Paz Part 7

"In this immense misfortune I found a happy life. To be to you an indispensable machine, to know myself useful to your comfort, your luxury, has been the source of deep enjoyments. If these enjoyments were great when I thought only of Adam, think what they were to my soul when the woman I loved was the mainspring of all I did. I have known the pleasures of maternity in my love. I accepted life thus. Like the paupers who live along the great highways, I built myself a hut on the borders of your beautiful domain, though I never sought to approach you. Poor and lonely, struck blind by Adam's good fortune, I was, nevertheless, the giver. Yes, you were surrounded by a love as pure as a guardian-angel's; it waked while you slept; it caressed you with a look as you pa.s.sed; it was happy in its own existence,--you were the sun of my native land to me, poor exile, who now writes to you with tears in his eyes as he thinks of the happiness of those first days.

"When I was eighteen years old, having no one to love, I took for my ideal mistress a charming woman in Warsaw, to whom I confided all my thoughts, my wishes; I made her the queen of my nights and days. She knew nothing of all this; why should she? I loved my love.

"You can fancy from this incident of my youth how happy I was merely to live in the sphere of your existence, to groom your horse, to find the new-coined gold for your purse, to prepare the splendor of your dinners and your b.a.l.l.s, to see you eclipsing the elegance of those whose fortunes were greater than yours, and all by my own good management. Ah! with what ardor I have ransacked Paris when Adam would say to me, '_She_ wants this or that.' It was a joy such as I can never express to you. You wished for a trifle at one time which kept me seven hours in a cab scouring the city; and what delight it was to weary myself for you. Ah! when I saw you, unseen by you, smiling among your flowers, I could forget that no one loved me. On certain days, when my happiness turned my head, I went at night and kissed the spot where, to me, your feet had left their luminous traces. The air you had breathed was balmy; in it I breathed in more of life; I inhaled, as they say persons do in the tropics, a vapor laden with creative principles.

"I _must_ tell you these things to explain the strange presumption of my involuntary thoughts,--I would have died rather than avow it until now.

"You will remember those few days of curiosity when you wished to know the man who performed the household miracles you had sometimes noticed. I thought,--forgive me, madame,--I believed you might love me. Your good-will, your glances interpreted by me, a lover, seemed to me so dangerous--for me--that I invented that story of Malaga, knowing it was the sort of liaison which women cannot forgive. I did it in a moment when I felt that my love would be communicated, fatally, to you. Despise me, crush me with the contempt you have so often cast upon me when I did not deserve it; and yet I am certain that, if, on that evening when your aunt took Adam away from you, I had said what I have now written to you, I should, like the tamed tiger that sets his teeth once more in living flesh, and scents the blood, and--

"Midnight.

"I could not go on; the memory of that hour is still too living.

Yes, I was maddened. Was there hope for me in your eyes? then victory with its scarlet banners would have flamed in mine and fascinated yours. My crime has been to think all this; perhaps wrongly. You alone can judge of that dreadful scene when I drove back love, desire, all the most invincible forces of our manhood, with the cold hand of grat.i.tude,--grat.i.tude which must be eternal.

"Your terrible contempt has been my punishment. You have shown me there is no return from loathing or disdain. I love you madly. I should have gone had Adam died; all the more must I go because he lives. A man does not tear his friend from the arms of death to betray him. Besides, my going is my punishment for the thought that came to me that I would let him die, when the doctors said that his life depended on his nursing.

"Adieu, madame; in leaving Paris I lose all, but you lose nothing now in my being no longer near you.

"Your devoted

"Thaddeus Paz."

"If my poor Adam says he has lost a friend, what have I lost?" thought Clementine, sinking into a chair with her eyes fixed on the carpet.

The following letter Constantin had orders to give privately to the count:--

"My dear Adam,--Malaga has told me all. In the name of all your future happiness, never let a word escape you to Clementine about your visits to that girl; let her think that Malaga has cost me a hundred thousand francs. I know Clementine's character; she will never forgive you either your losses at cards or your visits to Malaga.

"I am not going to Khiva, but to the Caucasus. I have the spleen; and at the pace at which I mean to go I shall be either Prince Paz in three years, or dead. Good-by; though I have taken sixty-thousand francs from Nucingen, our accounts are even.

"Thaddeus."

"Idiot that I was," thought Adam; "I came near to cutting my throat just now, talking about Malaga."

It is now three years since Paz went away. The newspapers have as yet said nothing about any Prince Paz. The Comtesse Laginska is immensely interested in the expeditions of the Emperor Nicholas; she is Russian to the core, and reads with a sort of avidity all the news that comes from that distant land. Once or twice every winter she says to the Russian amba.s.sador, with an air of indifference, "Do you know what has become of our poor Comte Paz?"

Alas! most Parisian women, those beings who think themselves so clever and clear-sighted, pa.s.s and repa.s.s beside a Paz and never recognize him. Yes, many a Paz is unknown and misconceived, but--horrible to think of!--some are misconceived even though they are loved. The simplest women in society exact a certain amount of conventional sham from the greatest men. A n.o.ble love signifies nothing to them if rough and unpolished; it needs the cutting and setting of a jeweller to give it value in their eyes.

In January, 1842, the Comtesse Laginska, with her charm of gentle melancholy, inspired a violent pa.s.sion in the Comte de La Palferine, one of the most daring and presumptuous lions of the day. La Palferine was well aware that the conquest of a woman so guarded by reserve as the Comtesse Laginska was difficult, but he thought he could inveigle this charming creature into committing herself if he took her unawares, by the a.s.sistance of a certain friend of her own, a woman already jealous of her.

Quite incapable, in spite of her intelligence, of suspecting such treachery, the Comtesse Laginska committed the imprudence of going with her so-called friend to a masked ball at the Opera. About three in the morning, led away by the excitement of the scene, Clementine, on whom La Palferine had expended his seductions, consented to accept a supper, and was about to enter the carriage of her faithless friend. At this critical moment her arm was grasped by a powerful hand, and she was taken, in spite of her struggles, to her own carriage, the door of which stood open, though she did not know it was there.

"He has never left Paris!" she exclaimed to herself as she recognized Thaddeus, who disappeared when the carriage drove away.

Did any woman ever have a like romance in her life? Clementine is constantly hoping she may again see Paz.