Part 58

Jansoulet answered him by a movement of despair and savage helplessness.

“Annoying, annoying,” repeated the other in a whisper, and feeling for his key in his pocket.

“Come, old fellow,” said the Nabob, taking his hand, “there’s no reason, because our wives don’t agree--That doesn’t hinder us from remaining friends. What a good chat the other day, eh?”

“No doubt” said the baron, disengaging himself, as he opened the door noiselessly, showing the deep workroom, whose lamp burned solitarily before the enormous empty chair. “Come, good-bye, I must go; I have my mail to despatch.”

“Ya didon, monci” (But look here, sir) said the poor Nabob, trying to joke, and using the patois of the south to recall to his old chum all the pleasant memories stirred up the other evening. “Our visit to Le Merquier still holds good. The picture we were going to present to him, you know. What day?”

“Ah, yes, Le Merquier--true--eh--well, soon. I will write to you.”

“Really? You know it is very important.”

“Yes, yes. I will write to you. Good-bye.”

And the big man shut his door in a hurry, as if he were afraid of his wife coming.

Two days after, the Nabob received a note from Hemerlingue, almost unreadable on account of the complicated scrawls, of abbreviations more or less commercial, under which the ex-sutler hid his entire want of spelling:

MY DEAR OLD COM--I cannot accom you to Le Mer. Too bus just now. Besid y will be bet alone to tal. Go th bold. You are exp. A Cassette, ev morn 8 to 10.

Yours faith

HEM.

Below as a postscript, a very small hand had written very legibly:

“A religious picture, as good as possible.”

What was he to think of this letter? Was there real good-will in it, or polite evasion? In any case hesitation was no longer possible. Time pressed. Jansoulet made a bold effort, then--for he was very frightened of Le Merquier--and called on him one morning.

Our strange Paris, alike in its population and its aspects, seems a specimen map of the whole world. In the Marais there are narrow streets, with old sculptured worm-eaten doors, with overhanging gables and balconies, which remind you of old Heidelberg. The Faubourg Saint-Honore, lying round the Russian church with its white minarets and golden domes, seems a part of Moscow. On Montmartre I know a picturesque and crowded corner which is simply Algiers. Little, low, clean houses, each with its brass plate and little front garden, are English streets between Neuilly and the Champs-Elysees while all behind the apse of Saint-Sulpice, the Rue Feron, the Rue Cassette, lying peaceably in the shadow of its great towers, roughly paved, their doors each with its knocker, seem lifted out of some provincial and religious town--Tours or Orleans, for example--in the district of the cathedral or the palace, where the great over-hanging trees in the gardens rock themselves to the sound of the bells and the choir.

It was there, in the neighbourhood of the Catholic Club--of which he had just been made honorary president--that M. Le Merquier lived. He was avocat, deputy for Lyons, business man of all the great communities of France; and Hemerlingue, moved by a deep-seated instinct, had intrusted him with the affairs of his firm.

He arrived before nine o’clock at an old mansion of which the ground floor was occupied by a religious bookshop, asleep in the odour of the sacristy, and of the thick gray paper on which the stories of miracles are printed for hawkers, and mounted the great whitewashed convent stairway. Jansoulet was touched by this provincial and Catholic atmosphere, in which revived the souvenirs of his past in the south, impressions of infancy still intact, thanks to his long absence from home; and since his arrival at Paris he had had neither the time nor the occasion to call them in question. Fashionable hypocrisy had presented itself to him in all its forms save that of religious integrity, and he refused now to believe in the venality of a man who lived in such surroundings. Introduced into the avocat’s waiting-room--a vast parlour with fine white muslin curtains, having for its sole ornament a large and beautiful copy of Tintoretto’s Dead Christ--his doubt and trouble changed into indignant conviction. It was not possible! He had been deceived as to Le Merquier. There was surely some bold slander in it, such as so easily spreads in Paris--or perhaps it was one of those ferocious snares among which he had stumbled for six months. No, this stern conscience, so well known in Parliament and the courts, this cold and austere personage, could not be treated like those great swollen pashas with loosened waist-belts and floating sleeves open to conceal the bags of gold. He would only expose himself to a scandalous refusal, to the legitimate revolt of outraged honour, if he attempted such means of corruption.

The Nabob told himself all this, as he sat on the oak bench which ran round the room, a bench polished with serge dresses and the rough cloth of cassocks. In spite of the early hour several persons were waiting there with him. A Dominican, ascetic and serene, walking up and down with great strides; two sisters of charity, buried under their caps, counting long rosaries which measured their time of waiting; priests from Lyons, recognisable by the shape of their hats; others reserved and severe in air, sitting at the great ebony table which filled the middle of the room, and turning over some of those pious journals printed at Fouvieres, just above Lyons, the Echo of Purgatory, the Rose-bush of Mary, which give as a present to all yearly subscribers pontifical indulgences and remissions of future sins. Some muttered words, a stifled cough, the light whispered prayers of the sisters, recalled to Jansoulet the distant and confused sensation of the hours of waiting in the corner of his village church round the confessional on the eves of the great festivals of the Church.

At last his turn came, and if a doubt as to M. Le Merquier had remained, he doubted no longer when he saw this great office, simple and severe, yet a little more ornate than the waiting-room, a fitting frame for the austerity of the lawyer’s principles, and for his thin form, tall, stooping, narrow-shouldered, squeezed into a black coat too short in the sleeves, from which protruded two black fists, broad and flat, two sticks of Indian ink with hieroglyphs of great veins. The clerical deputy had, with the leaden hue of a Lyonnese grown mouldy between his two rivers, a certain life of expression which he owed to his double look--sometimes sparkling, but impenetrable behind the glass of his spectacles; more often, vivid, mistrustful, and dark, above these same glasses, surrounded by the shadow which a lifted eye and a stooping head gives the eyebrow.

After a greeting almost cordial in comparison with the cold bow which the two colleagues exchanged at the Chamber, an “I was expecting you” in which perhaps an intention showed itself, the lawyer pointed the Nabob into a seat near his desk, told the smug domestic in black not to come till he was summoned, arranged a few papers, after which, sinking into his arm-chair with the attitude of a man ready to listen, who becomes all ears, his legs crossed, he rested his chin on his hand, with his eyes fixed on a great rep curtain falling to the ground in front of him.

The moment was decisive, the situation embarrassing. Jansoulet did not hesitate. It was one of the poor Nabob’s pretensions to know men as well as Mora. And this instinct, which, said he, had never deceived him, warned him that he was at that moment dealing with a rigid and unshakable honesty, a conscience in hard stone, untouchable by pick-axe or powder. “My conscience!” Suddenly he changed his programme, threw to the winds the tricks and equivocations which embarrassed his open and courageous disposition, and, head high and heart open, held to this honest man a language he was born to understand.

“Do not be astonished, my dear colleague,”--his voice trembled, but soon became firm in the conviction of his defence--“do not be astonished if I am come to find you here instead of asking simply to be heard by the third committee. The explanation which I have to make to you is so delicate and confidential that it would have been impossible to make it publicly before my colleagues.”

Maitre Le Merquier, above his spectacles, looked at the curtain with a disturbed air. Evidently the conversation was taking an unexpected turn.

“I do not enter on the main question,” said the Nabob. “Your report, I am assured, is impartial and loyal, such as your conscience has dictated to you. Only there are some heart-breaking calumnies spread about me to which I have not answered, and which have perhaps influenced the opinion of the committee. It is on this subject that I wish to speak to you. I know the confidence with which you are honoured by your colleagues, M. Le Merquier, and that, when I shall have convinced you, your word will be enough without forcing me to lay bare my distress to them all. You know the accusation--the most terrible, the most ignoble. There are so many people who might be deceived by it. My enemies have given names, dates, addresses. Well, I bring you the proofs of my innocence. I lay them bare before you--you only--for I have grave reasons for keeping the whole affair secret.”

Then he showed the lawyer a certificate from the Consulate of Tunis, that during twenty years he had only left the principality twice--the first time to see his dying father at Bourg-Saint Andeol; the second, to make, with the Bey, a visit of three days to his chateau of Saint-Romans.

“How comes it, then, that with a document so conclusive in my hands I have not brought my accusers before the courts to contradict and confound them? Alas, monsieur, there are cruel responsibilities in families. I have a brother, a poor fellow, weak and spoiled, who has for long wallowed in the mud of Paris, who has left there his intelligence and his honour. Has he descended to that degree of baseness which I, in his name, am accused of? I have not dared to find out. All I can say is, that my poor father, who knew more than any one in the family of it, whispered to me in dying, ‘Bernard, it is your elder brother who has killed me. I die of shame, my child.’”