He did not choose to do it. Very good! I will make the attempt, whatever it may cost me. Outrageously calumniated as I have been before the whole country, I owe to myself, I owe to my children this public justification, and I have decided to make it."
With that he turned abruptly toward the gallery where he knew that the enemy was watching him, and stopped suddenly, horror-stricken. Directly in front of him, behind the baroness"s pale, malicious little face, his mother, his mother whom he believed to be two hundred leagues away from the terrible storm, stood leaning against the wall, gazing at him, holding toward him her divine face streaming with tears, but proud and radiant none the less in her Bernard"s great success. For it was a genuine success of sincere, eminently human emotion, which a few words more would change into a triumph.--"Go on! Go on!" men shouted from all sides of the Chamber, to rea.s.sure him, to encourage him. But Jansoulet did not speak. And yet he had very little to say to justify himself: "Calumny wilfully confused two names. My name is Bernard Jansoulet. The other"s name was Jansoulet Louis." Not another word.
But that was too much in his mother"s presence, as she was still ignorant of her oldest son"s dishonor. It was too much for the family respect and unity.
He fancied he could hear his old father"s voice: "I am dying of shame, my son."--Would not she die of shame too, if he were to speak? He met his mother"s smile with a sublime glance of renunciation; then he continued in a dull voice and with a gesture of discouragement:
"Excuse me, Messieurs, this explanation is decidedly beyond my strength.
Order an investigation into my life, open to all and in the broad light of day, for any one can understand my every act. I swear to you that you will find nothing therein which should debar me from sitting among the representatives of my country."
The amazement, the disappointment at that surrender, which seemed to all the sudden downfall of great effrontery when brought to bay, were beyond all bounds. There was a moment of excitement on the benches, the confusion of a standing vote, which the Nabob watched listlessly in the uncertain light from the stained gla.s.s windows, as the condemned man watches the surging crowd from the platform of the scaffold; then, after the suspense of a century which precedes a supreme moment, the president announced amid profound silence, in the simplest manner imaginable:
"Monsieur Bernard Jansoulet"s election is declared void."
Never was a man"s life cut short with less solemnity or pother.
Mere Jansoulet, up yonder in her gallery, understood nothing except that she could see gaps on the benches all around,--that people were getting up and going away. Soon no one remained with her save the fat man and the lady in the white hat, who were leaning over the rail and gazing curiously at Bernard, who seemed to be preparing to go, for he was very calmly packing thick bundles of papers into a great portfolio. His papers arranged, he rose and left his seat.--Ah! the lives of those who sit in high places sometimes have very cruel moments. Gravely, heavily, under the eyes of the whole Chamber, he must redescend the steps he had climbed at the price of so much toil and money, only to be hurled back to their foot by an inexorable fatality.
It was that for which the Hemerlingues were waiting, following with their eyes to its last stage that heart-rending, humiliating exit which piles upon the back of the rejected one something of the shame and horror of an expulsion; then, as soon as the Nabob had disappeared, they looked at each other with a silent laugh and left the gallery, the old woman not daring to ask them to enlighten her, being warned by her instinct of the bitter hostility of those two. Left alone, she gave all her attention to something else that was being read, convinced that her son"s interests were still under discussion. There was talk of elections, of counting ballots, and the poor mother, leaning forward over the rail in her shabby cap, knitting her thick eyebrows, would have listened religiously to the report on the Sarigue election to the very end, had not the usher who had admitted her come to tell her that it was all over and that she had better go.
"Really? It"s all over?" she said, rising as if with regret.
And she added, timidly, in a low tone:
"Did he--did he win?"
It was so ingenuous, so touching, that the usher had not the slightest inclination to laugh.
"Unfortunately no, Madame. Monsieur Jansoulet did not win. But why did he stop after he made such a good start? If it"s true that he was never in Paris before and that another Jansoulet did all they accuse him of, why didn"t he say so?"
The old mother turned very pale and clung to the stair-rail.
She had understood.
Bernard"s sudden pause when he caught sight of her, the sacrifice he had offered her so simply with the eloquent glance of a murdered beast came to her mind; by the same blow the shame of the Elder, of the favorite child, was confounded with the other"s downfall, a two-edged maternal sorrow, which tore her heart whichever way she turned. Yes, yes, it was for her sake that he had forborne to speak. But she would not accept such a sacrifice. He must return at once and explain himself to the deputies.
"My son? where is my son?"
"Below, Madame, in his carriage. It was he who sent me to look for you."
She darted in front of the usher, walking rapidly, talking aloud, jostling against little black-faced, bearded men who were gesticulating in the corridors. After the Salle des Pas-Perdus, she pa.s.sed through a great ante-chamber, circular in shape, where servants, drawn up respectfully in line, formed a living, bedizened dado on the high bare wall. From there she could see, through the gla.s.s doors, the iron gateway outside, the crowd, and among other waiting carriages the Nabob"s. The peasant woman as she pa.s.sed recognized her enormous neighbor of the gallery talking with the sallow man in spectacles who had declaimed against her son and was receiving all sorts of congratulations and warm grasps of the hand for his speech. Hearing the name of Jansoulet p.r.o.nounced with an accompaniment of mocking, well-satisfied laughter, she slackened her long stride.
"At all events," said a young dandy with the face of a dissolute woman, "he didn"t prove wherein our charges are false."
At that the old woman made a jagged hole through the group and exclaimed, taking her stand in front of Moessard:
"What he didn"t tell you I will tell you. I am his mother, and it"s my duty to speak."
She interrupted herself to seize Le Merquier"s sleeve as he was slinking away.
"You, above all, you bad man, you are going to listen to me. What have you against my child? Don"t you know who he is? Wait a moment and let me tell you."
She turned to the journalist:
"I had two sons, Monsieur--"
Moessard was no longer there. She returned to Le Merquier:
"Two sons, Monsieur--"
Le Merquier had disappeared.
"Oh! listen to me, some one, I entreat you," said the poor mother, throwing her hands and her words about, to recall, to detain her auditors; but they all fled, melted away, disappeared, deputies, reporters, strange and mocking faces to whom she insisted upon telling her story by main force, heedless of the indifference which greeted her sorrows and her joys, her maternal pride and affection expressed in a jargon of her own. And while she rushed about and labored thus, intensely excited, her cap awry, at once grotesque and sublime like all children of nature in the drama of civilization, calling to witness to her son"s uprightness and the injustice of men even the footmen whose contemptuous impa.s.siveness was more cruel than all the rest, Jansoulet, who had come to look for her, being anxious at her non-appearance, suddenly stood beside her.
"Take my arm, mother. You must not stay here."
He spoke very loud, with a manner so composed and calm that all laughter ceased, and the old woman, suddenly quieted, supported by the firm pressure of that arm, clinging to which the last trembling of her indignation vanished, left the palace between two respectful lines of people. A sublime though rustic couple, the son"s millions illumining the mother"s peasantry like the relics of a saint enclosed in a golden shrine, they disappeared in the bright sunlight, in the splendor of the gorgeous carriage, brutal irony in presence of that sore distress, a striking example of the ghastly poverty of wealth.
They sat side by side on the back seat, for they dreaded to be seen, and at first they did not speak. But as soon as the carriage had started, as soon as they had left behind the sorrowful Calvary where his honor remained on the gibbet, Jansoulet, at the end of his strength, laid his head against his mother"s shoulder, hid his face in a fold of the old green shawl, and there, shedding hot tears, his whole body shaken by sobs, the cry of his infancy came once more to his lips, his _patois_ wail when he was a little child: "Mamma! mamma!"
XXII.
PARISIAN DRAMAS.
"Que l"heure est donc breve Qu"on pa.s.se en aimant!
C"est moins qu"un moment, Un peu plus qu"un reve."[7]
In the half-light of the great salon clad in its summer garb, filled with flowers, the plush furniture swathed in white covers, the chandeliers draped in gauze, the shades lowered and the windows open, Madame Jenkins sits at the piano, picking out the last production of the fashionable musician of the day; a few sonorous chords accompany the exquisite lines, a melancholy _Lied_ in unequal measures, which seems to have been written for the serious sweetness of her voice and the anxious state of her mind.
"Le temps nous enleve, Notre enchantement,"[8]
sighs the poor woman, moved by the sound of her own lament; and while the notes fly away through the courtyard of the mansion, tranquil as usual, where the fountain is playing in the midst of a clump of rhododendrons, the singer interrupts herself, her hands prolonging the chord, her eyes fixed on the music, but her glance far, far away. The doctor is absent. The interests of his business and his health have banished him from Paris for a few days, and, as frequently happens in solitude, the fair Madame Jenkins" thoughts have a.s.sumed that serious cast, that a.n.a.lytical tendency which sometimes makes a brief separation fatal to the most united households. United they had not been for a long time. They met only at table, before the servants, hardly spoke to each other, unless he, the man of oleaginous manners, chose to indulge in some brutal, uncivil remark concerning her son, her years which were beginning to tell upon her at last, or a dress which was not becoming to her. Always gentle and serene, she forced back her tears, submitted to everything, pretended not to understand; not that she loved him still, after so much cruel and contemptuous treatment, but it was the old story, as Joe the coachman said, of "an old incubus who wants to be married." Heretofore a terrible obstacle, the life of the legitimate spouse, had prolonged a shameful situation. Now that the obstacle no longer existed, she wanted to put an end to the comedy, because of Andre, who might any day be forced to despise his mother, because of the world which they had been deceiving for ten years, so that she never went into society without a sinking at the heart, dreading the welcome that would be accorded her on the morrow of a disclosure. To her hints, her entreaties, Jenkins had replied at first with vague phrases, with grandiloquent gestures: "Do you doubt me? Isn"t our engagement sacred?"
FOOTNOTES:
[7] "How swift flies the hour We pa.s.s in love"s pleasures!
"Tis less than a moment, Scarce more than a dream."
[8] "Time tears from our grasp Our blissful enchantment."
He also dwelt upon the difficulty of keeping secret a ceremony of such importance. Then he had taken refuge in malevolent silence, big with chilling anger and violent resolutions. The duke"s death, the check thereby administered to his insane vanity, had dealt the last blow; for disaster, which often brings together hearts that are ripe for a mutual understanding, consummates and completes disunion. And that was a genuine disaster. The popularity of the Jenkins Pearls suddenly arrested, the very thorough exposure of the position of the foreign physician, the charlatan, by old Bouchereau in the journal of the Academy, caused the leaders of society to gaze at one another in alarm, even paler from terror than from the absorption of a.r.s.enic into their systems, and the Irishman had already felt the effect of those bewilderingly sudden changes of the wind which make Parisian infatuations so dangerous.