“And it was directly after that conversation that the poor child left
for the lake, where she caught the pernicious fever?” asked Montfanon.
“Directly,” replied Dorsenne, “and what troubles me the most is that I
can not doubt but that she went there purposely. I was so troubled by
our conversation that I had not the strength to leave Rome the same
evening, as I told her I should. After much hesitation--you understand
why, now that I have told you all--I returned to the Villa Steno at six
o’clock. To speak to her, but of what? Did I know? It was madness. For
her avowal only allowed of two replies, either that which I made her or
an offer of marriage. Ah, I did not reason so much. I was afraid.... Of
what?... I do not know. I reached the villa, where I found the Countess,
gay and radiant, as was her custom, and tete-a-tete with her American.
‘Only think, there is my child,’ said she to me, ‘who has refused to go
to the English embassy, where she would enjoy herself, and who has gone
out for a drive alone.... Will you await her?’”
“At length she began to grow uneasy, and I, seeing that no one returned,
took my leave, my heart oppressed by presentiments.... Alba’s carriage
stopped at the door just as I was going out. She was pale, of a greenish
pallor, which caused me to say on approaching her: ‘Whence have you
come?’ as if I had the right. Her lips, already discolored, trembled as
they replied. When I learned where she had spent that hour of sunset,
and near what lake, the most deadly in the neighborhood, I said to her:
‘What imprudence!’ I shall all my life see the glance she gave me at the
moment, as she replied: ‘Say, rather, how wise, and pray that I may have
taken the fever and that I die of it.’ You know the rest, and how her
wish has been realized. She indeed contracted the fever, and so severely
that she died in less than six days. I have no doubt, since her last
words, that it was a suicide.”
“And the mother,” asked Montfanon, “did she not comprehend finally?”
“Absolutely nothing,” replied Dorsenne. “It is inconceivable, but it is
thus. Ah! she is truly the worthy friend of that knave Hafner, whom
his daughter’s broken engagement has not grieved, in spite of his
discomfiture. I forgot to tell you that he had just sold Palais Castagna
to a joint-stock company to convert it into a hotel. I laugh,” he
continued with singular acrimony, “in order not to weep, for I am
arriving at the most heartrending part. Do you know where I saw poor
Alba Steno’s face for the last time? It was three days ago, the day
after her death, at this hour. I called to inquire for the Countess!
She was receiving! ‘Do you wish to bid her adieu?’ she asked me. ‘Good
Lincoln is just molding her face for me.’ And I entered the chamber of
death. Her eyes were closed, her cheeks were sunken, her pretty nose was
pinched, and upon her brow and in the corners of her mouth was a mixture
of bitterness and of repose which I can not describe to you. I thought:
‘If you had liked, she would be alive, she would smile, she would love
you!’ The American was beside the bed, while Florent Chapron, always
faithful, was preparing the oil to put upon the face of the corpse, and
sinister Lydia Maitland was watching the scene with eyes which made
me shudder, reminding me of what I had divined at the time of my last
conversation with Alba. If she does not undertake to play the part of a
Nemesis and to tell all to the Countess, I am mistaken in faces! For the
moment she was silent, and guess the only words the mother uttered
when her lover, he on whose account her daughter had suffered so much,
approached their common victim: ‘Above all, do not injure her lovely
lashes!’ What horrible irony, was it not? Horrible!”
The young man sank upon a bench as he uttered that cry of distress and
of remorse, which Montfanon mechanically repeated, as if startled by the
tragical confidence he had just received.
Montfanon shook his gray head several times as if deliberating; then
forced Dorsenne to rise, chiding him thus:
“Come, Julien, we can not remain here all the afternoon dreaming and
sighing like young women! The child is dead. We can not restore her to
life, you in despairing, I in deploring. We should do better to look in
the face our responsibility in that sinister adventure, to repent of it
and to expiate it.”
“Our responsibility?” interrogated Julien. “I see mine, although I can
truly not see yours.”
“Yours and mine,” replied Montfanon. “I am no sophist, and I am not in
the habit of shifting my conscience. Yes or no,” he insisted, with a
return of his usual excitement, “did I leave the catacombs to arrange
that unfortunate duel? Yes or no, did I yield to the paroxysm of choler
which possessed me on hearing of the engagement of Ardea and on finding
that I was in the presence of that equivocal Hafner? Yes or no, did that
duel help to enlighten Madame Gorka as to her husband’s doings, and, in
consequence, Mademoiselle Steno as to her mother’s? Did you not relate
to me the progress of her anguish since that scandal, there just
now?... And if I have been startled, as I have been, by the news of that
suicide, know it has been for this reason especially, because a voice
has said to me: ‘A few of the tears of that dead girl are laid to your
account.”’
“But, my poor friend,” interrupted Dorsenne, “whence such reasoning?
According to that, we could not live any more. There enters into our
lives, by indirect means, a collection of actions which in no way
concerns us, and in admitting that we have a debt of responsibility to
pay, that debt commences and ends in that which we have wished directly,
sincerely, clearly.”
“It would be very convenient,” replied the Marquis, with still more
vivacity, “but the proof that it is not true is that you yourself
are filled with remorse at not having saved the soul so weak of that
defenseless child. Ah, I do not mince the truth to myself, and I shall
not do so to you. You remember the morning when you were so gay, and
when you gave me the theory of your cosmopolitanism? It amused you, as
a perfect dilettante, so you said, to assist in one of those dramas of
race which bring into play the personages from all points of the earth
and of history, and you then traced to me a programme very true, my
faith, and which events have almost brought about. Madame Steno has
indeed conducted herself toward her two lovers as a Venetian of the time
of Aretin; Chapron, with all the blind devotion of a descendant of an
oppressed race; his sister with the villainous ferocity of a rebel who
at length shakes off the yoke, since you think she wrote those anonymous
letters. Hafner and Ardea have laid bare two detestable souls, the one
of an infamous usurer, half German, half Dutch; the other of a degraded
nobleman, in whom is revived some ancient ‘condottiere’. Gorka has been
brave and mad, like entire Poland; his wife implacable and loyal, like
all of England. Maitland continues to be positive, insensible, and
wilful in the midst of it all, as all America. And poor Alba ended as
did her father. I do not speak to you of Baron Hafner’s daughter,” and
he raised his hat. Then, in an altered voice:
“She is a saint, in whom I was deceived. But she has Jewish blood in
her veins, blood which was that of the people of God. I should have
remembered it and the beautiful saying of the Middle Ages: ‘The Jewish
women shall be saved because they have wept for our Lord in secret.’....
You outlined for me in advance the scene of the drama in which we have
been mixed up.... And do you remember what I said: ‘Is there not among
them a soul which you might aid in doing better?’ You laughed in my face
at that moment. You would have treated me, had you been less polite,
as a Philistine and a cabotin. You wished to be only a spectator, the
gentleman in the balcony who wipes the glasses of his lorgnette in order
to lose none of the comedy. Well, you could not do so. That role is not
permitted a man. He must act, and he acts always, even when he thinks
he is looking on, even when he washes his hands as Pontius Pilate, that
dilettante, too, who uttered the words of your masters and of yourself.
What is truth? Truth is that there is always and everywhere a duty to
fulfil. Mine was to prevent that criminal encounter. Yours was not to
pay attention to that young girl if you did not love her, and if
you loved her, to marry her and to take her from her abominable
surroundings. We have both failed, and at what a price!”
“You are very severe,” said the young man; “but if you were right would
not Alba be dead? Of what use is it for me to know what I should have
done when it is too late?”
“First, never to do so again,” said the Marquis; “then to judge yourself
and your life.”
“There is truth in what you say,” replied Dorsenne, “but you are
mistaken if you think that the most intellectual men of our age have not
suffered, too, from that abuse of thought. What is to be done? Ah, it is
the disease of a century too cultivated, and there is no cure.”
“There is one,” interrupted Montfanon, “which you do not wish to see....
You will not deny that Balzac was the boldest of our modern writers. Is
it necessary for me, an ignorant man, to recite to you the phrase which
governs his work: ‘Thought, principle of evil and of good can only be
prepared, subdued, directed by religion.’ See?” he continued, suddenly
taking his companion by the arm and forcing him to look into a
transversal allee through the copse, “there he is, the doctor who holds
the remedy for that malady of the soul as for all the others. Do
not show yourself. They will have forgotten our presence. But, look,
look!....Ah, what a meeting!”
The personage who appeared suddenly in that melancholy, deserted garden,
and in a manner almost supernatural, so much did his presence form a
living commentary to the discourse of the impassioned nobleman, was
no other than the Holy Father himself, on the point of entering his
carriage for his usual drive. Dorsenne, who only knew Leo XIII from
his portraits, saw an old man, bent, bowed, whose white cassock gleamed
beneath the red mantle, and who leaned on one side upon a prelate of
his court, on the other upon one of his officers. In drawing back,
as Montfanon had advised, in order not to bring a reprimand upon
the keepers, he could study at his leisure the delicate face of the
Sovereign Pontiff, who paused at a bed of roses to converse familiarly
with a kneeling gardener. He saw the infinitely indulgent smile of
that spirituelle mouth. He saw the light of those eyes which seemed
to justify by their brightness the ‘lumen in coelo’ applied to the
successor of Pie IX by a celebrated prophecy. He saw the venerable
hand, that white, transparent hand, which was raised to give the solemn
benediction with so much majesty, turn toward a fine yellow rose, and
the fingers bend the flower without plucking it, as if not to harm the
frail creation of God. The old Pope for a second inhaled its perfume and
then resumed his walk toward the carriage, vaguely to be seen between
the trunks of the green oaks. The black horses set off at a trot, and
Dorsenne, turning again toward Montfanon, perceived large tears upon
the lashes of the former zouave, who, forgetting the rest of their
conversation, said, with a sigh: “And that is the only pleasure allowed
him, who is, however, the successor of the first apostle, to inhale his
flowers and drive in a carriage as rapidly as his horses can go! They
have procured four paltry kilometers of road at the foot of the terrace
where we were half an hour since. And he goes on, he goes on, thus
deluding himself with regard to the vast space which is forbidden him. I
have seen many tragical sights in my life. I have been to the war, and I
have spent one entire night wounded on a battlefield covered with snow,
among the dead, grazed by the wheels of the artillery of the conquerors,
who defiled singing. Nothing has moved me like that drive of the old
man, who has never uttered a complaint and who has for himself only that
acre of land in which to move freely. But these are grand words which
the holy man wrote one day at the foot of his portrait for a missionary.
The words explain his life: ‘Debitricem martyrii fidem’--Faith is bound
to martyrdom.”
“‘Debitricem martyrii fidem’,” repeated Dorsenne, “that is beautiful,
indeed. And,” he added, in a low voice, “you just now abused very rudely
the dilettantes and the sceptic. But do you think there would be one
of them who would refuse martyrdom if he could have at the same time
faith?”
Never had Montfanon heard the young man utter a similar phrase and
in such an accent. The image returned to him, by way of contrast, of
Dorsenne, alert and foppish, the dandy of literature, so gayly a scoffer
and a sophist, to whom antique and venerable Rome was only a city of
pleasure, a cosmopolis more paradoxical than Florence, Nice, Biarritz,
St. Moritz, than such and such other cities of international winter and
summer. He felt that for the first time that soul was strained to its
depths, the tragical death of poor Alba had become in the mind of the
writer the point of remorse around which revolved the moral life of the
superior and incomplete being, exiled from simple humanity by the most
invincible pride of mind. Montfanon comprehended that every additional
word would pain the wounded heart. He was afraid of having already
lectured Dorsenne too severely. He took within his arm the arm of the
young man, and he pressed it silently, putting into that manly caress
all the warm and discreet pity of an elder brother.
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