speech, Landri detected that instinctive hostility, unintelligible to
him, which he had always encountered in Pierre. The physician had
lectured in order to avoid having to talk. And not a word of inquiry as
to his own father, when they had not met for more than a year! Not a
word about M. de Claviers-Grandchamp, who had always been so kind to
him! Pierre Chaffin had an excuse--the ill-humor in which his master,
Professor Louvet, had put him by asking him not to leave Rue de
Solferino. The head of the clinic obeyed his "grand pontiff,"--the
students irreverently give that title to the masters on whom their
futures depend,--and he relieved himself by being ungracious to one who,
more than all others, represented that fashionable society to the
prestige of which his chief sacrificed him. There was not the slightest
failure of professional duty. A physician must not cavil at his
science,--with the friends of a patient. That was nothing--that theory
concerning the dreams of delirium--except a slightly pedantic excursus.
It was sufficient to cause the words extorted from Jaubourg by the
intoxication of his disease, if the crisis should come on in Landri's
presence, to assume an entirely different meaning in the young man's
mind. Alas! he had no need of that scientific "key." Unaided he would
have deciphered only too easily the dying man's words! They carried
their terrifying clearness with them. Nevertheless, the hypothesis of a
death-bed insanity would have left room for a doubt which the
scientist's lucid diagnosis had made untenable.
When Madame de Claviers' son entered his chamber, the dying man seemed
to be exhausted by the high fever of the night, and to be more calm. He
lay on a bed in the middle of the room, himself a curiosity for
exhibition, like all the articles of furniture of that room, brought
together during many years, with the painstaking zeal of a collector.
This elegance of stage-setting rendered more painful the last hours of
the old man, whose appearance shocked Landri, warned though he had been.
The cheeks were burning, the whole face hyperæmic; the eyes shone with
the unnatural brilliancy of suffering, and the hurried, almost
spasmodic, dilatation of the nostrils told of the struggle against
suffocation.
In his lifetime--it was already permissible to speak thus of
him--Jaubourg had been the typical society man, who does not surrender;
the worldling whose courageous courtesy spares others the contact and
the spectacle of his degeneration. That degeneration was complete
to-day, ominously undeniable and irreparable. But as a matter of habit
the Parisian had mustered energy to make a last toilet. His face was
washed and shaved, his sparse gray locks brushed, his hands cared for.
He had put on a dressing-jacket of soft silk. Puerile yet pathetic
details, which indicated his desire not to leave a too perverted image
of himself in the memory of his visitor, the only one whom he had
admitted during the last half-week. He had expressly forbidden Joseph to
notify the few relations--very distant they were--that he still
possessed. He had trembled lest they should suspect a condition of
affairs which he had made it a point of honor to conceal for twenty-nine
years. Yes, every effort of his life had had but one aim: to leave his
fortune to the son he had had by another man's wife, without causing the
world or that other man to wonder. The world--he had succeeded in
hoodwinking it almost absolutely by such prodigies of diplomacy! The
stories told by two or three members of his family, such as Madame
Privat, had not gone outside a very small circle, and intimates with the
perspicacity of a Bressieux are rare. The friendship which Jaubourg had
manifested for M. de Claviers since his widowhood, and which, by a
strange but very human anomaly, was sincere, would have put that
noble-minded man's suspicions to sleep, if he had conceived any. But
that great heart did not know what it was to distrust! It was he whom
Jaubourg by his will had made his sole legatee, without informing him or
anyone else. His reflections had led him to this roundabout method of
assuring to Landri his three millions at least. He had, as we have seen,
carried his scrupulosity to the point of being persistently cold in his
treatment of the young man, who, like everybody else, must never know
the truth.
The adulterine father had anticipated everything, everything except the
death-agony among the hallucinations of memory! On his death-bed he was
to destroy this masterpiece of his prudence, and, we must add, of a
chivalry instigated perhaps by a tacit rivalry with the magnanimous
friend whom his passion had caused him to betray. He had failed therein,
for the first time, in yielding to the unspeakable craving to see once
more, before taking his departure forever, that son who bore another's
name and who was so dear to him.
Few men have the strength to die absolutely alone. Jaubourg had alleged
to himself the pretext of talking to the young man of the project of
marriage with Mademoiselle de Charlus, to which he attached very great
importance. He had not foreseen the loss of energy under the attacks of
his malady, or the animal cry of nature in rebellion.
"You have come, my friend," he said in a short, jerky voice, in which
there was already a hint of the death-rattle. "You have come," he
repeated; "thanks." And he pressed the hand that the other held out, in
a passionate grasp. What a contrast to the guarded and quickly withdrawn
clasp that he had always given him, as if unwillingly and with the ends
of his fingers! This had been one of the most painful to the sensitive
Landri of all the indications of his antipathy. "I wanted to speak to
you--before I die--For I am going to die." And, as the other protested:
"What's the use of lying? I feel death coming. I haven't much strength.
Every word tears me apart." He pointed to both sides of his chest. "I
must speak quickly--I wanted to talk to you," he insisted,--"about your
marriage--"
"To Mademoiselle de Charlus?" rejoined the young man. He had noticed
that Jaubourg, like Chaffin a moment earlier, did not mention M. de
Claviers. "He doesn't really care for him, either," he thought,
recalling the last words that the marquis had shouted after him as they
parted. "It's the disease," he reflected further. "And I had thought of
consulting him about the tricks of our creditors--and I find him in this
state!"--He added, aloud: "My father told me how deeply you had
interested yourself for me in that matter, and I thank you heartily, you
understand,--heartily."
"Claviers mentioned it to you?" rejoined the dying man; and added, with
feverish anxiety, "and you replied?"
"That I shall never marry a woman I do not love, and that I do not love
Mademoiselle de Charlus."
"I was sure of it!" groaned Jaubourg, leaning forward sorrowfully. A
hoarse cough shook him, which he tried to check with his handkerchief,
upon which spots like rust appeared. "Don't call," he summoned strength
to say to Landri, who was putting out his hand to touch the button of
the electric bell. In face of the manifest terror of that appeal, he
remembered the doctor's recommendations. He obeyed. The invalid,
exhausted by the paroxysm of coughing, smoothed his hand to signify his
gratitude. He had thrown himself back, with his eyes closed. He reopened
them, to resume: "But _she_ loves _you_! And she is charming! And then,
there's the future--I don't know what you will find when Claviers is no
longer there. I have never been able to make him talk about his money
matters. He doesn't know where he stands himself. Ah! I tremble for you.
I have done what I could. But this Charlus marriage--everything would be
straightened out, everything. This Chaffin, in whom he has such blind
confidence, what is he? I have never been able to find out that, either.
Oh! my poor, poor Landri!"
His excitement increased. The young man did not yet interpret in their
true meaning words which, however, clothed with a new aspect that
strange nature; did they not betray a preoccupation wholly intent upon
him, in a man whom he regarded as a friend of his father exclusively? On
the other hand these words of distrust in connection with Chaffin
corresponded too nearly with the feeling aroused in his own mind for him
not to follow them up.
"Do you, too, look upon Chaffin with suspicion?"
"For a very long time," Jaubourg replied. "You will ask me: 'In that
case, why do you place yourself in his son's care?' Louvet forced him on
me. I did not refuse. I didn't think that I was so seriously ill! And
then, the son isn't the same sort as the father. But you don't know what
it is, to feel at times that you are going off, that you are speaking,
that you have spoken. And then you don't remember what you have
said--not a word. Everything is black before the mind. How I suffered
from that impression last night! Joseph swore that I didn't say
anything. You can believe him. He is reliable, perfectly reliable.--My
God! that feeling is coming back!--My head!--it aches. Oh! how it aches!
It's as if I had a pain in my mind!"--He took his head in his hands and
pressed it. Another paroxysm of coughing bent him double; he came out of
it repeating: "No! no! no! no!" Then, as if that almost convulsive
denial had renewed his strength, he added, speaking more jerkily than
ever: "I know why you won't marry this girl, who is so rich, who would
rescue you if Claviers has squandered everything! I know why. You still
love the other."
"What other?" queried Landri. The overmastering compassion that he felt
for the invalid's evident agony did not prevent him from starting at
that direct allusion. One fact stood out in his memory: Valentine
imploring him not to go up to Jaubourg's room, not to see him. Were they
acquainted, then? His surprise was so great that he insisted almost
harshly: "What other, I say? Whom are you referring to?"
"To that Madame Olier," said Jaubourg. "Oh! Landri, not those eyes, not
that voice! I can't stand that!--Look you,--I say nothing against her. I
know that no one ever spoke ill of her. But at Saint-Mihiel you saw her
constantly--I know that. She is a widow. I know that too, and where she
lives. I should have found a way to know her, if it had been necessary.
I know everything that concerns you, you see. I have always found a way
to know it, day by day, ever since you were born. You mustn't think of
marrying her. If she loves you for yourself, she ought not to think of
it, either. In the first place, Claviers will never consent. And
secondly you must be rich. I want you to be rich--I want it.--You don't
understand. You must not understand.--Ah! I have always loved you so
dearly, you know, Landri, and I have never been able to show it. It was
my duty not to. It's my duty now.--My head is getting confused again,
like yesterday.--But I don't want--I don't want--No. No. No. I won't say
anything.--Go away, Joseph. Go away, Chaffin. They're looking at me.
They shall not know. They shall not know.--My Landri! my own Landri!"
"Neither Joseph nor Chaffin is here," said the young man. "Calm
yourself, Jaubourg. Calm yourself."
He made him lie down again, very gently. Those few sentences from the
dying man's lips had moved him to the inmost depths of his being. With
what a passionate interest the man must have followed him in order to
have obtained such detailed information concerning incidents of so
private a nature! M. de Claviers did not even suspect Madame Olier's
existence before their conversation in the forest, and Jaubourg knew
everything about her! He knew everything about him, he had said, "day by
day, ever since he was born." What did those enigmatic words mean, and
uttered, too, in such a tone? And those other words: "I have always
loved you so dearly! I have never been able to show it. _It was my duty
not to_!"
And, already disturbed even to anguish, Landri repeated: "They are not
here. I am alone with you, all alone;" and, almost in a tone of
entreaty: "Before me you can say anything; speak, if that will calm you.
For you must calm yourself. You must."
"I have nothing to say," Jaubourg replied, "to anyone. To anyone." He
had recovered his self-control once more. "I am quite calm. But my head
gets so confused! Kiss me, Landri. Bid me adieu. I wanted to see you for
that.--Oh! Just once, let me kiss you once as I love you. Oh! my child!
my child!"
Tears gushed from his eyes, and rolled down amid the sweat with which
his face was bathed. He rested his moist face on the young man's hands.
He pressed him to his heart. He touched his hair and his shoulders; and
Landri, aghast at the horrible thing that was being disclosed to him,
listened as he continued:--
"You have gone back to your kind voice.--Your voice! That was my only
joy in you. When you were a little child, at Grandchamp, I used to go
into the library to listen to you as you played in the garden under the
windows."--He had raised himself to a sitting posture. The dream
described by the doctor was beginning.--"You don't see me, nor anyone
else. I am looking at you.--You run about, your curly hair floats in the
wind--your mother's hair.--She comes to you, along the path, against the
yews. The air has colored her cheeks. How lovely she is!--She knows I am
there. She smiles at me over our child's head.--Where has she gone?" His
eyes had changed their expression. They were fixed on other
scenes.--"How tiny she looks in that great bed! She insisted on dressing
up. Her pearls sink into the folds in the skin of her neck!--Ah! how she
suffers at the thought of death! So young, and that frightful
disease!--I am going. You know that if I could stay I would not leave
you, Geneviève--tell me that you know it.--I love you! I love
you!--They are taking her away.--Look! I do not weep. You can look at
me, I shall not betray her.--Geoffroy,--he is weeping. I do not weep. I
still have our child. He shall have everything, everything. I have found
a way--You sha'n't prevent that! You sha'n't prevent it!"
A terrifying vision had suddenly succeeded the pictures among which
Landri had recognized--with ever-increasing horror!--the amusements of
his childhood, his sick mother, and the minute detail of the pearl
necklace about her fleshless neck; that mother's burial--and the rest!
The invalid had raised himself in his bed. He was gazing at the young
man, with a stupefied expression in his eyes, evidently mingling the
altogether confused impression aroused by his presence with the
nightmare that had possession of him.
"You say that he's my son! You have no right to think that," he groaned,
"you don't know--Don't say it--I forbid you to say it!"
Then, as the illusion assumed a more definite and more alarming form, he
uttered a loud shriek and jumped out of his bed.
This outcry was heard through the partition. It reached the ears of the
servant and the doctor, both of whom rushed into the chamber at the same
moment, just in time to stop the invalid, who had darted toward the
window to escape from the voices that he heard.
"Leave us alone," said the doctor to Landri, who was so horrorstruck by
the scene, that he had not even gone to the assistance of the victim of
hallucination. "Joseph and I can take care of him."
He pushed the young man into the study, where he remained quarter of an
hour, half an hour, completely crushed, as if he himself were in the
clutches of a nightmare which paralyzed him with terror. At last the
doctor reappeared. His face bore the marks of extraordinary
preoccupation.
"I have just given him an injection of morphine, to subdue him," he
said. "He will doze now, till the end. But such a paroxysm! That of last
night was a mere outline.--Above all things pay no attention to what he
may have said to you. It was absolute mental confusion,--madness." He
repeated: "madness."
He looked his companion squarely in the face--too squarely--as he
emitted that phrase which contradicted so utterly his earlier formulas:
"He lives over past events.--The depths of his memory come to the
surface." He himself realized, no doubt, the terrible bearing of the
antithesis between this second assertion and the former one, for he
could not help blushing. What words had Jaubourg uttered, then, in his
delirium, that were even more explicit? Had he pronounced, before those
witnesses, the horrifying sentence: "I was Madame de Claviers' lover,
and Landri is my son?" At all events, that was the ghastly fact that
Chaffin had grasped amid the sick man's divagations, as Landri himself
had done; and, at this additional evidence, he felt an icy chill run
through his whole body.
When a man is suddenly brought face to face with a fact of supremely
tragic importance to him, which he cannot honestly doubt, and of which
he had no previous suspicion, an interval of semi-stupefaction succeeds,
of brief duration, during which he could not himself say what his
sensations are. It is not grief, for the man does not comprehend what he
has just learned. He does not realize it. Nor is it hesitation. Later he
will be able to argue, he will attempt, rather, to argue, against the
evidence. For the moment the fact has entered into him, with its
irresistible force, as a steel point enters the flesh that it passes
through, and there ensues, in the most secret depths of his being, that
total upheaval of nature to which the hymn in the liturgy refers:
_Stupebit et natura_. However, life goes on about this man who has been
stricken to death and knows it not. It even goes on within him, and he
seconds it, and he obeys its behests with an automatism resembling that
of an evil suggestion. In this state Landri descended the stairs from
Jaubourg's apartment, re-entered the cab he had left at the door, and
gave the cabman Maître Métivier's address, almost without being
conscious of it. The clock, wound before the terrible shock, performed
its functions mechanically.
The notary was not at his office. Of what consequence now to the young
man were those financial difficulties which had seemed so formidable to
him? What were they in presence of this other horrible thing? He left
his letter, and went on, on foot, toward the club on Rue Scribe where he
had determined to lunch. A telegraph office that he passed reminded him
of his promise to send M. de Claviers a despatch. He went in; and there,
as he rested his elbow on the desk of blackened wood, before the printed
form, and dipped his pen into the ink, this species of somnambulism
suddenly ceased. His consciousness returned, acute and heart-rending.
That ghastly hour that he had just lived through was a reality. Jaubourg
was really dying. He had really said to him those words which still
filled his ears and which had rooted in his mind the most cruel, the
most ineradicable of ideas. A sudden evocation showed him M. de Claviers
entering that same room, and the dying man, in the throes of the same
delirium, uttering the same words.
"That shall not be!" he said, and he crumpled the paper, on which he had
not even begun to write the address, with a convulsive gesture of
dismay. Feverishly he wrote on another sheet: "Marquis de
Claviers-Grandchamp. Château de Grandchamp, Oise.--Don't be alarmed. A
decided improvement;" and signed it. Then he handed the untruthful
despatch through the wicket.
He was within two steps of the club. The sight of one of the members
going in at the door, who, fortunately, did not see him, made him stop
short and walk away, almost run, in the opposite direction. That member
of the club knew Charles Jaubourg, as all the others did. He would ask
him for news of him. The friendship between the sick man and M. de
Claviers was legendary.--Friendship!--Suddenly Landri said to himself:
"They all know. Such scandals as this the world always knows; it hawks
them about and laughs at them. The whole club knows. All Paris knows.
There were only two people who didn't know."
He walked on and on,--how long he could not have told,--flying from
those witnesses of the family disgrace, flying from himself. He
mechanically entered a restaurant for luncheon, but had hardly begun to
eat when he rose. Another image sprang up in his mind,--that of
Valentine Olier. She too knew. That was the meaning of the exclamation
that rushed from her lips: "Monsieur Jaubourg dying? I hope he won't see
you"; of her entreaty not to see the sick man. She knew! With a bound as
brutally instinctive as the contraction of his fingers on the white
telegraphic form just before, Landri left the restaurant. He hailed
another cab, to fly to her.
In his unreasoning excitement he had walked heedlessly, from street to
street, as far as the network that encompasses the Department of the
Interior. He was quite near Rue du Faubourg-Saint-Honoré, where the
town mansion of the Claviers-Grandchamps is situated. There his mother
had died. There he had lived ever since with--By what name should he
call henceforth the man whom he loved and should always love as a son
loves his father, and who was nothing at all to him, nothing more than a
great-souled honorable man, outraged by the most terrible of affronts,
by those of the flesh of which his flesh was the offspring? The thought
of seeing that house again was abhorrent to the wretched youth. He had
given the cabman Madame Olier's address. As he was preparing to turn
into Rue des Saussaies, Landri knocked on the glass as if he would break
it. He ordered the man to go by way of Rue de Suresnes, Boulevard
Malesherbes, and Rue Royale. The mere aspect of the quarter in which he
had passed his childhood was, physically, intolerable to him. He closed
his eyes that he might recognize nothing. But in that crisis of his life
what impression could he receive that would not make him cry out in
pain?
And now he was going to Valentine. To tell her what? To ask her
what?--The cab had crossed Place de la Concorde, passed through Rue de
Bourgogne and Rue Barbet-de-Jouy, and was rumbling over the pavement of
Rue Monsieur; and he was still asking himself that question, without
finding any reply thereto. To have conceived that ghastly suspicion,
that certainty, alas! concerning Madame de Claviers and his own birth,
was such a disgrace to begin with! To put that idea in words, even to
Valentine, especially to Valentine, would be a crime! The affection of a
son for his mother bears so sacred a character, all the loving energies
of our being combine so powerfully to make her a creature apart from all
others, purer, more irreproachable, more venerable! Was Landri to
overstep the bounds of that respect which he alone could never cease to
feel for Madame de Claviers, whatever she might have done? Should he
repeat, voluntarily, knowingly, those terrible words torn from a dying
man by the approach of the death-agony,--words by which he himself, as
soon as he had heard them, was, as it were, stunned, ay, struck dead?
And yet it was absolutely necessary that he should find out whether
Valentine knew and what she knew. The nervous shock had been too
violent. All power of inhibition was momentarily suspended in him. His
thought was certain to become an act the instant that it bore any
relation to the overwhelming revelation that he had had to undergo. So
that it was impossible for him not to cross the courtyard, not to ring
at Madame Olier's door, not to ask if she would receive him. It had not
even occurred to him that it was barely half-past twelve, that their
appointment was for two o'clock, and that the simple fact of his
arriving unexpectedly indicated some extraordinary occurrence. Did he so
much as remember the reason that he and the young woman had made the
appointment, and the passionate and painful interview of yesterday
concerning their marriage? There is a peculiar characteristic of such
uncontrollably excited mental states into which we are cast by a too
abrupt and too violent shock: our mental equilibrium is temporarily
upset. Our most cherished sentiments are arrested as it were, and our
power of prevision as well. We seem to be looking on at the throwing out
of gear of certain all-powerful sensations which lead us where they
choose.
The bell had no sooner rung than Landri would have been glad to flee
again as he had been fleeing. He remained.
"Either later, or now," he said to himself, "I must see her. I prefer
now, and to know at once the whole extent of this dishonor."