The last of the de Ventadours seeking in death a refuge from shame, and leaving an everlasting blot upon his name! The debts and the disgrace!
He did once try to speak of it to old Madame, but she only laughed.
The debts would be paid—in full—in full! As for the disgrace, how dare Bertrand mention such a word in connection with the de Ventadours. And Bertrand did not dare speak of his father just then. Besides, what had been the use?
The debts and the disgrace; and the shame! That awful day in the magnificent apartment in Paris, when he knelt to Rixende and begged her, begged her not to throw him over! That awful, awful day! And her laugh! It would ring in his ears until the crack of doom. When he told her he could not live without her, she laughed: when he vaguely hinted at a bullet through his head, she had warned him not to make a mess on the carpet. Oh! the shame of that! And old Madame did not seem to understand! The word “disgrace” or “shame” was not to be used in connection with the de Ventadours, and when he, Bertrand, thought of that day in Paris, and of the debts, and—and other things, he ground his teeth, and could have beaten his head against the wall in an agony of shame.
How right Jaume Deydier had been! How right! What was he, Comte de Ventadour, but a defaulting debtor, a ne’er-do-well, sunk into a quagmire of improbity and beating the air with upstretched hands till they grasped a safety-pole held out to him by the weak, trusting arms of a young girl?
How right Jaume Deydier had been to turn on him and confound him with his final act of cowardice. What had he to offer? Debts, a name disgraced, a heart spurned by another! How right, how right! But, God in heaven, the shame of it!
And grandmama would not understand. Deydier would give his ears, she said, to have a Comte de Ventadour for a son-in-law: he only demurred, made difficulties and demands in order to dictate his own terms with regard to Nicolette’s dowry. That was old Madame’s explanation of the scene which had well-nigh killed Bertrand with shame. Pretence, she declared, mere pretence on Deydier’s part.
“Keep away from the mas, my son,” she said coolly to Bertrand one day, “keep away from it for a week, and we’ll have Deydier sending his wench to the château on some pretext or another, just to throw her in your way again.”
“But, thank God,” she added a moment or two later, “that we have not yet sunk so low as to be driven into bestowing the name of Ventadour on a peasant wench for the sake of her money-bags.”
Not yet sunk so low? Ye gods! Could man sink lower than he, Bertrand, had sunk? Could man feel more shamed than he had done when Nicolette stood beside him and said: “Take me, take all! I’ll not even ask for love in return.”