The Nabob Volume I Part 3

"It happens that Madame Jenkins intends to give a little party next month. If you would do us the honor--"

"I shall be very glad to go to your house, my dear doctor, and if the Nabob should be there, I should not object to his being presented to me."

At that moment the usher opened the door.

"Monsieur le Ministre de l'Interieur is in the blue salon. He has but a word to say to Your Excellency. Monsieur le Prefet de Police is still waiting below, in the gallery."

"Very good," said the duke, "I will go to him. But I should like to make a definite arrangement about this costume first. Let us see, friend What's-your-name, what do we decide about those ruffs? _Au revoir_, doctor. Nothing to do but keep on with the pearls, is there?"

"Keep on with the pearls," said Jenkins, bowing; and he took his leave, radiant over the two bits of good fortune that fell to his lot at the same time--the honor of entertaining the duke, and the pleasure of gratifying his dear Nabob. The crowd of pet.i.tioners through whom he pa.s.sed in the ante-chamber was even greater than when he entered; new arrivals had joined the patient waiters of the first hour, others were hurrying upstairs, pale-faced and full of business, and in the courtyard carriages continued to arrive, to range themselves gravely and solemnly in a double circle, while the question of ruffed sleeves was discussed upstairs with no less solemnity.

"To the club," said Jenkins to his coachman.

The coupe rolled along the quays, recrossed the bridges, and turned into Place de la Concorde, which already wore a different aspect from that it had worn a short time before. The mist had lifted in the direction of the Garde-Meuble and the Greek temple of the Madeleine, revealing here and there the white spray of a fountain, the arcade of a palace, the top of a statue, the shrubbery of the Tuileries, s.h.i.+vering by the gates. The veil, not raised but rent in spots, discovered patches of blue sky: and, on the avenue leading to the Arc de Triomphe, one could see breaks driving swiftly along, filled with coachmen and jockeys, dragoons of the Empress's corps, body-guards in gorgeous fur-lined coats riding two by two in long lines, with a great clanking of bits and spurs and neighing of fresh horses, all in the light of a still invisible sun, emerging from the vague depths of the mist, plunging into it again in ma.s.ses, like a swiftly-vanis.h.i.+ng vision of the morning splendor of that quarter.

Jenkins alighted at the corner of Rue Royale. From roof to cellar of the great gambling-house servants were bustling about, shaking rugs, airing the salons where the odor of cigar-smoke still lingered, where heaps of fine ashes were blowing about in the fireplaces, while on the green tables, still quivering with the games of the night, the candles were still burning in silver candelabra, the flame ascending straight into the pallid light of day. The uproar and the going and coming ceased on the third floor, where several members of the club had their apartments. Of the number was the Marquis de Monpavon, to whose door Jenkins bent his steps.

"Ah! is it you, doctor? Deuce take it! What time is it, pray? I'm not at home."

"Not even to the doctor?"

"Oh! not to anybody. A question of costume, my dear fellow. Never mind, come in all the same. Toast your feet a moment while Francois finishes my hair."

Jenkins entered the bedroom, which was as prosaic a place as all furnished apartments are, and approached the fire, where curling-tongs of all dimensions were heating, while from the adjoining laboratory, separated from the bedroom by an Algerian curtain, the Marquis de Monpavon submitted to the manipulations of his valet. Odors of patchouli, cold cream, burned horn and burned hair escaped from the restricted quarters; and from time to time, when Francois came out to take a fresh pair of tongs, Jenkins caught a glimpse of an enormous dressing-table laden with innumerable little instruments of ivory, steel, and mother-of-pearl, files, scissors, powder-puffs and brushes, phials, cups, cosmetics, labelled, arranged in lines, and amid all that rubbish, petty ironmongery and dolls' playthings, a hand, the hand of an old man, awkward and trembling, dry and long, with nails as carefully kept as a j.a.panese painter's.

While making up his face, the longest and most complicated of his matutinal occupations, Monpavon chatted with the doctor, told him of his aches and pains and of the good effect of the pearls, which were making him younger, he said. And listening to him thus, at a little distance, without seeing him, one would have believed he was the Duc de Mora, he had so faithfully copied his way of speaking. There were the same unfinished sentences, ending in a _ps_--_ps_--_ps_--uttered between the teeth. "What's-his-names" and "What-d'ye-call-'ems" at every turn, a sort of lazy, bored, aristocratic stammer, in which one divined profound contempt for the vulgar art of speech. In the duke's circle everybody strove to copy that accent, those disdainful intonations, in which there was an affectation of simplicity.

Jenkins, finding the session a little tedious, rose to go.

"Adieu, I am going. Shall I see you at the Nabob's?"

"Yes, I expect to breakfast there--promised to take What's-his-name, Thingumbob, you know, about our great affair--ps--ps--ps. Weren't for that, I'd stay away--downright menagerie, that house."

The Irishman, despite his kindly feeling, agreed that the society at his friend's house was a little mixed. But what of that! they must not blame him for that. He didn't know any better, poor man.

"Doesn't know and won't learn," said Monpavon sourly. "Instead of consulting men of experience--ps--ps--ps--takes the first sycophant that comes. Did you see the horses Bois-l'Hery bought for him?

Downright swindle, those beasts. And he paid twenty thousand francs for them. I'll wager Bois-l'Hery got 'em for six thousand."

"Oh! fie, fie--a gentleman!" said Jenkins, with the indignation of a n.o.ble soul refusing to believe in evil.

Monpavon went on, as if he did not hear:

"And all because the horses came from Mora's stable!"

"To be sure, the dear Nabob's heart is set on the duke. So that I shall make him very happy when I tell him--"

The doctor stopped, in some embarra.s.sment.

"When you tell him what, Jenkins?"

Jenkins, looking decidedly sheepish, was forced to admit that he had obtained permission from His Excellency to present his friend Jansoulet. He had hardly finished his sentence when a tall spectre with flabby cheeks and multicolored hair and whiskers darted from the dressing-room into the chamber, holding together with both hands at his skinny but very straight neck, a dressing-gown of light silk with violet dots, in which he had enveloped himself like a bonbon in its paper wrapper. The most salient feature in that heroi-comic countenance was a great arched nose s.h.i.+ning with cold cream, and a keen, piercing eye, too youthful, too clear for the heavy, wrinkled lid that covered it. All of Jenkins' patients had that same eye.

Verily Monpavon must have been deeply moved to show himself thus shorn of all prestige. In fact it was with white lips and in a changed voice that he now addressed the doctor, without the affected stammer, speaking rapidly and without stopping to breathe:--

"Come, come, my dear fellow, there's no nonsense between us, is there?

We have met in front of the same porringer; but I let you have your share and I propose that you shall let me have mine." Jenkins' air of amazement did not check him. "Let it be understood once for all. I promised the Nabob that I'd present him to the duke as I presented you long ago. Don't you interfere in what concerns me and me alone."

Jenkins, with his hand upon his heart, protested his innocence. He had never had any such intention. Of course Monpavon was too close a friend of the duke for any one else to--How could he have imagined such a thing?

"I imagine nothing," said the old n.o.bleman, more subdued, but still very cold. "I simply wanted to have a perfectly frank explanation with you on this subject."

The Irishman held out his broad open palm.

"My dear marquis, explanations are always frank between men of honor."

"Honor is a great word, Jenkins. Let us say men of good-breeding. That is sufficient."

And as that same good-breeding, which he put forward as a supreme guide of conduct, suddenly reminded him of his absurd plight, the marquis offered a finger for his friend's demonstrative grasp and pa.s.sed hastily behind his curtain, while the other took his leave, in haste to continue his round of visits.

What a magnificent practice this Jenkins had, to be sure! Nothing but princely mansions, halls comfortably heated and filled with flowers on every floor, downy, silk-lined alcoves, wherein disease became quiet and refined, where nothing suggested the brutal hand that tosses upon a bed of misery those who cease to work only to die. To tell the truth, these clients of Dr. Jenkins were not patients at all. They would not have been received at a hospital. As their organs had not even strength enough to feel a shock, it was impossible to find the seat of their trouble, and the physician leaning over them would have listened in vain for the palpitation of suffering in those bodies which were already inhabited by the inertia and silence of death. They were weakened, exhausted, anaemic, consumed by their absurd mode of life, and yet so attached to it that they strove desperately to prolong it. And the Jenkins Pearls became famous just because of the las.h.i.+ng they administered to jaded const.i.tutions.

"Doctor, I implore you, let me go to the ball this evening!" a young woman would say, as she lay, utterly prostrated, in her invalid's chair, her voice hardly more than a breath.

"You shall go, my dear child."

And go she would, and look lovelier than ever before.

"Doctor, at any price, even if it's the death of me, I must be at the council of ministers to-morrow morning."

He would be there and would win new triumphs by his eloquence and ambitious diplomacy. And afterward--oh! afterward, indeed. But no matter! to their last day Jenkins' patients went about, showed themselves, deceived the consuming selfishness of the mult.i.tude. They died on their feet, like men and women of the world.

After innumerable turns on the Chaussee d'Antin and Champs-elysees, after visiting all the millionaires and t.i.tled personages in Faubourg Saint-Honore, the doctor drew up at the corner of Cours-la-Reine and Rue Francois I., before a house with a swell front which stood at the corner of the quay, and entered an apartment on the ground floor which in no wise resembled those he had visited since the morning.

Immediately upon entering, the tapestries that covered the walls, the old stained gla.s.s windows intersecting with their lead sashes the soft, many-hued light, a gigantic saint in carved wood facing a j.a.panese monster with bulging eyes and back covered with highly polished scales, indicated the imaginative and eccentric taste of an artist. The small servant who opened the door held in leash an Arabian greyhound larger than himself.

"Madame Constance is at ma.s.s," he said, "and mademoiselle is in the studio, alone. We have been working since six o'clock this morning,"

the child added, with a terrible yawn, which the dog caught on the wing, and which caused him to open wide his red mouth with its rows of sharp teeth.

Jenkins, whom we have seen enter the private apartments of the Minister of State with such perfect tranquillity, trembled slightly as he raised the portiere that hid the open doorway of the studio. It was a magnificent sculptor's workroom, the rounded front being entirely of gla.s.s, with columns at either side: a large bay-window flooded with light and at that moment tinged with opal by the mist. More ornate than the majority of these workrooms, to which the daubs of plaster, the modelling tools, the clay scattered about and the splashes of water give something of the appearance of a mason's yard, this one blended a little coquetry with its artistic equipment. Green plants in every corner, a few good pictures hanging on the bare wall, and here and there--on oak pedestals--two or three of the works of Sebastien Ruys, whose very last work, not exhibited until after his death, was covered with black gauze.

The mistress of the establishment, Felicia Ruys, daughter of the famous sculptor, and already known to fame herself by two masterpieces, the bust of her father and that of the Duc de Mora, stood in the centre of the studio, at work modelling a figure. Dressed in a blue cloth riding-habit with long folds, a scarf of China silk twisted around her neck like a boy's cravat, her fine, black hair, gathered carelessly on top of her little Grecian head, Felicia was working with extreme zeal, which added to her beauty by the condensation, so to speak, the concentration of all her features in a scrutinizing and satisfied expression. But it changed abruptly on the doctor's arrival.

"Ah! it's you, is it?" she said brusquely, as if waking from a dream.

"Did you ring? I did not hear."

And in the ennui, the weariness that suddenly overspread that lovely face, only the eyes retained their expression and brilliancy, eyes in which the fact.i.tious gleam of the Jenkins Pearls was heightened by a natural fierceness.