. She manages
everything in the concern."
"You are very fortunate," sighed Jansoulet.
His melancholy was most eloquent touching Mademoiselle Afchin's
deficiencies. After a pause the baron continued:
"Marie has a bitter grudge against you, you know. She won't like it when
she knows that we have been talking together."
He contracted his heavy eyebrows as if he regretted the reconciliation
at the thought of the conjugal scene it would bring upon him.
"But I have never done anything to her," stammered Jansoulet.
"Ah! but you haven't been very polite to her, you know. Think of the
insult put upon her at the time of our wedding-call. Your wife sending
word to us that she didn't receive former slaves! As if our friendship
should not have been stronger than any prejudice. Women don't forget
such things."
"But I had nothing to do with it, old fellow. You know how proud those
Afchins are."
He was not proud, poor man. His expression was so piteous, so imploring
at sight of his friend's frowning brow, that the baron took pity on him.
The cemetery had a decidedly softening effect on the baron!
"Listen, Bernard, there's only one thing that will do any good. If you
wish that we should be friends as we used to be, that these handshakes
that we have exchanged should not be wasted, you must induce my wife to
be reconciled to you. Without that it's of no use. When Mademoiselle
Afchin shut her door in our faces, you let her do it, didn't you? It's
the same with me; if Marie should say to me when I go home: 'I don't
want you to be friends,' all my protestations wouldn't prevent me from
throwing you overboard. For there's no friendship that amounts to
anything. The best thing in the world is to have peace in your own
house."
"But what am I to do, then?" queried the Nabob, in dismay.
"That's what I'm going to tell you. The baroness is at home every
Saturday. Come with your wife and call on her day after to-morrow. You
will find the best people in Paris at the house. Nothing will be said
about the past. The ladies will talk dresses and bonnets, say what women
say to each other. And then it will be all settled. We shall be friends
again as in the old days; and if you're in the hole, why, we'll pull you
out."
"Do you think so? It's a fact that I am in very deep," said the other,
shaking his head.
Once more Hemerlingue's cunning eyes disappeared between his cheeks,
like two flies in butter.
"_Dame!_ yes, I've played pretty close. You don't lack skill. That
stroke of loaning fifteen millions to the bey was very shrewd. Ah!
you're a cool one; but you don't hold your cards right. Others can see
your hand."
Thus far they had spoken in undertones, as if awed by the silence of the
great necropolis; but gradually selfish interests raised their tones,
even amid the proofs of their nothingness displayed upon all those flat
stones covered with dates and figures, as if death were simply a matter
of time and reckoning, the desired solution of a problem.
Hemerlingue enjoyed seeing his friend so humble, he gave him advice
concerning his business affairs, with which he seemed to be thoroughly
acquainted. According to his view, the Nabob could still get out of his
difficulties in very good shape. Everything depended on the confirmation
of his election, on having another card to play. Then it must be played
judiciously. But Jansoulet had no confidence. In losing Mora he had lost
everything.
"You have lost Mora, but you have found me. One's worth as much as the
other," said the baron, calmly.
"But no, you see yourself it's impossible. It's too late. Le Merquier
has finished his report. It's a terrible report, so it seems."
"Very well! if he's finished his report, he must draw another, not so
unfavorable."
"How can that be?"
The baron stared at him in amazement.
"Come, come, you're losing your hold! Why, by giving him one, two, three
hundred thousand francs, if necessary."
"What do you mean? Le Merquier, that upright man--'My conscience,' as he
is called."
At that, Hemerlingue fairly roared with laughter, which echoed among the
recesses of the neighboring mausoleums, little wonted to such lack of
respect.
"'My conscience,' 'an upright man,' Ah! you amuse me. Can it be that you
don't know that that conscience belongs to me, and that--"
He checked himself and looked behind, a little disturbed by a noise he
heard.
"Listen."
It was the echo of his laughter, tossed back from the depths of a tomb,
as if that idea of Le Merquier's conscience amused even the dead.
"Suppose we walk a little," he said, "it begins to feel cold on this
bench."
Thereupon, as they walked among the tombs, he explained to him with a
certain pedantic conceit that in France bribes played as important a
part as in the Orient. Only more ceremony was used here. "Take Le
Merquier for instance. Instead of giving him your money outright in a
big purse as you would do with a _seraskier_, you beat around the bush.
The fellow likes pictures. He is always trading with Schwalbach, who
uses him as a bait to catch Catholic customers. Very good! you offer him
a picture, a souvenir to hang on a panel in his cabinet. It all depends
on getting your money's worth. However, you shall see. I'll take you to
him myself. I'll show you how the thing is done."
And, delighted to observe the wonderment of the Nabob, who exaggerated
his surprise in order to flatter him, and opened his eyes admiringly,
the banker elaborated his lesson, delivering a veritable lecture upon
Parisian and worldly philosophy.
"You see, old fellow, the thing that you must be more careful about than
anything else in Paris, is keeping up appearances! You have never given
enough attention to that. You go about with your waistcoat unbuttoned,
hail fellow well met, telling your business to everybody, showing
yourself just as you are. You act as if you were in Tunis, among the
bazaars or the _souks_. That's how you got yourself into trouble, my
good Bernard."
He stopped to take breath, unable to go any farther. He had expended
more steps and more words in an hour than he usually did in a year. They
noticed then that chance had led them back, while they talked, towards
the place of sepulture of the Moras, on the summit of an open plateau
from which they could see, above myriads of crowded roofs, Montmartre
and Les Buttes Chaumont in the distance like vague white billows. These,
with the hill of Pere-Lachaise, accurately represented the three
undulations, following one another at equal intervals, of which each
forward impulse of the sea consists at flood tide. In the hollows
between, lights were already twinkling, like ship's lanterns, through
the ascending purple haze; chimneys towered aloft like masts or funnels
of steamers belching forth smoke; and whirling it all about in its
undulating motion, the Parisian ocean seemed to be bringing it nearer to
the dark shore in successive series of three bounds, each time less
energetic than the last. The sky had become much brighter, as it often
does toward the close of rainy days, a boundless sky, tinged with the
hues of dawn, against which, upon the family tomb of the Moras, four
allegorical figures stood forth, imploring, contemplative, pensive, the
dying day exaggerating the sublimity of their attitudes. Naught remained
of the orations, the perfunctory official condolences. The trampled
grass all around, masons occupied in washing the spots of plaster from
the threshold, were all that recalled the recent interment.
Suddenly the door of the ducal cavern closed in all its metallic
ponderosity. Thenceforth the former minister of State was alone, quite
alone, in the darkness of his night, more dense than that just creeping
up from the garden below, invading the winding avenues, the stairways
surrounding the bases of columns, pyramids, crypts of every kind, whose
summits died more slowly. Gravediggers, all white with the chalky
whiteness of dried bones, passed with their tools and their baskets.
Stealthy mourners, tearing themselves away regretfully from tears and
prayer, crept along the hedges, brushing them in their silent flight,
like the flight of night-birds, while on the outskirts of Pere-Lachaise
voices arose, melancholy voices announcing the hour for closing. The
cemetery day was done. The city of the dead, given back to nature,
became an immense forest with cross-roads marked by crosses. In the
heart of a valley lights shone in the windows of a keeper's house. A
shiver ran through the air and lost itself in whisperings at the end of
interlaced paths.
"Let us go," said the two old comrades, yielding gradually to the
influence of the twilight, which seemed colder there than elsewhere;
but, before they turned away, Hemerlingue, following out his thought,
pointed to the monument, with the draperies and outstretched hands of
the carved figures like wings at the four corners:
"There was a man who understood all about keeping up appearances."
Jansoulet took his arm to assist him in the descent.
"Oh! yes, he was strong. But you are stronger than anybody else," he
said in his fervid Gascon accent.
Hemerlingue did not protest.
"I owe it all to my wife. So I urge you to make your peace with her,
because if you don't--"
"Oh! never fear--we will come Saturday; but you will go with me to Le
Merquier."
And as the two silhouettes, one tall and square-shouldered, the other
short and stout, disappeared in the windings of the great labyrinth, as
Jansoulet's voice, guiding his friend, with a "This way, old
fellow--lean on me," gradually died away, a stray beam of the setting
sun fell upon the plateau behind them, and lighted the colossal bust of
Balzac looking after them with its expressive face, its noble brow from
which the long hair was brushed back, its powerful and sarcastic lip.
XX.
BARONESS HEMERLINGUE.
At the farther end of the long archway beneath which were the offices of
Hemerlingue and Son, a dark tunnel which Pere Joyeuse had for ten years
bedecked and illumined with his dreams, a monumental staircase with
wrought-iron rail, a staircase of old Paris, ascended to the left,
leading to the baroness's salons, whose windows looked on the courtyard
just above the counting-room, so that, during the warm season, when
everything was open, the chink of the gold pieces, the noise made by
piles of crowns toppling over on the counters, slightly deadened by the
rich hangings at the long windows, formed a sort of commercial
accompaniment to the subdued conversations carried on by worldly
Catholicism.
That detail was responsible for the peculiar physiognomy of that salon,
no less peculiar than the woman who presided over it, mingling a vague
odor of the sacristy with the excitement of the Bourse and the most
consummate worldliness, heterogeneous elements which constantly met and
came in contact there, but remained separate, just as the Seine
separates the noble Catholic faubourg under whose auspices the notorious
conversion of the Moslem woman took place, from the financial quarters
in which Hemerlingue's life and his associations were located. Levantine
society, which is quite numerous in Paris, consisting principally of
German Jews, bankers or commission merchants, who, after making enormous
fortunes in the Orient, continue in business here in order not to lose
the habit of it, was very regular in its attendance on the baroness's
days. Tunisians sojourning in Paris never failed to call upon the wife
of the great banker, who was in favor at home, and old Colonel Brahim,
the bey's charge d'affaires, with his drooping lips and his lustreless
eyes, took his nap every Saturday in the corner of the same divan.
"Your salon smells of burning flesh, my goddaughter," the old Princesse
de Dions said laughingly to the newly-christened Marie, whom she and
Maitre Le Merquier had held at the baptismal font; but the presence of
that crowd of heretics, Jews, Mussulmans and even renegades, those fat
women with pimply faces, gaudily dressed, loaded down with gold and
earrings, "veritable bales" of finery, did not prevent Faubourg
Saint-Germain from calling upon, surrounding and watching over the young
neophyte, the plaything of those noble dames, a very pliant, very docile
doll, whom they took about and exhibited, quoting her _naive_
evangelical remarks, especially interesting by way of contrast to her
past. Perhaps there found its way into the hearts of those amiable
patronesses the hope of encountering in that company fresh from the
Orient an opportunity to make a new conversion, to fill the aristocratic
mission chapel once more with the touching spectacle of one of those
baptisms of adults, which carry you back to the early days of the faith,
to the banks of the Jordan, and are soon followed by the first
communion, the rebaptizing, the confirmation, all affording pretexts for
the godmother to accompany her goddaughter, to guide that young soul, to
look on at the ingenuous transports of a new-born faith, and at the same
time to display costumes deftly varied and shaded to suit the brilliancy
or the solemnity of the ceremony. But it does not often happen that a
baron prominent in financial circles brings to Paris an Armenian slave
whom he has made his lawful wife.
A slave! That was the stain in the past of that woman of the Orient,
purchased long ago in the slave-mart at Adrianople for the Emperor of
Morocco, then, upon the Emperor's death and the dispersion of his harem,
sold to the young Bey Ahmed. Hemerlingue had married her on her exit
from that second seraglio, but was unable to induce society to receive
her in Tunis, where no woman, be she Moor, Turk, or European, will ever
consent to treat a former slave as an equal, by virtue of a prejudice
not unlike that which separates the Creole from the most perfectly
disguised quadroon. There is an invincible repugnance there on that
subject, which the Hemerlingue family found even in Paris, where the
foreign colonies form little clubs overflowing with local
susceptibilities and traditions. Thus Yumina passed two or three years
in utter solitude, of which she was able to turn to good account all the
bitterness of heart and all the leisure hours; for she was an ambitious
woman of extraordinary strength of will and obstinacy. She learned the
French language thoroughly, said adieu forever to her embroidered
jackets and pink silk trousers, succeeded in adapting her figure and her
gait to European garb, to the embarrassment of long skirts; and one
evening, at the opera, displayed to the marvelling Parisians the figure,
still a little uncivilized, but elegant, refined and so original, of a
female Mussulman in a decollete costume by Leonard.
The sacrifice of her religion followed close upon that of her costume.
Madame Hemerlingue had long since abandoned all Mohammedan practices,
when Maitre Le Merquier, the intimate friend of the family and her
cicerone in Paris, pointed out that a formal conversion of the baroness
would open to her the doors of that portion of Parisian society which
seems to have become more and more difficult of access, in proportion as
the society all around it has become more democratic. Faubourg
Saint-Germain once conquered, all the rest would follow. And so it
proved that when, after the sensation occasioned by the baptism, it
became known that the greatest names of France did not disdain to
assemble at Baroness Hemerlingue's Saturdays, Mesdames Guggenheim,
Fuernberg, Caraiscaki, Maurice Trott, all wives of Fez millionaires and
illustrious in the market-places of Tunis, renounced their prejudices
and prayed to be admitted to the ex-slave's receptions. Madame Jansoulet
alone, newly landed in France with a stock of Oriental ideas impeding
circulation in her mind, as her nargileh, her ostrich eggs and all the
rest of her Tunisian trash impeded it in her apartments, protested
against what she called impropriety, cowardice, and declared that she
would never step foot inside "that creature's" doors. Immediately a
slight retrograde movement took place among Mesdames Guggenheim,
Caraiscaki, and other bales of finery, as always happens in Paris
whenever obstinate resistance from some quarter to the regularizing of
an irregular state of affairs leads to regrets and defections. They had
advanced too far to withdraw, but they determined that the value of
their complaisance, of the sacrifice of their prejudices should be more
fully understood; and Baroness Marie realized the difference simply from
the patronizing tone of the Levantines, who called her "my dear
child--my good girl," with haughty condescension not unmingled with
contempt. Thereafter her hatred of the Jansoulets knew no bounds, a
complicated, savage, seraglio hatred, with strangling and secret
drowning at the end, an operation rather more difficult of performance
in Paris than on the shores of the Lake of El-Baheira, but she was
already preparing the bow-string and stout bag.
That implacable hatred being well known and understood, we can imagine
the surprise and excitement in that exotic corner of society, when it
was reported that not only did the stout Afchin--as those ladies called
her--consent to meet the baroness, but was to call first upon her on her
next Saturday. You may be sure that neither the Fuernbergs nor the
Trotts proposed to miss that occasion. The baroness for her part did all
that she could to give the utmost possible publicity to that solemn act
of reparation, wrote notes and made calls and played her cards so well
that, notwithstanding the fact that the season was very far advanced,
Madame Jansoulet, if she had arrived at the mansion in Faubourg
Saint-Honore about four o'clock, might have seen before the lofty arched
gateway, beside the Princesse de Dions' quiet livery of the color of
dead leaves, and many genuine coats of arms, the showy, pretentious
crests, the multi-colored wheels of a multitude of financiers' equipages
and the tall powdered lackeys of the Caraiscakis.
Above, in the reception-rooms, there was the same strange and gorgeous
medley. There was a constant going and coming over the carpets of the
first two rooms, which were quite deserted, a rustling of silk dresses
to and from the boudoir, where the baroness received, dividing her
attentions and her cajoleries between the two very distinct camps; on
one side dark dresses, modest in appearance, whose richness was
discernible to none but practised eyes, on the other a tumultuous
springtime of bright colors, expansive waists, diamonds in profusion,
floating sashes, styles for exportation, wherein one could detect a sort
of regretful longing for a warmer climate and a luxurious, ostentatious
life. Fans waving majestically here, discreet whispering there. Very few
men, two or three youths, very thoughtful, silent and inactive, sucking
the heads of their canes, several stooping figures, standing behind
their wives' broad backs, talking with their heads lowered as if they
were discussing smuggling expeditions; in a corner the beautiful,
patriarchal beard and violet hood of an orthodox Armenian bishop.