“Oh, I assure you that I’m very cold,” Ormuzda repeated.
Atlas remained mute; he bent down toward the young woman, whom he took on his knees and warmed like a little child against his breast, with the aid of his muscular arms.
“You’re very good, Atlas, but why don’t you take me back to my father’s house?”
“Because I haven’t yet done enough to be loved by you,” the clubman replied, in a dull voice.
Ormuzda made no reply.
“And him, him?” he went on. “What more has he done for you than me? Oh, if you loved me, if you only loved me a little, Ormuzda! But no. it’s him that you love. Him, who wears a cloak like a rich man, him, a city fop, a fine lord reeking of perfumes to make one recoil at twenty paces, while I…I’m a bumpkin, a rustic, a wretch...”
“Oh! Who told you that, Atlas?”
“Who? Him…you…him, that handsome young fellow whose delicate lungs were suddenly paralyzed by the clouds of smoke, who fell down beside you, milady, while you were doubtless fleeing your mother’s eyes for a delightful rendezvous.”
“Atlas!”
“Oh, it’s the chaste Sylax who has punished you, because you were doing wrong, milady.”
A horrible grimace, which distorted Atlas’ lips at that moment, indicated the cruel suspicion that was tearing his soul. Ormuzda, very emotional, put her fingers over the mouth of the man who was blaspheming against her virtue so harshly, and uttered a small cry of indignation.
“So you don’t love me?” the young man retorted, following the train of his thoughts without paying any heed to the young woman’s mute protest.
Ormuzda still made no reply.
“But do you think that I’m not worth as much as your Hyperion?” cried Atlas, who could no longer contain himself. “He’s poor, like me, without a family, like me; but if you want, I’ll become rich, laden with honors. Give the order! What do you want me to be? What treasure do you want me to lay at your feet? Come on, speak, speak then! Because it’s for you that I’m made…oh, how do I know what I’m made for? I found under my hand a code that brought you nearer to me, laws that lifted me up to your level, and I embraced that code, and I blessed those laws, and that code and those laws will reign, understand that! And I’ll be to you not a king, but whatever you wish: rich, powerful, honored, richer, more powerful, more honored than the greatest of aristocrats of times past…come on, milady, speak!”
Ormuzda was trembling with fear; she lowered her head and did not know what to say to the ardent man who was squeezing her knees in his arms and kissing the hem of her dress.
“You don’t love me!” cried Atlas, “but I know a means to possess you, unless you want to be cast into the midst of the waves of the sea!”
Atlas’ eyes were blazing at that moment. He had tightened his arms around the young woman, whom he was hugging like a madman; his breath mingled with hers, his heart was beating against her breast. Ormuzda was shedding a torrent of tears, imploring the pity of the furious Me-nu-tchean.
Atlas stood up suddenly.
“God forbid,” he exclaimed, “that I only have a cadaver where I seek a soul! But I swear that I shall thwart all your amours! You’ll never marry any other man than your servant Atlas!”
At the same time, he snatched back his smock, and left.
VIII. The First Symptoms of a Disaster
A few days later, two men were prowling around the burned house, searching for an open door through which to enter it. But all the doors and all the windows were shut. The fire-blackened shutters were barricaded; the coaching entrance did not open under the redoubtable blows of the two men. The house was mute.
“By Sylax!” said one of the two prowlers, in a chagrined tone. “Where’s Nirvana, then?”
It was Lord Speos who said that.
“He’s gone, my lord,” replied Speos’ companion, who was none other than Nimrod.
“Gone! Gone! Who told you that?”
“I’ve known for two days.”
“And you didn’t tell me! You’ve come with me all the way to Me-nu-tche, to visit a friend who’d told you about his imminent departure!”
“He didn’t tell me, my lord,” Nimrod replied. “I guessed. When I came here on your behalf two days ago, the day after the fire, to see Lord Nirvana, I had difficulty getting to see him. I told you that without your seeming to place any great confidence in what I said. I succeeded, however, not by making use of your name—that means had not succeeded, as I’ve already told you—but under the pretext of having important secrets to confide to him, which succeeded perfectly.
“I did indeed have a secret to reveal to him, but that secret was not a secret to him; I didn’t know that. It was a fortuitous encounter that I’d had with one of his friends, on whom he was perhaps no longer counting. On going into his study, I perceived that friend, who was escaping through another door, doubtless in order not to find himself face to face with me.”
“I had nothing more to say then, and I said nothing, but I had to learn something, and I did indeed learn it. I learned from a few hateful words emerging from Lord Nirvana’s mouth that the fire in his house had been set by a traitor, a false friend: Lord Speos and his accomplices…me, no doubt,” Nimrod added, with a little smile that said that Nirvana was not mistaken.
“Me!” cried Speos, sharply, drawing himself up to his full height and frowning.
“You, Master. Now, as Lord Nirvana despaired of the law at a time as little benevolent to the nobility, he made the decision to avenge himself on his old friend, hating him with all his soul and wishing all kinds of misfortune upon him.”
“And...my daughter?” said Speos, hesitantly, his mind not quite following the thread of his servant’s narration. “My daughter, whom you promised to enable me to meet one day in his house?”
“You’ve seen her, my lord.”
“My daughter!” cried Speos, opening his eyes wide. “Is it Chemnis?”
“Yes, Chemnis, Ormuza’s friend and companion.”
“Well?”
“She’s no longer there. He expelled her shamefully from his home, because she was your servant’s protégée.”
“And where is she?”
“I don’t know yet, Master; I’ve been looking for her for two days.”
“Oh, my friend, my friend!” said Speos, animatedly. “My daughter! We have to find my daughter!” Speos extended his hand toward the village of Me-nu-tche. “Nirvana, I swear implacable hatred against you and all your family!”
“Oh, my lord,” said Nimrod, with sly bonhomie, “my story has finally made an impression on you. The first words I said to you the other day found you very indifferent, though. If you had not seen this closed house with your own eyes, and its occupant, whom you called your friend, departed without any concern for you, you wouldn’t have believed it.”
“But it seems to me,” said Speos, pulling at an ill-secured shutter, “that the house isn’t empty. I thought I heard a noise inside.”
“It is, in fact, the case that the house ought not to be entirely abandoned. I’d even wager, whatever anyone says, that Nirvana is hiding in Lutecia, and that the friend that I saw in his house the other day, whom I mentioned to you just now, is there in the house.”
“But who is that friend, Nimrod?”
“Oh, you know him well, Master, you know him very well. You’ve mentioned him to me several times: he’s an exile. I say an exile not because he’s been banished from Atlantis since the day of our revolution, like all those of his caste, saving your respect, but because he’s arrived in our midst so mysteriously that I have no doubt that he’s strongly affiliated to the cause of the exiles, and that he’s one of their envoys, who has probably come to see whether there’s any means of organizing a counter-revolution here. So, he’s a suspect individual. In truth, my lord, I don’t know whether I ought to tell you his name, because the Me-nu-tcheans don’t like those names.”
At the same time, Nimrod looked at his
master with an ironic smile, which his master did not see, for he had lowered his eyes and was thinking deeply.
“Come on, let’s go,” said Speos, finally, after a pause. “We have no need to scratch any longer at a door where we’re not wanted.”
They left, but the blow that Nimrod had delivered had struck home. Speos remained pensive for much of the journey, while Nimrod, for his part, was calculating profoundly all the benefits that his political skill was going to procure for him.
Lord Speos finally revived, full of kind attentions for his traveling companion. Nimrod was no longer an inconvenient tyrant so far as he was concerned, a gulf that he has incessantly obliged to fill with his fortune; he was an indispensable friend, an agent that he could not replace, a confidant who could read his heart like an open book. It seemed to him that Nimrod was the saving plank to which he had to cling in order to arrive safely in port.
Nomrod knew the human heart too well not to divine what Speos was thinking. He saw clearly at that moment what he had only understood imperfectly at first: that his master had finally realized the necessity of his entire intervention in his most secret affairs.
It was the memory of the exile that Nimrod had mentioned that had produced that prodigy. Speos was afraid of him. It was his evil genius. He had recognized that perfectly. On his own, however, he was incapable of extracting himself from that malign power. He sensed that, and Nimrod, who no longer had any doubt about it, had thought it appropriate to point out that necessity.
Such had been the objective of the journey to Me-nu-tche, which had not been a pleasure trip. Pleasure never entered into any of Nimrod’s actions, unless it was the pleasure of doing evil.
Scarcely had he arrived home when Speos shut himself in his study on his own. Then he asked for Nimrod, who went to see him with a joy that he had a great deal of difficulty containing.
IX. Confidences
Nimrod was in Speos’ study, beside his armchair. Speos had not yet seen him. All his attention was absorbed by reading a contract that was already old. He was reading the same page over and over, as if everything was contained therein. It would have been truer to say that he was not reading at all, although his eyes were scanning very attentively, apparently at least, all the lines of the contract. His mind was only seeing a single word within it: the word restitution.
In order to understand Speos’ state of mind a little better, we need to go back a little.
We already know that Lord Speos had once accepted the deposit of the infant son and fortune of his friend Mo-kie-thi. Now, while Ludia’s lover had fled Atlantis, directing his errant footsteps to distant lands and devoting himself to the strangest and most perilous adventures, when public rumor said that he had died, Lord Speos had been doing his best to struggle against adverse fortune.
Like all the great lords of that epoch who did not have enough millions and were searching everywhere to satisfy their luxurious caprices, he had sought them in gambling, and in the lottery of high finance: a terrible game that ruins or enriches a man of the yes or no of hazard; a game for the ambitious, a mortal game that a civilized society ought never to entertain.
Speos had the bad luck to win at first. He thought, in consequence, that he had discovered an inexhaustible mine. His needs became more demanding—but he soon began to lose.
Like all gamblers he thought then about reiterating the gains of the initial game. He lost again, but he did not stop playing, trying to return his fortune to its initial figure, promising himself that he would become wiser thereafter.
It was in vain, for his luck did not return; he doubled and tripled his stakes in vain in the perfidious frame of the lottery; everything sank into the abyss of the game. He lost his head then; he gambled his last resources, and lost them.
All those losses were so secret that no one suspected Speos’ desperate situation. His household went on in the same way, his credit did not diminish. His borrowings had been immense, but the lenders, who thought that the loans securely guaranteed by the rich lord’s wealth, were discreet.
Speos, who had made a bad bet in confiding the tranquility of his entire life to the hazards of gambling, did not make the second error of unfortunate gamblers who no longer want to exist after their treasures have been snatched away. He took a more graceful course, that of marriage: he married Ludia. Fortune therefore returned to his house, light and elegant, for she brought great credit with her.
It might have departed soon, however, because the debts were far from being paid. Speos, whose reputation for wisdom was still intact, was determined that his new wife should not know anything that might stain her husband’s past. He therefore did not hasten to expend all of Ludia’s fortune, hoping eventually to find a means of getting out of his embarrassing situation without a scandal. Thus he racked his brains incessantly in order to make them yield that difficult secret.
Heaven came to his aid. It was in those days, precisely, that Mo-kie-thi departed on his perilous voyages, instituting his friend as his sole heir in case of the death of his son. Now, his son soon died, as we already know, and the testament was subsequently accomplished in its entirety, for Mo-kie-thi did not come back.
Since the death of the son, however, Speos had eaten into it considerably, thus rendering definitive the temporary nature of his heritage.
Wealth, therefore, returned to his home, and, one might say, as quickly as it had fled. That was marvelous, in a time when Speos had such a great need of that fortunate hazard. Thus, there was no lack of talk about such a favorable death, especially on the part of Lord Nirvana, although no one knew as yet how very opportune it was.
There is no doubt that Nirvana would have protested vehemently against the appositeness of that inheritance, if the embarrassment of time had not stifled his voice. But he knew that Speos was entirely in tune with the times and that he was only a victim that would be sacrificed willingly, that the wisest thing to do was to stay carefully hidden. He therefore kept quiet, and everything remained as fortunate hazard had made it, each of the two friends keeping his secret to himself.
That entire order of facts and suspicions was sufficiently intimate for no one to know about it. Ludia was completely unaware of it, and Nimrod knew absolutely nothing.
It was perhaps the only secret of his master’s that the latter did not know—but he was probably on the brink of knowing it, because that secret had been weighing horribly upon Speos’ heart for an hour. Perhaps that was the object of the extraordinary preoccupation that veiled the presence of Nirmod, who was almost touching him, and was obliged to speak to announce his expected arrival.
“Master!” said Nimrod, placing himself directly in front of Speos.
“Oh, it’s you, my friend,” said Speos, getting to his feet precipitately and offering a chair to Nimrod, who said down without apologizing for that politeness, which he doubtless considered his due.
Speos sat down and remained silent, still holding his contract and seemingly too embarrassed to begin a conversation for which he was nevertheless mentally prepared.
Meanwhile, Nimrod waited patiently. He looked at the contract from the corner of his eye, and smiled casually at the sight of his master’s embarrassment, which gave him high hopes for the interest of the occasion.
“My friend,” said Speos, finally, without looking up at the man he could just as well have called his domestic demon, “I was rich before my marriage.”
“I know, Master.”
“But I suddenly became poor, ruined by gambling.”
“Ah! It happens, my lord. In gambling, you might win. You lost. That’s a misfortune, but not a crime.”
“The loss of my fortune was not a crime, no, but it was an intolerable misfortune. Naturally, I had to think of means of repairing it; and I employed two, by taking a rich heiress in marriage and…” Speos lowered his voice: “…stealing a treasure that I had under my hand.”
Lord Speos would have liked Nimrod to understand what he was saying, in order n
ot to have to explain further. Either because Nimrod did not know enough about his master’s antecedents to divine what he meant, however, or because he only wanted to reply in perfect knowledge of the facts, he looked at Speos with an astonished expression that demanded explanation.
“How, Master?” he asked.
Speos had to confess then. He recounted the precious deposit that his friend Mo-kie-thi had confided to him—but as he did not add anything more, Nimrod did not want to understand yet.
“And afterwards, Master?” he said.
“Afterwards…he died.”
“That was a very slight misfortune, since you inherited as a consequence.”
“But he didn’t die,” said Speos, in a muffled voice.
“Oh—too bad. What did you do with him, then, Master?” Nimrod went on, looking at his confidant with a malign smile.
“Well…well, I left him on the dolmen of lost children,” Speos replied, resentful at having been forced to explain so overtly.
The fact that Lord Speos had just revealed was too serious for him not to demand an entire confidence. Nimrod already had an inkling of what was to be done, but he needed to know more. “Well, so what, Master?” he said, bringing his thick eyebrows down over the glair of his eyes, which was an expression of profound thought in him.
“What!” said Speos, sharply, still keeping his eyes lowered. “Don’t you understand that I can’t be the heir of a child who isn’t dead?”
“Mo-kie-thie’s child is well and truly dead, my lord. Who can prove his existence? You’ve doubtless taken appropriate measures to have his death legally certified; hence, he’s dead. I don’t think that the dolmen will ever throw him back into your path saying: ‘Here he is!’ Then again, it was so long ago: sixteen, seventeen…perhaps eighteen years.”
“If the son is dead, how do you know that the father is also dead, Nimrod?” said Speos, fixing his confidant with a knowing gaze, as if to say to him: Remember the little house in Me-nu-tche.
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