The Nabob Part 35

"See, now, it is not possible that you should say that. Think that my fortune is at stake, the future of our children, the name you bear.

Everything is at stake in what you cannot refuse to do."

He could have spoken thus for hours and been always met by the same firm, unshakable obstinacy--an Afchin could not visit a slave.

"Well, madame," said he violently, "this slave is worth more than you.

She has increased tenfold her husband's wealth by her intelligence, while you, on the contrary----"

For the first time in the twelve years of their married life Jansoulet dared to hold up his head before his wife. Was he ashamed of this crime of _lese-majeste_, or did he understand that such a remark would place an impa.s.sable gulf between them? He changed his tone, knelt down before the bed, with that cheerful tenderness when one persuades children to be reasonable.

"My little Martha, I beg of you--get up, dress yourself. It is for your own sake I ask it, for your comfort, for your own welfare. What would become of you if, for a caprice, a stupid whim, we should become poor?"

But the word--poor--represented absolutely nothing to the Levantine. One could speak of it before her, as of death before little children.

She was not moved by it, not knowing what it was. She was perfectly determined to keep in bed in her _djebba_; and to show her decision, she lighted a new cigarette at her old one just finished; and while the poor Nabob surrounded his "dear little wife" with excuses, with prayers, with supplications, promising her a diadem of pearls a hundred times more beautiful than her own, if she would come, she watched the heavy smoke rising to the painted ceiling, wrapping herself up in it as in an imperturbable calm. At last, in face of this refusal, this silence, this barrier of headstrong obstinacy, Jansoulet unbridled his wrath and rose up to his full height:

"Come," said he, "I wish it."

He turned to the negresses:

"Dress your mistress at once."

And boor as he was at the bottom, the son of a southern nail-maker a.s.serting itself in this crisis which moved him so deeply, he threw back the coverlids with a brutal and contemptuous gesture, knocking down the innumerable toys they bore, and forcing the half-clad Levantine to bound to her feet with a prompt.i.tude amazing in so ma.s.sive a person. She roared at the outrage, drew the folds of her dalmatic against her bust, pushed her cap sideways on her dishevelled hair, and began to abuse her husband.

"Never, understand me, never! You may drag me sooner to this----"

The filth flowed from her heavy lips as from a spout. Jansoulet could have imagined himself in some frightful den of the port of Ma.r.s.eilles, at some quarrel of prost.i.tutes and bullies, or again at some open-air dispute between Genoese, Maltese, and Provencal hags, gleaning on the quays round the sacks of wheat, and abusing each other, crouched in the whirlwinds of golden dust. She was indeed a Levantine of a seaport, a spoiled child, who, in the evening, left alone, had heard from her terrace or from her gondola the sailors revile each other in every tongue of the Latin seas, and had remembered it all. The wretched man looked at her, frightened, terrified at what she forced him to hear, at her grotesque figure, foaming and gasping:

"No, I will not go--no, I will not go!"

And this was the mother of his children, a daughter of the Afchins!

Suddenly, at the thought that his fate was in the hands of this woman, that it would only cost her a dress to put on to save him--and that time was flying--that soon it would be too late, a criminal feeling rose to his brain and distorted his features. He came straight to her, his hands contracted, with such a terrible expression that the daughter of the Afchins, frightened, rushed, calling towards the door by which the _ma.s.seur_ had just gone out:

"Aristide!"

This cry, the words, this intimacy of his wife with a servant! Jansoulet stopped, his rage suddenly calmed; then, with a gesture of disgust, he flung himself out, slamming the doors, more eager to fly the misfortune and the horror whose presence he divined in his own home, than to seek elsewhere the help he had been promised.

A quarter of an hour later he made his appearance at the Hemerlingues', making a despairing gesture as he entered to the banker, and approached the baroness stammering the ready-made phrase he had heard repeated so often the night of his ball, "His wife, very unwell--most grieved not to have been able to come--" She did not give him time to finish, rose slowly, unwound herself like a long and slender snake from the pleated folds of her tight dress, and said, without looking at him, "Oh, I knew--I knew!" then changed her place and took no more notice of him. He attempted to approach Hemerlingue, but the good man seemed absorbed in his conversation with Maurice Trott. Then he went to sit down near Mme.

Jenkins, whose isolation seemed like his own. But, even while talking to the poor woman, as languid as he was preoccupied, he was watching the baroness doing the honours of this drawing-room, so comfortable when compared with his own gilded halls.

It was time to leave. Mme. Hemerlingue went to the door with some of the ladies, presented her forehead to the old princess, bent under the benediction of the Armenian bishop, nodded with a smile to the young men with the canes, found for each the fitting adieu with perfect ease; and the wretched man could not prevent himself from comparing this Eastern slave, so Parisian, so distinguished in the best society of the world, with the other, the European brutalized by the East, stupefied with Turkish tobacco, and swollen with idleness. His ambitions, his pride as a husband, were extinguished and humiliated in this marriage of which he saw the danger and the emptiness--a final cruelty of fate taking from him even the refuge of personal happiness from all his public disasters.

Little by little the room was emptied. The Levantines disappeared one after another, leaving each time an immense void in their place. Mme.

Jenkins was gone, and only two or three ladies remained whom Jansoulet did not know, and behind whom the mistress of the house seemed to shelter herself from him. But Hemerlingue was free, and the Nabob rejoined him at the moment when he was furtively escaping to his offices on the same floor opposite his rooms. Jansoulet went out with him, forgetting in his trouble to salute the baroness, and once on the antechamber staircase, Hemerlingue, cold and reserved while he was under his wife's eye, expanded a little.

"It is very annoying," said he in a low voice, as if he feared to be overheard, "that Mme. Jansoulet has not been willing to come."

Jansoulet answered him by a movement of despair and savage helplessness.

"Annoying, annoying," repeated the other in a whisper, and feeling for his key in his pocket.

"Come, old fellow," said the Nabob, taking his hand, "there's no reason, because our wives don't agree--That doesn't hinder us from remaining friends. What a good chat the other day, eh?"

"No doubt" said the baron, disengaging himself, as he opened the door noiselessly, showing the deep workroom, whose lamp burned solitarily before the enormous empty chair. "Come, good-bye, I must go; I have my mail to despatch."

"_Ya didon, monci_" (But look here, sir) said the poor Nabob, trying to joke, and using the _patois_ of the south to recall to his old chum all the pleasant memories stirred up the other evening. "Our visit to Le Merquier still holds good. The picture we were going to present to him, you know. What day?"

"Ah, yes, Le Merquier--true--eh--well, soon. I will write to you."

"Really? You know it is very important."

"Yes, yes. I will write to you. Good-bye."

And the big man shut his door in a hurry, as if he were afraid of his wife coming.

Two days after, the Nabob received a note from Hemerlingue, almost unreadable on account of the complicated scrawls, of abbreviations more or less commercial, under which the ex-sutler hid his entire want of spelling:

MY DEAR OLD COM_--I cannot accom_ you to Le Mer. _Too bus_ just now.

Besid_ y_ will be _bet_ alone to _tal_. Go _th bold_. You are _exp. A_ Ca.s.sette, _ev morn_ 8 to 10.

Yours _faith_

HEM.

Below as a postscript, a very small hand had written very legibly:

"A religious picture, as good as possible."

What was he to think of this letter? Was there real good-will in it, or polite evasion? In any case hesitation was no longer possible. Time pressed. Jansoulet made a bold effort, then--for he was very frightened of Le Merquier--and called on him one morning.

Our strange Paris, alike in its population and its aspects, seems a specimen map of the whole world. In the Marais there are narrow streets, with old sculptured worm-eaten doors, with overhanging gables and balconies, which remind you of old Heidelberg. The Faubourg Saint-Honore, lying round the Russian church with its white minarets and golden domes, seems a part of Moscow. On Montmartre I know a picturesque and crowded corner which is simply Algiers. Little, low, clean houses, each with its bra.s.s plate and little front garden, are English streets between Neuilly and the Champs-Elysees while all behind the apse of Saint-Sulpice, the Rue Feron, the Rue Ca.s.sette, lying peaceably in the shadow of its great towers, roughly paved, their doors each with its knocker, seem lifted out of some provincial and religious town--Tours or Orleans, for example--in the district of the cathedral or the palace, where the great over-hanging trees in the gardens rock themselves to the sound of the bells and the choir.

It was there, in the neighbourhood of the Catholic Club--of which he had just been made honorary president--that M. Le Merquier lived. He was _avocat_, deputy for Lyons, business man of all the great communities of France; and Hemerlingue, moved by a deep-seated instinct, had intrusted him with the affairs of his firm.

He arrived before nine o'clock at an old mansion of which the ground floor was occupied by a religious bookshop, asleep in the odour of the sacristy, and of the thick gray paper on which the stories of miracles are printed for hawkers, and mounted the great whitewashed convent stairway. Jansoulet was touched by this provincial and Catholic atmosphere, in which revived the souvenirs of his past in the south, impressions of infancy still intact, thanks to his long absence from home; and since his arrival at Paris he had had neither the time nor the occasion to call them in question. Fas.h.i.+onable hypocrisy had presented itself to him in all its forms save that of religious integrity, and he refused now to believe in the venality of a man who lived in such surroundings. Introduced into the _avocat's_ waiting-room--a vast parlour with fine white muslin curtains, having for its sole ornament a large and beautiful copy of Tintoretto's Dead Christ--his doubt and trouble changed into indignant conviction. It was not possible! He had been deceived as to Le Merquier. There was surely some bold slander in it, such as so easily spreads in Paris--or perhaps it was one of those ferocious snares among which he had stumbled for six months. No, this stern conscience, so well known in Parliament and the courts, this cold and austere personage, could not be treated like those great swollen pashas with loosened waist-belts and floating sleeves open to conceal the bags of gold. He would only expose himself to a scandalous refusal, to the legitimate revolt of outraged honour, if he attempted such means of corruption.

The Nabob told himself all this, as he sat on the oak bench which ran round the room, a bench polished with serge dresses and the rough cloth of ca.s.socks. In spite of the early hour several persons were waiting there with him. A Dominican, ascetic and serene, walking up and down with great strides; two sisters of charity, buried under their caps, counting long rosaries which measured their time of waiting; priests from Lyons, recognisable by the shape of their hats; others reserved and severe in air, sitting at the great ebony table which filled the middle of the room, and turning over some of those pious journals printed at Fouvieres, just above Lyons, the _Echo of Purgatory_, the _Rose-bush of Mary_, which give as a present to all yearly subscribers pontifical indulgences and remissions of future sins. Some muttered words, a stifled cough, the light whispered prayers of the sisters, recalled to Jansoulet the distant and confused sensation of the hours of waiting in the corner of his village church round the confessional on the eves of the great festivals of the Church.

At last his turn came, and if a doubt as to M. Le Merquier had remained, he doubted no longer when he saw this great office, simple and severe, yet a little more ornate than the waiting-room, a fitting frame for the austerity of the lawyer's principles, and for his thin form, tall, stooping, narrow-shouldered, squeezed into a black coat too short in the sleeves, from which protruded two black fists, broad and flat, two sticks of Indian ink with hieroglyphs of great veins. The clerical deputy had, with the leaden hue of a Lyonnese grown mouldy between his two rivers, a certain life of expression which he owed to his double look--sometimes sparkling, but impenetrable behind the gla.s.s of his spectacles; more often, vivid, mistrustful, and dark, above these same gla.s.ses, surrounded by the shadow which a lifted eye and a stooping head gives the eyebrow.

After a greeting almost cordial in comparison with the cold bow which the two colleagues exchanged at the Chamber, an "I was expecting you" in which perhaps an intention showed itself, the lawyer pointed the Nabob into a seat near his desk, told the smug domestic in black not to come till he was summoned, arranged a few papers, after which, sinking into his arm-chair with the att.i.tude of a man ready to listen, who becomes all ears, his legs crossed, he rested his chin on his hand, with his eyes fixed on a great rep curtain falling to the ground in front of him.

The moment was decisive, the situation embarra.s.sing. Jansoulet did not hesitate. It was one of the poor Nabob's pretensions to know men as well as Mora. And this instinct, which, said he, had never deceived him, warned him that he was at that moment dealing with a rigid and unshakable honesty, a conscience in hard stone, untouchable by pick-axe or powder. "My conscience!" Suddenly he changed his programme, threw to the winds the tricks and equivocations which embarra.s.sed his open and courageous disposition, and, head high and heart open, held to this honest man a language he was born to understand.

"Do not be astonished, my dear colleague,"--his voice trembled, but soon became firm in the conviction of his defence--"do not be astonished if I am come to find you here instead of asking simply to be heard by the third committee. The explanation which I have to make to you is so delicate and confidential that it would have been impossible to make it publicly before my colleagues."

Maitre Le Merquier, above his spectacles, looked at the curtain with a disturbed air. Evidently the conversation was taking an unexpected turn.

"I do not enter on the main question," said the Nabob. "Your report, I am a.s.sured, is impartial and loyal, such as your conscience has dictated to you. Only there are some heart-breaking calumnies spread about me to which I have not answered, and which have perhaps influenced the opinion of the committee. It is on this subject that I wish to speak to you. I know the confidence with which you are honoured by your colleagues, M.