How Women Love Part 13

"A bullet through the head. The night of day before yesterday. In the dressing-room beside the chamber where his wife was lying."

A pause ensued. Then Else, raising her tearful eyes to the doctor, said:

"You see, you see, this marriage was his destruction. He would be alive and happy to-day, if he had had me at his side."

"Or me," said Thiel.

Else shook her head. "No, no. He wanted this last romance too late."

"Or despaired too soon," replied Thiel, gazing thoughtfully at the bronze statuette of Asclepius, which stood on the writing-desk before him.

HOW WOMEN LOVE.

I.

ONE WAY.

It was the first of November, 1878. The Paris Exposition was over, and Herr Rudolph Weltli was preparing to return to his home, Switzerland, after spending a beautiful sunny fortnight on the Seine. He had made the great bazaar on the Champ de Mars the pretext for his journey; but in reality the study of the exhibition, many as were the interesting objects it could offer to him, the engineer, was a somewhat minor matter, and he devoted his stay in Paris princ.i.p.ally to walks through the streets, excursions to the environs, wanderings through the museums, in short, endless pilgrimages to all the scenes where, more than a quarter of a century before, the drama of his student's life in Paris had been enacted for three years, and whose image was interwoven with the most beloved memories of his youth.

A quarter of a century! Almost a human life-time. And, during this long period, he had not seen Paris again. When he left it he intended to return very soon and very often. But, as usually happens, life morosely opposed this pleasant plan. He was bound by the fetters of duty, and only imagination could allow itself to wander into the alluring blue distance.

Whoever makes his first visit to Rome throws a piece of money into the Fontana Trevi to be sure that he will see the eternal city again. We need not bind ourselves to Paris by such little superst.i.tious practices. Its mysterious spell obtains the pledge without any intervention, and lures and draws the absent one so that he cannot rest until he returns. But why attribute this spell to Paris alone? Every place where we have been young, dreamed, loved, and suffered, possesses it. We feel the affection for it which the ploughman has for the field to which he entrusted his seed. We have the desire to see whether we shall still find traces of our wanderings, and are joyously surprised when we discover that wherever we sowed our youth, the best part of ourselves, invisible to others, but tangible to us, a rich harvest of memories has sprung up.

Every year Rudolf planned the journey to Paris, every year he was compelled to defer it to the next, and he was already beginning to accustom himself to a sorrowful resignation, when the World's Fair of 1878 gave the external impulse for the realization of his long-cherished dream.

The holiday weeks on which his mind had been fixed so many years had pa.s.sed as swiftly as a dream, and the daily yoke of professional work must again be put on. The last day of his stay in Paris fell on the anniversary of All Souls. Rudolf, with the great majority of Parisians, used it to visit the cemeteries. He spent the first hours of the afternoon in Pere la Chaise, where, beside the old, well-known graves, he inspected with great interest the monuments erected since his residence in Paris--of Musset, Rossini, Michelet, Regnault, Countess d'Agoult and other celebrities. From Pere la Chaise he drove to the cemetery of Montmartre, where he merely wished to place a wreath of immortelles on Heine's grave. But once there, he could not go away without looking about the place a little.

He strolled slowly along the streets of graves, in which, amid commonplace stone slabs and insignificant iron crosses, stately monuments rose at brief intervals, though they rarely bore inscribed on their fronts a name of sufficient distinction to afford a justification for attracting the attention of the wanderer; while as a rule they were only memorials of the vanity extending beyond the grave of the poor obscure mortal whose ashes they sheltered.

The graves were adorned in various ways for the great festival of the dead. The narrow walks around them were strewn with fresh yellow gravel and river sand; pots of blossoming plants stood on the slabs and at the foot of the crosses; on the arms of the latter hung garlands of evergreen and yellow or red immortelles, but also the ugly wreaths of painted plaster and gla.s.s beads with affected inscriptions, which dishonour Parisian industry. Beside these mounds, where the work of a loving hand was apparent, and whose dead were evidently united by filaments of love to a tender human being still breathing in the suns.h.i.+ne, forsaken and neglected ones often appeared, on which only a few rain-soaked, decaying leaves of paper wreaths were mouldering, where moss and weeds grew rankly, and in which lay dead for whom no one grieved, and who were now remembered by none in the world of the living. But how speedily one is forgotten in Paris. How soon the ocean of the world's capital swallows up, not only a human being, but his family, all his friends and acquaintances, and even his memory! A chill ran down Rudolf's spine as he pondered over the melancholy thought of living and dying in Paris as a stranger.

As he drifted aimlessly on with the flowing human stream, he suddenly found himself in a narrow side-path before a monument surrounded by a specially dense throng. Several rows of people, princ.i.p.ally workmen and their wives, were standing around it, those behind thrusting their heads over the shoulders of the front ranks, the new arrivals pressing impatiently upon those who had taken the place before them and now, as though spell-bound by an absorbing spectacle, stood motionless, making no sign of moving on. Yet the whole crowded group was pervaded by a calmness, a solemn earnestness, not often found among the wors.h.i.+ppers in church. Rudolf, whose curiosity was awakened, forced his way through the living wall to the front rank, and suddenly stood--before the monument of Baudin, the republican representative of the people who, on the 3d of December, 1851, was shot down in the streets of Paris by drunken soldiers, as, girdled with the tri-coloured sash, which made him recognizable as a member of the legislature, he protested from the top of a barricade against Bonaparte's _coup d'etat_. A familiar anecdote is a.s.sociated with the death of this hero. As, surrounded by a few persons of similar views, he was preparing to ascend the barricade, some workmen pa.s.sing by shouted derisively: "There goes a twenty-five franc man!" This was the insult with which the proletarians, who were systematically incited against the National a.s.sembly, designated the representatives of the people, alluding to their daily pay. Baudin calmly answered: "You will see presently how one can die for twenty-five francs!" and a moment after, fell under the bullets of the soldiery.

At the sight of the monument Rudolf felt the emotion which it awakens in every spectator. On a rectangular stone pedestal lies the life-size bronze figure of Baudin, draped to the breast in a cloak, the left hand hanging in the relaxation of death, while the right convulsively clutches a symbolical table of laws, with the inscription "La Loi,"

through which pa.s.ses a treacherous rent. Baudin's face is that of a middle-aged man, with commonplace features, smooth-shaven lips and chin, and the regulation whiskers. But this ordinary countenance becomes grand and heroic by a horrible hole in the forehead, from which blood and brains have gushed. Oh, how such a hole in the brow, pierced by a bullet sent to murder liberty, transfigures a man's visage! A supernatural radiance appears to stream from this tragical opening, into which we cannot gaze without having our eyes overflow with tears.

Rudolf was more touched by the unspeakably pathetic monument than any of the others who reverently surrounded it; for he remembered how narrowly he, too, had escaped a fate akin to that of the martyr before whose statue he had unexpectedly wandered. As he followed the path toward the exit from the cemetery, he again saw himself on the terrible night of December 3d and 4th, 1851, lying weltering in his blood, with failing consciousness, upon the wet pavement of the Rue Montmartre, a bullet in his right hip. The memory of that moment was so vivid, that he fancied he again felt the pain in his hip and began to limp, as he had done for months after the wound. In the broad avenue leading to the main entrance new visions rose before him, made still more intense by the recollections of the coup d'etat evoked by the sight of Baudin's grave. At the right he saw the monument of Gottfried Cavaignac in the midst of the great common grave, into which all the nameless victims of the street fights were thrown in a horrible medley. This blood-stained bit of earth surrounds a circular border of flowers, in whose centre, above a low mound covered with stone slabs, rises a plain iron cross.

Rudolf entered the sinister circle and paused beside it. Very peculiar emotions stole over him. It seemed as though he were standing within a cabalistic line which divided him from the world and life. The air within the magic circle appeared more chill than without. He imagined he felt a stir and tremor in the ground beneath his feet as if the dead below were moving, and sc.r.a.ping with their bony fingers on the cover of their narrow abode.

"I should now be lying there with the rest, if the bullet had taken a little different course!" he thought, drawing a long breath of relief.

He glanced around him. At the foot of the cross was a heap of wreaths and bouquets, and several women were kneeling on the stone slabs, murmuring silent prayers. "Are there still, after the lapse of twenty-seven years, mourners who remember the dead? No one would have come for my sake, if they had thrown me there too."

He was standing beside one of the kneeling women, at whom he gazed with deep sympathy. She was dressed in black, a long black veil hung from her head, and she seemed wholly absorbed in her fervour. Feeling a steady gaze fixed upon her, she involuntarily looked up. Their eyes met. She sank back with a stifled cry which seemed to issue from a throat suddenly compressed. Involuntarily stretching her arms toward him, while her eyes half closed and consciousness seemed failing, her blanching lips whispered:

"Rudolf! Rudolf!"

He had retreated a step, astonished and bewildered, at the first cry, now he caught the fainting woman in his arms, drew her to his breast, and murmured in a hollow tone:

"Pauline! Is it possible! Pauline!"

She tottered to her feet, her knees trembled, she laid both hands on his shoulders and gazing steadily at him with head thrown back and dilated eyes, said:

"Is it really you! Is it you, Rudolf. You are alive!"

"So you believed me dead?" he asked in a trembling voice, bowing his head.

"I believed that you were down there," she answered, pointing to the stone slabs at their feet.

"And you came to-day----"

"To you, Rudolf; to-day as I have come every year for twenty-seven years. See, Rudolf, that is the wreath I laid there for you. And,"

she added in a very low tone, after a brief pause, "when I suddenly saw you before me, I thought you had risen from this grave to see me once more."

She again remained silent a short time, during which her glances timorously caressed him. "And do you know what instantly convinced me that I beheld no ghost? Because you no longer look as you did at the time when you would have been laid here, if you had really died. The dead do not change. But you, my poor Rudolf, have certainly altered."

"Do you find me very much changed?"

Pauline gazed at him a long time. Her eyes wandered slowly over his figure, his features, his whole appearance, then, as if speaking to herself, she said:

"Not really, Rudolf, not much, after all."

She was probably the only person in the world who could say it; the only one who could see in his countenance the face of the youth of twenty-three, as a practised eye detects, under a palimpsest, the effaced, almost invisible characters of the original writing. For her, his former wealth of brown locks still waved in the place of the closely cut, thin grey hair; she saw the bushy moustache fine and curled, the wrinkled skin ruddy and smooth, the somewhat corpulent figure slender and pliant; she transferred to the man of fifty before her, feature by feature, the image which lived in her faithful memory, transfigured and handsomer than the reality had ever been. And Rudolf did the same. His imagination effaced the little wrinkles around her eyes and mouth, restored to those dim black eyes the sparkle and mirthfulness of youth, developed, from the somewhat fleshy outlines, the graceful forms of the cheeks, chin, neck, bust, which he had once beheld and loved, recognized the raven braids which alone had lost none of their beauty, and saw in the faded woman the blooming girl, surrounded by all the magic of her nineteen years, whom he had left twenty-seven years ago.

Her first excitement had calmed a little during the silent observation which had occupied several minutes; her voice had regained its natural tone, and only trembled a little as she asked:

"But now, for Heaven's sake, tell me how all this has happened? Our concierge saw you when you fell in the street and were carried away."

"He saw correctly."

"Then you were not killed?"

"Merely wounded."

"Well, and----?"

"You know how I left you. I was excited, bareheaded, mad. When I came out of the Pa.s.sage Saumon into the Rue Montmartre, I found the street deserted, but I heard the roll of drums in the distance, soldiers seemed to be pressing forward from the boulevard. Several persons ran past, trying to escape into the side streets. Before I could clearly understand what was going on around me, a volley of musketry was fired, I felt a violent blow and fell. A few paces from me another man fell, who did not move again. A window in the Pa.s.sage Saumon opened and instantly closed.

"The soldiers came up, carrying lanterns and torches. They found the other man first, and threw the light into his face. Several voices rose and I saw bayonets thrust into his body. Then they came to me.

Bayonets were already flas.h.i.+ng above me, I instinctively thrust out my hands in defense, an officer cried: 'Halt!' approached me, and asked who I was. I said as quickly as my mortal fright would permit, that I was a Swiss, a pupil of the _ecole Centrale_, lived in the Pa.s.sage Saumon, had accidentally entered the street and been wounded by a shot.

The officer looked at my hands, they were not blackened by powder. The light of the lanterns was cast around--I lay in my own blood, but no weapon was near. 'Where is your hat?' asked the officer. 'I wore none when I left home.' 'That is suspicious,' he said, to my terror, but after a moment's reflection, which to me seemed an eternity, gave orders that I should be placed in a vegetable dealer's cart, which had been abandoned by the owner, and taken to a hospital. Four soldiers flung me roughly into the vehicle and dragged me to the Hotel Dieu."

He paused in his narrative.

Pauline looked at him and her eyes filled with tears.