CHAPTER X. GISELLE’S CONSOLATION
The arrival of the expected Enguerrand hindered Giselle from pleading Fred’s cause as soon as she could have wished. Her life for twenty-four hours was in great danger, and when the crisis was past, which M. de Talbrun treated very indifferently, as a matter of course, her first cry was “My baby!” uttered in a tone of tender eagerness such as had never been heard from her lips before.
The nurse brought him. He lay asleep swathed in his swaddling clothes like a mummy in its wrappings, a motionless, mysterious being, but he seemed to his mother beautiful—more beautiful than anything she had seen in those vague visions of happiness she had indulged in at the convent, which were never to be realized. She kissed his little purple face, his closed eyelids, his puckered mouth, with a sort of respectful awe. She was forbidden to fatigue herself. The wet-nurse, who had been brought from Picardy, drew near with her peasant cap trimmed with long blue streamers; her big, experienced hands took the baby from his mother, she turned him over on her lap, she patted him, she laughed at him. And the mother-happiness that had lighted up Giselle’s pale face died away.
“What right,” she thought, “has that woman to my child?” She envied the horrid creature, coarse and stout, with her tanned face, her bovine features, her shapeless figure, who seemed as if Nature had predestined her to give milk and nothing more. Giselle would so gladly have been in her place! Why wouldn’t they permit her to nurse her baby?
M. de Talbrun said in answer to this question:
“It is never done among people in our position. You have no idea, of all it would entail on you—what slavery, what fatigue! And most probably you would not have had milk enough.”
“Oh! who can tell? I am his mother! And when this woman goes he will have to have English nurses, and when he is older he will have to go to school. When shall I have him to myself?”
And she began to cry.
“Come, come!” said M. de Talbrun, much astonished, “all this fuss about that frightful little monkey!”
Giselle looked at him almost as much astonished as he had been at her. Love, with its jealousy, its transports, its anguish, its delights had for the first time come to her—the love that she could not feel for her husband awoke in her for her son. She was ennobled—she was transfigured by a sense of her maternity; it did for her what marriage does for some women—it seemed as if a sudden radiance surrounded her.
When she raised her infant in her arms, to show him to those who came to see her, she always seemed like a most chaste and touching representation of the Virgin Mother. She would say, as she exhibited him: “Is he not superb?” Every one said: “Yes, indeed!” out of politeness, but, on leaving the mother’s presence, would generally remark: “He is Monsieur de Talbrun in baby-clothes: the likeness is perfectly horrible!”
The only visitor who made no secret of this impression was Jacqueline, who came to see her cousin as soon as she was permitted—that is, as soon as her friend was able to sit up and be prettily dressed, as became the mother of such a little gentleman as the heir of all the Talbruns. When Jacqueline saw the little creature half-smothered in the lace that trimmed his pillows, she burst out laughing, though it was in the presence of his mother.
“Oh, mon Dieu!” she cried, “how ugly! I never should have supposed we could have been as ugly as that! Why, his face is all the colors of the rainbow; who would have imagined it? And he crumples up his little face like those things in gutta-percha. My poor Giselle, how can you bear to show him! I never, never could covet a baby!”
Giselle, in consternation, asked herself whether this strange girl, who did not care for children, could be a proper wife for Fred; but her habitual indulgence came to her aid, and she thought:
“She is but a child herself, she does not know what she is saying,” and profiting by her first tete-a-tete with Jacqueline’s stepmother, she spoke as she had promised to Madame de Nailles.
“A matchmaker already!” said the Baroness, with a smile. “And so soon after you have found out what it costs to be a mother! How good of you, my dear Giselle! So you support Fred as a candidate? But I can’t say I think he has much chance; Monsieur de Nailles has his own ideas.”
She spoke as if she really thought that M. de Nailles could have any ideas but her own. When the adroit Clotilde was at a loss, she was likely to evoke this chimerical notion of her husband’s having an opinion of his own.
“Oh! Madame, you can do anything you like with him!”
The clever woman sighed:
“So you fancy that when people have been long married a wife retains as much influence over her husband as you have kept over Monsieur de Talbrun? You will learn to know better, my dear.”
“But I have no influence,” murmured Giselle, who knew herself to be her husband’s slave.
“Oh! I know better. You are making believe!”
“Well, but we were not talking about me, but—”
“Oh! yes. I understood. I will think about it. I will try to bring over Monsieur de Nailles.”
She was not at all disposed to drop the meat for the sake of the shadow, but she was not sure of M. de Cymier, notwithstanding all that Madame de Villegry was at pains to tell her about his serious intentions. On the other hand, she would have been far from willing to break with a man so brilliant, who made himself so agreeable at her Tuesday receptions.
“Meantime, it would be well if you, dear, were to try to find out what Jacqueline thinks. You may not find it very easy.”
“Will you authorize me to tell her how well he loves her? Oh, then, I am quite satisfied!” cried Giselle.
But she was under a mistake. Jacqueline, as soon as she began to speak to her of Fred’s suit, stopped her:
“Poor fellow! Why can’t he amuse himself for some time longer and let me do the same? Men seem to me so strange! Now, Fred is one who, just because he is good and serious by nature, fancies that everybody else should be the same; he wishes me to be tethered in the flowery meads of Lizerolles, and browse where he would place me. Such a life would be an end of everything—an end to my life, and I should not like it at all. I should prefer to grow old in Paris, or some other capital, if my husband happened to be engaged in diplomacy. Even supposing I marry—which I do not think an absolute necessity, unless I can not get rid otherwise of an inconvenient chaperon—and to do my stepmother justice, she knows well enough that I will not submit to too much of her dictation!”
“Jacqueline, they say you see too much of the Odinskas.”
“There! that’s another fault you find in me. I go there because Madame Strahlberg is so kind as to give me some singing-lessons. If you only knew how much progress I am making, thanks to her. Music is a thousand times more interesting, I can tell you, than all that you can do as mistress of a household. You don’t think so? Oh! I know Enguerrand’s first tooth, his first steps, his first gleams of intelligence, and all that. Such things are not in my line, you know. Of course I think your boy very funny, very cunning, very—anything you like to fancy him, but forgive me if I am glad he does not belong to me. There, don’t you see now that marriage is not my vocation, so please give up speaking to me about matrimony.”
“As you will,” said Giselle, sadly, “but you will give great pain to a good man whose heart is wholly yours.”
“I did not ask for his heart. Such gifts are exasperating. One does not know what to do with them. Can’t he—poor Fred—love me as I love him, and leave me my liberty?”
“Your liberty!” exclaimed Giselle; “liberty to ruin your life, that’s what it will be.”
“Really, one would suppose there was only one kind of existence in your eyes—this life of your own, Giselle. To leave one cage to be shut up in another—that is the fate of many birds, I know, but there are others who like to use their wings to soar into the air. I like that expression. Come, little mother, tell me right out, plainly, that your lot is the only one in this world that ought to be envied by a woman.”
Giselle answered with a strange smile:
“You seem astonished that I adore my baby; but since he came great things seem to have been revealed to me. When I hold him to my breast I seem to understand, as I never did before, duty and marriage, family ties and sorrows, life itself, in short, its griefs and joys. You can not understand that now, but you will some day. You, too, will gaze upon the horizon as I do. I am ready to suffer; I am ready for self-sacrifice. I know now whither my life leads me. I am led, as it were, by this little being, who seemed to me at first only a doll, for whom I was embroidering caps and dresses. You ask whether I am satisfied with my lot in life. Yes, I am, thanks to this guide, this guardian angel, thanks to my precious Enguerrand.”
Jacqueline listened, stupefied, to this unexpected outburst, so unlike her cousin’s usual language; but the charm was broken by its ending with the tremendously long name of Enguerrand, which always made her laugh, it was in such perfect harmony with the feudal pretensions of the Monredons and the Talbruns.
“How solemn and eloquent and obscure you are, my dear,” she answered. “You speak like a sibyl. But one thing I see, and that is that you are not so perfectly happy as you would have us believe, seeing that you feel the need of consolations. Then, why do you wish me to follow your example?”
“Fred is not Monsieur de Talbrun,” said the young wife, for the moment forgetting herself.
“Do you mean to say—”
“I meant nothing, except that if you married Fred you would have had the advantage of first knowing him.”
“Ah! that’s your fixed idea. But I am getting to know Monsieur de Cymier pretty well.”
“You have betrayed yourself,” cried Giselle, with indignation. “Monsieur de Cymier!”
“Monsieur de Cymier is coming to our house on Saturday evening, and I must get up a Spanish song that Madame Strahlberg has taught me, to charm his ears and those of other people. Oh! I can do it very well. Won’t you come and hear me play the castanets, if Monsieur Enguerrand can spare you? There is a young Polish pianist who is to play our accompaniment. Ah, there is nothing like a Polish pianist to play Chopin! He is charming, poor young man! an exile, and in poverty; but he is cared for by those ladies, who take him everywhere. That is the sort of life I should like—the life of Madame Strahlberg—to be a young widow, free to do what I pleased.”
“She may be a widow—but some say she is divorced.”
“Oh! is it you who repeat such naughty scandals, Giselle? Where shall charity take refuge in this world if not in your heart? I am going—your seriousness may be catching. Kiss me before I go.”
“No,” said Madame de Talbrun, turning her head away.
After this she asked herself whether she ought not to discourage Fred. She could not resolve on doing so, yet she could not tell him what was false; but by eluding the truth with that ability which kind-hearted women can always show when they try to avoid inflicting pain, she succeeded in leaving the young man hope enough to stimulate his ambition.
CHAPTER XI. FRED ASKS A QUESTION
Time, whatever may be said of it by the calendars, is not to be measured by days, weeks, and months in all cases; expectation, hope, happiness and grief have very different ways of counting hours, and we know from our own experience that some are as short as a minute, and others as long as a century. The love or the suffering of those who can tell just how long they have suffered, or just how long they have been in love, is only moderate and reasonable.
Madame d’Argy found the two lonely years she passed awaiting the return of her son, who was winning his promotion to the rank of ensign, so long, that it seemed to her as if they never would come to an end. She had given a reluctant consent to his notion of adopting the navy as a profession, thinking that perhaps, after all, there might be no harm in allowing her dear boy to pass the most dangerous period of his youth under strict discipline, but she could not be patient forever! She idolized her son too much to be resigned to living without him; she felt that he was hers no longer. Either he was at sea or at Toulon, where she could very rarely join him, being detained at Lizerolles by the necessity of looking after their property. With what eagerness she awaited his promotion, which she did not doubt was all the Nailles waited for to give their consent to the marriage; of their happy half-consent she hastened to remind them in a note which announced the new grade to which he had been promoted. Her indignation was great on finding that her formal request received no decided answer; but, as her first object was Fred’s happiness, she placed the reply she had received in its most favorable light when she forwarded it to the person whom it most concerned. She did this in all honesty. She was not willing to admit that she was being put off with excuses; still less could she believe in a refusal.
She accepted the excuse that M. de Nailles gave for returning no decided answer, viz.: that “Jacqueline was too young,” though she answered him with some vehemence: “Fred was born when I was eighteen.” But she had to accept it. Her ensign would have to pass a few more months on the coast of Senegal, a few more months which were made shorter by the encouragement forwarded to him by his mother, who was careful to send him everything she could find out that seemed to be, or that she imagined might be, in his favor; she underlined such things and commented upon them, so as to make the faintest hypothesis seem a certainty. Sometimes she did not even wait for the post. Fred would find, on putting in at some post, a cablegram: “Good news,” or “All goes well,” and he would be beside himself with joy and excitement until, on receiving his poor, dear mother’s next letter, he found out on how slight a foundation her assurance had been founded.
Sometimes, she wrote him disagreeable things about Jacqueline, as if she would like to disenchant him, and then he said to himself: “By this, I am to understand that my affairs are not going on well; I still count for little, notwithstanding my promotion.” Ah! if he could only have had, so near the beginning of his career, any opportunity of distinguishing himself! No brilliant deed would have been too hard for him. He would have scaled the very skies. Alas! he had had no chance to win distinction, he had only had to follow in the beaten track of ordinary duty; he had encountered no glorious perils, though at St. Louis he had come very near leaving his bones, but it was only a case of typhoid fever. This fever, however, brought about a scene between M. de Nailles and his mother.
“When,” she cried, with all the fury of a lioness, “do you expect to come to the conclusion that my son is a suitable match for Jacqueline? Do you imagine that I shall let him wait till he is a post-captain to satisfy the requirements of Mademoiselle your daughter—provided he does not die in a hospital? Do you think that I shall be willing to go on living—if you can call it living!—all alone and in continual apprehension? Why do you let him keep on in uncertainty? You know his worth, and you know that with him Jacqueline would be happy. Instead of that—instead of saying once for all to this young man, who is more in love with her than any other man will ever be: ‘There, take her, I give her to you,’ which would be the straightforward, sensible way, you go on encouraging the caprices of a child who will end by wasting, in the life you are permitting her to lead, all the good qualities she has and keeping nothing but the bad ones.”
“Mon Dieu! I can’t see that Jacqueline leads a life like that!” said M. de Nailles, who felt that he must say something.
“You don’t see, you don’t see! How can any one see who won’t open his eyes? My poor friend, just look for once at what is going on around you, under your own roof—”
“Jacqueline is devoted to music,” said her father, good-humoredly. Madame d’Argy in her heart thought he was losing his mind.
And in truth he was growing older day by day, becoming more and more anxious, more and more absorbed in the great struggle—not for life; that might exhaust a man, but at least it was energetic and noble—but for superfluous wealth, for vanity, for luxury, which, for his own part, he cared nothing for, and which he purchased dearly, spurred on to exertion by those near to him, who insisted on extravagances.
“Oh! yes, Jacqueline, I know, is devoted to music,” went on Madame d’Argy, with an air of extreme disapproval, “too much so! And when she is able to sing like Madame Strahlberg, what good will it do her? Even now I see more than one little thing about her that needs to be reformed. How can she escape spoiling in that crowd of Slavs and Yankees, people of no position probably in their own countries, with whom you permit her to associate? People nowadays are so imprudent about acquaintances! To be a foreigner is a passport into society. Just think what her poor mother would have said to the bad manners she is adopting from all parts of the globe? My poor, dear Adelaide! She was a genuine Frenchwoman of the old type; there are not many such left now. Ah!” continued Madame d’Argy, without any apparent connection with her subject, “Monsieur de Talbrun’s mother, if he had one, would be truly happy to see him married to Giselle!”
“But,” faltered M. de Nailles, struck by the truth of some of these remarks, “I make no opposition—quite the contrary—I have spoken several times about your son, but I was not listened to!”
“What can she say against Fred?”
“Nothing. She is very fond of him, that you know as well as I do. But those childish attachments do not necessarily lead to love and marriage.”
“Friendship on her side might be enough,” said Madame d’Argy, in the tone of a woman who had never known more than that in marriage. “My poor Fred has enthusiasm and all that, enough for two. And in time she will be madly in love with him—she must! It is impossible it should be otherwise.”
“Very good, persuade her yourself if you can; but Jacqueline has a pretty strong will of her own.”
Jacqueline’s will was a reality, though the ideas of M. de Nailles may have been illusion.
“And my wife, too!” resumed the Baron, after a long sigh. “I don’t know how it is, but Jacqueline, as she has grown up, has become like an unbroken colt, and those two, who were once all in all to each other, are now seldom of one mind. How am I to act when their two wills cross mine, as they often do? I have so many things on my mind. There are times when—”
“Yes, one can see that. You don’t seem to know where you are. And do you think that the disposition she shows to act, as you say, like an unbroken colt, is nothing to me? Do you think I am quite satisfied with my son’s choice? I could have wished that he had chosen for his wife—but what is the use of saying what I wished? The important thing is that he should be happy in his own way. Besides, I dare say the young thing will calm down of her own accord. Her mother’s daughter must be good at heart. All will come right when she is removed from a circle which is doing her no good; it is injuring her in people’s opinion already, you must know. And how will it be by-and-bye? I hear people saying everywhere: ‘How can the Nailles let that young girl associate so much with foreigners?’ You say they are old school-fellows, they went to the ‘cours’ together. But see if Madame d’Etaples and Madame Ray, under the same pretext, let Isabelle and Yvonne associate with the Odinskas! As to that foolish woman, Madame d’Avrigny, she goes to their house to look up recruits for her operettas, and Madame Strahlberg has one advantage over regular artists, there is no call to pay her. That is the reason why she invites her. Besides which, she won’t find it so easy to marry Dolly.”
“Oh! there are several reasons for that,” said the Baron, who could see the mote in his neighbor’s eye, “Mademoiselle d’Avrigny has led a life so very worldly ever since she was a child, so madly fast and lively, that suitors are afraid of her. Jacqueline, thank heaven, has never yet been in what is called the world. She only visits those with whom she is on terms of intimacy.”
“An intimacy which includes all Paris,” said Madame d’Argy, raising her eyes to heaven. “If she does not go to great balls, it is only because her stepmother is bored by them. But with that exception it seems to me she is allowed to do anything. I don’t see the difference. But, to be sure, if Jacqueline is not for us, you have a right to say that I am interfering in what does not concern me.”
“Not at all,” said the unfortunate father, “I feel how much I ought to value your advice, and an alliance with your family would please me more than anything.”
He said the truth, for he was disturbed by seeing M. de Cymier so slow in making his proposals, and he was also aware that young girls in our day are less sought for in marriage than they used to be. His friend Wermant, rich as he was, had had some trouble in capturing for Berthe a fellow of no account in the Faubourg St. Germain, and the prize was not much to be envied. He was a young man without brains and without a sou, who enjoyed so little consideration among his own people that his wife had not been received as she expected, and no one spoke of Madame de Belvan without adding: “You know, that little Wermant, daughter of the ‘agent de change’.”
Of course, Jacqueline had the advantage of good birth over Berthe, but how great was her inferiority in point of fortune! M. de Nailles sometimes confided these perplexities to his wife, without, however, receiving much comfort from her. Nor did the Baroness confess to her husband all her own fears. In secret she often asked herself, with the keen insight of a woman of the world well trained in artifice and who possessed a thorough knowledge of mankind, whether there might not be women capable of using a young girl so as to put the world on a wrong scent; whether, in other words, Madame de Villegry did not talk everywhere about M. de Cymier’s attentions to Mademoiselle de Nailles in order to conceal his relations to herself? Madame de Villegry indeed cared little about standing well in public opinion, but rather the contrary; she would not, however, for the world have been willing, by too openly favoring one man among her admirers, to run the risk of putting the rest to flight. No doubt M. de Cymier was most assiduous in his attendance on the receptions and dances at Madame de Nailles’s, but he was there always at the same time as Madame de Villegry herself. They would hold whispered conferences in corners, which might possibly have been about Jacqueline, but there was no proof that they were so, except what Madame de Villegry herself said. “At any rate,” thought Madame de Nailles, “if Fred comes forward as a suitor it may stimulate Monsieur de Cymier. There are men who put off taking a decisive step till the last moment, and are only to be spurred up by competition.”
So every opportunity was given to Fred to talk freely with Jacqueline when he returned to Paris. By this time he wore two gold-lace stripes upon his sleeve. But Jacqueline avoided any tete-a-tete with him as if she understood the danger that awaited her. She gave him no chance of speaking alone with her. She was friendly—nay, sometimes affectionate when other people were near them, but more commonly she teased him, bewildered him, excited him. After an hour or two spent in her society he would go home sometimes savage, sometimes desponding, to ponder in his own room, and in his own heart, what interpretation he ought to put upon the things that she had said to him.
The more he thought, the less he understood. He would not have confided in his mother for the world; she might have cast blame on Jacqueline. Besides her, he had no one who could receive his confidences, who would bear with his perplexities, who could assist in delivering him from the network of hopes and fears in which, after every interview with Jacqueline, he seemed to himself to become more and more entangled.
At last, however, at one of the soirees given every fortnight by Madame de Nailles, he succeeded in gaining her attention.
“Give me this quadrille,” he said to her.
And, as she could not well refuse, he added, as soon as she had taken his arm: “We will not dance, and I defy you to escape me.”
“This is treason!” she cried, somewhat angrily. “We are not here to talk; I can almost guess beforehand what you have to say, and—”
But he had made her sit down in the recess of that bow-window which had been called the young girls’ corner years ago. He stood before her, preventing her escape, and half-laughing, though he was deeply moved.
“Since you have guessed what I wanted to say, answer me quickly.”
“Must I? Must I, really? Why didn’t you ask my father to do your commission? It is so horribly disagreeable to do these things for one’s self.”
“That depends upon what the things may be that have to be said. I should think it ought to be very agreeable to pronounce the word on which the happiness of a whole life is to depend.”
“Oh! what a grand phrase! As if I could be essential to anybody’s happiness? You can’t make me believe that!”
“You are mistaken. You are indispensable to mine.”
“There! my declaration has been made,” thought Fred, much relieved that it was over, for he had been afraid to pronounce the decisive words.
“Well, if I thought that were true, I should be very sorry,” said Jacqueline, no longer smiling, but looking down fixedly at the pointed toe of her little slipper; “because—”
She stopped suddenly. Her face flushed red.
“I don’t know how to explain to you;” she said.
“Explain nothing,” pleaded Fred; “all I ask is Yes, nothing more. There is nothing else I care for.”
She raised her head coldly and haughtily, yet her voice trembled as she said:
“You will force me to say it? Then, no! No!” she repeated, as if to reaffirm her refusal.
Then, alarmed by Fred’s silence, and above all by his looks, he who had seemed so gay shortly before and whose face now showed an anguish such as she had never yet seen on the face of man, she added:
“Oh, forgive me!—Forgive me,” she repeated in a lower voice, holding out her hand. He did not take it.
“You love some one else?” he asked, through his clenched teeth.
She opened her fan and affected to examine attentively the pink landscape painted on it to match her dress.
“Why should you think so? I wish to be free.”
“Free? Are you free? Is a woman ever free?”
Jacqueline shook her head, as if expressing vague dissent.
“Free at least to see a little of the world,” she said, “to choose, to use my wings, in short—”
And she moved her slender arms with an audacious gesture which had nothing in common with the flight of that mystic dove upon which she had meditated when holding the card given her by Giselle.
“Free to prefer some other man,” said Fred, who held fast to his idea with the tenacity of jealousy.
“Ah! that is different. Supposing there were anyone whom I liked—not more, but differently from the way I like you—it is possible. But you spoke of loving!”
“Your distinctions are too subtle,” said Fred.
“Because, much as it seems to astonish you, I am quite capable of seeing the difference,” said Jacqueline, with the look and the accent of a person who has had large experience. “I have loved once—a long time ago, a very long time ago, a thousand years and more. Yes, I loved some one, as perhaps you love me, and I suffered more than you will ever suffer. It is ended; it is over—I think it is over forever.”
“How foolish! At your age!”
“Yes, that kind of love is ended for me. Others may please me, others do please me, as you said, but it is not the same thing. Would you like to see the man I once loved?” asked Jacqueline, impelled by a juvenile desire to exhibit her experience, and also aware instinctively that to cast a scrap of past history to the curious sometimes turns off their attention on another track. “He is near us now,” she added.
And while Fred’s angry eyes, under his frowning brows, were wandering all round the salon, she pointed to Hubert Marien with a movement of her fan.
Marien was looking on at the dancing, with his old smile, not so brilliant now as it had been. He now only smiled at beauty collectively, which was well represented that evening in Madame de Nailles’s salon. Young girls ‘en masse’ continued to delight him, but his admiration as an artist became less and less personal.
He had grown stout, his hair and beard were getting gray; he was interested no longer in Savonarola, having obtained, thanks to his picture, the medal of honor, and the Institute some months since had opened its doors to him.
“Marien? You are laughing at me!” cried Fred.
“It is simply the truth.”
Some magnetic influence at that moment caused the painter to turn his eyes toward the spot where they were talking.
“We were speaking of you,” said Jacqueline.
And her tone was so singular that he dared not ask what they were saying. With humility which had in it a certain touch of bitterness he said, still smiling:
“You might find something better to do than to talk good or evil of a poor fellow who counts now for nothing.”
“Counts for nothing! A fellow to be pitied!” cried Fred, “a man who has just been elected to the Institute—you are hard to satisfy!”
Jacqueline sat looking at him like a young sorceress engaged in sticking pins into the heart of a waxen figure of her enemy. She never missed an opportunity of showing her implacable dislike of him.
She turned to Fred: “What I was telling you,” she said, “I am quite willing to repeat in his presence. The thing has lost its importance now that he has become more indifferent to me than any other man in the world.”
She stopped, hoping that Marien had understood what she was saying and that he resented the humiliating avowal from her own lips that her childish love was now only a memory.
“If that is the only confession you have to make to me,” said Fred, who had almost recovered his composure, “I can put up with my former rival, and I pass a sponge over all that has happened in your long past of seventeen years and a half, Jacqueline. Tell me only that at present you like no one better than me.”
She smiled a half-smile, but he did not see it. She made no answer.
“Is he here, too—like the other!” he asked, sternly.
And she saw his restless eyes turn for an instant to the conservatory, where Madame de Villegry, leaning back in her armchair, and Gerard de Cymier, on a low seat almost at her feet, were carrying on their platonic flirtation.
“Oh! you must not think of quarrelling with him,” cried Jacqueline, frightened at the look Fred fastened on De Cymier.
“No, it would be of no use. I shall go out to Tonquin, that’s all.”
“Fred! You are not serious.”
“You will see whether I am not serious. At this very moment I know a man who will be glad to exchange with me.”
“What! go and get yourself killed at Tonquin for a foolish little girl like me, who is very, very fond of you, but hardly knows her own mind. It would be absurd!”
“People are not always killed at Tonquin, but I must have new interests, something to divert my mind from—”
“Fred! my dear Fred”—Jacqueline had suddenly become almost tender, almost suppliant. “Your mother! Think of your mother! What would she say? Oh, my God!”
“My mother must be allowed to think that I love my profession better than all else. But, Jacqueline,” continued the poor fellow, clinging in despair to the very smallest hope, as a drowning man catches at a straw, “if you do not, as you said, know exactly your own mind—if you would like to question your own heart—I would wait—”
Jacqueline was biting the end of her fan—a conflict was taking place within her breast. But to certain temperaments there is pleasure in breaking a chain or in leaping a barrier; she said:
“Fred, I am too much your friend to deceive you.”
At that moment M. de Cymier came toward them with his air of assurance: “Mademoiselle, you forget that you promised me this waltz,” he said.
“No, I never forget anything,” she answered, rising.
Fred detained her an instant, saying, in a low voice:
“Forgive me. This moment, Jacqueline, is decisive. I must have an answer. I never shall speak to you again of my sorrow. But decide now—on the spot. Is all ended between us?”
“Not our old friendship, Fred,” said Jacqueline, tears rising in her eyes.
“So be it, then, if you so will it. But our friendship never will show itself unless you are in need of friendship, and then only with the discretion that your present attitude toward me has imposed.”
“Are you ready, Mademoiselle,” said Gerard, who, to allow them to end their conversation, had obligingly turned his attention to some madrigals that Colette Odinska was laughing over.
Jacqueline shook her head resolutely, though at that moment her heart felt as if it were in a vise, and the moisture in her eyes looked like anything but a refusal. Then, without giving herself time for further thought, she whirled away into the dance with M. de Cymier. It was over, she had flung to the winds her chance for happiness, and wounded a heart more cruelly than Hubert Marien had ever wounded hers. The most horrible thing in this unending warfare we call love is that we too often repay to those who love us the harm that has been done us by those whom we have loved. The seeds of mistrust and perversity sown by one man or by one woman bear fruit to be gathered by some one else.
CHAPTER XII. A COMEDY AND A TRAGEDY
The departure of Frederic d’Argy for Tonquin occasioned a break in the intercourse between his mother and the family of De Nailles. The wails of Hecuba were nothing to the lamentations of poor Madame d’Argy; the unreasonableness of her wrath and the exaggeration in her reproaches hindered even Jacqueline from feeling all the remorse she might otherwise have felt for her share in Fred’s departure. She told her father, who the first time in her life addressed her with some severity, that she could not be expected to love all the young men who might threaten to go to the wars, or to fling themselves from fourth-story windows, for her sake.
“It was very indelicate and inconsiderate of Fred to tell any one that it was my fault that he was doing anything so foolish,” she said, with true feminine deceit, “but he has taken the very worst possible means to make me care for him. Everybody has too much to say about this matter which concerns only him and me. Even Giselle thought proper to write me a sermon!”
And she gave vent to her feelings in an exclamation of three syllables that she had learned from the Odinskas, which meant: “I don’t care!” (je m’en moque).
But this was not true. She cared very much for Giselle’s good opinion, and for Madame d’Argy’s friendship. She suffered much in her secret heart at the thought of having given so much pain to Fred. She guessed how deep it was by the step to which it had driven him. But there was in her secret soul something more than all the rest, it was a puerile, but delicious satisfaction in feeling her own importance, in having been able to exercise an influence over one heart which might possibly extend to that of M. de Cymier. She thought he might be gratified by knowing that she had driven a young man to despair, if he guessed for whose sake she had been so cruel. He knew it, of course. Madame de Nailles took care that he should not be ignorant of it, and the pleasure he took in such a proof of his power over a young heart was not unlike that pleasure Jacqueline experienced in her coquetry—which crushed her better feelings. He felt proud of the sacrifice this beautiful girl had made for his sake, though he did not consider himself thereby committed to any decision, only he felt more attached to her than ever. Ever since the day when Madame de Villegry had first introduced him at the house of Madame de Nailles, he had had great pleasure in going there. The daughter of the house was more and more to his taste, but his liking for her was not such as to carry him beyond prudence. “If I chose,” he would say to himself after every time he met her, “if I chose I could own that jewel. I have only to stretch out my hand and have it given me.” And the next morning, after going to sleep full of that pleasant thought, he would awake glad to find that he was still as free as ever, and able to carry on a flirtation with a woman of the world, which imposed no obligations upon him, and yet at the same time make love to a young girl whom he would gladly have married but for certain reports which were beginning to circulate among men of business concerning the financial position of M. de Nailles.
They said that he was withdrawing money from secure investments to repair (or to increase) considerable losses made by speculation, and that he operated recklessly on the Bourse. These rumors had already withdrawn Marcel d’Etaples from the list of his daughter’s suitors. The young fellow was a captain of Hussars, who had no scruple in declaring the reason of his giving up his interest in the young lady. Gerard de Cymier, more prudent, waited and watched, thinking it would be quite time enough to go to the bottom of things when he found himself called upon to make a decision, and greatly interested meantime in the daily increase of Jacqueline’s beauty. It was evident she cared for him. After all, it was doing the little thing no harm to let her live on in the intoxication of vanity and hope, and to give her something to dwell upon in her innocent dreams. Never did Gerard allow himself to overstep the line he had marked out for himself; a glance, a slight pressure of the hand, which might have been intentional, or have meant nothing, a few ambiguous words in which an active imagination might find something to dream about, a certain way of passing his arm round her slight waist which would have meant much had it not been done in public to the sound of music, were all the proofs the young diplomatist had ever given of an attraction that was real so far as consisted with his complete selfishness, joined to his professional prudence, and that systematic habit of taking up fancies at any time for anything, which prevents each fancy as it occurs from ripening into passion.
He alluded indirectly to Fred’s departure in a way that turned it into ridicule. While playing a game of ‘boston’ he whispered into Jacqueline’s ear something about the old-fashionedness and stupidity of Paul and Virginia, and his opinion of “calf-love,” as the English call an early attachment, and something about the right of every girl to know a suitor long before she consents to marry him. He said he thought that the days of courtship must be the most delightful in the life of a woman, and that a man who wished to cut them short was a fellow without delicacy or discretion!
From this Jacqueline drew the conclusion that he was not willing to resemble such a fellow, and was more and more persuaded that there was tenderness in the way he pressed her waist, and that his voice had the softness of a caress when he spoke to her. He made many inquiries as to what she liked and what she wished for in the future, as if his great object in all things was to anticipate her wishes. As for his intimacy with Madame de Villegry, Jacqueline thought nothing of it, notwithstanding her habitual mistrust of those she called old women. In the first place, Madame de Villegry was her own mistress, nothing hindered them from having been married long ago had they wished it; besides, had not Madame de Villegry brought the young man to their house and let every one see, even Jacqueline herself, what was her object in doing so? In this matter she was their ally, a most zealous and kind ally, for she was continually advising her young friend as to what was most becoming to her and how she might make herself most attractive to men in general, with little covert allusions to the particular tastes of Gerard, which she said she knew as well as if he had been her brother.
All this was lightly insinuated, but never insisted upon, with the tact which stood Madame de Villegry in stead of talent, and which had enabled her to perform some marvellous feats upon the tight-rope without losing her balance completely. She, too, made fun of the tragic determination of Fred, which all those who composed the society of the De Nailles had been made aware of by the indiscreet lamentations of Madame d’Argy.
“Is not Jacqueline fortunate?” cried. Colette Odinska, who, herself always on a high horse, looked on love in its tragic aspect, and would have liked to resemble Marie Stuart as much as she could, “is she not fortunate? She has had a man who has gone abroad to get himself killed—and all for her!”
Colette imagined herself under the same circumstances, making the most of a slain lover, with a crape veil covering her fair hair, her mourning copied from that of her divorced sister, who wore her weeds so charmingly, but who was getting rather tired of a single life.
As for Miss Kate Sparks and Miss Nora, they could not understand why the breaking of half-a-dozen hearts should not be the prelude to every marriage. That, they said with much conviction, was always the case in America, and a girl was thought all the more of who had done so.
Jacqueline, however, thought more than was reasonable about the dangers that the friend of her childhood was going to encounter through her fault. Fred’s departure would have lent him a certain prestige, had not a powerful new interest stepped in to divert her thoughts. Madame d’Avrigny was getting up her annual private theatricals, and wanted Jacqueline to take the principal part in the play, saying that she ought to put her lessons in elocution to some use. The piece chosen was to illustrate a proverb, and was entirely new. It was as unexceptionable as it was amusing; the most severe critic could have found no fault with its morality or with its moral, which turned on the eagerness displayed by young girls nowadays to obtain diplomas. Scylla and Charybdis was its name. Its story was that of a young bride, who, thinking to please a husband, a stupid and ignorant man, was trying to obtain in secret a high place in the examination at the Sorbonne—‘un brevet superieur’. The husband, disquieted by the mystery, is at first suspicious, then jealous, and then is overwhelmed with humiliation when he discovers that his wife knows more of everything than himself. He ends by imploring her to give up her higher education if she wishes to please him. The little play had all the modern loveliness and grace which Octave Feuillet alone can give, and it contained a lesson from which any one might profit; which was by no means always the case with Madame d’Avrigny’s plays, which too often were full of risky allusions, of critical situations, and the like; likely, in short, to “sail too close to the wind,” as Fred had once described them. But Madame d’Avrigny’s prime object was the amusement of society, and society finds pleasure in things which, if innocence understood them, would put her to the blush. This play, however, was an exception. There had been very little to cut out this time. Madame de Nailles had been asked to take the mother’s part, but she declined, not caring to act such a character in a house where years before in all her glory she had made a sensation as a young coquette. So Madame d’Avrigny had to take the part herself, not sorry to be able to superintend everything on the stage, and to prompt Dolly, if necessary—Dolly, who had but four words to say, which she always forgot, but who looked lovely in a little cap as a femme de chambre.
People had been surprised that M. de Cymier should have asked for the part of the husband, a local magistrate, stiff and self-important, whom everybody laughed at. Jacqueline alone knew why he had chosen it: it would give him the opportunity of giving her two kisses. Of course those kisses were to be reserved for the representation, but whether intentionally or otherwise, the young husband ventured upon them at every rehearsal, in spite of the general outcry—not, however, very much in earnest, for it is well understood that in private theatricals certain liberties may be allowed, and M. de Cymier had never been remarkable for reserve when he acted at the clubs, where the female parts were taken by ladies from the smaller theatres. In this school he had acquired some reputation as an amateur actor. “Besides,” as he remarked on making his apology, “we shall do it very awkwardly upon the stage if we are not allowed to practise it beforehand.” Jacqueline burst out laughing, and did not make much show of opposition. To play the part of his wife, to hear him say to her, to respond with the affectionate and familiar ‘toi’, was so amusing! It was droll to see her cut out her husband in chemistry, history, and grammar, and make him confound La Fontaine with Corneille. She had such a little air while doing it! And at the close, when he said to her: “If I give you a pony to-morrow, and a good hearty kiss this very minute, shall you be willing to give up getting that degree?” she responded, with such gusto: “Indeed, I shall!” and her manner was so eager, so boyish, so full of fun, that she was wildly applauded, while Gerard embraced her as heartily as he liked, to make up to himself for her having had, as his wife, the upper hand.
All this kissing threw him rather off his balance, and he might soon have sealed his fate, had not a very sad event occurred, which restored his self-possession.
The dress rehearsal was to take place one bright spring day at about four o’clock in the afternoon. A large number of guests was assembled at the house of Madame d’Avrigny. The performance had been much talked about beforehand in society. The beauty, the singing, and the histrionic powers of the principal actress had been everywhere extolled. Fully conscious of what was expected of her, and eager to do herself credit in every way, Jacqueline took advantage of Madame Strahlberg’s presence to run over a little song, which she was to—sing between the acts and in which she could see no meaning whatever. This little song, which, to most of the ladies present, seemed simply idiotic, made the men in the audience cry “Oh!” as if half-shocked, and then “Encore! Encore!” in a sort of frenzy. It was a so-called pastoral effusion, in which Colinette rhymed with herbette, and in which the false innocence of the eighteenth century was a cloak for much indelicate allusion.
“I never,” said Jacqueline in self-defense, before she began the song, “sang anything so stupid. And that is saying much when one thinks of all the nonsensical words that people set to music! It’s a marvel how any one can like this stuff. Do tell me what there is in it?” she added, turning to Gerard, who was charmed by her ignorance.
Standing beside the grand piano, with her arms waving as she sang, repeating, by the expression of her eyes, the question she had asked and to which she had received no answer, she was singing the verses she considered nonsense with as much point as if she had understood them, thanks to the hints given her by Madame Strahlberg, who was playing her accompaniment, when the entrance of a servant, who pronounced her name aloud, made a sudden interruption. “Mademoiselle de Nailles is wanted at home at once. Modeste has come for her.”
Madame d’Avrigny went out to say to the old servant: “She can not possibly go home with you! It is only half an hour since she came. The rehearsal is just beginning.”
But something Modeste said in answer made her give a little cry, full of consternation. She came quickly back, and going up to Jacqueline:
“My dear,” she said, “you must go home at once—there is bad news, your father is ill.”
“Ill?”
The solemnity of Madame d’Avrigny’s voice, the pity in her expression, the affection with which she spoke and above all her total indifference to the fate of her rehearsal, frightened Jacqueline. She rushed away, not waiting to say good-by, leaving behind her a general murmur of “Poor thing!” while Madame d’Avrigny, recovering from her first shock, was already beginning to wonder—her instincts as an impresario coming once more to the front—whether the leading part might not be taken by Isabelle Ray. She would have to send out two hundred cards, at least, and put off her play for another fortnight. What a pity! It seemed as if misfortunes always happened just so as to interfere with pleasures.
The fiacre which had brought Modeste was at the door. The old nurse helped her young lady into it.
“What has happened to papa?” cried Jacqueline, impetuously.
There was something horrible in this sudden transition from gay excitement to the sharpest anxiety.
“Nothing—that is to say—he is very sick. Don’t tremble like that, my darling-courage!” stammered Modeste, who was frightened by her agitation.
“He was taken sick, you say. Where? How happened it?”
“In his study. Pierre had just brought him his letters. We thought we heard a noise as if a chair had been thrown down, and a sort of cry. I ran in to see. He was lying at full length on the floor.”
“And now? How is he now?”
“We did what we could for him. Madame came back. He is lying on his bed.”
Modeste covered her face with her hands.
“You have not told me all. What else?”
“Mon Dieu! you knew your poor father had heart disease. The last time the doctor saw him he thought his legs had swelled—”
“Had!” Jacqueline heard only that one word. It meant that the life of her father was a thing of the past. Hardly waiting till the fiacre could be stopped, she sprang out, rushed into the house, opened the door of her father’s chamber, pushing aside a servant who tried to stop her, and fell upon her knees beside the bed where lay the body of her father, white and rigid.
“Papa! My poor dear—dear papa!”
The hand she pressed to her lips was as cold as ice. She raised her frightened eyes to the face over which the great change from life to death had passed. “What does it mean?” Jacqueline had never looked on death before, but she knew this was not sleep.
“Oh, speak to me, papa! It is I—it is Jacqueline!”
Her stepmother tried to raise her—tried to fold her in her arms.
“Let me alone!” she cried with horror.
It seemed to her as if her father, where he was now, so far from her, so far from everything, might have the power to look into human hearts, and know the perfidy he had known nothing of when he was living. He might see in her own heart, too, her great despair. All else seemed small and of no consequence when death was present.
Oh! why had she not been a better daughter, more loving, more devoted? why had she ever cared for anything but to make him happy?
She sobbed aloud, while Madame de Nailles, pressing her handkerchief to her eyes, stood at the foot of the bed, and the doctor, too, was near, whispering to some one whom Jacqueline at first had not perceived—the friend of the family, Hubert Marien.
Marien there? Was it not natural that, so intimate as he had always been with the dead man, he should have hastened to offer his services to the widow?
Jacqueline flung herself upon her father’s corpse, as if to protect it from profanation. She had an impulse to bear it away with her to some desert spot where she alone could have wept over it.
She lay thus a long time, beside herself with grief.
The flowers which covered the bed and lay scattered on the floor, gave a festal appearance to the death-chamber. They had been purchased for a fete, but circumstances had changed their destination. That evening there was to have been a reception in the house of M. de Nailles, but the unexpected guest that comes without an invitation had arrived before the music and the dancers.