The Son of Clemenceau

Chapter 9

REPARATION.

Fortunately for the fugitives, the poorly paid railway officials in these parts are the obsequious servants of those who liberally bribe. The station-master, though a very grand personage, indeed, in his uniform and metal-bound cap, became pliant as an East Indian waiter and accepted without question the explanation of the lady. It was she who was spokesman throughout. She said that she and her companion were play-actors and that their baggage was detained by a cruel manager of a Munich musical beer-hall; this was a wise admission as the man might have seen her at the Harmonista, or, at least, her photograph in the doorway. But they were compelled to reach Lucerne without delay or lose a profitable engagement, by the proceeds of which they could redeem their paraphernalia. While listening, the man dealt out the tickets, pocketed the gratuity which was handsomely added to a previous donation, and, without any surprise, agreed to let any one calling take away the horses; they certainly were above the means of strolling singers who had to flee from a town. Farther discussion, if he had sought it, was curtailed by the electric signal heralding the coming of a train. In eight minutes, the two were ensconced in a first-class compartment and hurried along toward the Land of Lakes.

In the sumptuous coach, the girl unburdened herself, but, with rare art or imperfect knowledge of her origin, she was more explicit on the family of her cousin than on her own. However, it was his that had made a niche in art and scandalous story.

As for Kaiserina, her mother was the eldest daughter of a Count Dobronowska, of a Polish branch of the Vieradlers, who had settled in Fuiland. The count had meddled with politics and the Czar had promptly confiscated his landed property. The loss and fear of Siberia had broken his heart. After his death, the widow passed the intervals of her grief in besieging persons of influence to obtain a restitution of the estate. Unfortunately, she had no son to fight the battle with the Czar, but two daughters were growing up with such a superabundance of charm that they promised to be no mean allies in the enterprise. But fortune did not altogether favor the widow; it is true that she interested a Russian of great wealth and political sway, but when the time came for his co-operation to be active, he played her a wicked trick. He attracted her elder daughter to him and married her. Not liking to have a mother-in-law in his mansion, he pensioned her off, with the proviso that her presence should never clash immediately with his own in any country. It is regrettable to add that Wanda, Madame Godaloff, agreed to this arrangement, and, indeed, having attained woman's goal, troubled herself not once about her parent who had schemed and plotted tirelessly for this end. The countess had brought her deer to a pretty market; but, unhappily, she gained little by the bargain compared with what she had dreamed.

She had a brother-in-law who had acted very differently from her husband. Instead of playing the patriot--and the fool--he had submitted to the tyrant and won a lucrative post at St. Petersburg. He was afraid to injure himself by giving countenance to his brother's relict, who was always seeking an audience of the Emperor. It was strongly suspected that she intended, since Wanda was out of the lists, to throw the next daughter, Iza, at the head of a Grand-duke with whom the two girls had played when all three were children at Warsaw.

The countess seemed to have educated the girl, as soon as her elder was out of the way, for a royal match. Like most Poles, Iza spoke several languages fluently, sang and played the harp and piano. She was growing lovelier than her sister because she was a purer blonde, and yet Wanda had been accounted a miracle. Remembering that, at a later period, a foreign adventuress almost inextricably ensnared one of the imperial family, the Countess Dobronowska's matrimonial project was not so insane. Some other pretender to the grand-ducal left or right hand thought it feasible, for everybody said that it was feminine jealousy that led to the countess and her "little beauty" being ordered out of the White Czar's realm. The pair, spurred on by the police of every capital, and all are in communication with St. Petersburg, at last rested in Paris. It was a favorable moment; the French government had offended the older powers by its presumption in chastising venerable Austria almost as severely as the Great Napoleon had done. The Dobronowskas were let alone in the imperial city on the Seine; but, unfortunately, the important state functionaries soon became as tired of the countess's plaints as their brothers on the Neva. Reduced to the shifts of the penniless aristocrats, the two lived like the shabby genteel. They made a desperate attempt to entrap their Grand-duke again. But the victim had warning and the pair were stopped at Warsaw. Here a beam of the sun, long withheld, glanced through the clouds and transiently warmed "the marrying mamma." A distant relative of hers, one Lergins, was an attach of the embassy and he fell in love with his "cousin" Iza, as the mother allowed the youth to call her. As he had splendid prospects and seemed to be quite another man as regarded maternal control of Wanda's husband, mamma dismissed her brilliant ignis fatuus and tried to have a clandestine marriage come off. But the young secretary of embassy was not of age and again she was forced to depart for Paris--that sink-hole for refugees of all sorts. His family put pressure on the officiale who in turn applied it to the luckless intriguante.

Farewell, the future in which a semi-imperial coronet hand gleamed! even that where a cascade of gold coin inundated the new Danae. Wearied of this constant grasping at the unattainable Iza, who had something of a heart, chose for herself, much as her elder had done, with happiness at home as the object; one fine morning, married M. Pierre Clemenceau, a young but rising sculptor. He had on the previous visit of theirs to Paris, materially befriended them. It was only gratitude after all, although he, enamored like an artist of this unrivaled beauty, would have sacrificed fortune to possess her. Indeed, he sacrificed all--even his honor, for he suffered himself to be gulled by her wiles as profoundly as he was infatuated by her charms.

At this point, as became a young woman telling of a relative's iniquity, Kaiserina glazed the facts and gave a perversion. It was later, therefore, that Felix Clemenceau learned in detail the whole mournful tale of a beautiful wanton's ingrained perfidy and a loving husband's blind confidence. The end was inevitably tragical. Lergins was decoyed by the countess to Paris, where she languished like a shark out of water. The sculptor's income did not come up to her dreams of luxury, any more than those she inspired in her daughter. She brought about a separation of the wedded pair and rejoiced when a fresh scandal necessitated a duel between the young Russian and the Frenchman. Unhappily for her revengeful ideas, it passed over harmlessly enough.

Iza remained the talk and admiration of the gay capital, although women of superior physical attractions rendezvous there. Nothing blemished her appearance; no excesses, no indulgements, not even bearing a son had a blighting effect. Unfortunately for the dissevered artist, she had been his model for the most renowned of his works and her name was inseparably intertwined with his own.

Although "crowned" as the favorite of a king who came in transparent incognito to Paris to visit her, though occupying princely quarters, outshining the fading La Mesard and the rising Julia Barucci in diamonds, Iza was still known as "the Clemenceau Statue."

Her mother, as lost to shame, was the mistress of the wardrobe in this palace; she was spiteful as a witch, and began to resemble one in her prime, bloated, red with importance and self-indulgence, before the wrinkles came many and fast. One day, annoyed at the persistency with which a friend of Clemenceau's watched the queen of the disreputable in hopes to make her flagrancy a cause for legal annulment of the marriage, she denounced him as a traitor in an anonymous letter to the fretting husband, then in Rome. Her daughter agreed to make good the assertion that the friend had failed monstrously in his trust.

Like Othello, Clemenceau swore that this demon of lasciviousness should betray no more men. The force of depravity should no farther flow to corrupt the finest and best. He entered the boudoir of the royal favorite and stabbed her to the heart. In the morning, he gave himself up to the police.

The victim was so notorious that the Clemenceau trial was a nine days' wonder. His advocate was eloquent to a fault, but that inexplicable thing, the jury, found no extenuating circumstances in the act and brought in the verdict of murder. The good men were incapable of appreciating the right he claimed to stop the blighting career of Messalina--to divorce with steel where the state of the law, then meekly following the ecclesiastical ruling, forbade any sundering of the connubial tie except by death.

He met his doom calmly and laid his head beneath the axe with a martyr's brow. Kaiserina acknowledged this.

Felix Clemenceau understood everything now. The trustees to whom he owed his subsistence-money, M. Rollinet the imperial counsel, and M. Constantin Ritz, a famous sculptor's son, and the life-companion of Clemenceau, were characters in the momentous drama which Kaiserina recited, whom he knew by correspondence.

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 judgeship 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!"