The Son of Clemenceau Part 17

"I, alone?" repeated the Italian, affected by the melancholy tone common to the man of one idea who must, to concentrate his thoughts, set aside other ties of union with his race.

"Do you doubt it?"

Antonino felt no doubt. He would be the most to be deplored among men if he were not fond of Clemenceau after all that he had done for him. He was an orphan vagrant, next to a beggar, when he had been housed by him, kept, and highly educated. Then, too, with a frankness not common among born brothers, the Frenchman had a.s.sociated him in all his labors for the revolution in the science of artillery--the greatest since Bacon discovered gunpowder. All that he was, he owed to the man before him.

"Believe me, father," he said, earnestly, "I esteem and venerate you!"

"And yet you keep secrets from me!" reproached Clemenceau.

"I--I have no secrets."

"I see you are too serious."

"I am only sorrowful--sorrowful at quitting you."

"Why should you do it, I repeat?"

"I am never merry--happiness is not my portion," faltered Antonino, not knowing what answer to make.

"That's nothing. Better now than later! At your age, unhappiness is easily borne--it is only what the sporting gentlemen call a preliminary canter. Wait till you come to the actual race!"

"I am not fit to dwell with others--with grave, earnest men; I am too nervous and impressionable."

"Because you come of an excitable race, and your childhood was pa.s.sed in too deep poverty. You will grow out of all that, gradually. Stay here; oh, keep with me, for I have need of you and you require a companion-soul, soothing like mine. The kind of disappointment you experience is not to be cured by change of place. You carry it with you, and distance increases and strengthens it, and whenever you meet the object again to whom was due the vexation you will perceive that you went on the journey for no good."

Antonino looked at the speaker as one regards the mind-reader who has answered to the point. Clemenceau fixed him with his serene, unvarying eyes, and continued, in an emotionless voice, like a statue, speaking:

"You are in love--and you love my wife."

Antonino started away and involuntarily lifted his hands in a position of defense. Averting his eyes and unclenching his fists, he muttered sullenly:

"What makes you suppose that?"

"I saw it was so."

At the end of a silence more burdensome than any before the younger man found his voice and, as though tears interfered with his utterance, said pathetically, and indistinctly:

"Do you not acknowledge, master, now, that I must go; for when I am far away, perhaps you will forgive the ingrate!"

Looking at the young man of two-and-twenty, Clemenceau knew by his own infatuation at the same tender age with the same woman, that he had nothing to forgive him for--little to reproach him. It was youth that was to blame, and it had loved. No matter who that Cytherean priestess was, he must have adored her whether sister, wife or daughter of dearest friend, teacher and paternal patron. But it was clear from the grief that had made the youth a melancholy man that he was honorable.

Grief is never, when the outcome of remorse, a useless or evil feeling.

It is a fair-fighting adversary which has only to be overcome to be a sure ally, always ready to defend and protect its victor. In his own terse language, that of a mathematician and mechanician who knew no words of double meaning.

Clemenceau told the Italian this.

"With your youth and your grief, such a spirit as yours and such a friend as you have in me, Anto," he said, "you possess the weapons of Achilles."

Antonino thought he was mocking at him and frowned.

"You think I am sneering? Or merely laughing at you? Alas, it is a long while since I indulged in laughter. It was this woman, with whom you have fallen in love, who froze the laugh forever on my lips! she would have been the death of me if I had not overruled her and exterminated her within my breast. How I loved her! how I have suffered through her--enough to be our united portions of future pain--suffer you no more, therefore. You are too young, tender and credulous to try a fall with that creature. She must have divined long ago that you were enamored of her. She is not too clear-sighted in all things, but she sees such effects by intuition. It is very probable that she has returned to this house on your account, so suddenly. I could guess that she was on the eve of flight, but not that she would return. She always needs fresh sensations to make herself believe that she is alive, for she is more lifeless than those whom she robbed of life."

Antonino did not understand the allusion, for he had never felt less like dying than since Cesarine had been seen again.

"I mean that she sends the chill of death into the soul, heart and brain of man, and it congeals the marrow in his bones!" said Clemenceau, energetically. "You may say that if she is a wicked woman and if, whatever her defense, her absence covers some evil step, I ought to separate from her. It is all the present state of the law allows. But while her absence would have prevented you, or another friend, from meeting her, still she would have borne my name. That name I am doubly bound to make honorable, for it was stained with blood--that of one of her ever-accursed race. My father won an ill.u.s.trious name and, her ancestress, whom he married, was dragging it publically in the mud amid all the scandals of society, when he slew her on her couch of gilded infamy. Ashamed of this name--not because he was indicated under it, but because she had so vilified it--his greatest desire to the friends who visited him in the condemned cell, was to have me, his son, change it.

They had me brought up at a distance under the name of Claudius Ruprecht. It might even have happened that another country than that of my birth would receive the glory which a heaven-sent idea is to bestow upon France. Now, I am more than ever determined that her venom shall not sully me. She may cause a little ridicule to arise, but that I can scorn. The laugh at Montmorency will not reach Paris, far less echo around the globe! For a long time I hoped to enlighten her and redeem her, but I have failed. But I am bound to enlighten you and save you, am I not? From the feeling you harbor can spring only an additional shame for Cesarine, and certain, perhaps irreparable woe for you. Stop, turn about and look the other way. A man of twenty, who may naturally live another three-score years and work during two of them, who would talk to you of that nonsense, love's sorrow? That was all very well once, when the world revolved slowly and there was little to be done by the people who blocked n.o.body's way. But these are busy times and things to be done cannot wait till you finish loving and wailing, or till you die of a broken heart without having done anything for your fellow men."

"Bravo!" exclaimed the sympathetical and easily aroused Italian, grasping the speaker by the hand and pressing it with revived energy.

"My excellent leader, you are right!"

"And by and by," said the other, with an effort, as though he had to master inward commotion, "when you win a prize from your own country and you look for household joys more agreeably to reward you, you may find one not far from here at this moment to be your wife. For, generally, the bane is near the antidote--the serpent is crushed under the heel next the beneficent plant which heals the bite."

"Rebecca?" questioned the young man in amazement. "But if I can read her heart as you do mine, master, Rebecca Daniels loves you."

"She admires me and pities me, Antonino," replied Clemenceau, hastily, as if wishful to elude the question. "She does not love me. Besides, that is of no consequence. I have no room for love again--always provided that I have once loved. Pa.s.sion often has the honor of being confounded with the purer feeling, especially in the young. Did I love that monster--for she is a monster, Antonino--I might forgive, for love excuses everything--that is true love, but it is rare as virtue--common sense and all that is truth. To the altar of love, many are called, but few elected, and all are not fit.

"I see you are not convinced, because the dog that bit me is so shapely, and graceful and wears so silky a coat! Such dogs are mad and their bite in the heart is fatal and agonizing unless one at once applies the white hot cautery. The seam remains--from time to time it aches--but the victim's life is saved that he may save, serve, gladden his fellow men.

Would you rather I should weep, or force a smile, and appear happy for a period? In any case, since I have cured the injury and she is in my house again, I shall not retaliate on her. But if she threatens to become a public danger--if she bares her poisonous fangs to harm my friend--my son--another--let her beware!"

"Master," stammered Antonino, beginning to see the temptress in the new light, as Felix had often shown him other objects to which he had been blind, "you may or may not judge her too harshly, but you certainly judge me too leniently. Better to let me go away, and far, or at least, since you began the revelation, make the evidence complete of your trust and esteem."

Clemenceau saw that the young man still believed in Cesarine, but he did not care to tell him all he knew of her. Had he been told that she had encouraged Gratian to flee with her and had abandoned him at the first danger, without lifting a finger to save him, or her voice to procure him succor, he might loathe and hate her; but Clemenceau meant to say nothing. Such revelations, and denunciations are permissible alone to wrath, revenge, or despair, in the man whose heart is still bleeding from the wound made in it so that his outburst is sealed by his blood.

"No, Antonino, by my mouth no one shall ever know all that woman has done--or what victories I have won over myself--in severe wrestlings."

"I see you have forgiven her," said the Italian, advancing the virtue in which he was deficient.

"I have expunged her from my heart," answered Clemenceau firmly. "She is a picture on only one page of my life-book, and I do not open it there.

Knowing my secret, you are the last person to whom I shall speak of Cesarine's misdeeds. I wish your deliverance, like mine, to be owed to your will, but you are free and have been forewarned, so that you will have less effort to make than I. Let the scarlet woman go by and do not step across her path. Between two smiles, she will dishonor you or deal death to you! She slays like a dart of Satan. That is all you need know.

But, as, indeed, you deserve a token of esteem and confidence from your frankness, affection and labors, I will give you one."

Having seated himself, he drew from an inner pocket a paper written in odd characters.

"The time of my giving you the proof of trust should make it more sacred and precious still. I have found the solution of the last problem over which we pored. You know that while we discovered the means of imprisoning the gas in a concentrated form of scarcely appreciable bulk, it was not always our obedient slave, we had the fear that sometimes it would not submit to being liberated by piecemeal but would now and then disrupt its containing chamber in impatience, and then the holder would certainly die, choked if the fragments of the gun had not fatally lacerated him. After many days and nights, I have found the simple means to render the gas innocuous except in the direction to which we direct its flow. I have written out the formula, in the minutest particulars and in the cipher which you and I alone understand. In the same way we two share the secret of this safe."

He handed Antonino a peculiar key and he went to unlock the coffer which had aroused Madame Clemenceau's curiosity.

"Lock it up with the other papers," concluded the inventor. "I appoint you its keeper while I live--my heir and the carrier out of the work after my decease, should I die before having proved what I consign there. What matters it now if my material form disappears when my spirit lives on in thee! Well," he said, as Antonino returned, after closing and fastening the chest, "do you need any farther proof of the confidence I have in you?"

Antonino grasped his hand and wrung it fondly When both had recovered calmness, they went on speaking of their work, which might be considered past the stage when the projector is racked by misgivings. They went into the breakfast-room together, prepared to bear the singular meeting with the errant wife whose return was so unexpected. But she preferred not to take the step so soon, and, as Rebecca also kept away, warned by Hedwig, who might appear at the board, the three men took their meal together.

CHAPTER XV.

THE MAN OF MANY MASKS.