Jules examined his narrow oval fingernails minutely. “I have sent my formula to the patent office. Just the other day.” He raised the full brilliance of his eyes to Ernest’s face.
“Ah,” said Ernest reflectively, after a pause.
He sat down. “Jules,” he said, “you may enter the Sessions Steel mills tomorrow, if you wish.”
CHAPTER XC
That night Jules and Leon went to see their cousin, Honore Bouchard.
The three young men felt a trust and a camaraderie for each other that nothing was ever to destroy. They had other brothers, whom they scarcely noticed, and other cousins, whom they noticed less. They understood each other, respected each other, had mutual aims, mutual opinions and mutual affection. And oddly, they liked each other’s mothers. Honore was quite his Aunt Florabelle’s favorite, for though he was somewhat unwieldy of manner and phrase, and a little too sober, Florabelle found something sadly reminiscent of Raoul in her nephew’s imperturbable courtesy, his occasional wild gaiety which contrasted grotesquely with his usual unyouthful stateliness, and a certain gallantry that he wore eternally like a jewelled dagger. She often said that she felt she could “trust” Honore, completely forgetting that she had never been able to trust Raoul. As for Jules, he was his Aunt Dorcas’ favorite. She was very fond of the young man, and he was the only one among her numerous nieces and nephews that she could endure. She knew he admired her, for this middle-aged woman was still beautiful and calm and coolly serene, so different from his flustered little mother with her untidy graying curls and fluttering ribbons and peeping petticoats.
Both Leon and Jules liked and respected their Uncle Eugene. They sensed his real kindness under his rather sullen and abrupt mannerisms. Sometimes he would look at them with tired eyes in a brown-gray face, and his expression would be sad and gentle. They knew his integrity, and though having none of this commodity themselves, they could not help reverencing it in their uncle. They believed him implicitly, respected his judgment, invariably acted on his advice. When they asked him for it.
Tonight, they were not to ask his advice. In this particular instance they distrusted his integrity. What they were plotting together could not be entrusted to a man who would have denounced them indignantly. Besides, though each knew exactly what they were plotting, they had not spoken of it frankly to each other. Their French subtlety filled in their silences.
Jules, the usually unsmiling and silent, was almost gay this evening. He chaffed his Aunt Dorcas; he knew that she loved his chaffing. Leon, the exigent, forced himself to be considerate and polite. Dorcas found him less objectionable than usual. Jules could be witty and ironical, and even Eugene laughed heartily several times during the course of the evening meal. Afterwards, Jules and Leon retired together to Honore’s room, upstairs in the old, big and still ugly house. “Do not you three go to your plotting too vigorously,” Eugene called after them, smiling, but a little uneasy. He liked his nephews, but he decidedly did not trust the supple Jules. He said to his wife: “Jules is an intriguer. The others only follow. He is a natural courtier and plotter, and Richelieu would have found him invaluable.”
When the three young men were alone, Jules told Honore of his interview with his uncle that afternoon. Honore listened intently and somberly, but his eyes glinted. “Good!” he exclaimed. He was a stocky young man, dark and handsome and heavy-faced, with calm features but intensely vivid eyes. “And today I secretly sent away my formula for the new explosive.”
“You are certain your father knows nothing of it?”
“Nothing!”
“Very good. Things are certainly going well. The old devil smells what we are about, and it seems to amuse him. If we get what we want, and outwit that horse-in-a-cravat, old Ernest won’t lift a finger to save him. What a man he is! You must give him credit.”
“I still don’t believe he’d allow us to strip Paul, Jules.”
“Certainly not. He’d protect his interests. But he wouldn’t keep him from losing the surplus. He got where he is by taking other people’s surpluses. He admires bandits. He believes in letting the best man win. Spoils-to-the-victor idea. He loves victors. Yes, you’ve got to give the old devil credit.”
“But he’s still Ernest Barbour. You must remember that. I doubt even the three of us could outwit him one single time.”
“Who said anything about outwitting him? We’re out to gain his acknowledgment, tolerance and amusement. He likes to be amused. And the only way to amuse him is to let him see you outsmart someone else. Even Paul. He likes his joke, does the old dog.”
“I hope you’re right, Jules,” said Honore dubiously. He seemed uneasy. “It isn’t easy for me to deceive my father, I can tell you.”
“Easy?”
“I mean, I hate to do it. The dear old boy will get an awful shock when it comes out that I’ve patented my new explosive over his head and under an assumed name.”
Leon flashed his brother a slightly contemptuous smile. “Your father, Honore,” he pointed out, “admires Uncle Ernest. And you can be sure that when dear Uncle Ernest expresses his amusement and admiration at what you have done, your father will soon be convinced that you have been pretty astute and smart.”
“Exactly,” said Jules.
Honore lifted his big shoulders in a resigned and melancholy shrug. “You are very clever, Jules,” he said.
“We shall need all our cleverness,” Jules replied smoothly.
Honore had brought up a bottle of wine and three glasses. He filled them carefully and soberly, pursing his lips as he did so. The three young men lifted their glasses. The lamplight shone on their faces, all brown and secretive and dry, Jules’ crafty and hidden, Leon’s coarse and ironical, Honore’s somber.
“A toast!” said Jules. “To Bouchard and Sons!”
“To Bouchard and Sons!” echoed Leon, smiling.
Honore drank the toast in silence.
CHAPTER XCI
Since the various debacles in his Uncle Ernest’s family, Paul had felt very safe and complacent. Minor irritations rarely affected him, for he ignored them. Consequently, Guy having been removed as a very formidable threat to his complacency and prospects, and Frey banished; and Reginald repudiating all his father’s wealth, and he, himself, married to Gertrude Barbour, and Joseph Barbour a youth only fifteen years of age and away at school. Paul had considered himself secure. The subtle things that make for real happiness, though not in his life, he did not miss. All his thoughts and desires were centered on the acquisition of money and the exhilaration of success, and having these he did not miss less concrete and more tenuous things.
Gertrude did not “bother” him, as women usually bothered their husbands, and Paul was grateful for this. She never had any tantrums, any whimsicalities or visible melancholies; she was never temperamental and exacting, incalculable and petty. The new fine house in Roseville which he had named Robin’s Nest, was perfectly kept, artistically furnished, splendidly run, dignified, quiet and formal, with tail cool rooms and curving dim staircases; white marble mantels and mirrors, parquet floors and severe polished mahogany, high French windows and stately gardens. So carefully was it built, so precise its design, in such good taste its every room, that fifty or more years later it was still the pride of its owners. Gertrude, silent, faintly smiling, colorlessly dark and patrician; never in a hurry, never upset or querulous, never disordered or annoyed, was the perfect mistress of this house. There was never any fluster here. Two guests or twenty: it was all the same, the servants moving with precision and without flurry, the meals excellent, the service not to be bettered. It never occurred to Paul that a man could ask more of his wife, more warmth and tenderness, passion and laughter, storm and sweet reconciliation. He loved Gertrude as he had always loved her and he never bothered to inquire much if she loved him. He took it for granted: she seemed contented and serene, no longer nervous and tense and erratic, as she had been before their marriage. At first she had seemed tranced and almo
st stupefied, had cried in her sleep, had often turned from him with involuntarily wild and timid gestures. But this had passed. Everything was as it should be now. A child was expected, and Paul hoped desperately that it would be a boy. He had little hope for any more children, for Gertrude was apparently not prolific, this being the first child after nearly five years of marriage. If he needed anything more to solidify his position, he would have it in his child. He knew that Ernest had already established a large trust fund for his coming grandchild. Paul had already decided to name his son after Ernest. “Let the Bouchards try anything after that!” he would say to Gertrude, in contemptuous triumph.
So everything had been going along satisfactorily until the sinuous arrival of Jules Bouchard in the Sessions Steel mills. Paul’s first reaction, after fear and uncertainty, had been outrage. That slippery Frenchman daring to insinuate himself into something that was not only beyond his powers but really none of his business! His mother was a stockholder in Barbour-Bouchard, but naturally inactive. Paul felt not only rage, but affront. He had demanded of his uncle the reason for this, and Ernest, looking at him with his pale round disks of opaque eyes, had answered coolly that Jules had satisfied him as to his sincerity and ability. Those eyes had frightened Paul more than the words, more than anything had ever frightened him before. He had gone home, sick and shaken and bewildered. “Why!” he exclaimed passionately to his wife, “I believe your father is treacherous, as well as cruel and malicious! I heard that before but never believed it. I do now! It’s like being at the mercy of a—a Nero, or something. He’s been raising my expectations, with actual promises, mind you! and showing me all kinds of favors, and consulting and advising me, and putting his arm around me, and now he does this! I suppose I’m not courtier enough,” he added bitterly.
He was so distressed, so pathetic, that Gertrude felt pity and a sudden affection, for him. She kissed his flushed cheek upon her own volition, something she had never done before. It surprised and startled Paul, and he suddenly realized that perhaps he had missed something in his married life. He actually clung to her, with a rising of hope and relief in himself, and he listened with eagerness to her insistence that he was imagining things, and that, really, her Papa was only being fair in giving Jules a chance. After all, Jules’ mother was his own sister, and his favorite. “Papa,” she said, bravely looking her lie in the face and simultaneously denying and acknowledging it to herself, “never was treacherous to any one. If he promised you something, he will certainly keep his promise.”
Paul, wishing to believe this, was half convinced. However, he threw himself madly into his work, giving himself up to it with fever and grimness. No hours were too long for him, no detail too small, no work too tedious. Ernest watched this, smiling to himself saturninely. Nothing like greed to spur a man either to heaven or hell, he thought. He did nothing to reassure Paul, who had become a little diffident and suspicious when with him. He could easily have turned Paul’s misery into peace, but the sadistic spot in him needed its tickling, even at the expense of those whom he cared for and planned for.
Guy’s tragic death had affected him more than even Amy suspected. He had shown little evidence of it, except in the savagery of his treatment of the striking miners. When the railroad men had struck in West Virginia, in 1877, it had been by Ernest’s orders that the militia had fired upon the strikers and killed over a dozen. He was responsible for the riots that took place thereafter, the desperate and murderous fighting between the soldiers and the strikers. When the news of the massacre was brought to him, he said only one word: “Good!”
Yet he did not believe in the slightest the story that Paul had told him. He knew very well that Paul had shown exceptional wiliness in giving that story to the newspapers. What an ironical joke it would have been to the world had it known that the thugs Ernest Barbour had hired to kill the miners had killed his own son! He was not at all sure that Paul himself had not fired the shot that killed Guy; Paul’s distress, his real anguish, betrayed this possibility to Guy’s father. But Ernest knew there were places where it was not well to tread, and he knew that should he force Paul’s confession, if confession there might be, he would no longer be able to have him near him. Besides, Paul had saved him from world-wide derision and taunting laughter. For this he was more grateful than the uneasy Paul ever suspected.
There seemed little satisfaction in things nowadays, Ernest would often think morosely. His oldest son, Godfrey, had repudiated him and had been repudiated in turn; he had even committed the unpardonable crime of shedding his father’s name and taking his mother’s. If Ernest would ever have forgiven him, this act of his made that impossible. Guy was dead. Reginald, who had never seemed one of the family, anyway, had become a stranger, dour and rigid and removed. There was left only Gertrude, and Joey, who was away at school.
His home was silent and deserted. There were the same rooms, the same careful burnishing, the same beauty and delicate dignity, the same warmth and spaciousness. Yet, somehow, it had taken on an air of dark brooding and and desertion; something bright and comforting and lofty had gone from it. It had become just a darkened shell, full of echoes and silences. Certainly the Sessions house had become strange to him; something hostile, something inimical, stood in every room and faced him darkly and obscurely. He no longer found comfort in any part of it. He felt himself an intruder, and every object became stiff and unfriendly when he approached it or even looked at it. Moreover, the gleaming surface of things had been lost; at times the silent rooms looked almost shabby.
Perhaps, he thought, this was due to May’s attitude. He and she were all alone in the house, except for the servants. They had never been alone before. There had been Gregory and Amy in the beginning, and then the children. But now there were only these two. And between them was a silence and emptiness wider than the house. May no longer appeared at breakfast; he ate alone in the great dining room at the end of the mahogany table. The servants moved in a hush, and he could hear them whispering behind doors. The clink of his china and silver echoed back from the panelled walls, and in the winter even the fire seemed to lurk uneasily behind its polished bars. But at dinnertime May appeared, perfectly and carefully dressed and discreetly jewelled, presiding over the silver tureen and polished teapot. She had aged very much in the past four years, and her face and eyes were sunken. But her smile was gracious, her voice composed, her glance calm and steady. At the dinner table she and Ernest talked of the most casual and trivial matters, not awkwardly or even just politely, but with the manner of cool and pleasant acquaintances. Ernest watched his wife furtively during these agreeable exchanges. He remembered his mother’s prolonged and sultry furies, her ominous silences, her passionate resentments and hostilities. He was still not accustomed to the ways of gentlefolk and the manners of great ladies; he never ceased to admire his wife. Over the agony he knew was constantly in her, she could smile amiably, converse pleasantly, listen with interest, even to the one person responsible for most of her suffering. But he dared not approach her with any word of intimacy, any look beyond mere friendliness; he knew he dared not do that.
He also knew that she spent most of her time writing to her three sons, especially to Godfrey in Paris. But of Godfrey she never spoke to her husband. At first he thought that it was because of a delicacy toward himself; finally he became convinced that she would have been outraged, overcome, had he spoken of Godfrey to her. He could not speak to her of Reginald, whom he had literally kicked out of his house. He could not speak to her of Guy. No, never of Guy. Sometimes, at dinner, when he would involuntarily think of his murdered son, he could eat no more, but would push his plate from him, and then sit staring heavily at nothing at all. He never knew that May guessed what he was thinking, and that her suffering increased accordingly.
He found it difficult these days to visit Amy. More and more often he arrived at Amy’s house only to find Elsa, paler and very silent, firmly and bitterly rooted in the room. She had little to s
ay to him, though her voice was as affectionate as ever when she did speak. Sometimes she would sit and gaze broodingly at her mother, with something close to disgust in her restless eyes. At twenty-seven, she considered herself a hopeless old maid. In the morning her eyes were often pink and rimmed. She had loved, and still loved, her cousin Godfrey with all the force of her ardent and exuberant nature.
Amy, as usual, understood everything without words. Without her, he could scarcely have borne with stolidity what he had to bear. When he looked at her, and she smiled gently, or touched him, or said something casual, he was inordinately comforted. “I never understood what a great lady was until I knew you—and May,” he would say to her.
She would smile with a little wry humor.
“Being a ‘great lady,’ my dear Ernest,” she would say lightly, “has its advantages. It does so help, to behave as though disagreeable things did not exist, and as though insupportable things had not occurred!” She added: “Sometimes, it is possible to persuade even yourself that everything is exactly as it should be. A harmless but necessary way of making life endurable.”
Once she said to him: “It is so nice, dearest Ernest, that you are not a gentleman. You have no idea how really honest you are!”
And he did not know whether to be pleased or affronted.
CHAPTER XCII
One night, when Gertrude was in her eighth month of pregnancy, she had a frightful dream.
She dreamt that she was lying in her bed at night, as she actually was at the time. There was moonlight outside, a cool white cataract of light that poured over the spring trees and seeped through the Venetian blinds, striping the quiet dark room and all its objects with silver and black. She could plainly see the distorted shadow of the newly leafed trees on the blinds, and could clearly hear the throbbing of tree-toads in the motionless midnight silence. She dreamt that Paul was lying beside her, as he really was, and that she could discern his low and rhythmic breathing.
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