The Nabob Volume Ii Part 15

Caba.s.su, seeing the turn that the discussion was taking, had prudently disappeared in an adjoining room, the five books of _Revolte_ in a pile under his arm.

"Stay," said the Nabob to his wife, "it is clear that you don't understand the terrible plight I am in. Listen."

Heedless of the maids and negresses, with the Oriental's sovereign indifference for the servant cla.s.s, he began to draw the picture of his great embarra.s.sment, his property in Tunis seized, his credit in Paris lost, his whole life hanging in suspense on the decision of the Chamber, Hemerlingue's influence with the man who was to make the report, and the absolute necessity of sacrificing all self-love to such momentous interests. He talked with great warmth, eager to persuade her, to take her with him. But she replied, simply: "I will not go," as if it were a matter of an expedition of no possible consequence, so long that it was likely to tire her.

"Come, come, it isn't possible that you would say such a thing," he continued, quivering with excitement. "Remember that my fortune is at stake, the future of your children, the very name you bear. Everything is staked on this one concession, which you cannot refuse to make."

He might have talked thus for hours, he would still have been met by the same determined, invincible obstinacy. A Mademoiselle Afchin could not call upon a slave.

"I tell you, madame," he exclaimed, savagely, "that slave is worth more than you. By her shrewdness she has doubled her husband's wealth, while you on the contrary--"

For the first time in the twelve years of their married life Jansoulet dared to oppose his wife's will. Was he ashamed of that crime of _lese-majeste_ or did he realize that such a declaration might dig an impa.s.sable abyss between them? At all events he changed his tone at once and knelt beside the low bed, with the affectionate, smiling tone one employs to make children listen to reason.

"My dear little Marthe, I implore you--get up and dress yourself. It's for your own interest that I ask you to do it, for your luxury, for your comfort. What will become of you if, by a mere whim, by naughty wilfulness, we are to be reduced to poverty?"

The word "poverty" conveyed absolutely no meaning to the Levantine. You could speak of it before her as you speak of death before small children. It failed to move her, as she had no idea what it was. At all events she was obstinately determined to remain in bed in her _djebba_, for, to emphasize her decision, she lighted a fresh cigarette from the one she had just finished, and while the Nabob enveloped his "darling little wife" in apologies and prayers and supplications, promising her a diadem of pearls a hundred times more beautiful than hers if she would come, she watched the heady smoke float up to the painted ceiling and wrapped herself in it as in imperturbable tranquillity. Finally, in face of that persistent refusal, that silence, that forehead upon which he detected the barrier of unconquerable obstinacy, Jansoulet gave rein to his wrath and drew himself up to his full height.

"Very good," said he, "I say you shall."

He turned to the negresses:

"Dress your mistress, at once."

And the boor that he really was, the son of the Southern junk-dealer coming to the surface in that crisis, which moved him to the depths of his being, he threw back the bedclothes with a brutal, contemptuous gesture, tossing the innumerable gewgaws they held to the floor, and forcing the half-naked Levantine to jump to her feet with a prompt.i.tude most remarkable in that bulky personage. She roared under the outrage, gathered the folds of her tunic about her misshapen bust, fixed her little cap crosswise over her falling hair, and began to blackguard her husband.

"Never, you hear me, never--you shall never drag me to that--"

Filth poured from her heavy lips as from the mouth of a drain. Jansoulet might well have believed that he was in one of the frightful dens along the water front in Ma.r.s.eille, listening to a quarrel between a prost.i.tute and a _nervi_, or looking on at some open-air fracas between Genoese, Maltese and Provencal women gleaning on the quay around bags of grain in process of unloading, and reviling each other at full speed in eddies of golden dust. She was the typical seaport Levantine, the spoiled, neglected child, who from her terrace, or from her gondola, in the evening, has heard sailors cursing one another in all the languages of the Latin seas, and has remembered everything. The wretched man stared at her, horrified and dismayed at what she compelled him to hear, at her grotesque figure, foaming at the mouth and sputtering:

"No, I won't go--no, I won't go!"

And she was the mother of his children, an Afchin!

Suddenly, at the thought that his fate was in that woman's hands, that she had only to put on a dress to save him, and that time was flying, that it would soon be too late, a gust of crime rushed to his brain, distorted all his features. He rushed at her, opening and closing his hands with such a terrible expression that the daughter of the Afchins, in deadly terror, darted toward the door through which the _ma.s.seur_ had just left the room, calling:

"Aristide!"

That cry, that voice, his wife's evident intimacy with his lieutenant--Jansoulet stopped, his frantic anger pa.s.sed away, and he rushed from the room, throwing the doors open, more eager to escape the disaster and the horror whose presence he felt in his own house, than to go elsewhere to seek the help that had been promised him.

A quarter of an hour later he made his appearance at Hemerlingue's, making a despairing gesture in the banker's direction as he entered, and approached the baroness, stammering the ready-made phrase that he had heard repeated so often on the evening of his own ball: "His wife was very ill--in despair that she could not--" She did not give him time to finish, but rose slowly, like a long, slender snake in the crosswise folds of her clinging skirt, and said, in her schoolgirl accent, without looking at him: "Oh! _I_ knew--_I_ knew;" then moved away and paid no further heed to him. He tried to accost Hemerlingue, but that gentleman seemed deeply absorbed in his conversation with Maurice Trott. Thereupon he went and sat down beside Madame Jenkins, whose isolation was no less marked than his. But, while he talked with the poor woman, who was as languid as he himself was preoccupied, he watched the baroness do the honors of that salon, so much more comfortable than his own great gilded halls.

The guests were taking their leave. Madame Hemerlingue escorted some of the ladies to the door, bent her head beneath the benediction of the Armenian bishop, bowed smilingly to the young dandies with canes, bestowed upon every one the proper variety of salutation, with perfect self-possession; and the poor devil could not avoid a mental comparison between that Oriental slave become such a thorough Parisian, of such marked distinction in the most refined society on earth, and that other woman, the European enervated by the Orient, brutalized by Turkish tobacco and bloated by a life of sloth. His ambition, his pride as a husband were disappointed, humiliated in that union of which he now saw the peril and the emptiness, the last cruel blow of destiny which deprived him even of the refuge of domestic happiness against all his public misfortunes.

Gradually the salons became empty. The Levantines disappeared one after another, each leaving an immense void in her place. Madame Jenkins had gone, and only two or three women, strangers to Jansoulet, remained, among whom the mistress of the house seemed to be seeking refuge from him. But Hemerlingue was at liberty, and the Nabob joined him just as he was sidling furtively away in the direction of his offices, which were on the same floor opposite the state apartments. Jansoulet went out with him, forgetting in his confusion to salute the baroness; and when they were safely out on the landing, arranged as a reception-room, the corpulent Hemerlingue, who had been very cold and reserved so long as he felt his wife's eye upon him, a.s.sumed a somewhat more open expression.

"It's a great pity," he said in a low tone, as if he were afraid of being overheard, "that Madame Jansoulet would not come."

Jansoulet replied with a gesture of despair and savage helplessness.

"Too bad--too bad!" said the other, blowing his nose and feeling in his pocket for his key.

"Look here, old fellow," said the Nabob, taking his arm, "because our wives don't hit it off together, is no reason--That doesn't prevent our remaining friends. What a nice little chat we had the other day, eh?"

"To be sure," said the baron, withdrawing his hand to unlock the door, which opened noiselessly, disclosing the lofty private office with its one lamp burning in front of the capacious, empty armchair.

"Ya didon, Mouci,"[5] said the poor Nabob, trying to jest, and resorting to the _sabir_ patois to remind his old chum of all the pleasant reminiscences they had overhauled the day before. "Our visit to Le Merquier still holds. The picture we were going to offer him, you know.

What day shall we go?"

FOOTNOTES:

[5] Ah! I say, Monsieur.

"Ah! yes, Le Merquier. To be sure. Well, very soon. I will write you."

"Sure? You know it's very urgent."

"Yes, yes, I'll write you. Adieu."

And the fat man closed his door hastily as if he feared that his wife might appear.

Two days later the Nabob received a note from Hemerlingue, almost undecipherable with its little fly-tracks, complicated by abbreviations more or less commercial, behind which the ex-sutler concealed his absolute lack of orthography:

"MON CH/ANC/CAM/--Je ne puis decid/t'accom/ chez Le Merq/. Trop d'aff/en ce mom/. D'aill/v/ ser/mieux seuls pour caus/. Vas-y carrem/. On t'att/.

R/Ca.s.sette, tous les mat/de 8 a 10.

"A toi cor/

"HEM/."[6]

FOOTNOTES:

[6] "MY DEAR OLD COMRADE,--I cannot see my way to accompanying you to see Le Merquier. Too busy just now. Indeed, you will do better to talk with him alone. Go there openly. You are expected. Rue Ca.s.sette, every morning, 8 to 10.

"Yours cordially,

"HEMERLINGUE."

Below, by way of postscript, in a hand equally fine, but much clearer, was written very legibly:

"A religious picture, if possible."

What was he to think of that letter? Was it dictated by real friendliness or polite dissimulation? At all events, further hesitation was out of the question. The time was very short. So Jansoulet made a brave effort, for Le Merquier frightened him sadly, and went to his office one morning.

This strange Paris of ours, in its population and its varied aspects, seems like a map of the whole world. We find in the Marais narrow streets with old, carved, vermiculated doors, with overhanging gables, with balconies _en moucharabies_, which make one think of old Heidelberg. Faubourg Saint-Honore where it is broadest, near the Russian church with its white minarets and golden b.a.l.l.s, recalls a bit of Moscow. On Montmartre there is a picturesque, crowded spot that is pure Algiers. Low, clean little houses, with their copper-plates on the doors, and their private gardens, stand in line along typical English streets between Neuilly and the Champs-elysees; while the whole circuit of the apse of Saint-Sulpice, Rue Ferou, Rue Ca.s.sette, lying placidly in the shadow of the great towers, roughly paved, with knockers on the front doors, seems to have been transplanted from some pious provincial city,--Tours or Orleans for instance, in the neighborhood of the cathedral and the bishop's palace, where tall trees tower above the walls and sway to the music of the bells and the responses.