Part 47

Love is, as one knows, a poor blind creature, deprived of hearing and speech, and only led by presentiments, divinations, the nervous faculties of a sick man. It is pitiable indeed to see him wandering, feeling his way, constantly making false steps, passing his hands over the supports by which he guides himself with the distrustful awkwardness of the infirm. At the very moment when Paul was doubting Aline’s sensibility, in announcing to his friends that he was about to start on a journey which would occupy several days, perhaps several weeks, did not remark the girl’s sudden paleness, did not hear the distressed cry that escaped her lips:

“You are going away?”

He was going away, going to Tunis, very much troubled at leaving his poor Nabob in the midst of the pack of furious wolves that surrounded him. Mora’s protection, however, gave him some reassurance; and then, the journey in question was absolutely necessary.

“And the Territorial?” asked the old accountant, ever returning to the subject in his mind. “How are things standing there? I see Jansoulet’s name still at the head of the board. You cannot get him out, then, from that Ali-Baba’s cave? Take care--take care!”

“Ah, I know all about that, M. Joyeuse. But, to leave it with honour, money is needed, much money, a fresh sacrifice of two or three millions, and we have not got them. That is exactly the reason why I am going to Tunis to try to wrest from the rapacity of the Bey a slice of that great fortune which he is retaining in his possession so unjustly. At present I have still some chance of succeeding, while later on, perhaps--”

“Go, then, and make haste, my dear lad, and if you return, as I wish you may, with a heavy bag, see that you deal first of all with the Paganetti gang. Remember that one shareholder less patient than the rest has the power to smash the whole thing up, to demand an inquiry; and you know what the inquiry would reveal. Now I come to think of it,” added M. Joyeuse, whose brow had contracted a frown, “I am even surprised that Hemerlingue, in his hatred for you, has not secretly brought up a few shares.”

He was interrupted by the chorus of imprecations which the name of Hemerlingue raised from all the young people, who detested the fat banker for the injury he had done their father, and for the ill-will he bore that good Nabob, who was adored in the house through Paul de Gery.

“Hemerlingue, the heartless monster! Wretch! That wicked man!”

But amid all these exclamations, the Visionary was following up his idea of the fat baron becoming a shareholder in the Territorial for the purpose of dragging his enemy into the courts. And you may imagine the stupefaction of Andre Maranne, a complete stranger to the whole affair, when he saw M. Joyeuse turn to him, and, with face purple and swollen with rage, point his finger at him, with these terrible words:

“The greatest rascal, after all, in this affair, is you, sir!”

“Oh, papa, papa! what are you saying?”

“Eh, what? Ah, forgive me, my dear Andre. I was fancying myself in the examining magistrate’s private room, face to face with that rogue. It is my confounded brain that is always running away with me.”

All broke into uproarious laughter, which escaped into the outer air through the open windows, and went to mingle with the thousand noises of moving vehicles and people in their Sunday clothes going up the Avenue des Ternes. The author of Revolt took advantage of the diversion to ask whether they were not soon going to start. It was late--the good places would be taken in the Bois.

“To the Bois de Boulogne, on Sunday!” exclaimed Paul de Gery.

“Oh, our Bois is not yours,” replied Aline with a smile. “Come with us, and you will see.”

Did it ever happen to you, in the course of a solitary and contemplative walk, to lie down on your face in the undergrowth of a forest, amid that vegetation which springs up, various and manifold, through the fallen autumn leaves, and allow your eyes to wander along the level of the ground before you? Little by little the sense of height is lost, the interwoven branches of the oaks above your head form an inaccessible sky, and you behold a new forest extending beneath the other, opening its deep avenues filled by a green and mysterious light, and formed of tiny shrubs or root fibres taking the appearance of the stems of sugar-canes, of severely graceful palm-trees, of delicate cups containing a drop of water, of many-branched candlesticks bearing little yellow lights which the wind blows on as it passes. And the miraculous thing is, that beneath these light shadows live minute plants and thousand of insects whose existence, observed from so near at hand, is a revelation to you of all the mysteries. An ant, bending like a wood-cutter under his burden, drags after it a splinter of bark bigger than itself; a beetle makes its way along a blade of grass thrown like a bridge from one stem to another; while beneath a lofty bracken standing isolated in the middle of a patch of velvety moss, a little blue or red insect waits, with antennae at attention, for another little insect on its way through some desert path over there to arrive at the trysting-place beneath the giant tree. It is a small forest beneath a great one, too near the soil to be noticed by its big neighbours, too humble, too hidden to be reached by its great orchestra of song and storm.

A similar revelation awaits in the Bois de Boulogne. Behind those sanded drives, watered and clean, whereon files of carriage-wheels moving slowly round the lake trace all day long a worn and mechanical furrow, behind that admirably set scene of trimmed green hedges, of captive water, of flowery rocks, the true Bois, a wild wood with perennial undergrowth, grows and flourishes, forming impenetrable recesses traversed by narrow paths and bubbling springs.

This is the Bois of the children, the Bois of the humble, the little forest beneath the great one. And Paul, who knew only the long avenues of the aristocratic Parisian promenades, the sparkling lake perceived from the depths of a carriage or from the top of a coach in a drive back from Longchamps, was astonished to see the deliciously sheltered nook to which his friends had led him. It was on the banks of a pond lying like a mirror under willow-trees, covered with water-lilies, with here and there large white shimmering spaces where sunbeams fell and lay on the bright surface.

On the sloping bank, sheltered by the boughs of trees where the leaves were already thick, they sat down to listen to the reading of the play, and the pretty, attentive faces, the skirts lying puffed out over the grass, made one think of some Decameron, more innocent and chaste, in a peaceful atmosphere. To complete this pleasant country scene, two windmill-sails seen through an opening in the branches were revolving over in the direction of Suresnes, while of the dazzling and luxurious vision to be met at every cross-roads in the Bois there reached them only a confused and perpetual murmur, which one ended by ceasing to notice. The poet’s voice alone rose in the silence, the verses fell on the air tremblingly, repeated below the breath by other moved lips, and stifled sounds of approbation greeted them, with shudders at the tragic passages. Bonne Maman was even seen to wipe away a big tear. That comes, you see, from having no embroidery in one’s hand!

His first work! That was what the Revolt was for Andre, that first work always too exuberant and ornate, into which the author throws, to begin with, whole arrears of ideas and opinions, pent up like the waters of a river-lock; that first work which is often the richest if not the best of its writer’s productions. As for the fate that awaited it, no one could predict it; and the uncertainty that hovered over the reading of the drama added to its own emotion that of each auditor, the hopes, all arrayed in white, of Mlle. Elise, the fantastic hallucinations of M. Joyeuse, and the more positive desires of Aline as she installed in advance the modest fortune of her sister in the nest of an artist’s household, beaten by the winds but envied by the crowd.

Ah, if one of those idle people, taking a turn for the hundredth time round the lake, overwhelmed by the monotony of his habitual promenade, had come and parted the branches, how surprised he would have been at this picture! But would he ever have suspected how much passion, how many dreams, what poetry and hope there could be contained in that little green corner, hardly larger than the shadow a fern throws on the moss?

“You were right; I did not know the Bois,” said Paul in a low voice to Aline, who was leaning on his arm.

They were following a narrow path overarched by the boughs of trees, and as they talked were moving forward at a quick pace, well in advance of the others. It was not, however, pere Kontzen’s terrace nor his appetizing fried dishes that drew them on. No; the beautiful lines which they had just heard had carried them away, lifting them to great heights, and they had not yet come down to earth again. They walked straight on towards the ever-retreating end of the road, which opened out at its extremity into a luminous glory, a mass of sunbeams, as if all the sunshine of that beautiful day lay waiting for them where it had fallen on the outskirts of the wood. Never had Paul felt so happy. That light arm that lay on his arm, that child’s step by which his own was guided, these alone would have made life sweet and pleasant to him, no less than this walk over the mossy turf of a green path. He would have told the girl so, simply, as he felt it, had he not feared to alarm that confidence which Aline placed in him, no doubt because of the sentiments which she knew he possessed for another woman, and which seemed to hold at a distance from them every thought of love.

Suddenly, right before them, against the bright background, a group of persons riding on horseback came in sight, at first vague and indistinct, then appearing as a man and a woman, handsomely mounted, and entered the mysterious path among the bars of gold, the leafy shadows, the thousand dots of light with which the ground was strewn, and which, displaced by their progress as they cantered along, rose and covered them with flowery patterns from the chests of the horses to the blue veil of the lady rider. They came along slowly, capriciously, and the two young people, who had drawn back into the copse, could see pass close by them, with a clinking of bits proudly shaken and white with foam as though after a furious gallop, two splendid animals carrying a pair of human beings brought very near together by the narrowing of the path; he, supporting with one arm the supple figure moulded in a dark cloth habit; she, with a hand resting on the shoulder of her cavalier and her small head seen in retreating profile beneath the half-dropped tulle of her veil, resting on it tenderly. This embrace, half disturbed by the impatience of the horses, that kiss on which their reins became confused, that passion which stalked in broad day through the Bois with so great a contempt for public opinion, would have been enough to betray the duke and Felicia, if the haughty and charming mein of the lady and the aristocratic ease of her companion, his pallor slightly tinged with colour as the result of his ride and of Jenkins’s miraculous pearls, had not already betrayed them.

It is not an extraordinary thing to meet Mora in the Bois on a Sunday. Like his master, he loved to show himself to the Parisians, to advertise his popularity with all sections of the public; and then the duchess never accompanied him on that day, and he could make a halt quite at his ease in that little villa of Saint-James, known to all Paris, whose red towers, outlined among the trees schoolboys used to point out to each other in whispers. But only a mad woman, a daring affronter of society like this Felicia, could have dreamt of advertising herself like this, with the loss of her reputation forever. A sound of hoofs dying away in the distance, of shrubs brushed in passing; a few plants that had been pressed down and were straightening themselves again; branches pushed out of the way resuming their places--that was all that remained of the apparition.

“You saw?” said Paul; speaking first.

She had seen, and she had understood, notwithstanding the candour of her innocence, for a blush spread over her features, one of those feelings of shame experienced for the faults of those we love.

“Poor Felicia!” she said in a low voice, pitying not only the unhappy woman who had just passed them, but also him whom this defection must have smitten to the very heart. The truth is that Paul de Gery had felt no surprise at this meeting, which justified previous suspicions and the instinctive aversion which he had felt for Felicia at their dinner some days before. But he found it pleasant to be pitied by Aline, to feel the compassion in that voice becoming more tender, in that arm leaning upon his. Like children who pretend to be ill for the sake of the pleasure of being fondled by their mother, he allowed his consoler to strive to appease his grief, speaking to him of his brothers, of the Nabob, and of his forthcoming trip to Tunis--a fine country, they said. “You must write to us often, and long letters about the interesting things on the journey, the place you stay in. For one can see those who are far away better when one imagines the kind of place they are inhabiting.”