Part 9 (1/2)
The finger of fate, which had urged the artist to commit a homicide for morality's sake, had pointed out to his son the way which had to be followed over corpses of the young student's slaying.
Brooding over the alteration in his future, he exchanged hardly a word with his cousin, during the prolonged journey, which they continued together, as though mutual reluctance to part bound them indissolubly.
Logic said there should be a powerful repugnance between those whom the shadow of the guillotine's red arm clouded. But, spite of all, Felix felt that Kaiserina was, like himself, well within the circle of infamy.
Her mother was the sister of the shameful Iza, and her husband's careful guard of her proved that he doubted her walking virtuously if her unscrupulous mother stood by her side. This old Megara--who sold her offspring to worse than death--was living--seemed eternal as evil itself. It were a pious act to save Kaiserina from her as his father had tried to do with Iza. He was pleased that she seemed inclined to cling to him as though wearied of the erratic life she seemed to have led after a flight from her mother's, and which she did not describe minutely. He was also grateful that, in her allusions to his father, she did not speak with the bitterness of a blood-avenger.
They made the journey to Paris without any stoppage. He had to visit M.
Ritz, for M. Rollinet was no longer there, having accepted a judges.h.i.+p in Algeria. In the vehicle, carrying to a hotel where he purposed leaving her, Felix said, feelingly:
”I think I see why we were brought together. I am not to lead the life of an artist, lounging in galleries, sketching ruins and pretty girls, but one of expiation for my poor father's crime.”
”Perhaps. More surely,” she replied with a smile which, on her peerless lips, seemed divine, ”_I_ should make the faults of the Dobronowskas be forgotten.”
They had arrived at the same conclusion as the journey ended, but the means had not occurred yet to either.
”Here we are,” he exclaimed, as the carriage horse came to a stop.
He alighted, entered the hotel and settled for the young lady's stay.
Returning, he came to help her out.
”My door will never be closed to you,” she said, remembering how, in her story, her notorious ancestors had playfully suggested in a letter announcing her renunciation of her scheming mother's toils and her return to marry Clemenceau, that he might leave his door on the jar for her at all instants. ”And yet, what will be the gain in our meeting again?”
”Everything for our souls, and materially! Here in France, where La Belle Iza and the executed Clemenceau point a moral, neither of us can find a mate in marriage easily. If blood stains me, shame is reflected on you. Let us efface both blood and shame by an united effort! Let our life in common force the world to look no farther than ourselves and see nothing of the disgrace beyond.”
”I do not care a fig for what people think or say,” said the one-night _diva_, with a curl of the lip. ”And I do not understand you fully.”
”Wait till I see you again, when all shall be made clear. Meanwhile, cousin--since without you I should have lost my life, or, certainly my liberty--I am eternally bound to you. It is left to you to have the bonds solemnized in the church, here, in France--my country!”
CHAPTER X.
THE FOX IN THE FOLD.
Among the secluded villas that dot with pretty colors the suburb of Montmorency, there is none more agreeable than the Villa Reine-Claude, which was in the hands of the notary who had managed the transmission of the maintenance money to young Clemenceau. At the hint from M. Ritz, who had a debt of honor to pay the son of his dead friend, the house was rented at a nominal sum. Here Felix, as he boldly described himself by right, though the name had a tinge of mockery, installed himself with his bride. He had a portfolio of architectural sketches soon completed and, thanks to the fellows.h.i.+p to which his name might exercise a spell, all the old artists who had known his father, helped him manfully.
Luckily, there was something markedly novel in his work.
His odd training helped him. He came from the Polish University into an unromantic society which, after its stirring up by the Great Revolution, was so levelled and amalgamated that everybody resembled his neighbor as well in manners and speech as in attire. Strong characters, heated pa.s.sions, black vices, deep prejudices, grievous misfortunes, and even utterly ridiculous persons had disappeared. The country he had been reared in still thrilled with patriotism and meant something when it muttered threats to kill its tyrant--meant so much that the Czar did not pa.s.s through a Polish town until the police and military had ”ensured an enthusiastic reception.” But in France, tyrants and love of country were mere words to draw applause from the country cousins in a popular theatre.
Felix, though a youth, stood a head and shoulders above the level of the weaklings excluded as ”finished” from these commonplace educational inst.i.tutions--schools called colleges and colleges called universities, resulting necessarily from the proclamation of man's equality. He sickened at seeing the neutral-tinted lake of society, with ”shallow-swells,” more painful to the right-minded than an ocean in a tempest.
He soon became like the French, but not so his wife. She suffered the change of her unp.r.o.nounceable name, being euphonized as ”Cesarine,”
smilingly, but life at home in a demure and tranquil suburb little suited the young meteor who had flashed across Germany. Felix saw with dismay that domestic bliss was not that which she enjoyed. For a while he hoped that she would content herself as his helpmate and the genius of the hearth when a mother.
But maternity had nothing but thorns for her. She chafed under the burden and her joy was indecent when the little boy died. Until then he had believed that the path of duty was wide enough and lined sufficiently with flowers to gratify or at least pacify her.
But Cesarine was, like her aunt, a born dissolvent of society's vital elements. Ruled by a strong hand, and removed from the pernicious influence of the vicious countess, her mother had never inculcated evil to her child; on the contrary, impressed by the lesson of Iza's career, she had perhaps been too Puritanic with Cesarine, whose flight from home at an early age, was like the spring of a deer through a gap in a fence.
Cesarine, wherever placed, sapped morality, faith, labor and the family ties.