impossible. One adopts a stranger, a kinsman, but not one like me."
Lowering his eyes, the child of sin repeated: "Not one like me! At this
moment it is your affection that is stirring and that speaks, not your
mind. These are not your--I make bold to say, our--convictions. To-day I
represent to you some one who is dear to you, and whom you are about to
lose. To-morrow, day after to-morrow, if we should be so weak, the thing
that I should soon come to represent to you again, would horrify you,
and me as well. I cannot consent. That name to which I have no right,
and which I bore so long, that stolen name, I will not take again, not
even from your hands." And, sorrowfully, he added: "Besides, even if I
had a right to it, I could not bear to live in France, now that I have
left the service. You say that you did not see clearly enough the good
that one in your station might do. The real truth is that, because of
that very station, you are condemned to inaction. But when you were of
my age, could a Claviers hope to see a government established in France
in which he could find employment? Such an expectation to-day would be
insane. And I need to be doing something. I long to work, to exert my
faculties. Where I am going, in that new country, I shall begin my life
anew, I shall found a family, without having to undergo the social
ostracism which seemed so cruel to me when I believed myself to be what
I was not. That again would prevent me from accepting, even if there
were not that falsehood, which you would never be able to endure. I
appeal to you yourself, to the head of the family, whom I have always
known as so unyielding, so irreconcilable, so hostile to any
compromise."
"You are right," said M. de Claviers in a broken voice. "The Spirit is
strong and the Heart is weak! Let us say adieu then, Landri. If I miss
you too much, and if I live, nothing will prevent my joining you,
wherever you may be. And if I do not live!" He shook his aged head with
an air of supreme weariness. Then, as firmly as the other had spoken a
moment earlier: "Yes, I must learn to consider myself the last of the
line, to close the list worthily. You are right," he repeated, "too
wofully right! I shall have worn out my life in one long expectation,
always unfulfilled: the King come again, the Revolution driven out, our
houses restored, the Church triumphant, France regenerated, and resuming
her place in Europe, with her traditions and her natural frontiers--what
empty dreams! And nothing has happened, nothing, nothing, nothing! I
shall have been one of the vanquished. I shall have defended naught but
tombs. You told me so, justly enough; and, to end it all, this tragedy
in which my last hope is wrecked!--No, I cannot adopt you--that is true.
The Claviers-Grandchamps will die with me, and it is better so. They
will die as all the great families of France are dying, one after
another. We are passing away, like the old monarchy that made us and
that we made. But there will be no stain on the shield. I shall know how
to make a fitting end.--And now," he added after a pause, in the tone of
one who has made up his mind, manfully, and will lament no more, "let us
part. At what time does your boat sail?"
"At half-past four," said Landri.
"It is nearly four," exclaimed the marquis. "You must go aboard. Adieu!"
He took the young man in his arms again and pressed him to his heart
with extraordinary force, but without a tear. Then, he seemed to
hesitate a second. An indescribable light of affection shone in his
eyes, and he said, almost in a whisper:--
"I should not like to go away without seeing your wife."
"I will go and call her," said Valentine's husband, likewise almost in a
whisper, so profoundly moved was he by that last proof of an affection
which he thought that he had lost forever. To measure its depth, was to
measure the depth of the abyss of bitter sorrow into which that man had
descended, and where he was preparing to make a fitting end, as he had
said with sublime simplicity.
When Landri reappeared, holding his young wife's hand, he was actually
unable to utter a word of introduction. She was very pale, very
tremulous, and with her noble, straightforward glance, as if to say,
"Read my heart," she looked at the _grand seigneur_, who was unknown to
her even in his physical aspect, but whose whole soul she knew. He gazed
at her for some moments, likewise without speaking. How could he not
feel the charm of that delicate, proud creature, whose every feature,
every movement, every breath revealed a nature ardent and refined,
loving and pure? And how could he not feel, in her presence, a reopening
of the secret, incurable wound? How could he not compare her with
another? But no. Those eyes could not lie. The graceful, trembling
woman, whose blue eyes were raised to his with such fervor and purity,
would be to him who had chosen her the faithful companion, the friend of
every hour, she who divines and soothes all cares, who supports every
noble effort. He could let Landri go away with her, without any
apprehension. She would know how to assist him in the heroic rebuilding
of a home, amid such a mass of ruins, which he was about to attempt!
Such was the thought that the old man expressed aloud, incapable at that
solemn moment of uttering conventional phrases, and obliged to refrain
from uttering others which would have been too true.
"I was most anxious to salute you, madame, before you sailed. The past
is past. I see in you now only the wife of the man whom I love best on
earth. I desired to know to what sort of hands he had entrusted his
happiness. I know now, and it is a great joy to me, the last of my life.
I owe it to you."
"And I, monsieur," said Valentine, "shall never forget this moment. We
should have missed your blessing too sadly! You bring it to us. That too
is a very great joy, and one which I needed, as Landri did."
She had taken the marquis's hand in hers, and, with filial respect, was
about to put it to her lips. He drew her to him and kissed her on the
forehead--a kiss of respect, of affection, of blessing, as she had said.
He gave a last glance at Landri, a friendly wave of the hand, and left
the room, where the young people remained, side by side, stirred to the
lowest depths of their being by all that there was of human suffering
and loftiness of soul in that despairing but uncomplaining adieu.
"What a great thing is a great heart!" said Valentine at last.
"You understand now how hard it was for me to contend against his
influence in the old days, don't you?" said Landri. "And to think that I
shall never see him again on earth, perhaps!"
"He'll be there to see you off," she replied.
Three quarters of an hour later, in fact, when the Cambria began to
move, and as Valentine and Landri, leaning on the rail near the stern,
were watching the crowd on the pier, already some distance away, of
those who had come to take leave of the passengers, they espied at the
end of the pier a man standing apart from the rest, with his face turned
towards them, and in that haughty countenance they recognized the
marquis. He had stationed himself there to obtain a last glimpse of
Landri, and to be seen by him. At that distance, and in the misty
twilight, it was impossible to distinguish his features. The sea breeze
blew his dark cloak about him as he stood there motionless, in an almost
superhuman immobility; and although Valentine was by his side,
breathing, living, loving, Landri felt the chill of death creep into his
heart at the sight. The last of the Claviers-Grandchamps, standing there
on English soil, alone, on that foggy evening, watching all that he had
loved and had sacrificed to the honor of his name sail away into the
darkness, was in very truth the "Émigré," he who is not of his country
or of his epoch. The private drama, of which this station of the old
French gentleman on the planks of the Liverpool pier, was the crowning
episode, expanded into a broader and more pathetic symbolism. Behind
that living phantom arose the phantoms of all his ancestors. That heir
of a long line of nobles, whose race would die out with him, became for
a moment, in Landri's eyes, the incarnation of all the melancholy of a
vanquished caste. And what was he himself but another "Émigré"? Was
not he about to try to reconstruct, beyond the sea, an existence which,
with his fortune and with the name which the law recognized as his, he
should have passed upon his native soil peacefully and happily? He had
sacrificed that destiny, so enviable in the eyes of many people,--to
what? To a principle. It was to uphold that principle that he was
leaving his fatherland, ceasing to bear a name which was not his, and at
the same time to safeguard his mother's memory. Another remark made by
M. de Claviers in their discussion at Saint-Mihiel, after his refusal to
assist in taking the inventory, came to his mind: "One must sometimes
lay down one's life in order to keep intact the germ of the future!"
Landri realized all its force, and what a store-house of honor is
represented by a genuine aristocrat like him whose form was becoming
more and more indistinct in the distance.
Bringing his mind back to his country, he reflected with much sadness
that France no longer employs those exemplars of an unchanging and
superior type. She paralyzes them by persecution. She degrades them by
idleness. She ruins them by her laws concerning inheritance. All her
efforts are directed toward destroying the conditions in which others
might grow great.
The Cambria was about to leave the Mersey. The great swell of the
Channel rose and fell about the steamship's mighty hull. The Channel
lights pierced the thickening mist with a duller gleam. Around the exile
voices arose in a strange tongue, that of the rivals of centuries, who
have been wise enough to retain all of the past, the better to control
the present; and the ex-lieutenant mingled pity for that France which he
should never again make his home, perhaps, with pity for the old
nobleman for whom he should never cease to feel the affection of a son;
and he strained his eyes in a vain effort to see once more, across the
space that lay between them, the haughty and motionless figure that had
disappeared in the darkness--doubtless forever!
THE END.