The Nabob Volume I Part 4

Oh! how humble and condescending the doctor's voice became, as he replied:

"Your work absorbs you completely, does it not, my dear Felicia? Is it something new that you're doing? I should say that it is very pretty."

He drew near to the still formless sketch in which a group of two animals could be vaguely distinguished, one of them, a greyhound, flying over the ground at a truly extraordinary pace.

"The idea came to me last night. I began to work by lamplight. My poor Kadour doesn't find it amusing," said the girl, looking with a caressing expression of affection at the greyhound, whose paws the small servant was trying to separate in order to force him into the proper pose.

Jenkins observed with a fatherly air that she did wrong to tire herself so, and added, taking her wrist with ecclesiastical precautions:

"Let us see, I am sure that you are feverish."

At the touch of that hand Felicia had a feeling of something very like repulsion.

"Let me alone--let me alone--your pearls can do nothing for me. When I am not working, I am bored, bored to death, so bored that I could kill myself; my ideas are of the color of that thick, brackish water flowing yonder. To be just at the beginning of life and to be disgusted with it! It's hard. I am reduced to the point of envying my poor Constance, who pa.s.ses her days in her chair, never opening her mouth, but smiling all by herself at her memories of the past. I have not even that, not even any pleasant memories to recall. I have nothing but work--work!"

[Ill.u.s.tration: _In Felicia's Studio_]

As she spoke, she worked fiercely, sometimes with the tool, sometimes with her fingers, which she wiped from time to time on a little sponge kept on the wooden frame on which the group stood; so that her complaints, her lamentations, inexplicable in a mouth of twenty years which had in repose the purity of a Grecian smile, seemed to be uttered at random, and addressed to no one in particular. And yet Jenkins seemed anxious and disturbed, notwithstanding the apparent interest he displayed in the artist's work, or rather in the artist herself, in the queenly grace of that mere girl, whose style of beauty seemed to have predestined her to the study of the plastic arts.

Annoyed by that admiring glance, which she felt like a weight, Felicia resumed:

"By the way, do you know that I saw your Nabob? He was pointed out to me at the Opera, Friday."

"Were you at the Opera, Friday?"

"Yes. The duke sent me his box."

Jenkins changed color.

"I persuaded Constance to go with me. It was the first time in twenty years, since her farewell performance, that she had entered the Opera.

It made a great impression on her. During the ballet especially, she trembled, she beamed, all her former triumphs sparkled in her eyes. How fortunate one is to have such emotions. A perfect type of his cla.s.s, that Nabob. You must bring him to see me. It would amuse me to do his head."

"What! why he is frightful! You can't have had a good look at him."

"Indeed I did, on the contrary. He was opposite us. That white Ethiopian visage would be superb in marble. And not commonplace, at all events. Moreover, if he's so ugly as all that, you won't be so unhappy as you were last year when I was doing Mora's bust. What a wicked face you had at that time, Jenkins!"

"Not for ten years of life," muttered Jenkins in a threatening voice, "would I go through those hours again. But it amuses you to see people suffer."

"You know very well that nothing amuses me," she said, shrugging her shoulders with supreme impertinence.

Then, without looking at him, without another word, she plunged into one of those periods of intense activity by means of which true artists escape from themselves and all their surroundings.

Jenkins took a few hurried steps, deeply moved, his lip swollen with avowals that dared not come forth, and began two or three sentences that met with no reply; at last, feeling that he was dismissed, he took his hat and walked toward the door.

"It's understood then, is it? I am to bring him here?"

"Who, pray?"

"Why, the Nabob. Only a moment ago you said yourself--"

"Oh! yes," said the strange creature, whose caprices were not of long duration, "bring him if you choose; I don't care particularly about it."

And her musical, listless voice, in which something seemed to have broken, the utter indifference of her whole bearing showed that it was true, that she cared for nothing on earth.

Jenkins went away in sore perplexity, with clouded brow. But as soon as he had pa.s.sed the door he resumed his smiling, cordial manner, being one of those men who wear a mask on the street. The mist, still visible in the neighborhood of the Seine, was reduced to a few floating shreds, which gave an air of vapory unsubstantiality to the houses on the quay, to the steam-boats of which only the paddle-wheels could be seen, and to the distant horizon, where the dome of the Invalides hovered like a gilded balloon, whose netting shed rays of light. The increasing warmth, the activity in the quarter indicated that noon was not far away and that it would soon be announced by the ringing of all the bells.

Before calling upon the Nabob, however, Jenkins had another call to make. But it seemed to be a great nuisance to him. However, as he had promised! So he said, with sudden decision, as he jumped into the carriage:

"68 Rue Saint-Ferdinand, aux Ternes."

Joe, the coachman, was scandalized and made his master repeat the address; even the horse showed some little hesitation, as if the valuable beast and the spotless new livery were disgusted at having to visit a faubourg so far away, outside the restricted but brilliant circle in which their master's patients were grouped together. They arrived, however, without hindrance, at the end of an unfinished provincial street, and at the last of its houses, a five-story building, which the street seemed to have sent out to reconnoitre and ascertain if it could safely continue in that direction, isolated as it was between desolate tracts of land awaiting prospective buildings or filled with the materials of demolished structures, with blocks of stone, old blinds with no rooms to shelter, boards with hanging hinges, a vast boneyard of a whole demolished quarter.

Innumerable signs swayed in the wind over the door, which was adorned with a large case of photographs, white with dust, before which Jenkins paused for a moment. Had the ill.u.s.trious physician come so far to have his picture taken? One might have thought so from the interest which detained him in front of that case, containing fifteen or twenty photographs representing the same family in different groups and att.i.tudes and with different expressions: an old gentleman with his chin supported by a high white stock, and a leather satchel under his arm, surrounded by a bevy of maidens with their hair arranged in braids or in curls. Sometimes the old gentleman had sat with only two of his daughters; or perhaps one of those pretty, graceful figures appeared alone, her elbow resting on a truncated column, her head bending over a book, in a natural and unstudied pose. But it was always the same motive with variations, and there was no other male figure in the case but the old gentleman in the white cravat, and no other female figures than those of his numerous daughters.

"Studios on the fifth floor," said a sign over the case. Jenkins sighed, measured with his eye the distance from the ground to the little balcony up among the clouds; then he made up his mind to enter.

In the hall he pa.s.sed a white cravat and a majestic leather satchel, evidently the old gentleman of the showcase. Upon being questioned, he replied that M. Maranne did in fact live on the fifth floor. "But," he added with an engaging smile, "the floors are not high." With that encouragement the Irishman started up an entirely new and narrow staircase, with landings no larger than a stair, a single door on each floor and windows which afforded glimpses of a melancholy paved courtyard and other stairways, all empty: one of those horrible modern houses, built by the dozen by contractors without a son, their greatest disadvantage consisting in the thinness of the part.i.tions, which forces all the lodgers to live together as in a Fourierite community. For the moment that disadvantage was not of serious consequence, only the fourth and fifth floors being occupied, as if the tenants had fallen from the sky.

On the fourth, behind a door bearing a copper plate with the words: M.

JOYEUSE, _Expert in Handwriting_, the doctor heard the sound of fresh, young laughter and conversation and active footsteps, which accompanied him to the door of the photographic establishment above.

These little industries, perching in out-of-the-way corners, and seeming to have no communication with the outer world, are one of the surprises of Paris. We wonder how people live who take to them for a living. What scrupulous providence, for instance, could send customers to a photographer on a fifth floor among waste lands, at the far end of Rue Ferdinand, or doc.u.ments for examination to the expert on the floor below. Jenkins, as he made that reflection, smiled a pitying smile, then entered without ceremony as he was invited to do by this inscription: "Walk in without knocking." Alas! the permission was not abused.--A tall youth in spectacles, who was writing at a small table, his legs wrapped in a traveling shawl, rose hurriedly to greet the visitor, whom his short-sightedness prevented him from recognizing.

"Good-morning, Andre," said the doctor, extending his hand cordially.

"Monsieur Jenkins!"

"I am a good fellow as always, you see. Your conduct to us, your persistence in living apart from your relatives, commended to my dignity the utmost reserve in dealing with you; but your mother wept.

And here I am."

As he was speaking, he glanced about the poor little studio, where the bare walls, the scanty furniture the brand-new photographic apparatus, the little fireplace _a la prussienne_, also new, which had never seen a fire, were disastrously apparent in the bright light that fell from the gla.s.s roof. The drawn features and straggling beard of the young man, whose very light eyes, high, narrow forehead, and long fair hair thrown back in disorder gave him the appearance of a visionary, all were accentuated in the uncompromising light; and so was the dogged will expressed in that limpid glance which met Jenkins' eye coldly, and offered in antic.i.p.ation an unconquerable opposition to all his arguments, all his protestations.

But the excellent Jenkins pretended not to notice it.

"You know how it is, my dear Andre. From the day that I married your mother, I have looked upon you as my son. I expected to leave you my office, my practice, to place your foot in a golden stirrup, and I was overjoyed to see you follow a career devoted to the welfare of mankind.

Suddenly, without a word of explanation, without a thought for the effect such a rupture might produce in the eyes of the world, you cut loose from us, you dropped your studies and renounced your future prospects, to embark in some degrading mode of life, to adopt an absurd trade, the refuge and the pretext of all those who are shut out from the society to which they belong."

"I am working at this trade for a living. It's a means of earning my bread while I wait."

"Wait for what?--literary renown?"

He glanced contemptuously at the papers scattered over the table.

"But all this does not touch the question; this is what I came here to say to you: an opportunity is offered you, a door thrown wide open to the future. The Work of Bethlehem is founded. The n.o.blest of my humanitarian dreams has taken shape. We have bought a magnificent villa at Nanterre in which to install our first branch. The superintendence, the management of that establishment is what it has occurred to me to offer to you, as to another myself. A princely house to live in, the salary of a major-general, and the satisfaction of rendering a service to the great human family. Say the word and I will take you to see the Nabob, the n.o.ble-hearted man who pays the expenses of our undertaking.

Do you accept?"

"No," said the author, so abruptly that Jenkins was disconcerted.

"That's it. I expected a refusal when I came here, but I came none the less. I took for my motto, 'Do what is right, without hope.' And I am faithful to my motto. So, it's understood, is it--that you prefer a life dependent on chance, without prospects and without dignity, to the honorable, dignified, useful life that I offer you?"