The Parisians Part 59

CHAPTER XII.

Gustave recovered, but slowly. The physician p.r.o.nounced him out of all immediate danger, but said frankly to him, and somewhat more guardedly to his parents, "There is ample cause to beware." "Look you, my young friend," he added to Rameau, "mere brain-work seldom kills a man once accustomed to it like you; but heart-work, and stomach-work, and nerve-work, added to brain-work, may soon consign to the coffin a frame ten times more robust than yours. Write as much as you will--that is your vocation; but it is not your vocation to drink absinthe--to preside at orgies in the Maison Doree. Regulate yourself, and not after the fas.h.i.+on of the fabulous Don Juan. Marry--live soberly and quietly--and you may survive the grandchildren of viveurs. Go on as you have done, and before the year is out you are in Pere la Chaise."

Rameau listened languidly, but with a profound conviction that the physician thoroughly understood his case.

Lying helpless on his bed, he had no desire for orgies at the Maison Doree; with parched lips thirsty for innocent tisane of lime-blossoms, the thought of absinthe was as odious to him as the liquid fire of Phlegethon. If ever sinner became suddenly convinced that there was a good deal to be said in favour of a moral life, that sinner at the moment I speak of was Gustave Rameau: Certainly a moral life--'Domus et placens uxor',--was essential to the poet who, aspiring to immortal glory, was condemned to the ailments of a very perishable frame.

"Ah," he murmured plaintively to himself, "that girl Isaura can have no true sympathy with genius! It is no ordinary man that she will kill in me!"

And so murmuring he fell asleep. When he woke and found his head pillowed on his mother's breast, it was much as a sensitive, delicate man may wake after having drunk too much the night before. Repentant, mournful, maudlin, he began to weep, and in the course of his weeping he confided to his mother the secret of his heart.

Isaura had refused him--that refusal had made him desperate.

"Ah! with Isaura how changed would be his habits! how pure! how healthful!" His mother listened fondly, and did her best to comfort him and cheer his drooping spirits.

She told him of Isaura's messages of inquiry duly twice a day. Rameau, who knew more about women in general, and Isaura in particular, than his mother conjectured, shook his head mournfully. "She could not do less,"

he said. "Has no one offered to do more?"--he thought of Julie when he asked that--Madame Rameau hesitated.

The poor Parisians! it is the mode to preach against them; and before my book closes, I shall have to preach--no, not to preach, but to imply--plenty of faults to consider and amend. Meanwhile I try my best to take them, as the philosophy of life tells us to take other people, for what they are.

I do not think the domestic relations of the Parisian bourgeoisie are as bad as they are said to be in French novels. Madame Rameau is not an uncommon type of her cla.s.s. She had been when she first married singularly handsome. It was from her that Gustave inherited his beauty; and her husband was a very ordinary type of the French shopkeeper--very plain, by no means intellectual, but gay, good-humoured, devotedly attached to his wife, and with implicit trust in her conjugal virtue.

Never was trust better placed. There was not a happier nor a more faithful couple in the quartier in which they resided. Madame Rameau hesitated when her boy, thinking of Julie, asked if no one had done more than send to inquire after him as Isaura had done.

After that hesitating pause she said, "Yes--a young lady calling herself Mademoiselle Julie Caumartin wished to instal herself here as your nurse. When I said, 'But I am his mother--he needs no other nurses,' she would have retreated, and looked ashamed--poor thing! I don't blame her if she loved my son. But, my son, I say this,--if you love her, don't talk to me about that Mademoiselle Cicogna; and if you love Mademoiselle Cicogna, why, then your father will take care that the poor girl who loved you not knowing that you loved another is not left to the temptation of penury."

Rameau's pale lips withered into a phantom-like sneer! Julie! the resplendent Julie!--true, only a ballet-dancer, but whose equipage in the Bois had once been the envy of d.u.c.h.esses--Julie! who had sacrificed fortune for his sake--who, freed from him, could have millionaires again at her feet!--Julie! to be saved from penury, as a shopkeeper would save an erring nursemaid--Julie! the irrepressible Julie! who had written to him, the day before his illness, in a pen dipped, not in ink, but in blood from a vein she had opened in her arm:

"Traitor!--I have not seen thee for three days. Dost thou dare to love another? If so, I care not how thou attempt to conceal it--woe to her! Ingrat! woe to thee! Love is not love, unless, when betrayed by Love, it appeals to death. Answer me quick--quick.

JULIE."

Poor Gustave thought of that letter and groaned. Certainly his mother was right--he ought to get rid of Julie; but he did not clearly see how Julie was to be got rid of. He replied to Madame Rameau peevishly, "Don't trouble your head about Mademoiselle Caumartin; she is in no want of money. Of course, if I could hope for Isaura--but, alas! I dare not hope. Give me my tisane."

When the doctor called next day, he looked grave, and, drawing Madame Rameau into the next room, he said, "We are not getting on so well as I had hoped; the fever is gone, but there is much to apprehend from the debility left behind. His spirits are sadly depressed." Then added the doctor, pleasantly, and with that wonderful insight into our complex humanity in which physicians excel poets, and in which Parisian physicians are not excelled by any physicians in the world: "Can't you think of any bit of good news--that 'M. Thiers raves about your son's last poem! that 'it is a question among the Academicians between him and Jules Janin'--or that 'the beautiful d.u.c.h.esse de ------- has been placed in a lunatic asylum because she has gone mad for love of a certain young Red Republican whose name begins with R.'--can't you think of any bit of similar good news? If you can, it will be a tonic to the relaxed state of your dear boy's amour propre, compared to which all the drugs in the Pharmacopoeia are moons.h.i.+ne and water; and meanwhile be sure to remove him to your own house, and out of the reach of his giddy young friends, as soon as you possibly can."

When that great authority thus left his patient's case in the hands of the mother, she said, "The boy shall be saved."

CHAPTER XIII.

Isaura was seated beside the Venosta,--to whom, of late, she seemed to cling with greater fondness than ever,--working at some piece of embroidery--a labour from which she had been estranged for years; but now she had taken writing, reading, music, into pa.s.sionate disgust.

Isaura was thus seated, silently intent upon her work, and the Venosta in full talk, when the servant announced Madame Rameau.

The name startled both; the Venosta had never heard that the poet had a mother living, and immediately jumped to the conclusion that Madame Rameau must be a wife he had hitherto kept unrevealed. And when a woman, still very handsome, with a countenance grave and sad, entered the salon, the Venosta murmured, "The husband's perfidy reveals itself on a wife's face," and took out her handkerchief in preparation for sympathising tears.

"Mademoiselle," said the visitor, halting, with eyes fixed on Isaura.

"Pardon my intrusion-my son has the honour to be known to you. Every one who knows him must share in my sorrow--so young--so promising, and in such danger--my poor boy!" Madame Rameau stopped abruptly. Her tears forced their way--she turned aside to conceal them.

In her twofold condition of being--womanhood and genius--Isaura was too largely endowed with that quickness of sympathy which distinguishes woman from man, and genius from talent, not to be wondrously susceptible to pity.

Already she had wound her arm round the grieving mother--already drawn her to the seat from which she herself had risen--and bending over her had said some words--true, conventional enough in themselves,--but cooed forth in a voice the softest I ever expect to hear, save in dreams, on this side of the grave.

Madame Rameau swept her hand over her eyes, glanced round the room, and noticing the Venosta in dressing-robe and slippers, staring with those Italian eyes, in seeming so quietly innocent, in reality so searchingly shrewd, she whispered pleadingly, "May I speak to you a few minutes alone?" This was not a request that Isaura could refuse, though she was embarra.s.sed and troubled by the surmise of Madame Rameau's object in asking it; accordingly she led her visitor into the adjoining room, and making an apologetic sign to the Venosta, closed the door.

CHAPTER XIV.

When they were alone, Madame Rameau took Isaura's hand in both her own, and, gazing wistfully into her face, said, "No wonder you are so loved--yours is the beauty that sinks into the hearts and rests there.

I prize my boy more, now that I have seen you. But, oh, Mademoiselle!

pardon me--do not withdraw your hand--pardon the mother who comes from the sick-bed of her only son and asks if you will a.s.sist to save him! A word from you is life or death to him!"

"Nay, nay, do not speak thus, Madame; your son knows how much I value, how sincerely I return, his friends.h.i.+p; but--but," she paused a moment, and continued sadly and with tearful eyes--"I have no heart to give to him-to any one."

"I do not--I would not if I dared--ask what it would be violence to yourself to promise. I do not ask you to bid me return to my son and say, 'Hope and recover,' but let me take some healing message from your lips. If I understand your words rightly, I at least may say that you do not give to another the hopes you, deny to him?"

"So far you understand me rightly, Madame. It has been said, that romance-writers give away so much of their hearts to heroes or heroines of their own creation, that they leave nothing worth the giving to human beings like themselves. Perhaps it is so; yet, Madame," added Isaura, with a smile of exquisite sweetness in its melancholy, "I have heart enough left to feel for you."

Madame Rameau was touched. "Ah, Mademoiselle, I do not believe in the saying you have quoted. But I must not abuse your goodness by pressing further upon you subjects from which you shrink. Only one word more: you know that my husband and I are but quiet tradesfolks, not in the society, nor aspiring to it, to which my son's talents have raised himself; yet dare I ask that you will not close here the acquaintance that I have obtruded on you?--dare I ask, that I may, now and then, call on you--that now and then I may see you at my own home? Believe that I would not here ask anything which your own mother would disapprove if she overlooked disparities of station. Humble as our home is, slander never pa.s.sed its threshold."

"Ah, Madame, I and the Signora Venosta, whom in our Italian tongue I call mother, can but feel honoured and grateful whenever it pleases you to receive visits from us."

"It would be a base return for such gracious compliance with my request if I concealed from you the reason why I pray Heaven to bless you for that answer. The physician says that it may be long before my son is sufficiently convalescent to dispense with a mother's care, and resume his former life and occupation in the great world. It is everything for us if we can coax him into coming under our own roof-tree. This is difficult to do. It is natural for a young man launched into the world to like his own chez lui. Then what will happen to Gustave? He, lonely and heart-stricken, will ask friends, young as himself, but far stronger, to come and cheer him; or he will seek to distract his thoughts by the overwork of his brain; in either case he is doomed. But I have stronger motives yet to fix him a while at our hearth. This is just the moment, once lost never to be regained, when soothing companions.h.i.+p, gentle reproachless advice, can fix him lastingly in the habits and modes of life which will banish all fears of his future from the hearts of his parents. You at least honour him with friends.h.i.+p, with kindly interest--you at least would desire to wean him from all that a friend may disapprove or lament--a creature whom Providence meant to be good, and perhaps great. If I say to him, 'It will be long before you can go out and see your friends, but at my house your friends shall come and see you--among them Signora Venosta and Mademoiselle Cicogna will now and then drop in'--my victory is gained, and my son is saved."

"Madame," said Isaura, half sobbing, "what a blessing to have a mother like you! Love so n.o.ble enn.o.bles those who hear its voice. Tell your son how ardently I wish him to be well, and to fulfil more than the promise of his genius; tell him also this--how I envy him his mother."

CHAPTER XV.

It needs no length of words to inform thee, my intelligent reader, be thou man or woman--but more especially woman--of the consequences following each other, as wave follows wave in a tide, that resulted from the interview with which my last chapter closed. Gustave is removed to his parents' house; he remains for weeks confined within doors, or, on sunny days, takes an hour or so in his own carriage, drawn by the horse bought from Rochebriant, into by-roads remote from the fas.h.i.+onable world; Isaura visits his mother, liking, respecting, influenced by her more and more; in those visits she sits beside the sofa on which Rameau reclines. Gradually, gently--more and more by his mother's lips--is impressed on her the belief that it is in her power to save a human life, and to animate its career towards those goals which are never based wholly upon earth in the earnest eyes of genius, or perhaps in the yet more upward vision of pure-souled believing woman.

And Gustave himself, as he pa.s.ses through the slow stages of convalescence, seems so gratefully to ascribe to her every step in his progress--seems so gently softened in character--seems so refined from the old affectations, so enn.o.bled above the old cynicism--and, above all, so needing her presence, so sunless without it, that--well, need I finish the sentence?--the reader will complete what I leave unsaid.

Enough, that one day Isaura returned home from a visit at Madame Rameau's with the knowledge that her hand was pledged--her future life disposed of; and that, escaping from the Venosta, whom she so fondly, and in her hunger for a mother's love, called Madre, the girl shut herself up in her own room with locked doors.

Ah, poor child! ah, sweet-voiced Isaura! whose delicate image I feel myself too rude and too hard to transfer to this page in the purity of its outlines, and the blended softnesses of its hues--thou who, when saying things serious in the words men use, saidst them with a seriousness so charming, and with looks so feminine--thou, of whom no man I ever knew was quite worthy--ah, poor, simple, miserable girl, as I see thee now in the solitude of that white-curtained virginal room; hast thou, then, merged at last thy peculiar star into the cl.u.s.ter of all these commonplace girls whose lips have said "Ay," when their hearts said "No"?--thou, O brilliant Isaura! thou, O motherless child!

She had sunk into her chair--her own favourite chair, the covering of it had been embroidered by Madame de Grantmesnil, and bestowed on her as a birthday present last year--the year in which she had first learned what it is to love--the year in which she had first learned what it is to strive for fame. And somehow uniting, as many young people do, love and fame in dreams of the future, that silken seat had been to her as the Tripod of Delphi was to the Pythian: she had taken to it, as it were intuitively, in all those hours, whether of joy or sorrow, when youth seeks to prophesy, and does but dream.

There she sat now, in a sort of stupor--a sort of dreary bewilderment--the illusion of the Pythian gone--desire of dream and of prophecy alike extinct--pressing her hands together, and muttering to herself, "What has happened?--what have I done?"

Three hours later you would not have recognised the same face that you see now. For then the bravery, the honour, the loyalty of the girl's nature had a.s.serted their command. Her promise had been given to one man--it could not be recalled. Thought itself of any other man must be banished. On her hearth lay ashes and tinder--the last remains of every treasured note from Graham Vane; of the h.o.a.rded newspaper extracts that contained his name; of the dry treatise he had published, and which had made the lovely romance-writer first desire "to know something about politics." Ay, if the treatise had been upon fox-hunting, she would have desired "to know something about" that! Above all, yet distinguishable from the rest--as the sparks still upon stem and leaf here and there faintly glowed and twinkled--the withered flowers which recorded that happy hour in the arbour, and the walks of the forsaken garden--the hour in which she had so blissfully pledged herself to renounce that career in art wherein fame would have been secured, but which would not have united Fame with Love--in dreams evermore over now.