TRULY A MAN.
Long after Madame Clemenceau had left the room, the Italian stood in the
same position as he had taken after kissing her hand. The mild voice
from the pallid but little changed beauty thrilled him as formerly, and
went far towards making him as mad as he had been ten days before when
she had dropped, like an extinguished star, out of that small system. In
her absence, he had regained quiet and some coolness, and believed he
had conquered the treasonable passion which threatened his benefactor
with disgrace. Had she not disgraced him as it was; had she not run away
with another lover?
Clemenceau had not said one word to his associate about the telegram
from Paris, which he seemed not to believe, or of the note beginning:
"The faithless one," by which Von Sendlingen had been warned of
Gratian's absconding and which he instructed Hedwig to place where her
master must see it. Hence, the view by Clemenceau of the stamping out of
the Viscount-baron, for his accomplices had not let the chance pass when
he stumbled into their ambush, in order to see if the Frenchman in
jealous spite would assail him.
Clemenceau had recognized his wife and he divined that the lonely man
making for the same point was the villain, without understanding into
what deathpit he had fallen.
At the juncture of his being about hurrying after his wife, he heard the
half-strangled wretch's outcry and the low appeal of humanity
overpowering the hoarse summons of revenge in his bosom. But when he
arrived at the broken footway bridge, all was over. A little farther, he
fancied he saw a shadow in an osier bed, but when he waded to it, all
was hushed. He called, but no sound responded. All seemed a
vision--victim and assassins.
And his wife was flying, by the train which had merely stopped to take
her up. As every resident is known at these suburban stations, he
refrained from an inquiry which would have made him a laughing-stock.
Since Césarine had returned, the conflict of duty and passion would be
resumed and he felt sure that he had been defeated before. Reflecting
profoundly, he could come to no other conclusion than that he ought to
shun the dangerous traitress.
As he lifted his head, less troubled after arriving at this resolution,
he was not sorry to see that Clemenceau had silently entered the room.
"Oh, is it you, my dear master?" he exclaimed.
It was not easy on that placid brow to read whether he knew of
Césarine's return or not.
"Well, are you satisfied with your test this morning?" inquired he.
"Have you succeeded with the bullets of the new shape?"
"I believe so," answered Antonino, "for the modifications which you
suggested, improved it in every point they dealt with. They go forth
clean and the windage is much reduced."
"Is the range improved?"
"At fourteen hundred metres I put two elongated balls into an oak so
deeply that I could not dig them out with my knife. They struck very
closely to one another. It is a hundred metres greater distance.
Inserting the bullets by the mass of twenty-five and firing the two took
four seconds. I was less careful about marking where the others struck,
and one that I discharged on my return near the house broke and went
badly askew. With bullets made by regular moulders, such an accident
should not happen."
"Have you any left? Let me see."
Antonino took two bullets from his waistcoat pocket; they were unlike
the ordinary globules, and resembled the long, pointed cylinders of
modern guns. With a pair of pocket plyers, he broke one to exhibit the
interior to Clemenceau; it was composed of two metals in curiously
shaped segments and a chamber in one end contained a loose ball of
another and heavier metal, on the principle of the quick-silver
enhancing the force of the blow of the "loaded" executioner's sword. All
had a novel aspect, but the chief inventor was familiar with the
arrangement.
"By the cavity in it I have reduced the weight of three to two," went on
Antonino. "I am in hopes to put in fifty or sixty bullets at a time
without making the arm too heavy, and that would suffice, considering
that the replacement of the mass of projectiles requires no appreciable
time, while the supply of explosive, liquefied air suffices for three
hundred discharges. The repetition of the emissive force does not jar
the gun, and the metal of our alloy does not show a strain although the
gauge induces a pressure of fifty thousand pounds per square inch if it
were accumulated."
"And the injection valve?"
"It works as easily by pressure on the disc, which replaces the trigger,
perfectly."
"That was your idea."
"After you put me on the track," returned the Italian, gratefully. "Oh,
I am still very ignorant in these matters."
"Not more than I, a few months ago. I had not handled a firearm until--"
he checked himself and frowned; then, tranquilly resuming, he said:
"Labor, and you will reach the goal!"
Antonino looked on silently as his instructor took the gun and inserted
the bullet, but when he was going over to the open window, with the
evident intention to fire off into the garden, he followed and laid his
hand on his arm, saying animatedly:
"Do not fire!"
"Why not?" returned Clemenceau, but without astonishment. "We live in a
desert since we have frightened our neighbors away. For two leagues
around, nobody is about at this hour and everybody within our walls is
accustomed to the noise of the gas exploding."
"Not everybody," remonstrated Antonino. "Madame Clemenceau has returned
home and the sound frightens her because so strange."
"It is so. That's another matter," replied the inventor, putting the
rifle down in the corner without haste.
"Did you know it? Have you seen her?" cried Antonino, struck by the
remarkable unconcern of his master.
"I knew of it by seeing her, yes, as I was coming down stairs a while
since--she was going to her rooms from this one, with her maid."
"It's a lucky thing that Mademoiselle Daniels refused to occupy them!"
exclaimed Antonino. "Why did you not speak to your wife?"
"Because I can have nothing to say to her and she would speak to me
nothing but lies," said Clemenceau in so severe and convinced a tone
that the young man remained silent, hurt at the judgment pronounced upon
his idol by its own high-priest. "What are you brooding over?" he
inquired, after an embarrassing pause.
"My dear master, I think that I ought to ask leave of absence since I
have finished the work of designing the bullet most fit for the
gas-rifle."
"Do you ask leave of me, at your age, as of a schoolmaster?"
The relations between the adopted son and the architect, who had
mistaken his bent and become an innovator in artillery, had been
affectionate, and on the younger man's side respectful. He had never
taken any serious steps without asking his consent.
"Well, where did you think of going?" asked Clemenceau.
"To Paris."
"To show the rifle and projectile complete? No, we can test the latter
at the new series of firing experiments before the Ordnance Committee.
The Minister of War and the Emperor will not thank you for disturbing
them for so little. It was the great gun they wanted. They are wedded to
the Chassepot for the soldier's gun and, besides, the government musket
factories are opposed to so great a novelty."
"I need exercise--action--the open air," persisted the Italian.
Clemenceau shook his head. Only the day before, the young man had called
himself the happiest soul in the world and did not wish to quit
tranquil Montmorency.
"Well, after you have had your fling, would you hasten back?"
"I--I fear not, master," said he. "I daresay if you and M. Daniels
should approve, I might have a situation to travel for the Clemenceau
Rifle Company, for some months, in England or America--and explain the
value of your invention."
"You wish to be my trumpeter, eh?" said the Frenchman, sadly smiling.
"But what is to become of me during your absence and of M. Daniels?
Remember that I have nobody to understand me, sympathize with me, become
endeared to me, and aid me!"
"I, alone?" repeated the Italian, affected by the melancholy tone common
to the man of one idea who must, to concentrate his thoughts, set aside
other ties of union with his race.
"Do you doubt it?"
Antonino felt no doubt. He would be the most to be deplored among men if
he were not fond of Clemenceau after all that he had done for him. He
was an orphan vagrant, next to a beggar, when he had been housed by him,
kept, and highly educated. Then, too, with a frankness not common among
born brothers, the Frenchman had associated him in all his labors for
the revolution in the science of artillery--the greatest since Bacon
discovered gunpowder. All that he was, he owed to the man before him.
"Believe me, father," he said, earnestly, "I esteem and venerate you!"
"And yet you keep secrets from me!" reproached Clemenceau.
"I--I have no secrets."
"I see you are too serious."
"I am only sorrowful--sorrowful at quitting you."
"Why should you do it, I repeat?"
"I am never merry--happiness is not my portion," faltered Antonino, not
knowing what answer to make.
"That's nothing. Better now than later! At your age, unhappiness is
easily borne--it is only what the sporting gentlemen call a preliminary
canter. Wait till you come to the actual race!"
"I am not fit to dwell with others--with grave, earnest men; I am too
nervous and impressionable."
"Because you come of an excitable race, and your childhood was passed in
too deep poverty. You will grow out of all that, gradually. Stay here;
oh, keep with me, for I have need of you and you require a
companion-soul, soothing like mine. The kind of disappointment you
experience is not to be cured by change of place. You carry it with you,
and distance increases and strengthens it, and whenever you meet the
object again to whom was due the vexation you will perceive that you
went on the journey for no good."
Antonino looked at the speaker as one regards the mind-reader who has
answered to the point. Clemenceau fixed him with his serene, unvarying
eyes, and continued, in an emotionless voice, like a statue, speaking:
"You are in love--and you love my wife."
Antonino started away and involuntarily lifted his hands in a position
of defense. Averting his eyes and unclenching his fists, he muttered
sullenly:
"What makes you suppose that?"
"I saw it was so."
At the end of a silence more burdensome than any before the younger man
found his voice and, as though tears interfered with his utterance,
said pathetically, and indistinctly:
"Do you not acknowledge, master, now, that I must go; for when I am far
away, perhaps you will forgive the ingrate!"
Looking at the young man of two-and-twenty, Clemenceau knew by his own
infatuation at the same tender age with the same woman, that he had
nothing to forgive him for--little to reproach him. It was youth that
was to blame, and it had loved. No matter who that Cytherean priestess
was, he must have adored her whether sister, wife or daughter of dearest
friend, teacher and paternal patron. But it was clear from the grief
that had made the youth a melancholy man that he was honorable.
Grief is never, when the outcome of remorse, a useless or evil feeling.
It is a fair-fighting adversary which has only to be overcome to be a
sure ally, always ready to defend and protect its victor. In his own
terse language, that of a mathematician and mechanician who knew no
words of double meaning.
Clemenceau told the Italian this.
"With your youth and your grief, such a spirit as yours and such a
friend as you have in me, Anto," he said, "you possess the weapons of
Achilles."
Antonino thought he was mocking at him and frowned.
"You think I am sneering? Or merely laughing at you? Alas, it is a long
while since I indulged in laughter. It was this woman, with whom you
have fallen in love, who froze the laugh forever on my lips! she would
have been the death of me if I had not overruled her and exterminated
her within my breast. How I loved her! how I have suffered through
her--enough to be our united portions of future pain--suffer you no
more, therefore. You are too young, tender and credulous to try a fall
with that creature. She must have divined long ago that you were
enamored of her. She is not too clear-sighted in all things, but she
sees such effects by intuition. It is very probable that she has
returned to this house on your account, so suddenly. I could guess that
she was on the eve of flight, but not that she would return. She always
needs fresh sensations to make herself believe that she is alive, for
she is more lifeless than those whom she robbed of life."
Antonino did not understand the allusion, for he had never felt less
like dying than since Césarine had been seen again.
"I mean that she sends the chill of death into the soul, heart and brain
of man, and it congeals the marrow in his bones!" said Clemenceau,
energetically. "You may say that if she is a wicked woman and if,
whatever her defense, her absence covers some evil step, I ought to
separate from her. It is all the present state of the law allows. But
while her absence would have prevented you, or another friend, from
meeting her, still she would have borne my name. That name I am doubly
bound to make honorable, for it was stained with blood--that of one of
her ever-accursed race. My father won an illustrious name and, her
ancestress, whom he married, was dragging it publically in the mud amid
all the scandals of society, when he slew her on her couch of gilded
infamy. Ashamed of this name--not because he was indicated under it, but
because she had so vilified it--his greatest desire to the friends who
visited him in the condemned cell, was to have me, his son, change it.
They had me brought up at a distance under the name of Claudius
Ruprecht. It might even have happened that another country than that of
my birth would receive the glory which a heaven-sent idea is to bestow
upon France. Now, I am more than ever determined that her venom shall
not sully me. She may cause a little ridicule to arise, but that I can
scorn. The laugh at Montmorency will not reach Paris, far less echo
around the globe! For a long time I hoped to enlighten her and redeem
her, but I have failed. But I am bound to enlighten you and save you, am
I not? From the feeling you harbor can spring only an additional shame
for Césarine, and certain, perhaps irreparable woe for you. Stop, turn
about and look the other way. A man of twenty, who may naturally live
another three-score years and work during two of them, who would talk to
you of that nonsense, love's sorrow? That was all very well once, when
the world revolved slowly and there was little to be done by the people
who blocked nobody's way. But these are busy times and things to be done
cannot wait till you finish loving and wailing, or till you die of a
broken heart without having done anything for your fellow men."
"Bravo!" exclaimed the sympathetical and easily aroused Italian,
grasping the speaker by the hand and pressing it with revived energy.
"My excellent leader, you are right!"
"And by and by," said the other, with an effort, as though he had to
master inward commotion, "when you win a prize from your own country and
you look for household joys more agreeably to reward you, you may find
one not far from here at this moment to be your wife. For, generally,
the bane is near the antidote--the serpent is crushed under the heel
next the beneficent plant which heals the bite."
"Rebecca?" questioned the young man in amazement. "But if I can read her
heart as you do mine, master, Rebecca Daniels loves you."
"She admires me and pities me, Antonino," replied Clemenceau, hastily,
as if wishful to elude the question. "She does not love me. Besides,
that is of no consequence. I have no room for love again--always
provided that I have once loved. Passion often has the honor of being
confounded with the purer feeling, especially in the young. Did I love
that monster--for she is a monster, Antonino--I might forgive, for love
excuses everything--that is true love, but it is rare as virtue--common
sense and all that is truth. To the altar of love, many are called, but
few elected, and all are not fit.
"I see you are not convinced, because the dog that bit me is so shapely,
and graceful and wears so silky a coat! Such dogs are mad and their bite
in the heart is fatal and agonizing unless one at once applies the white
hot cautery. The seam remains--from time to time it aches--but the
victim's life is saved that he may save, serve, gladden his fellow men.
Would you rather I should weep, or force a smile, and appear happy for a
period? In any case, since I have cured the injury and she is in my
house again, I shall not retaliate on her. But if she threatens to
become a public danger--if she bares her poisonous fangs to harm my
friend--my son--another--let her beware!"
"Master," stammered Antonino, beginning to see the temptress in the new
light, as Felix had often shown him other objects to which he had been
blind, "you may or may not judge her too harshly, but you certainly
judge me too leniently. Better to let me go away, and far, or at least,
since you began the revelation, make the evidence complete of your trust
and esteem."
Clemenceau saw that the young man still believed in Césarine, but he did
not care to tell him all he knew of her. Had he been told that she had
encouraged Gratian to flee with her and had abandoned him at the first
danger, without lifting a finger to save him, or her voice to procure
him succor, he might loathe and hate her; but Clemenceau meant to say
nothing. Such revelations, and denunciations are permissible alone to
wrath, revenge, or despair, in the man whose heart is still bleeding
from the wound made in it so that his outburst is sealed by his blood.
"No, Antonino, by my mouth no one shall ever know all that woman has
done--or what victories I have won over myself--in severe wrestlings."
"I see you have forgiven her," said the Italian, advancing the virtue in
which he was deficient.
"I have expunged her from my heart," answered Clemenceau firmly. "She is
a picture on only one page of my life-book, and I do not open it there.
Knowing my secret, you are the last person to whom I shall speak of
Césarine's misdeeds. I wish your deliverance, like mine, to be owed to
your will, but you are free and have been forewarned, so that you will
have less effort to make than I. Let the scarlet woman go by and do not
step across her path. Between two smiles, she will dishonor you or deal
death to you! She slays like a dart of Satan. That is all you need know.
But, as, indeed, you deserve a token of esteem and confidence from your
frankness, affection and labors, I will give you one."
Having seated himself, he drew from an inner pocket a paper written in
odd characters.
"The time of my giving you the proof of trust should make it more sacred
and precious still. I have found the solution of the last problem over
which we pored. You know that while we discovered the means of
imprisoning the gas in a concentrated form of scarcely appreciable bulk,
it was not always our obedient slave, we had the fear that sometimes it
would not submit to being liberated by piecemeal but would now and then
disrupt its containing chamber in impatience, and then the holder would
certainly die, choked if the fragments of the gun had not fatally
lacerated him. After many days and nights, I have found the simple means
to render the gas innocuous except in the direction to which we direct
its flow. I have written out the formula, in the minutest particulars
and in the cipher which you and I alone understand. In the same way we
two share the secret of this safe."
He handed Antonino a peculiar key and he went to unlock the coffer which
had aroused Madame Clemenceau's curiosity.
"Lock it up with the other papers," concluded the inventor. "I appoint
you its keeper while I live--my heir and the carrier out of the work
after my decease, should I die before having proved what I consign
there. What matters it now if my material form disappears when my spirit
lives on in thee! Well," he said, as Antonino returned, after closing
and fastening the chest, "do you need any farther proof of the
confidence I have in you?"
Antonino grasped his hand and wrung it fondly When both had recovered
calmness, they went on speaking of their work, which might be considered
past the stage when the projector is racked by misgivings. They went
into the breakfast-room together, prepared to bear the singular meeting
with the errant wife whose return was so unexpected. But she preferred
not to take the step so soon, and, as Rebecca also kept away, warned by
Hedwig, who might appear at the board, the three men took their meal
together.