Scenes from a Courtesan's Life Part 73

Hearing the guttural rattle that accompanied these words, the warder bowed and went. Jacques Collin clung wildly to this hope; but when he saw the doctor and the governor come in together, he perceived that the attempt was abortive, and coolly awaited the upshot of the visit, holding out his wrist for the doctor to feel his pulse.

"The Abbe is feverish," said the doctor to Monsieur Gault, "but it is the type of fever we always find in inculpated prisoners--and to me,"

he added, in the governor's ear, "it is always a sign of some degree of guilt."

Just then the governor, to whom the public prosecutor had intrusted Lucien's letter to be given to Jacques Collin, left the doctor and the prisoner together under the guard of the warder, and went to fetch the letter.

"Monsieur," said Jacques Collin, seeing the warder outside the door, and not understanding why the governor had left them, "I should think nothing of thirty thousand francs if I might send five lines to Lucien de Rubempre."

"I will not rob you of your money," said Doctor Lebrun; "no one in this world can ever communicate with him again----"

"No one?" said the prisoner in amazement. "Why?"

"He has hanged himself----"

No tigress robbed of her whelps ever startled an Indian jungle with a yell so fearful as that of Jacques Collin, who rose to his feet as a tiger rears to spring, and fired a glance at the doctor as scorching as the flash of a falling thunderbolt. Then he fell back on the bed, exclaiming:

"Oh, my son!"

"Poor man!" said the doctor, moved by this terrific convulsion of nature.

In fact, the first explosion gave way to such utter collapse, that the words, "Oh, my son," were but a murmur.

"Is this one going to die in our hands too?" said the turnkey.

"No; it is impossible!" Jacques Collin went on, raising himself and looking at the two witnesses of the scene with a dead, cold eye. "You are mistaken; it is not Lucien; you did not see. A man cannot hang himself in one of these cells. Look--how could I hang myself here? All Paris shall answer to me for that boy's life! G.o.d owes it to me."

The warder and the doctor were amazed in their turn--they, whom nothing had astonished for many a long day.

On seeing the governor, Jacques Collin, crushed by the very violence of this outburst of grief, seemed somewhat calmer.

"Here is a letter which the public prosecutor placed in my hands for you, with permission to give it to you sealed," said Monsieur Gault.

"From Lucien?" said Jacques Collin.

"Yes, monsieur."

"Is not that young man----"

"He is dead," said the governor. "Even if the doctor had been on the spot, he would, unfortunately, have been too late. The young man died--there--in one of the rooms----"

"May I see him with my own eyes?" asked Jacques Collin timidly. "Will you allow a father to weep over the body of his son?"

"You can, if you like, take his room, for I have orders to remove you from these cells; you are no longer in such close confinement, monsieur."

The prisoner's eyes, from which all light and warmth had fled, turned slowly from the governor to the doctor; Jacques Collin was examining them, fearing some trap, and he was afraid to go out of the cell.

"If you wish to see the body," said Lebrun, "you have no time to lose; it is to be carried away to-night."

"If you have children, gentlemen," said Jacques Collin, "you will understand my state of mind; I hardly know what I am doing. This blow is worse to me than death; but you cannot know what I am saying. Even if you are fathers, it is only after a fashion--I am a mother too--I--I am going mad--I feel it!"

By going through certain pa.s.sages which open only to the governor, it is possible to get very quickly from the cells to the private rooms. The two sets of rooms are divided by an underground corridor formed of two ma.s.sive walls supporting the vault over which Galerie Marchande, as it is called, is built. So Jacques Collin, escorted by the warder, who took his arm, preceded by the governor, and followed by the doctor, in a few minutes reached the cell where Lucien was lying stretched on the bed.

On seeing the body, he threw himself upon it, seizing it in a desperate embrace with a pa.s.sion and impulse that made these spectators shudder.

"There," said the doctor to Monsieur Gault, "that is an instance of what I was telling you. You see that man clutching the body, and you do not know what a corpse is; it is stone----"

"Leave me alone!" said Jacques Collin in a smothered voice; "I have not long to look at him. They will take him away to----"

He paused at the word "bury him."

"You will allow me to have some relic of my dear boy! Will you be so kind as to cut off a lock of his hair for me, monsieur," he said to the doctor, "for I cannot----"

"He was certainly his son," said Lebrun.

"Do you think so?" replied the governor in a meaning tone, which made the doctor thoughtful for a few minutes.

The governor gave orders that the prisoner should be left in this cell, and that some locks of hair should be cut for the self-styled father before the body should be removed.

At half-past five in the month of May it is easy to read a letter in the Conciergerie in spite of the iron bars and the close wire trellis that guard the windows. So Jacques Collin read the dreadful letter while he still held Lucien's hand.

The man is not known who can hold a lump of ice for ten minutes tightly clutched in the hollow of his hand. The cold penetrates to the very life-springs with mortal rapidity. But the effect of that cruel chill, acting like a poison, is as nothing to that which strikes to the soul from the cold, rigid hand of the dead thus held. Thus Death speaks to Life; it tells many dark secrets which kill many feelings; for in matters of feeling is not change death?

As we read through once more, with Jacques Collin, Lucien's last letter, it will strike us as being what it was to this man--a cup of poison:--

"_To the Abbe Carlos Herrera_.

"MY DEAR ABBE,--I have had only benefits from you, and I have betrayed you. This involuntary ingrat.i.tude is killing me, and when you read these lines I shall have ceased to exist. You are not here now to save me.

"You had given me full liberty, if I should find it advantageous, to destroy you by flinging you on the ground like a cigar-end; but I have ruined you by a blunder. To escape from a difficulty, deluded by a clever question from the examining judge, your son by adoption and grace went over to the side of those who aim at killing you at any cost, and insist on proving an ident.i.ty, which I know to be impossible, between you and a French villain. All is said.

"Between a man of your calibre and me--me of whom you tried to make a greater man than I am capable of being--no foolish sentiment can come at the moment of final parting. You hoped to make me powerful and famous, and you have thrown me into the gulf of suicide, that is all. I have long heard the broad pinions of that vertigo beating over my head.

"As you have sometimes said, there is the posterity of Cain and the posterity of Abel. In the great human drama Cain is in opposition. You are descended from Adam through that line, in which the devil still fans the fire of which the first spark was flung on Eve. Among the demons of that pedigree, from time to time we see one of stupendous power, summing up every form of human energy, and resembling the fevered beasts of the desert, whose vitality demands the vast s.p.a.ces they find there. Such men are as dangerous as lions would be in the heart of Normandy; they must have their prey, and they devour common men and crop the money of fools. Their sport is so dangerous that at last they kill the humble dog whom they have taken for a companion and made an idol of.

"When it is G.o.d's will, these mysterious beings may be a Moses, an Attila, Charlemagne, Mahomet, or Napoleon; but when He leaves a generation of these stupendous tools to rust at the bottom of the ocean, they are no more than a Pugatschef, a Fouche, a Louvel, or the Abbe Carlos Herrera. Gifted with immense power over tenderer souls, they entrap them and mangle them. It is grand, it is fine --in its way. It is the poisonous plant with gorgeous coloring that fascinates children in the woods. It is the poetry of evil. Men like you ought to dwell in caves and never come out of them. You have made me live that vast life, and I have had all my share of existence; so I may very well take my head out of the Gordian knot of your policy and slip it into the running knot of my cravat.

"To repair the mischief I have done, I am forwarding to the public prosecutor a retraction of my deposition. You will know how to take advantage of this doc.u.ment.

"In virtue of a will formally drawn up, rest.i.tution will be made, Monsieur l'Abbe, of the moneys belonging to your Order which you so imprudently devoted to my use, as a result of your paternal affection for me.

"And so, farewell. Farewell, colossal image of Evil and Corruption; farewell--to you who, if started on the right road, might have been greater than Ximenes, greater than Richelieu! You have kept your promises. I find myself once more just as I was on the banks of the Charente, after enjoying, by your help, the enchantments of a dream. But, unfortunately, it is not now in the waters of my native place that I shall drown the errors of a boy; but in the Seine, and my hole is a cell in the Conciergerie.

"Do not regret me: my contempt for you is as great as my admiration.

"LUCIEN."

A little before one in the morning, when the men came to fetch away the body, they found Jacques Collin kneeling by the bed, the letter on the floor, dropped, no doubt, as a suicide drops the pistol that has shot him; but the unhappy man still held Lucien's hand between his own, and was praying to G.o.d.