The Nabob Volume I Part 5

Andre made no reply; but his silence spoke for him.

"Beware--you know to what this decision of yours will lead, a final estrangement; but you have always desired it. I need not tell you,"

continued Jenkins, "that to break with me is to break with your mother also. She and I are one."

The young man turned pale, hesitated a second, then said with an effort:

"If my mother cares to come and see me here, I shall certainly be very happy--but my determination to remain apart from you, to have nothing in common with you, is irrevocable."

"At least, you will tell me why?"

He made a gesture signifying, "no," that he would not tell him.

For the moment the Irishman was really angry. His whole face a.s.sumed a savage, cunning expression which would have greatly surprised those who knew only the good-humored, open-hearted Jenkins; but he was careful to go no farther in the direction of an explanation, which he dreaded perhaps no less than he desired it.

"Adieu," he said from the doorway, half turning his head. "Never apply to us."

"Never," replied his stepson in a firm voice.

This time, when the doctor said to Joe: "Place Vendome," the horse, as if he understood that they were going to call on the Nabob, proudly shook his s.h.i.+ning curb, and the coupe drove away at full speed, transforming the hub of each of its wheels into a gleaming sun. "To come such a distance to meet with such a reception! One of the celebrities of the day treated so by that Bohemian! This comes of trying to do good!" Jenkins vented his wrath in a long monologue in that vein; then suddenly exclaimed with a shrug: "Oh! pshaw!" And such traces of care as remained on his brow soon vanished on the pavement of Place Vendome. On all sides the clocks were striking twelve in the suns.h.i.+ne. Emerging from her curtain of mist, fas.h.i.+onable Paris, awake and on her feet, was beginning her day of giddy pleasure. The shop-windows on Rue de la Paix shone resplendent. The mansions on the square seemed to be drawn up proudly in line for the afternoon receptions; and, at the end of Rue Castiglione with its white arcades, the Tuileries, in the glorious sunlight of winter, marshalled its s.h.i.+vering statues, pink with cold, among the leafless quincunxes.

II.

A BREAKFAST ON PLACE VENDoME.

There were hardly more than a score of persons that morning in the Nabob's dining-room, a dining-room finished in carved oak, supplied only the day before from the establishment of some great house-furnisher, who furnished at the same time the four salons which could be seen, one beyond the other, through an open door: the hangings, the objects of art, the chandeliers, even the plate displayed on the sideboards, even the servants who served the breakfast. It was the perfect type of the establishment improvised, immediately upon alighting from the railway train, by a parvenu of colossal wealth, in great haste to enjoy himself. Although there was no sign of a woman's dress about the table, no bit of light and airy material to enliven the scene, it was by no means monotonous, thanks to the incongruity, the nondescript character of the guests, gathered together from all ranks of society, specimens of mankind culled from every race in France, in Europe, in the whole world, from top to bottom of the social scale.

First of all, the master of the house, a sort of giant--sunburned, swarthy, with his head between his shoulders--to whom his short nose, lost in the puffiness of the face, his woolly hair ma.s.sed like an Astrakhan cap over a low, headstrong forehead, his bristling eyebrows with eyes like a wild cat's in ambush, gave the ferocious aspect of a Kalmuk, of a savage on the frontiers of civilization, who lived by war and marauding. Luckily the lower part of the face, the thick, double lips which parted readily in a fascinating, good-humored smile, tempered with a sort of Saint Vincent de Paul expression that uncouth ugliness, that original countenance, so original that it forgot to be commonplace. But his inferior extraction betrayed itself in another direction by his voice, the voice of a Rhone boatman, hoa.r.s.e and indistinct, in which the southern accent became rather coa.r.s.e than harsh, and by two broad, short hands, with hairy fingers, square at the ends and with almost no nails, which, as they rested on the white table cloth, spoke of their past with embarra.s.sing eloquence. Opposite the host, on the other side of the table, at which he was a regular guest, was the Marquis de Monpavon, but a Monpavon who in no wise resembled the mottled spectre whom we saw in the last chapter; a man of superb physique, in the prime of life, with a long, majestic nose, the haughty bearing of a great n.o.bleman, displaying a vast breastplate of spotless linen, which cracked under the continuous efforts of the chest to bend forward, and swelled out every time with a noise like that made by a turkey gobbling, or a peac.o.c.k spreading his tail. His name Monpavon was well suited to him.[1]

[1] Paon_, peac.o.c.k--from Latin pavo, pavonis_.

Belonging to a great family, with wealthy kindred, the Duc de Mora's friends.h.i.+p had procured for him a receiver-generals.h.i.+p of the first cla.s.s. Unfortunately his health had not permitted him to retain that fine berth--well-informed persons said that his health had nothing to do with it--and he had been living in Paris for a year past, waiting until he should be cured, he said, to return to his post. The same persons a.s.serted that he would never find it again, and that, were it not for the patronage of certain exalted personages--Be that as it may, he was the important guest at the breakfast; one could see that by the way in which the servants waited upon him, by the way in which the Nabob consulted him, calling him "Monsieur le Marquis," as they do at the Comedie Francaise, less from humility than from pride because of the honor that was reflected on himself. Filled with disdain for his fellow-guests, Monsieur le Marquis talked little, but with a very lofty manner, as if he were obliged to stoop to those persons whom he honored with his conversation. From time to time he tossed at the Nabob, across the table, sentences that were enigmatical to everybody.

"I saw the duke yesterday. He talked a good deal about you in connection with that matter of--you know, What's-his-name, Thingumbob--Who is the man?"

"Really! He talked about me?" And the honest Nabob, swelling with pride, would look about him, nodding his head in a most laughable way, or would a.s.sume the meditative air of a pious woman when she hears the name of Our Lord.

"His Excellency would be pleased to have you go into the--ps--ps--ps--the thing."

"Did he tell you so?"

"Ask the governor--he heard it as well as I."

The person referred to as the governor, Paganetti by name, was an energetic, gesticulatory little man, tiresome to watch, his face a.s.sumed so many different expressions in a minute. He was manager of the _Caisse Territoriale_ of Corsica, a vast financial enterprise, and was present in that house for the first time, brought by Monpavon; he also occupied a place of honor. On the Nabob's other side was an old man, b.u.t.toned to the chin in a frock-coat without lapels and with a standing collar, like an oriental tunic, with a face marred by innumerable little gashes, and a white moustache trimmed in military fas.h.i.+on. It was Brahim Bey, the most gallant officer of the regency of Tunis, _aide-de-camp_ to the former bey, who made Jansoulet's fortune.

This warrior's glorious exploits were written in wrinkles, in the scars of debauchery, on his lower lip which hung down helplessly as if the spring were broken, and in his inflamed, red eyes, devoid of lashes.

His was one of the faces we see in the felon's dock in cases that are tried behind closed doors. The other guests had seated themselves pell-mell, as they arrived, or beside such acquaintances as they chanced to meet, for the house was open to everybody, and covers were laid for thirty every morning.

There was the manager of the theatre in which the Nabob was a sleeping partner,--Cardailhac, almost as renowned for his wit as for his failures, that wonderful carver, who would prepare one of his _bons mots_ as he detached the limbs of a partridge, and deposit it with a wing in the plate that was handed him. He was a sculptor rather than an _improvisateur_, and the new way of serving meats, having them carved beforehand in the Russian fas.h.i.+on, had been fatal to him by depriving him of all excuse for a preparatory silence. So it was generally said that he was failing. He was a thorough Parisian, a dandy to his fingers' ends, and as he himself boasted, "not full to bursting with superst.i.tion," which fact enabled him to give some very piquant details concerning the women in his theatrical company to Brahim Bey, who listened to him as one turns the pages of an obscene book, and to talk theology to his nearest neighbor, a young priest, cure of some little Southern village, a thin, gaunt fellow, with a complexion as dark as his ca.s.sock, with glowing cheek-bones, pointed nose, all the characteristics of an ambitious man, who said to Cardailhac, in a very loud voice, in a tone of condescension, of priestly authority:

"We are very well satisfied with Monsieur Guizot. He is doing well, very well--it's a victory for the Church."

Beside that pontiff with the starched band, old Schwalbach, the famous dealer in pictures, displayed his prophet's beard, yellow in spots like a dirty fleece, his three mouldy-looking waistcoats and all the slovenly, careless attire which people forgave him in the name of art, and because he had the good taste to have in his employ, at a time when the mania for galleries kept millions of money in circulation, the one man who was most expert in negotiating those vainglorious transactions.

Schwalbach did not talk, contenting himself with staring about through his enormous lens-shaped monocle, and smiling in his beard at the extraordinary juxtapositions to be observed at that table, which stood alone in all the world. For instance Monpavon had very near him--and you should have seen how the disdainful curve of his nose was accentuated at every glance in his direction--Garrigou the singer, a countryman of Jansoulet, distinguished as a ventriloquist, who sang _Figaro_ in the patois of the South and had not his like for imitating animals. A little farther on, Caba.s.su, another fellow-countryman, a short, thick-set man, with a bull-neck, a biceps worthy of Michel Angelo, who resembled equally a Ma.r.s.eillais hair-dresser and the Hercules at a country fair, a _ma.s.seur_, pedicurist, manicurist and something of a dentist, rested both elbows on the table with the a.s.surance of a quack whom one receives in the morning and who knows the petty weaknesses, the private miseries of the house in which he happens to be. M. Bompain completed that procession of subalterns, all cla.s.sified with reference to some one specialty. Bompain, the secretary, the steward, the man of confidence, through whose hands all the business of the establishment pa.s.sed; and a single glance at that stupidly solemn face, that vague expression, that Turkish fez poised awkwardly on that village schoolmaster's head, sufficed to convince one what manner of man he was to whom interests like the Nabob's had been entrusted.

Lastly, to fill the gaps between the figures we have sketched, Turks of every variety! Tunisians, Moors, Egyptians, Levantines; and, mingled with that exotic element, a whole multicolored Parisian Bohemia of decayed gentlemen, squinting tradesmen, penniless journalists, inventors of strange objects, men from the South landed in Paris without a sou--all the tempest-tossed vessels to be revictualled, all the flocks of birds whirling about in the darkness, that were attracted by that great fortune as by the light of a lighthouse. The Nabob received that motley crew at his table through kindness of heart, generosity, weakness, and entire lack of dignity, combined with absolute ignorance, and partly as a result of the same exile's melancholy, the same need of expansion that led him to receive, in his magnificent palace on the Bardo in Tunis, everybody who landed from France, from the petty tradesman and exporter of small wares, to the famous pianist on a tour and the consul-general.

Listening to those different voices, those foreign accents, incisive or stammering, glancing at those varying types of countenance, some uncivilized, pa.s.sionate, unrefined, others over-civilized, faded, of the type that haunts the boulevards, over-ripe as it were, and observing the same varieties in the corps of servants, where "flunkeys," taken the day before from some office, insolent fellows, with the heads of dentists or bath-attendants, bustled about among the motionless Ethiopians, who shone like black marble torch-holders,--it was impossible to say exactly where you were; at all events, you would never have believed that you were on Place Vendome, at the very heart and centre of the life of our modern Paris. On the table there was a similar outlandish collection of foreign dishes, sauces with saffron or anchovies, elaborately spiced Turkish delicacies, chickens with fried almonds; all this, taken in conjunction with the commonplace decorations of the room, the gilded wainscotings and the shrill jangle of the new bells, gave one the impression of a table-d'hote in some great hotel in Smyrna or Calcutta, or of the gorgeous saloon of a trans-Atlantic liner, the _Pereire_ or the _Sinai_.

It would seem that such a variety of guests--I had almost said of pa.s.sengers--would make the repast animated and noisy. Far from it. They all ate nervously, in silence, watching one another out of the corner of the eye; and even the most worldly, those who seemed most at ease, had in their eyes the wandering, distressed expression indicating a persistent thought, a feverish anxiety which caused them to speak without answering, to listen without understanding a word of what was said.

Suddenly the door of the dining-room was thrown open.

"Ah! there's Jenkins," exclaimed the Nabob, joyfully. "Hail, doctor, hail! How are you, my boy?"

A circular smile, a vigorous handshake for the host, and Jenkins took his seat opposite him, beside Monpavon and in front of a plate which a servant brought in hot haste, exactly as at a table-d'hote. Amid those preoccupied, feverish faces, that one presented a striking contrast with its good-humor, its expansive smile, and the loquacious, flattering affability which makes the Irish to a certain extent the Gascons of Great Britain. And what a robust appet.i.te! with what energy, what liberty of conscience, he managed his double row of white teeth, talking all the while.

"Well, Jansoulet, did you read it?"

"Read what, pray?"

"What! don't you know? Haven't you read what the _Messager_ said about you this morning?"

Beneath the thick tan on his cheeks the Nabob blushed like a child, and his eyes sparkled with delight as he replied:

"Do you mean it? The _Messager_ said something about me?"

"Two whole columns. How is it that Moessard didn't show it to you?"

"Oh!" said Moessard modestly, "it wasn't worth the trouble."

He was a journalist in a small way, fair-haired and spruce, a pretty fellow enough, but with a face marked by the faded look peculiar to waiters at all-night restaurants, actors and prost.i.tutes, made up of conventional grimaces and the sallow reflection of the gas. He was reputed to be the plighted lover of an exiled queen of very easy virtue. That rumor was whispered about wherever he went, and gave him an envied and most contemptible prominence in his circle.

Jansoulet insisted upon reading the article, being impatient to hear what was said of him. Unfortunately Jenkins had left his copy at the duke's.

"Let some one go at once and get me a _Messager_," said the Nabob to the servant behind his chair.

Moessard interposed:

"That isn't necessary; I must have the thing about me."

And with the free and easy manner of the tap-room habitue, of the reporter who scrawls his notes as he sits in front of his mug of beer, the journalist produced a pocketbook stuffed with memoranda, stamped papers, newspaper clippings, notes on glossy paper with crests--which he scattered over the table, pus.h.i.+ng his plate away, to look for the proof of his article.

"Here it is." He pa.s.sed it to Jansoulet; but Jenkins cried out:

"No, no, read it aloud."