“YOUR HECTOR, FOR LIFE.”
Reine carried off this reply, the first letter the Baron had written to his “sweet friend.” Such emotions to some extent counterbalanced the disasters growling in the distance; but the Baron, at this moment believing he could certainly avert the blows aimed at his uncle, Johann Fischer, thought only of the deficit.
One of the characteristics of the Bonapartist temperament is a firm belief in the power of the sword, and confidence in the superiority of the military over civilians. Hulot laughed to scorn the Public Prosecutor in Algiers, where the War Office is supreme. Man is always what he has once been. How can the officers of the Imperial Guard forget that time was when the mayors of the largest towns in the Empire and the Emperor’s prefects, Emperors themselves on a minute scale, would come out to meet the Imperial Guard, to pay their respects on the borders of the Departments through which it passed, and to do it, in short, the homage due to sovereigns?
At half-past four the baron went straight to Madame Marneffe’s; his heart beat as high as a young man’s as he went upstairs, for he was asking himself this question, “Shall I see her? or shall I not?”
How was he now to remember the scene of the morning when his weeping children had knelt at his feet? Valerie’s note, enshrined for ever in a thin pocket-book over his heart, proved to him that she loved him more than the most charming of young men.
Having rung, the unhappy visitor heard within the shuffling slippers and vexatious scraping cough of the detestable master. Marneffe opened the door, but only to put himself into an attitude and point to the stairs, exactly as Hulot had shown him the door of his private room.
“You are too exclusively Hulot, Monsieur Hulot!” said he.
The Baron tried to pass him, Marneffe took a pistol out of his pocket and cocked it.
“Monsieur le Baron,” said he, “when a man is as vile as I am—for you think me very vile, don’t you?—he would be the meanest galley-slave if he did not get the full benefit of his betrayed honor.—You are for war; it will be hot work and no quarter. Come here no more, and do not attempt to get past me. I have given the police notice of my position with regard to you.”
And taking advantage of Hulot’s amazement, he pushed him out and shut the door.
“What a low scoundrel!” said Hulot to himself, as he went upstairs to Lisbeth. “I understand her letter now. Valerie and I will go away from Paris. Valerie is wholly mine for the remainder of my days; she will close my eyes.”
Lisbeth was out. Madame Olivier told the Baron that she had gone to his wife’s house, thinking that she would find him there.
“Poor thing! I should never have expected her to be so sharp as she was this morning,” thought Hulot, recalling Lisbeth’s behavior as he made his way from the Rue Vanneau to the Rue Plumet.
As he turned the corner of the Rue Vanneau and the Rue de Babylone, he looked back at the Eden whence Hymen had expelled him with the sword of the law. Valerie, at her window, was watching his departure; as he glanced up, she waved her handkerchief, but the rascally Marneffe hit his wife’s cap and dragged her violently away from the window. A tear rose to the great official’s eye.
“Oh! to be so well loved! To see a woman so ill used, and to be so nearly seventy years old!” thought he.
Lisbeth had come to give the family the good news. Adeline and Hortense had already heard that the Baron, not choosing to compromise himself in the eyes of the whole office by appointing Marneffe to the first class, would be turned from the door by the Hulot-hating husband. Adeline, very happy, had ordered a dinner that her Hector was to like better than any of Valerie’s; and Lisbeth, in her devotion, was helping Mariette to achieve this difficult result. Cousin Betty was the idol of the hour. Mother and daughter kissed her hands, and had told her with touching delight that the Marshal consented to have her as his housekeeper.
“And from that, my dear, there is but one step to becoming his wife!” said Adeline.
“In fact, he did not say no when Victorin mentioned it,” added the Countess.
The Baron was welcomed home with such charming proofs of affection, so pathetically overflowing with love, that he was fain to conceal his troubles.
Marshal Hulot came to dinner. After dinner, Hector did not go out. Victorin and his wife joined them, and they made up a rubber.
“It is a long time, Hector,” said the Marshal gravely, “since you gave us the treat of such an evening.”
This speech from the old soldier, who spoiled his brother though he thus implicitly blamed him, made a deep impression. It showed how wide and deep were the wounds in a heart where all the woes he had divined had found an echo. At eight o’clock the Baron insisted on seeing Lisbeth home, promising to return.
“Do you know, Lisbeth, he ill-treats her!” said he in the street. “Oh, I never loved her so well!”
“I never imagined that Valerie loved you so well,” replied Lisbeth. “She is frivolous and a coquette, she loves to have attentions paid her, and to have the comedy of love-making performed for her, as she says; but you are her only real attachment.”
“What message did she send me?”
“Why, this,” said Lisbeth. “She has, as you know, been on intimate terms with Crevel. You must owe her no grudge, for that, in fact, is what has raised her above utter poverty for the rest of her life; but she detests him, and matters are nearly at an end.—Well, she has kept the key of some rooms—”
“Rue du Dauphin!” cried the thrice-blest Baron. “If it were for that alone, I would overlook Crevel.—I have been there; I know.”
“Here, then, is the key,” said Lisbeth. “Have another made from it in the course of to-morrow—two if you can.”
“And then,” said Hulot eagerly.
“Well, I will dine at your house again to-morrow; you must give me back Valerie’s key, for old Crevel might ask her to return it to him, and you can meet her there the day after; then you can decide what your facts are to be. You will be quite safe, as there are two ways out. If by chance Crevel, who is Regence in his habits, as he is fond of saying, should come in by the side street, you could go out through the shop, or vice versa.
“You owe all this to me, you old villain; now what will you do for me?”
“Whatever you want.”
“Then you will not oppose my marrying your brother?”
“You! the Marechale Hulot, the Comtesse de Frozheim?” cried Hector, startled.
“Well, Adeline is a Baroness!” retorted Betty in a vicious and formidable tone. “Listen to me, you old libertine. You know how matters stand; your family may find itself starving in the gutter—”
“That is what I dread,” said Hulot in dismay.
“And if your brother were to die, who would maintain your wife and daughter? The widow of a Marshal gets at least six thousand francs pension, doesn’t she? Well, then, I wish to marry to secure bread for your wife and daughter—old dotard!”
“I had not seen it in that light!” said the Baron. “I will talk to my brother—for we are sure of you.—Tell my angel that my life is hers.”
And the Baron, having seen Lisbeth go into the house in the Rue Vanneau, went back to his whist and stayed at home. The Baroness was at the height of happiness; her husband seemed to be returning to domestic habits; for about a fortnight he went to his office at nine every morning, he came in to dinner at six, and spent the evening with his family. He twice took Adeline and Hortense to the play. The mother and daughter paid for three thanksgiving masses, and prayed to God to suffer them to keep the husband and father He had restored to them.
One evening Victorin Hulot, seeing his father retire for the night, said to his mother:
“Well, we are at any rate so far happy that my father has come back to us. My wife and I shall never regret our capital if only this lasts—”
“Your father is nearly seventy,” said the Baroness. “He still thinks of Madame Marneffe, that I can see; but he will forget her in time. A passion for women is not like gambling, or speculation, or avarice; there is an end to it.”
But Adeline, still beautiful in spite of her fifty years and her sorrows, in this was mistaken. Profligates, men whom Nature has gifted with the precious power of loving beyond the limits ordinarily set to love, rarely are as old as their age.
During this relapse into virtue Baron Hulot had been three times to the Rue du Dauphin, and had certainly not been the man of seventy. His rekindled passion made him young again, and he would have sacrificed his honor to Valerie, his family, his all, without a regret. But Valerie, now completely altered, never mentioned money, not even the twelve hundred francs a year to be settled on their son; on the contrary, she offered him money, she loved Hulot as a woman of six-and-thirty loves a handsome law-student—a poor, poetical, ardent boy. And the hapless wife fancied she had reconquered her dear Hector!
The fourth meeting between this couple had been agreed upon at the end of the third, exactly as formerly in Italian theatres the play was announced for the next night. The hour fixed was nine in the morning. On the next day when the happiness was due for which the amorous old man had resigned himself to domestic rules, at about eight in the morning, Reine came and asked to see the Baron. Hulot, fearing some catastrophe, went out to speak with Reine, who would not come into the anteroom. The faithful waiting-maid gave him the following note:—
“DEAR OLD MAN,—Do not go to the Rue du Dauphin. Our incubus is
ill, and I must nurse him; but be there this evening at nine.
Crevel is at Corbeil with Monsieur Lebas; so I am sure he will
bring no princess to his little palace. I have made arrangements
here to be free for the night and get back before Marneffe is
awake. Answer me as to all this, for perhaps your long elegy of a
wife no longer allows you your liberty as she did. I am told she
is still so handsome that you might play me false, you are such a
gay dog! Burn this note; I am suspicious of every one.”
Hulot wrote this scrap in reply:
“MY LOVE,—As I have told you, my wife has not for five-and-twenty
years interfered with my pleasures. For you I would give up a
hundred Adelines.—I will be in the Crevel sanctum at nine this
evening awaiting my divinity. Oh that your clerk might soon die!
We should part no more. And this is the dearest wish of