THE STORM BREAKS
Monsieur de Nailles was dead, struck down suddenly by what is called
indefinitely heart-failure. The trouble in that organ from which he had
long suffered had brought on what might have been long foreseen, and yet
every one seemed, stupefied by the event. It came upon them like a
thunderbolt. It often happens so when people who are really ill persist
in doing all that may be done with safety by other persons. They
persuaded themselves, and those about them are easily persuaded, that
small remedies will prolong indefinitely a state of things which is
precarious to the last degree. Friends are ready to believe, when the
sufferer complains that his work is too hard for him, that he thinks too
much of his ailments and that he exaggerates trifles to which they are
well accustomed, but which are best known to him alone. When M. de
Nailles, several weeks before his death, had asked to be excused and to
stay at home instead of attending some large gathering, his wife, and
even Jacqueline, would try to convince him that a little amusement would
be good for him; they were unwilling to leave him to the repose he
needed, prescribed for him by the doctors, who had been unanimous that he
must "put down the brakes," give less attention to business, avoid late
hours and over-exertion of all kinds. "And, above all," said one of the
lights of science whom he had consulted recently about certain feelings
of faintness which were a bad symptom, "above all, you must keep yourself
from mental anxiety."
How could he, when his fortune, already much impaired, hung on chances as
uncertain as those in a game of roulette? What nonsense! The failure of
a great financial company had brought about a crisis on the Bourse. The
news of the inability of Wermant, the 'agent de change', to meet his
engagements, had completed the downfall of M. de Nailles. Not only
death, but ruin, had entered that house, where, a few hours before,
luxury and opulence had seemed to reign.
"We don't know whether there will be anything left for us to live upon,"
cried Madame de Nailles, with anguish, even while her husband's body lay
in the chamber of death, and Jacqueline, kneeling beside it, wept,
unwilling to receive comfort or consolation.
She turned angrily upon her stepmother and cried:
"What matter? I have no father--there is nothing else I care for."
But from that moment a dreadful thought, a thought she was ashamed of,
which made her feel a monster of selfishness, rose in her mind, do what
she would to hinder it. Jacqueline was sensible that she cared for
something else; great as was her sense of loss, a sort of reckless
curiosity seemed haunting her, while all the time she felt that her great
grief ought not to give place to anything besides. "How would Gerard de
Cymier behave in these circumstances?" She thought about it all one
dreadful night as she and Modeste, who was telling her beads softly,
sat in the faint light of the death-chamber. She thought of it at dawn,
when, after one of those brief sleeps which come to the young under all
conditions, she resumed with a sigh a sense of surrounding realities.
Almost in the same instant she thought: "My dear father will never wake
again," and "Does he love me?--does he now wish me to be his wife?--
will he take me away?" The devil, which put this thought into her heart,
made her eager to know the answer to these questions. He suggested how
dreadful life with her stepmother would be if no means of escape were
offered her. He made her foresee that her stepmother would marry again--
would marry Marien. "But I shall not be there!" she cried, "I will not
countenance such an infamy!" Oh, how she hoped Gerard de Cymier loved
her! The hypocritical tears of Madame de Nailles disgusted her. She
could not bear to have such false grief associated with her own.
Men in black, with solemn faces, came and bore away the body, no longer
like the form of the father she had loved. He had gone from her forever.
Pompous funeral rites, little in accordance with the crash that soon
succeeded them, were superintended by Marien, who, in the absence of near
relatives, took charge of everything. He seemed to be deeply affected,
and behaved with all possible kindness and consideration to Jacqueline,
who could not, however, bring herself to thank him, or even to look at
him. She hated him with an increase of resentment, as if the soul of her
dead father, who now knew the truth, had passed into her own.
Meantime, M. de Cymier took care to inform himself of the state of
things. It was easy enough to do so. All Paris was talking of the
shipwreck in which life and fortune had been lost by a man whose
kindliness as a host at his wife's parties every one had appreciated.
That was what came, people said, of striving after big dividends! The
house was to be sold, with the horses, the pictures, and the furniture.
What a change for his poor wife and daughter! There were others who
suffered by the Wermant crash, but those were less interesting than the
De Nailles. M. de Belvan found himself left by his father-in-law's
failure with a wife on his hands who not only had not a sou, but who was
the daughter of an 'agent de change' who had behaved dishonorably.
This was a text for dissertations on the disgrace of marrying for money;
those who had done the same thing, minus the same consequences, being
loudest in reprobating alliances of that kind. M. de Cymier listened
attentively to such talk, looking and saying the right things, and as he
heard more and more about the deplorable condition of M. de Nailles's
affairs, he congratulated himself that a prudent presentiment had kept
him from asking the hand of Jacqueline. He had had vague doubts as to
the firm foundation of the opulence which made so charming a frame for
her young beauty; it seemed to him as if she were now less beautiful than
he had imagined her; the enchantment she had exercised upon him was
thrown off by simple considerations of good sense. And yet he gave a
long sigh of regret when he thought she was unattainable except by
marriage. He, however, thanked heaven that he had not gone far enough
to have compromised himself with her. The most his conscience could
reproach him with was an occasional imprudence in moments of
forgetfulness; no court of honor could hold him bound to declare himself
her suitor. The evening that he made up his mind to this he wrote two
letters, very nearly alike; one was to Madame d'Avrigny, the other to
Madame de Nailles, announcing that, having received orders to join the
Embassy to which he was attached at Vienna, he was about to depart at
once, with great regret that he should not be able to take leave of any
one. To Madame d'Avrigny he made apologies for having to give up his
part in her theatricals; he entreated Madame de Nailles to accept both
for herself and for Mademoiselle Jacqueline his deepest condolences and
the assurance of his sympathy. The manner in which this was said was all
it ought to have been, except that it might have been rather more brief.
M. de Cymier said more than was necessary about his participation in
their grief, because he was conscious of a total lack of sympathy. He
begged the ladies would forgive him if, from feelings of delicacy and a
sense of the respect due to a great sorrow, he did not, before leaving
Paris, which he was about do to probably for a long time, personally
present to them 'ses hommages attristes'. Then followed a few lines in
which he spoke of the pleasant recollections he should always retain of
the hospitality he had enjoyed under M. de Nailles's roof, in a way that
gave them clearly to understand that he had no expectation of ever
entering their family on a more intimate footing.
Madame de Nailles received this letter just as she had had a conversation
with a man of business, who had shown her how complete was the ruin for
which in a great measure she herself was responsible. She had no longer
any illusions as to her position. When the estate had been settled there
would be nothing left but poverty, not only for herself, who, having
brought her husband no dot, had no right to consider herself wronged by
the bankruptcy, but for Jacqueline, whose fortune, derived from her
mother, had suffered under her father's management (there are such men--
unfaithful guardians of a child's property, but yet good fathers) in
every way in which it was possible to evade the provisions of the Code
intended to protect the rights of minor children. In the little salon
so charmingly furnished, where never before had sorrow or sadness been
discussed, Madame de Nailles poured out her complaints to her
stepdaughter and insisted upon plans of strict economy, when M. de
Cymier's letter was brought in.
"Read!" said the Baroness, handing the strange document to Jacqueline,
after she had read it through.
Then she leaned back in her chair with a gesture which signified: "This
is the last straw!" and remained motionless, apparently overwhelmed,
with her face covered by one hand, but furtively watching the face of the
girl so cruelly forsaken.
That face told nothing, for pride supplies some sufferers with necessary
courage. Jacqueline sat for some time with her eyes fixed on the
decisive adieu which swept away what might have been her secret hope.
The paper did not tremble in her hand, a half-smile of contempt passed
over her mouth. The answer to the restless question that had intruded
itself upon her in the first moments of her grief was now before her.
Its promptness, its polished brutality, had given her a shock, but not
the pain she had expected. Perhaps her great grief--the real, the true,
the grief death brings--recovered its place in her heart, and prevented
her from feeling keenly any secondary emotion. Perhaps this man, who
could pay court to her in her days of happiness and disappear when the
first trouble came, seemed to her not worth caring for.
She silently handed back the letter to her stepmother.
"No more than I expected," said the Baroness.
"Indeed?" replied Jacqueline with complete indifference. She wished to
give no opening to any expressions of sympathy on the part of Madame de
Nailles.
"Poor Madame d'Avrigny," she added, "has bad luck; all her actors seem to
be leaving her."
This speech was the vain bravado of a young soldier going into action.
The poor child betrayed herself to the experienced woman, trained either
to detect or to practise artifice, and who found bitter amusement in
watching the girl's assumed 'sang-froid'. But the mask fell off at the
first touch of genuine sympathy. When Giselle, forgetful of a certain
coolness between them ever since Fred's departure, came to clasp her in
her arms, she showed only her true self, a girl suffering all the
bitterness of a cruel, humiliating desertion. Long talks ensued between
the friends, in which Jacqueline poured into Giselle's ear her sad
discoveries in the past, her sorrows and anxieties in the present, and
her vague plans for the future. "I must go away," she said; "I must
escape somewhere; I can not go on living with Madame de Nailles--I should
go mad, I should be tempted every day to upbraid her with her conduct."
Giselle made no attempt to curb an excitement which she knew would resist
all she could say to calm it. She feigned agreement, hoping thereby to
increase her future influence, and advised her friend to seek in a
convent the refuge that she needed. But she must do nothing rashly; she
should only consider it a temporary retreat whose motive was a wish to
remain for a while within reach of religious consolation. In that way
she would give people nothing to talk about, and her step mother could
not be offended. It was never of any use to get out of a difficulty by
breaking all the glass windows with a great noise, and good resolutions
are made firmer by being matured in quietness. Such were the lessons
Giselle herself had been taught by the Benedictine nuns, who, however
deficient they might be in the higher education of women, knew at least
how to bring up young girls with a view to making them good wives.
Giselle illustrated this day by day in her relations to a husband as
disagreeable as a husband well could be, a man of small intelligence,
who was not even faithful to her. But she did not cite herself as an
example. She never talked about herself, or her own difficulties.
"You are an angel of sense and goodness," sobbed Jacqueline. "I will do
whatever you wish me to do."
"Count upon me--count upon all your friends," said Madame de Talbrun,
tenderly.
And then, enumerating the oldest and the truest of these friends, she
unluckily named Madame d'Argy. Jacqueline drew herself back at once:
"Oh, for pity's sake!" she cried, "don't mention them to me!"
Already a comparison between Fred's faithful affection and Gerard de
Cymier's desertion had come into her mind, but she had refused to
entertain it, declaring resolutely to herself that she never should
repent her refusal. She was sore, she was angry with all men, she wished
all were like Cymier or like Marien, that she might hate every one of
them; she came to the conclusion in her heart of hearts that all of them,
even the best, if put to the proof, would turn out selfish. She liked to
think so--to believe in none of them. Thus it happened that an
unexpected visit from Fred's mother, among those that she received
in her first days of orphanhood, was particularly agreeable to her.
Madame d'Argy, on hearing of the death and of the ruin of M. de Nailles,
was divided by two contradictory feelings. She clearly saw the hand of
Providence in what had happened: her son was in the squadron on its way
to attack Formosa; he was in peril from the climate, in peril from
Chinese bullets, and assuredly those who had brought him into peril could
not be punished too severely; on the other hand, the last mail from
Tonquin had brought her one of those great joys which always incline us
to be merciful. Fred had so greatly distinguished himself in a series of
fights upon the river Min that he had been offered his choice between the
Cross of the Legion of Honor or promotion. He told his mother now that
he had quite recovered from a wound he had received which had brought him
some glory, but which he assured her had done him no bodily harm, and he
repeated to her what he would not tell her at first, some words of praise
from Admiral Courbet of more value in his eyes than any reward.
Triumphant herself, and much moved by pity for Jacqueline, Madame d'Argy
felt as if she must put an end to a rupture which could not be kept up
when a great sorrow had fallen on her old friends, besides which she
longed to tell every one, those who had been blind and ungrateful in
particular, that Fred had proved himself a hero. So Jacqueline and her
stepmother saw her arrive as if nothing had ever come between them.
There were kisses and tears, and a torrent of kindly meant questions,
affectionate explanations, and offers of service. But Fred's mother
could not help showing her own pride and happiness to those in sorrow.
They congratulated her with sadness. Madame d'Argy would have liked to
think that the value of what she had lost was now made plain to
Jacqueline. And if it caused her one more pang--what did it matter?
He and his mother had suffered too. It was the turn of others. God was
just. Resentment, and kindness, and a strange mixed feeling of
forgiveness and revenge contended together in the really generous heart
of Madame d'Argy, but that heart was still sore within her. Pity,
however, carried the day, and had it not been for the irritating coldness
of "that little hard-hearted thing," as she called Jacqueline, she would
have entirely forgiven her. She never suspected that the exaggerated
reserve of manner that offended her was owing to Jacqueline's dread
(commendable in itself) of appearing to wish in her days of misfortune
for the return of one she had rejected in the time of prosperity.
In spite of the received opinion that society abandons those who are
overtaken by misfortune, all the friends of the De Nailles flocked to
offer their condolences to the widow and the orphan with warm
demonstrations of interest. Curiosity, a liking to witness, or to
experience, emotion, the pleasure of being able to tell what has been
seen and heard, to find out new facts and repeat them again to others,
joined to a sort of vague, commonplace, almost intrusive pity, are
sentiments, which sometimes in hours of great disaster, produce what
appears to wear the look of sympathy. A fortnight after M. de Nailles's
death, between the acts of Scylla and Charybdis, the principal parts in
which were taken by young d'Etaples and Isabelle Ray, the company, as it
ate ices, was glibly discussing the real drama which had produced in
their own elegant circle much of the effect a blow has upon an ant-hill--
fear, agitation, and a tumultuous rush to the scene of the disaster.
Great indignation was expressed against the man who had risked the
fortune of his family in speculation. Oh! the thing had been going on
for a long while. His fortune had been gradually melting away;
Grandchaux was loaded down with mortgages and would bring almost nothing
at a forced sale.
Everybody forgot that had M. de Nailles's speculations been successful
they would have been called matters of business, conducted with great
ability on a large scale. When a performer falls from the tightrope, who
remembers all the times he has not failed? It is simply said that he
fell from his own carelessness.
"The poor Baroness is touchingly resigned," said Madame de Villegry, with
a deep sigh; "and heaven knows how many other cares she has besides the
loss of money! I don't mean only the death of her husband--and you know
how much they were attached to each other--I am speaking of that
unaccountable resolution of Jacqueline's."
Madame d'Avrigny here came forward with her usual equanimity which
nothing disturbed, unless it were something which interfered with the
success of her salon.
She was of course very sorry for her friends in trouble, but the
vicissitudes that had happened to her theatricals she had more at heart.
"After all," she said, "the first act did not go off badly, did it? The
musical part made up for the rest. That divine Strahlberg is ready for
any emergency. How well she sang that air of 'La Petite Mariee!' It was
exquisite, but I regretted Jacqueline. She was so charming in that
lively little part. What a catastrophe!
What a terrible catastrophe! Were you speaking of the retreat she wishes
to make in a convent? Well, I quite understand how she feels about it!
I should feel the same myself. In the bewilderment of a first grief one
does not care to see anything of the world. 'Mon Dieu'! youth always
has these exaggerated notions. She will come back to us. Poor little
thing! Of course it was no fault of hers, and I should not think of
blaming Monsieur de Cymier. The exigencies of his career--but you all
must own that unexpected things happen so suddenly in this life that it
is enough to discourage any one who likes to open her house and provide
amusement for her friends."
Every one present pitied her for the contretemps over which she had
triumphed so successfully. Then she resumed, serenely:
"Don't you think that Isabelle played the part almost as well as
Jacqueline? Up to the last moment I was afraid that something would go
wrong. When one gets into a streak of ill-luck--but all went off to
perfection, thank heaven!"
Meantime Madame Odinska was whispering to one of those who sat near her
her belief that Jacqueline would never get over her father's loss.
"It would not astonish me," she said, "to hear that the child, who has
a noble nature, would remain in the convent and take the veil."
Any kind of heroic deed seemed natural to this foolish enthusiast, who,
as a matter of fact, in her own life, had never shown any tendency to
heroic virtues; her mission in life had seemed to be to spoil her
daughters in every possible way, and to fling away more money than
belonged to her.
"Really? Was she so very fond of her father!" asked Madame Ray,
incredulously. "When he was alive, they did not seem to make much of
him in his own house. Maybe this retreat is a good way of getting over
a little wound to her 'amour-propre'."
"The proper thing, I think," said Madame d'Etaples, "would be for the
mother and daughter to keep together, to bear the troubles before them
hand in hand. Jacqueline does not seem to think much of the last wishes
of the father she pretends to be so fond of. The Baroness showed me,
with many tears, a letter he left joined to his will, which was written
some years ago, and which now, of course, is of no value. He told mother
and daughter to take care of each other and hoped they would always
remain friends, loving each other for love of him. Jacqueline's conduct
amazes me; it looks like ingratitude."
"Oh! she is a hard-hearted little thing! I always thought so!" said
Madame de Villegry, carelessly.
Here the rising of the curtain stopped short these discussions, which
displayed so much good-nature and perspicacity. But some laid the blame
on the influence of that little bigot of a Talbrun, who had secretly
blown up the fire of religious enthusiasm in Jacqueline, when Madame
d'Avrigny's energetic "Hush!" put an end to the discussion. It was time
to come back to more immediate interests, to the play which went on in
spite of wind and tide.
ETEXT EDITOR'S BOOKMARKS:
A mother's geese are always swans
Bathers, who exhibited themselves in all degrees of ugliness
Fred's verses were not good, but they were full of dejection
Hang out the bush, but keep no tavern
A familiarity which, had he known it, was not flattering
His sleeplessness was not the insomnia of genius
Importance in this world are as easily swept away as the sand
Natural longing, that we all have, to know the worst
Notion of her husband's having an opinion of his own
Pride supplies some sufferers with necessary courage
Seemed to enjoy themselves, or made believe they did
This unending warfare we call love
Unwilling to leave him to the repose he needed