"And if I should do without it?" he ventured to say.
"You will not do without it. She is the one, do you hear, she is the one who will not allow it. I know you, my Landri," continued the father, in an affectionate tone in striking contrast to the evident inflexibility of his decision. "For you to love this woman so dearly, she must be very pure and of a very delicate sense of honor. It was she who insisted that you should speak to me before she gave you her answer, was it not? Such a woman will never consent to marry you against your father's declared wish. If she were not magnanimous and high-minded to that degree, you would not love her."
"And if it were so, you would not be touched?"
"There is no question here of my emotions, my son, nor of yours. It is a question of our name. Military heroism is not the only sort. There is a family heroism. As a soldier, you would consider it a perfectly natural thing to sacrifice your life. A man of a certain name should consider it natural to sacrifice his happiness. But is there really so much at stake? It is a crisis, and it will pass away. In any event," he added, in a tone of affectionate banter, "you haven't asked for my consent. So that I have not refused it. We have talked about plans, probabilities, supposititious cases—nothing more. All the same, be agreeable to Marie de Charlus this evening. Don't be too angry with her for having distinguished you, as our grandmothers used so prettily to say. And now let us enjoy what my grandmother left us. Here we are out of the forest and in the park. If the fearless woman had not stayed here, during the Terror, everything would have been cut down, devastated, burned, pillaged. I never return to Grandchamp without giving her a thought."
He ceased to speak, and his blue eyes were filled with pious veneration as he looked at the château, a sedate and grandiose structure in Mansart's very earliest manner. In the eighteenth century a Claviers-Grandchamp, to whom a friend, in gratitude for a service rendered him, had bequeathed a fortune made in the Compagnie des Indes, had reconstructed it inside without touching the façade. In front lay an immense garden à la française. Twelve gardeners were required to keep up this marvel, laid out in flower-beds, ponds and tree-lined paths, with many bronze groups about the ponds, and stone statues in the paths. In that closing hour of a lovely day, in that atmosphere now so delicately tinged with gray, the garden was a beautiful sight. Like those of Versailles, and of the whole seventeenth century, it bore the physiognomy of nature respected in its strength and at the same time guided, regulated and harmonized in its expansions. It was in truth visible "order," the order of the society of olden time whence the Claviers-Grandchamps had sprung. The trees, which were still vigorous, but pruned and trimmed, did not put forth their leaves until they had been disciplined.
At the close of this conversation, Landri's wounded sensibility found a symbol of his destiny in the aspect of that garden. He, too, like those trees, bore witness to the effects of discipline. No more than they could he develop freely. He should never marry Valentine,—M. de Claviers reasoned too justly. She would never enter a noble family without the consent of its head. The allusion made by the far-sighted and implacable marquis to the possibilities of his military career, finished freezing his heart. What should he do, in either case? The tree in the hedge which pushes its branches beyond the line fixed by the gardener destroys the fine ensemble, and it will never bloom. It retains the marks of the hatchet that pruned it. In the hedge they added to its beauty. They are a mutilation when it stands by itself. Such is the fate of the member of a caste who cuts loose from it and essays to live for himself. But nobility, great houses, caste, mésalliances,—were not all these ideas a mere phantasmagoria, a superstition, the imaginary residuum of an abolished reality, an absurd anachronism in the France of to-day?—Away from his father the son would have answered yes. He could not do it at that moment, in that carriage where he could hear the slightest movement and the very breathing of that man, so intensely alive, who imparted to his beliefs that ardent flame of his individual life which gave them their inspiration. The prestige of his father's presence acted anew upon Landri, with such force that he could not even blame the paternal determination, against which he would rebel to-morrow, but at a distance,—and he fell into a fit of melancholy which M. de Claviers finally observed. With his temperament the "Émigré" was most worthy to utter the words of Don Diego, savage and sublime in his dauntless manliness:—
Il n'est qu'un seul honneur, il est tant de maîtresses.[3]
He had almost quoted it in characterizing his son's passion as a mere passing crisis, and once more there was a world of compassion, a world of affection in the tone in which he renewed the conversation, in order to divert his mind from his thoughts:—
"Can you imagine the existence of that woman here, under the Terror? You know that a denunciation against her was the cause of the proposal of that villain Roland, in a committee of the Legislative Assembly, in November, '92, that the decree of the 20th of September should be suspended so far as the wives of 'émigrés' were concerned. If it had not been for the procureur-syndic de Thury, a former gardener of ours, her being legally divorced would have availed her nothing, they would have taken everything from her, and her life with the rest. She never ceased to correspond with her husband. She went twice to see him, and she received him here three times. One shudders to think of those interviews! But what courage! What heroism, to repeat my former word! It was of us that she was thinking, she was determined to defend the inheritance, the House. With her jewels she might have passed all those years happily in Germany or in England, and she died, worn out with grief, in 1804. From veneration for her memory, my grandfather would never allow anything to be changed inside the château, nor my father, nor I. Nothing, nothing, nothing. When I am no longer here, I authorize you to have the telephone put in, as you are more up-to-date than your old father," he concluded, laughingly, "but that's all!—Ah! there's the worthy Bressieux conspiring with Chaffin again. They are far greater changes that he has in his head than the installation of a telephone. It seems that certain details are not in style, and thereupon Monsieur Chaffin comes and bores me with dissertations on door-knobs and tiles at the back of the fireplace, and shutter-fastenings, which Bressieux has taught him. Nothing, nothing, nothing! I will change nothing. I don't know where I have read that line of an English poet, 'The Siren loves the sea, and I the past.'—Come, come, Bressieux!" he cried in his strong, resonant voice through the window of the automobile, "don't spoil Chaffin for me altogether. He will end by refusing to live at Grandchamp any longer, because it's not pure enough."
Louis de Bressieux was in fact standing at an angle of the château, intently considering—so it seemed, at all events—the detail of the decoration of a window on the ground floor. He had not yet changed his hunting costume, and the visor of his velvet cap concealed his eyes. Beside him stood a man of small stature, thick-set, with hair once red, now turning gray,—one of those men whose crabbed countenance leads one at a glance to judge them to be very frank and downright. His gleaming eyes, shifting and impenetrable, indicated that he concealed many complexities behind the rough bonhomie of his manners. He was Landri's former tutor, promoted twelve years before to the rank of general factotum, which was not likely to be a sinecure with the very large income of the Marquis de Claviers, and his expenditures, which, alas! were much larger. He called him, it will be remembered, "my good Chaffin," as he said "my good Jaubourg," and "the worthy Bressieux." A learned connoisseur of human nature has said: "He who does not make up his mind to be a dupe will never be magnanimous"; and the admirable Marquis de Claviers-Grandchamp was truly magnanimous. How surprised he would have been if, at the moment when he called to Bressieux, one of those modern machines—the objects of his half-sincere, half-simulated aversion—had been at hand to record and transmit to him the conversation which his sudden arrival had interrupted!