The Nabob Part 44

"What does that prove? She is at her business as a stager of new fashions. It is very pretty, that hat. In Desgrange's racing colours."

"And Jenkins? What is Jenkins doing?"

"At Tunis, with Felicia. Old Brahim has seen them both. It seems that the Bey has begun to take the pearls."

"The deuce he has!"

Farther along, soft voices were murmuring:

"Yes, father, do, do go speak to him. See how lonely he looks, poor man!"

"But, children, I do not know him."

"Never mind. Just a bow. Something to show him that he is not utterly deserted."

Thereupon the little old gentleman, very red in the face and wearing a white tie, stepped quickly in front of the Nabob, and ceremoniously raised his hat to him with great respect. With what grat.i.tude, what a smile of eager good-will was that solitary greeting returned, that greeting from a man whom Jansoulet did not know, whom he had never seen, and who had yet exerted a weighty influence upon his destiny; for, but for the _pere_ Joyeuse, the chairman of the board of the Territorial would probably have shared the fate of the Marquis de Bois l'Hery. Thus it is that in the tangle of modern society, that great web of interests, ambitions, services accepted and rendered, all the various worlds are connected, united beneath the surface, from the highest existences to the most humble; this it is that explains the variegation, the complexity of this study of manners, the collection of the scattered threads of which the writer who is careful of truth is bound to make the background of his story.

In ten minutes the Nabob had been subjected to every manifestation of the terrible ostracism of that Paris world to which he had neither relationship nor serious ties, and whose contempt isolated him more surely than a visiting monarch is isolated by respect--the averted look, the apparently aimless step aside, the hat suddenly put on and pulled down over the eyes. Overcome by embarra.s.sment and shame, he stumbled.

Some one said quite loudly, "He is drunk," and all that the poor man could manage to do was to return and shut himself up in the salon at the back of his box. Ordinarily, this little retreat was crowded during the intervals between the acts by stock-brokers and journalists. They laughed and smoked and made a great noise; the manager would come to greet his sleeping partner. But on this evening there was n.o.body. And the absence of Cardailhac, with his keen nose for success, signified fully to Jansoulet the measure of his disgrace.

"What have I done? Why will Paris have no more of me?"

Thus he questioned himself amid a solitude that was accentuated by the noises around, the abrupt turning of keys in the doors of the boxes, the thousand exclamations of an amused crowd. Then suddenly, the freshness of his luxurious surroundings, the Moorish lantern casting strange shadows on the brilliant silks of the divan and walls, reminded him of the date of his arrival. Six months! Only six months since he came to Paris! Completely done for and ruined in six months! He sank into a kind of torpor, from which he was roused by the sound of applause and enthusiastic bravos. It was decidedly a great success--this play _Revolt_. There were some pa.s.sages of strength and satire, and the violent tirades, a trifle over-emphatic but written with youth and sincerity, excited the audience after the idyllic calm of the opening.

Jansoulet in his turn wished to hear and see. This theatre belonged to him after all. His place in that stage-box had cost him over a million francs; the very least he could do was to occupy it.

So he seated himself in the front of his box. In the theatre the heat was suffocating in spite of the fans which were vigorously at work, throwing reflections from their bright spangles through the impalpable atmosphere of silence. The house was listening religiously to an indignant and lofty denunciation of the scamps who occupied exalted positions, after having robbed their fellows in those depths from which they were sprung. Certainly, Maranne when he wrote these fine lines had been far from having the Nabob in his mind. But the public saw an allusion in them; and while a triple salvo of applause greeted the conclusion of the speech, all heads were turned towards the stage-box on the left with an indignant, openly offensive movement. The poor wretch, pilloried in his own theatre! A pillory which had cost him so dear!

This time he made no attempt to escape the insult, but settled himself resolutely in his seat, with arms folded, and braved the crowd that was staring at him--those hundreds of faces raised in mockery, that virtuous _tout Paris_ which had seized upon him as a scapegoat and was driving him into the wilderness, after having laden him with the burden of all its own crimes.

A pretty gang, truly, for a manifestation of that kind! Opposite, the box of a bankrupt banker, the wife and her lover sitting next each other in the front row, the husband behind in the shadow, voluntarily inconspicuous and solemn. Near them the frequent trio of a mother who has married her daughter in accordance with the personal inclination of her own heart, in order to make a son-in-law of her lover. Then irregular households, courtesans exhibiting the price of shame, diamonds like circlets of fire riveted around arms and neck. And those groups of emasculate youths, with their open collars and painted eyebrows, whose shirts of embroidered cambric and white satin corsets people used to admire in the guest-chambers at Compiegne; those _mignons_, of the time of Agrippa, calling each other among themselves: "My heart--My dear girl." An a.s.semblage of all the scandals, all the turpitudes, consciences sold or for sale, the vice of an epoch devoid of greatness and without originality, intent on making trial of the caprices of every other age.

And these were the people who were insulting him and crying: "Away with thee, thou art unworthy!"

"Unworthy--I! But my worth is a hundred times greater than that of any among you, wretches that you are! You make my millions a reproach to me, but who has helped me to spend them? Thou, cowardly and treacherous comrade, who hidest thy sick pasha-like obesity in the corner of thy stage-box! I made thy fortune along with my own in the days when we shared all things in brotherly community. Thou, pale marquis--I paid a hundred thousand francs at the club in order to save thee from shameful expulsion!

"Thee I covered with jewels, hussy, letting thee pa.s.s for my mistress, because that kind of thing makes a good impression in our world--but without ever asking thee anything in return. And thou, brazen-faced journalist, who for brain hast all the dirty sediment of thy inkstand, and on thy conscience as many spots as thy queen has on her skin, thou thinkest that I have not paid thee thy price and that is why thy insults are heaped on me. Yes, yes; stare at me, you vermin! I am proud. My worth is above yours."

All that he was thus saying to himself mentally, in an ungovernable rage, visible in the quivering of his pale, thick lips. The unfortunate man, who was nearly mad, was about perhaps to shout it aloud in the silence, to denounce that insulting crowd--who knows?--to spring into the midst of it, kill one of them--ah! kill _one_ of them--when he felt a light tap on his shoulder, and a fair head came before his eyes, serious and frank, two hands held out, which he grasped convulsively, like a drowning man.

"Ah! dear friend, dear--" the poor man stammered. But he had not the strength to say more. This emotion of joy coming suddenly in the midst of his fury melted him into a sobbing torrent of tears, and stifled words. His face became purple. He motioned "Take me away." And, stumbling in his walk, leaning on de Gery's arm, he only managed to cross the threshold of his box before he fell prostrate in the corridor.

"Bravo! Bravo!" cried the house in reply to the speech which the actor had just finished; and there was a noise like a hailstorm, and stamping of enthusiastic feet while the great lifeless body, raised with difficulty by the scene-shifters, was carried through the brightly lighted wings, crowded with people pressing in their curiosity round the stage, excited by the atmosphere of success and who hardly noticed the pa.s.sage of the inert and vanquished man, borne on men's arms like some victim of a riot. They laid him on a couch in the room where the properties were stored, Paul de Gery at his side, with a doctor and two porters who eagerly lent all the a.s.sistance in their power. Cardailhac, extremely busy over his play, had sent word that he should come to hear the news "directly, after the fifth act."

Bleeding after bleeding, cuppings, mustard leaves--nothing brought even a quiver to the skin of the patient, insensible apparently to all the remedies usually employed in cases of apoplexy. The whole being seemed to be surrendering to death, to be preparing the way for the rigidity of the corpse; and this in the most sinister place in the world, this chaos, lighted by a lantern merely, amid which there lie about pell-mell in the dust all the remains of former plays--gilt furniture, curtains with gay fringes, coaches, boxes, card-tables, dismantled staircases and bal.u.s.ters, among ropes and pulleys, a confusion of out-of-date theatrical properties, thrown down, broken, and damaged. Bernard Jansoulet, as he lay among this wreckage, his shirt opened over his chest, pale and covered with blood, was indeed a man come to the shipwreck of his life, bruised and tossed aside along with the pitiful ruins of his artificial luxury dispersed and broken up, in the whirlpool of Paris. Paul, with aching heart, contemplated the scene sadly, that face with its short nose, preserving in its inertia the savage yet kindly expression of an inoffensive creature that tried to defend itself before it died and had not time to bite. He reproached himself bitterly with his inability to be of any service to him. Where was that fine project of leading Jansoulet across the bogs, of guarding him against ambushes? All that he had been able to do had been to save a few millions for him, and even these had come too late.

The windows had just been thrown open upon the curved balcony over the boulevard, now at the height of its noisy and brilliant stir. The theatre was surrounded by, as it were, a plinth of gas-jets, a zone of fire which brought the gloomiest recesses into light, p.r.i.c.ked out with revolving lanterns, like stars journeying through a dark sky. The play was over. People were coming out. The black and dense crowd on the steps was dispersing over the white pavements, on its way to spread through the town the news of a great success and the name of an unknown author who to-morrow would be triumphant and famous. A splendid evening, so that the windows of the restaurants were lighted up in gaiety and files of carriages pa.s.sed through the streets at a late hour. This tumult of festivity which the poor Nabob had loved so keenly, which seemed to go so well with the dizzy whirl of his existence, roused him to life for a moment. His lips moved, and into his dilated eyes, turned towards de Gery, there came before he died a pained expression, beseeching and protesting, as though to call upon him as witness of one of the greatest and most cruel acts of injustice that Paris has ever committed.