The Nabob, Alphonse Daudet [new books to read .txt] 📗

days of great receptions, was sending carriages up the Rue de Lille, in order to keep a door free for those leaving. Rather anxious, he wondered, "What is there going on?" Perhaps a concert given by the duchess, a charity bazaar, some festivity from which Mora might have excluded him on account of the scandal of his last adventure. And this anxiety was augmented still further when Jansoulet, after having passed across the principal court-yard amid a din of slamming doors and a dull and continuous rumble of wheels over the sand, found himself--after ascending the steps--in the immense entrance-hall filled by a crowd which did not extend beyond any of the doors leading to the rooms; centring its anxious going and coming around the porter's table, where all the famous names of fashionable Paris were being inscribed. It seemed as though a disastrous gust of wind had gone through the house, carrying off a little of its calm, and allowing disquiet and danger to filter into its comfort.
"What a misfortune!"
"Ah! it is terrible."
"And so suddenly!"
Such were the remarks that people were exchanging as they met.
An idea flashed into Jansoulet's mind:
"Is the duke ill?" he inquired of a servant.
"Ah, monsieur, he is dying! He will not live through the night!"
If the roof of the palace had fallen in upon his head he would not have been more utterly stunned. Red lights flashed before his eyes, he tottered, and let himself drop into a seat on a velvet-covered bench beside the great cage of monkeys. The animals, over-excited by all this bustle, suspended by their tails, by their little long-thumbed hands, were hanging to the bars in groups, and came, inquisitive and frightened, to make the most ludicrous grimaces at this big, stupefied man as he sat staring at the marble floor, repeating aloud to himself, "I am ruined! I am ruined!"
The duke was dying. He had been seized suddenly with illness on the Sunday after his return from the Bois. He had felt intolerable burnings in his bowels, which passed through his whole body, searing as with a red-hot iron, and alternating with a cold lethargy and long periods of coma. Jenkins, summoned at once, did not say much, but ordered certain sedatives. The next day the pains came on again with greater intensity and followed by the same icy torpor, also more accentuated, as if life, torn up by the roots, were departing in violent spasms. Among those around him, none was greatly concerned. "The day after a visit to Saint-James Villa," was muttered in the antechamber, and Jenkins's handsome face preserved its serenity. He had spoken to two or three people, in the course of his morning rounds, of the duke's indisposition, and that so lightly that nobody had paid much attention to the matter.
Mora himself, notwithstanding his extreme weakness, although he felt his head absolutely blank, and, as he said, "not an idea anywhere," was far from suspecting the gravity of his condition. It was only on the third day, on waking in the morning, that the sight of a tiny stream of blood, which had trickled from his mouth over his beard and the stained pillow, had frightened this fastidious man, who had a horror of all human ills, especially sickness, and now saw it arrive stealthily with its pollutions, its weaknesses, and the loss of physical self-control, the first concession made to death. Monpavon, entering the room behind Jenkins, surprised the anxious expression of the great seigneur faced by the terrible truth, and at the same time was horrified by the ravages made in a few hours upon Mora's emaciated face, in which all the wrinkles of age, suddenly evident, were mingled with lines of suffering, and those muscular depressions which tell of serious internal lesions. He took Jenkins aside, while the duke's toilet necessaries were carried to him--a whole apparatus of crystal and silver contrasting with the yellow pallor of the invalid.
"Look here, Jenkins, the duke is very ill."
"I am afraid so," said the Irishman, in a low voice.
"But what is the matter with him?"
"What he wanted, _parbleu_!" answered the other in a fury. "One cannot be young at his age with impunity. This intrigue will cost him dear."
Some evil passion was getting the better of him but he subdued it immediately, and, puffing out his cheeks as though his head were full of water, he sighed deeply as he pressed the old nobleman's hands.
"Poor duke! poor duke! Ah, my friend, I am most unhappy!"
"Take care, Jenkins," said Monpavon coldly, disengaging his hands, "you are assuming a terrible responsibility. What! is the duke as bad as that?--ps--ps--ps--Will you see nobody? You have arranged no consultation?"
The Irishman raised his hands as if to say, "What good can it do?"
The other insisted. It was absolutely necessary that Brisset, Jousseline, Bouchereau, all the great physicians should be called in.
"But you will frighten him."
De Monpavon expanded his chest, the one pride of the old broken-down charger.
"_Mon Cher_, if you had seen Mora and me in the trenches of Constantine--ps--ps. Never looked away. We don't know fear. Give notice to your colleagues. I undertake to inform him."
The consultation took place in the evening with great privacy, the duke having insisted on this from a singular sense of shame produced by his illness, by that suffering which discrowned him, making him the equal of other men. Like those African kings who hide themselves in the recesses of their palaces to die, he would have wished that men should believe him carried off, transfigured, become a god. Then, too, he dreaded above all things the expressions of pity, the condolences, the compassion with which he knew that his sick-bed would be surrounded; the tears because he suspected them to be hypocritical, and because, if sincere, they displeased him still more by their grimacing ugliness.
He had always detested scenes, exaggerated sentiments, everything that could move him to emotion or disturb the harmonious equilibrium of his life. Every one knew this, and the order was to keep away from him the distress, the misery, which from one end of France to the other flowed towards Mora as to one of those forest refuges lighted during the night at which all wanderers may knock. Not that he was hard to the unfortunate; perhaps he may have been too easily moved to the pity which he regarded as an inferior sentiment, a weakness unworthy of the strong, and, refusing it to others, he dreaded it for himself, for the integrity of his courage. Nobody in the palace, then, except Monpavon and Louis the _valet de chambre_, knew of the visit of those three personages introduced mysteriously into the Minister of State's apartments. The duchess herself was ignorant of it. Separated from her husband by the barriers frequently placed by the political and fashionable life of the great world between married people, she believed him slightly indisposed, nervous more than anything else; and had so little suspicion of a catastrophe that at the very hour when the doctors were mounting the great, dimly lit staircase at the other end of the palace, her private apartments were being lit up for a girls' dance, one of those _bals blancs_ which the ingenuity of the idle world had begun to make fashionable in Paris.
This consultation was like all others: solemn and sinister. Doctors no longer wear their great periwigs of the time of Moliere, but they still assume the same gravity of the priests of Isis, of astrologers bristling with cabalistic formulae pronounced with sage noddings of the head, to which, for comical effect, there is only wanting the high pointed cap of former days. In this case the scene borrowed an imposing aspect from its setting. In the vast bed-chamber, transformed, heightened, as it were, in dignity by the immobility of the owner, these grave figures came forward round the bed on which the light was concentrated, illuminating amid the whiteness of the linen and the purple of the hangings a face worn into hollows, pale from lips to eyes, but wrapped in serenity as in a veil, as in a shroud. The consultants spoke in low tones, cast furtive glances as each other, or exchanged some barbarous word, remaining impassive, without even a frown. But this mute and reticent expression of the doctor and magistrate, this solemnity with which science and justice hedge themselves about to hide their frailty or ignorance, had no power to move the duke.
Sitting up in bed, he continued to talk quietly, with the upward glance of the eye in which it seems as if thought rises before it finally takes wing, and Monpavon coldly followed his cue, hardening himself against his own emotion, taking from his friend a last lesson in "form"; while Louis, in the background, stood leaning against the door leading to the duchess's apartment, the spectre of a silent domestic in whom detached indifference is a duty.
The most agitated, nervous man present was Jenkins. Full of obsequious attentions for his "illustrious colleagues," as he called them, with his lips pursed up, he hung round their consultation and attempted to take part in it; but the colleagues kept him at a distance and hardly answered him, as Fagon--the Fagon of Louis XIV--might have addressed some empiric summoned to the royal bedside. Old Bouchereau especially had black looks for the inventor of the Jenkins pearls. Finally, when they had thoroughly examined and questioned their patient, they retired to deliberate among themselves in a little room with lacquered ceilings and walls, filled by an assortment of _bric-a-brac_ the triviality of which contrasted strangely with the importance of the discussion.
Solemn moment! Anguish of the accused awaiting the decision of his judges--life, death, reprieve, or pardon!
With his long, white hand Mora continued to stroke his mustache with a favourite gesture, to talk with Monpavon of the club, of the foyer of the _Varietes_, asking news of the Chamber, how matters stood with regard to the Nabob's election--all this coldly, without the least affectation. Then, tired, no doubt, or fearing lest his glance, constantly drawn to that curtain opposite him, from behind which the sentence was to come presently, should betray the emotion which he must have felt in the depths of his soul, he laid his head on the pillow, closed his eyes, and did not open them again until the return of the doctors. Still the same cold and sinister faces, veritable physiognomies of judges having on their lips the terrible decree of human fate, the final word which the courts pronounce fearlessly, but which the doctors, whose science it mocks, elude, and express in periphrases.
"Well, gentlemen, what says the faculty?" demanded the sick man.
There were sundry murmurs of hypocritical encouragement, vague recommendations; then the three learned physicians hastened to depart, eager to escape from the responsibility of this disaster. Monpavon rushed after them. Jenkins remained at the bedside, overwhelmed by the cruel truths which he had just heard during the consultation. In vain had he laid his hand on his heart, quoted his famous motto; Bouchereau had not spared him. It was not the first of the Irishman's clients whom he had seen thus suddenly collapse; but he fervently hoped that the death of Mora would act as a salutary warning to the world of fashion, and that the prefect of police, after this great calamity, would send the "dealer in cantharides" to retail his drugs on the other side of the Channel.
The duke understood immediately that neither Jenkins nor Louis would tell him the true issue of the consultation. He abstained, therefore, from any insistence in his questionings of them, submitted to their pretended confidence, affected even to share it, to believe the most hopeful things they announced to him. But when Monpavon returned, he summoned him to