The Brotherhood of Consolation, Honoré de Balzac [robert munsch read aloud txt] 📗

was long a stranger to his eyes. If tears were not forever dried at their source, withered by such scorching sorrows, that look would have been tearful.

The old man sat playing with his snuff-box and looking at his daughter in silent ecstasy.

"To-morrow, madame," said Godefroid, when the music ceased; "to-morrow your fate will be decided. I bring you good news. The celebrated Halpersohn is coming to see you at three o'clock in the afternoon. He has promised," added Godefroid in a low voice to Monsieur Bernard, "to tell me the exact truth."

The old man rose, and grasping Godefroid's hand, drew him to a corner of the room beside the fireplace.

"Ah! what a night I shall pass! a definitive decision! My daughter cured or doomed!"

"Courage!" said Godefroid; "after tea come out with me."

"My child, my child, don't play any more," said the old man; "you will bring on an attack; such a strain upon your strength must end in reaction."

He made Auguste take away the instrument and offered a cup of tea to his daughter with the coaxing manner of a nurse quieting the petulance of a child.

"What is the doctor like?" she asked, her mind already distracted by the prospect of seeing a new person.

Vanda, like all prisoners, was full of eager curiosity. When the physical phenomena of her malady ceased, they seemed to betake themselves to the moral nature; she conceived the strangest fancies, the most violent caprices; she insisted on seeing Rossini, and wept when her father, whom she believed to be all powerful, refused to fetch him.

Godefroid now gave her a minute account of the Jewish doctor and his study; of which she knew nothing, for Monsieur Bernard had cautioned Auguste not to tell his mother of his visits to Halpersohn, so much had he feared to rouse hopes in her mind which might not be realized.

Vanda hung upon Godefroid's words like one fascinated; and she fell into a sort of ecstasy in her passionate desire to see this strange Polish doctor.

"Poland has produced many singular, mysterious beings," said Monsieur Bernard. "To-day, for instance, besides this extraordinary doctor, we have Hoene Wronski, the enlightened mathematician, the poet Mickievicz, Towianksi the mystic, and Chopin, whose talent is supernatural. Great national convulsions always produce various species of dwarfed giants."

"Oh! dear papa; what a man you are! If you would only write down what we hear you say merely to amuse me you would make your reputation. Fancy, monsieur, my dear old father invents wonderful stories when I have no novels to read; he often puts me to sleep in that way. His voice lulls me, and he quiets my mind with his wit. Who can ever reward him? Auguste, my child, you ought for my sake, to kiss the print of your grandfather's footsteps."

The young man raised his beautiful moist eyes to his mother, and the look he gave her, full of a long-repressed compassion, was a poem. Godefroid rose, took the lad's hand, and pressed it.

"God has placed two angels beside you, madame," he said.

"Yes, I know that. And for that reason I often reproach myself for harassing them. Come, my dear Auguste, and kiss your mother. He is a child, monsieur, of whom all mothers might be proud; pure as gold, frank and honest, a soul without sin--but too passionate a soul, alas! like that of his poor mother. Perhaps God has fastened me in this bed to keep me from the follies of women--who have too much heart," she added, smiling.

Godefroid replied with a smile and a bow.

"Adieu, monsieur; and thank your friend for the instrument; tell him it makes the happiness of a poor cripple."

"Monsieur," said Godefroid, when they were alone in the latter's room. "I think I may assure you that you shall not be robbed by that trio of bloodsuckers. I have the necessary sum to free your book, but you must first show me your written agreement with them. And after that, in order to do still more for you, you must let me have your work to read,--not I myself, of course, I have not knowledge enough to judge of it, but a former magistrate, a lawyer of eminence and of perfect integrity, who will undertake, according to what he thinks of the book, to find you an honorable publisher with whom you can make an equitable agreement. This, however, I will not insist upon. Meantime here are five hundred francs," he added, giving a bank-note to the stupefied old man, "to meet your present needs. I do not ask for any receipt; you will be under obligations to your own conscience only, and that conscience is not to move you until you have recovered a sufficient competence,--I undertake to pay Halpersohn."

"Who are you, then?" asked the old man, dropping into a chair.

"I myself," replied Godefroid, "am nothing; but I serve powerful persons to whom your distress is known, and who feel an interest in you. Ask me nothing more about them."

"But what induces them to do this?" said the old man.

"Religion."

"Religion! is it possible?"

"Yes, the catholic, apostolic, and Roman religion."

"Ah! do you belong to the order of Jesus?"

"No, monsieur," replied Godefroid. "Do not feel uneasy; these persons have no designs upon you, except that of helping you to restore your family to prosperity."

"Can philanthropy be anything but vanity?"

"Ah! monsieur," said Godefroid, hastily; "do not insult the virtue defined by Saint Paul, sacred, catholic Love!"

Monsieur Bernard, hearing this answer, began to stride up and down with long steps.

"I accept," he said suddenly, "and I have but one way of thanking you, and that is to offer you my work. The notes and citations are unnecessary to the magistrate you speak of; and I have still two months' work to do in arranging them for the press. To-morrow I will give you the five volumes," he added, offering Godefroid his hand.

"Can I have made a conversion?" thought Godefroid, struck by the new expression which he saw on the old man's face.


XVII. HALPERSOHN

The next afternoon at three o'clock a cabriolet stopped before the house, and Godefroid saw Halpersohn getting out of it, wrapped in a monstrous bear-skin pelisse. The cold had strengthened during the night, the thermometer marking ten degrees of it.

The Jewish doctor examined with curious eyes, though furtively, the room in which his client of the day before received him, and Godefroid detected the suspicious thought which darted from his eyes like the sharp point of a dagger. This rapid conception of distrust gave Godefroid a cold chill, for he thought within himself that such a man would be pitiless in all relations; it is so natural to suppose that genius is connected with goodness that a strong sensation of disgust took possession of him.

"Monsieur," he said, "I see that the simplicity of my room makes you uneasy; therefore you need not be surprised at my method of proceeding. Here are your two hundred francs, and here, too, are three notes of a thousand francs each," he added, drawing from his pocket-book the money Madame de la Chanterie had given him to release Monsieur Bernard's book; but in case you still feel doubtful of my solvency I offer you as reference Messrs. Mongenod, bankers, rue de la Victoire."

"I know them," said Halpersohn, putting the ten gold pieces into his pocket.

"He'll inquire of them," thought Godefroid.

"Where is the patient?" asked the doctor, rising like a man who knows the value of time.

"This way, monsieur," said Godefroid, preceding him to show the way.

The Jew examined with a shrewd and suspicious eye the places he passed through, giving them the keen, rapid glance of a spy; he saw all the horrors of poverty through the door of the room in which the grandfather and the grandson lived; for, unfortunately, Monsieur Bernard had gone in to change his clothes before entering his daughter's room, and in his haste to open the outer door to the doctor, he had forgotten to close that of his lair.

He bowed in a stately manner to Halpersohn, and opened the door of his daughter's room cautiously.

"Vanda, my child, here is the doctor," he said.

Then he stood aside to allow Halpersohn, who kept on his bear-skin pelisse, to pass him. The Jew was evidently surprised at the luxury of the room, which in this quarter, and more especially in this house, was an anomaly; but his surprise only lasted for an instant, for he had seen among German and Russian Jews many instances of the same contrast between apparent misery and hoarded wealth. As he walked from the door to the bed he kept his eye on the patient, and the moment he reached her he said in Polish:--

"You are a Pole?"

"No, I am not; my mother was."

"Whom did your grandfather, Colonel Tarlowski, marry?"

"A Pole."

"From what province?"

"A Soboleska, of Pinsk."

"Very good; monsieur is your father?"

"Yes."

"Monsieur," he said, turning to the old man; "your wife--"

"Is dead;" said Monsieur Bernard.

"Was she very fair?" said Halpersohn, showing a slight impatience at being interrupted.

"Here is her portrait," said Monsieur Bernard, unhooking from the wall a handsome frame which enclosed several fine miniatures.

Halpersohn felt the head and handled the hair of the patient while he looked at the portrait of Vanda Tarlowska, born Countess Sobolewska.

"Relate to me the symptoms of your illness," he said, placing himself on the sofa and looking fixedly at Vanda during the twenty minutes the history, given alternately by the father and daughter, lasted.

"How old are you?"

"Thirty-eight."

"Ah! good!" he cried, rising; "I will answer for the cure. Mind, I do not say that I can restore the use of her legs; but cured of the disease, that she shall be. Only, I must have her in a private hospital under my own eye."

"But, monsieur, my daughter cannot be moved!"

"I will answer for her," said Halpersohn, curtly; "but I will answer for her only on those conditions. She will have to exchange her present malady for another still more terrible, which may last a year, six months at the very least. You may come and see her at the hospital, since you are her father."

"Are you certain of curing her?" said Monsieur Bernard.

"Certain," repeated the Jew. "Madame has in her body an element, a vitiated fluid, the national disease, and it must be eliminated. You must bring her to me at Challot, rue Basse-Saint-Pierre, private hospital of Doctor Halpersohn."

"How can I?"

"On a stretcher, just as all sick persons are carried to hospitals."

"But the removal will kill her!"

"No."

As he said the word in a curt tone he was already at the door; Godefroid rejoined him on the staircase. The Jew, who was stifling with heat, said in his ear:

"Besides the three thousand francs, the cost will be fifteen francs a day, payable three months in advance."

"Very good, monsieur. And," continued Godefroid, putting one foot on the step of the cabriolet, into which the doctor had sprung, "you say you will answer for the cure?"

"I will answer for it," said the Jewish doctor. "Are you in love with the lady?"

"No," replied Godefroid.

"You must not repeat what I am about to say to you; I