“Rather too formal,” said Jeanne. “Now, let me try.”
And the enchantress added, with ready pen:
“It is I, Monsieur Mouillard, who am chiefly in need of forgiveness. Mine is the greater fault by far. You forbade Monsieur Fabien to love me, and I took no steps to prevent his doing so. Even yesterday, when he came to your house, it was my doing. I had assured him that your kind heart would not be proof against his loving confession.
“Was I really wrong in that?
“The words that you spoke just now have led me to hope that I was not.
“But if I was wrong, visit your anger on me alone. Forgive your nephew, invite him to dinner instead of us, and let me depart, regretting only that I was not judged worthy of calling you uncle, which would have been so pleasant and easy a name to speak.
I read the two letters over aloud. Madeleine broke into sobs as she listened.
A smile flickered about the corners of Jeanne’s mouth.
We left the house, committing to Madeleine the task of choosing a favorable moment to hand M. Mouillard our joint entreaty.
And here I may as well confess that from the instant we got out of the house, all through breakfast at the hotel, and for a quarter of an hour after it, M. Charnot treated me, in his best style, to the very hottest “talking-to” that I had experienced since my earliest youth. He ended with these words: “If you have not made your peace with your uncle by nine o’clock this evening, Monsieur, I withdraw my consent, and we shall return to Paris.”
I strove in vain to shake his decision. Jeanne made a little face at me, which warned me I was on the wrong track.
“Very well,” I said to her, “I leave the matter in your hands.”
“And I leave it in the hands of God,” she answered. “Be a man. If trouble awaits us, hope will at any rate steal us a happy hour or two.”
We were just then in front of the gardens of the Archbishop’s palace, so M. Charnot walked in. The current of his reflections was soon changed by the freshness of the air, the groups of children playing around their mothers—whom he studied ethnologically and with reference to the racial divisions of ancient Gaul—by the beauty of the landscape—its foreground of flowers, the Place St. Michel beyond, and further yet, above the barrack-roofs, the line of poplars lining the Auron. He ceased to be a father-in-law, and became a tourist again.
Jeanne stepped with airy grace among the groups of strollers, and the murmurs which followed her path, though often envious, sounded none the less sweetly in my ears for that. I hoped to meet Mademoiselle Lorinet.
After we had seen the gardens, we had to visit the Place Seraucourt, the Cours Chanzy, the cathedral, Saint-Pierrele-Guillard, and the house of Jacques-Coeur. It was six o’clock by the time we got back to the Hotel de France.
A letter was waiting for us in the small and badly furnished entrance—hall. It was addressed to Mademoiselle Jeanne Charnot.
I recognized at once the ornate hand of M. Mouillard, and grew as white as the envelope.
M. Charnot cried, excitedly:
“Read it, Jeanne. Read it, can’t you!”
Jeanne alone of us three kept a brave face.
She read:
When we rang at M. Mouillard’s door, it was opened to us by Baptiste, the office-boy, who waits at table on grand occasions.
My uncle received us in the large drawing-room, in full dress, with his whitest cravat and his most camphorous frock-coat: “not a moth in ten years,” is Madeleine’s boast concerning this garment.
He saluted us all solemnly, without his usual effusiveness; bearing himself with simple and touching dignity. Strong emotion, which excites most natures, only served to restrain his. He said not a word of the past, nor of our marriage. This, the decisive engagement, opened with polite formalities.
I have often noticed this phenomenon; people meeting to “have it out” usually begin by saying nothing at all.
M. Mouillard offered his arm to Jeanne, to escort her to the dining-room. Jeanne was in high spirits. She asked him question after question about Bourges, its dances, fashions, manufactures, even about the procedure of its courts.
“I am sure you know that well, uncle,” she said.
“Uncle” smiled at each question, his face illumined with a glow like that upon a chimney-piece when someone is blowing the fire. He answered her questions, but presently fell into a state of dejection, which even his desire to do honor to his guests could not entirely conceal. His thoughts betrayed themselves in the looks he kept casting upon me, no longer of anger, but of suffering, almost pleading, affection.
M. Charnot, who was rather tired, and also absorbed in Madeleine’s feats of cookery, cast disjointed remarks and ejaculations into the gaps in the conversation.
I knew my uncle well enough to feel sure that the end of the dinner would be quite unlike the beginning.
I was right. During dessert, just as the Academician was singing the praises of a native delicacy, ‘la forestine’, my uncle, who had been revolving a few drops of some notable growth of Medoc in his glass for the last minute or two, stopped suddenly, and put down his glass on the table.
“My dear Monsieur Charnot,” said he, “I have a painful confession to make to you.”
“Eh? What? My dear friend, if it’s painful to you, don’t make it.”
“Fabien,” my uncle went on, “has behaved badly to me on certain occasions. But I say no more of it. His faults are forgotten. But I have not behaved to him altogether as I should.”
“You, uncle?”
“Alas! It is so, my dear child. My practice, the family practice, which I faithfully promised your father to keep for you—”
“You have sold it?”
My uncle buried his face in his hands.
“Last night, my poor child, only last night!”
“I thought so.”
“I was weak I listened to the prompting of anger; I have compromised your future. Fabien, forgive me in your turn.”
He rose from the table, and came and put a trembling hand on my shoulder.
“No, uncle, you’ve not compromised anything, and I’ve nothing to forgive you.”
“You wouldn’t take the practice if I could still offer it to you?”
“No, uncle.”
“Upon your word?”
“Upon my word!”
M. Mouillard drew himself up, beaming:
“Ah! Thank you for that speech, Fabien; you have relieved me of a great weight.”
With one corner of his napkin he wiped away two tears, which, having arisen in time of war, continued to flow in time of peace.
“If Mademoiselle Jeanne, in addition to all her other perfections, brings you fortune, Fabien, if your future is assured—”
“My dear Monsieur Mouillard,” broke in the Academician with ill-concealed satisfaction. “My colleagues call me rich. They slander me. Works on numismatics do not make a man rich. Monsieur Fabien, who made some investigations into the subject, can prove it to you. No; I possess no more than an honorable competence, which does not give me everything, but lets me lack nothing.”
“Aurea mediocritas,” exclaimed my uncle, delighted with his quotation. “Oh, that Horace! What a fellow he was!”
“He was indeed. Well, as I was saying, our daily bread is assured; but that’s no reason why my son-in-law should vegetate in idleness which I do not consider my due, even at my age.”
“Quite right.”
“So he must work.”
“But what is he to work at?”
“There are other professions besides the law, Monsieur Mouillard. I have studied Fabien. His temperament is somewhat wayward. With special training he might have become an artist. Lacking that early moulding into shape, he never will be anything more than a dreamer.”
“I should not have expressed it so well, but I have often thought the same.”
“With a temperament like your nephew’s,” continued M. Charnot, “the best he can do is to enter upon a career in which the ideal has some part; not a predominant, but a sufficient part, something between prose and poetry.”
“Let him be a notary, then.”
“No, that’s wholly prose; he shall be a librarian.”
“A librarian?”
“Yes, Monsieur Mouillard; there are a few little libraries in Paris, which are as quiet as groves, and in which places are to be got that are as snug as nests. I have some influence in official circles, and that can do no harm, you know.”
“Quite so.”
“We will put our Fabien into one of those nests, where he will be protected against idleness by the little he will do, and against revolutions by the little he will be. It’s a charming profession; the very smell of books is improving; merely by breathing it you live an intellectual life.”
“An intellectual life!” exclaimed my uncle with enthusiasm. “Yes, an intellectual life!”
“And cataloguing books, Monsieur Mouillard, looking through them, preserving them as far as possible from worms and readers. Don’t you think that’s an enviable lot?”
“Yes, more so than mine has been, or my successor’s will be.”
“By the way, uncle, you haven’t told us who your successor is to be.”
“Haven’t I, really? Why, you know him; it’s your friend Larive.”
“Oh! That explains a great deal.”
“He is a young man who takes life seriously.”
“Very seriously, uncle. Isn’t he about to be married?”
“Why, yes; to a rich wife.”
“To whom?”
“My dear boy, he is picking up all your leavings; he is going to marry Mademoiselle Lorinet.”
“He was always enterprising! But, uncle, it wasn’t with him you were engaged yesterday evening?”
“Why not, pray?”
“You told Madeleine to admit a gentleman with a decoration.”
“He has one.”
“Good heavens! What is it?”
“The Nicham Iftikar, if it please you.”
“It doesn’t displease me, uncle, and surprises me still less. Larive will die with his breast more thickly plastered with decorations than an Odd Fellow’s; he will be a member of all the learned societies in the department, respected and respectable, the more thoroughly provincial for having been outrageously Parisian. Mothers will confide their anxieties to him, and fathers their interests; but when his old acquaintances pass this way they will take the liberty of smiling in his face.”
“What, jealous? Are you jealous of his bit of ribbon?”
“No, uncle, I regret nothing; not even Larive’s good fortune.”
M. Mouillard fixed his eyes on the cloth, and began again, after a moment’s silence:
“I, Fabien, do regret some things. It will be mournful at times, growing old alone here. Yet, after all, it will be some consolation to me to think that you others are satisfied with life, to welcome you here for your holidays.”
“You can do better than that,” said M. Charnot. “Come and grow old among us. Your years will be the lighter to bear, Monsieur Mouillard. Doubtless we must always bear them, and they weigh upon us and bend our backs. But youth, which carries its own burden so lightly, can always give us a little help in bearing ours.”
I looked to hear my uncle break out with loud objections.
“It is a fine night,” he said, simply; “let us go into the garden, and do you decide whether I can leave roses like mine.”
M. Mouillard took us into the garden, pleased with himself, with me, with Jeanne, with everybody, and with the weather.
It was too dark to see the roses, but we could smell them as we passed. I had taken Jeanne’s arm in mine, and we went on in front, in the cool dusk, choosing all the little winding paths.
The birds were all asleep. But the grasshoppers, crickets, and all manner of creeping things hidden in the grass, or in the moss on the trees, were singing and chattering in their stead.
Behind us, at some distance—in fact, as far off as we could manage—the gravel crackled beneath the equal tread of the two elders, and in a murmur we could catch occasional scraps of sentences:
“A granddaughter like Jeanne, Monsieur Charnot....”
“A grandson like Fabien, Monsieur Mouillard....”
We are married. We are just back from the church. We have said good-by to all our friends, not without a quick touch or two of sadness, as quickly swallowed up in the joy which for the first time in the history of my heart is surging there at full tide, and widening to a limitless horizon. In the two hours I have to spare before starting for Italy, I am writing the last words in this brown diary, which I do not intend to take with me.
Jeanne, my own Jeanne, is leaning upon me and reading over my shoulder, which distracts the flow of my recollections.
There were crowds at the church. The papers had put us down among the fashionable marriages of the week. The Institute, the army, men of letters, public officials, had come out of respect for M. Charnot; lawyers of Bourges and Paris had come out of respect for my uncle. But the happiest, the most radiant, next to ourselves, were the people who came only for Jeanne’s sake and mine; Sylvestre Lampron, painter-in-ordinary to Mademoiselle Charnot, bringing his pretty sketch as a wedding-present; M. Flamaran and Sidonie; Jupille, who wept as he used to “thirty years ago;” and M. and Madame Plumet, who took it in turns to carry their white-robed infant.
Jeanne and I certainly shook hands with a good many persons, but not with nearly as many as M. Mouillard. Clean-shaven, his cravat tied with exquisite care, he spun round in the crowd like a top, always dragging with him some one who was to introduce him to some one else. “One should make acquaintances immediately on arrival,” he kept saying.
Yes, Uncle Mouillard has just arrived in Paris; he has settled down near us on the Quai Malaquais, in a pretty set of rooms which Jeanne chose for him. He thinks them perfect because she thought they would do. The tastes and interests of old student days have suddenly reawakened within him, and will not be put to sleep again. He already knows the omnibus and tramway lines better than I; he talks of Bourges as if it were twenty years since he left it: “When I used to live in the country, Fabien—”
My father-in-law has found in him a whole-hearted admirer, perhaps even a future pupil in numismatics. Their friendship makes me think of that—
I caught this fragment of their talk:
“My dear Charnot, can you guess what I’m thinking about?”
“No, I haven’t the least idea.”
“I think it is very queer.”
“What is queer?”
“To see a librarian begin his career with a blot of ink. For you can not deny that Fabien’s marriage and situation, and my return to the capital, are all due to that. It must have been sympathetic ink—eh?”
“‘Felix culpa’, as you say, Monsieur Mouillard. There are some blunders that are lucky; but you can’t tell which they are, and that’s never any excuse for committing them.”
I could hardly get hold of Lampron for a moment in the crowd he so dislikes. He was more uncouth and more devoted than ever.
“Well, are you happy?” he said.
“Quite.”
“When you’re less happy, come and see me.”
“We shall always be just as happy as we are now,” said Jeanne.
And I think she is right.
Lampron smiled.
“Yes, I am quite happy, Sylvestre, and I owe my happiness to you, to her, and to others. I have done nothing myself to deserve happiness beyond letting myself drift on the current of life. Whenever I tried to row a stroke the boat nearly upset. Everything that others tried to do for me succeeded. I can’t get over it. Just think of it yourself. I owed my introduction to Jeanne to Monsieur Flamaran, who drove me to call on her father; his friend; you courted her for me by painting her portrait; Madame Plumet told her you had done so, and also removed the obstacle in my path. I met her in Italy, thanks entirely to you; and you clinched the proposal which had been begun by Flamaran. To crown all, the very situation I desired has been obtained for me by my father-in-law. What have I had to do? I have loved, sorrowed, and suffered, nothing more; and now I tremble at the thought that I owe my happiness to every one I know except myself.”
“Cease to tremble, my friend; don’t be surprised at it, and don’t alter your system in the least. Your happiness is your due; what matter how God chooses to grant it? Suppose it is an income for life paid to you by your relatives, your friends, the world in general, and the natural order of things? Well, draw your dividends, and don’t bother about where they come from.”
Since Lampron said so, and he is a philosopher, I think I had better follow his advice. If you don’t mind, Jeanne, I will cherish no ambition beyond your love, and refrain from running after any increase in wealth or reputation which might prove a decrease in happiness. If you agree, Jeanne, we shall see little of society, and much of our friends; we shall not open our windows wide enough for Love, who is winged, to fly out of them. If such is your pleasure, Jeanne, you shall direct the household of your own sweet will—I should say, of your sweet wisdom; you shall be queen in all matters of domestic economy, you shall rule our goings-out and our comings-in, our visits, our travels. I shall leave you to guide me, as a child, along the joyous path in which I follow your footsteps. I am looking up at Jeanne. She has not said “No.”