sudden softening, this return of submissive affection after his bursts
of passion. "But," she insinuated, "if you were really as I would have
you, you would let me give you some advice."
"What is it?" he inquired anxiously.
"To confide in your father. Yes, to talk with him of your plans,--of me
if you think best,--but first of all, and at any cost, of your
apprehension on the subject of these impending inventories. You owe it
to him," she insisted at a gesture from the young man. "I say nothing of
the bond that binds together the members of the same family, in order
not to return to that question of the name, although bourgeois and
nobles are equal when the common honor is involved. You owe it to him
from respect for his noble heart. He loves you. A determination so
opposed to his wishes is likely to cause him very deep sorrow. He must
not learn it first from another than you, so that he may not misconstrue
your motives. You must tell him what they are, and even if he blames
them, at all events he will know that you deserve his esteem. I know it
well, I who am a believer, and to whom that proceeding will be so
grievous if you carry it out. Ah! how earnestly I will pray God to spare
us, your father and me, that trial! But you must speak to Monsieur de
Claviers. You realize yourself that you must, don't you?"'
"I will try," replied the young man, whose eyes once more expressed
genuine distress. "You do not know him, and what an imposing effect he
has, even on me. I ought to say, especially on me, since I can read his
heart so well. But you are right, and I will obey you."
"Thanks," she said, rising. "And now think that you must not prepare him
to receive in bad part what you have to say, by displeasing him. Since
he was urgent that you should come to Grandchamp for this hunt, you must
go. You must do it for my sake, too, for I need a little rest and
solitude. Besides you still have to lunch, and it is quarter to
twelve."--The clock of a near-by convent struck three strokes, whose
tinkling cadence reached the little parlor over the trees of the garden.
The clock on the mantel-piece also emitted three shrill notes.--"You
have just time."
"With the automobile I shall be at Grandchamp in an hour and a half," he
replied. "But I mean to continue to be obedient, as obedient as I have
been rebellious." He had taken the young woman's hand and he pressed it
to his lips as he added: "I forgot. I have to stop on Rue de Solferino
to inquire for a friend of my father who is very ill. It won't take very
long."
Valentine Olier withdrew her fingers with such a nervous movement that
Landri could not help exclaiming:--
"Why, what's the matter?"
"Nothing," said she. "Rue de Solferino? Then it's Monsieur Jaubourg,
this sick friend? it is to Monsieur Jaubourg's that you are going?"
"Yes. How do you know his name?" And then, answering his own question,
"To be sure, I have been to his house several times on leaving you. I
have talked about him to you, and rather unkindly. I am sorry now. He
has never shown much liking for me, and when I wanted to enter
Saint-Cyr, he did much to excite my father against me. I bore him a
grudge for it. But that was long ago, and he is mixed up in so many
memories of my childhood! The news of his illness touched me. According
to my father's despatch which I found at the house, asking me to go to
see him, he is dying."
"He is dying!" she echoed. "Mon Dieu! I hope you will not be admitted.
In your present state of wounded sensibility, that visit will be too
trying, and it's of no use. Promise me that you won't try to see him!"
"Dear, dear friend!" exclaimed Landri, bestowing a second kiss on
Valentine's clenched hand, "I tell you again that you do not know how
completely you have restored my tranquillity, nor how brave I should be
at this moment before the worst trials. And this visit would not be a
trial to me. But I will manage to do what you wish, even in so
unimportant a matter. I shall deserve no credit for it. I prefer not to
place any too painful image between what I feel here"--he pointed to his
heart--"and my return--to-morrow. How far away it is, and yet so near!"
"Until to-morrow, then," she rejoined with a half smile, as to which he
could not divine that it was forced. "Come at two o'clock as usual,--and
now, adieu."
"Adieu!" he said. Instinctively he drew near to her. In his eyes blazed
a gleam of passion instantly subdued by her eyes. He repeated "Adieu!"
in a voice stifled by the effort he made to control himself and not to
give way to his ardent longing to cover with kisses that fair hair, that
pure brow, that quivering mouth.
He rushed from the salon. She listened to the young man's step as he
passed through the adjoining room, then through the reception-room and
the street door, which opened and closed. When he had gone from the
house, and doubtless from the street, a long while, she was still on the
same spot and in the same attitude, steadfastly contemplating her
thoughts. What she saw was not the refined and soldierly profile of the
young man whom she loved, who loved her, and whose wife she _knew_ now
that she would be. No, she saw herself at Saint-Mihiel, a very long time
before. She fancied that she was living through that hour again. Landri
had just joined the regiment. Valentine had a friend, one Madame Privat,
the wife of one of the officers of the garrison. On several occasions
she had fancied that that friend was extraordinarily cold to the
newcomer. Inconsiderately enough she had asked her--she could hear
herself putting the question: "Monsieur de Claviers-Grandchamp seems so
antipathetic to you. Why is it?" And she could hear Marguerite Privat
reply:--
"I admit it, but it's an old, a very old story. We have a distant
cousin, a Monsieur Jaubourg, of whom we used to see a great deal. I say
we; I should say my parents. They had a little plan for having him marry
one of my aunts. Suddenly the relations between us lost their warmth.
The marriage didn't take place. This coldness dates from the day that he
became intimate with the Claviers. He had, at all events my parents
thought so, a passion for Madame de Claviers. They even believed that
there was a liaison. In families many things are known that the public
doesn't understand. He seemed to avoid us. My parents did not seek a
reconciliation which would have seemed to be based on self-interest.
Monsieur Jaubourg is the son of a broker and very rich. I witnessed my
father's grief from this rupture, which was the cause of a very unhappy
union contracted by my aunt out of spite. I have always blamed Madame de
Claviers for it, perhaps unjustly. The sight of her son stirs those
memories and is painful to me."
Yes, that was long, long ago, and lo! Madame Olier found anew in her
heart the melancholy sensation with which Madame Privat's words had
suddenly oppressed her. Must it be that she loved Landri even then,
unconsciously? The truth of that confidence was guaranteed both by the
character of her who made it and by the chance that led to it. But
perhaps it was all a matter of chance. So that Madame Olier did not
believe in it altogether. However, she had retained an ineradicable
doubt. How often she had wondered whether the young man's mother had
really made a misstep, and whether he was in danger of ever hearing of
it! She had had a little shiver every time that he had mentioned the
name of Jaubourg, by chance, in their conversations; and deeply stirred
as she was, all those complex and confused sensations had suddenly
reawakened when he had spoken of his proposed visit to Rue de Solferino.
She had fancied him at the bedside of a sick man who, in his last
moments, would perhaps let a terrible secret escape his lips! Her
apprehension had been so great that an impulsive entreaty had followed,
most imprudent if the relations between Jaubourg and the late Marquise
de Claviers-Grandchamp had really been culpable!
"I am mad," she said, rousing herself from the sort of waking dream,
which had reproduced with the detail of an hallucination that brief
scene, her apartment at Saint-Mihiel, Madame Privat's face, her voice,
her very words. "If Monsieur Jaubourg had been Madame de Claviers'
lover, he would not have continued to be Monsieur de Claviers' friend
after her death. If only my movement and my exclamation did not arouse
suspicion in Landri's mind! I should never forgive myself. No. He is so
honest, so straightforward. He has too noble a heart to imagine in
others the evil that it would be a horror to him to commit. If he will
only speak to his father about that possibility of an expedition against
a church! He promised. He will speak to him. His father will prevent him
from following out that shocking purpose. For my part, I cannot. I love
him too well. Mon Dieu! how I love him! how I love him! I defended
myself too long. Ah! I feel that I am all his, now!"
And as, at that moment, she heard laughter through the partition,
announcing little Ludovic's return, she opened the door to call her
child, and, pressing him to her heart, she embraced him frantically, to
prove to herself that this love to which she was on the point of
abandoning herself, by promising to become the wife of a second husband,
would take nothing from the son of the first; and she said to him:--
"You know that your mother loves you, you know it, tell me that you know
it."
II
A GRAND SEIGNEUR
Madame Olier's prevision was just: that little unthinking gesture, as of
a hand extended to prevent a fall, was destined to be one of the signs
which should arouse in Landri the most painful of ideas, but not until
later. That youthful heart--Valentine had read it accurately in this
respect, as well--was too noble not to entertain an instinctive
repugnance for suspicion, that calumny of the mind. How could he have
made an exception in his mother's case? He had never ascribed a criminal
motive, even for a second, nor imagined that any one could ascribe such
a motive to the assiduities of one of the intimate friends of their
family. The tears that he had shed on Madame de Claviers-Grandchamp's
death had been the loving, sincere tears of a son, with no alloy in his
veneration. And so, while he returned from Rue Monsieur to Place
Saint-François, to get his automobile, no suspicion entered his mind.
The imprudent entreaty that his friend had addressed to him not to see
the invalid on Rue de Solferino was only a proof of an affection a
little too easily disturbed, and he was the more touched by it.
"How I love her!" he exclaimed, echoing, and conscious of it, the
passionate sigh which she, on her side, was breathing toward him. "And
she loves me, too. She fights against it still, but I understood it, I
saw it, I know it. I know that she will be my wife.--My wife!" he
repeated, with an intimate quiver of his whole being which made him
close his eyes. Suddenly Valentine's image brought before his eyes that
of his father, and the memory of the undertaking he had entered into
abruptly crushed that outburst of joy. "She is right," he said to
himself, without transition, mentally repeating the very words that she
had used. "I owe it to him to speak both of her and of all the rest. I
owe it to him from respect for his noble heart. I will do it."
The bare thought of that explanation oppressed the young man with an
agony of timidity. He had always suffered from it in the presence of
that man whose name he bore, whose heir he was, whom he loved, and by
whom he was loved, and he had never been able to open his heart to him
fully, to explain himself concerning his inmost thoughts. His character,
which was very manly in respect to important decisions, but extremely
sensitive, and consequently easily disconcerted in its outward
manifestations, had always been taken by surprise as it were by that of
the marquis, so unhesitating, so dominating, so impervious to argument.
His resistance to this moral despotism was not altogether conscious. It
was that which incited him in his constant effort not to be an
"émigré," as he said, to make himself useful, to belong to his own
time, "to do his duty"--another of his phrases. We must repeat it. There
are none more just. Many another young man of his class has felt, as he
did, that magnanimous and praiseworthy appetite for efficient and
beneficent action. Many have, like him, tried to rebel against the
ostracism which France, the offspring of the Revolution, practises, by
her customs as well as by her laws, against the old families. They have,
like him, stumbled over obstacles. They have rarely felt them, as he
did, as tragedies. This excessive and morbid view of his destiny
betrayed in Landri a lack of equilibrium, of certainty. In truth, if, in
certain directions, his ideas were absolutely opposed to those of his
father, in others he underwent a veritable hypnotism at the hands of
that powerful personality, and he was very near the point of doubting
himself before an irreconcilability which he had not dared really to
face but once, when it was a question of entering Saint-Cyr. His mind
had been developed by reading, observation, reflection, all solitary,
constantly held in check by the loud speech, the imperious intelligence,
the steadfast and logical convictions, in a word, the decision, of the
marquis. Landri, too, had decision, but by fits and starts, and when he
had provided himself with very well-considered reasons therefor. His
father had it always, gaily, buoyantly, as he walked, as he breathed, by
an unfolding of his inward energy, if one may say so, which was as
natural in him as the muscular development is in a lion. The prestige of
that opulent and powerful nature maintained so complete a domination
over the temperament, more refined perhaps, but less masterful, of his
son, that he had been on the point of equivocating when Valentine asked
him for that promise. He had given it, however. His lover's pride would
have been too deeply humiliated to confess a weakness of which he was
now sensible once more.
"Yes," he repeated, "I must speak to him--but how? Of her? That will be
very difficult, but let him once see her and my cause will be won. She
is so refined, so pretty, such a lady!--Of the inventories? It is
impossible. She understood me at once, devout as she is. Their religion
is not the same. To her the Church is the faith. Those who haven't it
are simply to be pitied. To him the Church is like the monarchy, like
the nobility, the essential condition of public order. It is the
hierarchy that guarantees all the others. What answer can I make? I
should think as he does if our time were not our time."
Soliloquizing thus he reached the side of the Church of
Saint-François-Xavier, at the spot where he had left his automobile.
His chauffeur, when he did not return, had left his car in the care of
one of the numerous idlers who transform that isolated square into a
club of bicyclists and tennis-players, and had gone to refresh himself
at one of the wine-shops in the neighborhood.
"Deuce take it!" said the young man ill-humoredly, "Auguste isn't here!
I shall never get to Grandchamp. I sha'n't have any lunch, that's all,"
he concluded. "But how is the machine?" and while the small boy who had
been left in charge of the vehicle ran off to fetch the conscienceless
chauffeur, he began to examine the different parts of the machine with a
connoisseur's eye. That too was one of the small points upon which he
had based his self-esteem as a "modernist." He understood how to repair
and handle his automobile as well as a professional. "Everything is in
order," he said. "I will drive myself. We shall go faster, and I shall
not irritate my nerves by thinking." He began therefore to put on the
cloak and cap and goggles and gloves of the profession, and Auguste had
no sooner joined him, than he started his heavy machine with as much
precision as if he had not borne the name of Landri, which denoted in
the family of Claviers-Grandchamp pretensions more or less
justified--but they date back to the twelfth century--of descending from
the kings of the first race. And this car of the latest model bore on
its panels the curious arms which, with the device, _E tenebris
inclarescent_, symbolize that legendary origin: three frogs _or_ on a
field _sable_. These were, according to some authorities in heraldry,
the arms of our first kings. Géliot waxed wroth over it long ago, in
his "Vraye et parfaite science des armoiries."[1] He saw therein only
three roughly executed fleurs-de-lys. He would have enjoyed maintaining
that opinion before the choleric marquis. "And to think," reflected the
heir of the pseudo-Merovingian, "that it took years to make my father
admit the mere idea of the telephone, of electricity and the automobile!
But at last we have one, and of an excellent make. I shall be there
before the hunt is over."
He had, in obedience to a childish whim in which all young men will
recognize themselves, instead of driving straight along the boulevard,
the Esplanade and the quay, taken Rue de Babylone, in order to pass Rue
Monsieur. He longed to see once more the outside of the little
hôtel of the time of Louis XVI. Valentine became once more so present
to his mind that he was absorbed anew in that inward vision
when he reached the house in which Jaubourg lived. Lovers, even the most
affectionate,--especially the most affectionate,--are almost savagely
insensible to what does not concern, either nearly or distantly, the
object of their passion. He had no need to remember his promise, in
order to avoid trying to see the invalid.
"There should be a bulletin in the concierge's lodge," he said to
Auguste; "get down, copy it, leave my name and come back quickly. We
haven't five minutes to waste."
The chauffeur jumped down from his seat, with the reckless haste of a
servant who seeks to earn forgiveness for a fault. He disappeared like a
gust of wind behind the door of the enormous porte-cochère which
imparted a seignorial aspect to the abode of the unique personality,
untitled, but of the most unexceptional elegance, that Charles Jaubourg
had been. In order that his name should have been so much as mentioned
in connection with Madame de Claviers-Grandchamp, it must have been that
he, who came of such a widely different social caste, had been able to
win for himself an exceptional position in society. Of that supremely
refined man, of the great bourgeois, who had become, by dint of
adaptability of manners, and, in due time, of wit, a notable member of
Society, there remained only a poor tattered remnant, an old man at the
point of death with pneumonia, behind those high windows. The straw
spread upon the pavement to deaden the noise of passing vehicles
attested the gravity of a condition of which Landri had a more decisive
proof. His messenger reappeared, holding in his hand a paper on which
was written this laconic and ill-boding bulletin: "A very bad night.
Condition stationary.--Professor Louvet, Dr. Pierre Chaffin."
The officer read these words in an undertone; and with an indifference
which, under the circumstances, was of an irony no less unintentional
than cruel, he folded the paper and slipped it into his pocket, saying:
"All right. Let's be off!"
"The concierge told me to tell Monsieur le Comte," interposed the
chauffeur, "that Monsieur Jaubourg had given special orders to send
Monsieur le Comte up to him when he came."
"Me?" exclaimed the young man, with unfeigned surprise and vexation.
There was a gleam of hesitation in his eyes, and he started to get down.
"But no, I really haven't time!" And with this exclamation, the irony of
which was even more cruel, he started the automobile once more. It had
already crossed the Seine, turned into Rue des Tuileries, passed the
Opéra, the Gare du Nord, the barrier, and Saint-Denis, and entered upon
the road through the forest of Hez, beyond which is the château of
Grandchamp, before the mind of Madame de Claviers' son had even begun to
detect behind that second little sign the mystery which was destined, a
few hours later, to revolutionize his career forever.
"Jaubourg dying and wanting to see me? Why, when he has never in his
whole life shown anything but antipathy to me? It's easily explained. My
father had told him I would call. Really, I ought to have gone up. But
what more should I have had to take to Grandchamp than this bulletin?
And then, Chaffin is there. He must have been sent by my father, and
he'll keep him posted."
Pierre Chaffin was the son of Landri's former tutor, become, under the
more distinguished title of secretary, the marquis's steward and man of
business. The younger man, formerly intern at a hospital, and very
eminent in his profession, was now the head of the clinical staff of
Louvet, who had been the Claviers-Grandchamps' physician from time
immemorial.
"Besides," continued the lover, "I promised"; and his mouth, which was
open to inhale the cool breeze caused by their speed, closed as if to
place, despite the distance, a last kiss on his friend's burning hands.
That recollection sent the blood coursing more hotly through his veins,
and the automobile flew the faster through the wild flight of the
houses, already beplumed with smoke, of the autumn crops, of the misty
fields, of that whole landscape, which ordinarily was to Landri the
source of reflections rather than of sensations. How many times, on his
way to Grandchamp, had he noticed that multiplicity of small estates,
which checker the land, isolate the châteaux, surround them, as if
determined to conquer them! A symbol of the upward progress of the lower
classes. To-day he saw nothing save space to be devoured, at the end of
which he would stand face to face with his father and his promise. He
had chosen to drive, in order not to think; and, despite himself, he
formed and unformed in his mind the plan of that interview, while he
drove on, leaving behind him, one after another, Saint-Denis and its
basilica, Groslay and its moss-covered roofs, the forest of l'Isle-Adam
and its white quarries, Beaumont and the long blue ribbon of the Oise,
the charming nosegay of Cahet, the wood of Saint-Vaast, Cires-lès-Mello
and its mills, Balagny, and peaceful Thérain, Mouny and its graceful
gables.
"Thirty-three minutes past one," said the chauffeur, looking at his
watch, when the first houses of Thury appeared at the end of the road,
and the oaks of the forest of Hez. "That is travelling! And Monsieur le
Comte never drove better."
"Now all we have to do is find the hunt," Landri replied. "It hasn't
been a bad run, that's a fact. Take the wheel now, Auguste, please. I am
going to search the avenues with my glass. Let's go toward La Neuville,
and drive slowly, so as not to lose any sound."
The forest, over whose gravel roads they were now driving, told no less
clearly than the fields the story of the parcelling out of old France.
It formerly joined the forests of Compiègne and of Carnelle, and the
whole formed, between the Seine and the Oise, a vast region teeming with
game, of which only fragments remain. This of Hez occupies a plateau, of
a slightly irregular surface, which the automobile traversed at a very
slow pace. There were constant halts, to ask information of some
passer-by, to investigate with the glass the interstices in the hedges,
and above all to listen for the baying of the hounds. Several times
Landri had thought that he detected a "Vue!" or a "Bien allé." Suddenly
he put his hand on the chauffeur's arm. He heard distinctly a blast of
the horn.
"Why, that's a _hallali_!" he exclaimed. "So soon?--Yes.--And it's not
far away. To the left, and a little speed. There we are. I see the hunt.
Stop a moment while I look! Oh! what a beautiful sight!"