Landri had listened with, an indescribable mixture of fear and disgust—fear of betraying his excessive emotion, disgust at the infamy of which he was the helpless witness. This then was the ghastly means devised by Jaubourg to leave his whole fortune to his son! And should he, the son, permit that money to be accepted thus, with such touching and confiding gratitude, by that nobleman, so proud and of such magnificent moral integrity? If, by his silence concerning what he knew, he should make himself an accomplice in that final act of treachery, would he not cap the climax of the outrage by his false generosity? The cry of protest was on his lips, and he did not utter it. There was something more atrocious than the failure to warn that honorable and terribly abused man, and that was for his wife's child to tell him what that wife had been.
M. de Claviers had walked to the door. He seemed to await a word, a gesture, a glance; and Landri stood silent, with downcast eyes. The marquis himself started to turn back. Then, in face of the young man's obstinate immobility, his dense eyebrows contracted, his eyes became stern. He repeated:—
"Adieu. Do you understand that I am bidding you adieu?"
"Adieu," said Landri, without raising his eyes, while the dispenser of justice, with a shrug of his powerful shoulders, left the room to avoid giving way to the fresh wave of indignation that swept over his great heart.
[5]In French law, a sommation respectueuse is an extrajudicial document, which a young man of twenty-five or a young woman of twenty-one, proposing to marry without parental consent, is required to serve upon his or her parents, requesting advice concerning the marriage.
[6]Merlin, Répertoire de Jurisprudence, "Puissance Paternelle," Sect. III, § 1:—"Basset mentions a sentence pronounced by a father in person, by the advice of his family, against his son. He declared him to be unworthy to succeed, and sentenced him to the galleys for twenty years. The procureur-général of the Parliament of Grenoble appealed from this sentence as too light, and by decree of September 19, 1663, the son was sentenced to the galleys for life."
VII
ALL SAVE HONOR
Four weeks had passed since the young man had listened to the Marquis de Claviers-Grandchamp's wrathful stride through the reception-room of his apartment, without calling him back to cry out the truth, to prevent that deplorable injustice: the debts incurred by his imprudent but generous and chivalrous prodigality paid with the money of his wife's lover! After those twenty-nine days Landri found himself once more, in the same place and at the same hour, surrounded by the same familiar objects amid which his period of arrest had passed.
He was free now. On the preceding day he had been sentenced by the court-martial at Châlons, by five votes against two, to a fortnight's imprisonment, to date back to his original arrest. On his return from Châlons to Saint-Mihiel, he had found in his room an official communication, stating that "by presidential order, under date of this day, Lieutenant de Claviers-Grandchamp is retired from active service on half-pay." That sheet of paper was the veritable "Here lies" of the soldier, rather than the letter that he had received from the colonel on his return from the Hugueville expedition. Landri had crumpled it up and thrown it aside, paying no further heed to it. All his attention was given to a telegram which he read again and again, an indefinite number of times, seated, with his head in his hands, at the same table and in the same attitude as the marquis the other day, while his valet and the orderly went in and out, packing his trunks.