‘I promise you, Professor, that I’ll never laugh at him again,’ said Gaston, very gravely. ‘There can be nothing absurd about a man who mourns a little child like that. Give me his address, and I’ll write to him at once.’
‘It may be a distraction for him, and at any rate it will serve to show him that he is remembered in Paris,’ said Rameau, eager to comply with the request. We thanked the Professor for his story, with some surprise at the lateness of the hour. The door-bell rang, and the appearance of the servant with the evening letters arrested our departure. With a hand extended to the sobered St. Thomas, Rameau took the letters and glanced as he spoke at the top envelope, deeply edged with black. ‘Tiens! a letter from poor Krowtosky,’ he exclaimed. He broke the seal and read aloud: ‘My dear friend, I thank you for your kind words in my bereavement. But I am past consolation; I am alone now; my wife is dead, and my heart is broken.’
ARMAND’S MISTAKE
To Demetrius Bikélas
ARMAND’S MISTAKE
I
UNTIL the age of twenty-one, Armand Ulrich submitted to the controlling influences around him,—somewhat gracelessly, be it admitted. He sat out his uncle’s long dinners, and solaced himself by sketching on the cloth between the courses. He showed a discontented face at his mother’s weekly receptions in a big Parisian hotel, and all the while his heart was out upon the country roads and among the pleasant fields, where the children played under poplars and dabbled on the brim of reedy streams. At twenty-one, however, he regarded himself as a free man, and threw up a situation worth £50,000 a year or thereabouts. From this we may infer that he was a lad full of bright hopes and fair dreams.
He was the only son of a Frenchwoman of noble birth and of the junior partner of a wealthy Alsatian banking-house. His taste for strolling and camping out of doors, sketch-book in hand and pipe in mouth, was partly an inherited taste, with the difference that transmission had strengthened instead of having weakened the heritage. In earlier days Ulrich junior had not shown an undivided spirit of devotion to commercial interests; he had, on the contrary, permitted himself the treasonable luxury of gazing abroad upon many objects not connected with the business of the firm. Amateur theatricals had engaged his affections in youth; five-act tragedies, in alexandrines as long as the acts, had proved him fickle, and operatic music had sent him fairly distraught. He aspired to excel in all the arts, and as a fact was successful in none.
When congratulated upon his brother’s versatility, Ulrich senior would contemptuously retort that the fellow was able to do everything except attend to his business. As a result, he was held in light esteem at the bank, and the meanest client would have regarded himself insulted if passed for consultation to this accomplished but incompetent representative of the firm. However agreeable his tastes may have rendered him in society, it cannot be denied that they were of a nature to diminish his commercial authority. Humanity wisely draws the line at a sonneteering banker, and looks upon the ill-assorted marriage of account and sketch-book with a natural distrust.
This state of things broke the banker’s heart. He had a reverence for the firm of Ulrich Brothers, and if he considered himself specially gifted for anything, it was for the judicious management of its affairs. Thus he lived and died a misappreciated and misunderstood person. To him it was a grievous injustice that he should be treated as a man of no account, because of a few irregular and purely decorative accomplishments. His heart might be led astray, he argued, but his head was untampered with, and that, after all, is the sole organ essential to the matter of bonds and shares. A man may be a wise head of a family and an honest husband, and not for that unacquainted with lighter loves. Such trifles are but gossiping pauses in the serious commotions and preoccupations of life. But no amount of argument, however logical, could blind him or others to the fact that commercially he was a dead failure, because a few ill-regulated impulses had occasionally led him into idle converse with two or three of the disreputable Nine; and mindful of this, he solemnly exhorted his son Armand to fix his thoughts upon the bank, and not let himself be led astray like his misguided father by illusive talents and disastrous tastes.