"For my part," said Simone, "I am for the lovers. If I had been in Monsieur de Claviers' place, I'd have scolded a little, on principle, and then I'd have given one of those parties that he knew how to give."
"Look you, my dear," interposed Charlus angrily, "when I hear you and Jean talk like this, I wonder whether we oughtn't to long for another '93, to bring you all to a realizing sense of what you are and what you should be."
"Oh!" laughed Madame de Sicard, "now you're just like my grandmother de Prosny, who used to prophesy the guillotine every night."
"I know," Marie de Charlus broke in, "and you replied: 'You hope for the staircase of the nobles, but you'll get the wall.'—Wall or staircase, it's always blood that flows, and I agree with old Claviers, let us try to see to it that it's pure blood; and his grandchildren's won't be that. He did all he could to prevent it, and he did well. That's what I call chic and not chiqué."
And upon this conclusion of the "emancipated gratin," the conversation took another turn, Bressieux having asked Simone, with an air of indifference, whether she had seen the new play at the Français, in order not to prolong the discussion of such dangerous topics. They talked in undertones of a proposed marriage between Sicard's brother and a Demoiselle Mosé, and the satirical personage almost regretted having yielded to the temptation to bury his poisonous fang in the self-esteem of the happiest of the "Three Halves." The commission he had received in the second Altona deal—two hundred thousand francs, for the Chaffins who are in society are more expensive than the others—had put him on his feet for some time. But who could say? The future Sicard-Mosé ménage might need advice about furnishing their abode. And so he tried to repair with the young wife the bad turn he had done himself with her husband by his epigram. He tried without energy, however. Contradictory as it may appear, Geoffroy de Claviers' misfortune saddened him, despite the two hundred thousand francs so quickly earned. He had pocketed the money, but had actually made Sieur Altona pay another million. Moreover, as there was in him a man of race, compared with the dealer, he had admired the demeanor of the châtelain of Grandchamp during a trial of which he alone understood the hidden side. In fact it was Jean de Sicard's little attack on the chivalrous marquis that had drawn his mot from him; and while the salon discussed the actors on Rue Richelieu, he was elsewhere in thought.
"Claviers in England?" he said to himself. "To buy horses? Nonsense! He probably wanted to see Landri once more. How he loved him! No one will ever make me believe that he was not told the truth by that Chaffin,—to whom the infamous performance didn't bring luck, however, for Altona tells me he has had a paralytic shock. It's another piece of luck for me, that shock. The rascal would have claimed a percentage, on the ground that he baited the hook!"
Observers of the type of Bressieux, those disguised tradesmen, who earn their bread—or their luxuries—by studying the characters of their dupes or their rivals, really do possess a second sight. At the very moment when these comments, neither very intelligent nor very foolish, very kindly or very unkindly, were being exchanged in the Charlus salon, another scene was taking place many miles away; and that scene was the veritable conclusion of this tale.
This dénouement had for its stage one of those spots where it seems least likely that words of a certain sort can be spoken: a room in a hotel at Liverpool, that city on the bank of the Mersey, the immense mart of England's commerce, one of the extremities of a vast moving street of steamships and sailing vessels, of which the other ends are Boston and New York! City of docks and railway-stations, of smoke and speed, panting with the travail of a world, with its irregular and chaotic structures of brick and stone, built in haste, above which the finest days spread only a mistily blue sky, dimmed by clouds of vapor.
It was such a veiled, uncertain sky that Landri and Valentine saw through the bow-window of a small parlor in that hotel, at which they had alighted the day before. They were awaiting the time to go on board the boat that was to take them in six days to New York, whence they were to journey, via Montreal, to Ottawa, to prepare for their permanent establishment. Little Ludovic had insisted upon going with his tutor on board the steamer, which the husband and wife—they had been married ten days—could see at the dock, within a few rods of the hotel. The huge vessel was called the Cambria, the Latin name of the principality of Wales. She was of thirty-two thousand five hundred tons, with engines of seventy thousand horse-power; seven hundred and eighty feet long and eighty-eight feet beam. Her vast black hull towered above the gray water of the river, swollen by the rising of the tide. A floating palace, pierced by innumerable port-holes, and dominated by four huge smoke-stacks, reared its white walls above the waterline. Locomotives whistled. Tram-cars ran along their electric wires, with a snapping noise. Between the hotel and the landing-stage were travellers going to and fro, giving orders, looking after their trunks, or hailing porters.
Valentine had sent her maid on before, so that not even a package was left in that empty parlor whose dark mahogany furniture emphasized its depressing commonness. How far away they were, she from her homelike little sanctuary on Rue Monsieur, he from the magnificence of Grandchamp and Rue du Faubourg-Saint-Honoré! That contrast was the anticipatory reflection of the exile that Landri had desired and she had agreed to. The melancholy aspect of their surroundings intensified the distress with which the young man was weighed down. He was thinking of M. de Claviers, and he said to his wife:—