Other People's Money 28 – Gaboriau · Verses Across
Literature · Detective Fiction
Other People's Money 28Part 1 · Chapter 28
18
Literature · Detective Fiction
Other People's Money 28
Part 1 · Chapter 28
GaboriauEnglish
For about a minute Maxence remained stupefied at this sudden denouement; and, when he had recovered his presence of mind and his voice, Mlle. Lucienne had disappeared, and he could hear her bolting her door, and striking a match against the wall.
He might also have thought that he was awaking from a dream, had he not had, to attest the reality, the vague perfume which filled his room, and the light shawl, which Mlle. Lucienne wore as she came in, and which she had forgotten, on a chair.
The night was almost ended: six o’clock had just struck. Still he did not feel in the least sleepy. His head was heavy, his temples throbbing, his eyes smarting. Opening his window, he leaned out to breathe the morning air. The day was dawning pale and cold. A furtive and livid light glanced along the damp walls of the narrow court of the Hotel des Folies, as at the bottom of a well. Already arose those confused noises which announce the waking of Paris, and above which can be heard the sonorous rolling of the milkmen’s carts, the loud slamming of doors, and the sharp sound of hurrying steps on the hard pavement.
But soon Maxence felt a chill coming over him. He closed the window, threw some wood in the chimney, and stretched himself on his chair, his feet towards the fire. It was a most serious event which had just occurred in his existence; and, as much as he could, he endeavored to measure its bearings, and to calculate its consequences in the future.
He kept thinking of the story of that strange girl, her haughty frankness when unrolling certain phases of her life, of her wonderful impassibility, and of the implacable contempt for humanity which her every word betrayed. Where had she learned that dignity, so simple and so noble, that measured speech, that admirable respect of herself, which had enabled her to pass through so much filth without receiving a stain?
“What a woman!” he thought.
Before knowing her, he loved her. Now he was convulsed by one of those exclusive passions which master the whole being. Already he felt himself so much under the charm, subjugated, dominated, fascinated; he understood so well that he was going to cease being his own master; that his free will was about escaping from him; that he would be in Mlle. Lucienne’s hands like wax under the modeler’s fingers; he saw himself so thoroughly at the discretion of an energy superior to his own, that he was almost frightened.
“It’s my whole future that I am going to risk,” he thought.
And there was no middle path. Either he must fly at once, without waiting for Mlle. Lucienne to awake, fly without looking behind, or else stay, and then accept all the chances of an incurable passion for a woman who, perhaps, might never care for him. And he remained wavering, like the traveler who finds himself at the intersection of two roads, and, knowing that one leads to the goal, and the other to an abyss, hesitates which to take.
With this difference, however, that if the traveler errs, and discovers his error, he is always free to retrace his steps; whereas man, in life, can never return to his starting-point. Every step he takes is final; and if he has erred, if he has taken the fatal road, there is no remedy.
“Well, no matter!” exclaimed Maxence. “It shall not be said that through cowardice I have allowed that happiness to escape which passes within my reach. I shall stay.” And at once he began to examine what reasonably he might expect; for there was no mistaking Mlle. Lucienne’s intentions. When she had said, “Do you wish to be friends?” she had meant exactly that, and nothing else,--friends, and only friends.
“And yet,” thought Maxence, “if I had not inspired her with a real interest, would she have so wholly confided unto me? She is not ignorant of the fact that I love her; and she knows life too well to suppose that I will cease to love her when she has allowed me a certain amount of intimacy.”
His heart filled with hope at the idea.
“My mistress,” he thought, “never, evidently, but my wife. Why not?”
But the very next moment he became a prey to the bitterest discouragement. He thought that perhaps Mlle. Lucienne might have some capital interest in thus making a confidant of him. She had not told him the explanation given her by the peace-officer. Had she not, perhaps, succeeded in lifting a corner of the veil which covered the secret of her birth? Was she on the track of her enemies? and had she discovered the motive of their animosity?
“Is it possible,” thought Maxence, “that I should be but one of the powers in the game she is playing? How do I know, that, if she wins, she will not cast me off?”
In the midst of these thoughts, he had gradually fallen asleep, murmuring to the last the name of Lucienne.
The creaking of his opening door woke him up suddenly. He started to his feet, and met Mlle. Lucienne coming in.
“How is this?” said she. “You did not go to bed?”
“You recommended me to reflect,” he replied. “I’ve been reflecting.”
He looked at his watch: it was twelve o’clock.
“Which, however,” he added, “did not keep me from going to sleep.”
All the doubts that besieged him at the moment when he had been overcome by sleep now came back to his mind with painful vividness.
“And not only have I been sleeping,” he went on, “but I have been dreaming too.”
Mlle. Lucienne fixed upon him her great black eyes.
“Can you tell me your dream?” she asked.
He hesitated. Had he had but one minute to reflect, perhaps he would not have spoken; but he was taken unawares.
“I dreamed,” he replied, “that we were friends in the noblest and purest acceptance of that word. Intelligence, heart, will, all that I am, and all that I can,--I laid every thing at your feet. You accepted the most entire devotion, the most respectful and the most tender that man is capable of. Yes, we were friends indeed; and upon a glimpse of love, never expressed, I planned a whole future of love.” He stopped.
“Well?” she asked.
“Well, when my hopes seemed on the point of being realized, it happened that the mystery of your birth was suddenly revealed to you. You found a noble, powerful, and wealthy family. You resumed the illustrious name of which you had been robbed; your enemies were crushed; and your rights were restored to you. It was no longer Van Klopen’s hired carriage that stopped in front of the Hotel des Folies, but a carriage bearing a gorgeous coat of arms. That carriage was yours; and it came to take you to your own residence in the Faubourg St. Germain, or to your ancestral manor.”
“And yourself?” inquired the girl.
Maxence repressed one of those nervous spasms which frequently break out in tears, and, with a gloomy look,
“I,” he answered, “standing on the edge of the pavement, I waited for a word or a look from you. You had forgotten my very existence. Your coachman whipped his horses; they started at a gallop; and soon I lost sight of you. And then a voice, the inexorable voice of fate, cried to me, ‘Never more shalt thou see her!’”
With a superb gesture Mlle. Lucienne drew herself up.
“It is not with your heart, I trust, that you judge me, M. Maxence Favoral,” she uttered.
He trembled lest he had offended her.
“I beseech you,” he began.
But she went on in a voice vibrating with emotion,
“I am not of those who basely deny their past. Your dream will never be realized. Those things are only seen on the stage. If it did realize itself, however, if the carriage with the coat-of-arms did come to the door, the companion of the evil days, the friend who offered me his month’s salary to pay my debt, would have a seat by my side.”
That was more happiness than Maxence would have dared to hope for. He tried, in order to express his gratitude, to find some of those words which always seem to be lacking at the most critical moments. But he was suffocating; and the tears, accumulated by so many successive emotions, were rising to his eyes.
With a passionate impulse, he seized Mlle. Lucienne’s hand, and, taking it to his lips, he covered it with kisses. Gently but resolutely she withdrew her hand, and, fixing upon him her beautiful clear gaze,
“Friends,” she uttered.
Her accent alone would have been sufficient to dissipate the presumptuous illusions of Maxence, had he had any. But he had none.
“Friends only,” he replied, “until the day when you shall be my wife. You cannot forbid me to hope. You love no one?”
“No one.”
“Well since we are going to tread the path of life, let me think that we may find love at some turn of the road.”
She made no answer. And thus was sealed between them a treaty of friendship, to which they were to remain so strictly faithful, that the word “love” never once rose to their lips.
In appearance there was no change in their mode of life.
Every morning, at seven o’clock, Mlle. Lucienne went to M. Van Klopen’s, and an hour later Maxence started for his office. They returned home at night, and spent their evenings together by the fireside.
But what was easy to foresee now took place.
Weak and undecided by nature, Maxence began very soon to feel the influence of the obstinate and energetic character of the girl. She infused, as it were, in his veins, a warmer and more generous blood. Gradually she imbued him with her ideas, and from her own will gave him one.
He had told her in all sincerity his history, the miseries of his home, M. Favoral’s parsimony and exaggerated severity, his mother’s resigned timidity, and Mlle. Gilberte’s resolute nature.
He had concealed nothing of his past life, of his errors and his follies, confessing even the worst of his actions; as, for instance, having abused his mother’s and sister’s affection to extort from them all the money they earned.
He had admitted to her that it was only with great reluctance and under pressure of necessity, that he worked at all; that he was far from being rich; that although he took his dinner with his parents, his salary barely sufficed for his wants; and that he had debts.
He hoped, however, he added, that it would not be always thus, and that, sooner or later, he would see the termination of all this misery and privation; for his father had at least fifty thousand francs a year and some day he must be rich.
Far from smiling, Mlle. Lucienne frowned at such a prospect.
“Ah! your father is a millionaire, is he?” she interrupted. “Well, I understand now how, at twenty-five, after refusing all the positions which have been offered to you, you have no position. You relied on your father, instead of relying on yourself. Judging that he worked hard enough for two, you bravely folded your arms, waiting for the fortune which he is amassing, and which you seem to consider yours.”
Such morality seemed a little steep to Maxence. “I think,” he began, “that, if one is the son of a rich man--”
“One has the right to be useless, I suppose?” added the girl.
“I do not mean that; but--”
“There is no but about it. And the proof that your views are wrong, is that they have brought you where you are, and deprived you of your own free will. To place one’s self at the mercy of another, be that other your own father, is always silly; and one is always at the mercy of the man from whom he expects money that he has not earned. Your father would never have been so harsh, had he not believed that you could not do without him.”
He wanted to discuss: she stopped him.
“Do you wish the proof that you are at M. Favoral’s mercy?” she said. “Very well. You spoke of marrying me.”
“Ah, if you were willing!”
“Very well. Go and speak of it to your father.”
“I suppose--”
“You don’t suppose any thing at all: you are absolutely certain that he will refuse you his consent.”
“I could do without it.”
“I admit that you could. But do you know what he would do then? He would arrange things in such a way that you would never get a centime of his fortune.”
Maxence had never thought of that.
“Therefore,” the young girl went on gayly, “though there is as yet no question of marriage, learn to secure your independence; that is, the means of living. And to that effect let us work.”
It was from that moment, that Mme. Favoral had noticed in her son the change that had surprised her so much.
Under the inspiration, under the impulsion, of Mlle. Lucienne, Maxence had been suddenly taken with a zeal for work, and a desire to earn money, of which he could not have been suspected.
He was no longer late at his office, and had not, at the end of each month, ten or fifteen francs’ fines to pay.
Every morning, as soon as she was up, Mlle. Lucienne came to knock at his door. “Come, get up!” she cried to him.
And quick he jumped out of bed and dressed, so that he might bid her good-morning before she left.
In the evening, the last mouthful of his dinner was hardly swallowed, before he began copying the documents which he procured from M. Chapelain’s successor.
And often he worked quite late in the night whilst by his side Mlle. Lucienne applied herself to some work of embroidery.
The girl was the cashier of the association; and she administered the common capital with such skillful and such scrupulous economy, that Maxence soon succeeded in paying off his creditors.
“Do you know,” she was saying at the end of December, “that, between us, we have earned over six hundred francs this month?”
On Sundays only, after a week of which not a minute had been lost, they indulged in some little recreation.
If the weather was not too bad, they went out together, dined in some modest restaurant, and finished the day at the theatre.
Having thus a common existence, both young, free, and having their rooms divided only by a narrow passage it was difficult that people should believe in the innocence of their intercourse. The proprietors of the Hotel des Folies believed nothing of the kind; and they were not alone in that opinion.
Mlle. Lucienne having continued to show herself in the Bois on the afternoons when the weather was fine, the number of fools who annoyed her with their attentions had greatly increased. Among the most obstinate could be numbered M. Costeclar, who was pleased to declare, upon his word of honor, that he had lost his sleep, and his taste for business, since the day when, together with M. Saint Pavin, he had first seen Mlle. Lucienne.
The efforts of his valet, and the letters which he had written, having proved useless, M. Costeclar had made up his mind to act in person; and gallantly he had come to put himself on guard in front of the Hotel des Folies.
Great was his surprise, when he saw Mlle. Lucienne coming out arm in arm with Maxence; and greater still was his spite.
“That girl is a fool,” he thought, “to prefer to me a fellow who has not two hundred francs a month to spend. But never mind! He laughs best who laughs last.”
And, as he was a man fertile in expedients, he went the next day to take a walk in the neighborhood of the Mutual Credit; and, having met M. Favoral by chance, he told him how his son Maxence was ruining himself for a young lady whose toilets were a scandal, insinuating delicately that it was his duty, as the head of the family, to put a stop to such a thing.
This was precisely the time when Maxence was endeavoring to obtain a situation in the office of the Mutual Credit.
It is true that the idea was not original with him, and that he had even vehemently rejected it, when, for the first time, Mlle. Lucienne had suggested it.
“What!” had he exclaimed, “be employed in the same establishment as my father? Suffer at the office the same intolerable despotism as at home? I’d rather break stones on the roads.”
But Mlle. Lucienne was not the girl to give up so easily a project conceived and carefully matured by herself.
She returned to the charge with that infinite art of women, who understand so marvelously well how to turn a position which they cannot carry in front. She kept the matter so well before him, she spoke of it so often and so much, on every occasion, and under all pretexts, that he ended by persuading himself that it was the only reasonable and practical thing he could do, the only way in which he had any chance of making his fortune; and so, one evening overcoming his last hesitations,
“I am going to speak about it to my father,” he said to Mlle. Lucienne.
But whether he had been influenced by M. Costeclar’s insinuations, or for some other reason, M. Favoral had rejected indignantly his son’s request, saying that it was impossible to trust a young man who was ruining himself for the sake of a miserable creature.
Maxence had become crimson with rage on hearing the woman spoken of thus, whom he loved to madness, and who, far from ruining him, was making him.
He returned to the Hotel des Folies in an indescribable state of exasperation.
“There’s the result,” he said to Mlle. Lucienne, “of the step which you have urged me so strongly to take.”
She seemed neither surprised nor irritated.
“Very well,” she replied simply.
But Maxence could not resign himself so quietly to such a cruel disappointment; and, not having the slightest suspicion of Costeclar’s doings,
“And such is,” he added, “the result of all the gossip of these stupid shop-keepers who run to see you every time you go out in the carriage.”
The girl shrugged her shoulders contemptuously. “I expected it,” she said, “the day when I accepted M. Van Klopen’s offers.”
“Everybody believes that you are my mistress.”
“What matters it, since it is not so?”
Maxence did not dare to confess that this was precisely what made him doubly angry; and he shuddered at the thought of the ridicule that would certainly be heaped upon him, if the true state of the case was known.
“We ought to move,” he suggested.
“What’s the use? Wherever we should go, it would be the same thing. Besides, I don’t want to leave this neighborhood.”
“And I am too much your friend not to tell you, that your reputation in it is absolutely lost.”
“I have no accounts to render to any one.”
“Except to your friend the commissary of police, however.”
A pale smile flitted upon her lips. “Ah!” she uttered, “he knows the truth.”
“You have seen him again, then?”
“Several times.”
“Since we have known each other?”
“Yes.”
“And you never told me anything about it?”
“I did not think it necessary.”
Maxence insisted no more; but, by the sharp pang that he felt, he realized how dear Mlle. Lucienne had become to him.
“She has secrets from me,” thought he,--“from me who would deem it a crime to have any from her.”
What secrets? Had she concealed from him that she was pursuing an object which had become, as it were, that of her whole life. Had she not told him, that with the assistance of her friend the peace-officer, who had now become commissary of police of the district, she hoped to penetrate the mystery of her birth, and to revenge herself on the villains, who, three times, had attempted to do away with her?
She had never mentioned her projects again; but it was evident that she had not abandoned them, for she would at the same time have given up her rides to the bois, which were to her an abominable torment.
But passion can neither reason nor discuss.
“She mistrusts me, who would give my life for hers,” repeated Maxence.
And the idea was so painful to him, that he resolved to clear his doubts at any cost, preferring the worst misery to the anxiety which was gnawing at his heart.
And as soon as he found himself alone with Mlle. Lucienne, arming himself with all his courage, and looking her straight in the eyes,
“You never speak to me any more of your enemies?” he said.
She doubtless understood what was passing within him.
“It’s because I don’t hear any thing of them myself,” she answered gently.
“Then you have given up your purpose?”
“Not at all.”
“What are your hopes, then, and what are your prospects?”
“Extraordinary as it may seem to you, I must confess that I know nothing about it. My friend the commissary has his plan, I am certain; and he is following it with an indefatigable obstinacy. I am but an instrument in his hands. I never do any thing without consulting him; and what he advises me to do I do.”
Maxence started upon his chair.
“Was it he, then,” he said in a tone of bitter irony, “who suggested to you the idea of our fraternal association?”
A frown appeared upon the girl’s countenance. She evidently felt hurt by the tone of this species of interrogatory.
“At least he did not disapprove of it,” she replied.
But that answer was just evasive enough to excite Maxence’s anxiety.
“Was it from him too,” he went on, “that came the lovely idea of having me enter the Mutual Credit?”
“Yes, it was from him.”
“For what purpose?”
“He did not explain.”
“Why did you not tell me?”
“Because he requested me not to do so.”
From being red at the start, Maxence had now become very pale.
“And so,” he resumed, “it is that man, that police-agent, who is the real arbiter of my fate; and if to-morrow he commanded you to break off with me--”
Mlle. Lucienne drew herself up.
“Enough!” she interrupted in a brief tone, “enough! There is not in my whole existence a single act which would give to my bitterest enemy the right to suspect my loyalty; and now you accuse me of the basest treason. What have you to reproach me with? Have I not been faithful to the pact sworn between us. Have I not always been for you the best of comrades and the most devoted of friends? I remained silent, because the man in whom I have the fullest confidence requested me to do so; but he knew, that, if you questioned me, I would speak. Did you question me? And now what more do you want? That I should stoop to quiet the suspicions of your morbid mind? That I do not mean to do.”
She was not, perhaps, entirely right; but Maxence was certainly wrong. He acknowledged it, wept, implored her pardon, which was granted; and this explanation only served to rivet more closely the fetters that bound him.
It is true, that, availing himself of the permission that had been granted him, he kept himself constantly informed of Mlle. Lucienne’s doings. He learnt from her that her friend the commissary had held a most minute investigation at Louveciennes, and that the footman who went to the bois with her was now, in reality, a detective. And at last, one day,
“My friend the commissary,” she said, “thinks he is on the right track now.”
