his knowledge, any one except himself and the servants entered the sick
man's bedroom. If no one went in, he will say no, simply. If some one
did go in, and that some one was his father, he will be confused. If it
is only for a second, I shall see it. That will be a certain indication,
and then I shall act."
How? By what steps? He did not know. But on the other hand he did know
that he was on his way to another trying scene in which all the
suffering of the last weeks would be revived, on seeing the physician
for the first time since that fatal Tuesday. He recalled Pierre's
preoccupied expression as he came from his delirious patient's bedside,
and the persistence with which he repeated: "It's downright madness."
But what then? They were likely to meet at any time, and if Landri
really proposed to keep to the compact he had made with M. de Claviers
and to defend his mother's memory, guilty though she was, against this
witness of Jaubourg's death-agony, it was much better to see him at once
and to bear himself in their interview as if the dying man had in truth
talked mere nonsense, which was of no consequence.
There was, to be sure, a difficulty of another sort. Pierre was the son
of a man dismissed by the marquis for dishonesty. True. But Landri was
not making a personal call upon him. He was going to seek information at
the hands of a doctor who had been paid by M. de Claviers; for
Jaubourg's residuary legatee must have paid all the debts of the
deceased, including the expenses of the last sickness. Moreover, if
Pierre was not Chaffin's confederate, he certainly did not know the true
reason of his father's discharge. His father would never have told him.
In that case there was nothing in Landri's procedure to surprise the
doctor. In the contrary case, why spare a couple of brigands?
All varieties of grief have their egoism. There was another hypothesis
which Madame de Claviers' son did not consider: perhaps, since his
father's dismissal, Pierre Chaffin had been passing through a crisis
similar to that of which his playmate in childhood was undergoing the
terrors. Between ignorance and actual complicity, there is room for
suspicion. Let us say at once that such was the plight of the physician,
worried to the point of dismay by the visible change that he had
observed in his father during the past month.
One afternoon in November Chaffin had appeared, in a state of great
agitation. He had told his son that the marquis had made him the
scapegoat of his follies. He had inveighed against the ingratitude of
the _grand seigneur_, in whose service his life had been passed, had
declared that he would accept nothing, not even the smallest pension,
from that man, and had forbidden his name to be mentioned in his
presence. Since then he had been wasting away in a melancholic state,
the true causes of which were, on the one hand, terror lest his son
should learn the real reason of his disgrace, and on the other hand the
most violent and invincible remorse.
Landri's instinct had led him to the right conclusion. Chaffin was the
anonymous informer. Enraged by the sudden collapse of his hopes, the
loss of a commission which would have rounded out his fortune, and
really convinced in his own mind that M. de Claviers would renounce the
Jaubourg legacy, Chaffin had gone to Altona to strike another bargain
with him, and to demand not one but two per cent of the four millions
offered for the list of treasures preserved at Grandchamp. He agreed, in
consideration of that sum, to induce the marquis to reopen the
negotiations that had been instantly broken off by the legacy. Altona
had accepted his offer.
Chaffin had in his possession a letter from Madame de Claviers to
Jaubourg. He had opened it when he was only a tutor, nearly eighteen
years before. Finding it on a table, in a package prepared for the post,
he had yielded to an intense curiosity to learn the real relations
between the friend of the family and the marchioness. That was the
period at which the process of corruption already described began.
Perhaps this discovery of the sin of his pupil's mother was the most
virulent element in his moral degeneration. He had not used the paper,
as he might have done, as the foundation of a lucrative system of
blackmail. He was not ripe for such villainy. But he had not destroyed
it, by reason of that sort of vague expectation which, in certain
natures, outwardly sound but rotten at the core, is, as it were, the
gestation of crime. He had, in fact, supplemented it by adding to
it--these were the "other documents"--three notes from Jaubourg,
pilfered from Landri's mother's desk. At the time the lovers had
discovered, with dismay, the disappearance of Madame de Claviers'
letter. They had both made cautious inquiry, and failing to learn
anything, had attributed the loss to some irregularity on the part of
the mail. The marchioness had not detected the second theft, which would
have put her on the scent. Jaubourg had always suspected Chaffin. That
was the meaning of the question, "What is he?" uttered in such distress
on his death-bed.
That is the sort of man that the former tutor was: a scoundrel who
lacked only a tempting opportunity. The bait of eighty thousand francs
was the opportunity. He had written the anonymous letter himself, on his
typewriter. He had placed it in an envelope with the other, the
incriminating one, and despatched them both to the marquis. But although
a greedy longing for gain, added to base and pitiless envy of the _grand
seigneur_, had impelled him to do this disgraceful deed in an hour of
madness, when the blow was dealt, his conscience of the earlier days, of
the humble giver of lessons to worthy bourgeois, had begun to make
itself heard. He could not banish from his thoughts the haunting image
of M. de Claviers' face as he had seen it during the fortnight between
his crime and his dismissal, so haggard, so ravaged by suffering! His
handiwork terrified him, especially as the end sought--at such a
price!--was not attained. Contrary to his expectation, the marquis went
on paying his debts. Pictures, furniture, hangings, remained at
Grandchamp. The eighty thousand francs Altona had promised him would
never come to his hands.
There are not many criminals who, in the face of a useless crime,
practise the calm philosophy of the assassin in the old story, who found
only a single sou in his victim's pocket, and observed: "A hundred like
this will make five francs!" The absolute inutility of his murderous
villainy did not even afford Chaffin the semi-insensibility which might
have come from the possession of that little fortune which, added to the
store already accumulated, would have given him a round twenty thousand
francs a year.
Tormented by this fixed idea, he was beginning to exhibit symptoms of
the acute mental alienation which incessant, poignant regret for an
irreparable sin is likely to cause in a man of some education. He could
no longer eat or sleep, read or write, attend to any business or remain
quiet. This agitation had not escaped the son's notice. The doctor had
begun, almost automatically, to watch his father. He soon assured
himself that these symptoms, so readily interpreted by an alienist, were
caused by no physical disturbance. The cause was entirely mental--the
physician said, cerebral. Almost automatically again, he had sought that
cause.
One fact aroused his suspicion: he fancied that he observed a certain
constraint in Professor Louvet's manner toward himself. As the head of
the clinical staff he was in constant communication with the illustrious
master of the Hôtel-Dieu. It had seemed to him, during the last weeks,
that his chief's handshake was, not less cordial, but less unreserved,
less familiar--in a word, that there was "a thorn" in it, as they would
have said to each other in neurologists' parlance, in speaking of a
common abrasion of the skin on a patient. Under any other circumstances
Pierre would not have hesitated to question the professor. He did not do
it. He had put together the two symptoms: the change in his master's
manner to him, and the change in his father. He had drawn therefrom the
conclusion, still automatically,--a profession like his ends by
imparting a mechanical method, an instinctive gait, to the mind,--that
the same fact was at the root of both. What fact? The quarrel between
Chaffin and M. de Claviers, that old and very important patient of
Louvet.
Pierre knew the marquis well, and although he had for him the antipathy
of one social class for another, his innate sense of justice compelled
him to esteem the great nobleman's greatness of soul. No, the châtelain
of Grandchamp, who bestowed pensions on scores of old servants,--only
two months since, his factotum was bewailing the fact at the family
table!--had not parted, without weighty reasons, from one whom he had
had in his service so many years.
What were those reasons? This question had been haunting the physician
for several days, with such persistent and increasing distress, that it
had occurred to him to seek an answer to it from Landri. He had been
deterred by very diverse considerations. It will be recalled that their
relations had never been perfectly simple. It was hard for the plebeian
to ask the titled man if his, the plebeian's, father had been guilty of
any offence contrary to honor. It was painful, too, for the physician,
who had learned, in the delirium of a death-agony, the secret of an
illegitimate birth, to seek a meeting with the son of the patient,--a
meeting over which that consciousness would hover like a pall,
especially as Pierre knew the terms of Jaubourg's will, and he did the
child of that adulterous connection the justice to believe that M. de
Claviers' acceptance of the legacy was torture to him.
One can imagine now the shock that it caused him, as he sat at work one
afternoon in his little study, littered with books and pamphlets,
when the maid handed him a card on which he read: "Comte de
Claviers-Grandchamp." Fate, which is wont to teach such lessons, brought
those two men face to face, who were born and reared under such widely
different conditions, and who were undergoing, unknown to each other,
the same universal ordeal of heredity, whereof one of the ancients said:
"We shall be punished, either in our own persons or in those of our
descendants, for the sins we have committed in this world." This is the
principle, at once mysterious and natural, moral and physiological,
which, by uniting persons of the same blood, creates the Family and
Society.
Pierre's first impulse--so intolerable to him was the thought of his
father's possible shame--was to reply: "I am not at home;" the
second, to say: "Show him in." For the very reason that he was
ignorant of the real reason for the dismissal of the steward of the
Claviers-Grandchamps, he was unwilling to appear to dread a conversation
with the future head of that house, and he thought:--
"What does he want of me? Doubtless he has come on account of the will.
He is going to ask me not to mention what I may have heard and guessed.
Those people have no appreciation of the honor of the medical
profession. Bah! the honor of a bourgeois in the eyes of a noble!--A
noble?" He laughed sneeringly,--"and of an officer with such ideas as
this incompetent has, and as he exhibited in that stupid business of the
inventory!"
As will be seen, his customary surly humor had already returned to this
strange creature, who had always taken life against the grain, if we may
so express it, because of his false position on the edge of a society in
which he had no well-defined place. The result was that on entering that
little room, the aspect of which disclosed the professional and
intellectual ardor of its tenant, Landri de Claviers encountered the
same armed glance that he had always known, behind the young scientist's
gold-bowed spectacles. With his red beard and his irregular features, as
if carved by a bill-hook, which gave him the aspect of a Tartar, the
younger Chaffin really had, at that moment, the look of a very
evil-minded man. This sensation was calculated to impart and did in fact
impart a dryness, almost a bitterness of accent to Landri's first words,
which were destined instantly to transform that conversation into a
brief and fierce duel.
"I shall not detain you long," he began, after they had exchanged a few
words of ordinary courtesy. Because of their former companionship and
their difference in rank, they never knew how to address each other.
They never called each other "monsieur," or by their names simply. "I
have come upon a delicate, a very delicate errand. But the question I
have come to ask is not put to the man, but to the physician who
attended Monsieur Jaubourg."
He had the strength to pronounce those two syllables without removing
his eyes from the other, who could not restrain a contraction of his
bushy eyebrows and a curl of his lip as he replied:--
"I am at your service so far as this question does not run counter to my
duty as a physician. We have a duty of absolute silence, which you do
not suspect," he continued with a peculiar bitterness: "nec visa, nec
audita, nec intellecta[7] is the old form of the Hippocratic oath. It is
still true."
"It is a very simple matter," rejoined Landri. "You are aware that
Monsieur de Claviers is Monsieur Jaubourg's legatee. We have obtained
proof that some papers of great importance were taken from his apartment
during the last days of his illness. Well! I would be glad to have your
word--"
"That I didn't take them?" the doctor hastily interrupted. "Don't tell
me that you came here to ask me that," he continued with an outburst of
anger; "I will not allow it."
"You might have let me finish my sentence," retorted Landri, more
calmly, but very little more. Being absolutely ignorant of the inward
tragedy--so like his own, alas!--of which Pierre Chaffin was the victim,
this outbreak at the bare idea of a suspicion of dishonesty was
inexplicable to him. He had said nothing to justify it, and being
rendered so sensitive by his own suffering, he could not brook a reply
uttered in such a tone. "I finish that sentence. I would be glad to have
your word, not that you did not take the papers, but simply that no
person, to your knowledge, entered Monsieur Jaubourg's bedroom during
his illness,--besides the servants, Professor Louvet, and yourself, of
course. It seems to me that there is nothing in that to cause any
sensitiveness on your part. It is simply a matter of preventing
suspicion from going astray. You should be the first to desire it."
"I have no answer to make to a question of that sort," said Pierre. He
did not clearly discern his questioner's object. It was true that he
would have no right to take offence at the question, if it had not been
couched in terms too imperious and inquisitorial. The conclusion
especially had irritated him. But as Landri had affected to speak in a
very self-contained tone, almost ceremonious in its stiffness, he
determined to meet his coldness with equal coldness. He would have been
humiliated to appear less able to control his nerves, or less polished,
than the young noble, and he added: "I do not admit that it is the duty
of a physician to keep watch over his patient otherwise than
professionally. I venture to assert that I treated Monsieur Jaubourg to
the best of my ability, and that is all that his heirs have a right to
concern themselves about with respect to me."
"It is not a question of keeping watch," Landri replied. "You compel me,
in spite of myself, to make my questions more precise. Did you admit no
stranger to the invalid's bedroom? For you did receive visitors, I know
from Joseph."
"Visitors?" exclaimed the physician. "No one, except my father." He had
no sooner pronounced the word, than he ejaculated the "Ah!" of one who
suddenly grasps the situation. He was silent for a moment. Then,
controlling himself with an effort, he continued, throwing out his
breast and walking up to the other, with distorted face and breathing
quickly: "I will satisfy you. I give you my word of honor that I
admitted no one to Monsieur Jaubourg's bedroom,--no one, you understand;
my word of honor, and it's the word of an honest man, again you
understand! And that gives me the right to put a question to
you, in my turn. For all you call yourself Monsieur le Comte de
Claviers-Grandchamp, and I am simple Pierre Chaffin, we are no longer
living under the old régime, and I don't know that you are entitled to
come here, on your private authority, to question me like an examining
magistrate. You told me that some one had stolen papers from Monsieur
Jaubourg's, and you asked me if the person from whom I received a visit
did not go into the room where the stolen papers were. That was
equivalent to saying that you suspected that person of stealing them,
and that person was my father. My question is this: Do you suspect my
father, or do you not?"
"I will say, as you said just now, that I have no answer to make, having
named no one," Landri retorted.
His irritation faded away in the face of evidence: he had before him in
very truth an absolutely honest man. He had felt it in the vigor with
which Pierre had asserted his honor, in the upheaval of his whole being,
above all in his outcry of indignant surprise. And lo! a strange and
melancholy sympathy stirred in his heart. The tone in which the son had
spoken of his father echoed in the depths of his soul. It was like a
sudden repetition of his own inward lament. He observed with dismay
that, having come thither to obtain confirmation of one suspicion, his
visit had aroused another, not in his own mind, but in that of the very
person upon whom he had relied to discover the truth; and already it had
ceased to be in his power to allay that suspicion.
"To decline to answer is to answer," said Pierre Chaffin. "So papers are
missing from Monsieur Jaubourg's, valuable papers, no doubt, and you,
and Monsieur de Claviers, I suppose, with you, accuse my father of the
theft!"
"No valuable paper is missing from Monsieur Jaubourg's," replied Landri,
"and, once more, we accuse no one."
"If it is not valuable papers that have disappeared," continued the
physician, "it must be letters. And why do people steal letters? To sell
them, threatening to make them public, for blackmail."
His habit of inductive reasoning began to work anew, and in that moment
of supreme agony, he made use of what he knew to guess the rest. Letters
had been stolen. What letters? Those which referred to the birth of the
child of Jaubourg and Madame de Claviers. They were afraid of blackmail.
What sort of blackmail? That which the will suggested. And he said
aloud, changing from questioned to questioner, to suppliant rather, he
trembled so with anxiety as he made this appeal to his playmate in
childhood:--
"I gave you my word just now; give me your word that you did not believe
that my father was capable of that.--You don't answer? Then it must be
that you did believe it. And yet you and Monsieur de Claviers are not
cruel. You believed that? Why? I must know. I must know everything,
everything, everything, and first of all the real reason why my father
and Monsieur de Claviers parted. I am a man, Landri, and I am addressing
another man. What was the reason? Tell me."
"You are well aware that I was not here," Landri replied. "I know
nothing positive."
"Yes or no, did you hear any talk of dishonesty?"
"I heard something said of confusion in Monsieur de Claviers' affairs,"
said Landri. "But I give you my word on this--that this matter of
Jaubourg's papers, as to which I wanted to obtain your testimony, had no
connection whatever with the reasons that may have led Monsieur de
Claviers to dispense with Monsieur Chaffin's services."
He was only too well aware, when he made this indefinite reply, that the
craving for knowledge with which the other was consumed demanded a reply
of a very different tenor. But he could not answer yes or no. He had
suffered too keenly when he learned of his mother's sin to allow his
lips to form words which should inform a son of his father's crime. Nor
would his sense of honor permit him to be lavish of denials. Indeed,
what was the use? When he decided upon this step, he had had no means of
divining that Pierre's mind was already disturbed, so that he had
immediately read into his question a meaning that was only too dear.
This altogether unforeseen result of their interview created in Landri's
mind the impression of an inevitable destiny, which he had felt many
times since his visit to his real father's death-bed, and he was, as it
were, paralyzed by it. Was that impression shared by the physician, or
was the poor fellow afraid of learning more? The evasive reply returned
by his interlocutor to so pitilessly precise a question seemed to have
overwhelmed him. He questioned him no further.
After a few moments of exceedingly painful silence, Landri rose. The
other did not try to detain him, and the young men parted, just touching
each other's fingers, and almost afraid to look at each other.
The same impression of Necessity, of a network of events woven by a will
stronger than his own, haunted Landri throughout that evening, which he
was able to pass alone, by good luck, M. de Claviers having gone to
Grandchamp. He found it on his pillow when he awoke, still pursued by
the image of that young man with whom he had played as a child, and whom
he saw as he had left him, pale and motionless in the grasp of that
horrible thought: "My father is a thief." As he said to himself at
Saint-Mihiel, "If the Clermont train had only been late!" so he said
now, "If only Louvet had not sent him to Rue de Solferino in order to
help him along! If only his father had not gone to see him--merely by
chance, perhaps!"
But is there such a thing as chance in the world? The triviality of the
incidents which had led up, in Pierre's case as well as in his own, to
so terrible an ordeal, confounded Landri, especially as that ordeal was
merited--by whom? By those of whom they were born.
The vision of the common catastrophe which enveloped the son of the
felonious steward and the son of the unfaithful wife, reached the point
of absolutely terrifying him when, about half-past nine, his servant
handed him a letter of which the handwriting alone made him tremble with
excitement. He was preparing to pay Joseph another visit. He had changed
his hypothesis since his visit to Quai de Béthune. He desired to talk
with Joseph concerning the people who were most intimate with Jaubourg,
remembering M. de Claviers' expression: "That smells of the club." As
will be seen, he had entirely abandoned the idea of incriminating
Chaffin. Now, this letter was from Chaffin!
The young man's heart beat fast, as he tore the envelope open, and yet
faster as he read these lines:--
"Landri, your old master implores you, in the name of the past, to
receive him instantly. He has a favor to ask of you which will save more
than his life, and he can perhaps do you a service which will wipe out
many things."
"Admit Monsieur Chaffin," he said to the valet; and almost in the same
breath: "Do you know whether Monsieur le Marquis has returned from
Grandchamp?"
"Last night, Monsieur le Comte," the servant replied; and while he left
the room to summon the discharged steward, Landri said to himself:--
"Do me a service? What if he were really the culprit? What if he has
brought the other letters? What if I am able to get them and give them
to _him_, in a few minutes?"
And the mere thought of M. de Claviers' expression as he thanked him
warmed his whole heart!
[Footnote 7: "A physician should disclose neither what he has seen, nor
what he has heard, nor what he has divined."]
IX
SEPARATION
Chaffin was profoundly preoccupied, and very anxious as he followed the
footman who was instructed to usher him into Landri's presence. He would
have been even more so if he had glanced through the windows of the long
glass gallery that surrounded the courtyard of the hôtel. His legs,
trembling already, would have refused further service. He certainly
would not have crossed the threshold of the room where his former pupil
awaited him.