Cousin Bette (20 page)

‘How?' asked the poor artist, brim-full of happiness, and too naïve to suspect a trap.

‘In this way,' the Lorraine peasant continued. Lisbeth could not deny herself the agonizing pleasure of watching Wenceslas, who was looking at her with a son's affection, made more intense by the overflow of his love for Hortense; and the spinster was misled. When she saw for the first time in her life the fires of passion in a man's eyes she believed she had lighted them there.

‘Monsieur Crevel is ready to advance us a hundred thousand francs to start a business, if, so he says, you wish to marry me. He has odd notions, that fat man.… What do you think of it?' she asked.

The artist, grown deathly pale, looked at his benefactress with a dulled eye which revealed all his thought. He stood there dumbfounded and dazed.

‘No one has ever told me so plainly before,' she said with a bitter laugh, ‘that I am hideously ugly!'

‘Mademoiselle,' replied Steinbock, ‘my benefactress will never be ugly to me. I have a very deep affection for you, but I am not yet thirty years old, and…'

‘And I am forty-three I' said Bette. ‘My cousin, Baroness Hulot, who is forty-eight, still inspires desperate passion; but then she is beautiful!'

‘Fifteen years between us, Mademoiselle I What kind of marriage would that be? For our own sakes I think we should reflect very seriously. My gratitude to you will certainly not fall short of your great goodness to me. And your money, what's more, will be returned in a few days!'

‘My money!' she exclaimed. ‘Oh I you treat me as if I were a heartless usurer!'

‘I beg your pardon,' replied Wenceslas, ‘but you have talked so often about it.… Well, it is you who have made me, do not destroy me.'

‘You want to leave me, I see,' she said, shaking her head.

‘Who can have given you the power to be ungrateful, you who are like a man made of papier mâché? Do you not trust me – me, your good angel? I have so often spent the night working for you, have handed over to you the savings of my whole life-time; for four years I have shared my bread with you, a poor working-woman's bread; have lent you everything I had, even to my courage!'

‘Mademoiselle, stop! stop!' he said, throwing himself on his knees and holding out his hands to her. ‘Don't say anything more! In three days' time I will explain, I will tell you everything. Let me…' he went on, and kissed her hand, ‘let me be happy. I love someone and I am loved in return.'

‘Very well, be happy, my child,' she said, as she drew him to his feet. Then she kissed his forehead and hair, with the desperation a condemned man must feel as he lives his last morning on earth.

‘Ah! you are the noblest and best of human beings; you are the peer of the woman I love,' said the poor artist.

‘I love you dearly enough to tremble for your future,' she said sombrely. ‘Judas hanged himself! All ingrates come to a terrible end. You are leaving me, and you will never do work worth while again. Consider: we need not marry – I am an old maid, I know. I do not want to stifle the flower of your youth, your poetry as you call it, in my arms that are like vine-stocks, but, without marrying, can we not stay together? Listen. I have a head for business. I can gather a fortune for you in ten years' work, for my name is Thrift; whereas with a young wife, who will bring only expenses, you will throw everything away, you will only work to make her happy. Happiness creates nothing but memories. When I think of you, I stay for hours with my hands idle.… Well, Wenceslas, stay with me.… You know, I understand everything. You shall have mistresses, pretty women like that little Marneffe who wants to meet you, who will give you the kind of happiness you could not find with me. Then you shall get married when I have saved thirty thousand francs a year for you.'

‘You are an angel, Mademoiselle, and I shall never forget this moment,' Wenceslas answered, wiping away tears.

‘I see you now as I want you to be, my child,' she said, gazing at him in ecstasy.

So strong is vanity in us, that Lisbeth believed that she had triumphed. She had made such a great concession in offering Madame Marneffe! She experienced the keenest emotion of her life. For the first time she felt joy flood her heart. For such another hour she would have sold her soul to the devil.

‘My word is pledged,' he answered, ‘and I love a woman against whom no other can prevail. But you are and you will always be the mother I have lost.'

These words fell like an avalanche of snow upon that blazing crater. Lisbeth sat down and sombrely contemplated the youthfulness and distinguished good looks before her: the artist's brow, the mane of silky hair, everything that called to her repressed instincts as a woman; and a few tears, instantly dried, dimmed her eyes for a moment. She looked like one of the frail, meagre, figures carved by medieval sculptors above tombs.

‘I place no curse upon you,' she said, rising abruptly. ‘You are only a child. May God protect you!'

She went away, and shut herself in her room.

‘She's in love with me,' Wenceslas said to himself, ‘poor soul. What a torrent of burning eloquence! She's out of her mind.'

The supreme effort of that stiff, matter-of-fact nature to hold the image of beauty and poetry in its keeping can only be compared, in its vehemence, to a shipwrecked sailor's wild striving as he makes his last attempt to reach the shore.

Two days later, at half past four in the morning, when Count Steinbock was wrapped in deep sleep, he was awakened by knocking at his garret door. He went to open it, and two shabbily dressed men walked in, accompanied by a third who looked like a wretched process-server.

‘You are Monsieur Wenceslas, Count Steinbock?' this third man said.

‘Yes.'

‘My name is Grasset, Monsieur, successor to Louchard, sheriff's officer.'

‘Yes. Well?'

‘You are under arrest, Monsieur. You must come with us to the Clichy prison. Please get dressed. We have done this as courteously as possible, as you see. I have not brought police, and there's a cab waiting downstairs.'

‘You are properly caught,' added one of the bailiff's men, ‘and we count on your coming quietly.'

Steinbock dressed and walked downstairs with a bailiff's man gripping each arm. When he had been put in the cab, the driver set off without being directed, like a man who knows where to go. Within half an hour, the poor foreigner found himself well and truly locked up, and had lodged no protest, so completely had he been surprised.

At ten o'clock he was called to the prison office, and there found Lisbeth, who, bathed in tears, gave him money to pay for additional food and a room large enough to work in.

‘My child,' she said, ‘speak of your arrest to no one; don't write to a living soul. It would be the ruin of your career. This stigma must be kept concealed. I'll soon have you out of this. I'll get the money together… never fear. Write down what I should bring for your work. I'll die or you'll soon be free.'

‘Oh! I'll owe you my life again!' he exclaimed. ‘For I should lose more than life if my reputation were lost.'

Lisbeth left, with joy in her heart. She was hoping, with the artist under lock and key, to wreck his marriage with Hor-tense by saying that he was a married man, had been pardoned through his wife's efforts on his behalf, and had left for Russia. And so, in order to carry out this plan, she betook herself about three o'clock to visit the Baroness, although it was not the day when she usually dined there. She was anxious to savour the tortures her young cousin would suffer at the time when Wenceslas generally arrived.

‘You are staying to dinner, Bette?' the Baroness asked, concealing her disappointment.

‘Oh, yes.'

‘Good!' answered Hortense. ‘I'll go and tell them to be punctual, since you don't like being late.'

Hortense nodded reassuringly to her mother, for she intended to tell the man-servant to send Monsieur Steinbock away when he presented himself; but as the man had gone
out, Hortense was obliged to give her message to the parlour maid, and the parlour maid went upstairs to fetch her needlework before taking up her post in the anteroom.

‘And what about my sweetheart?' Cousin Bette said to Hortense, when she returned. ‘You never ask me about him nowadays.'

‘Now that I think of it, what's he doing?' said Hortense. ‘For he's famous now. You must be pleased,' she added, whispering in her cousin's ear. ‘Everyone's talking of Monsieur Wenceslas Steinbock.'

‘He's talked about far too much for his own good,' Lis-beth answered. ‘It unsettles Monsieur. If it was only a matter of my charms carrying the day against the pleasures of Paris, I know my own power, but they say that the Czar Nicholas is anxious to attach an artist of such talent to his own Court, and is going to pardon him.…'

‘Nonsense,' said the Baroness.

‘How do you know that?' Hortense asked, with a sudden pang.

‘Well,' the fiendish Bette went on, ‘a person to whom he is bound by the most sacred ties, his wife, wrote to tell him so, yesterday. And he wants to go. Ah! he would be very foolish to leave France for Russia.…'

Hortense looked towards her mother, as her head drooped sideways. The Baroness had just time to catch her daughter as she fell fainting, as white as the lace of her fichu.

‘Lisbeth! You have killed my girl!' exclaimed the Baroness. ‘You were born to bring misfortune upon us.'

‘Why, how am I to blame for this, Adeline?' the peasant-woman demanded, rising to her feet menacingly. But, in her anxiety, the Baroness did not notice her.

‘I was wrong,' answered Adeline, supporting Hortense in her arms. ‘Ring the belli'

At that moment the door opened. The two women simultaneously turned their heads and saw Wenceslas Steinbock, who had been admitted by the cook during the parlour maid's absence.

‘Hortense!' cried the artist, springing towards the three women. And he kissed his love on her forehead before her
mother's eyes, but so reverently that the Baroness could not be angry. For a fainting fit it was a better restorative than smelling-salts. Hortense opened her eyes, saw Wenceslas, and colour returned to her cheeks. In a few moments she had quite recovered.

‘So this is what you have been hiding from me?' said Cousin Bette, smiling at Wenceslas, and appearing to guess the truth from the confusion of her two cousins. ‘How did you contrive to steal my sweetheart?' she said to Hortense, leading her into the garden.

Hortense artlessly told her cousin the story of her love. Her mother and father, she said, convinced that Bette would never marry, had permitted Count Steinbock's visits. Not like a naive girl, however, but with maturity's complex motives, she attributed to chance the purchase of the group, and the arrival of the artist, who, according to her, had wanted to know the name of his first patron.

Steinbock came quickly to join the two cousins, to thank the old maid with the utmost warmth for his swift deliverance from prison. To his thanks Lisbeth jesuitically replied that as the creditor had made only vague promises to her, she had not expected to obtain his release until the following day, and that this money-lender must have been ashamed of his petty persecution, and so had no doubt taken the initiative himself. The old maid, moreover, appeared to be pleased, and congratulated Wenceslas upon his good fortune.

‘Wicked boy!' she said, before Hortense and her mother. ‘If you had confessed, two days ago, that you loved my cousin Hortense and were loved by her in return, you would have spared me many tears. I thought that you were deserting your old friend, your governess, while, on the contrary, you are going to be my cousin. From now on you will be part of my family. The link is slender, it-is true; but strong enough to justify my affection for you.'

And she kissed Wenceslas on the forehead. Hortense threw herself into her cousin's arms, and burst into tears.

‘I owe my happiness to you,' she said. ‘I will never forget it.'

‘Cousin Bette,' the Baroness added, kissing Lisbeth in the
exhilaration of seeing everything turn out so well, ‘the Baron and I owe you a debt, and we will pay it. Come, let us talk these matters over in the garden.' And she led the way there.

So Lisbeth was, to all appearances, the family's good angel. She had everyone at her feet: Crevel, Hulot, Adeline, and Hortense.

‘We don't want you to work any longer,' said the Baroness. ‘I suppose that you may earn forty sous a day, not counting Sundays: that makes six hundred francs a year. Well, how much have you put away in savings?'

‘Four thousand five hundred francs.'

‘Poor Cousin!' said the Baroness.

She raised her eyes to heaven, she was so moved to think of all the hardships and privations that that sum of money, gathered together through thirty years, represented. Lisbeth misunderstood the nature of the Baroness's exclamation, saw in it a successful woman's contempt, and her hatred acquired a new intensity of bitterness, at the very moment when her cousin was abandoning all her mistrust of the tyrant of her childhood.

‘We will add ten thousand five hundred francs to that,' Adeline continued, ‘placed in trust, the interest to go to you, the principal to revert to Hortense; so that you will have an income of six hundred francs a year.'

Lisbeth's cup was full, or so it seemed. When she returned to the drawing-room, her handkerchief to her eyes, wiping away happy tears, Hortense told her of all the commissions and favours pouring in on Wenceslas, the darling of the whole family.

When the Baron came in, therefore, he found his family complete, for the Baroness had formally greeted Count Stein-bock by the name of son and fixed the date of the marriage, subject to her husband's approval, at a fortnight from that day. As soon as he appeared in the drawing-room, the Councillor of State was taken possession of by his wife and daughter, who ran to meet him, one anxious to have a word with him in private, the other to throw her arms round him.