The Two Brothers Part 9

"The disgrace of it!" cried the Descoings.

"You shall leave this room, or you shall kill me!" cried Joseph, springing on his brother with the fury of a lion.

"My G.o.d! my G.o.d!" cried Agathe, trying to separate the brothers.

At this moment Bixiou and Haudry the doctor entered. Joseph had just knocked his brother over and stretched him on the ground.

"He is a regular wild beast," he cried. "Don't speak another word, or I'll--"

"I'll pay you for this!" roared Philippe.

"A family explanation," remarked Bixiou.

"Lift him up," said the doctor, looking at him. "He is as ill as Madame Descoings; undress him and put him to bed; get off his boots."

"That's easy to say," cried Bixiou, "but they must be cut off; his legs are swollen."

Agathe took a pair of scissors. When she had cut down the boots, which in those days were worn outside the clinging trousers, ten pieces of gold rolled on the floor.

"There it is,--her money," murmured Philippe. "Cursed fool that I was, I forgot it. I too have missed a fortune."

He was seized with a horrible delirium of fever, and began to rave.

Joseph, a.s.sisted by old Desroches, who had come back, and by Bixiou, carried him to his room. Doctor Haudry was obliged to write a line to the Hopital de la Charite and borrow a strait-waistcoat; for the delirium ran so high as to make him fear that Philippe might kill himself,--he was raving. At nine o'clock calm was restored. The Abbe Loraux and Desroches endeavored to comfort Agathe, who never ceased to weep at her aunt's bedside. She listened to them in silence, and obstinately shook her head; Joseph and the Descoings alone knew the extent and depth of her inward wound.

"He will learn to do better, mother," said Joseph, when Desroches and Bixiou had left.

"Oh!" cried the widow, "Philippe is right,--my father cursed me: I have no right to--Here, here is your money," she said to Madame Descoings, adding Joseph's three hundred francs to the two hundred found on Philippe. "Go and see if your brother does not need something," she said to Joseph.

"Will you keep a promise made to a dying woman?" asked Madame Descoings, who felt that her mind was failing her.

"Yes, aunt."

"Then swear to me to give your property to young Desroches for a life annuity. My income ceases at my death; and from what you have just said, I know you will let that wretch wring the last farthing out of you."

"I swear it, aunt."

The old woman died on the 31st of December, five days after the terrible blow which old Desroches had so innocently given her. The five hundred francs--the only money in the household--were barely enough to pay for her funeral. She left a small amount of silver and some furniture, the value of which Madame Bixiou paid over to her grandson Bixiou. Reduced to eight hundred francs' annuity paid to her by young Desroches, who had bought a business without clients, and himself took the capital of twelve thousand francs, Agathe gave up her _appartement_ on the third floor, and sold all her superfluous furniture. When, at the end of a month, Philippe seemed to be convalescent, his mother coldly explained to him that the costs of his illness had taken all her ready money, that she should be obliged in future to work for her living, and she urged him, with the utmost kindness, to re-enter the army and support himself.

"You might have spared me that sermon," said Philippe, looking at his mother with an eye that was cold from utter indifference. "I have seen all along that neither you nor my brother love me. I am alone in the world; I like it best!"

"Make yourself worthy of our affection," answered the poor mother, struck to the very heart, "and we will give it back to you--"

"Nonsense!" he cried, interrupting her.

He took his old hat, rubbed white at the edges, stuck it over one ear, and went downstairs, whistling.

"Philippe! where are you going without any money?" cried his mother, who could not repress her tears. "Here, take this--"

She held out to him a hundred francs in gold, wrapped up in paper.

Philippe came up the stairs he had just descended, and took the money.

"Well; won't you kiss me?" she said, bursting into tears.

He pressed his mother in his arms, but without the warmth of feeling which was all that could give value to the embrace.

"Where shall you go?" asked Agathe.

"To Florentine, Girodeau's mistress. Ah! they are real friends!" he answered brutally.

He went away. Agathe turned back with trembling limbs, and failing eyes, and aching heart. She fell upon her knees, prayed G.o.d to take her unnatural child into His own keeping, and abdicated her woeful motherhood.

CHAPTER VI

By February, 1822, Madame Bridau had settled into the attic room recently occupied by Philippe, which was over the kitchen of her former _appartement_. The painter's studio and bedroom was opposite, on the other side of the staircase. When Joseph saw his mother thus reduced, he was determined to make her as comfortable as possible. After his brother's departure he a.s.sisted in the re-arrangement of the garret room, to which he gave an artist's touch. He added a rug; the bed, simple in character but exquisite in taste, had something monastic about it; the walls, hung with a cheap glazed cotton selected with taste, of a color which harmonized with the furniture and was newly covered, gave the room an air of elegance and nicety. In the hallway he added a double door, with a "portiere" to the inner one. The window was shaded by a blind which gave soft tones to the light. If the poor mother's life was reduced to the plainest circ.u.mstances that the life of any woman could have in Paris, Agathe was at least better off than all others in a like case, thanks to her son.

To save his mother from the cruel cares of such reduced housekeeping, Joseph took her every day to dine at a table-d'hote in the rue de Beaune, frequented by well-bred women, deputies, and t.i.tled people, where each person's dinner cost ninety francs a month. Having nothing but the breakfast to provide, Agathe took up for her son the old habits she had formerly had with the father. But in spite of Joseph's pious lies, she discovered the fact that her dinner was costing him nearly a hundred francs a month. Alarmed at such enormous expense, and not imaging that her son could earn much money by painting naked women, she obtained, thanks to her confessor, the Abbe Loraux, a place worth seven hundred francs a year in a lottery-office belonging to the Comtesse de Bauvan, the widow of a Chouan leader. The lottery-offices of the government, the lot, as one might say, of privileged widows, ordinarily sufficed for the support of the family of each person who managed them.

But after the Restoration the difficulty of rewarding, within the limits of const.i.tutional government, all the services rendered to the cause, led to the custom of giving to reduced women of t.i.tle not only one but two lottery-offices, worth, usually, from six to ten thousand a year. In such cases, the widow of a general or n.o.bleman thus "protected" did not keep the lottery-office herself; she employed a paid manager. When these managers were young men they were obliged to employ an a.s.sistant; for, according to law, the offices had to be kept open till midnight; moreover, the reports required by the minister of finance involved considerable writing. The Comtesse de Bauvan, to whom the Abbe Loraux explained the circ.u.mstances of the widow Bridau, promised, in case her manager should leave, to give the place to Agathe; meantime she stipulated that the widow should be taken as a.s.sistant, and receive a salary of six hundred francs. Poor Agathe, who was obliged to be at the office by ten in the morning, had scarcely time to get her dinner.

She returned to her work at seven in the evening, remaining there till midnight. Joseph never, for two years, failed to fetch his mother at night, and bring her back to the rue Mazarin; and often he went to take her to dinner; his friends frequently saw him leave the opera or some brilliant salon to be punctually at midnight at the office in the rue Vivienne.

Agathe soon acquired the monotonous regularity of life which becomes a stay and a support to those who have endured the shock of violent sorrows. In the morning, after doing up her room, in which there were no longer cats and little birds, she prepared the breakfast at her own fire and carried it into the studio, where she ate it with her son. She then arranged Joseph's bedroom, put out the fire in her own chamber, and brought her sewing to the studio, where she sat by the little iron stove, leaving the room if a comrade or a model entered it. Though she understood nothing whatever of art, the silence of the studio suited her. In the matter of art she made not the slightest progress; she attempted no hypocrisy; she was utterly amazed at the importance they all attached to color, composition, drawing. When the Cenacle friends or some brother-painter, like Schinner, Pierre Gra.s.sou, Leon de Lora,--a very youthful "rapin" who was called at that time Mistigris,--discussed a picture, she would come back afterwards, examine it attentively, and discover nothing to justify their fine words and their hot disputes. She made her son's shirts, she mended his stockings, she even cleaned his palette, supplied him with rags to wipe his brushes, and kept things in order in the studio. Seeing how much thought his mother gave to these little details, Joseph heaped attentions upon her in return. If mother and son had no sympathies in the matter of art, they were at least bound together by signs of tenderness. The mother had a purpose. One morning as she was petting Joseph while he was sketching a large picture (finished in after years and never understood), she said, as it were, casually and aloud,--

"My G.o.d! what is he doing?"

"Doing? who?"

"Philippe."

"Oh, ah! he's sowing his wild oats; that fellow will make something of himself by and by."

"But he has gone through the lesson of poverty; perhaps it was poverty which changed him to what he is. If he were prosperous he would be good--"

"You think, my dear mother, that he suffered during that journey of his.

You are mistaken; he kept carnival in New York just as he does here--"

"But if he is suffering at this moment, near to us, would it not be horrible?"

"Yes," replied Joseph. "For my part, I will gladly give him some money; but I don't want to see him; he killed our poor Descoings."

"So," resumed Agathe, "you would not be willing to paint his portrait?"

"For you, dear mother, I'd suffer martyrdom. I can make myself remember nothing except that he is my brother."

"His portrait as a captain of dragoons on horseback?"

"Yes, I've a copy of a fine horse by Gros and I haven't any use for it."