Chapter V
“Monsieur le Marquis,” said Duplessis, when the salon was cleared of all but himself and the two friends, “Lemercier has confided to me the state of your affairs in connection with M. Louvier, and flatters me by thinking my advice may be of some service; if so, command me.”
“I shall most gratefully accept your advice,” answered Alain, “but I fear my condition defies even your ability and skill.”
“Permit me to hope not, and to ask a few necessary questions. M. Louvier has constituted himself your sole mortgagee; to what amount, at what interest, and from what annual proceeds is the interest paid?”
Herewith Alain gave details already furnished to the reader. Duplessis listened, and noted down the replies.
“I see it all,” he said, when Alain had finished. “M. Louvier had predetermined to possess himself of your estate: he makes himself mortgagee at a rate of interest so low, that I tell you fairly, at the present value of money, I doubt if you could find any capitalist who would accept the transfer of the mortgage at the same rate. This is not like Louvier, unless he had an object to gain, and that object is your land. The revenue from your estate is derived chiefly from wood, out of which the interest due to Louvier is to be paid. M. Gandrin, in a skilfully-guarded letter, encourages you to sell the wood from your forests to a man who offers you several thousand francs more than it could command from customary buyers. I say nothing against M. Gandrin, but every man who knows Paris as I do, knows that M. Louvier can put, and has put, a great deal of money into M. Gandrin’s pocket. The purchaser of your wood does not pay more than his deposit, and has just left the country insolvent. Your purchaser, M. Collot, was an adventurous speculator; he would have bought anything at any price, provided he had time to pay; if his speculations had been lucky he would have paid. M. Louvier knew, as I knew, that M. Collot was a gambler, and the chances were that he would not pay. M. Louvier allows a year’s interest on his hypotheque to become due-notice thereof duly given to you by his agent--now you come under the operation of the law. Of course, you know what the law is?”
“Not exactly,” answered Alain, feeling frostbitten by the congealing words of his counsellor; “but I take it for granted that if I cannot pay the interest of a sum borrowed on my property, that property itself is forfeited.”
“No, not quite that--the law is mild. If the interest which should be paid half-yearly remains unpaid at the end of a year, the mortgagee has a right to be impatient, has he not?”
“Certainly he has.”
“Well, then, on fait un commandement tendant de saisie immobiliere, viz: The mortgagee gives a notice that the property shall be put up for sale. Then it is put up for sale, and in most cases the mortgagee buys it in. Here, certainly, no competitors in the mere business way would vie with Louvier; the mortgage at three and a half per cent. covers more than the estate is apparently worth. Ah! but stop, M. le Marquis; the notice is not yet served: the whole process would take six months from the day it is served to the taking possession after the sale; in the meanwhile, if you pay the interest due, the action drops. Courage, M. le Marquis! Hope yet, if you condescend to call me friend.”
“And me,” cried Lemercier; “I will sell out of my railway shares to-morrow-see to it, Duplessis--enough to pay off the damnable interest. See to it, mon ami.”
“Agree to that, M. le Marquis, and you are safe for another year,” said Duplessis, folding up the paper on which he had made his notes, but fixing on Alain quiet eyes half concealed under drooping lids.
“Agree to that!” cried Rochebriant, rising--“agree to allow even my worst enemy to pay for me moneys I could never hope to repay--agree to allow the oldest and most confiding friends to do so--M. Duplessis, never! If I carried the porter’s knot of an Auverguat, I should still remain gentilhomme and Breton.”
Duplessis, habitually the driest of men, rose with a moistened eye and flushing cheek--“Monsieur le Marquis, vouchsafe me the honour to shake hands with you. I, too, am by descent gentilhomme, by profession a speculator on the Bourse. In both capacities I approve the sentiment you have uttered. Certainly, if our friend Frederic lent you 7000 Louis or so this year, it would be impossible for you even to foresee the year in which you could repay it; but,”--here Duplessis paused a minute, and then lowering the tone of his voice, which had been somewhat vehement and enthusiastic, into that of a colloquial good-fellowship, equally rare to the measured reserve of the financier, he asked, with a lively twinkle of his grey eye, “Did you never hear, Marquis, of a little encounter between me and M. Louvier?”
“Encounter at arms--does Louvier fight?” asked Alain, innocently.
“In his own way he is always fighting; but I speak metaphorically. You see this small house of mine--so pinched in by the houses next to it that I can neither get space for a ball-room for Valerie, nor a dining-room for more than a friendly party like that which has honoured me to-day. Eh bien! I bought this house a few years ago, meaning to buy the one next to it and throw the two into one. I went to the proprietor of the next house, who, as I knew, wished to sell. ‘Aha,’ he thought, ‘this is the rich Monsieur Duplessis;’ and he asked me 2000 louis more than the house was worth. We men of business cannot bear to be too much cheated; a little cheating we submit to--much cheating raises our gall. Bref--this was on Monday. I offered the man 1000 louis above the fair price, and gave him till Thursday to decide. Somehow or other Louvier hears of this. ‘Hillo!’ says Louvier, ‘here is a financier who desires a hotel to vie with mine!’ He goes on Wednesday to my next-door neighbour. ‘Friend, you want to sell your house. I want to buy--the price?’ The proprietor, who does not know him by sight, says: ‘It is as good as sold. M. Duplessis and I shall agree.’ ‘Bah! What sum did you ask M. Duplessis?’ He names the sum; 2000 louis more than he can get elsewhere. ‘But M. Duplessis will give me the sum.’ ‘You ask too little. I will give 3000. A fig for M. Duplessis. I am Monsieur Louvier.’ So when I call on Thursday the house is sold. I reconcile myself easily enough to the loss of space for a larger dining-room; but though Valerie was then a child at a convent, I was sadly disconcerted by the thought that I could have no salle de bal ready for her when she came to reside with me. Well, I say to myself, patience; I owe M. Louvier a good turn; my time to pay him off will come. It does come, and very soon. M. Louvier buys an estate near Paris--builds a superb villa. Close to his property is a rising forest ground for sale. He goes to the proprietor: says the proprietor to himself, ‘The great Louvier wants this,’ and adds 5000 louis to its market price. Louvier, like myself, can’t bear to be cheated egregiously. Louvier offers 2000 louis more than the man could fairly get, and leaves him till Saturday to consider. I hear of this--speculators hear of everything. On Friday night I go to the man and I give him 6000 louis, where he had asked 5000. Fancy Louvier’s face the next day! But there my revenge only begins,” continued Duplessis, chuckling inwardly. “My forest looks down on the villa he is building. I only wait till his villa is built, in order to send to my architect and say, Build me a villa at least twice as grand as M. Louvier’s, then clear away the forest trees, so that every morning he may see my palace dwarfing into insignificance his own.”
“Bravo!” cried Lemercier, clapping his hands. Lemercier had the spirit of party, and felt for Duplessis against Louvier much as in England Whig feels against Tory, or vice versa.
“Perhaps now,” resumed Duplessis, more soberly,--“perhaps now, M. le Marquis, you may understand why I humiliate you by no sense of obligation if I say that M. Louvier shall not be the Seigneur de Rochebriant if I can help it. Give me a line of introduction to your Breton lawyer and to Mademoiselle your aunt--let me have your letters early to-morrow. I will take the afternoon train. I know not how many days I may be absent, but I shall not return till I have carefully examined the nature and conditions of your property. If I see my way to save your estate, and give a mauvais quart d’heure to Louvier, so much the better for you, M. le Marquis; if I cannot, I will say frankly, ‘Make the best terms you can with your creditor.’”
“Nothing can be more delicately generous than the way you put it,” said Alain; “but pardon me, if I say that the pleasantry with which you narrate your grudge against M. Louvier does not answer its purpose in diminishing my sense of obligation.” So, linking his arm in Lemercier’s, Alain made his bow and withdrew.
When his guests had gone, Duplessis remained seated in meditation--apparently pleasant meditation, for he smiled while indulging it; he then passed through the reception-rooms to one at the far end appropriated to Valerie as a boudoir or morning-room, adjoining her bed-chamber; he knocked gently at the door, and, all remaining silent within, he opened it noiselessly and entered. Valerie was reclining on the sofa near the window-her head drooping, her hands clasped on her knees. Duplessis neared her with tender stealthy steps, passed his arm round her, and drew her head towards his bosom. “Child!” he murmured; “my child, my only one!”
At that soft loving voice, Valerie flung her arms round him, and wept aloud like an infant in trouble. He seated himself beside her, and wisely suffered her to weep on, till her passion had exhausted itself; he then said, half fondly, half chillingly: “Have you forgotten our conversation only three days ago? Have you forgotten that I then drew forth the secret of your heart? Have you forgotten what I promised you in return for your confidence? and a promise to you have I ever yet broken?”
“Father! father! I am so wretched and so ashamed of myself for being wretched! Forgive me. No, I do not forget your promise; but who can promise to dispose of the heart of another? and that heart will never be mine. But bear with me a little, I shall soon recover.”
“Valerie, when I made you the promise you now think I cannot keep, I spoke only from that conviction of power to promote the happiness of a child which nature implants in the heart of parents; and it may be also from the experience of my own strength of will, since that which I have willed I have always won. Now I speak on yet surer ground. Before the year is out you shall be the beloved wife of Alain de Rochebriant. Dry your tears and smile on me, Valerie. If you will not see in me mother and father both, I have double love for you, motherless child of her who shared the poverty of my youth, and did not live to enjoy the wealth which I hold as a trust for that heir to mine all which she left me.”
As this man thus spoke you would scarcely have recognized in him the old saturnine Duplessis, his countenance became so beautified by the one soft feeling which care and contest, ambition and money-seeking, had left unaltered in his heart. Perhaps there is no country in which the love of parent and child, especially of father and daughter, is so strong as it is in France; even in the most arid soil, among the avaricious, even among the profligate, it forces itself into flower. Other loves fade away: in the heart of the true Frenchman that parent love blooms to the last. Valerie felt the presence of that love as a divine protecting guardianship. She sank on her knees and covered his hand with grateful kisses.
“Do not torture yourself, my child, with jealous fears of the fair Italian. Her lot and Alain de Rochebriant’s can never unite; and whatever you may think of their whispered converse, Alain’s heart at this moment is too filled with anxious troubles to leave one spot in it accessible even to a frivolous gallantry. It is for us to remove these troubles; and then, when he turns his eyes towards you, it will be with the gaze of one who beholds his happiness. You do not weep now, Valerie!”
Chapter I
On waking some morning, have you ever felt, reader, as if a change for the brighter in the world, without and within you, had suddenly come to pass-some new glory has been given to the sunshine, some fresh balm to the air-you feel younger, and happier, and lighter, in the very beat of your heart-you almost fancy you hear the chime of some spiritual music far off, as if in the deeps of heaven? You are not at first conscious how, or wherefore, this change has been brought about. Is it the effect of a dream in the gone sleep, that has made this morning so different from mornings that have dawned before? And while vaguely asking yourself that question, you become aware that the cause is no mere illusion, that it has its substance in words spoken by living lips, in things that belong to the work-day world.
It was thus that Isaura woke the morning after the conversation with Alain de Rochebriant, and as certain words, then spoken, echoed back on her ear, she knew why she was so happy, why the world was so changed.
In those words she heard the voice of Graham Vane--nor she had not deceived herself--she was loved! she was loved! What mattered that long cold interval of absence? She had not forgotten--she could not believe that absence had brought forgetfulness. There are moments when we insist on judging another’s heart by our own. All would be explained some day--all would come right.
How lovely was the face that reflected itself in the glass as she stood before it, smoothing back her long hair, murmuring sweet snatches of Italian love-song, and blushing with sweeter love-thoughts as she sang! All that had passed in that year so critical to her outer life--the authorship, the fame, the public career, the popular praise--vanished from her mind as a vapour that rolls from the face of a lake to which the sunlight restores the smile of a brightened heaven.
She was more the girl now than she had ever been since the day on which she sat reading Tasso on the craggy shore of Sorrento.
Singing still as she passed from her chamber, and entering the sitting-room, which fronted the east, and seemed bathed in the sunbeams of deepening May, she took her bird from its cage, and stopped her song to cover it with kisses, which perhaps yearned for vent somewhere.
Later in the day she went out to visit Valerie. Recalling the altered manner of her young friend, her sweet nature became troubled. She divined that Valerie had conceived some jealous pain which she longed to heal; she could not bear the thought of leaving any one that day unhappy. Ignorant before of the girl’s feelings towards Alain, she now partly guessed them--one woman who loves in secret is clairvoyante as to such secrets in another.
Valerie received her visitor with a coldness she did not attempt to disguise. Not seeming to notice this, Isaura commenced the conversation with frank mention of Rochebriant. “I have to thank you so much, dear Valerie, for a pleasure you could not anticipate--that of talking about an absent friend, and hearing the praise he deserved from one so capable of appreciating excellence as M. de Rochebriant appears to be.”
“You were talking to M. de Rochebriant of an absent friend--ah! you seemed indeed very much interested in the conversation--”
“Do not wonder at that, Valerie; and do not grudge me the happiest moments I have known for months.”
“In talking with M. de Rochebriant! No doubt, Mademoiselle Cicogna, you found him very charming.”
To her surprise and indignation, Valerie here felt the arm of Isaura tenderly entwining her waist, and her face drawn towards Isaura’s sisterly kiss.
“Listen to me, naughty child-listen and believe. M. de Rochebriant can never be charming to me--never touch a chord in my heart or my fancy except as friend to another, or--kiss me in your turn, Valerie--as suitor to yourself.”
Valerie here drew back her pretty childlike head, gazed keenly a moment into Isaura’s eyes, felt convinced by the limpid candour of their unmistakable honesty, and flinging herself on her friend’s bosom, kissed her passionately, and burst into tears.
The complete reconciliation between the two girls was thus peacefully effected; and then Isaura had to listen, at no small length, to the confidences poured into her ears by Valerie, who was fortunately too engrossed by her own hopes and doubts to exact confidences in return. Valerie’s was one of those impulsive eager natures that longs for a confidante. Not so Isaura’s. Only when Valerie had unburthened her heart, and been soothed and caressed into happy trust in the future, did she recall Isaura’s explanatory words, and said, archly: “And your absent friend? Tell me about him. Is he as handsome as Alain?”
“Nay,” said Isaura, rising to take up the mantle and hat she had laid aside on entering, “they say that the colour of a flower is in our vision, not in the leaves.” Then with a grave melancholy in the look she fixed upon Valerie, she added: “Rather than distrust of me should occasion you pain, I have pained myself, in making clear to you the reason why I felt interest in M. de Rochebriant’s conversation. In turn, I ask of you a favour--do not on this point question me farther. There are some things in our past which influence the present, but to which we dare not assign a future--on which we cannot talk to another. What soothsayer can tell us if the dream of a yesterday will be renewed on the night of a morrow? All is said--we trust one another, dearest.”
Chapter II
That evening the Morleys looked in at Isaura’s on their way to a crowded assembly at the house of one of those rich Americans, who were then outvying the English residents at Paris in the good graces of Parisian society. I think the Americans get on better with the French than the English do--I mean the higher class of Americans. They spend more money; their men speak French better; the women are better dressed, and, as a general rule, have read more largely, and converse more frankly. Mrs. Morley’s affection for Isaura had increased during the last few months. As so notable an advocate of the ascendancy of her sex, she felt a sort of grateful pride in the accomplishments and growing renown of so youthful a member of the oppressed sisterhood. But, apart from that sentiment, she had conceived a tender mother-like interest for the girl who stood in the world so utterly devoid of family ties, so destitute of that household guardianship and protection which, with all her assertion of the strength and dignity of woman, and all her opinions as to woman’s right of absolute emancipation from the conventions fabricated by the selfishness of man, Mrs. Morley was too sensible not to value for the individual, though she deemed it not needed for the mass. Her great desire was that Isaura should marry well, and soon. American women usually marry so young that it seemed to Mrs. Morley an anomaly in social life, that one so gifted in mind and person as Isaura should already have passed the age in which the belles of the great Republic are enthroned as wives and consecrated as mothers. We have seen that in the past year she had selected from our unworthy but necessary sex, Graham Vane as a suitable spouse to her young friend. She had divined the state of his heart--she had more than suspicions of the state of Isaura’s. She was exceedingly perplexed and exceedingly chafed at the Englishman’s strange disregard to his happiness and her own projects. She had counted, all this past winter, on his return to Paris; and she became convinced that some misunderstanding, possibly some lover’s quarrel, was the cause of his protracted absence, and a cause that, if ascertained, could be removed. A good opportunity now presented itself--Colonel Morley was going to London the next day. He had business there which would detain him at least a week. He would see Graham; and as she considered her husband the shrewdest and wisest person in the world--I mean of the male sex--she had no doubt of his being able to turn Graham’s mind thoroughly inside out, and ascertain his exact feelings and intentions. If the Englishman, thus assayed, were found of base metal, then, at least, Mrs. Morley would be free to cast him altogether aside, and coin for the uses of the matrimonial market some nobler effigy in purer gold.
“My dear child,” said Mrs. Morley, in a low voice, nestling herself close to Isaura, while the Colonel, duly instructed, drew off the Venosta, “have you heard anything lately of our pleasant friend Mr. Vane?”
You can guess with what artful design Mrs. Morley put that question point-blank, fixing keen eyes on Isaura while she put it. She saw the heightened colour, the quivering lip of the girl thus abruptly appealed to, and she said inly: “I was right--she loves him!”
“I heard of Mr. Vane last night--accidentally.”
“Is he coming to Paris soon?”
“Not that I know of. How charmingly that wreath becomes you! it suits the earrings so well, too.”
“Frank chose it; he has good taste for a man. I trust him with my commissions to Hunt and Roskell’s but I limit him as to price, he is so extravagant--men are, when they make presents. They seem to think we value things according to their cost. They would gorge us with jewels, and let us starve for want of a smile. Not that Frank is so bad as the rest of them. But a propos of Mr. Vane--Frank will be sure to see him, and scold him well for deserting us all. I should not be surprised if he brought the deserter back with him, for I send a little note by Frank, inviting him to pay us a visit. We have spare rooms in our apartments.”
Isaura’s heart heaved beneath her robe, but she replied in a tone of astonishing indifference: “I believe this is the height of the London season, and Mr. Vane would probably be too engaged to profit even by an invitation so tempting.”
“Nous verrons. How pleased he will be to hear of your triumphs! He admired you so much before you were famous: what will be his admiration now! men are so vain--they care for us so much more when people praise us. But till we have put the creatures in their proper place, we must take them for what they are.”
Here the Venosta, with whom the poor Colonel had exhausted all the arts at his command for chaining her attention, could be no longer withheld from approaching Mrs. Morley, and venting her admiration of that lady’s wreath, earrings, robes, flounces. This dazzling apparition had on her the effect which a candle has on a moth--she fluttered round it, and longed to absorb herself in its blaze. But the wreath especially fascinated her--a wreath which no prudent lady with colourings less pure, and features less exquisitely delicate than the pretty champion of the rights of women, could have fancied on her own brows without a shudder. But the Venosta in such matters was not prudent. “It can’t be dear,” she cried piteously, extending her arms towards Isaura. “I must have one exactly like. Who made it? Cara signora, give me the address.”
“Ask the Colonel, dear Madame; he chose and bought it,” and Mrs. Morley glanced significantly at her well-tutored Frank.
“Madame,” said the Colonel, speaking in English, which he usually did with the Venosta--who valued herself on knowing that language and was flattered to be addressed in it--while he amused himself by introducing into its forms the dainty Americanisms with which he puzzled the Britisher--he might well puzzle the Florentine,--“Madame, I am too anxious for the appearance of my wife to submit to the test of a rival schemer like yourself in the same apparel. With all the homage due to a sex of which I am enthused dreadful, I decline to designate the florist from whom I purchased Mrs. Morley’s head-fixings.”
“Wicked man!” cried the Venosta, shaking her finger at him coquettishly. “You are jealous! Fie! a man should never be jealous of a woman’s rivalry with women;” and then, with a cynicism that might have become a greybeard, she added, “but of his own sex every man should be jealous--though of his dearest friend. Isn’t it so, Colonello?”
The Colonel looked puzzled, bowed, and made no reply. “That only shows,” said Mrs. Morley, rising, “what villains the Colonel has the misfortune to call friends and fellow-men.”
“I fear it is time to go,” said Frank, glancing at the clock.
In theory the most rebellious, in practice the most obedient, of wives, Mrs. Morley here kissed Isaura, resettled her crinoline, and shaking hands with the Venosta, retreated to the door.
“I shall have the wreath yet,” cried the Venosta, impishly. “La speranza e fenamina” (Hope is female).
“Alas!” said Isaura, half mournfully, half smiling, “alas! do you not remember what the poet replied when asked what disease was most mortal?--‘the hectic fever caught from the chill of hope.’”
Chapter III
Graham Vane was musing very gloomily in his solitary apartment one morning, when his servant announced Colonel Morley.
He received his visitor with more than the cordiality with which every English politician receives an American citizen. Graham liked the Colonel too well for what he was in himself to need any national title to his esteem. After some preliminary questions and answers as to the health of Mrs. Morley, the length of the Colonel’s stay in London, what day he could dine with Graham at Richmond or Gravesend, the Colonel took up the ball. “We have been reckoning to see you at Paris, sir, for the last six months.”
“I am very much flattered to hear that you have thought of me at all; but I am not aware of having warranted the expectation you so kindly express.”
“I guess you must have said something to my wife which led her to do more than expect--to reckon on your return. And, by the way, sir, I am charged to deliver to you this note from her, and to back the request it contains that you will avail yourself of the offer. Without summarising the points I do so.”
Graham glanced over the note addressed to him
“DEAR MR. VANE,--Do you forget how beautiful the environs of Paris are in May and June? how charming it was last year at the lake of Enghien? how gay were our little dinners out of doors in the garden arbours, with the Savarins and the fair Italian, and her incomparably amusing chaperon? Frank has my orders to bring you back to renew these happy days, while the birds are in their first song, and the leaves are in their youngest green. I have prepared your rooms chez nous--a chamber that looks out on the Champs Elysees, and a quiet cabinet de travail at the back, in which you can read, write, or sulk undisturbed. Come, and we will again visit Enghien and Montmorency. Don’t talk of engagements. If man proposes, woman disposes. Hesitate not--obey. Your sincere little friend, Lizzy.”
“My dear Morley,” said Graham, with emotion, “I cannot find words to thank your wife sufficiently for an invitation so graciously conveyed. Alas! I cannot accept it.”
“Why?” asked the Colonel, drily.
“I have too much to do in London.”
“Is that the true reason, or am I to suspicion that there is anything, sir, which makes you dislike a visit to Paris?”
The Americans enjoy the reputation of being the frankest putters of questions whom liberty of speech has yet educated into la recherche de la verite, and certainly Colonel Morley in this instance did not impair the national reputation.
Graham Vane’s brow slightly contracted, and he bit his lip as if stung by a sudden pang; but after a moment’s pause, he answered with a good-humoured smile:
“No man who has taste enough to admire the most beautiful city, and appreciate the charms of the most brilliant society in the world, can dislike Paris.”
“My dear sir, I did not ask you if you disliked Paris, but if there were anything that made you dislike coming back to it on a visit.”
“What a notion! and what a cross-examiner you would have made if you had been called to the bar! Surely, my dear friend, you can understand that when a man has in one place business which he cannot neglect, he may decline going to another place, whatever pleasure it would give him to do so. By the way, there is a great ball at one of the Ministers’ to-night; you should go there, and I will point out to you all those English notabilities in whom Americans naturally take interest. I will call for you at eleven o’clock. Lord ------, who is a connection of mine, would be charmed to know you.”
Morley hesitated; but when Graham said, “How your wife will scold you if you lose such an opportunity of telling her whether the Duchess of ---- is as beautiful as report says, and whether Gladstone or Disraeli seems to your phrenological science to have the finer head!” the Colonel gave in, and it was settled that Graham should call for him at the Langham Hotel.
That matter arranged, Graham probably hoped that his inquisitive visitor would take leave for the present, but the Colonel evinced no such intention. On the contrary, settling himself more at ease in his arm-chair, he said, “if I remember aright, you do not object to the odour of tobacco?”
Graham rose and presented to his visitor a cigar-box which he took from the mantelpiece.
The Colonel shook his head, and withdrew from his breast pocket a leather case, from which he extracted a gigantic regalia; this he lighted from a gold match-box in the shape of a locket attached to his watch-chain, and took two or three preliminary puffs, with his head thrown back and his eyes meditatively intent upon the ceiling.
We know already that strange whim of the Colonel’s (than whom, if he so pleased, no man could speak purer English as spoken by the Britisher) to assert the dignity of the American citizen by copious use of expressions and phrases familiar to the lips of the governing class of the great Republic--delicacies of speech which he would have carefully shunned in the polite circles of the Fifth Avenue in New York. Now the Colonel was much too experienced a man of the world not to be aware that the commission with which his Lizzy had charged him was an exceedingly delicate one; and it occurred to his mother wit that the best way to acquit himself of it, so as to avoid the risk of giving or of receiving serious affront, would be to push that whim of his into more than wonted exaggeration. Thus he could more decidedly and briefly come to the point; and should he, in doing so, appear too meddlesome, rather provoke a laugh than a frown-retiring from the ground with the honours due to a humorist. Accordingly, in his deepest nasal intonation, and withdrawing his eyes from the ceiling, he began:
“You have not asked, sir, after the signorina, or as we popularly call her, Mademoiselle Cicogna?”
“Have I not? I hope she is quite well, and her lively companion, Signora Venosta.”
“They are not sick, sir; or at least they were not so last night when my wife and I had the pleasure to see them. Of course you have read Mademoiselle Cicogna’s book--a bright performance, sir, age considered.”
“Certainly, I have read the book; it is full of unquestionable genius. Is Mademoiselle writing another? But of course she is.”
“I am not aware of the fact, sir. It may be predicated; such a mind cannot remain inactive; and I know from M. Savarin and that rising young man Gustave Rameau, that the publishers bid high for her brains considerable. Two translations have already appeared in our country. Her fame, sir, will be world-wide. She may be another George Sand, or at least another Eulalie Grantmesnil.”
Graham’s cheek became as white as the paper I write on. He inclined his head as in assent, but without a word. The Colonel continued:
“We ought to be very proud of her acquaintance, sir. I think you detected her gifts while they were yet unconjectured. My wife says so. You must be gratified to remember that, sir--clear grit, sir, and no mistake.”
“I certainly more than once have said to Mrs. Morley, that I esteemed Mademoiselle’s powers so highly that I hoped she would never become a stage-singer and actress. But this M. Rameau? You say he is a rising man. It struck me when at Paris that he was one of those charlatans with a great deal of conceit and very little information, who are always found in scores on the ultra-Liberal side of politics;-possibly I was mistaken.”
“He is the responsible editor of Le Sens Commun, in which talented periodical Mademoiselle Cicogna’s book was first raised.”
“Of course, I know that; a journal which, so far as I have looked into its political or social articles, certainly written by a cleverer and an older man than M. Rameau, is for unsettling all things and settling nothing. We have writers of that kind among ourselves--I have no sympathy with them. To me it seems that when a man says, ‘Off with your head,’ he ought to let us know what other head he would put on our shoulders, and by what process the change of heads shall be effected. Honestly speaking, if you and your charming wife are intimate friends and admirers of Mademoiselle Cicogna, I think you could not do her a greater service than that of detaching her from all connection with men like M. Rameau, and journals like La Sens Commun.”
The Colonel here withdrew his cigar from his lips, lowered his head to a level with Graham’s, and relaxing into an arch significant smile, said: “Start to Paris, and dissuade her yourself. Start--go ahead--don’t be shy--don’t seesaw on the beam of speculation. You will have more influence with that young female than we can boast.” Never was England in greater danger of quarrel with America than at that moment; but Graham curbed his first wrathful impulse, and replied coldly:
“It seems to me, Colonel, that you, though very unconsciously, derogate from the respect due to Mademoiselle Cicogna. That the counsel of a married couple like yourself and Mrs. Morley should be freely given to and duly heeded by a girl deprived of her natural advisers in parents, is a reasonable and honourable supposition; but to imply that the most influential adviser of a young lady so situated is a young single man, in no way related to her, appears to me a dereliction of that regard to the dignity of her sex which is the chivalrous characteristic of your countrymen--and to Mademoiselle Cicogna herself, a surmise which she would be justified in resenting as an impertinence.”
“I deny both allegations,” replied the Colonel serenely. “I maintain that a single man whips all connubial creation when it comes to gallantising a single young woman; and that no young lady would be justified in resenting as impertinence my friendly suggestion to the single man so deserving of her consideration as I estimate you to be, to solicit the right to advise her for life. And that’s a caution.”
Here the Colonel resumed his regalia, and again gazed intent on the ceiling.
“Advise her for life! You mean, I presume, as a candidate for her hand.”
“You don’t Turkey now. Well, I guess, you are not wide of the mark there, sir.”
“You do me infinite honour, but I do not presume so far.”
“So, so--not as yet. Before a man who is not without gumption runs himself for Congress, he likes to calculate how the votes will run. Well, sir, suppose we are in caucus, and let us discuss the chances of the election with closed doors.”
Graham could not help smiling at the persistent officiousness of his visitor, but his smile was a very sad one.
“Pray change the subject, my dear Colonel Morley--it is not a pleasant one to me; and as regards Mademoiselle Cicogna, can you think it would not shock her to suppose that her name was dragged into the discussions you would provoke, even with closed doors?”
“Sir,” replied the Colonel, imperturbably, “since the doors are closed, there is no one, unless it be a spirit-listener under the table, who can wire to Mademoiselle Cicogna the substance of debate. And, for my part, I do not believe in spiritual manifestations. Fact is, that I have the most amicable sentiments towards both parties, and if there is a misunderstanding which is opposed to the union of the States, I wish to remove it while yet in time. Now, let us suppose that you decline to be a candidate; there are plenty of others who will run; and as an elector must choose one representative or other, so a gal must choose one husband or other. And then you only repent when it is too late. It is a great thing to be first in the field. Let us approximate to the point; the chances seem good-will you run? Yes or no?”
“I repeat, Colonel Morley, that I entertain no such presumption.”
The Colonel here, rising, extended his hand, which Graham shook with constrained cordiality, and then leisurely walked to the door; there he paused, as if struck by a new thought, and said gravely, in his natural tone of voice, “You have nothing to say, sir, against the young lady’s character and honour?”
“I!--heavens, no! Colonel Morley, such a question insults me.”
The Colonel resumed his deepest nasal bass: “It is only, then, because you don’t fancy her now so much as you did last year--fact, you are soured on her and fly off the handle. Such things do happen. The same thing has happened to myself, sir. In my days of celibacy, there was a gal at Saratoga whom I gallantised, and whom, while I was at Saratoga, I thought Heaven had made to be Mrs. Morley: I was on the very point of telling her so, when I was suddenly called off to Philadelphia; and at Philadelphia, sir, I found that Heaven had made another Mrs. Morley. I state this fact, sir, though I seldom talk of my own affairs, even when willing to tender my advice in the affairs of another, in order to prove that I do not intend to censure you if Heaven has served you in the same manner. Sir, a man may go blind for one gal when he is not yet dry behind the ears, and then, when his eyes are skinned, go in for one better. All things mortal meet with a change, as my sisters little boy said when, at the age of eight, he quitted the Methodys and turned Shaker. Threep and argue as we may, you and I are both mortals--more’s the pity. Good morning, sir (glancing at the clock, which proclaimed the hour of 3 P.M.),--I err--good evening.”
By the post that day the Colonel transmitted a condensed and laconic report of his conversation with Graham Vane. I can state its substance in yet fewer words. He wrote word that Graham positively declined the invitation to Paris; that he had then, agreeably to Lizzy’s instruction, ventilated the Englishman, in the most delicate terms, as to his intentions with regard to Isaura, and that no intentions at all existed. The sooner all thoughts of him were relinquished, as a new suitor on the ground, the better it would be for the young lady’s happiness in the only state in which happiness should be, if not found, at least sought, whether by maid or man.
Mrs. Morley was extremely put out by this untoward result of the diplomacy she had intrusted to the Colonel; and when, the next day, came a very courteous letter from Graham, thanking her gratefully for the kindness of her invitation, and expressing his regret briefly, though cordially, at his inability to profit by it, without the most distant allusion to the subject which the Colonel had brought on the tapis, or even requesting his compliments to the Signoras Venosta and Cicogna, she was more than put out, more than resentful,--she was deeply grieved. Being, however, one of those gallant heroes of womankind who do not give in at the first defeat, she began to doubt whether Frank had not rather overstrained the delicacy which he said he had put into his “soundings.” He ought to have been more explicit. Meanwhile she resolved to call on Isaura, and, without mentioning Graham’s refusal of her invitation, endeavour to ascertain whether the attachment which she felt persuaded the girl secretly cherished for this recalcitrant Englishman were something more than the first romantic fancy--whether it were sufficiently deep to justify farther effort on Mrs. Morley’s part to bring it to a prosperous issue.
She found Isaura at home and alone; and, to do her justice, she exhibited wonderful tact in the fulfilment of the task she had set herself. Forming her judgment by manner and look--not words--she returned home, convinced that she ought to seize the opportunity afforded to her by Graham’s letter. It was one to which she might very naturally reply, and in that reply she might convey the object at her heart more felicitously than the Colonel had done. “The cleverest man is,” she said to herself, “stupid compared to an ordinary woman in the real business of life, which does not consist of fighting and moneymaking.”
Now there was one point she had ascertained by words in her visit to Isaura--a point on which all might depend. She had asked Isaura when and where she had seen Graham last; and when Isaura had given her that information, and she learned it was on the eventful day on which Isaura gave her consent to the publication of her MS. if approved by Savarin, in the journal to be set up by the handsome-faced young author, she leapt to the conclusion that Graham had been seized with no unnatural jealousy, and was still under the illusive glamoury of that green-eyed fiend. She was confirmed in this notion, not altogether an unsound one, when asking with apparent carelessness, “And in that last interview, did you see any change in Mr. Vane’s manner, especially when he took leave?”
Isaura turned away pale, and involuntarily clasping her hands-as women do when they would suppress pain-replied, in a low murmur, “His manner was changed.”
Accordingly, Mrs. Morley sat down and wrote the following letter:
“DEAR MR. VANE,--I am very angry indeed with you for refusing my invitation--I had so counted on you, and I don’t believe a word of your excuse. Engagements! To balls and dinners, I suppose, as if you were not much too clever to care about such silly attempts to enjoy solitude in crowds. And as to what you men call business, you have no right to have any business at all. You are not in commerce; you are not in Parliament; you told me yourself that you had no great landed estates to give you trouble; you are rich, without any necessity to take pains to remain rich, or to become richer; you have no business in the world except to please yourself: and when you will not come to Paris to see one of your truest friends--which I certainly am--it simply means, that no matter how such a visit would please me, it does not please yourself. I call that abominably rude and ungrateful.
“But I am not writing merely to scold you. I have something else on my mind, and it must come out. Certainly, when you were at Paris last year you did admire, above all other young ladies, Isaura Cicogna. And I honoured you for doing so. I know no other young lady to be called her equal. Well, if you admired her then, what would you do now if you met her? Then she was but a girl--very brilliant, very charming, it is true--but undeveloped, untested. Now she is a woman, a princess among women, but retaining all that is most lovable in a girl; so courted, yet so simple--so gifted, yet so innocent. Her head is not a bit turned by all the flattery that surrounds her. Come and judge for yourself. I still hold the door of the rooms destined to you open for repentance.
“My dear Mr. Vane, do not think me a silly match-making little woman, when I write to you thus, a coeur ouvert.
“I like you so much that I would fain secure to you the rarest prize which life is ever likely to offer to your ambition. Where can you hope to find another Isaura? Among the stateliest daughters of your English dukes, where is there one whom a proud man would be more proud to show to the world, saying, ‘She is mine!’ where one more distinguished--I will not say by mere beauty, there she might be eclipsed--but by sweetness and dignity combined--in aspect, manner, every movement, every smile?
“And you, who are yourself so clever, so well read--you who would be so lonely with a wife who was not your companion, with whom you could not converse on equal terms of intellect,--my dear friend, where could you find a companion in whom you would not miss the poet-soul of Isaura? Of course I should not dare to obtrude all these questionings on your innermost reflection, if I had not some idea, right or wrong, that since the days when at Enghien and Montmorency, seeing you and Isaura side by side, I whispered to Frank, ‘So should those two be through life,’ some cloud has passed between your eyes and the future on which they gazed. Cannot that cloud be dispelled? Were you so unjust to yourself as to be jealous of a rival, perhaps of a Gustave Rameau? I write to you frankly--answer me frankly; and if you answer, ‘Mrs. Morley, I don’t know, what you mean; I admired Mademoiselle Cicogna as I might admire any other pretty, accomplished girl, but it is really nothing to me whether she marries Gustave Rameau or any one else,’--why, then, burn this letter--forget that it has been written; and may you never know the pang of remorseful sigh, if, in the days to come, you see her--whose name in that case I should profane did I repeat it--the comrade of another man’s mind, the half of another man’s heart, the pride and delight of another man’s blissful home.”
Chapter IV
There is somewhere in Lord Lytton’s writings--writings so numerous that I may be pardoned if I cannot remember where-a critical definition of the difference between dramatic and narrative art of story, instanced by that marvellous passage in the loftiest of Sir Walter Scott’s works, in which all the anguish of Ravenswood on the night before he has to meet Lucy’s brother in mortal combat is conveyed without the spoken words required in tragedy. It is only to be conjectured by the tramp of his heavy boots to and fro all the night long in his solitary chamber, heard below by the faithful Caleb. The drama could not have allowed that treatment; the drama must have put into words, as “soliloquy,” agonies which the non-dramatic narrator knows that no soliloquy can describe. Humbly do I imitate, then, the great master of narrative in declining to put into words the conflict between love and reason that tortured the heart of Graham Vane when, dropping noiselessly the letter I have just transcribed, he covered his face with his hands and remained--I know not how long--in the same position, his head bowed, not a sound escaping from his lips.
He did not stir from his rooms that day; and had there been a Caleb’s faithful ear to listen, his tread, too, might have been heard all that sleepless night passing to and fro, but pausing oft, along his solitary floors.
Possibly love would have borne down all opposing seasonings, doubts, and prejudices, but for incidents that occurred the following evening. On that evening Graham dined en famille with his cousins the Altons. After dinner, the Duke produced the design for a cenotaph inscribed to the memory of his aunt, Lady Janet King, which he proposed to place in the family chapel at Alton.
“I know,” said the Duke, kindly, “you would wish the old house from which she sprang to preserve some such record of her who loved you as her son; and even putting you out of the question, it gratifies me to attest the claim of our family to a daughter who continues to be famous for her goodness, and made the goodness so lovable that envy forgave it for being famous. It was a pang to me when poor Richard King decided on placing her tomb among strangers; but in conceding his rights as to her resting-place, I retain mine to her name,--Nostris liberis virtutis exemplar.”
Graham wrung his cousin’s hand-he could not speak, choked by suppressed tears.
The Duchess, who loved and honoured Lady Janet almost as much as did her husband, fairly sobbed aloud. She had, indeed, reason for grateful memories of the deceased: there had been some obstacles to her marriage with the man who had won her heart, arising from political differences and family feuds between their parents, which the gentle meditation of Lady Janet had smoothed away. And never did union founded on mutual and ardent love more belie the assertions of the great Bichat (esteemed by Dr. Buckle the finest intellect which practical philosophy has exhibited since Aristotle), that “Love is a sort of fever which does not last beyond two years,” than that between those eccentric specimens of a class denounced as frivolous and artless by philosophers, English and French, who have certainly never heard of Bichat.
When the emotion the Duke had exhibited was calmed down, his wife pushed towards Graham a sheet of paper, inscribed with the epitaph composed by his hand. “Is it not beautiful,” she said, falteringly--“not a word too much or too little?”
Graham read the inscription slowly, and with very dimmed eyes. It deserved the praise bestowed on it; for the Duke, though a shy and awkward speaker, was an incisive and graceful writer.
Yet, in his innermost self, Graham shivered when he read that epitaph, it expressed so emphatically the reverential nature of the love which Lady Janet had inspired--the genial influences which the holiness of a character so active in doing good had diffused around it. It brought vividly before Graham that image of perfect spotless womanhood. And a voice within him asked, “Would that cenotaph be placed amid the monuments of an illustrious lineage if the secret known to thee could transpire? What though the lost one were really as unsullied by sin as the world deems, would the name now treasured as an heirloom not be a memory of gall and a sound of shame?”
He remained so silent after putting down the inscription, that the Duke said modestly: “My dear Graham, I see that you do not like what I have written. Your pen is much more practised than mine. If I did not ask you to compose the epitaph, it was because I thought it would please you more in coming, as a spontaneous tribute due to her, from the representative of her family. But will you correct my sketch, or give me another according to your own ideas?”
“I see not a word to alter,” said Graham; “forgive me if my silence wronged my emotion; the truest eloquence is that which holds us too mute for applause.”
“I knew you would like it. Leopold is always so disposed to underrate himself,” said the duchess, whose hand was resting fondly on her husband’s shoulder. “Epitaphs are so difficult to write-especially epitaphs on women of whom in life the least said the better. Janet was the only woman I ever knew whom one could praise in safety.”
“Well expressed,” said the Duke, smiling: “and I wish you would make that safety clear to some lady friends of yours, to whom it might serve as a lesson. Proof against every breath of scandal herself, Janet King never uttered and never encouraged one ill-natured word against another. But I am afraid, my dear fellow, that I must leave you to a tete-a-tete with Eleanor. You know that I must be at the House this evening--I only paired till half-past nine.”
“I will walk down to the House with you, if you are going on foot.”
“No,” said the Duchess; “you must resign yourself to me for at least half an hour. I was looking over your aunt’s letters to-day, and I found one which I wish to show you; it is all about yourself, and written within the last few months of her life.” Here she put her arm into Graham’s, and led him into her own private drawing-room, which, though others might call it a boudoir, she dignified by the name of her study. The Duke remained for some minutes thoughtfully leaning his arm on the mantelpiece. It was no unimportant debate in the Lords that night, and on a subject in which he took great interest, and the details of which he had thoroughly mastered. He had been requested to speak, if only a few words, for his high character and his reputation for good sense gave weight to the mere utterance of his opinion. But though no one had more moral courage in action, the Duke had a terror at the very thought of addressing an audience, which made him despise himself.
“Ah!” he muttered, “if Graham Vane were but in Parliament, I could trust him to say exactly what I would rather be swallowed up by an earthquake than stand up and say for myself. But now he has got money he seems to think of nothing but saving it.”
Chapter V
The letter from Lady Janet, which the Duchess took from the desk and placed in Graham’s hand, was in strange coincidence with the subject that for the last twenty-four hours had absorbed his thoughts and tortured his heart. Speaking of him in terms of affectionate eulogy, the writer proceeded to confide her earnest wish that he should not longer delay that change in life which, concentrating so much that is vague in the desires and aspirations of man, leaves his heart and his mind, made serene by the contentment of home, free for the steadfast consolidation of their warmth and their light upon the ennobling duties that unite the individual to his race.
“There is no one,” wrote Lady Janet, “whose character and career a felicitous choice in marriage can have greater influence over than this dear adopted son of mine. I do not fear that in any case he will be liable to the errors of his brilliant father. His early reverse of fortune here seems to me one of those blessings which Heaven conceals in the form of affliction. For in youth, the genial freshness of his gay animal spirits, a native generosity mingled with desire of display and thirst for applause, made me somewhat alarmed for his future. But, though he still retains these attributes of character, they are no longer predominant; they are modified and chastened. He has learned prudence. But what I now fear most for him is that which he does not show in the world, which neither Leopold nor you seem to detect,--it is an exceeding sensitiveness of pride. I know not how else to describe it. It is so interwoven with the highest qualities, that I sometimes dread injury to them could it be torn away from the faultier ones which it supports.
“It is interwoven with that lofty independence of spirit which has made him refuse openings the most alluring to his ambition; it communicates a touching grandeur to his self-denying thrift; it makes him so tenacious of his word once given, so cautious before he gives it. Public life to him is essential; without it he would be incomplete; and yet I sigh to think that whatever success he may achieve in it will be attended with proportionate pain. Calumny goes side by side with fame, and courting fame as a man, he is as thin-skinned to calumny as a woman.
“The wife for Graham should have qualities, not taken individually, uncommon in English wives, but in combination somewhat rare.
“She must have mind enough to appreciate his--not to clash with it. She must be fitted with sympathies to be his dearest companion, his confidante in the hopes and fears which the slightest want of sympathy would make him keep ever afterwards pent within his breast. In herself worthy of distinction, she must merge all distinction in his. You have met in the world men who, marrying professed beauties, or professed literary geniuses, are spoken of as the husband of the beautiful Mrs. A------, or of the clever Mrs. B-------: can you fancy Graham Vane in the reflected light of one of those husbands? I trembled last year when I thought he was attracted by a face which the artists raved about, and again by a tongue which dropped bons mots that went the round of the club. I was relieved, when, sounding him, he said, laughingly, ‘No, dear aunt, I should be one sore from head to foot if I married a wife that was talked about for anything but goodness.’
“No,--Graham Vane will have pains sharp enough if he live to be talked about himself. But that tenderest half of himself, the bearer of the name he would make, and for the dignity of which he alone would be responsible,--if that were the town talk, he would curse the hour he gave any one the right to take on herself his man’s burden of calumny and fame. I know not which I should pity the most, Graham Vane or his wife.
“Do you understand me, dearest Eleanor? No doubt you do so far, that you comprehend that the women whom men most admire are not the women we, as women ourselves, would wish our sons or brothers to marry. But perhaps you do not comprehend my cause of fear, which is this--for in such matters men do not see as we women do--Graham abhors, in the girls of our time, frivolity and insipidity. Very rightly, you will say. True, but then he is too likely to be allured by contrasts. I have seen him attracted by the very girls we recoil from more than we do from those we allow to be frivolous and insipid. I accused him of admiration for a certain young lady whom you call ‘odious,’ and whom the slang that has come into vogue calls ‘fast;’ and I was not satisfied with his answer, ‘Certainly I admire her; she is not a doll--she has ideas.’ I would rather of the two see Graham married to what men call a doll, than to a girl with ideas which are distasteful to women.”
Lady Janet then went on to question the Duchess about a Miss Asterisk, with whom this tale will have nothing to do, but who, from the little which Lady Janet had seen of her, might possess all the requisites that fastidious correspondent would exact for the wife of her adopted son.
This Miss Asterisk had been introduced into the London world by the Duchess. The Duchess had replied to Lady Janet, that if earth could be ransacked, a more suitable wife for Graham Vane than Miss Asterisk could not be found; she was well born--an heiress; the estates she inherited were in the county of--(viz., the county in which the ancestors of D’Altons and Vanes had for centuries established their whereabout). Miss Asterisk was pretty enough to please any man’s eye, but not with the beauty of which artists rave; well informed enough to be companion to a well-informed man, but certainly not witty enough to supply bons mots to the clubs. Miss Asterisk was one of those women of whom a husband might be proud, yet with whom a husband would feel safe from being talked about.
And in submitting the letter we have read to Graham’s eye, the Duchess had the cause of Miss Asterisk pointedly in view. Miss Asterisk had confided to her friend, that, of all men she had seen, Mr. Graham Vane was the one she would feel the least inclined to refuse.
So when Graham Vane returned the letter to the Duchess, simply saying, “How well my dear aunt divined what is weakest in me!” the Duchess replied quickly, “Miss Asterisk dines here to-morrow; pray come; you would like her if you knew more of her.”
“To-morrow I am engaged--an American friend of mine dines with me; but ‘tis no matter, for I shall never feel more for Miss Asterisk than I feel for Mont Blanc.”
Chapter VI
On leaving his cousin’s house Graham walked on, he scarce knew or cared whither, the image of the beloved dead so forcibly recalled the solemnity of the mission with which he had been intrusted, and which hitherto he had failed to fulfil. What if the only mode by which he could, without causing questions and suspicions that might result in dragging to day the terrible nature of the trust he held, enrich the daughter of Richard King, repair all wrong hitherto done to her, and guard the sanctity of Lady Janet’s home,--should be in that union which Richard King had commended to him while his heart was yet free? In such a case, would not gratitude to the dead, duty to the living, make that union imperative at whatever sacrifice of happiness to himself? The two years to which Richard King had limited the suspense of research were not yet expired. Then, too, that letter of Lady Janet’s,--so tenderly anxious for his future, so clear-sighted as to the elements of his own character in its strength or its infirmities--combined with graver causes to withhold his heart from its yearning impulse, and--no, not steel it against Isaura, but forbid it to realise, in the fair creature and creator of romance, his ideal of the woman to whom an earnest, sagacious, aspiring man commits all the destinies involved in the serene dignity of his hearth. He could not but own that this gifted author--this eager seeker after fame--this brilliant and bold competitor with men on their own stormy battle-ground-was the very person from whom Lady Janet would have warned away his choice. She (Isaura) merge her own distinctions in a husband’s;--she leave exclusively to him the burden of fame and calumny!--she shun “to be talked about!” she who could feel her life to be a success or a failure, according to the extent and the loudness of the talk which it courted!
While these thoughts racked his mind, a kindly hand was laid on his arm, and a cheery voice accosted him. “Well met, my dear Vane! I see we are bound to the same place; there will be a good gathering to-night.”
“What do you mean, Bevil? I am going nowhere, except to my own quiet rooms.”
“Pooh! Come in here at least for a few minutes,”--and Bevil drew him up to the door-step of a house close by, where, on certain evenings, a well-known club drew together men who seldom meet so familiarly elsewhere--men of all callings; a club especially favoured by wits, authors, and the flaneurs of polite society.
Graham shook his head, about to refuse, when Bevil added, “I have just come from Paris, and can give you the last news, literary, political, and social. By the way, I saw Savarin the other night at the Cicogna’s--he introduced me there.” Graham winced; he was spelled by the music of a name, and followed his acquaintance into the crowded room, and, after returning many greetings and nods, withdrew into a remote corner, and motioned Bevil to a seat beside him.
“So you met Savarin? Where, did you say?”
“At the house of the new lady-author--I hate the word authoress--Mademoiselle Cicogna! Of course you have read her book?”
“Yes.”
“Full of fine things, is it not?--though somewhat highflown and sentimental: however, nothing succeeds like success. No book has been more talked about at Paris: the only thing more talked about is the lady-author herself.”
“Indeed, and how?”
“She doesn’t look twenty, a mere girl--of that kind of beauty which so arrests the eye that you pass by other faces to gaze on it, and the dullest stranger would ask, ‘Who, and what is she?’ A girl, I say, like that--who lives as independently as if she were a middle-aged widow, receives every week (she has her Thursdays), with no other chaperon than an old ci-devant Italian singing woman, dressed like a guy--must set Parisian tongues into play even if she had not written the crack book of the season.”
“Mademoiselle Cicogna receives on Thursdays,--no harm in that; and if she have no other chaperon than the Italian lady you mention, it is because Mademoiselle Cicogna is an orphan, and having a fortune, such as it is, of her own, I do not see why she should not live as independently as many an unmarried woman in London placed under similar circumstances. I suppose she receives chiefly persons in the literary or artistic world, and if they are all as respectable as the Savarins, I do not think ill-nature itself could find fault with her social circle.”
“Ah! you know the Cicogna, I presume. I am sure I did not wish to say anything that could offend her best friends, only I do think it is a pity she is not married, poor girl!”
“Mademoiselle Cicogna, accomplished, beautiful, of good birth (the Cicogna’s rank among the oldest of Lombard families), is not likely to want offers.”
“Offers of marriage,--h’m--well, I dare say, from authors and artists. You know Paris better even than I do, but I don’t suppose authors and artists there make the most desirable husbands; and I scarcely know a marriage in France between a man-author and lady-author which does not end in the deadliest of all animosities--that of wounded amour propre. Perhaps the man admires his own genius too much to do proper homage to his wife’s.”
“But the choice of Mademoiselle Cicogna need not be restricted to the pale of authorship--doubtless she has many admirers beyond that quarrelsome borderland.”
“Certainly-countless adorers. Enguerrand de Vandemar--you know that diamond of dandies?”
“Perfectly--is he an admirer?”
“Cela va sans dire--he told me that though she was not the handsomest woman in Paris, all other women looked less handsome since he had seen her. But, of course, French lady-killers like Enguerrand, when it comes to marriage, leave it to their parents to choose their wives and arrange the terms of the contract. Talking of lady-killers, I beheld amid the throng at Mademoiselle Cicogna’s the ci-devant Lovelace whom I remember some twenty-three years ago as the darling of wives and the terror of husbands-Victor de Mauleon.”
“Victor de Mauleon at Mademoiselle Cicogna’s!--what, is that man restored to society?”
“Ah! you are thinking of the ugly old story about the jewels--oh, yes, he has got over that; all his grand relations, the Vandemars, Beauvilliers, Rochebriant, and others, took him by the hand when he reappeared at Paris last year; and though I believe he is still avoided by many, he is courted by still more--and avoided, I fancy, rather from political than social causes. The Imperialist set, of course, execrate and prescribe him. You know he is the writer of those biting articles signed Pierre Firmin in the Sens Commun; and I am told he is the proprietor of that very clever journal, which has become a power.”
“So, so--that is the journal in which Mademoiselle Cicogna’s roman first appeared. So, so--Victor de Mauleon one of her associates, her counsellor and friend--ah!”
“No, I didn’t say that; on the contrary, he was presented to her the first time the evening I was at the house. I saw that young silk-haired coxcomb, Gustave Rameau, introduce him to her. You don’t perhaps know Rameau, editor of the Sens Commun--writes poems and criticisms. They say he is a Red Republican, but De Mauleon keeps truculent French politics subdued if not suppressed in his cynical journal. Somebody told me that the Cicogna is very much in love with Rameau; certainly he has a handsome face of his own, and that is the reason why she was so rude to the Russian Prince X-----.”
“How rude! Did the Prince propose to her?”
“Propose! you forget--he is married. Don’t you know the Princess? Still there are other kinds of proposals than those of marriage which a rich Russian prince may venture to make to a pretty novelist brought up for the stage.”
“Bevil!” cried Graham, grasping the man’s arm fiercely, “how dare you?”
“My dear boy,” said Bevil, very much astonished, “I really did not know that your interest in the young lady was so great. If I have wounded you in relating a mere on dit picked up at the Jockey Club, I beg you a thousand pardons. I dare say there was not a word of truth in it.”
“Not a word of truth, you may be sure, if the on dit was injurious to Mademoiselle Cicogna. It is true, I have a strong interest in her; any man--any gentleman--would have such interest in a girl so brilliant and seemingly so friendless. It shames one of human nature to think that the reward which the world makes to those who elevate its platitudes, brighten its dulness, delight its leisure, is Slander! I have had the honour to make the acquaintance of this lady before she became a ‘celebrity,’ and I have never met in my paths through life a purer heart or a nobler nature. What is the wretched on dit you condescend to circulate? Permit me to add:
“‘He who repeats a slander shares the crime.’”
“Upon my honour, my dear Vane,” said Bevil seriously (he did not want for spirit), “I hardly know you this evening. It is not because duelling is out of fashion that a man should allow himself to speak in a tone that gives offence to another who intended none; and if duelling is out of fashion in England, it is still possible in France.--Entre nous, I would rather cross the Channel with you than submit to language that conveys unmerited insult.”
Graham’s cheek, before ashen pale, flushed into dark red. “I understand you,” he said quietly, “and will be at Boulogne to-morrow.”
“Graham Vane,” replied Bevil, with much dignity, “you and I have known each other a great many years, and neither of us has cause to question the courage of the other; but I am much older than yourself--permit me to take the melancholy advantage of seniority. A duel between us in consequence of careless words said about a lady in no way connected with either, would be a cruel injury to her; a duel on grounds so slight would little injure me--a man about town, who would not sit an hour in the House of Commons if you paid him a thousand pounds a minute. But you, Graham Vane--you whose destiny it is to canvass electors and make laws--would it not be an injury to you to be questioned at the hustings why you broke the law, and why you sought another man’s life? Come, come! shake hands and consider all that seconds, if we chose them, would exact, is said, every affront on either side retracted, every apology on either side made.”
“Bevil, you disarm and conquer me. I spoke like a hotheaded fool; forget it--forgive. But--but--I can listen calmly now--what is that on dit?”
“One that thoroughly bears out your own very manly upholding of the poor young orphan, whose name I shall never again mention without such respect as would satisfy her most sensitive champion. It was said that the Prince X------ boasted that before a week was out Mademoiselle Cicogna should appear in his carriage at the Bois de Boulogne, and wear at the opera diamonds he had sent to her; that this boast was enforced by a wager, and the terms of the wager compelled the Prince to confess the means he had taken to succeed, and produce the evidence that he had lost or won. According to this on dit, the Prince had written to Mademoiselle Cicogna, and the letter had been accompanied by a parure that cost him half a million of francs; that the diamonds had been sent back with a few words of such scorn as a queen might address to an upstart lackey. But, my dear Vane, it is a mournful position for the girl to receive such offers; and you must agree with me in wishing she were safely married, even to Monsieur Rameau, coxcomb though he be. Let us hope that they will be an exception to French authors, male and female, in general, and live like turtle-doves.”
Chapter VII
A few days after the date of the last chapter, Colonel Morley returned to Paris. He had dined with Graham at Greenwich, had met him afterwards in society, and paid him a farewell visit on the day before the Colonel’s departure; but the name of Isaura Cicogna had not again been uttered by either. Morley was surprised that his wife did not question him minutely as to the mode in which he had executed her delicate commission, and the manner as well as words with which Graham had replied to his “ventilations.” But his Lizzy cut him short when he began his recital:
“I don’t want to hear anything more about the man. He has thrown away a prize richer than his ambition will ever gain, even if it gained him a throne.”
“That it can’t gain him in the old country. The people are loyal to the present dynasty, whatever you may be told to the contrary.”
“Don’t be so horribly literal, Frank; that subject is done with. How was the Duchess of ------ dressed?”
But when the Colonel had retired to what the French call the cabinet de traivail--and which he more accurately termed his “smoke den”--and there indulged in the cigar which, despite his American citizenship, was forbidden in the drawing-room of the tyrant who ruled his life, Mrs. Morley took from her desk a letter received three days before, and brooded over it intently, studying every word. When she had thus reperused it, her tears fell upon the page. “Poor Isaura!” she muttered--“poor Isaura! I know she loves him--and how deeply a nature like hers can love! But I must break it to her. If I did not, she would remain nursing a vain dream, and refuse every chance of real happiness for the sake of nursing it.” Then she mechanically folded up the letter--I need not say it was from Graham Vane--restored it to the desk, and remained musing till the Colonel looked in at the door and said peremptorily, “Very late--come to bed.”
The next day Madame Savarin called on Isaura.
“Chere enfant,” said she, “I have bad news for you. Poor Gustave is very ill--an attack of the lungs and fever; you know how delicate he is.”
“I am sincerely grieved,” said Isaura, in earnest tender tones; “it must be a very sudden attack: he was here last Thursday.”
“The malady only declared itself yesterday morning, but surely you must have observed how ill he has been looking for several days past? It pained me to see him.”
“I did not notice any change in him,” said Isaura, somewhat conscience-stricken. Wrapt in her own happy thoughts, she would not have noticed change in faces yet more familiar to her than that of her young admirer.
“Isaura,” said Madame Savarin, “I suspect there are moral causes for our friend’s failing health. Why should I disguise my meaning? You know well how madly he is in love with you, and have you denied him hope?”
“I like M. Rameau as a friend; I admire him--at times I pity him.”
“Pity is akin to love.”
“I doubt the truth of that saying, at all events as you apply it now. I could not love M. Rameau; I never gave him cause to think I could.”
“I wish for both your sakes that you could make me a different answer; for his sake, because, knowing his faults and failings, I am persuaded that they would vanish in a companionship so pure, so elevating as yours: you could make him not only so much happier but so much better a man. Hush! let me go on, let me come to yourself,--I say for your sake I wish it. Your pursuits, your ambition, are akin to his; you should not marry one who could not sympathise with you in these. If you did, he might either restrict the exercise of your genius or be chafed at its display. The only authoress I ever knew whose married lot was serenely happy to the last, was the greatest of English poetesses married to a great English poet. You cannot, you ought not, to devote yourself to the splendid career to which your genius irresistibly impels you, without that counsel, that support, that protection, which a husband alone can give. My dear child, as the wife myself of a man of letters, and familiarised to all the gossip, all the scandal, to which they who give their names to the public are exposed, I declare that if I had a daughter who inherited Savarin’s talents, and was ambitious of attaining to his renown, I would rather shut her up in a convent than let her publish a book that was in every one’s hands until she had sheltered her name under that of a husband; and if I say this of my child, with a father so wise in the world’s ways, and so popularly respected as my bon homme, what must I feel to be essential to your safety, poor stranger in our land! poor solitary orphan! with no other advice or guardian than the singing mistress whom you touchingly call ‘Madre!’ I see how I distress and pain you--I cannot help it. Listen! The other evening Savarin came back from his favourite cafe in a state of excitement that made me think he came to announce a revolution. It was about you; he stormed, he wept--actually wept--my philosophical laughing Savarin. He had just heard of that atrocious wager made by a Russian barbarian. Every one praised you for the contempt with which you had treated the savage’s insolence. But that you should have been submitted to such an insult without one male friend who had the right to resent and chastise it,--you cannot think how Savarin was chafed and galled. You know how he admires, but you cannot guess how he reveres you; and since then he says to me every day: ‘That girl must not remain single. Better marry any man who has a heart to defend a wife’s honour and the nerve to fire a pistol: every Frenchman has those qualifications!’”
Here Isaura could no longer restrain her emotions; she burst into sobs so vehement, so convulsive, that Madame Savarin became alarmed; but when she attempted to embrace and soothe her, Isaura recoiled with a visible shudder, and gasping out, “Cruel, cruel!” turned to the door, and rushed to her own room.
A few minutes afterwards a maid entered the salon with a message to Madame Savarin that Mademoiselle was so unwell that she must beg Madame to excuse her return to the salon.
Later in the day Mrs. Morley called, but Isaura would not see her.
Meanwhile poor Rameau was stretched on his sick-bed, and in sharp struggle between life and death. It is difficult to disentangle, one by one, all the threads in a nature so complex as Rameau’s; but if we may hazard a conjecture, the grief of disappointed love was not the immediate cause of his illness, and yet it had much to do with it. The goad of Isaura’s refusal had driven him into seeking distraction in excesses which a stronger frame could not have courted with impunity. The man was thoroughly Parisian in many things, but especially in impatience of any trouble. Did love trouble him--love could be drowned in absinthe; and too much absinthe may be a more immediate cause of congested lungs than the love which the absinthe had lulled to sleep.
His bedside was not watched by hirelings. When first taken thus ill--too ill to attend to his editorial duties--information was conveyed to the publisher of the Sens Commun, and in consequence of that information, Victor de Mauleon came to see the sick man. By his bed he found Savarin, who had called, as it were by chance, and seen the doctor, who had said, “It is grave. He must be well nursed.” Savarin whispered to De Mauleon, “Shall we call in a professional nurse, or a soeur de charite?”
De Mauleon replied, also in a whisper, “Somebody told me that the man had a mother.”
It was true--Savarin had forgotten it. Rameau never mentioned his parents--he was not proud of them.
They belonged to a lower class of the bourgeoisie, retired shopkeepers, and a Red Republican is sworn to hate of the bourgeoisie, high or low; while a beautiful young author pushing his way into the Chaussee d’Antin does not proclaim to the world that his parents had sold hosiery in the Rue St. Denis.
Nevertheless Savarin knew that Rameau had such parents still living, and took the hint. Two hours afterwards Rameau was leaning his burning forehead on his mother’s breast.
The next morning the doctor said to the mother, “You are worth ten of me. If you can stay here we shall pull him through.”
“Stay here!--my own boy!” cried indignantly the poor mother.
Chapter VIII
The day which had inflicted on Isaura so keen an anguish was marked by a great trial in the life of Alain de Rochebriant.
In the morning he received the notice “of un commandement tendant a saisie immobiliere,” on the part of his creditor, M. Louvier; in plain English, an announcement that his property at Rochebriant would be put up to public sale on a certain day, in case all debts due to the mortgagee were not paid before. An hour afterwards came a note from Duplessis stating that “he had returned from Bretagne on the previous evening, and would be very happy to see the Marquis de Rochebriant before two o’clock, if not inconvenient to call.”
Alain put the “commandement” into his pocket, and repaired to the Hotel Duplessis.
The financier received him with very cordial civility. Then he began: “I am happy to say I left your excellent aunt in very good health. She honoured the letter of introduction to her which I owe to your politeness with the most amiable hospitalities; she insisted on my removing from the auberge at which I first put up and becoming a guest under your venerable roof-tree--a most agreeable lady, and a most interesting chateau.”
“I fear your accommodation was in striking contrast to your comforts at Paris; my chateau is only interesting to an antiquarian enamoured of ruins.”
“Pardon me, ‘ruins’ is an exaggerated expression. I do not say that the chateau does not want some repairs, but they would not be costly; the outer walls are strong enough to defy time for centuries to come, and a few internal decorations and some modern additions of furniture would make the old manoir a home fit for a prince. I have been over the whole estate, too, with the worthy M. Hebert,--a superb property.”
“Which M. Louvier appears to appreciate,” said Alain, with a somewhat melancholy smile, extending to Duplessis the menacing notice.
Duplessis glanced at it, and said drily: “M. Louvier knows what he is about. But I think we had better put an immediate stop to formalities which must be painful to a creditor so benevolent. I do not presume to offer to pay the interest due on the security you can give for the repayment. If you refused that offer from so old a friend as Lemercier, of course you could not accept it from me. I make another proposal, to which you can scarcely object. I do not like to give my scheming rival on the Bourse the triumph of so profoundly planned a speculation. Aid me to defeat him. Let me take the mortgage on myself, and become sole mortgagee--hush!--on this condition,--that there should be an entire union of interests between us two; that I should be at liberty to make the improvements I desire, and when the improvements be made, there should be a fair arrangement as to the proportion of profits due to me as mortgagee and improver, to you as original owner. Attend, my dear Marquis,--I am speaking as a mere man of business. I see my way to adding more than a third, I might even say a half--to the present revenues of Rochbriant. The woods have been sadly neglected, drainage alone would add greatly to their produce. Your orchards might be rendered magnificent supplies to Paris with better cultivation. Lastly, I would devote to building purposes or to market gardens all the lands round the two towns of ------ and ---------. I think I can lay my hands on suitable speculators for these last experiments. In a word, though the market value of Rochebriant, as it now stands, would not be equivalent to the debt on it, in five or six years it could be made worth--well, I will not say how much--but we shall be both well satisfied with the result. Meanwhile, if you allow me to find purchasers for your timber, and if you will not suffer the Chevalier de Finisterre to regulate your expenses, you need have no fear that the interest due to me will not be regularly paid, even though I shall be compelled, for the first year or two at least, to ask a higher rate of interest than Louvier exacted--say a quarter per cent. more; and in suggesting that, you will comprehend that this is now a matter of business between us, and not of friendship.”
Alain turned his head aside to conceal his emotion, and then, with the quick affectionate impulse of the genuine French nature, threw himself on the financier’s breast and kissed him on both cheeks.
“You save me! you save the home and the tombs of my ancestors! Thank you I cannot; but I believe in God--I pray--I will pray for you as for a father; and if ever,” he hurried on in broken words, “I am mean enough to squander on idle luxuries one franc that I should save for the debt due to you, chide me as a father would chide a graceless son.”
Moved as Alain was, Duplessis was moved yet more deeply. “What father would not be proud of such a son? Ah, if I had such a one!” he said softly. Then, quickly recovering his wonted composure, he added, with the sardonic smile which often chilled his friends and alarmed his foes, “Monsieur Louvier is about to pass that which I ventured to promise him, a ‘mauvais quart-d’heure.’ Lend me that commandement tendant a saisie. I must be off to my avoue with instructions. If you have no better engagement, pray dine with me to-day and accompany Valerie and myself to the opera.”
I need not say that Alain accepted the invitation. How happy Valerie was that evening!
Chapter IX
The next day Duplessis was surprised by a visit from M. Louvier--that magnate of millionaires had never before set foot in the house of his younger and less famous rival.
The burly man entered the room with a face much flushed, and with more than his usual mixture of jovial brusquerie and opulent swagger.
“Startled to see me, I dare say,” began Louvier, as soon as the door was closed. “I have this morning received a communication from your agent containing a cheque for the interest due to me from M. Rochebriant, and a formal notice of your intention to pay off the principal on behalf of that popinjay prodigal. Though we two have not hitherto been the best friends in the world, I thought it fair to a man in your station to come to you direct and say, ‘Cher confrere, what swindler has bubbled you? You don’t know the real condition of this Breton property, or you would never so throw away your millions. The property is not worth the mortgage I have on it by 30,000 louis.”
“Then, M. Louvier, you will be 30,000 louis the richer if I take the mortgage off your hands.”
“I can afford the loss--no offence--better than you can; and I may have fancies which I don’t mind paying for, but which cannot influence another. See, I have brought with me the exact schedule of all details respecting this property. You need not question their accuracy; they have been arranged by the Marquis’s own agents, M. Gandrin and M. Hebert. They contain, you will perceive, every possible item of revenue, down to an apple-tree. Now, look at that, and tell me if you are justified in lending such a sum on such a property.”
“Thank you very much for an interest in my affairs that I scarcely ventured to expect M. Louvier to entertain; but I see that I have a duplicate of this paper, furnished to me very honestly by M. Hebert himself. Besides, I, too, have fancies which I don’t mind paying for, and among them may be a fancy for the lands of Rochebriant.”
“Look you, Duplessis, when a man like me asks a favour, you may be sure that he has the power to repay it. Let me have my whim here, and ask anything you like from me in return!”
“Desole not to oblige you, but this has become not only a whim of mine, but a matter of honour; and honour you know, my dear M. Louvier, is the first principle of sound finance. I have myself, after careful inspection of the Rochebriant property, volunteered to its owner to advance the money to pay off your hypotheque; and what would be said on the Bourse if Lucien Duplessis failed in an obligation?”
“I think I can guess what will one day be said of Lucien Duplessis if he make an irrevocable enemy of Paul Louvier. Corbleu! mon cher, a man of thrice your capital, who watched every speculation of yours with a hostile eye, might some beau jour make even you a bankrupt!”
“Forewarned, forearmed!” replied Duplessis, imperturbably, “Fas est ab hoste doceri,--I mean, ‘It is right to be taught by an enemy;’ and I never remember the day when you were otherwise, and yet I am not a bankrupt, though I receive you in a house which, thanks to you, is so modest in point of size!”
“Bah! that was a mistake of mine,--and, ha! ha! you had your revenge there--that forest!”
“Well, as a peace offering, I will give you up the forest, and content my ambition as a landed proprietor with this bad speculation of Rochebriant!”
“Confound the forest, I don’t care for it now! I can sell my place for more than it has cost me to one of your imperial favourites. Build a palace in your forest. Let me have Rochebriant, and name your terms.”
“A thousand pardons! but I have already had the honour to inform you, that I have contracted an obligation which does not allow me to listen to terms.”
As a serpent, that, after all crawlings and windings, rears itself on end, Louvier rose, crest erect:
“So then it is finished. I came here disposed to offer peace--you refuse, and declare war.”
“Not at all, I do not declare war; I accept it if forced on me.”
“Is that your last word, M. Duplessis?”
“Monsieur Louvier, it is.”
“Bon jour!”
And Louvier strode to the door; here he paused: “Take a day to consider.”
“Not a moment.”
“Your servant, Monsieur,--your very humble servant.” Louvier vanished.
Duplessis leaned his large thoughtful forehead on his thin nervous hand. “This loan will pinch me,” he muttered. “I must be very wary now with such a foe. Well, why should I care to be rich? Valerie’s dot, Valerie’s happiness, are secured.”
Chapter X
Madame Savarin wrote a very kind and very apologetic letter to Isaura, but no answer was returned to it. Madame Savarin did not venture to communicate to her husband the substance of a conversation which had ended so painfully. He had, in theory, a delicacy of tact, which, if he did not always exhibit it in practice, made him a very severe critic of its deficiency in others. Therefore, unconscious of the offence given, he made a point of calling at Isaura’s apartments, and leaving word with her servant that “he was sure she would be pleased to hear M. Rameau was somewhat better, though still in danger.”
It was not till the third day after her interview with Madame Savarin that Isaura left her own room,--she did so to receive Mrs. Morley.
The fair American was shocked to see the change in Isaura’s countenance. She was very pale, and with that indescribable appearance of exhaustion which betrays continued want of sleep; her soft eyes were dim, the play of her lips was gone, her light step weary and languid.
“My poor darling!” cried Mrs. Morley, embracing her, “you have indeed been ill! What is the matter?--who attends you?”
“I need no physician, it was but a passing cold--the air of Paris is very trying. Never mind me, dear--what is the last news?”
Therewith Mrs. Morley ran glibly through the principal topics of the hour: the breach threatened between M. Ollivier and his former liberal partisans; the tone unexpectedly taken by M. de Girardin; the speculations as to the result of the trial of the alleged conspirators against the Emperor’s life, which was fixed to take place towards the end of that month of June,--all matters of no slight importance to the interests of an empire. Sunk deep into the recesses of her fauteuil, Isaura seemed to listen quietly, till, when a pause came, she said in cold clear tones:
“And Mr. Graham Vane--he has refused your invitation?”
“I am sorry to say he has--he is so engaged in London.”
“I knew he had refused,” said Isaura, with a low bitter laugh.
“How? who told you?”
“My own good sense told me. One may have good sense, though one is a poor scribbler.”
“Don’t talk in that way; it is beneath you to angle for compliments.”
“Compliments, ah! And so Mr. Vane has refused to come to Paris; never mind, he will come next year. I shall not be in Paris then. Did Colonel Morley see Mr. Vane?”
“Oh, yes; two or three times.”
“He is well?”
“Quite well, I believe--at least Frank did not say to the contrary; but, from what I hear, he is not the person I took him for. Many people told Frank that he is much changed since he came into his fortune--is grown very stingy, quite miserly indeed; declines even a seat in Parliament because of the expense. It is astonishing how money does spoil a man.”
“He had come into his fortune when he was here. Money had not spoiled him then.”
Isaura paused, pressing her hands tightly together; then she suddenly rose to her feet, the colour on her cheek mantling and receding rapidly, and fixing on her startled visitor eyes no longer dim, but with something half fierce, half imploring in the passion of their gaze, said: “Your husband spoke of me to Mr. Vane: I know he did. What did Mr. Vane answer? Do not evade my question. The truth! the truth! I only ask the truth!”
“Give me your hand; sit here beside me, dearest child.”
“Child!--no, I am a woman!--weak as a woman, but strong as a woman too!--The truth!”
Mrs. Morley had come prepared to carry out the resolution she had formed and “break” to Isaura “the truth,” that which the girl now demanded. But then she had meant to break the truth in her own gentle, gradual way. Thus suddenly called upon, her courage failed her. She burst into tears. Isaura gazed at her dry-eyed.
“Your tears answer me. Mr. Vane has heard that I have been insulted. A man like him does not stoop to love for a woman who has known an insult. I do not blame him; I honour him the more--he is right.”
“No-no-no!--you insulted! Who dared to insult you? (Mrs. Morley had never heard the story about the Russian Prince.) Mr. Vane spoke to Frank, and writes of you to me as of one whom it is impossible not to admire, to respect; but--I cannot say it--you will have the truth,--there, read and judge for yourself.” And Mrs. Morley drew forth and thrust into Isaura’s hands the letter she had concealed from her husband. The letter was not very long; it began with expressions of warm gratitude to Mrs. Morley, not for her invitation only, but for the interest she had conceived in his happiness. It went on thus “I join with my whole heart in all that you say, with such eloquent justice, of the mental and personal gifts so bounteously lavished by nature on the young lady whom you name.
“No one can feel more sensible than I of the charm of so exquisite a loveliness; no one can more sincerely join in the belief that the praise which greets the commencement of her career is but the whisper of the praise that will cheer its progress with louder and louder plaudits.
“He only would be worthy of her hand, who, if not equal to herself in genius, would feel raised into partnership with it by sympathy with its objects and joy in its triumphs. For myself, the same pain with which I should have learned she had adopted the profession which she originally contemplated, saddened and stung me when, choosing a career that confers a renown yet more lasting than the stage, she no less left behind her the peaceful immunities of private life. Were I even free to consult only my own heart in the choice of the one sole partner of my destinies (which I cannot at present honestly say that I am, though I had expected to be so ere this, when I last saw you at Paris); could I even hope--which I have no right to do--that I could chain to myself any private portion of thoughts which now flow into the large channels by which poets enrich the blood of the world,--still (I say it in self-reproach, it may be the fault of my English rearing, it may rather be the fault of an egotism peculiar to myself)--still I doubt if I could render happy any woman whose world could not be narrowed to the Home that she adorned and blessed.
“And yet not even the jealous tyranny of man’s love could dare to say to natures like hers of whom we speak, ‘Limit to the household glory of one the light which genius has placed in its firmament for the use and enjoyment of all.’”
“I thank you so much,” said Isaura, calmly; “suspense makes a woman so weak--certainty so strong.” Mechanically she smoothed and refolded the letter--mechanically, with slow, lingering hands--then she extended it to her friend, smiling.
“Nay, will you not keep it yourself?” said Mrs. Morley. “The more you examine the narrow-minded prejudices, the English arrogant man’s jealous dread of superiority--nay, of equality--in the woman he ‘can only value as he does his house or his horse, because she is his exclusive property, the more you will be rejoiced to find yourself free for a more worthy choice. Keep the letter; read it till you feel for the writer forgiveness and disdain.”
Isaura took back the letter, and leaned her cheek on her hand, looking dreamily into space. It was some moments before she replied, and her words then had no reference to Mrs. Morley’s consolatory exhortation.
“He was so pleased when he learned that I renounced the career on which I had set my ambition. I thought he would have been so pleased when I sought in another career to raise myself nearer to his level--I see now how sadly I was mistaken. All that perplexed me before in him is explained. I did not guess how foolishly I had deceived myself till three days ago,--then I did guess it; and it was that guess which tortured me so terribly that I could not keep my heart to myself when I saw you to-day; in spite of all womanly pride it would force its way--to the truth.
“Hush! I must tell you what was said to me by another friend of mine--a good friend, a wise and kind one. Yet I was so angry when she said it that I thought I could never see her more.”
“My sweet darling! who was this friend, and what did she say to you?”
“The friend was Madame Savarin.”
“No woman loves you more except myself--and she said?”
“That she would have suffered no daughter of hers to commit her name to the talk of the world as I have done--be exposed to the risk of insult as I have been--until she had the shelter and protection denied to me. And I have thus overleaped the bound that a prudent mother would prescribe to her child, have become one whose hand men do not seek, unless they themselves take the same roads to notoriety. Do you not think she was right?”
“Not as you so morbidly put it, silly girl,--certainly not right. But I do wish that you had the shelter and protection which Madame Savarin meant to express; I do wish that you were happily married to one very different from Mr. Vane--one who would be more proud of your genius than of your beauty--one who would say, ‘My name, safer far in its enduring nobility than those that depend on titles and lands--which are held on the tenure of the popular breath--must be honoured by posterity, for She has deigned to make it hers. No democratic revolution can disennoble me.”
“Ay, ay, you believe that men will be found to think with complacency that they owe to a wife a name they could not achieve for themselves. Possibly there are such men. Where?--among those that are already united by sympathies in the same callings, the same labours, the same hopes and fears with the women who have left behind them the privacies of home. Madame de Grantmesnil was wrong. Artists should wed with artists. True--true!”
Here she passed her hand over her forehead--it was a pretty way of hers when seeking to concentrate thought--and was silent a moment or so.
“Did you ever feel,” she then asked dreamily, “that there are moments in life when a dark curtain seems to fall over one’s past that a day before was so clear, so blended with the present? One cannot any longer look behind; the gaze is attracted onward, and a track of fire flashes upon the future,--the future which yesterday was invisible. There is a line by some English poet--Mr. Vane once quoted it, not to me, but to M. Savarin, and in illustration of his argument, that the most complicated recesses of thought are best reached by the simplest forms of expression. I said to myself, ‘I will study that truth if ever I take to literature as I have taken to song;’ and--yes--it was that evening that the ambition fatal to woman fixed on me its relentless fangs--at Enghien--we were on the lake--the sun was setting.”
“But you do not tell me the line that so impressed you,” said Mrs. Morley, with a woman’s kindly tact.
“The line--which line? Oh, I remember; the line was this:
“‘I see as from a tower the end of all.”
“And now--kiss me, dearest--never a word again to me about this conversation: never a word about Mr. Vane--the dark curtain has fallen on the past.”
Chapter XI
Men and women are much more like each other in certain large elements of character than is generally supposed, but it is that very resemblance which makes their differences the more incomprehensible to each other; just as in politics, theology, or that most disputatious of all things disputable, metaphysics, the nearer the reasoners approach each other in points that to an uncritical bystander seem the most important, the more sure they are to start off in opposite directions upon reaching the speck of a pin-prick.
Now there are certain grand meeting-places between man and woman--the grandest of all is on the ground of love, and yet here also is the great field of quarrel. And here the teller of a tale such as mine ought, if he is sufficiently wise to be humble, to know that it is almost profanation if, as man, he presumes to enter the penetralia of a woman’s innermost heart, and repeat, as a man would repeat, all the vibrations of sound which the heart of a woman sends forth undistinguishable even to her own ear.
I know Isaura as intimately as if I had rocked her in her cradle, played with her in her childhood, educated and trained her in her youth; and yet I can no more tell you faithfully what passed in her mind during the forty-eight hours that intervened between her conversation with that American lady and her reappearance in some commonplace drawing-room, than I can tell you what the Man in the Moon might feel if the sun that his world reflected were blotted out of creation.
I can only say that when she reappeared in that commonplace drawing-room world, there was a change in her face not very perceptible to the ordinary observer. If anything, to his eye she was handsomer--the eye was brighter--the complexion (always lustrous, though somewhat pale, the limpid paleness that suits so well with dark hair) was yet more lustrous,--it was flushed into delicate rose hues--hues that still better suit with dark hair. What, then, was the change, and change not for the better? The lips, once so pensively sweet, had grown hard; on the brow that had seemed to laugh when the lips did, there was no longer sympathy between brow and lip; there was scarcely seen a fine threadlike line that in a few years would be a furrow on the space between the eyes; the voice was not so tenderly soft; the step was haughtier. What all such change denoted it is for a woman to decide-I can only guess. In the mean while, Mademoiselle Cicogna had sent her servant daily to inquire after M. Rameau. That, I think, she would have done under any circumstances. Meanwhile, too, she had called on Madame Savarin--made it up with her--sealed the reconciliation by a cold kiss. That, too, under any circumstances, I think she would have done--under some circumstances the kiss might have been less cold.
There was one thing unwonted in her habits. I mention it, though it is only a woman who can say if it means anything worth noticing.
For six days she had left a letter from Madame de Grantmesnil unanswered. With Madame de Grantmesnil was connected the whole of her innermost life--from the day when the lonely desolate child had seen, beyond the dusty thoroughfares of life, gleams of the faery land in poetry and art-onward through her restless, dreamy, aspiring youth-onward--onward--till now, through all that constitutes the glorious reality that we call romance.
Never before had she left for two days unanswered letters which were to her as Sibylline leaves to some unquiet neophyte yearning for solutions to enigmas suggested whether by the world without or by the soul within. For six days Madame de Grantmesnil’s letter remained unanswered, unread, neglected, thrust out of sight; just as when some imperious necessity compels us to grapple with a world that is, we cast aside the romance which, in our holiday hours, had beguiled us to a world with which we have interests and sympathies no more.
Chapter XII
Gustave recovered, but slowly. The physician pronounced him out of all immediate danger, but said frankly to him, and somewhat more guardedly to his parents, “There is ample cause to beware.” “Look you, my young friend,” he added to Rameau, “mere brain-work seldom kills a man once accustomed to it like you; but heart-work, and stomach-work, and nerve-work, added to brain-work, may soon consign to the coffin a frame ten times more robust than yours. Write as much as you will--that is your vocation; but it is not your vocation to drink absinthe--to preside at orgies in the Maison Doree. Regulate yourself, and not after the fashion of the fabulous Don Juan. Marry--live soberly and quietly--and you may survive the grandchildren of viveurs. Go on as you have done, and before the year is out you are in Pere la Chaise.”
Rameau listened languidly, but with a profound conviction that the physician thoroughly understood his case.
Lying helpless on his bed, he had no desire for orgies at the Maison Doree; with parched lips thirsty for innocent tisane of lime-blossoms, the thought of absinthe was as odious to him as the liquid fire of Phlegethon. If ever sinner became suddenly convinced that there was a good deal to be said in favour of a moral life, that sinner at the moment I speak of was Gustave Rameau: Certainly a moral life--‘Domus et placens uxor’,--was essential to the poet who, aspiring to immortal glory, was condemned to the ailments of a very perishable frame.
“Ah,” he murmured plaintively to himself, “that girl Isaura can have no true sympathy with genius! It is no ordinary man that she will kill in me!”
And so murmuring he fell asleep. When he woke and found his head pillowed on his mother’s breast, it was much as a sensitive, delicate man may wake after having drunk too much the night before. Repentant, mournful, maudlin, he began to weep, and in the course of his weeping he confided to his mother the secret of his heart.
Isaura had refused him--that refusal had made him desperate.
“Ah! with Isaura how changed would be his habits! how pure! how healthful!” His mother listened fondly, and did her best to comfort him and cheer his drooping spirits.
She told him of Isaura’s messages of inquiry duly twice a day. Rameau, who knew more about women in general, and Isaura in particular, than his mother conjectured, shook his head mournfully. “She could not do less,” he said. “Has no one offered to do more?”--he thought of Julie when he asked that--Madame Rameau hesitated.
The poor Parisians! it is the mode to preach against them; and before my book closes, I shall have to preach--no, not to preach, but to imply--plenty of faults to consider and amend. Meanwhile I try my best to take them, as the philosophy of life tells us to take other people, for what they are.
I do not think the domestic relations of the Parisian bourgeoisie are as bad as they are said to be in French novels. Madame Rameau is not an uncommon type of her class. She had been when she first married singularly handsome. It was from her that Gustave inherited his beauty; and her husband was a very ordinary type of the French shopkeeper--very plain, by no means intellectual, but gay, good-humoured, devotedly attached to his wife, and with implicit trust in her conjugal virtue. Never was trust better placed. There was not a happier nor a more faithful couple in the quartier in which they resided. Madame Rameau hesitated when her boy, thinking of Julie, asked if no one had done more than send to inquire after him as Isaura had done.
After that hesitating pause she said, “Yes--a young lady calling herself Mademoiselle Julie Caumartin wished to instal herself here as your nurse. When I said, ‘But I am his mother--he needs no other nurses,’ she would have retreated, and looked ashamed--poor thing! I don’t blame her if she loved my son. But, my son, I say this,--if you love her, don’t talk to me about that Mademoiselle Cicogna; and if you love Mademoiselle Cicogna, why, then your father will take care that the poor girl who loved you not knowing that you loved another is not left to the temptation of penury.”
Rameau’s pale lips withered into a phantom-like sneer! Julie! the resplendent Julie!--true, only a ballet-dancer, but whose equipage in the Bois had once been the envy of duchesses--Julie! who had sacrificed fortune for his sake--who, freed from him, could have millionaires again at her feet!--Julie! to be saved from penury, as a shopkeeper would save an erring nursemaid--Julie! the irrepressible Julie! who had written to him, the day before his illness, in a pen dipped, not in ink, but in blood from a vein she had opened in her arm:
“Traitor!--I have not seen thee for three days. Dost thou dare to love another? If so, I care not how thou attempt to conceal it--woe to her! Ingrat! woe to thee! Love is not love, unless, when betrayed by Love, it appeals to death. Answer me quick--quick. JULIE.”
Poor Gustave thought of that letter and groaned. Certainly his mother was right--he ought to get rid of Julie; but he did not clearly see how Julie was to be got rid of. He replied to Madame Rameau peevishly, “Don’t trouble your head about Mademoiselle Caumartin; she is in no want of money. Of course, if I could hope for Isaura--but, alas! I dare not hope. Give me my tisane.”
When the doctor called next day, he looked grave, and, drawing Madame Rameau into the next room, he said, “We are not getting on so well as I had hoped; the fever is gone, but there is much to apprehend from the debility left behind. His spirits are sadly depressed.” Then added the doctor, pleasantly, and with that wonderful insight into our complex humanity in which physicians excel poets, and in which Parisian physicians are not excelled by any physicians in the world: “Can’t you think of any bit of good news--that ‘M. Thiers raves about your son’s last poem! that ‘it is a question among the Academicians between him and Jules Janin’--or that ‘the beautiful Duchesse de ------- has been placed in a lunatic asylum because she has gone mad for love of a certain young Red Republican whose name begins with R.’--can’t you think of any bit of similar good news? If you can, it will be a tonic to the relaxed state of your dear boy’s amour propre, compared to which all the drugs in the Pharmacopoeia are moonshine and water; and meanwhile be sure to remove him to your own house, and out of the reach of his giddy young friends, as soon as you possibly can.”
When that great authority thus left his patient’s case in the hands of the mother, she said, “The boy shall be saved.”
Chapter XIII
Isaura was seated beside the Venosta,--to whom, of late, she seemed to cling with greater fondness than ever,--working at some piece of embroidery--a labour from which she had been estranged for years; but now she had taken writing, reading, music, into passionate disgust. Isaura was thus seated, silently intent upon her work, and the Venosta in full talk, when the servant announced Madame Rameau.
The name startled both; the Venosta had never heard that the poet had a mother living, and immediately jumped to the conclusion that Madame Rameau must be a wife he had hitherto kept unrevealed. And when a woman, still very handsome, with a countenance grave and sad, entered the salon, the Venosta murmured, “The husband’s perfidy reveals itself on a wife’s face,” and took out her handkerchief in preparation for sympathising tears.
“Mademoiselle,” said the visitor, halting, with eyes fixed on Isaura. “Pardon my intrusion-my son has the honour to be known to you. Every one who knows him must share in my sorrow--so young--so promising, and in such danger--my poor boy!” Madame Rameau stopped abruptly. Her tears forced their way--she turned aside to conceal them.
In her twofold condition of being--womanhood and genius--Isaura was too largely endowed with that quickness of sympathy which distinguishes woman from man, and genius from talent, not to be wondrously susceptible to pity.
Already she had wound her arm round the grieving mother--already drawn her to the seat from which she herself had risen--and bending over her had said some words--true, conventional enough in themselves,--but cooed forth in a voice the softest I ever expect to hear, save in dreams, on this side of the grave.
Madame Rameau swept her hand over her eyes, glanced round the room, and noticing the Venosta in dressing-robe and slippers, staring with those Italian eyes, in seeming so quietly innocent, in reality so searchingly shrewd, she whispered pleadingly, “May I speak to you a few minutes alone?” This was not a request that Isaura could refuse, though she was embarrassed and troubled by the surmise of Madame Rameau’s object in asking it; accordingly she led her visitor into the adjoining room, and making an apologetic sign to the Venosta, closed the door.
Chapter XIV
When they were alone, Madame Rameau took Isaura’s hand in both her own, and, gazing wistfully into her face, said, “No wonder you are so loved--yours is the beauty that sinks into the hearts and rests there. I prize my boy more, now that I have seen you. But, oh, Mademoiselle! pardon me--do not withdraw your hand--pardon the mother who comes from the sick-bed of her only son and asks if you will assist to save him! A word from you is life or death to him!”
“Nay, nay, do not speak thus, Madame; your son knows how much I value, how sincerely I return, his friendship; but--but,” she paused a moment, and continued sadly and with tearful eyes--“I have no heart to give to him-to any one.”
“I do not--I would not if I dared--ask what it would be violence to yourself to promise. I do not ask you to bid me return to my son and say, ‘Hope and recover,’ but let me take some healing message from your lips. If I understand your words rightly, I at least may say that you do not give to another the hopes you, deny to him?”
“So far you understand me rightly, Madame. It has been said, that romance-writers give away so much of their hearts to heroes or heroines of their own creation, that they leave nothing worth the giving to human beings like themselves. Perhaps it is so; yet, Madame,” added Isaura, with a smile of exquisite sweetness in its melancholy, “I have heart enough left to feel for you.”
Madame Rameau was touched. “Ah, Mademoiselle, I do not believe in the saying you have quoted. But I must not abuse your goodness by pressing further upon you subjects from which you shrink. Only one word more: you know that my husband and I are but quiet tradesfolks, not in the society, nor aspiring to it, to which my son’s talents have raised himself; yet dare I ask that you will not close here the acquaintance that I have obtruded on you?--dare I ask, that I may, now and then, call on you--that now and then I may see you at my own home? Believe that I would not here ask anything which your own mother would disapprove if she overlooked disparities of station. Humble as our home is, slander never passed its threshold.”
“Ah, Madame, I and the Signora Venosta, whom in our Italian tongue I call mother, can but feel honoured and grateful whenever it pleases you to receive visits from us.”
“It would be a base return for such gracious compliance with my request if I concealed from you the reason why I pray Heaven to bless you for that answer. The physician says that it may be long before my son is sufficiently convalescent to dispense with a mother’s care, and resume his former life and occupation in the great world. It is everything for us if we can coax him into coming under our own roof-tree. This is difficult to do. It is natural for a young man launched into the world to like his own chez lui. Then what will happen to Gustave? He, lonely and heart-stricken, will ask friends, young as himself, but far stronger, to come and cheer him; or he will seek to distract his thoughts by the overwork of his brain; in either case he is doomed. But I have stronger motives yet to fix him a while at our hearth. This is just the moment, once lost never to be regained, when soothing companionship, gentle reproachless advice, can fix him lastingly in the habits and modes of life which will banish all fears of his future from the hearts of his parents. You at least honour him with friendship, with kindly interest--you at least would desire to wean him from all that a friend may disapprove or lament--a creature whom Providence meant to be good, and perhaps great. If I say to him, ‘It will be long before you can go out and see your friends, but at my house your friends shall come and see you--among them Signora Venosta and Mademoiselle Cicogna will now and then drop in’--my victory is gained, and my son is saved.”
“Madame,” said Isaura, half sobbing, “what a blessing to have a mother like you! Love so noble ennobles those who hear its voice. Tell your son how ardently I wish him to be well, and to fulfil more than the promise of his genius; tell him also this--how I envy him his mother.”
Chapter XV
It needs no length of words to inform thee, my intelligent reader, be thou man or woman--but more especially woman--of the consequences following each other, as wave follows wave in a tide, that resulted from the interview with which my last chapter closed. Gustave is removed to his parents’ house; he remains for weeks confined within doors, or, on sunny days, takes an hour or so in his own carriage, drawn by the horse bought from Rochebriant, into by-roads remote from the fashionable world; Isaura visits his mother, liking, respecting, influenced by her more and more; in those visits she sits beside the sofa on which Rameau reclines. Gradually, gently--more and more by his mother’s lips--is impressed on her the belief that it is in her power to save a human life, and to animate its career towards those goals which are never based wholly upon earth in the earnest eyes of genius, or perhaps in the yet more upward vision of pure-souled believing woman.
And Gustave himself, as he passes through the slow stages of convalescence, seems so gratefully to ascribe to her every step in his progress--seems so gently softened in character--seems so refined from the old affectations, so ennobled above the old cynicism--and, above all, so needing her presence, so sunless without it, that--well, need I finish the sentence?--the reader will complete what I leave unsaid.
Enough, that one day Isaura returned home from a visit at Madame Rameau’s with the knowledge that her hand was pledged--her future life disposed of; and that, escaping from the Venosta, whom she so fondly, and in her hunger for a mother’s love, called Madre, the girl shut herself up in her own room with locked doors.
Ah, poor child! ah, sweet-voiced Isaura! whose delicate image I feel myself too rude and too hard to transfer to this page in the purity of its outlines, and the blended softnesses of its hues--thou who, when saying things serious in the words men use, saidst them with a seriousness so charming, and with looks so feminine--thou, of whom no man I ever knew was quite worthy--ah, poor, simple, miserable girl, as I see thee now in the solitude of that white-curtained virginal room; hast thou, then, merged at last thy peculiar star into the cluster of all these commonplace girls whose lips have said “Ay,” when their hearts said “No”?--thou, O brilliant Isaura! thou, O motherless child!
She had sunk into her chair--her own favourite chair, the covering of it had been embroidered by Madame de Grantmesnil, and bestowed on her as a birthday present last year--the year in which she had first learned what it is to love--the year in which she had first learned what it is to strive for fame. And somehow uniting, as many young people do, love and fame in dreams of the future, that silken seat had been to her as the Tripod of Delphi was to the Pythian: she had taken to it, as it were intuitively, in all those hours, whether of joy or sorrow, when youth seeks to prophesy, and does but dream.
There she sat now, in a sort of stupor--a sort of dreary bewilderment--the illusion of the Pythian gone--desire of dream and of prophecy alike extinct--pressing her hands together, and muttering to herself, “What has happened?--what have I done?”
Three hours later you would not have recognised the same face that you see now. For then the bravery, the honour, the loyalty of the girl’s nature had asserted their command. Her promise had been given to one man--it could not be recalled. Thought itself of any other man must be banished. On her hearth lay ashes and tinder--the last remains of every treasured note from Graham Vane; of the hoarded newspaper extracts that contained his name; of the dry treatise he had published, and which had made the lovely romance-writer first desire “to know something about politics.” Ay, if the treatise had been upon fox-hunting, she would have desired “to know something about” that! Above all, yet distinguishable from the rest--as the sparks still upon stem and leaf here and there faintly glowed and twinkled--the withered flowers which recorded that happy hour in the arbour, and the walks of the forsaken garden--the hour in which she had so blissfully pledged herself to renounce that career in art wherein fame would have been secured, but which would not have united Fame with Love--in dreams evermore over now.
Chapter I
Graham Vane had heard nothing for months from M. Renard, when one morning he received the letter I translate:
“MONSIEUR,--I am happy to inform you that I have at last obtained one piece of information which may lead to a more important discovery. When we parted after our fruitless research in Vienna, we had both concurred in the persuasion that, for some reason known only to the two ladies themselves, Madame Marigny and Madame Duval had exchanged names--that it was Madame Marigny who had deceased in the name of Madame Duval, and Madame Duval who had survived in that of Marigny.
“It was clear to me that the beau Monsieur who had visited the false Duval must have been cognisant of this exchange of name, and that, if his name and whereabouts could be ascertained, he, in all probability, would know what had become of the lady who is the object of our research; and after the lapse of so many years he would probably have very slight motive to preserve the concealment of facts which might, no doubt, have been convenient at the time. The lover of the soi-disant Mademoiselle Duval was by such accounts as we could gain a man of some rank--very possibly a married man; and the liaison, in short, was one of those which, while they last, necessitate precautions and secrecy.
“Therefore, dismissing all attempts at further trace of the missing lady, I resolved to return to Vienna as soon as the business that recalled me to Paris was concluded, and devote myself exclusively to the search after the amorous and mysterious Monsieur.
“I did not state this determination to you, because, possibly, I might be in error--or, if not in error, at least too sanguine in my expectations--and it is best to avoid disappointing an honourable client.
“One thing was clear, that, at the time of the soi-disant Duval’s decease, the beau Monsieur was at Vienna.
“It appeared also tolerably clear that when the lady friend of the deceased quitted Munich so privately, it was to Vienna she repaired, and from Vienna comes the letter demanding the certificates of Madame Duval’s death. Pardon me, if I remind you of all these circumstances no doubt fresh in your recollection. I repeat them in order to justify the conclusions to which they led me.
“I could not, however, get permission to absent myself from Paris for the time I might require till the end of last April. I had meanwhile sought all private means of ascertaining what Frenchmen of rank and station were in that capital in the autumn of 1849. Among the list of the very few such Messieurs I fixed upon one as the most likely to be the mysterious Achille--Achille was, indeed, his nom de bapteme.
“A man of intrigue--a bonnes fortunes--of lavish expenditure withal; very tenacious of his dignity, and avoiding any petty scandals by which it might be lowered; just the man who, in some passing affair of gallantry with a lady of doubtful repute, would never have signed his titular designation to a letter, and would have kept himself as much incognito as he could. But this man was dead--had been dead some years. He had not died at Vienna--never visited that capital for some years before his death. He was then, and had long been, the ami de la maison of one of those grandes dames of whose intimacy grands seigneurs are not ashamed. They parade there the bonnes fortunes they conceal elsewhere. Monsieur and the grande dame were at Baden when the former died. Now, Monsieur, a Don Juan of that stamp is pretty sure always to have a confidential Leporello. If I could find Leporello alive I might learn the secrets not to be extracted from a Don Juan defunct. I ascertained, in truth, both at Vienna, to which I first repaired in order to verify the renseignements I had obtained at Paris, and at Baden, to which I then bent my way, that this brilliant noble had a favourite valet who had lived with him from his youth--an Italian, who had contrived in the course of his service to lay by savings enough to set up a hotel somewhere in Italy, supposed to be Pisa. To Pisa I repaired, but the man had left some years; his hotel had not prospered--he had left in debt. No one could say what had become of him. At last, after a long and tedious research, I found him installed as manager of a small hotel at Genoa--a pleasant fellow enough; and after friendly intercourse with him (of course I lodged at his hotel), I easily led him to talk of his earlier life and adventures, and especially of his former master, of whose splendid career in the army of ‘La Belle Deesse’ he was not a little proud. It was not very easy to get him to the particular subject in question. In fact, the affair with the poor false Duval had been so brief and undistinguished an episode in his master’s life, that it was not without a strain of memory that he reached it.
“By little and little, however, in the course of two or three evenings, and by the aid of many flasks of Orviette or bottles of Lacrima (wines, Monsieur, that I do not commend to any one who desires to keep his stomach sound and his secrets safe), I gathered these particulars.
“Our Don Juan, since the loss of a wife in the first year of marriage, had rarely visited Paris where he had a domicile--his ancestral hotel there he had sold.
“But happening to visit that capital of Europe a few months before we come to our dates at Aix-la-Chapelle, he made acquaintance with Madame Marigny, a natural daughter of high-placed parents, by whom, of course, she had never been acknowledged, but who had contrived that she should receive a good education at a convent; and on leaving it also contrived that an old soldier of fortune--which means an officer without fortune--who had served in Algiers with some distinction, should offer her his hand, and add the modest dot they assigned her to his yet more modest income. They contrived also that she should understand the offer must be accepted. Thus Mademoiselle ‘Quelque Chose’ became Madame Marigny, and she, on her part, contrived that a year or so later she should be left a widow. After a marriage, of course the parents washed their hands of her--they had done their duty. At the time Don Juan made this lady’s acquaintance nothing could be said against her character; but the milliners and butchers had begun to imply that they would rather have her money than trust to her character. Don Juan fell in love with her, satisfied the immediate claims of milliner and butcher, and when they quitted Paris it was agreed that they should meet later at Aix-la-Chapelle. But when he resorted to that sultry and, to my mind, unalluring spa, he was surprised by a line from her saying that she had changed her name of Marigny for that of Duval.
“‘I recollect,’ said Leporello, ‘that two days afterwards my master said to me, ‘Caution and secrecy. Don’t mention my name at the house to which I may send you with any note for Madame Duval. I don’t announce my name when I call. La petite Marigny has exchanged her name for that of Louise Duval; and I find that there is a Louise Duval here, her friend, who is niece to a relation of my own, and a terrible relation to quarrel with--a dead shot and unrivalled swordsman--Victor de Mauleon. My master was brave enough, but he enjoyed life, and he did not think la petite Marigny worth being killed for.’
“Leporello remembered very little of what followed. All he did remember is that Don Juan, when at Vienna, said to him one morning, looking less gay than usual, ‘It is finished with ca petite Marigny-she is no more.’ Then he ordered his bath, wrote a note, and said with tears in his eyes, ‘Take this to Mademoiselle Celeste; not to be compared to la petite Marigny; but la petite Celeste is still alive.’ Ah, Monsieur! if only any man in France could be as proud of his ruler as that Italian was of my countrymen! Alas! we Frenchmen are all made to command--or at least we think ourselves so--and we are insulted by one who says to us, ‘Serve and obey.’ Nowadays, in France, we find all Don Juans and no Leporellos.
“After strenuous exertions upon my part to recall to Leporello’s mind the important question whether he had ever seen the true Duval, passing under the name of Marigny--whether she had not presented herself to his master at Vienna or elsewhere--he rubbed his forehead, and drew from it these reminiscences.
“‘On the day that his Excellency,’--Leporello generally so styled his master--‘Excellency,’ as you are aware, is the title an Italian would give to Satan if taking his wages, told me that la petite Marigny was no more, he had received previously a lady veiled and mantled, whom I did not recognise as any one I had seen before, but I noticed her way of carrying herself--haughtily--her head thrown back; and I thought to myself, that lady is one of his grandes dames. She did call again two or three times, never announcing her name; then she did not reappear. She might be Madame Duval--I can’t say.’
“‘But did you never hear his Excellency speak of the real Duval after that time?’
“‘No--non mi ricordo--I don’t remember.’
“‘Nor of some living Madame Marigny, though the real one was dead?’
“‘Stop, I do recollect; not that he ever named such a person to me, but that I have posted letters for him to a Madame Marigny--oh, yes! even years after the said petite Marigny was dead; and once I did venture to say, ‘Pardon me, Eccellenza, but may I ask if that poor lady is really dead, since I have to prepay this letter to her?’”
“‘Oh,’ said he, ‘Madame Marigny! Of course the one you know is dead, but there are others of the same name; this lady is of my family. Indeed, her house, though noble in itself, recognises the representative of mine as its head, and I am too bon prince not to acknowledge and serve any one who branches out of my own tree.’”
“A day after this last conversation on the subject, Leporello said to me: ‘My friend, you certainly have some interest in ascertaining what became of the lady who took the name of Marigny (I state this frankly, Monsieur, to show how difficult even for one so prudent as I am to beat about a bush long but what you let people know the sort of bird you are in search of).
“‘Well,’ said I, ‘she does interest me. I knew something of that Victor de Mauleon, whom his Excellency did not wish to quarrel with; and it would be a kindly act to her relation if one could learn what became of Louise Duval.’
“‘I can put you on the way of learning all that his Excellency was likely to have known of her through correspondence. I have often heard him quote, with praise, a saying so clever that it might have been Italian, “Never write, never burn;” that is, never commit yourself by a letter--keep all letters that could put others in your power. All the letters he received were carefully kept and labelled. I sent them to his son in four large trunks. His son, no doubt, has them still.’
“Now, however, I have exhausted my budget. I arrived at Paris last night. I strongly advise you to come hither at once, if you still desire to prosecute your search.
“You, Monsieur, can do what I could not venture to do; you can ask the son of Don Juan if, amid the correspondence of his father, which he may have preserved, there be any signed Marigny or Duval--any, in short, which can throw light on this very obscure complication of circumstances. A grand seigneur would naturally be more complaisant to a man of your station than he would be to an agent of police. Don Juan’s son, inheriting his father’s title, is Monsieur le Marquis de Rochebriant; and permit me to add, that at this moment, as the journals doubtless inform you, all Paris resounds with the rumour of the coming war; and Monsieur de Rochebriant--who is, as I have ascertained, now in Paris--it may be difficult to find anywhere on earth a month or two hence.--I have the honour, with profound consideration, &c., &c., RENARD.”
The day after the receipt of this letter Graham Vane was in Paris.
Chapter II
Among things indescribable is that which is called “Agitation” in Paris--“Agitation” without riot or violence--showing itself by no disorderly act, no turbulent outburst. Perhaps the cafes are more crowded; passengers in the streets stop each other more often, and converse in small knots and groups; yet, on the whole, there is little externally to show how loudly the heart of Paris is beating. A traveller may be passing through quiet landscapes, unconscious that a great battle is going on some miles off, but if he will stop and put his ear to the ground he will recognise by a certain indescribable vibration, the voice of the cannon.
But at Paris an acute observer need not stop and put his ear to the ground; he feels within himself a vibration--a mysterious inward sympathy which communicates to the individual a conscious thrill--when the passions of the multitude are stirred, no matter how silently.
Tortoni’s cafe was thronged when Duplessis and Frederic Lemercier entered it: it was in vain to order breakfast; no table was vacant either within the rooms or under the awnings without.
But they could not retreat so quickly as they had entered. On catching sight of the financier several men rose and gathered round him, eagerly questioning:
“What do you think, Duplessis? Will any insult to France put a drop of warm blood into the frigid veins of that miserable Ollivier?”
“It is not yet clear that France has been insulted, Messieurs,” replied Duplessis, phlegmatically.
“Bah! Not insulted! The very nomination of a Hohenzollern to the crown of Spain was an insult--what would you have more?”
“I tell you what it is, Duplessis,” said the Vicomte de Breze, whose habitual light good temper seemed exchanged for insolent swagger--“I tell you what it is, your friend the Emperor has no more courage than a chicken. He is grown old, and infirm, and lazy; he knows that he can’t even mount on horseback. But if, before this day week, he has not declared war on the Prussians, he will be lucky if he can get off as quietly as poor Louis Philippe did under shelter of his umbrella, and ticketed ‘Schmidt.’ Or could you not, M. Duplessis, send him back to London in a bill of exchange?”
“For a man of your literary repute, M. le Vicomte,” said Duplessis, “you indulge in a strange confusion of metaphors. But, pardon me, I came here to breakfast, and I cannot remain to quarrel. Come, Lemercier, let us take our chance of a cutlet at the Trois Freres.”
“Fox, Fox,” cried Lemercier, whistling to a poodle that had followed him into the cafe, and, frightened by the sudden movement and loud voices of the habitues, had taken refuge under the table.
“Your dog is poltron,” said De Breze; “call him Nap.” At this stroke of humour there was a general laugh, in the midst of which Duplessis escaped, and Frederic, having discovered and caught his dog, followed with that animal tenderly clasped in his arms.
“I would not lose Fox for a great deal,” said Lemercier with effusion; “a pledge of love and fidelity from an English lady the most distinguished: the lady left me--the dog remains.”
Duplessis smiled grimly: “What a thoroughbred Parisian you are, my dear Frederic! I believe if the tramp of the last angel were sounding, the Parisians would be divided into two sets: one would be singing the Marseillaise, and parading the red flag; the other would be shrugging their shoulders and saying, ‘Bah! as if le Bon Dieu would have the bad taste to injure Paris--the Seat of the Graces, the School of the Arts, the Fountain of Reason, the Eye of the World;’ and so be found by the destroying angel caressing poodles and making bons mots about les femmes.”
“And quite right, too,” said Lemercier, complacently; “what other people in the world could retain lightness of heart under circumstances so unpleasant? But why do you take things so solemnly? Of course there will be war idle now to talk of explanations and excuses. When a Frenchman says, ‘I am insulted,’ he is not going to be told that he is not insulted. He means fighting, and not apologising. But what if there be war? Our brave soldiers beat the Prussians--take the Rhine--return to Paris covered with laurels; a new Boulevard de Berlin eclipses the Boulevard Sebastopol. By the way, Duplessis, a Boulevard de Berlin will be a good speculation--better than the Rue de Louvier. Ah! is not that my English friend, Grarm Varn?” here, quitting the arm of Duplessis, Lemercier stopped a gentleman who was about to pass him unnoticing. “Bon jour, mon ami! how long have you been at Paris?”
“I only arrived last evening,” answered Graham, “and my stay will be so short that it is a piece of good luck, my dear Lemercier, to meet with you, and exchange a cordial shake of the hand.”
“We are just going to breakfast at the Trois Freres--Duplessis and I--pray join us.”
“With great pleasure--ah, M. Duplessis, I shall be glad to hear from you that the Emperor will be firm enough to check the advances of that martial fever which, to judge by the persons I meet, seems to threaten delirium.”
Duplessis looked very keenly at Graham’s face, as he replied slowly: “The English, at least, ought to know that when the Emperor by his last reforms resigned his personal authority for constitutional monarchy, it ceased to be a question whether he could or could not be firm in matters that belonged to the Cabinet and the Chambers. I presume that if Monsieur Gladstone advised Queen Victoria to declare war upon the Emperor of Russia, backed by a vast majority in Parliament, you would think me very ignorant of constitutional monarchy and Parliamentary government if I said, ‘I hope Queen Victoria will resist that martial fever.’”
“You rebuke me very fairly, M. Duplessis, if you can show me that the two cases are analogous; but we do not understand in England that, despite his last reforms, the Emperor has so abnegated his individual ascendency, that his will, clearly and resolutely expressed, would not prevail in his Council and silence opposition in the Chambers. Is it so? I ask for information.”
The three men were walking on towards the Palais Royal side by side while this conversation proceeded.
“That all depends,” replied Duplessis, “upon what may be the increase of popular excitement at Paris. If it slackens, the Emperor, no doubt, could turn to wise account that favourable pause in the fever. But if it continues to swell, and Paris cries, ‘War,’ in a voice as loud as it cried to Louis Philippe ‘Revolution,’ do you think that the Emperor could impose on his ministers the wisdom of peace? His ministers would be too terrified by the clamour to undertake the responsibility of opposing it--they would resign. Where is the Emperor to find another Cabinet? a peace Cabinet? What and who are the orators for peace?--whom a handful!--who? Gambetta, Jules Favre, avowed Republicans,--would they even accept the post of ministers to Louis Napoleon? If they did, would not their first step be the abolition of the Empire? Napoleon is therefore so far a constitutional monarch in the same sense as Queen Victoria, that the popular will in the country (and in France in such matters Paris is the country) controls the Chambers, controls the Cabinet; and against the Cabinet the Emperor could not contend. I say nothing of the army--a power in France unknown to you in England, which would certainly fraternise with no peace party. If war is proclaimed,--let England blame it if she will--she can’t lament it more than I should: but let England blame the nation; let her blame, if she please, the form of the government, which rests upon popular suffrage; but do not let her blame our sovereign more than the French would blame her own, if compelled by the conditions on which she holds her crown to sign a declaration of war, which vast majorities in a Parliament just elected, and a Council of Ministers whom she could not practically replace, enforced upon her will.”
“Your observations, M. Duplessis, impress me strongly, and add to the deep anxieties with which, in common with all my countrymen, I regard the menacing aspect of the present hour. Let us hope the best. Our Government, I know, is exerting itself to the utmost verge of its power, to remove every just ground of offence that the unfortunate nomination of a German Prince to the Spanish throne could not fail to have given to French statesmen.”
“I am glad you concede that such a nomination was a just ground of offence,” said Lemercier, rather bitterly; “for I have met Englishmen who asserted that France had no right to resent any choice of a sovereign that Spain might make.”
“Englishmen in general are not very reflective politicians in foreign affairs,” said Graham; “but those who are must see that France could not, without alarm the most justifiable, contemplate a cordon of hostile states being drawn around her on all sides,--Germany, is, itself so formidable since the field of Sadowa, on the east; a German prince in the southwest; the not improbable alliance between Prussia and the Italian kingdom, already so alienated from the France to which it owed so much. If England would be uneasy were a great maritime power possessed of Antwerp, how much more uneasy might France justly be if Prussia could add the armies of Spain to those of Germany, and launch them both upon France. But that cause of alarm is over--the Hohenzollern is withdrawn. Let us hope for the best.”
The three men had now seated themselves at a table in the Trois Freres, and Lemercier volunteered the task of inspecting the menu and ordering the repast, still keeping guard on Fox.
“Observe that man,” said Duplessis, pointing towards a gentleman who had just entered; “the other day he was the popular hero--now, in the excitement of threatened war, he is permitted to order his bifteck uncongratulated, uncaressed; such is fame at Paris! here to-day and gone to-morrow.”
“How did the man become famous?”
“He is a painter, and refused a decoration--the only French painter who ever did.”
“And why refuse?”
“Because he is more stared at as the man who refused than he would have been as the man who accepted. If ever the Red Republicans have their day, those among them most certain of human condemnation will be the coxcombs who have gone mad for the desire of human applause.”
“You are a profound philosopher, M. Duplessis.”
“I hope not--I have an especial contempt for philosophers. Pardon me a moment--I see a man to whom I would say a word or two.”
Duplessis crossed over to another table to speak to a middle-aged man of somewhat remarkable countenance, with the red ribbon in his buttonhole, in whom Graham recognised an ex-minister of the Emperor, differing from most of those at that day in his Cabinet, in the reputation of being loyal to his master and courageous against a mob. Left thus alone with Lemercier, Graham said:
“Pray tell me where I can find your friend the Marquis de Rochebriant. I called at his apartment this morning, and I was told that he had gone on some visit into the country, taking his valet, and the concierge could not give me his address. I thought myself so lucky on meeting with you, who are sure to know.”
“No, I do not; it is some days since I saw Alain. But Duplessis will be sure to know.” Here the financier rejoined them.
“Mon cher, Grarm Varn wants to know for what Sabine shades Rochebriant has deserted the ‘fumum opes strepitumque’ of the capital.”
“Ah! the Marquis is a friend of yours, Monsieur?”
“I can scarcely boast that honour, but he is an acquaintance whom I should be very glad to see again.”
“At this moment he is at the Duchesse de Tarascon’s country-house near Fontainebleau; I had a hurried line from him two days ago stating that he was going there on her urgent invitation. But he may return to-morrow; at all events he dines with me on the 8th, and I shall be charmed if you will do me the honour to meet him at my house.”
“It is an invitation too agreeable to refuse, and I thank you very much for it.”
Nothing worth recording passed further in conversation between Graham and the two Frenchmen. He left them smoking their cigars in the garden, and walked homeward by the Rue de Rivoli. As he was passing beside the Magasin du Louvre he stopped, and made way for a lady crossing quickly out of the shop towards her carriage at the door. Glancing at him with a slight inclination of her head in acknowledgment of his courtesy, the lady recognised his features,--
“Ah, Mr. Vane!” she cried, almost joyfully--“you are then at Paris, though you have not come to see me.”
“I only arrived last night, dear Mrs. Morley,” said Graham, rather embarrassed, “and only on some matters of business which unexpectedly summoned me. My stay will probably be very short.”
“In that case let me rob you of a few minutes--no, not rob you even of them; I can take you wherever you want to go, and as my carriage moves more quickly than you do on foot, I shall save you the minutes instead of robbing you of them.”
“You are most kind, but I was only going to my hotel, which is close by.”
“Then you have no excuse for not taking a short drive with me in the Champs Elysees--come.”
Thus bidden, Graham could not civilly disobey. He handed the fair American into her carriage, and seated himself by her side.
Chapter III
“Mr. Vane, I feel as if I had many apologies to make for the interest in your life which my letter to you so indiscreetly betrayed.”
“Oh, Mrs. Morley! you cannot guess how deeply that interest touched me.”
“I should not have presumed so far,” continued Mrs. Morley, unheeding the interruption, “if I had not been altogether in error as to the nature of your sentiments in a certain quarter. In this you must blame my American rearing. With us there are many flirtations between boys and girls which come to nothing; but when in my country a man like you meets with a woman like Mademoiselle Cicogna, there cannot be flirtation. His attentions, his looks, his manner, reveal to the eyes of those who care enough for him to watch, one of two things--either he coldly admires and esteems, or he loves with his whole heart and soul a woman worthy to inspire such a love. Well, I did watch, and I was absurdly mistaken. I imagined that I saw love, and rejoiced for the sake of both of you to think so. I know that in all countries, our own as well as yours, love is so morbidly sensitive and jealous that it is always apt to invent imaginary foes to itself. Esteem and admiration never do that. I thought that some misunderstanding, easily removed by the intervention of a third person, might have impeded the impulse of two hearts towards each other--and so I wrote. I had assumed that you loved--I am humbled to the last degree--you only admired and esteemed.”
“Your irony is very keen, Mrs. Morley, and to you it may seem very just.”
“Don’t call me Mrs. Morley in that haughty tone of voice,--can’t you talk to me as you would talk to a friend? You only esteemed and admired--there is an end of it.”
“No, there is not an end of it,” cried Graham, giving way to an impetuosity of passion, which rarely, indeed, before another, escaped his self-control; “the end of it to me is a life out of which is ever stricken such love as I could feel for woman. To me true love can only come once. It came with my first look on that fatal face--it has never left me in thought by day, in dreams by night. The end of it to me is farewell to all such happiness as the one love of a life can promise--but--”
“But what?” asked Mrs. Morley, softly, and very much moved by the passionate earnestness of Graham’s voice and words.
“But,” he continued with a forced smile, “we Englishmen are trained to the resistance of absolute authority; we cannot submit all the elements that make up our being to the sway of a single despot. Love is the painter of existence, it should not be its sculptor.”
“I do not understand the metaphor.”
“Love colours our life, it should not chisel its form.”
“My dear Mr. Vane, that is very cleverly said, but the human heart is too large and too restless to be quietly packed up in an aphorism. Do you mean to tell me that if you found you had destroyed Isaura Cicogna’s happiness as well as resigned your own, that thought would not somewhat deform the very shape you would give to your life? Is it colour alone that your life would lose?”
“Ah, Mrs. Morley, do not lower your friend into an ordinary girl in whom idleness exaggerates the strength of any fancy over which it dreamily broods. Isaura Cicogna has her occupations--her genius--her fame--her career. Honestly speaking, I think that in these she will find a happiness that no quiet hearth could bestow. I will say no more. I feel persuaded that were we two united I could not make her happy. With the irresistible impulse that urges the genius of the writer towards its vent in public sympathy and applause, she would chafe if I said, ‘Be contented to be wholly mine.’ And if I said it not, and felt I had no right to say it, and allowed the full scope to her natural ambition, what then? She would chafe yet more to find that I had no fellowship in her aims and ends--that where I should feel pride, I felt humiliation. It would be so; I cannot help it, ‘tis my nature.”
“So be it then. When, next year perhaps, you visit Paris, you will be safe from my officious interference! Isaura will be the wife of another.”
Graham pressed his hand to his heart with the sudden movement of one who feels there an agonising spasm--his cheek, his very lips were bloodless.
“I told you,” he said bitterly, “that your fears of my influence over the happiness of one so gifted, and so strong in such gifts, were groundless; you allow that I should be very soon forgotten?”
“I allow no such thing--I wish I could. But do you know so little of a woman’s heart (and in matters of heart, I never yet heard that genius had a talisman against emotion),--do you know so little of a woman’s heart as not to know that the very moment in which she may accept a marriage the least fitted to render her happy, is that in which she has lost all hope of happiness in another?”
“Is it indeed so?” murmured Graham--“Ay, I can conceive it.”
“And have you so little comprehension of the necessities which that fame, that career to which you allow she is impelled by the instincts of genius, impose on this girl, young, beautiful, fatherless, motherless? No matter how pure her life, can she guard it from the slander of envious tongues? Will not all her truest friends--would not you, if you were her brother--press upon her by all the arguments that have most weight with the woman who asserts independence in her modes of life, and yet is wise enough to know that the world can only judge of virtue by its shadow--reputation, not to dispense with the protection which a husband can alone secure? And that is why I warn you, if it be yet time, that in resigning your own happiness you may destroy Isaura’s. She will wed another, but she will not be happy. What a chimera or dread your egotism as man conjures up! Oh! forsooth, the qualities that charm and delight a world are to unfit a woman to be helpmate to a man. Fie on you!--fie!”
Whatever answer Graham might have made to these impassioned reproaches was here checked.
Two men on horseback stopped the carriage. One was Enguerrand de Vandemar, the other was the Algerine Colonel whom we met at the supper given at the Maison Doree by Frederic Lemercier.
“Pardon, Madame Morley,” said Enguerrand; “but there are symptoms of a mob-epidemic a little further up the fever began at Belleville, and is threatening the health of the Champs Elysees. Don’t be alarmed--it may be nothing, though it may be much. In Paris, one can never calculate an hour beforehand the exact progress of a politico-epidemic fever. At present I say, ‘Bah! a pack of ragged boys, gamins de Paris;’ but my friend the Colonel, twisting his moustache en souriant amerement, says, ‘It is the indignation of Paris at the apathy of the Government under insult to the honour of France;’ and Heaven only knows how rapidly French gamins grow into giants when Colonels talk about the indignation of Paris and the honour of France!”
“But what has happened?” asked Mrs. Morley, turning to the Colonel.
“Madame,” replied the warrior, “it is rumoured that the King of Prussia has turned his back upon the ambassador of France; and that the pekin who is for peace at any price--M. Ollivier--will say tomorrow in the Chamber, that France submits to a slap in the face.”
“Please, Monsieur de Vandemar, to tell my coachman to drive home,” said Mrs. Morley.
The carriage turned and went homeward. The Colonel lifted his hat, and rode back to see what the gamins were about. Enguerrand, who had no interest in the gamins, and who looked on the Colonel as a bore, rode by the side of the carriage.
“Is there anything serious in this?” asked Mrs. Morley.
“At this moment, nothing. What it may be this hour to-morrow I cannot say. Ah! Monsieur Vane, bon jour I did not recognise you at first. Once, in a visit at the chateau of one of your distinguished countrymen, I saw two game-cocks turned out facing each other: they needed no pretext for quarrelling--neither do France and Prussia--no matter which game-cock gave the last offence, the two game-cocks must have it out. All that Ollivier can do, if he be wise, is to see that the French cock has his steel spurs as long as the Prussians. But this I do say, that if Ollivier attempts to put the French cock back into its bag, the Empire is gone in forty-eight hours. That to me is a trifle--I care nothing for the Empire; but that which is not a trifle is anarchy and chaos. Better war and the Empire than peace and Jules Favre. But let us seize the present hour, Mr. Vane; whatever happens to-morrow, shall we dine together to-day? Name your restaurant.”
“I am so grieved,” answered Graham, rousing himself, “I am here only on business, and engaged all the evening.”
“What a wonderful thing is this life of ours!” said Enguerrand. “The destiny of France at this moment hangs on a thread--I, a Frenchman, say to an English friend, ‘Let us dine--a cutlet to-day and a fig for to-morrow;’ and my English friend, distinguished native of a country with which we have the closest alliance, tells me that in this crisis of France he has business to attend to! My father is quite right; he accepts the Voltairean philosophy, and cries, Vivent les indifferents!”
“My dear M. de Vandemar,” said Graham, “in every country you will find the same thing. All individuals massed together constitute public life. Each individual has a life of his own, the claims and the habits and the needs of which do not suppress his sympathies with public life, but imperiously overrule them. Mrs. Morley, permit me to pull the check-string--I get out here.”
“I like that man,” said Enguerrand, as he continued to ride by the fair American, “in language and esprit he is so French.”
“I use to like him better than you can,” answered Mrs. Morley, “but in prejudice and stupidity he is so English. As it seems you are disengaged, come and partake, pot au feu, with Frank and me.”
“Charmed to do so,” answered the cleverest and best bred of all Parisian beaux garcons, “but forgive me if I quit you soon. This poor France! Entre nous, I am very uneasy about the Parisian fever. I must run away after dinner to clubs and cafes to learn the last bulletins.”
“We have nothing like that French Legitimist in the States,” said the fair American to herself, “unless we should ever be so silly as to make Legitimists of the ruined gentlemen of the South.”
Meanwhile Graham Vane went slowly back to his apartment. No false excuse had he made to Enguerrand; this evening was devoted to M. Renard, who told him little he had not known before; but his private life overruled his public, and all that night he, professed politician, thought sleeplessly, not over the crisis to France, which might alter the conditions of Europe, but the talk on his private life of that intermeddling American woman.
Chapter IV
The next day, Wednesday, July 6th, commenced one of those eras in the world’s history in which private life would vainly boast that it overrules Life Public. How many private lives does such a terrible time influence, absorb, darken with sorrow, crush into graves?
It was the day when the Duc de Gramont uttered the fatal speech which determined the die between peace and war. No one not at Paris on that day can conceive the popular enthusiasm with which that speech was hailed--the greater because the warlike tone of it was not anticipated; because there had been a rumour amidst circles the best informed that a speech of pacific moderation was to be the result of the Imperial Council. Rapturous indeed were the applauses with which the sentences that breathed haughty defiance were hailed by the Assembly. The ladies in the tribune rose with one accord, waving their handkerchiefs. Tall, stalwart, dark, with Roman features and lofty presence, the Minister of France seemed to say with Catiline in the fine tragedy: “Lo! where I stand, I am war!”
Paris had been hungering for some hero of the hour--the Duc de Gramont became at once raised to that eminence. All the journals, save the very few which were friendly to peace, because hostile to the Emperor, resounded with praise, not only of the speech, but of the speaker. It is with a melancholy sense of amusement that one recalls now to mind those organs of public opinion--with what romantic fondness they dwelt on the personal graces of the man who had at last given voice to the chivalry of France: “The charming gravity of his countenance--the mysterious expression of his eye!”
As the crowd poured from the Chambers, Victor de Mauleon and Savarin, who had been among the listeners, encountered.
“No chance for my friends the Orleanists now,” said Savarin. “You who mock at all parties are, I suppose, at heart for the Republican--small chance, too, for that.”
“I do not agree with you. Violent impulses have quick reactions.”
“But what reaction could shake the Emperor after he returns a conqueror, bringing in his pocket the left bank of the Rhine?”
“None--when he does that. Will he do it? Does he himself think he will do it? I doubt--”
“Doubt the French army against the Prussian?”
“Against the German people united--yes, very much.”
“But war will disunite the German people. Bavaria will surely assist us--Hanover will rise against the spoliator--Austria at our first successes must shake off her present enforced neutrality?”
“You have not been in Germany, and I have. What yesterday was a Prussian army, to-morrow will be a German population; far exceeding our own in numbers, in hardihood of body, in cultivated intellect, in military discipline. But talk of something else. How is my ex-editor--poor Gustave Rameau?”
“Still very weak, but on the mend. You may have him back in his office soon.”
“Impossible! even in his sick-bed his vanity was more vigorous than ever. He issued a war-song, which has gone the round of the war journals signed by his own name. He must have known very well that the name of such a Tyrtaeus cannot reappear as the editor of Le Sens Commun; that in launching his little firebrand he burned all vessels that could waft him back to the port he had quitted. But I dare say he has done well for his own interests; I doubt if Le Sens Commun can much longer hold its ground in the midst of the prevalent lunacy.”
“What! it has lost subscribers?--gone off in sale already, since it declared for peace?”
“Of course it has; and after the article which, if I live over to-night, will appear to-morrow, I should wonder if it sell enough to cover the cost of the print and paper.”
“Martyr to principle! I revere, but I do not envy thee.”
“Martyrdom is not my ambition. If Louis Napoleon be defeated, what then? Perhaps he may be the martyr; and the Favres and Gambettas may roast their own eggs on the gridiron they heat for his majesty.”
Here an English gentleman, who was the very able correspondent to a very eminent journal, and in that capacity had made acquaintance with De Mauleon, joined the two Frenchmen; Savarin, however, after an exchange of salutations, went his way.
“May I ask a frank answer to a somewhat rude question, M. le Vicomte?” said the Englishman. “Suppose that the Imperial Government had to-day given in their adhesion to the peace party, how long would it have been before their orators in the Chamber and their organs in the press would have said that France was governed by poltrons?”
“Probably for most of the twenty-four hours. But there are a few who are honest in their convictions; of that few I am one.”
“And would have supported the Emperor and his Government?”
“No, Monsieur--I do not say that.”
“Then the Emperor would have turned many friends into enemies, and no enemies into friends.”
“Monsieur--you in England know that a party in opposition is not propitiated when the party in power steals its measures. Ha!--pardon me, who is that gentleman, evidently your countryman, whom I see yonder talking to the Secretary of your Embassy?”
“He.--Mr. Vane-Graham Vane. Do you not know him? He has been much in Paris, attached to our Embassy formerly; a clever man--much is expected from him.”
“Ah! I think I have seen him before, but am not quite sure. Did you say Vane? I once knew a Monsieur Vane, a distinguished parliamentary orator.”
“That gentleman is his son--would you like to be introduced to him?”
“Not to-day--I am in some hurry.” Here Victor lifted his hat in parting salutation, and as he walked away cast at Graham another glance keen and scrutinising. “I have seen that man before,” he muttered, “where?--when?--can it be only a family likeness to the father? No, the features are different; the profile is--ha!--Mr. Lamb, Mr. Lamb--but why call himself by that name?--why disguised?--what can he have to do with poor Louise? Bah--these are not questions I can think of now. This war--this war--can it yet be prevented? How it will prostrate all the plans my ambition so carefully schemed! Oh!--at least if I were but in the Chamber. Perhaps I yet may be before the war is ended--the Clavignys have great interest in their department.”
Chapter V
Graham had left a note with Rochebriant’s concierge requesting an interview on the Marquis’s return to Paris, and on the evening after the day just commemorated he received a line, saying that Alain had come back, and would be at home at nine o’clock. Graham found himself in the Breton’s apartment punctually at the hour indicated.
Alain was in high spirits: he burst at once into enthusiastic exclamations on the virtual announcement of war.
“Congratulate me, mon cher!” he cried--“the news was a joyous surprise to me. Only so recently as yesterday morning I was under the gloomy apprehension that the Imperial Cabinet would continue to back Ollivier’s craven declaration ‘that France had not been affronted!’ The Duchesse de Tarascon, at whose campagne I was a guest, is (as you doubtless know) very much in the confidence of the Tuileries. On the first signs of war, I wrote to her, saying that whatever the objections of my pride to enter the army as a private in time of peace, such objections ceased on the moment when all distinctions of France must vanish in the eyes of sons eager to defend her banners. The Duchesse in reply begged me to come to her campagne and talk over the matter. I went; she then said that if war should break out it was the intention to organise the Mobiles and officer them with men of birth and education, irrespective of previous military service, and in that case I might count on my epaulets. But only two nights ago she received a letter--I know not of course from whom--evidently from some high authority--that induced her to think the moderation of the Council would avert the war, and leave the swords of the Mobiles in their sheaths. I suspect the decision of yesterday must have been a very sudden one. Ce cher Gramont! See what it is to have a well-born man in a sovereign’s councils.”
“If war must come, I at least wish all renown to yourself. But--”
“Oh! spare me your ‘buts’; the English are always too full of them where her own interests do not appeal to her. She had no ‘buts’ for war in India or a march into Abyssinia.”
Alain spoke petulantly; at that moment the French were very much irritated by the monitory tone of the English journals. Graham prudently avoided the chance of rousing the wrath of a young hero yearning for his epaulets.
“I am English enough,” said he, with good-humoured courtesy, “to care for English interests; and England has no interest abroad dearer to her than the welfare and dignity of France. And now let me tell you why I presumed on an acquaintance less intimate than I could desire, to solicit this interview on a matter which concerns myself, and in which you could perhaps render me a considerable service.”
“If I can, count it rendered; move to this sofa--join me in a cigar, and let us talk at ease comme de vieux amis, whose fathers or brothers might have fought side by side in the Crimea.” Graham removed to the sofa beside Rochebriant, and after one or two whiffs laid aside the cigar and began:
“Among the correspondence which Monsieur your father has left, are there any letters of no distant date signed Marigny--Madame Marigny? Pardon me, I should state my motive in putting this question. I am intrusted with a charge, the fulfilment of which may prove to the benefit of this lady or her child; such fulfilment is a task imposed upon my honour. But all the researches to discover this lady which I have instituted stop at a certain date, with this information,--viz., that she corresponded occasionally with the late Marquis de Rochebriant; that he habitually preserved the letters of his correspondents; and that these letters were severally transmitted to you at his decease.”
Alain’s face had taken a very grave expression while Graham spoke, and he now replied with a mixture of haughtiness and embarrassment:
“The boxes containing the letters my father received and preserved were sent to me as you say--the larger portion of them were from ladies--sorted and labelled, so that in glancing at any letter in each packet I could judge of the general tenor of these in the same packet without the necessity of reading them. All packets of that kind, Monsieur Vane, I burned. I do not remember any letters signed ‘Marigny!”
“I perfectly understand, my dear Marquis, that you would destroy all letters which your father himself would have destroyed if his last illness had been sufficiently prolonged. But I do not think the letters I mean would have come under that classification; probably they were short, and on matters of business relating to some third person--some person, for instance, of the name of Louise, or of Duval!”
“Stop! let me think. I have a vague remembrance of one or two letters which rather perplexed me, they were labelled, ‘Louise D--. Mem.: to make further inquiries as to the fate of her uncle.’”
“Marquis, these are the letters I seek. Thank heaven, you have not destroyed them?”
“No; there was no reason why I should destroy, though I really cannot state precisely any reason why I kept them. I have a very vague recollection of their existence.”
“I entreat you to allow me at least a glance at the handwriting, and compare it with that of a letter I have about me; and if the several handwritings correspond, I would ask you to let me have the address, which, according to your father’s memorandum, will be found in the letters you have preserved.”
“To compliance with such a request I not only cannot demur, but perhaps it may free me from some responsibility which I might have thought the letters devolved upon my executorship. I am sure they did not concern the honour of any woman of any family, for in that case I must have burned them.”
“Ah, Marquis, shake hands there! In such concord between man and man, there is more entente cordiale between England and France than there was at Sebastopol. Now let me compare the handwritings.”
“The box that contained the letters is not here--I left it at Rochebriant; I will telegraph to my aunt to send it; the day after to-morrow it will no doubt arrive. Breakfast with me that day--say at one o’clock, and after breakfast the Box!”
“How can I thank you?”
“Thank me! but you said your honour was concerned in your request--requests affecting honour between men comma il faut is a ceremony of course, like a bow between them. One bows, the other returns the bow--no thanks on either side. Now that we have done with that matter, let me say that I thought your wish for our interview originated in a very different cause.”
“What could that be?”
“Nay, do you not recollect that last talk between us, when with such loyalty you spoke to me about Mademoiselle Cicogna, and supposing that there might be rivalship between us, retracted all that you might have before said to warn me against fostering the sentiment with which she had inspired me; even at the first slight glance of a face which cannot be lightly forgotten by those who have once seen it.”
“I recollect perfectly every word of that talk, Marquis,” answered Graham, calmly, but with his hand concealed within his vest and pressed tightly to his heart. The warning of Mrs. Morley flashed upon him. “Was this the man to seize the prize he had put aside--this man, younger than himself--handsomer than himself--higher in rank?”
“I recollect that talk, Marquis! Well, what then?”
“In my self-conceit I supposed that you might have heard how much I admired Mademoiselle Cicogna--how, having not long since met her at the house of Duplessis (who by the way writes me word that I shall meet you chez lui tomorrow), I have since sought her society wherever there was a chance to find it. You may have heard, at our club, or elsewhere, how I adore her genius--how, I say, that nothing so Breton--that is, so pure and so lofty--has appeared and won readers since the days of Chateaubriand,--and--you, knowing that les absents ont toujours tort, come to me and ask Monsieur de Rochebriant, Are we rivals? I expected a challenge--you relieve my mind--you abandon the field to me?”
At the first I warned the reader how improved from his old mauvaise honte a year or so of Paris life would make our beau Marquis. How a year or two of London life with its horsey slang and its fast girls of the period would have vulgarised an English Rochebriant! Graham gnawed his lips and replied quietly, “I do not challenge! Am I to congratulate you?”
“No, that brilliant victory is not for me. I thought that was made clear in the conversation I have referred to. But if you have done me the honour to be jealous I am exceedingly flattered. Speaking, seriously, if I admired Mademoiselle Cicogna when you and I last met, the admiration is increased by the respect with which I regard a character so simply noble. How many women older than she would have been spoiled by the adulation that has followed her literary success!--how few women so young, placed in a position so critical, having the courage to lead a life so independent, would have maintained the dignity of their character free from a single indiscretion! I speak not from my own knowledge, but from the report of all, who would be pleased enough to censure if they could find a cause. Good society is the paradise of mauvaises langues.”
Graham caught Alain’s hand and pressed it, but made no answer.
The young Marquis continued:
“You will pardon me for speaking thus freely in the way that I would wish any friend to speak of the demoiselle who might become my wife. I owe you much, not only for the loyalty with which you address me in reference to this young lady, but for words affecting my own position in France, which sank deep into my mind--saved me from deeming myself a proscrit in my own land--filled me with a manly ambition, not stifled amidst the thick of many effeminate follies--and, in fact, led me to the career which is about to open before me, and in which my ancestors have left me no undistinguished examples. Let us speak, then, a coeur ouvert, as one friend to another. Has there been any misunderstanding between you and Mademoiselle Cicogna which has delayed your return to Paris? If so, is it over now?”
“There has been no such misunderstanding.”
“Do you doubt whether the sentiments you expressed in regard to her when we met last year, are returned?”
“I have no right to conjecture her sentiments. You mistake altogether.”
“I do not believe that I am dunce enough to mistake your feelings towards Mademoiselle--they may be read in your face at this moment. Of course I do not presume to hazard a conjecture as to those of Mademoiselle towards yourself. But when I met her not long since at the house of Duplessis, with whose daughter she is intimate, I chanced to speak to her of you; and if I may judge, by looks and manner, I chose no displeasing theme. You turn away--I offend you?”
“Offend!--no, indeed; but on this subject I am not prepared to converse. I came to Paris on matters of business much complicated and which ought to absorb my attention. I cannot longer trespass on your evening. The day after to-morrow, then, I will be with you at one o’clock.”
“Yes, I hope then to have the letters you wish to consult; and, meanwhile, we meet to-morrow at the Hotel Duplessis.”
Chapter VI
Graham had scarcely quitted Alain, and the young Marquis was about to saunter forth to his club, when Duplessis was announced.
These two men had naturally seen much of each other since Duplessis had returned from Bretagne and delivered Alain from the gripe of Louvier. Scarcely a day had passed but what Alain had been summoned to enter into the financier’s plans for the aggrandisement of the Rochebriant estates, and delicately made to feel that he had become a partner in speculations, which, thanks to the capital and the abilities Duplessis brought to bear, seemed likely to result in the ultimate freedom of his property from all burdens, and the restoration of his inheritance to a splendour correspondent with the dignity of his rank.
On the plea that his mornings were chiefly devoted to professional business, Duplessis arranged that these consultations should take place in the evenings. From those consultations Valerie was not banished; Duplessis took her into the council as a matter of course. “Valerie,” said the financier to Alain, “though so young, has a very clear head for business, and she is so interested in all that interests myself, that even where I do not take her opinion, I at least feel my own made livelier and brighter by her sympathy.”
So the girl was in the habit of taking her work or her book into the cabinet de travail, and never obtruding a suggestion unasked, still, when appealed to, speaking with a modest good sense which justified her father’s confidence and praise; and a propos of her book, she had taken Chateaubriand into peculiar favour. Alain had respectfully presented to her beautifully bound copies of Atala and Ls Genie du Christianisme; it is astonishing, indeed, how he had already contrived to regulate her tastes in literature. The charms of those quiet family evenings had stolen into the young Breton’s heart.
He yearned for none of the gayer reunions in which he had before sought for a pleasure that his nature had not found; for, amidst the amusements of Paris, Alain remained intensely Breton--viz., formed eminently for the simple joys of domestic life, associating the sacred hearthstone with the antique religion of his fathers; gathering round it all the images of pure and noble affections which the romance of a poetic temperament had evoked from the solitude which had surrounded a melancholy boyhood-an uncontaminated youth.
Duplessis entered abruptly, and with a countenance much disturbed from its wonted saturnine composure.
“Marquis, what is this I have just heard from the Duchesse de Tarascon? Can it be? You ask military service in this ill-omened war?--you?”
“My dear and best friend,” said Alain, very much startled, “I should have thought that you, of all men in the world, would have most approved of my request--you, so devoted an Imperialist--you, indignant that the representative of one of these families, which the First Napoleon so eagerly and so vainly courted, should ask for the grade of sous-lieutenant in the armies of Napoleon the Third--you, who of all men know how ruined are the fortunes of a Rochebriant--you, feel surprised that he clings to the noblest heritage his ancestors have left to him--their sword! I do not understand you.”
“Marquis,” said Duplessis, seating himself, and regarding Alain with a look in which were blended the sort of admiration and the sort of contempt with which a practical man of the world, who, having himself gone through certain credulous follies, has learned to despise the follies, but retains a reminiscence of sympathy with the fools they bewitch, “Marquis, pardon me; you talk finely, but you do not talk common sense. I should be extremely pleased if your Legitimist scruples had allowed you to solicit, or rather to accept, a civil appointment not unsuited to your rank, under the ablest sovereign, as a civilian, to whom France can look for rational liberty combined with established order. Such openings to a suitable career you have rejected; but who on earth could expect you, never trained to military service, to draw a sword hitherto sacred to the Bourbons, on behalf of a cause which the madness, I do not say of France but of Paris, has enforced on a sovereign against whom you would fight to-morrow if you had a chance of placing the descendant of Henry IV. on his throne.”
“I am not about to fight for any sovereign, but for my country against the foreigner.”
“An excellent answer if the foreigner had invaded your country; but it seems that your country is going to invade the foreigner--a very different thing. Chut! all this discussion is most painful to me. I feel for the Emperor a personal loyalty, and for the hazards he is about to encounter a prophetic dread, as an ancestor of yours might have felt for Francis I. could he have foreseen Pavia. Let us talk of ourselves and the effect the war should have upon our individual action. You are aware, of course, that, though M. Louvier has had notice of our intention to pay off his mortgage, that intention cannot be carried into effect for six months; if the money be not then forthcoming his hold on Rochebriant remains unshaken--the sum is large.”
“Alas! yes.”
“The war must greatly disturb the money-market, affect many speculative adventures and operations when at the very moment credit may be most needed. It is absolutely necessary that I should be daily at my post on the Bourse, and hourly watch the ebb and flow of events. Under these circumstances I had counted, permit me to count still, on your presence in Bretagne. We have already begun negotiations on a somewhat extensive scale, whether as regards the improvement of forests and orchards, or the plans for building allotments, as soon as the lands are free for disposal--for all these the eye of a master is required. I entreat you, then, to take up your residence at Rochebriant.”
“My dear friend, this is but a kindly and delicate mode of relieving me from the dangers of war. I have, as you must be conscious, no practical knowledge of business. Hebert can be implicitly trusted, and will carry out your views with a zeal equal to mine, and with infinitely more ability.”
“Marquis, pray neither to Hercules nor to Hebert; if you wish to get your own cart out of the ruts, put your own shoulder to the wheel.”
Alain coloured high, unaccustomed to be so bluntly addressed, but he replied with a kind of dignified meekness: “I shall ever remain grateful for what you have done, and wish to do for me. But, assuming that you suppose rightly, the estates of Rochebriant would, in your hands, become a profitable investment, and more than redeem the mortgage, and the sum you have paid Louvier on my account, let it pass to you irrespectively of me. I shall console myself in the knowledge that the old place will be restored, and those who honoured its old owners prosper in hands so strong, guided by a heart so generous.”
Duplessis was deeply affected by these simple words; they seized him on the tenderest side of his character--for his heart was generous, and no one, except his lost wife and his loving child, had ever before discovered it to be so. Has it ever happened to you, reader, to be appreciated on the one point of the good or the great that is in you--on which secretly you value yourself most--but for which nobody, not admitted into your heart of hearts, has given you credit? If that has happened to you, judge what Duplessis felt when the fittest representative of that divine chivalry which, if sometimes deficient in head, owes all that exalts it to riches of heart, spoke thus to the professional moneymaker, whose qualities of head were so acknowledged that a compliment to them would be a hollow impertinence, and whose qualities of heart had never yet received a compliment!
Duplessis started from his seat and embraced Alain, murmuring, “Listen to me, I love you--I never had a son--be mine--Rochebriant shall be my daughter’s dot.”
Alain returned the embrace, and then recoiling, said: “Father, your first desire must be honour for your son. You have guessed my secret--I have learned to love Valerie. Seeing her out in the world, she seemed like other girls, fair and commonplace--seeing her--at your house, I have said to myself, ‘There is the one girl fairer than all others in my eyes, and the one individual to whom all other girls are commonplace.’”
“Is that true?--is it?”
“True! does a gentilhomme ever lie? And out of that love for her has grown this immovable desire to be something worthy of her--something that may lift me from the vulgar platform of men who owe all to ancestors, nothing to themselves. Do you suppose for one moment that I, saved from ruin and penury by Valerie’s father, could be base enough to say to her, ‘In return be Madame la Marquise de Rochebriant’? Do you suppose that I, whom you would love and respect as son, could come to you and say: ‘I am oppressed by your favours--I am crippled with debts--give me your millions and we are quits.’ No, Duplessis! You, so well descended yourself--so superior as man amongst men that you would have won name and position had you been born the son of a shoeblack,--you would eternally despise the noble who, in days when all that we Bretons deem holy in noblesse are subjected to ridicule and contempt, should so vilely forget the only motto which the scutcheons of all gentilhommes have in common, ‘Noblesse oblige.’ War, with all its perils and all its grandeur,--war lifts on high the banners of France,--war, in which every ancestor of mine whom I care to recall aggrandised the name that descends to me. Let me then do as those before me have done; let me prove that I am worth something in myself, and then you and I are equals; and I can say with no humbled crest, ‘Your benefits are accepted:’ the man who has fought not ignobly for France may aspire to the hand of her daughter. Give me Valerie; as to her dot,--be it so, Rochebriant,--it will pass to her children.”
“Alain! Alain! my friend! my son!--but if you fall.”
“Valerie will give you a nobler son.”
Duplessis moved away, sighing heavily; but he said no more in deprecation of Alain’s martial resolves.
A Frenchman, however practical, however worldly, however philosophical he may be, who does not sympathise with the follies of honour--who does not concede indulgence to the hot blood of youth when he says, “My country is insulted and her banner is unfurled,” may certainly be a man of excellent common sense; but if such men had been in the majority, Gaul would never have been France--Gaul would have been a province of Germany.
And as Duplessis walked homeward--he the calmest and most far-seeing of all authorities on the Bourse--the man who, excepting only De Mauleon, most decidedly deemed the cause of the war a blunder, and most forebodingly anticipated its issues, caught the prevalent enthusiasm. Everywhere he was stopped by cordial hands, everywhere met by congratulating smiles. “How right you have been, Duplessis, when you have laughed at those who have said, ‘The Emperor is ill, decrepit, done up.’”
“Vive l’Empereur! at least we shall be face to face with those insolent Prussians!”
Before he arrived at his home, passing along the Boulevards, greeted by all the groups enjoying the cool night air before the cafes, Duplessis had caught the war epidemic.
Entering his hotel, he went at once to Valerie’s chamber. “Sleep well to-night, child; Alain has told me that he adores thee, and if he will go to the war, it is that he may lay his laurels at thy feet. Bless thee, my child, thou couldst not have made a nobler choice.”
Whether, after these words, Valerie slept well or not ‘tis not for me to say; but if she did sleep, I venture to guess that her dreams were rose-coloured.
Chapter VII
All the earlier part of that next day, Graham Vane remained in-doors--a lovely day at Paris that 8th of July, and with that summer day all hearts at Paris were in unison. Discontent was charmed into enthusiasm--Belleville and Montmartre forgot the visions of Communism and Socialism and other “isms” not to be realised except in some undiscovered Atlantis!
The Emperor was the idol of the day--the names of Jules Favre and Gambetta were by-words of scorn. Even Armand Monnier, still out of work, beginning to feel the pinch of want, and fierce for any revolution that might turn topsy-turvy the conditions of labour,--even Armand Monnier was found among groups that were laying immortelles at the foot of the column in the Place Vendome, and heard to say to a fellow malcontent, with eyes uplifted to the statue of the First Napoleon, “Do you not feel at this moment that no Frenchman can be long angry with the Little Corporal? He denied La Liberte, but he gave La Gloire.”
Heeding not the stir of the world without, Graham was compelling into one resolve the doubts and scruples which had so long warred against the heart which they ravaged, but could not wholly subdue.
The conversations with Mrs. Morley and Rochebriant had placed in a light in which he had not before regarded it, the image of Isaura.
He had reasoned from the starting-point of his love for her, and had sought to convince himself that against that love it was his duty to strive.
But now a new question was addressed to his conscience as well as to his heart. What though he had never formally declared to her his affection--never, in open words, wooed her as his own--never even hinted to her the hopes of a union which at one time he had fondly entertained,--still was it true that his love had been too transparent not to be detected by her, and not to have led her on to return it?
Certainly he had, as we know, divined that he was not indifferent to her: at Enghien, a year ago, that he had gained her esteem, and perhaps interested her fancy.
We know also how he had tried to persuade himself that the artistic temperament, especially when developed in women, is too elastic to suffer the things of real life to have lasting influence over happiness or sorrow,--that in the pursuits in which her thought and imagination found employ, in the excitement they sustained, and the fame to which they conduced, Isaura would be readily consoled for a momentary pang of disappointed affection. And that a man so alien as himself, both by nature and by habit, from the artistic world, was the very last person who could maintain deep and permanent impression on her actual life or her ideal dreams. But what if, as he gathered from the words of the fair American--what if, in all these assumptions, she was wholly mistaken? What if, in previously revealing his own heart, he had decoyed hers--what if, by a desertion she had no right to anticipate, he had blighted her future? What if this brilliant child of genius could love as warmly, as deeply, as enduringly as any simple village girl to whom there is no poetry except love? If this were so--what became the first claim on his honour, his conscience, his duty?
The force which but a few days ago his reasonings had given to the arguments that forbade him to think of Isaura, became weaker and weaker, as now in an altered mood of reflection he resummoned and reweighed them.
All those prejudices--which had seemed to him such rational common-sense truths, when translated from his own mind into the words of Lady Janet’s letter,--was not Mrs. Morley right in denouncing them as the crotchets of an insolent egotism? Was it not rather to the favour than to the disparagement of Isaura, regarded even in the man’s narrow-minded view of woman’s dignity, that this orphan girl could, with character so unscathed, pass through the trying ordeal of the public babble, the public gaze-command alike the esteem of a woman so pure as Mrs. Morley, the reverence of a man so chivalrously sensitive to honour as Alain de Rochebriant?
Musing thus, Graham’s countenance at last brightened--a glorious joy entered into and possessed him. He felt as a man who had burst asunder the swathes and trammels which had kept him galled and miserable with the sense of captivity, and from which some wizard spell that took strength from his own superstition had forbidden to struggle.
He was free!--and that freedom was rapture!--yes, his resolve was taken.
The day was now far advanced. He should have just time before the dinner with Duplessis to drive to A------, where he still supposed Isaura resided. How, as his fiacre rolled along the well-remembered road--how completely he lived in that world of romance of which he denied himself to be a denizen.
Arrived at the little villa, he found it occupied only by workmen--it was under repair. No one could tell him to what residence the ladies who occupied it the last year had removed.
“I shall learn from Mrs. Morley,” thought Graham, and at her house he called in going back, but Mrs. Morley was not at home; he had only just time, after regaining his apartment, to change his dress for the dinner to which he was invited. As it was, he arrived late, and while apologising to his host for his want of punctuality, his tongue faltered. At the farther end of the room he saw a face, paler and thinner than when he had seen it last--a face across which a something of grief had gone.
The servant announced that dinner was served.
“Mr. Vane,” said Duplessis, “will you take into dinner Mademoiselle Cicogna?”
Chapter I
Amoung the frets and checks to the course that “never did run smooth,” there is one which is sufficiently frequent, for many a reader will remember the irritation it caused him. You have counted on a meeting with the beloved one unwitnessed by others, an interchange of confessions and vows which others may not hear. You have arranged almost the words in which your innermost heart is to be expressed; pictured to yourself the very looks by which those words will have their sweetest reply. The scene you have thus imagined appears to you vivid and distinct, as if foreshown in a magic glass. And suddenly, after long absence, the meeting takes place in the midst of a common companionship: nothing that you wished to say can be said. The scene you pictured is painted out by the irony of Chance; and groups and backgrounds of which you had never dreamed start forth from the disappointing canvas. Happy if that be all! But sometimes, by a strange, subtle intuition, you feel that the person herself is changed; and sympathetic with that change, a terrible chill comes over your own heart.
Before Graham had taken his seat at the table beside Isaura, he felt that she was changed to him. He felt it by her very touch as their hands met at the first greeting,--by the tone of her voice in the few words that passed between them,--by the absence of all glow in the smile which had once lit up her face, as a burst of sunshine lights up a day in spring, and gives a richer gladness of colour to all its blooms. Once seated side by side they remained for some moments silent. Indeed, it would have been rather difficult for anything less than the wonderful intelligence of lovers between whom no wall can prevent the stolen interchange of tokens, to have ventured private talk of their own amid the excited converse which seemed all eyes, all tongues, all ears, admitting no one present to abstract himself from the common emotion. Englishmen do not recognise the old classic law which limited the number of guests, where banquets are meant to be pleasant, to that of the Nine-Muses. They invite guests so numerous, and so shy of launching talk across the table, that you may talk to the person next to you not less secure from listeners than you would be in talking with the stranger whom you met at a well in the Sahara. It is not so, except on state occasions, at Paris. Difficult there to retire into solitude with your next neighbour. The guests collected by Duplessis completed with himself the number of the Sacred Nine--the host, Valerie, Rochebriant, Graham, Isaura, Signora Venosta, La Duchesse de Tarascon, the wealthy and high-born Imperialist, Prince --------, and last and least, one who shall be nameless.
I have read somewhere, perhaps in one of the books which American superstition dedicates to the mysteries of Spiritualism, how a gifted seer, technically styled medium, sees at the opera a box which to other eyes appears untenanted and empty, but to him is full of ghosts, well dressed in costume de-regle, gazing on the boards and listening to the music. Like such ghosts are certain beings whom I call Lookers-on. Though still living, they have no share in the life they survey, they come as from another world to hear and to see what is passing in ours. In ours they lived once, but that troubled sort of life they have survived. Still we amuse them as stage-players and puppets amuse ourselves. One of these Lookers-on completed the party at the house of Duplessis.
How lively, how animated the talk was at the financier’s pleasant table that day, the 8th of July! The excitement of the coming war made itself loud in every Gallic voice, and kindled in every Gallic eye. Appeals at every second minute were made, sometimes courteous, sometimes sarcastic, to the Englishman--promising son of an eminent statesman, and native of a country in which France is always coveting an ally, and always suspecting an enemy. Certainly Graham could not have found a less propitious moment for asking Isaura if she really were changed. And certainly the honour of Great Britain was never less ably represented (that is saying a great deal) than it was on this occasion by the young man reared to diplomacy and aspiring to Parliamentary distinction. He answered all questions with a constrained voice and an insipid smile,--all questions pointedly addressed to him as to what demonstrations of admiring sympathy with the gallantry of France might be expected from the English Government and people; what his acquaintance with the German races led him to suppose would be the effect on the Southern States of the first defeat of the Prussians; whether the man called Moltke was not a mere strategist on paper, a crotchety pedant; whether, if Belgium became so enamoured of the glories of France as to solicit fusion with her people, England would have a right to offer any objection,&c., &c. I do not think that during that festival Graham once thought one-millionth so much about the fates of Prussia and France as he did think, “Why is that girl so changed to me? Merciful heaven! is she lost to my life?”
By training, by habit, even by passion, the man was a genuine politician, cosmopolitan as well as patriotic, accustomed to consider what effect every vibration in that balance of European power, which no deep thinker can despise, must have on the destinies of civilised humanity, and on those of the nation to which he belongs. But are there not moments in life when the human heart suddenly narrows the circumference to which its emotions are extended? As the ebb of a tide, it retreats from the shores it had covered on its flow, drawing on with contracted waves the treasure-trove it has selected to hoard amid its deeps.
Chapter II
On quitting the dining-room, the Duchesse de Tarascon said to her host, on whose arm she was leaning, “Of course you and I must go with the stream. But is not all the fine talk that has passed to-day at your table, and in which we too have joined, a sort of hypocrisy? I may say this to you; I would say it to no other.”
“And I say to you, Madame la Duchesse, that which I would say to no other. Thinking over it as I sit alone, I find myself making a ‘terrible hazard;’ but when I go abroad and become infected by the general enthusiasm, I pluck up gaiety of spirit, and whisper to myself, ‘True, but it may be an enormous gain.’ To get the left bank of the Rhine is a trifle; but to check in our next neighbour a growth which a few years hence would overtop us,--that is no trifle. And, be the gain worth the hazard or not, could the Emperor, could any Government likely to hold its own for a week, have declined to take the chance of the die?”
The Duchesse mused a moment, and meanwhile the two seated themselves on a divan in the corner of the salon. Then she said very slowly--
“No Government that held its tenure on popular suffrage could have done so. But if the Emperor had retained the personal authority which once allowed the intellect of one man to control and direct the passions of many, I think the war would have been averted. I have reason to know that the Emperor gave his emphatic support to the least bellicose members of the Council, and that Gramont’s speech did not contain the passage that precipitates hostilities when the Council in which it was framed broke up. These fatal Ministers found the Chamber, and the reports of the popular excitement which could not be resisted without imminent danger of revolution. It is Paris that has forced the war on the Emperor. But enough of this subject. What must be, must, and, as you say, the gain may be greater than the hazard. I come to something else you whispered to me before we went in to dinner,--a sort of complaint which wounds me sensibly. You say I had assisted to a choice of danger and possibly of death a very distant connection of mine, who might have been a very near connection of yours. You mean Alain de Rochebriant?”
“Yes; I accept him as a suitor for the hand of my only daughter.”
“I am so glad, not for your sake so much as for his. No one can know him well without appreciating in him the finest qualities of the finest order of the French noble; but having known your pretty Valerie so long, my congratulations are for the man who can win her. Meanwhile, hear my explanation: when I promised Alain any interest I can command for the grade of officer in a regiment of Mobiles, I knew not that he had formed, or was likely to form, ties or duties to keep him at home. I withdraw my promise.”
“No, Duchesse, fulfil it. I should be disloyal indeed if I robbed a sovereign under whose tranquil and prosperous reign I have acquired, with no dishonour, the fortune which Order proffers to Commerce, of one gallant defender in the hour of need. And, speaking frankly, if Alain were really my son, I think I am Frenchman enough to remember that France is my mother.”
“Say no more, my friend--say no more,” cried the Duchesse, with the warm blood of the heart rushing through all the delicate coatings of pearl-powder. “If every Frenchman felt as you do; if in this Paris of ours all hostilities of class may merge in the one thought of the common country; if in French hearts there yet thrills the same sentiment as that which, in the terrible days when all other ties were rent asunder, revered France as mother, and rallied her sons to her aid against the confederacy of Europe,--why, then, we need not grow pale with dismay at the sight of a Prussian needle-gun. Hist! look yonder: is not that a tableau of Youth in Arcady? Worlds rage around, and Love, unconcerned, whispers to Love!” The Duchesse here pointed to a corner of the adjoining room in which Alain and Valerie sat apart, he whispering into her ear; her cheek downcast, and, even seen at that distance, brightened by the delicate tenderness of its blushes.
Chapter III
But in that small assembly there were two who did not attract the notice of Duplessis or of the lady of the Imperial Court. While the Prince ---- and the placid Looker-on were engaged at a contest of ecarte, with the lively Venosta, for the gallery, interposing criticisms and admonitions, Isaura was listlessly turning over a collection of photographs, strewed on a table that stood near to an open window in the remoter angle of the room, communicating with a long and wide balcony filled partially with flowers and overlooking the Champs Elysees, softly lit up by the innumerable summer stars. Suddenly a whisper, the command of which she could not resist, thrilled through her ear, and sent the blood rushing back to her heart.
“Do you remember that evening at Enghien? how I said that our imagination could not carry us beyond the question whether we two should be gazing together that night twelve months on that star which each of us had singled out from the hosts of heaven? That was the 8th of July. It is the 8th of July once more. Come and seek for our chosen star--come. I have something to say, which say I must. Come.”
Mechanically, as it were,--mechanically, as they tell us the Somnambulist obeys the Mesmeriser,--Isaura obeyed that summons. In a kind of dreamy submission she followed his steps, and found herself on the balcony, flowers around her and stars above, by the side of the man who had been to her that being ever surrounded by flowers and lighted by stars,--the ideal of Romance to the heart of virgin Woman.
“Isaura,” said the Englishman, softly. At the sound of her own name for the first time heard from those lips, every nerve in her frame quivered. “Isaura, I have tried to live without you. I cannot. You are all in all to me: without you it seems to me as if earth had no flowers, and even heaven had withdrawn its stars. Are there differences between us, differences of taste, of sentiments, of habits, of thought? Only let me hope that you can love me a tenth part so much as I love you, and such differences cease to be discord. Love harmonises all sounds, blends all colours into its own divine oneness of heart and soul. Look up! is not the star which this time last year invited our gaze above, is it not still there? Does it not still invite our gaze? Isaura, speak!”
“Hush, hush, hush,”--the girl could say no more, but she recoiled from his side.
The recoil did not wound him: there was no hate in it. He advanced, he caught her hand, and continued, in one of those voices which become so musical in summer nights under starry skies:
“Isaura, there is one name which I can never utter without a reverence due to the religion which binds earth to heaven--a name which to man should be the symbol of life cheered and beautified, exalted, hallowed. That name is ‘wife.’ Will you take that name from me?”
And still Isaura made no reply. She stood mute, and cold, and rigid as a statue of marble. At length, as if consciousness had been arrested and was struggling back, she sighed heavily, and passed her hands slowly over her forehead.
“Mockery, mockery,” she said then, with a smile half bitter, half plaintive, on her colourless lips. “Did you wait to ask me that question till you knew what my answer must be? I have pledged the name of wife to another.”
“No, no; you say that to rebuke, to punish me! Unsay it! unsay it!”
Isaura beheld the anguish of his face with bewildered eyes. “How can my words pain you?” she said, drearily. “Did you not write that I had unfitted myself to be wife to you?”
“I?”
“That I had left behind me the peaceful immunities of private life? I felt you were so right! Yes! I am affianced to one who thinks that in spite of that misfortune--”
“Stop, I command you--stop! You saw my letter to Mrs. Morley. I have not had one moment free from torture and remorse since I wrote it. But whatever in that letter you might justly resent--”
“I did not resent--”
Graham heard not the interruption, but hurried on. “You would forgive could you read my heart. No matter. Every sentiment in that letter, except those which conveyed admiration, I retract. Be mine, and instead of presuming to check in you the irresistible impulse of genius to the first place in the head or the heart of the world, I teach myself to encourage, to share, to exult in it. Do you know what a difference there is between the absent one and the present one--between the distant image against whom our doubts, our fears, our suspicions, raise up hosts of imaginary giants, barriers of visionary walls, and the beloved face before the sight of which the hosts are fled, the walls are vanished? Isaura, we meet again. You know now from my own lips that I love you. I think your lips will not deny that you love me. You say that you are affianced to another. Tell the man frankly, honestly, that you mistook your heart. It is not yours to give. Save yourself, save him, from a union in which there can be no happiness.”
“It is too late,” said Isaura, with hollow tones, but with no trace of vacillating weakness on her brow and lips. “Did I say now to that other one, ‘I break the faith that I pledged to you,’ I should kill him, body and soul. Slight thing though I be, to him I am all in all; to you, Mr. Vane, to you a memory--the memory of one whom a year, perhaps a month, hence, you will rejoice to think you have escaped.”
She passed from him--passed away from the flowers and the starlight; and when Graham,--recovering from the stun of her crushing words, and with the haughty mien and stop of the man who goes forth from the ruin of his hopes, leaning for support upon his pride,--when Graham re-entered the room, all the guests had departed save only Alain, who was still exchanging whispered words with Valerie.
Chapter IV
The next day, at the hour appointed, Graham entered Alain’s apartment. “I am glad to tell you,” said the Marquis, gaily, “that the box has arrived, and we will very soon examine its contents. Breakfast claims precedence.” During the meal Alain was in gay spirits, and did not at first notice the gloomy countenance and abstracted mood of his guest. At length, surprised at the dull response to his lively sallies on the part of a man generally so pleasant in the frankness of his speech, and the cordial ring of his sympathetic laugh, it occurred to him that the change in Graham must be ascribed to something that had gone wrong in the meeting with Isaura the evening before; and remembering the curtness with which Graham had implied disinclination to converse about the fair Italian, he felt perplexed how to reconcile the impulse of his good nature with the discretion imposed on his good-breeding. At all events, a compliment to the lady whom Graham had so admired could do no harm.
“How well Mademoiselle Cicogna looked last night!”
“Did she? It seemed to me that, in health at least, she did not look very well. Have you heard what day M. Thiers will speak on the war?”
“Thiers? No. Who cares about Thiers? Thank heaven his day is past! I don’t know any unmarried woman in Paris, not even Valerie--I mean Mademoiselle Duplessis--who has so exquisite a taste in dress as Mademoiselle Cicogna. Generally speaking, the taste of a female author is atrocious.”
“Really--I did not observe her dress. I am no critic on subjects so dainty as the dress of ladies, or the tastes of female authors.”
“Pardon me,” said the beau Marquis, gravely. “As to dress, I think that so essential a thing in the mind of woman, that no man who cares about women ought to disdain critical study of it. In woman, refinement of character is never found in vulgarity of dress. I have only observed that truth since I came up from Bretagne.”
“I presume, my dear Marquis, that you may have read in Bretagne books which very few not being professed scholars have ever read at Paris; and possibly you may remember that Horace ascribes the most exquisite refinement in dress, denoted by the untranslatable words, ‘simplex munditiis,’ to a lady who was not less distinguished by the ease and rapidity with which she could change her affection. Of course that allusion does not apply to Mademoiselle Cicogna, but there are many other exquisitely dressed ladies at Paris of whom an ill-fated admirer
‘fidem Mutatosque deos flebit.’
“Now, with your permission, we will adjourn to the box of letters.”
The box being produced and unlocked, Alain looked with conscientious care at its contents before he passed over to Graham’s inspection a few epistles, in which the Englishman immediately detected the same handwriting as that of the letter from Louise which Richard King had bequeathed to him.
They were arranged and numbered chronologically.
Letter I
DEAR M. LE MARQUIS,--How can I thank you sufficiently for obtaining and remitting to me those certificates? You are too aware of the unhappy episode in my life not to know how inestimable is the service you render me. I am saved all further molestation from the man who had indeed no right over my freedom, but whose persecution might compel me to the scandal and disgrace of an appeal to the law for protection, and the avowal of the illegal marriage into which I was duped. I would rather be torn limb from limb by wild horses, like the Queen in the history books, than dishonour myself and the ancestry which I may at least claim on the mother’s side, by proclaiming that I had lived with that low Englishman as his wife, when I was only--O heavens, I cannot conclude the sentence!
“No, Mons. le Marquis, I am in no want of the pecuniary aid you so generously wish to press on me. Though I know not where to address my poor dear uncle,--though I doubt, even if I did, whether I could venture to confide to him the secret known only to yourself as to the name I now bear--and if he hear of me at all he must believe me dead,--yet I have enough left of the money he last remitted to me for present support; and when that fails, I think, what with my knowledge of English and such other slender accomplishments as I possess, I could maintain myself as a teacher or governess in some German family. At all events, I will write to you again soon, and I entreat you to let me know all you can learn about my uncle. I feel so grateful to you for your just disbelief of the horrible calumny which must be so intolerably galling to a man so proud, and, whatever his errors, so incapable of a baseness.
“Direct to me Poste restante, Augsburg.
“Yours with all consideration, LETTER II.
(Seven months after the date of Letter 1.)
“AUGSBURG.
“DEAR M. LE MARQUIS,--I thank you for your kind little note informing me of the pains you have taken, as yet with no result, to ascertain what has become of my unfortunate uncle. My life since I last wrote has been a very quiet one. I have been teaching among a few families here; and among my pupils are two little girls of very high birth. They have taken so great a fancy to me that their mother has just asked me to come and reside at their house as governess. What wonderfully kind hearts those Germans have,--so simple, so truthful! They raise no troublesome questions,--accept my own story implicitly.” Here follow a few commonplace sentences about the German character, and a postscript. “I go into my new home next week. When you hear more of my uncle, direct to me at the Countess von Rudesheim, Schloss --------, near Berlin.”
“Rudesheim!” Could this be the relation, possibly the wife, of the Count von Rudesheim with whom Graham had formed acquaintance last year? LETTER III.
(Between three and four years after the date of the last.)
“You startle me indeed, dear M. le Marquis. My uncle said to have been recognised in Algeria under another name, a soldier in the Algerian army? My dear, proud, luxurious uncle! Ah, I cannot believe it, any more than you do: but I long eagerly for such further news as you can learn of him. For myself, I shall perhaps surprise you when I say I am about to be married. Nothing can exceed the amiable kindness I have received from the Rudesheims since I have been in their house. For the last year especially I have been treated on equal terms as one of the family. Among the habitual visitors at the house is a gentleman of noble birth, but not of rank too high, nor of fortune too great, to make a marriage with the French widowed governess a misalliance. I am sure that he loves me sincerely; and he is the only man I ever met whose love I have cared to win. We are to be married in the course of the year. Of course he is ignorant of my painful history, and will never learn it. And after all, Louise D---- is dead. In the home to which I am about to remove, there is no probability that the wretched Englishman can ever cross my path. My secret is as safe with you as in the grave that holds her whom in the name of Louise D---- you once loved. Henceforth I shall trouble you no more with my letters; but if you hear anything decisively authentic of my uncle’s fate, write me a line at any time, directed as before to Madame ----, enclosed to the Countess von Rudesheim.
“And accept, for all the kindness you have ever shown me, as to one whom you did not disdain to call a kinswoman, the assurance of my undying gratitude. In the alliance she now makes, your kinswoman does not discredit the name through which she is connected with the yet loftier line of Rochebriant.”
To this letter the late Marquis had appended in pencil. “Of course Rochebriant never denies the claim of a kinswoman, even though a drawing-master’s daughter. Beautiful creature, Louise, but a termagant. I could not love Venus if she were a termagant. L.’s head turned by the unlucky discovery that her mother was noble. In one form or other, every woman has the same disease--vanity. Name of her intended not mentioned--easily found out.”
The next letter was dated May 7, 1859, on black-edged paper, and contained but these lines: “I was much comforted by your kind visit yesterday, dear Marquis. My affliction has been heavy: but for the last two years my poor husband’s conduct has rendered my life unhappy, and I am recovering the shock of his sudden death. It is true that I and the children are left very ill provided for; but I cannot accept your generous offer of aid. Have no fear as to my future fate. Adieu, my dear Marquis! This will reach you just before you start for Naples. Bon voyage.” There was no address on this note-no postmark on the envelope-evidently sent by hand.
The last note, dated 1861, March 20, was briefer than its predecessor. “I have taken your advice, dear Marquis; and, overcoming all scruples, I have accepted his kind offer, on the condition that I am never to be taken to England. I had no option in this marriage. I can now own to you that my poverty had become urgent.--Yours, with inalienable gratitude. This last note, too, was without postmark, and was evidently sent by hand.
“There are no other letters, then, from this writer?” asked Graham; “and no further clue as to her existence?”
“None that I have discovered; and I see now why I preserved these letters. There is nothing in their contents not creditable to my poor father. They show how capable he was of good-natured disinterested kindness towards even a distant relation of whom he could certainly not have been proud, judging not only by his own pencilled note, or by the writer’s condition as a governess, but by her loose sentiments as to the marriage tie. I have not the slightest idea who she could be. I never at least heard of one connected, however distantly, with my family, whom I could identify with the writer of these letters.”
“I may hold them a short time in my possession?”
“Pardon me a preliminary question. If I may venture to form a conjecture, the object of your search must be connected with your countryman, whom the lady politely calls the ‘wretched Englishman;’ but I own I should not like to lend, through these letters, a pretence to any steps that may lead to a scandal in which my father’s name or that of any member of my family could be mixed up.”
“Marquis, it is to prevent the possibility of all scandal that I ask you to trust these letters to my discretion.”
“Foi de gentilhomme?”
“Foi de gentilhomme!”
“Take them. When and where shall we meet again?”
“Soon, I trust; but I must leave Paris this evening. I am bound to Berlin in quest of this Countess von Rudesheim: and I fear that in a very few days intercourse between France and the German frontier will be closed upon travellers.”
After a few more words not worth recording, the two young men shook hands and parted.
Chapter V
It was with an interest languid and listless indeed, compared with that which he would have felt a day before, that Graham mused over the remarkable advances towards the discovery of Louise Duval which were made in the letters he had perused. She had married, then, first a foreigner, whom she spoke of as noble, and whose name and residence could be easily found through the Countess von Rudesheim. The marriage did not seem to have been a happy one. Left a widow in reduced circumstances, she had married again, evidently without affection. She was living so late as 1861, and she had children living is 1859: was the child referred to by Richard King one of them?
The tone and style of the letters served to throw some light on the character of the writer: they evinced pride, stubborn self-will, and unamiable hardness of nature; but her rejection of all pecuniary aid from a man like the late Marquis de Rochebriant betokened a certain dignity of sentiment. She was evidently, whatever her strange ideas about her first marriage with Richard King, no vulgar woman of gallantry; and there must have been some sort of charm about her to have excited a friendly interest in a kinsman so remote, and a man of pleasure so selfish, as her high-born correspondent.
But what now, so far as concerned his own happiness, was the hope, the probable certainty, of a speedy fulfilment of the trust bequeathed to him? Whether the result, in the death of the mother, and more especially of the child, left him rich, or, if the last survived, reduced his fortune to a modest independence, Isaura was equally lost to him, and fortune became valueless. But his first emotions on recovering from the shock of hearing from Isaura’s lips that she was irrevocably affianced to another, were not those of self-reproach. They were those of intense bitterness against her who, if really so much attached to him as he had been led to hope, could within so brief a time reconcile her heart to marriage with another. This bitterness was no doubt unjust; but I believe it to be natural to men of a nature so proud and of affections so intense as Graham’s, under similar defeats of hope. Resentment is the first impulse in a man loving with the whole ardour of his soul, rejected, no matter why or wherefore, by the woman by whom he had cause to believe he himself was beloved; and though Graham’s standard of honour was certainly the reverse of low, yet man does not view honour in the same light as woman does, when involved in analogous difficulties of position. Graham conscientiously thought that if Isaura so loved him as to render distasteful an engagement to another which could only very recently have been contracted, it would be more honourable frankly so to tell the accepted suitor than to leave him in ignorance that her heart was estranged. But these engagements are very solemn things with girls like Isaura, and hers was no ordinary obligation of woman-honour. Had the accepted one been superior in rank-fortune--all that flatters the ambition of woman in the choice of marriage; had he been resolute, and strong, and self-dependent amid the trials and perils of life--then possibly the woman’s honour might find excuse in escaping the penalties of its pledge. But the poor, ailing, infirm, morbid boy-poet, who looked to her as his saving angel in body, in mind, and soul-to say to him, “Give me back my freedom,” would be to abandon him to death and to sin. But Graham could not of course divine why what he as a man thought right was to Isaura as woman impossible: and he returned to his old prejudiced notion that there is no real depth and ardour of affection for human lovers in the poetess whose mind and heart are devoted to the creation of imaginary heroes. Absorbed in reverie, he took his way slowly and with downcast looks towards the British embassy, at which it was well to ascertain whether the impending war yet necessitated special passports for Germany.
“Bon-jour, cher ami,” said a pleasant voice; “and how long have you been at Paris?”
“Oh, my dear M. Savarin! charmed to see you looking so well! Madame well too, I trust? My kindest regards to her. I have been in Paris but a day or two, and I leave this evening.”
“So soon? The war frightens you away, I suppose. Which way are you going now?”
“To the British embassy.”
“Well, I will go with you so far--it is in my own direction. I have to call at the charming Italian’s with my congratulations--on news I only heard this morning.”
“You mean Mademoiselle Cicogna--and the news that demands congratulations--her approaching marriage!”
“Mon Dieu! when could you have heard of that?”
“Last night at the house of M. Duplessis.”
“Parbleu! I shall scold her well for confiding to her new friend Valerie the secret she kept from her old friends, my wife and myself.”
“By the way,” said Graham, with a tone of admirably-feigned indifference, “who is the happy man? That part of the secret I did not hear.”
“Can’t you guess?” “NO.”
“Gustave Rameau.”
“Ah!” Graham almost shrieked, so sharp and shrill was his cry. “Ah! I ought indeed to have guessed that!”
“Madame Savarin, I fancy, helped to make up the marriage. I hope it may turn out well; certainly it will be his salvation. May it be for her happiness!”
“No doubt of that! Two poets-born for each other, I dare say. Adieu, my dear Savarin! Here we are at the embassy.”