REPARATION.
Fortunately for the fugitives, the poorly paid railway officials in
these parts are the obsequious servants of those who liberally bribe.
The station-master, though a very grand personage, indeed, in his
uniform and metal-bound cap, became pliant as an East Indian waiter and
accepted without question the explanation of the lady. It was she who
was spokesman throughout. She said that she and her companion were
play-actors and that their baggage was detained by a cruel manager of a
Munich musical beer-hall; this was a wise admission as the man might
have seen her at the Harmonista, or, at least, her photograph in the
doorway. But they were compelled to reach Lucerne without delay or lose
a profitable engagement, by the proceeds of which they could redeem
their paraphernalia. While listening, the man dealt out the tickets,
pocketed the gratuity which was handsomely added to a previous donation,
and, without any surprise, agreed to let any one calling take away the
horses; they certainly were above the means of strolling singers who had
to flee from a town. Farther discussion, if he had sought it, was
curtailed by the electric signal heralding the coming of a train. In
eight minutes, the two were ensconced in a first-class compartment and
hurried along toward the Land of Lakes.
In the sumptuous coach, the girl unburdened herself, but, with rare art
or imperfect knowledge of her origin, she was more explicit on the
family of her cousin than on her own. However, it was his that had made
a niche in art and scandalous story.
As for Kaiserina, her mother was the eldest daughter of a Count
Dobronowska, of a Polish branch of the Vieradlers, who had settled in
Fuiland. The count had meddled with politics and the Czar had promptly
confiscated his landed property. The loss and fear of Siberia had broken
his heart. After his death, the widow passed the intervals of her grief
in besieging persons of influence to obtain a restitution of the
estate. Unfortunately, she had no son to fight the battle with the Czar,
but two daughters were growing up with such a superabundance of charm
that they promised to be no mean allies in the enterprise. But fortune
did not altogether favor the widow; it is true that she interested a
Russian of great wealth and political sway, but when the time came for
his co-operation to be active, he played her a wicked trick. He
attracted her elder daughter to him and married her. Not liking to have
a mother-in-law in his mansion, he pensioned her off, with the proviso
that her presence should never clash immediately with his own in any
country. It is regrettable to add that Wanda, Madame Godaloff, agreed to
this arrangement, and, indeed, having attained woman's goal, troubled
herself not once about her parent who had schemed and plotted tirelessly
for this end. The countess had brought her deer to a pretty market; but,
unhappily, she gained little by the bargain compared with what she had
dreamed.
She had a brother-in-law who had acted very differently from her
husband. Instead of playing the patriot--and the fool--he had submitted
to the tyrant and won a lucrative post at St. Petersburg. He was afraid
to injure himself by giving countenance to his brother's relict, who was
always seeking an audience of the Emperor. It was strongly suspected
that she intended, since Wanda was out of the lists, to throw the next
daughter, Iza, at the head of a Grand-duke with whom the two girls had
played when all three were children at Warsaw.
The countess seemed to have educated the girl, as soon as her elder was
out of the way, for a royal match. Like most Poles, Iza spoke several
languages fluently, sang and played the harp and piano. She was growing
lovelier than her sister because she was a purer blonde, and yet Wanda
had been accounted a miracle. Remembering that, at a later period, a
foreign adventuress almost inextricably ensnared one of the imperial
family, the Countess Dobronowska's matrimonial project was not so
insane. Some other pretender to the grand-ducal left or right hand
thought it feasible, for everybody said that it was feminine jealousy
that led to the countess and her "little beauty" being ordered out of
the White Czar's realm. The pair, spurred on by the police of every
capital, and all are in communication with St. Petersburg, at last
rested in Paris. It was a favorable moment; the French government had
offended the older powers by its presumption in chastising venerable
Austria almost as severely as the Great Napoleon had done. The
Dobronowskas were let alone in the imperial city on the Seine; but,
unfortunately, the important state functionaries soon became as tired of
the countess's plaints as their brothers on the Neva. Reduced to the
shifts of the penniless aristocrats, the two lived like the shabby
genteel. They made a desperate attempt to entrap their Grand-duke again.
But the victim had warning and the pair were stopped at Warsaw. Here a
beam of the sun, long withheld, glanced through the clouds and
transiently warmed "the marrying mamma." A distant relative of hers, one
Lergins, was an attaché of the embassy and he fell in love with his
"cousin" Iza, as the mother allowed the youth to call her. As he had
splendid prospects and seemed to be quite another man as regarded
maternal control of Wanda's husband, mamma dismissed her brilliant
_ignis fatuus_ and tried to have a clandestine marriage come off. But
the young secretary of embassy was not of age and again she was forced
to depart for Paris--that sink-hole for refugees of all sorts. His
family put pressure on the officiale who in turn applied it to the
luckless _intriguante_.
Farewell, the future in which a semi-imperial coronet hand gleamed! even
that where a cascade of gold coin inundated the new Danae. Wearied of
this constant grasping at the unattainable Iza, who had something of a
heart, chose for herself, much as her elder had done, with happiness at
home as the object; one fine morning, married M. Pierre Clemenceau, a
young but rising sculptor. He had on the previous visit of theirs to
Paris, materially befriended them. It was only gratitude after all,
although he, enamored like an artist of this unrivaled beauty, would
have sacrificed fortune to possess her. Indeed, he sacrificed all--even
his honor, for he suffered himself to be gulled by her wiles as
profoundly as he was infatuated by her charms.
At this point, as became a young woman telling of a relative's iniquity,
Kaiserina glazed the facts and gave a perversion. It was later,
therefore, that Felix Clemenceau learned in detail the whole mournful
tale of a beautiful wanton's ingrained perfidy and a loving husband's
blind confidence. The end was inevitably tragical. Lergins was decoyed
by the countess to Paris, where she languished like a shark out of
water. The sculptor's income did not come up to her dreams of luxury,
any more than those she inspired in her daughter. She brought about a
separation of the wedded pair and rejoiced when a fresh scandal
necessitated a duel between the young Russian and the Frenchman.
Unhappily for her revengeful ideas, it passed over harmlessly enough.
Iza remained the talk and admiration of the gay capital, although women
of superior physical attractions rendezvous there. Nothing blemished her
appearance; no excesses, no indulgements, not even bearing a son had a
blighting effect. Unfortunately for the dissevered artist, she had been
his model for the most renowned of his works and her name was
inseparably intertwined with his own.
Although "crowned" as the favorite of a king who came in transparent
incognito to Paris to visit her, though occupying princely quarters,
outshining the fading La Mesard and the rising Julia Barucci in
diamonds, Iza was still known as "the Clemenceau Statue."
Her mother, as lost to shame, was the mistress of the wardrobe in this
palace; she was spiteful as a witch, and began to resemble one in her
prime, bloated, red with importance and self-indulgence, before the
wrinkles came many and fast. One day, annoyed at the persistency with
which a friend of Clemenceau's watched the queen of the disreputable in
hopes to make her flagrancy a cause for legal annulment of the marriage,
she denounced him as a traitor in an anonymous letter to the fretting
husband, then in Rome. Her daughter agreed to make good the assertion
that the friend had failed monstrously in his trust.
Like Othello, Clemenceau swore that this demon of lasciviousness should
betray no more men. The force of depravity should no farther flow to
corrupt the finest and best. He entered the boudoir of the royal
favorite and stabbed her to the heart. In the morning, he gave himself
up to the police.
The victim was so notorious that the Clemenceau trial was a nine days'
wonder. His advocate was eloquent to a fault, but that inexplicable
thing, the jury, found no extenuating circumstances in the act and
brought in the verdict of murder. The good men were incapable of
appreciating the right he claimed to stop the blighting career of
Messalina--to divorce with steel where the state of the law, then meekly
following the ecclesiastical ruling, forbade any sundering of the
connubial tie except by death.
He met his doom calmly and laid his head beneath the axe with a martyr's
brow. Kaiserina acknowledged this.
Felix Clemenceau understood everything now. The trustees to whom he owed
his subsistence-money, M. Rollinet the imperial counsel, and M.
Constantin Ritz, a famous sculptor's son, and the life-companion of
Clemenceau, were characters in the momentous drama which Kaiserina
recited, whom he knew by correspondence.
The finger of fate, which had urged the artist to commit a homicide for
morality's sake, had pointed out to his son the way which had to be
followed over corpses of the young student's slaying.
Brooding over the alteration in his future, he exchanged hardly a word
with his cousin, during the prolonged journey, which they continued
together, as though mutual reluctance to part bound them indissolubly.
Logic said there should be a powerful repugnance between those whom the
shadow of the guillotine's red arm clouded. But, spite of all, Felix
felt that Kaiserina was, like himself, well within the circle of infamy.
Her mother was the sister of the shameful Iza, and her husband's careful
guard of her proved that he doubted her walking virtuously if her
unscrupulous mother stood by her side. This old Megara--who sold her
offspring to worse than death--was living--seemed eternal as evil
itself. It were a pious act to save Kaiserina from her as his father had
tried to do with Iza. He was pleased that she seemed inclined to cling
to him as though wearied of the erratic life she seemed to have led
after a flight from her mother's, and which she did not describe
minutely. He was also grateful that, in her allusions to his father, she
did not speak with the bitterness of a blood-avenger.
They made the journey to Paris without any stoppage. He had to visit M.
Ritz, for M. Rollinet was no longer there, having accepted a judgeship
in Algeria. In the vehicle, carrying to a hotel where he purposed
leaving her, Felix said, feelingly:
"I think I see why we were brought together. I am not to lead the life
of an artist, lounging in galleries, sketching ruins and pretty girls,
but one of expiation for my poor father's crime."
"Perhaps. More surely," she replied with a smile which, on her peerless
lips, seemed divine, "_I_ should make the faults of the Dobronowskas be
forgotten."
They had arrived at the same conclusion as the journey ended, but the
means had not occurred yet to either.
"Here we are," he exclaimed, as the carriage horse came to a stop.
He alighted, entered the hotel and settled for the young lady's stay.
Returning, he came to help her out.
"My door will never be closed to you," she said, remembering how, in her
story, her notorious ancestors had playfully suggested in a letter
announcing her renunciation of her scheming mother's toils and her
return to marry Clemenceau, that he might leave his door on the jar for
her at all instants. "And yet, what will be the gain in our meeting
again?"
"Everything for our souls, and materially! Here in France, where La
Belle Iza and the executed Clemenceau point a moral, neither of us can
find a mate in marriage easily. If blood stains me, shame is reflected
on you. Let us efface both blood and shame by an united effort! Let our
life in common force the world to look no farther than ourselves and see
nothing of the disgrace beyond."
"I do not care a fig for what people think or say," said the one-night
_diva_, with a curl of the lip. "And I do not understand you fully."
"Wait till I see you again, when all shall be made clear. Meanwhile,
cousin--since without you I should have lost my life, or, certainly my
liberty--I am eternally bound to you. It is left to you to have the
bonds solemnized in the church, here, in France--my country!"