The Nabob by Alphonse Daudet (good english books to read TXT) 📖

Monpavon that he is walking into blackness. He shivers a little, but does not falter, and continues to walk with erect head and chest thrown out.
M. de Monpavon walks to his death! Now he is entering the complicated labyrinth of noisy streets, where the clatter of the omnibus mingles with the thousand humming trades of the working city, where the heat of the factory chimneys loses itself in the fever of a whole people struggling against hunger. The air trembles, the gutters steam, the houses shake at the passing of the wagons, of the heavy drays rumbling round the narrow streets. On a sudden the marquis stops; he has found what he wanted. Between the black shop of a charcoal-seller and the establishment of a packing-case maker, whose pine boards leaning on the walls give him a little shiver, there is a wide door, surmounted by its sign, the word BATHS on a dirty lantern. He enters, crosses a little damp garden where a jet of water weeps in a rockery. Here is the gloomy corner he was looking for. Who would ever believe that the Marquis de Monpavon had come there to cut his throat? The house is at the end, low, with green blinds and a glass door, with a sham air of a villa. He asks for a bath, and while it is being prepared he smokes his cigar at the window, with the noise of the water behind him, looks at the flower-bed of sparse lilac, and the high walls which inclose it.
At the side there is a great yard, the court-yard of a fire station, with a gymnasium, whose masts and swings, vaguely seen from below, look like gibbets. A bugle-call sounds in the yard, and its call takes the marquis thirty years back, reminds him of his campaigns in Algeria, the high ramparts of Constantine, the arrival of Mora at the regiment, and the duels, and the little parties. Ah! how well life began then! What a pity that those cursed cards--ps--ps--ps--Well, it's something to have saved appearances.
"Your bath is ready, sir," said the attendant.
At that moment, breathless and pale, Mme. Jenkins was entering Andre's studio, where an instinct stronger than her will had brought her--the wish to embrace her child before she died. When she opened the door (he had given her a key) she was relieved to find that he was not there, and that she would have time to calm her excitement, increased as it was by the long walk to which she was so little accustomed. No one was there. But on the table was the little note which he always left when he went out, so that his mother, whose visits were becoming shorter and less frequent on account of the tyranny of Jenkins, could tell where he was, and wait for him or rejoin him easily. The two had not ceased to love each other deeply, tenderly, in spite of the cruelty of life which forced into the relations of mother and son the clandestine precautions of an intrigue.
"I am at my rehearsal," said the note to-day, "I shall be back at seven."
This attention of the son, whom she had not seen for three weeks, yet who persisted in expecting her all the same, brought to the mother's eyes the flood of tears which was suffocating her. She felt as if she had just entered a new world. This little room was so pure, so quiet, so elevated. It kept the last rays of the setting sun on its windows, and seemed, with its bare walls, hewn from a corner of the sky. It was adorned only with one great portrait, hers, nothing but hers, smiling in the place of honour, and again, down there, on the table in a gilt frame. This humble little lodging, so light when all Paris was becoming dark, made an extraordinary impression on her, in spite of the poverty of its sparse furniture, scattered in two rooms, its common chintz, and its chimney garnished with two great bunches of hyacinths--those flowers which are hawked round the streets in barrowsful. What a good and worthy life she could have led by the side of her Andre! And in her mind's eye she had arranged her bed in one corner, her piano in another, she saw herself giving lessons, and caring for the home to which she was adding her share of ease and courageous gaiety. How was it that she had not seen that her duty, the pride of her widowhood, was there? By what blindness, what unworthy weakness?
It was a great fault, no doubt, but one for which many excuses might be found in her easy and tender disposition, and the clever knavery of her accomplice, always talking of marriage, hiding from her that he himself was no longer free, and when at last obliged to confess it, painting such a picture of his dull life, of his despair, of his love, that the poor creature, so deeply compromised already, and incapable of one of those heroic efforts which raise the sufferer above the false situations, had given way at last, had accepted this double existence, so brilliant and so miserable, built on a lie which had lasted ten years. Ten years of intoxicating success and unspeakable unhappiness--ten years of singing, with the fear of exposure between each verse--where the least remark on irregular unions wounded her like an allusion--where the expression of her face had softened to the air of mild humility, of a guilty woman begging for pardon. Then the certainty that she would be deserted had come to spoil even these borrowed joys, had tarnished her luxury; and what misery, what sufferings borne in silence, what incessant humiliations, even to this last, the most terrible of all!
While she is thus sadly reviewing her life in the cool of the evening and the calm of the deserted house, a gust of happy laughter rose from the rooms beneath; and recalling the confidences of Andre, his last letter telling the great news, she tried to distinguish among all these fresh and limpid voices that of her daughter Elise, her son's betrothed, whom she did not know, whom she would never know. This reflection added to the misery of her last moments, and loaded them with so much remorse and regret that, in spite of her will to be brave, she wept.
Night comes on little by little. Large shadows cover the sloping windows, where the immense depth of the sky seems to lose its colour, and to deepen into obscurity. The roofs seem to draw close together for the night, like soldiers preparing for the attack. The bells count the hours gravely, while the martins fly round their hidden nests, and the wind makes its accustomed invasion of the rubbish of the old wood-yard. To-night it sighs with the sound of the river, a shiver of the fog; it sighs of the river, to remind the unfortunate woman that it is there she must go. She shivers beforehand in her lace mantle. Why did she come here to reawaken her desire for a life impossible after the avowal she was forced to make? Hasty steps shake the staircase; the door opens precipitately; it is Andre. He is singing, happy, in a great hurry, for they are waiting dinner for him below. But, as he is striking the match, he feels that someone is in the room--a moving shadow among the shadows at rest.
"Who is there?"
Something answers him like a stifled laugh or a sob. He believes that it is one of his little neighbours, a plot of the children to amuse themselves. He draws near. Two hands, two arms, seize and surround him.
"It is I."
And with a feverish voice, hurrying as if to assure herself, she tells him that she is setting out on a long journey, and that before going--
"A journey! And where are you going?"
"Oh, I do not know. We are going over there, a long way, on business in his own part of the world."
"What! You will not be here for my play? It is in three days. And then, immediately after, my marriage. Come now, he cannot hinder you from coming to my marriage?"
She makes excuses, imagines reasons, but her hands burning between her son's, and her altered voice, tell Andre that she is not speaking the truth. He is going to strike a light; she prevents him.
"No, no; it is useless. We are better without it. Besides, I have so much to get ready still. I must go away."
They are both standing up, ready for the separation, but Andre will not let her go without telling him what is the matter, what tragic care is hollowing that fair face where the eyes--was it an effect of the dusk?--shone with a strange light.
"Nothing; no, nothing, I assure you. Only the idea of not being able to take part in your happiness, your triumph. At any rate, you know I love you; you don't mistrust your mother, do you? I have never been a day without thinking of you: do the same--keep me in your heart. And now kiss me and let me go quickly. I have waited too long."
Another minute and she would have the strength for what she had to do. She darts forward.
"No, you shall not go. I feel that something extraordinary is happening in your life which you do not want to tell. You are in some great trouble, I am sure. This man has done some infamous thing."
"No, no. Let me go! Let me go!"
But he held her fast.
"Tell me, what is it? Tell me."
Then, whispering in her ear, with a voice tender and low as a kiss:
"He has left you, hasn't he?"
The wretched woman shivers, hesitates.
"Ask me nothing. I will say nothing. Adieu!"
He pressed her to his heart:
"What could you tell me that I do not know already, poor mother? You did not guess, then, why I left six months ago?"
"You know?"
"I know everything. And what has happened to you to-day I have foreseen for long, and hoped for."
"Oh, wretch, wretch that I am, why did I come?"
"Because it is your home, because you owe me ten years of my mother. You see now that I must keep you."
He said all this on his knees, before the sofa on which she had let herself fall, in a flood of tears, and the last painful sobs of her wounded pride. She wept thus for long, her child at her feet. And now the Joyeuse family, anxious because Andre did not come down, hurried up in a troop to look for him. It was an invasion of innocent faces, transparent gaiety, floating curls, modest dress, and over all the group shone the big lamp, the good old lamp with the vast shade which M. Joyeuse solemnly carried, as high, as straight as he could, with the gesture of a caryatid. Suddenly they stopped before this pale and sad lady, who looked, touched to the depths, at all this smiling grace, above all at Elise, a little behind the others, whose conscious air in this indiscreet visit points her out as the _fiancee_.
"Elise, embrace our mother and thank her. She has come to live with her children."
There she is, caught in all these caressing arms, pressed against four little feminine hearts which have missed the shelter of a mother's love for so long; there she is introduced, and so gently, into the luminous circle of the family lamp, widened to allow her to take her place there, to dry her eyes, to warm and brighten her spirit at this steady flame, even in this little studio near the roof, where just now the terrible storm blew so