"So my husband has made up his mind," wrote Julie Despois. "He ended the conversation by repeating poor Captain Magniez' noble declaration: 'I prefer to be shot rather than commit sacrilege.'—If this thing happens to us, we shall be very poor, my dear friend. The education of our three sons will be seriously endangered. But I could do nothing but say to him: 'You are right. We are Christian folk. We have founded a Christian family. God help us!'—And you will recognize my dear Despois in this. His only anxiety is for his officers. He doesn't want to see the hecatomb at Saint-Servan repeated.—'If they call on me for sappers to break in the church doors, I shall refuse. I sha'n't give the civil authorities time to telegraph for further orders. I shall order all my men to remount, and return to Saint-Mihiel. In this way I shall be sure of being the only one to be disciplined.'—You see, Valentine, what a sad time we are passing through, so that we can't turn our minds to any other subject! In all the officers' families, nothing else is thought of. We shouldn't talk about anything else if we didn't know that to-day an orderly may be an informer listened to at headquarters. We are all wondering when these two inventories will be taken, and to whom they will be entrusted. Will anything happen or not? God grant that we are imagining chimæras, and that everything will go off peacefully, as it has in so many places! Whatever happens, I am writing down these conversations with my husband so that my sons may have them some day, when he and I are no more. They will see what sort of man their father was, and that their mother understood him."
Landri read the last sentence again and again. The captain's magnanimous determination made it possible for him to have no fear of consequences if Despois were in command.—But what followed? How could he fail to make a comparison between that simple-hearted helpmate of a gallant officer, devoted to her husband, so proud to esteem and admire him,—and another woman? Between those children who found at their humble fireside no reason for aught save respect,—and another child? Why had not his own mother understood the man whose name she bore? Why had she betrayed him? Why was a son born of that treachery? And why was not that son, who knew nothing of that horror for so many years, left in ignorance forever? Upon what trivial chances our destinies depend! Suppose that the train from Clermont had reached Paris an hour late yesterday? Doubtless Landri would have found the invalid of Rue de Solferino unconscious. The physician would not have let him in. He would have known nothing. He would not have had to undergo this inward agony which everything renewed—and when would it end? Oh, never! never!
"I am amusing myself with absurd scruples," he said to himself twenty-four hours later. It was afternoon. He was riding along the Meuse. He had received a despatch from the marquis to the effect that Jaubourg's funeral would take place on the following Friday at nine o'clock, and he had answered, by telegraph, that he could not be there. He had understood what the selection of that early hour in the morning meant, as well as a note in the newspapers stating that the deceased had desired a very simple ceremony, without invitations, and without flowers or wreaths. This insistence upon effacement after death avoided comments upon M. de Claviers-Grandchamp's presence behind the bier of his wife's lover. Therein Landri saw a new proof of the ominous secret. He would have been no less irritated by a showy funeral. His irritation manifested itself in a recurrence of the blind and almost savage revolt of the first moments. This feeling imparted its sombre hue to his renewed reflections on the possibility of his responsible participation in one of the inventories—the sole object, as Madame Despois had said, of the silent meditations of all the officers of the garrison. Three of his comrades, who were as sure of him as he was of them, had spoken to him about it in confidence that morning. He had evaded a reply, and he reproached himself bitterly for it.
"Yes, absurd! With respect to him"—he was still unable to name M. de Claviers in his heart, as he was to name the other elsewhere,—"with respect to him, I cannot have any duty. The mere fact that I am breathing is an insult so dishonoring to him that I can never add anything to it. All that I can do is to avoid contact between us. He will follow the body to-morrow. I shall not be there. Nobody shall see us walking side by side. Hereafter it must be so in life. My impulse yesterday was the best, the wisest one. Yes, if I am ordered to take part in the expedition to Hugueville or Montmartin, so much the better! If I have to break into one of those two churches, so much the better! That will be irreparable. The name of Claviers-Grandchamp will be dishonored because a soldier has made every other sentiment yield to discipline. That theory can be supported, too. A proof of it is that Despois hesitated, and he's a professed Christian. Even Valentine, who is very religious, but who knows what our profession is, accepts the idea!—He will condemn me. But he won't be able to despise me, in his heart. And it will be all over, all over, all over! He will suffer, suffer terribly. And shall I not suffer when I no longer have him to call 'father,' when I can no longer live with him in that heart-to-heart intimacy which was complete,—I realize it now!—despite the differences in our ideas! I understand them now, those differences which used to surprise me—they were Race. He is right. There is such a thing as Race. I hadn't the instincts of a true noble. Nor have I those of a true bourgeois, either. What a terrible word that is, to which I never gave a thought—adultery! And how just it is! It is the stranger at the hearth. It is a forged Race. It is the creation of a hybrid personality like mine. That is the secret of the vacillations of my nature, of the contradictions that I never could explain: why I have never loved in my inmost heart any of the women of my caste, and why, even to-day, I cannot bring myself to a simple and definite decision. I shall come to it. My relations with him are impossible. That is the one fact to which I must cling, firmly, irrevocably. Let the occasion come to dig the abyss, and I will dig it!"
This second line of reasoning corresponded too nearly with the actual situation not to prevail in the young man's mind. He retained, none the less, deep down in his heart, a hope, almost a certainty, that he would not be required to adapt his conduct to it. One need not have in his veins blood imbued with contradictory inherited characteristics, to be subject to such incoherences. It is enough to be passionately attached to some one from whom one deems it necessary to part forever. So that he felt a shock that was most painful to him, as he was returning from his ride, upon meeting, in one of the streets of the town, the colonel of his regiment, on foot,—the one who did not like "names with currents of air." He was the son of a petty government official who had reached his present rank by a combination of energy and shrewdness,—a good officer with fundamentally false ideas, in whose heart were fermenting those extraordinary anticlerical and anti-noble passions of which sincere Jacobinism is made.
The expression of his superior, by whom he knew that he was detested, froze Landri's blood, it betrayed such ironical and fiendish delight. He did not mistake its meaning. The supposition hitherto treated as imaginary was coming true. It began to take shape. The hostile colonel's face expressed the satisfied hatred of one who knows with certainty that misfortune is about to befall his enemy. The affair of the inventories was about to be solved, and he, Landri, was involved in it in some way or other.
Five minutes later this presentiment became an established fact. As he dismounted, his orderly handed him a note from Captain Despois, begging him to come to his quarters about an important matter connected with the service.
"That's what it is," said Landri to himself. "We are to go."
He found the devout officer, whose most secret thoughts he knew, so intimate was their confidence, busily writing, in the exceedingly modest salon that he used as an office. Despois was a man of forty-five, very tall, with a bony, tanned face, his temples worn smooth by the rubbing of the helmet, hair already almost white, reddish mustache, and light greenish-gray eyes. The eyes were clouded with so sad an expression that Landri was deceived.
"It is he who is ordered to command us," he thought. He remembered the letter he had read the day before. His heart swelled with pity for that father who was evidently making ready to sacrifice his military future to his faith. But from his first words Landri understood that he himself aroused a like pity on the part of that excellent man, who said as he handed him two sheets of paper the official size of which betrayed their source:—