The foregoing letters seemed very original to the persons from whom the author of the “Comedy of Human Life” obtained them; but their interest in this duel, this crossing of pens between two minds, may not be shared. For every hundred readers, eighty might weary of the battle. The respect due to the majority in every nation under a constitutional government, leads us, therefore, to suppress eleven other letters exchanged between Ernest and Modeste during the month of September. If, later on, some flattering majority should arise to claim them, let us hope that we can then find means to insert them in their proper place.
Urged by a mind that seemed as aggressive as the heart was lovable, the truly chivalrous feelings of the poor secretary gave themselves free play in these suppressed letters, which seem, perhaps, more beautiful than they really are, because the imagination is charmed by a sense of the communion of two free souls. Ernest’s whole life was now wrapped up in these sweet scraps of paper; they were to him what banknotes are to a miser; while in Modeste’s soul a deep love took the place of her delight in agitating a glorious life, and being, in spite of distance, its mainspring. Ernest’s heart was the complement of Canalis’s glory. Alas! it often takes two men to make a perfect lover, just as in literature we compose a type by collecting the peculiarities of several similar characters. How many a time a woman has been heard to say in her own salon after close and intimate conversations:—
“Such a one is my ideal as to soul, and I love the other who is only a dream of the senses.”
The last letter written by Modeste, which here follows, gives us a glimpse of the enchanted isle to which the meanderings of this correspondence had led the two lovers.
This letter had been sent off the evening before the day when the abortive struggle between Dumay and Modeste had taken place. The happy girl was impatiently awaiting Sunday, when her eyes were to vindicate or condemn her heart and her actions,—a solemn moment in the life of any woman, and which three months of close communion of souls now rendered as romantic as the most imaginative maiden could have wished. Every one, except the mother, had taken this torpor of expectation for the calm of innocence. No matter how firmly family laws and religious precepts may bind, there will always be the Clarissas and the Julies, whose souls like flowing cups o’erlap the brim under some spiritual pressure. Modeste was glorious in the savage energy with which she repressed her exuberant youthful happiness and remained demurely quiet. Let us say frankly that the memory of her sister was more potent upon her than any social conventions; her will was iron in the resolve to bring no grief upon her father and her mother. But what tumultuous heavings were within her breast! no wonder that a mother guessed them.
On the following day Modeste and Madame Dumay took Madame Mignon about mid-day to a seat in the sun among the flowers. The blind woman turned her wan and blighted face toward the ocean; she inhaled the odors of the sea and took the hand of her daughter who remained beside her. The mother hesitated between forgiveness and remonstrance ere she put the important question; for she comprehended the girl’s love and recognized, as the pretended Canalis had done, that Modeste was exceptional in nature.
“God grant that your father return in time! If he delays much longer he will find none but you to love him. Modeste, promise me once more never to leave him,” she said in a fond maternal tone.
Modeste lifted her mother’s hands to her lips and kissed them gently, replying: “Need I say it again?”
“Ah, my child! I did this thing myself. I left my father to follow my husband; and yet my father was all alone; I was all the child he had. Is that why God has so punished me? What I ask of you is to marry as your father wishes, to cherish him in your heart, not to sacrifice him to your own happiness, but to make him the centre of your home. Before losing my sight, I wrote him all my wishes, and I know he will execute them. I enjoined him to keep his property intact and in his own hands; not that I distrust you, my Modeste, for a moment, but who can be sure of a son-in-law? Ah! my daughter, look at me; was I reasonable? One glance of the eye decided my life. Beauty, so often deceitful, in my case spoke true; but even were it the same with you, my poor child, swear to me that you will let your father inquire into the character, the habits, the heart, and the previous life of the man you distinguish with your love—if, by chance, there is such a man.”
“I will never marry without the consent of my father,” answered Modeste.
“You see, my darling,” said Madame Mignon after a long pause, “that if I am dying by inches through Bettina’s wrong-doing, your father would not survive yours, no, not for a moment. I know him; he would put a pistol to his head,—there could be no life, no happiness on earth for him.”
Modeste walked a few steps away from her mother, but immediately came back.
“Why did you leave me?” demanded Madame Mignon.
“You made me cry, mamma,” answered Modeste.
“Ah, my little darling, kiss me. You love no one here? you have no lover, have you?” she asked, holding Modeste on her lap, heart to heart.
“No, my dear mamma,” said the little Jesuit.
“Can you swear it?”
“Oh, yes!” cried Modeste.
Madame Mignon said no more; but she still doubted.
“At least, if you do choose your husband, you will tell your father?” she resumed.
“I promised that to my sister, and to you, mother. What evil do you think I could commit while I wear that ring upon my finger and read those words: ‘Think of Bettina?’ Poor sister!”
At these words a truce of silence came between the pair; the mother’s blighted eyes rained tears which Modeste could not check, though she threw herself upon her knees, and cried: “Forgive me! oh, forgive me, mother!”
At this instant the excellent Dumay was coming up the hill of Ingouville on the double-quick,—a fact quite abnormal in the present life of the cashier.
Three letters had brought ruin to the Mignons; a single letter now restored their fortunes. Dumay had received from a sea-captain just arrived from the China Seas the following letter containing the first news of his patron and friend, Charles Mignon:—
“Your father is coming,” said Madame Mignon to her daughter.
“What makes you think so, mamma?” asked Modeste.
“Nothing else could make Dumay hurry himself.”
“Victory! victory!” cried the lieutenant as soon as he reached the garden gate. “Madame, the colonel has not been ill a moment; he is coming back—coming back on the ‘Mignon,’ a fine ship of his own, which together with its cargo is worth, he tells me, eight or nine hundred thousand francs. But he requires secrecy from all of us; his heart is still wrung by the misfortunes of our dear departed girl.”
“He has still to learn her death,” said Madame Mignon.
“He attributes her disaster, and I think he is right, to the rapacity of young men after great fortunes. My poor colonel expects to find the lost sheep here. Let us be happy among ourselves but say nothing to any one, not even to Latournelle, if that is possible. Mademoiselle,” he whispered in Modeste’s ear, “write to your father and tell him of his loss and also the terrible results on your mother’s health and eyesight; prepare him for the shock he has to meet. I will engage to get the letter into his hands before he reaches Havre, for he will have to pass through Paris on his way. Write him a long letter; you have plenty of time. I will take the letter on Monday; Monday I shall probably go to Paris.”
Modeste was so afraid that Canalis and Dumay would meet that she started hastily for the house to write to her poet and put off the rendezvous.
“Mademoiselle,” said Dumay, in a very humble manner and barring Modeste’s way, “may your father find his daughter with no other feelings in her heart than those she had for him and for her mother before he was obliged to leave her.”
“I have sworn to myself, to my sister, and to my mother to be the joy, the consolation, and the glory of my father, and I shall keep my oath!” replied Modeste with a haughty and disdainful glance at Dumay. “Do not trouble my delight in the thought of my father’s return with insulting suspicions. You cannot prevent a girl’s heart from beating—you don’t want me to be a mummy, do you?” she said. “My hand belongs to my family, but my heart is my own. If I love any one, my father and my mother will know it. Does that satisfy you, monsieur?”
“Thank you, mademoiselle; you restore me to life,” said Dumay, “but you might still call me Dumay, even when you box my ears!”
“Swear to me,” said her mother, “that you have not engaged a word or a look with any young man.”
“I can swear that, my dear mother,” said Modeste, laughing, and looking at Dumay who was watching her and smiling to himself like a mischievous girl.
“She must be false indeed if you are right,” cried Dumay, when Modeste had left them and gone into the house.
“My daughter Modeste may have faults,” said her mother, “but falsehood is not one of them; she is incapable of saying what is not true.”
“Well! then let us feel easy,” continued Dumay, “and believe that misfortune has closed his account with us.”
“God grant it!” answered Madame Mignon. “You will see him, Dumay; but I shall only hear him. There is much of sadness in my joy.”
At this moment Modeste, happy as she was in the return of her father, was, nevertheless, pacing her room disconsolate as Perrette on seeing her eggs broken. She had hoped her father would bring back a much larger fortune than Dumay had mentioned. Nothing could satisfy her new-found ambition on behalf of her poet less than at least half the six millions she had talked of in her second letter. Trebly agitated by her two joys and the grief caused by her comparative poverty, she seated herself at the piano, that confidant of so many young girls, who tell out their wishes and provocations on the keys, expressing them by the notes and tones of their music. Dumay was talking with his wife in the garden under the windows, telling her the secret of their own wealth, and questioning her as to her desires and her intentions. Madame Dumay had, like her husband, no other family than the Mignons. Husband and wife agreed, therefore, to go and live in Provence, if the Comte de La Bastie really meant to live in Provence, and to leave their money to whichever of Modeste’s children might need it most.
“Listen to Modeste,” said Madame Mignon, addressing them. “None but a girl in love can compose such airs without having studied music.”
Houses may burn, fortunes be engulfed, fathers return from distant lands, empires may crumble away, the cholera may ravage cities, but a maiden’s love wings its way as nature pursues hers, or that alarming acid which chemistry has lately discovered, and which will presently eat through the globe, if nothing stops it.
Modeste, under the inspiration of her present situation, was putting to music certain stanzas which we are compelled to quote here—albeit they are printed in the second volume of the edition Dauriat had mentioned—because, in order to adapt them to her music, which had the inexpressible charm of sentiment so admired in great singers, Modeste had taken liberties with the lines in a manner that may astonish the admirers of a poet so famous for the correctness, sometimes too precise, of his measures.
“It is very pretty,” said Madame Dumay. “Modeste is a musician, and that’s the whole of it.”
“The devil is in her!” cried the cashier, into whose heart the suspicion of the mother forced its way and made him shiver.
“She loves,” persisted Madame Mignon.
By succeeding, through the undeniable testimony of the song, in making the cashier a sharer in her belief as to the state of Modeste’s heart, Madame Mignon destroyed the happiness the return and the prosperity of his master had brought him. The poor Breton went down the hill to Havre and to his desk in Gobenheim’s counting-room with a heavy heart; then, before returning to dinner, he went to see Latournelle, to tell his fears, and beg once more for the notary’s advice and assistance.
“Yes, my dear friend,” said Dumay, when they parted on the steps of the notary’s door, “I now agree with madame; she loves,—yes, I am sure of it; and the devil knows the rest. I am dishonored.”
“Don’t make yourself unhappy, Dumay,” answered the little notary. “Among us all we can surely get the better of the little puss; sooner or later, every girl in love betrays herself,—you may be sure of that. But we will talk about it this evening.”
Thus it happened that all those devoted to the Mignon family were fully as disquieted and uncertain as they were before the old soldier tried the experiment which he expected would be so decisive. The ill-success of his past efforts so stimulated Dumay’s sense of duty, that he determined not to go to Paris to see after his own fortune as announced by his patron, until he had guessed the riddle of Modeste’s heart. These friends, to whom feelings were more precious than interests, well knew that unless the daughter were pure and innocent, the father would die of grief when he came to know the death of Bettina and the blindness of his wife. The distress of poor Dumay made such an impression on the Latournelles that they even forgot their parting with Exupere, whom they had sent off that morning to Paris. During dinner, while the three were alone, Monsieur and Madame Latournelle and Butscha turned the problem over and over in their minds, and discussed every aspect of it.
“If Modeste loved any one in Havre she would have shown some fear yesterday,” said Madame Latournelle; “her lover, therefore, lives somewhere else.”
“She swore to her mother this morning,” said the notary, “in presence of Dumay, that she had not exchanged a look or a word with any living soul.”
“Then she loves after my fashion!” exclaimed Butscha.
“And how is that, my poor lad?” asked Madame Latournelle.
“Madame,” said the little cripple, “I love alone and afar—oh! as far as from here to the stars.”
“How do you manage it, you silly fellow?” said Madame Latournelle, laughing.
“Ah, madame!” said Butscha, “what you call my hump is the socket of my wings.”
“So that is the explanation of your seal, is it?” cried the notary.
Butscha’s seal was a star, and under it the words “Fulgens, sequar,”—“Shining One, I follow thee,”—the motto of the house of Chastillonest.
“A beautiful woman may feel as distrustful as the ugliest,” said Butscha, as if speaking to himself; “Modeste is clever enough to fear she may be loved only for her beauty.”
Hunchbacks are extraordinary creations, due entirely to society for, according to Nature’s plan, feeble or aborted beings ought to perish. The curvature or distortion of the spinal column creates in these outwardly deformed subjects as it were a storage-battery, where the nerve currents accumulate more abundantly than under normal conditions,—where they develop, and whence they are emitted, so to say, in lightning flashes, to energize the interior being. From this, forces result which are sometimes brought to light by magnetism, though they are far more frequently lost in the vague spaces of the spiritual world. It is rare to find a deformed person who is not gifted with some special faculty,—a whimsical or sparkling gaiety perhaps, an utter malignity, or an almost sublime goodness. Like instruments which the hand of art can never fully waken, these beings, highly privileged though they know it not, live within themselves, as Butscha lived, provided their natural forces so magnificently concentrated have not been spent in the struggle they have been forced to maintain, against tremendous odds, to keep alive. This explains many superstitions, the popular legends of gnomes, frightful dwarfs, deformed fairies,—all that race of bottles, as Rabelais called them, containing elixirs and precious balms.
Butscha, therefore, had very nearly found the key to the puzzle. With all the anxious solicitude of a hopeless lover, a vassal ever ready to die,—like the soldiers alone and abandoned in the snows of Russia, who still cried out, “Long live the Emperor,”—he meditated how to capture Modeste’s secret for his own private knowledge. So thinking, he followed his patrons to the Chalet that evening, with a cloud of care upon his brow: for he knew it was most important to hide from all these watchful eyes and ears the net, whatever it might be, in which he should entrap his lady. It would have to be, he thought, by some intercepted glance, some sudden start or quiver, as when a surgeon lays his finger on a hidden sore. That evening Gobenheim did not appear, and Butscha was Dumay’s partner against Monsieur and Madame Latournelle. During the few moment’s of Modeste’s absence, about nine o’clock, to prepare for her mother’s bedtime, Madame Mignon and her friends spoke openly to one another; but the poor clerk, depressed by the conviction of Modeste’s love, which had now seized upon him as upon the rest, seemed as remote from the discussion as Gobenheim had been the night before.
“Well, what’s the matter with you, Butscha?” cried Madame Latournelle; “one would really think you hadn’t a friend in the world.”
Tears shone in the eyes of the poor fellow, who was the son of a Swedish sailor, and whose mother was dead.
“I have no one in the world but you,” he answered with a troubled voice; “and your compassion is so much a part of your religion that I can never lose it—and I will never deserve to lose it.”
This answer struck the sensitive chord of true delicacy in the minds of all present.
“We love you, Monsieur Butscha,” said Madame Mignon, with much feeling in her voice.
“I’ve six hundred thousand francs of my own, this day,” cried Dumay, “and you shall be a notary and the successor of Latournelle.”
The American wife took the hand of the poor hunchback and pressed it.
“What! you have six hundred thousand francs!” exclaimed Latournelle, pricking up his ears as Dumay let fall the words; “and you allow these ladies to live as they do! Modeste ought to have a fine horse; and why doesn’t she continue to take lessons in music, and painting, and—”
“Why, he has only had the money a few hours!” cried the little wife.
“Hush!” murmured Madame Mignon.
While these words were exchanged, Butscha’s august mistress turned towards him, preparing to make a speech:—
“My son,” she said, “you are so surrounded by true affection that I never thought how my thoughtless use of that familiar phrase might be construed; but you must thank me for my little blunder, because it has served to show you what friends your noble qualities have won.”
“Then you must have news from Monsieur Mignon,” resumed the notary.
“He is on his way home,” said Madame Mignon; “but let us keep the secret to ourselves. When my husband learns how faithful Butscha has been to us, how he has shown us the warmest and the most disinterested friendship when others have given us the cold shoulder, he will not let you alone provide for him, Dumay. And so, my friend,” she added, turning her blind face toward Butscha; “you can begin at once to negotiate with Latournelle.”
“He’s of legal age, twenty-five and a half years. As for me, it will be paying a debt, my boy, to make the purchase easy for you,” said the notary.
Butscha was kissing Madame Mignon’s hand, and his face was wet with tears as Modeste opened the door of the salon.
“What are you doing to my Black Dwarf?” she demanded. “Who is making him unhappy?”
“Ah! Mademoiselle Mignon, do we luckless fellows, cradled in misfortune, ever weep for grief? They have just shown me as much affection as I could feel for them if they were indeed my own relations. I’m to be a notary; I shall be rich. Ha! ha! the poor Butscha may become the rich Butscha. You don’t know what audacity there is in this abortion,” he cried.
With that he gave himself a resounding blow on the cavity of his chest and took up a position before the fireplace, after casting a glance at Modeste, which slipped like a ray of light between his heavy half-closed eyelids. He perceived, in this unexpected incident, a chance of interrogating the heart of his sovereign. Dumay thought for a moment that the clerk dared to aspire to Modeste, and he exchanged a rapid glance with the others, who understood him, and began to eye the little man with a species of terror mingled with curiosity.
“I, too, have my dreams,” said Butscha, not taking his eyes from Modeste.
The young girl lowered her eyelids with a movement that was a revelation to the young man.
“You love romance,” he said, addressing her. “Let me, in this moment of happiness, tell you mine; and you shall tell me in return whether the conclusion of the tale I have invented for my life is possible. To me wealth would bring greater happiness than to other men; for the highest happiness I can imagine would be to enrich the one I loved. You, mademoiselle, who know so many things, tell me if it is possible for a man to make himself beloved independently of his person, be it handsome or ugly, and for his spirit only?”
Modeste raised her eyes and looked at Butscha. It was a piercing and questioning glance; for she shared Dumay’s suspicion of Butscha’s motive.
“Let me be rich, and I will seek some beautiful poor girl, abandoned like myself, who has suffered, who knows what misery is. I will write to her and console her, and be her guardian spirit; she shall read my heart, my soul; she shall possess by double wealth, my two wealths,—my gold, delicately offered, and my thought robed in all the splendor which the accident of birth has denied to my grotesque body. But I myself shall remain hidden like the cause that science seeks. God himself may not be glorious to the eye. Well, naturally, the maiden will be curious; she will wish to see me; but I shall tell her that I am a monster of ugliness; I shall picture myself hideous.”
At these words Modeste gave Butscha a glance that looked him through and through. If she had said aloud, “What do you know of my love?” she could not have been more explicit.
“If I have the honor of being loved for the poem of my heart, if some day such love may make a woman think me only slightly deformed, I ask you, mademoiselle, shall I not be happier than the handsomest of men,—as happy as a man of genius beloved by some celestial being like yourself.”
The color which suffused the young girl’s face told the cripple nearly all he sought to know.
“Well, if that be so,” he went on, “if we enrich the one we love, if we please the spirit and withdraw the body, is not that the way to make one’s self beloved? At any rate it is the dream of your poor dwarf,—a dream of yesterday; for to-day your mother gives me the key to future wealth by promising me the means of buying a practice. But before I become another Gobenheim, I seek to know whether this dream could be really carried out. What do you say, mademoiselle, you?”
Modeste was so astonished that she did not notice the question. The trap of the lover was much better baited than that of the soldier, for the poor girl was rendered speechless.
“Poor Butscha!” whispered Madame Latournelle to her husband. “Do you think he is going mad?”
“You want to realize the story of Beauty and the Beast,” said Modeste at length; “but you forget that the Beast turned into Prince Charming.”
“Do you think so?” said the dwarf. “Now I have always thought that that transformation meant the phenomenon of the soul made visible, obliterating the form under the light of the spirit. If I were not loved I should stay hidden, that is all. You and yours, madame,” he continued, addressing his mistress, “instead of having a dwarf at your service, will now have a life and a fortune.”
So saying, Butscha resumed his seat, remarking to the three whist-players with an assumption of calmness, “Whose deal is it?” but within his soul he whispered sadly to himself: “She wants to be loved for herself; she corresponds with some pretended great man; how far has it gone?”
“Dear mamma, it is nearly ten o’clock,” said Modeste.
Madame Mignon said good-night to her friends, and went to bed.
They who wish to love in secret may have Pyrenean hounds, mothers, Dumays, and Latournelles to spy upon them, and yet not be in any danger; but when it comes to a lover!—ah! that is diamond cut diamond, flame against flame, mind to mind, an equation whose terms are mutual.
On Sunday morning Butscha arrived at the Chalet before Madame Latournelle, who always came to take Modeste to church, and he proceeded to blockade the house in expectation of the postman.
“Have you a letter for Mademoiselle Mignon?” he said to that humble functionary when he appeared.
“No, monsieur, none.”
“This house has been a good customer to the post of late,” remarked the clerk.
“You may well say that,” replied the man.
Modeste both heard and saw the little colloquy from her chamber window, where she always posted herself behind the blinds at this particular hour to watch for the postman. She ran downstairs, went into the little garden, and called in an imperative voice:—
“Monsieur Butscha!”
“Here am I, mademoiselle,” said the cripple, reaching the gate as Modeste herself opened it.
“Will you be good enough to tell me whether among your various titles to a woman’s affection you count that of the shameless spying in which you are now engaged?” demanded the girl, endeavoring to crush her slave with the glance and gesture of a queen.
“Yes, mademoiselle,” he answered proudly. “Ah! I never expected,” he continued in a low tone, “that the grub could be of service to a star,—but so it is. Would you rather that your mother and Monsieur Dumay and Madame Latournelle had guessed your secret than one, excluded as it were from life, who seeks to be to you one of those flowers that you cut and wear for a moment? They all know you love; but I, I alone, know how. Use me as you would a vigilant watch-dog; I will obey you, protect you, and never bark; neither will I condemn you. I ask only to be of service to you. Your father has made Dumay keeper of the hen-roost, take Butscha to watch outside,—poor Butscha, who doesn’t ask for anything, not so much as a bone.”
“Well, I’ve give you a trial,” said Modeste, whose strongest desire was to get rid of so clever a watcher. “Please go at once to all the hotels in Graville and in Havre, and ask if a gentleman has arrived from England named Monsieur Arthur—”
“Listen to me, mademoiselle,” said Butscha, interrupting Modeste respectfully. “I will go and take a walk on the seashore, for you don’t want me to go to church to-day; that’s what it is.”
Modeste looked at her dwarf with a perfectly stupid astonishment.
“Mademoiselle, you have wrapped your face in cotton-wool and a silk handkerchief, but there’s nothing the matter with you; and you have put that thick veil on your bonnet to see some one yourself without being seen.”
“Where did you acquire all that perspicacity?” cried Modeste, blushing.
“Moreover, mademoiselle, you have not put on your corset; a cold in the head wouldn’t oblige you to disfigure your waist and wear half a dozen petticoats, nor hide your hands in these old gloves, and your pretty feet in those hideous shoes, nor dress yourself like a beggar-woman, nor—”
“That’s enough,” she said. “How am I to be certain that you will obey me?”
“My master is obliged to go to Sainte-Adresse. He does not like it, but he is so truly good he won’t deprive me of my Sunday; I will offer to go for him.”
“Go, and I will trust you.”
“You are sure I can do nothing for you in Havre?”
“Nothing. Hear me, mysterious dwarf,—look,” she continued, pointing to the cloudless sky; “can you see a single trace of that bird that flew by just now? No; well then, my actions are pure as the air is pure, and leave no stain behind them. You may reassure Dumay and the Latournelles, and my mother. That hand,” she said, holding up a pretty delicate hand, with the points of the rosy fingers, through which the light shone, slightly turning back, “will never be given, it will never even be kissed by what people call a lover until my father has returned.”
“Why don’t you want me in the church to-day?”
“Do you venture to question me after all I have done you the honor to say, and to ask of you?”
Butscha bowed without another word, and departed to find his master, in all the rapture of being taken into the service of his goddess.
Half an hour later, Monsieur and Madame Latournelle came to fetch Modeste, who complained of a horrible toothache.
“I really have not had the courage to dress myself,” she said.
“Well then,” replied the worthy chaperone, “stay at home.”
“Oh, no!” said Modeste. “I would rather not. I have bundled myself up, and I don’t think it will do me any harm to go out.”
And Mademoiselle Mignon marched off beside Latournelle, refusing to take his arm lest she should be questioned about the outward trembling which betrayed her inward agitation at the thought of at last seeing her great poet. One look, the first,—was it not about to decide her fate?
Is there in the life of man a more delightful moment than that of a first rendezvous? Are the sensations then hidden at the bottom of our hearts and finding their first expression ever renewed? Can we feel again the nameless pleasures that we felt when, like Ernest de La Briere, we looked up our sharpest razors, our finest shirt, an irreproachable collar, and our best clothes? We deify the garments associated with that all-supreme moment. We weave within us poetic fancies quite equal to those of the woman; and the day when either party guesses them they take wings to themselves and fly away. Are not such things like the flower of wild fruits, bitter-sweet, grown in the heart of a forest, the joy of the scant sun-rays, the joy, as Canalis says in the “Maiden’s Song,” of the plant itself whose eyes unclosing see its own image within its breast?
Such emotions, now taking place in La Briere, tend to show that, like other poor fellows for whom life begins in toil and care, he had never yet been loved. Arriving at Havre overnight, he had gone to bed at once, like a true coquette, to obliterate all traces of fatigue; and now, after taking his bath, he had put himself into a costume carefully adapted to show him off to the best advantage. This is, perhaps, the right moment to exhibit a full-length portrait of him, if only to justify the last letter that Modeste was still to write to him.
Born of a good family in Toulouse, and allied by marriage to the minister who first took him under his protection, Ernest had that air of good-breeding which comes of an education begun in the cradle; and the habit of managing business affairs gave him a certain sedateness which was not pedantic,—though pedantry is the natural outgrowth of premature gravity. He was of ordinary height; his face, which won upon all who saw him by its delicacy and sweetness, was warm in the flesh-tints, though without color, and relieved by a small moustache and imperial a la Mazarin. Without this evidence of virility he might have resembled a young woman in disguise, so refined was the shape of his face and the cut of his lips, so feminine the transparent ivory of a set of teeth, regular enough to have seemed artificial. Add to these womanly points a habit of speech as gentle as the expression of the face; as gentle, too, as the blue eyes with their Turkish eyelids, and you will readily understand how it was that the minister occasionally called his young secretary Mademoiselle de La Briere. The full, clear forehead, well framed by abundant black hair, was dreamy, and did not contradict the character of the face, which was altogether melancholy. The prominent arch of the upper eyelid, though very beautifully cut, overshadowed the glance of the eye, and added a physical sadness,—if we may so call it,—produced by the droop of the lid over the eyeball. This inward doubt or eclipse—which is put into language by the word modesty—was expressed in his whole person. Perhaps we shall be able to make his appearance better understood if we say that the logic of design required greater length in the oval of his head, more space between the chin, which ended abruptly, and the forehead, which was reduced in height by the way in which the hair grew. The face had, in short, a rather compressed appearance. Hard work had already drawn furrows between the eyebrows, which were somewhat too thick and too near together, like those of a jealous nature. Though La Briere was then slight, he belonged to the class of temperaments which begin, after they are thirty, to take on an unexpected amount of flesh.
The young man would have seemed to a student of French history a very fair representative of the royal and almost inconceivable figure of Louis XIII.,—that historical figure of melancholy modesty without known cause; pallid beneath the crown; loving the dangers of war and the fatigues of hunting, but hating work; timid with his mistress to the extent of keeping away from her; so indifferent as to allow the head of his friend to be cut off,—a figure that nothing can explain but his remorse for having avenged his father on his mother. Was he a Catholic Hamlet, or merely the victim of incurable disease? But the undying worm which gnawed at the king’s vitals was in Ernest’s case simply distrust of himself,—the timidity of a man to whom no woman had ever said, “Ah, how I love thee!” and, above all, the spirit of self-devotion without an object. After hearing the knell of the monarchy in the fall of his patron’s ministry, the poor fellow had next fallen upon a rock covered with exquisite mosses, named Canalis; he was, therefore, still seeking a power to love, and this spaniel-like search for a master gave him outwardly the air of a king who has met with his. This play of feeling, and a general tone of suffering in the young man’s face made it more really beautiful than he was himself aware of; for he had always been annoyed to find himself classed by women among the “handsome disconsolate,”—a class which has passed out of fashion in these days, when every man seeks to blow his own trumpet and put himself in the advance.
The self-distrustful Ernest now rested his immediate hopes on the fashionable clothes he intended to wear. He put on, for this sacred interview, where everything depended on a first impression, a pair of black trousers and carefully polished boots, a sulphur-colored waistcoat, which left to sight an exquisitely fine shirt with opal buttons, a black cravat, and a small blue surtout coat which seemed glued to his back and shoulders by some newly-invented process. The ribbon of the Legion of honor was in his buttonhole. He wore a well-fitting pair of kid gloves of the Florentine bronze color, and carried his cane and hat in the left hand with a gesture and air that was worthy of the Grand Monarch, and enabled him to show, as the sacred precincts required, his bare head with the light falling on his carefully arranged hair. He stationed himself before the service began in the church porch, from whence he could examine the church, and the Christians—more particularly the female Christians—who dipped their fingers in the holy water.
An inward voice cried to Modeste as she entered, “It is he!” That surtout, and indeed the whole bearing of the young man were essentially Parisian; the ribbon, the gloves, the cane, the very perfume of his hair were not of Havre. So when La Briere turned about to examine the tall and imposing Madame Latournelle, the notary, and the bundled-up (expression sacred to women) figure of Modeste, the poor child, though she had carefully tutored herself for the event, received a violent blow on her heart when her eyes rested on this poetic figure, illuminated by the full light of day as it streamed through the open door. She could not be mistaken; a small white rose nearly hid the ribbon of the Legion. Would he recognize his unknown mistress muffled in an old bonnet with a double veil? Modeste was so in fear of love’s clairvoyance that she began to stoop in her walk like an old woman.
“Wife,” said little Latournelle as they took their seats, “that gentleman does not belong to Havre.”
“So many strangers come here,” answered his wife.
“But,” said the notary, “strangers never come to look at a church like ours, which is less than two centuries old.”
Ernest remained in the porch throughout the service without seeing any woman who realized his hopes. Modeste, on her part, could not control the trembling of her limbs until Mass was nearly over. She was in the grasp of a joy that none but she herself could depict. At last she heard the foot-fall of a gentleman on the pavement of the aisle. The service over, La Briere was making a circuit of the church, where no one now remained but the punctiliously pious, whom he proceeded to subject to a shrewd and keen analysis. Ernest noticed that a prayer-book shook violently in the hands of a veiled woman as he passed her; as she alone kept her face hidden his suspicions were aroused, and then confirmed by Modeste’s dress, which the lover’s eye now scanned and noted. He left the church with the Latournelles and followed them at a distance to the rue Royale, where he saw them enter a house accompanied by Modeste, whose custom it was to stay with her friends till the hour of vespers. After examining the little house, which was ornamented with scutcheons, he asked the name of the owner, and was told that he was Monsieur Latournelle, the chief notary in Havre. As Ernest lounged along the rue Royale hoping for a glimpse into the house, Modeste caught sight of him, and thereupon declared herself too ill to go to vespers. Poor Ernest thus had his trouble for his pains. He dared not wander about Ingouville; moreover, he made it a point of honor to obey orders, and he therefore went back to Paris, previously writing a letter which Francoise Cochet duly delivered on the morrow with the Havre postmark.
It was the custom of Monsieur and Madame Latournelle to dine at the Chalet every Sunday when they brought back Modeste after vespers. So, as soon as the invalid felt a little better, they started for Ingouville, accompanied by Butscha. Once at home, the happy Modeste forgot her pretended illness and her disguise, and dressed herself charmingly, humming as she came down to dinner,—