The first low note of the violin fell upon the silence like a faint, far voice, heard across a wide reach of calm water, and, as the marvelous melody swelled into the fullness of its motif, something new and strange stirred in Pépin's heart, mounted and tightened in his throat, ran tingling to his finger-tips. Through his half parted lips the breath tiptoed in and out, and his deep eyes grew every instant, could he have known it, more like those of the picture that he loved. So he stood entranced, seeing, hearing nothing but Pazzini and Pazzini's violin, till the sonata drew imperceptibly toward its close. Like the child, the great violinist seemed to be unconscious of all that surrounded him. Slowly, tenderly, he led his music through the last phrases, until he paused before the supreme high sweetness of the final note. How it was he could never have told, but, in that infinitesimal fraction of time, the training of years played him false. He knew that his finger-tip slipped an incalculable atom of space, but it was too late. The bow was on the string, and the imperceptibly flatted note swelled, sank, and died away, unrecognized, he thought, with a throb of thankfulness, by any save his master ear. And then —
"Ah-h!" said Pépin.
The long ripple of applause drowned the child's whisper, and for an instant the terror in his heart grew still, believing his exclamation unheard. Then it leaped to life again, for Pazzini was looking at him, his bow hovering above the instrument like his mother's in the picture. In the mysterious solitude of the crowded room the eyes of these two met, each reading the other's as they had been an open book, and in Pépin's was the pain of a wounded animal, and in Pazzini's a great wonder and sorrow, as of one who has hurt without intention, and mutely pleads for pardon.
As the applause ceased, the violinist turned to the Comte, and pointed to Pépin with his bow.
"Who is that child?" he asked.
The thaw in the de Villersexel's "academic manner" had been but momentary. With the renewed hum of conversation he was himself again, pale, proud, and immovable.
"It is my son, Pépin," he replied, with stiff courtesy. "How shall I thank you for your playing? It was the essence of perfection, as it has ever been, and ever will be."
But he could not know, as he turned away with Pépin, that in his heart the violinist said, "Her boy! I understand!"
The miracle of his summons to the salon that night was not, as it appeared, the actual climax of existence, for a new marvel awaited Pépin on the morrow. The doors of the dining-room had barely slid together behind them when the Comte turned to him.
"Yesterday was Christmas," he said.
Pépin made no reply. In fact, the stupor which descended upon him at this infraction of the usual routine of life effectually deprived him, for the moment, of the power of speech.
"It was Christmas," repeated the Comte, "and because of that you are invited to a – a – soirée to-day. Do you know the English children on the entresol?"
"I have seen them," faltered Pépin, "but we have never spoken. You told me" —
"I have changed my mind," broke in his father. "Monsieur 'Ameelton" – stumbling desperately over the English name – "has asked me to let you visit them this afternoon, and I have said yes to him. Elizabeth will dress you. Now you may go."
Barely conscious that Pépin had added a timid "Merci, papa!" to his customary bow, de Villersexel turned to his writing-table, as the door closed behind the little Vicomte, and, unlocking a drawer, took therefrom a letter which had come to him that morning, and, burying himself in his arm-chair, proceeded to its careful reperusal. It was in the fine Italian handwriting of Pazzini, and ran as follows: —
My dear Friend, – This is to be at once a confession and a prayer. What would you say if I were to tell you that Pazzini – the flawless Pazzini, as men are pleased to call me! – murdered, yes, murdered last night's sonata by flatting that wonderful final note? Oh, it was a very little thing, and passed unnoticed, for they are stupid, these wise people who listen to me, and they did not hear. Even you, my poor friend, even you could not detect that tiny flaw that was a monstrous crime. No, of all who listened, there were but two that understood what I had done. I was one of these, and the other was your son – Pépin.
Do you know what that means, Monsieur le Comte de Villersexel? Do you understand that it is but one ear in millions that is so finely keyed that this minutest deviation could wound it like the most utter discord? And I wounded him, your Pépin. I saw it in his eyes. Therefore I tell you – I, who know – that he is a genius, a genius greater than his mother, and that, like her, he must be my pupil. I have none other now. It shall be the work of my old age to make him the greatest violinist of his day. Give him to me, my friend, if not for his own sake, then for hers!
Pazzini.Prime feature of all the year to the little Hamiltons, on the entresol, was their Christmas tree. It arrived in some unknowable way in the corner of the grand salon on the morning after Christmas, and, from the moment of its advent, the doors were sealed, and only the privileged world of grown-ups went in and out, and could see the splendors within. Inch by inch the hands of the tall clock in the antichambre dragged themselves around successive circles toward the hour of revelation, and, keyed to the snapping point of frenzy, the slender figure of George and the round, squat form of John stood motionless before the inexorable timepiece, awaiting the stroke of four. This suspense was harrowing enough in itself, and only made bearable by recourse to occasional mad caperings up and down the hall, and whoops of mingled ecstasy and exasperation. What was worse was the delay in the arrival of their guests. Later, the latter would be an indispensable part of the festivities: just now they were mere impediments in the path of bliss. Even the grown-ups were more considerate, and came on time. Well they might, since they were granted immediate admission to the enchanted room, and came out with maddening accounts of what was to be seen therein. They sat about the small salon, and talked the stupid things of which they were so fond of talking, – Hamilton, tall, straight, and with an amused twinkle in his eyes, while he watched his wife vainly endeavoring to calm her sons as they foamed and pranced at the sealed doors; Miss Kedgwick, who wrote books, and invited boys to tea; Monsieur de Bercy, who was odd because he spoke no English, but who cut heads out of nuts and apples, and drew droll pictures on scraps of paper; Miss Lys, who played the piano for "Going to Jerusalem;" and Mr. Sedgely, who talked very low in her ear, and said the great trouble with "Going to Jerusalem" was that the players couldn't go there in good earnest – whatever that might mean.
But would the doors never open?
The children arrived by twos and threes, shook hands limply with their elders, greeted their small hosts with embarrassed ceremony, and then, as if suddenly inoculated with the latter's madness, commenced to foam and prance in their turn before the unyielding portals. Last of all came Pépin, all brown, who bowed at the door, and then in turn to each of those who spoke to him.
Suddenly, with a shout, the children burst through the opened doorway, and gathered in voluble groups about the glistening miracle which shone like a hundred stars in the gathering twilight. For a half hour all was chaos, and Pépin, standing a little apart, marveled and was still. Dancing figures whirled about him, bearing boxes of soldiers, toy villages, dolls, trumpets, drums. The air was full of the wailing of whistles, the cries of mechanical animals, and the clamor of childish comment.
But to Pépin even the dazzling novelty of his surroundings was as nothing, compared to one object which drew and fixed his attention from the first instant, as the needle is held rigid by the magnetic pole. High up upon the tree, clearly outlined against its background of deep green, and gleaming gorgeously with fresh varnish in the light of the surrounding candles, hung a violin – not one like Monsieur Pazzini's, large and of a dull brown, but small – a violin for Pépin himself to hold, and new, and bright, and beyond all things beautiful and to be desired!
Then his attention was distracted for a moment. From the time of his entrance the eyes of Miss Lys had followed the dignified and silent little Frenchman, and where Miss Lys went Mr. Sedgely followed, so that now the two were so close that they brushed his elbow, and Pépin, turning with an instinctive "Pardon," saw that they were watching him curiously. When, with a feeling of restlessness under their scrutiny, he looked once more towards the tree, the violin was gone! An instant later, he saw it in the madly sawing hands of George Hamilton, dancing like a faun down the room, and he was conscious of a great faintness, such as he had known but once before, – when he had cut his hand, and the doctor had sewed it, as Elizabeth sewed rips in cloth.
"He is adorable," said Ethel Lys, "but I have never seen a sadder face. What eyes! – two brown poems."
"He makes my heart ache," answered Sedgely, slowly, "and yet I could hardly say why. Ask him what he wants off the tree."
The girl was on her knees by Pépin before the phrase was fairly finished.
"What didst thou have for Christmas?" she asked, falling unconsciously into that tender second singular which slips so naturally from the lips at sight of a French child.
"I? – but nothing," replied the little Vicomte, pleased out of his anguish by the sound of his own tongue amid the babel of English phrases.
The girl at his side looked at him with so frank an astonishment that he felt it necessary to explain.
"I have my gifts on the day of the year. Christmas is an English fête, and I am French. So I have nothing."
"Nothing!" replied Miss Lys blankly, and then, of a sudden, slipped her arm around him, and drew his head close to her own.
"What dost thou see on the tree that thou wouldst like to have?" she asked, eagerly. "What is there, dearest?"
And, at the unwonted tenderness of her question, the floodgates of Pépin's reserve suddenly gave way. Placing his hands upon the girl's shoulders, he searched her face with his eyes.
"If there were another violin" – he began, and, faltering, stopped, and turned away to hide the tears that would come, strive as he might to hold them back.
"Did you hear him – and see him?" queried Miss Lys, a minute after, furiously backing Sedgely into a corner by the lapels of his frock coat. "You did– you know you did! And you are still here? Lord! What a man!"
Sedgely shrugged his shoulders with a pretense of utter bewilderment.
"What must I do?" he inquired, blankly.
"Do?" stormed Miss Lys. "Do? Why, scour Paris till you find a violin precisely like that one George is doing his best to saw in half. Here! Clément is at the door with the trois-quarts. Tell him to drive you like mad to the Printemps – to the big place opposite the Grand Hotel – to the Louvre – to the Bon Marché – anywhere – everywhere! But inside of one hour I must have that violin!"
When Sedgely returned, thirty minutes later, violin in hand, Ethel met him at the door.
"They are all at tea," she said. "We'll call Pépin out."
She placed the violin in the hands of the Vicomte without a word, and without a word Pépin took it from her. The instrument slid to his cheek as if impelled by its own desire.
"Canst thou play?" she asked him.
"No," said Pépin, "and, besides, it is but a toy. I do not want to hear it. But I like to feel it – here." And he moved his cheek caressingly against the cheap varnish.
"Don't you think you might" – began Sedgely, and then found himself on the other side of the door, and Miss Lys facing him with an air of hopeless resignation.
"I – act-u-ally – be-lieve," she said, with an effort at calm, "that you were going to ask him to thank me for it!"
"Why not?" said Sedgely.
"Lord! What a man!" said Miss Lys.
In the dining-room of the de Villersexel apartment the Comte paced slowly to and fro, with bent head, and fingers that locked and unlocked behind his back. In the heavy chair before the fire, Pazzini seemed shrunk to but half his normal size, a mere rack of clothes, two lean white hands, that gripped the dragons' heads upon the arms of the fauteuil, and a pale stern face that looked into the smouldering embers, and beyond – immeasurably beyond.
"How did it happen?" he asked, after a time.
"Shall I ever know?" broke out de Villersexel irritably. "Pépin had been to a children's party below there on the entresol, at the English lawyer's. He and his imbecile of a bonne were entering the ascenseur. She goes from spasm to spasm, so there is no telling. But it seems they had given Pépin a toy – the English – and she wished to carry it and he refused. So between them – God knows how! – it slipped from their hands as the ascenseur cleared the gate – and Pépin stooped to catch it – and fell. He died at midnight."
There was a long silence, broken only by the snapping of the logs in the fireplace and the almost inaudible footfalls of the Comte on the thick carpet. Then —
"He was his mother's son," said Pazzini.
"And mine," replied the other. "The last of the de Villersexel."
He paused abruptly by a little table, and took up a handful of splintered wood and tangled catgut.
"The toy that killed him," he added in a low voice, and hurled the fragments over Pazzini's shoulder into the embers. A thin tongue of flame caught at them as they fell, and broke into a brilliant blaze. Pazzini leaned forward suddenly and peered at the little conflagration.
"A violin," he said.
"A violin," echoed the Comte. "Think of dying for a violin!"
Pazzini made no reply. His eyes had met those of the portrait over the chimney – and he was smiling.
The Tuition of Dodo Chapuis
THE situation was best summed up in the epigram of little Sacha Vitzoff, the second secretary at the Russian Embassy, who said that there was room enough in Paris for two and a half millions of people and Gabrielle de Poirier, or for two and a half millions of people and Thaïs de Trémonceau, but that even the place de la Concorde was not sufficiently wide for Gabrielle and Thaïs to pass without treading on each others' toes.
It was a rivalry of long standing, nourished by innumerable petty jealousies and carefully treasured affronts. Gabrielle was tall and very slender, with a clear, pale complexion, and hair of a curious dark bronze that in certain lights showed a hint of olive green. So Thaïs called her the Asparagus Woman – la Femme Asperge. Thaïs was short and anything but slim, and brown of hair, eyes, and skin. So Gabrielle called her the Mud-Ball – la Boule de Boue. And neither appellation was pleasing to the object thereof.
These two great luminaries of the Parisian demi-monde, blazing crimson with mutual jealousy, followed, for six months of the year, a kind of right-triangular orbit, comprising the restaurant of Armenonville, the race-course of Auteuil, and the Café de Paris, and embracing divers other points of common interest, – the Palais de Glace, of a Sunday afternoon, the tea-room of the Elysée Palace Hotel, the Folies-Marigny, the Salon, and the Horse-Show; and, individually, Gabrielle's apartment on the avenue Kléber, and Thaïs's little hôtel on the rue de la Faisanderie. Between the last two, as regards situation, cost, and general equipment, there was not a straw's weight of difference, save in the estimation of their respective occupants. The apartment had been rented for a term of years, and furnished and decorated, and supplied with four servants, by a Russian millionaire, and the same was true of the hotel in every, save one, detail, – the de Trémonceau's millionaire was a Brazilian. For the rest, Gabrielle was of a literary bent, and wrote occasional feuilletons for the Journal, and short stories, staggering with emotion, for the Gil Blas Illustré: something which, in the opinion of Thaïs, was stupid and all there was of the most ignoble. Thaïs herself was a sporadic feature at the Folies-Bergère, where she sang songs of a melody and a propriety equally doubtful, bunching up her silk skirts at the end of the refrain, with her side toward the audience, and winking, with brazen effrontery, at a spot midway between the heads of the bald gentleman in the third row and the wide-eyed little St. Cyrien across the aisle. The which Gabrielle found to be the trade of a camel.
Each had her horses, and her carriage, in which she was whirled three times up and three times down the allée des Acacias each noon of the season, and again at five o'clock, and each spent hours daily in the rue de la Paix, trailing long skirts of tulle and satin before the mirrors of the men-milliners, and pricing strings of pearls in the private offices of servile jewelers. Each was deftly veneered, as it were, with the bearing of the grande dame, except at the moment when she chanced to pass the other, or refer to her in the course of conversation. Then the irrepressible past came suddenly to the fore in a word or a gesture, which babbled of Gabrielle's early experience in the workroom of the very Paquin she was now patronizing, and of Thaïs's salad days as assistant to a florist on the grand boulevards.
Honors were even between the two when Dodo Chapuis first came up to pay homage to the queen capital, of which he had been dreaming for four years. He was only nineteen, the son of a great manufacturer of Arles, who had lived severely and frugally, and, dying a widower, left a cool half million of francs to be divided between Dodo and his sister Louise. There seems to have been no trace of doubt in the mind of either as to the respective uses to which their dazzling inheritances should be applied. Louise promptly accepted a young playwright with a record of fourteen rejected revues, to whose suit her father had been most violently opposed; and Dodo, as promptly, took out a letter of credit for fifty thousand francs and departed for Paris on the morning following the funeral.
The story of Dodo's first six weeks in the capital is the story of full a million of his kind. A pocket filled with gold and a mind emptied of responsibility; youth, health, and craving for the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge, – these foundations given, the aspect of the structure erected thereupon is inevitable.
Dodo made his début at the Moulin Rouge at eight o'clock on the evening of his first day in Paris. Despite appearances, this did not mean that he was wholly a fool. One must remember that it was the evening of the first day. He walked leagues, it seemed to him, around the crowded promenade, half stifled by an atmosphere composed of equal parts of stale beer, cigarette smoke, and cheap perfumery. He watched a quadrille made up of shrill shrieks, rouge, and an abundance of white lace. He tossed balls into numbered holes in a long board, and won a variety of prizes of pseudo-Japanese make, which he immediately presented to the exponents of the aforesaid quadrille. He squandered a louis in firing a rifle at paper rabbits passing in monotonous succession over three feet of sickly green hillside. He bought a citronade for a girl with blue eyes, and a menthe glaciale for another with brown; and, at the end, rebuffing the proffered services of a guide, who, by reason of his new tan overcoat, and to his intense disgust, addressed him in English, he returned to the Hôtel du Rhin in a state of profound despondency.
But that, as we have said, was on his first evening. On the third, he had engaged a table in advance at Maxim's, and supped in state on caviar, langouste à l'Américaine, and Ruinart. And with Antoinette Féria. It was not much of an achievement, but it showed progress.
On the following day Dodo went to Auteuil, won twelve francs fifty on a ten-franc bet, and dined at Armenonville. It was here that Suzanne Derval looked cross-eyed at him, fingered her pearls, and remarked that he had beaux yeux. Dodo might be said to be fairly launched.
It would be superfluous to note the further stages of his initiation. They were strictly conventional, and, under the circumstances, it was remarkable that, at the end of six weeks, he had drawn but seven thousand francs on his letter of credit, and still retained his enthusiasms. It is not every one from the provinces for whom Paris reserves her supreme surprise for the forty-third day.
It chanced to be the first evening of the de Trémonceau's annual engagement at the Folies-Bergère, and for three days the eloquent legend "La Belle Thaïs" had been glaring at the boulevard throngs in huge block letters from the posters on the colonnes Morris. Dodo, meanwhile, had made many friends among men of tastes similar to his own – a feat which is curiously easy of accomplishment in Paris, when one has forty-odd thousand francs and a desire for company. Of these was Sacha Vitzoff, who, on occasion, had five louis, and invariably spent them at once upon his friends, before he should be tempted to put them to a worse use.
So Sacha bought the box, and they sat, five of them, through two hours of biograph, and trained dogs, and Neapolitan ballet, until the liveried attendants thrust cards bearing the number 19 into rococo frames at the side of the proscenium, and the orchestra plunged into Sarasate's "Zapateado," and various stout gentlemen wrestled with mechanical devices for supplying opera-glasses, and, conquering, sat back in their seats and grunted. Then the drop rose upon a pale pink and gray libel on Versailles, and La Belle Thaïs flashed out from the wing, with a red silk scarf bound about her head and a toreador's hat perched on one side.
There was no denying it. Despite her rouge, despite her four decades (an eternity in Paris), La Thaïs was very beautiful. Dodo forgot his cigarette, his champagne, and his companions. He followed every swish of her spangled skirts, every click of her castanets, every tap of her pointed shoes, every movement of her gleaming shoulders and her lithe, white arms. This, then, was the reality of his dream, the soul and substance of his vision, the essence of the great city that had drawn him like a magnet from his humdrum bourgeois life in the suburbs of Arles, – the ineffable, eternal Woman, poured like oil upon the smouldering fire of boyish imagination! His slender hands gripped the plush of the box-rail feverishly, his eyes widened and brightened, his lips parted, and his breath came short. Then, suddenly, there was a final clash of tambourines and castanets which brought La Belle Thaïs to a standstill, her head flung back, and one arm high in air!
"She has charm – even now!" said Sacha, emptying his glass.
Three days later, it was known to all the world that concerns itself with such things that Dodo Chapuis was latest in the train of victims to the fascinations of Thaïs de Trémonceau. One cannot pretend to say what she saw in him to divert her attention from richer and maturer men. He was handsome – yes – but the Comte d'Ys was handsomer. He was rich, as such things go, and for the moment. But he had no wit, poor Dodo – and as for money, which, after all, is the only other thing which counts in the demi-monde, what were forty thousand francs to one authorized to draw, ad libitum, upon a Brazilian multi-millionaire? No, evidently, it was one of those strange whims to which the slaves of self-interest are sometimes subject. The de Trémonceau had nothing to gain, and everything to lose, for, certainly, her Brazilian miché would have been ill pleased to know that Dodo Chapuis was riding daily six times up and six times down the allée des Acacias in the victoria of La Belle Thaïs. As it chanced, he was in Buenos Ayres. Still, he might return without warning. He had an ignoble habit of doing that. But when those sufficiently intimate suggested this to Thaïs she only laughed, and sang a snatch from La Belle Hélène: —
"Si par mégarde il se hasardeDe rentrer chez lui tout à coup,Il est le maître, mais c'est, peut-être,Imprudent et de mauvais goût!"As for Dodo, he was in Elysium. He was singularly innocent, Dodo, with his smooth russet hair, and his steady gray eyes, and his straight, fine nose, and his sensitive, patrician mouth; and, believe it or not as you will, he cherished the project of marrying Thaïs de Trémonceau! He had fed himself on the poetry of Alfred de Musset, giving doubtful words and phrases his own interpretation, from lack of experience, and, despite the lesson of "Don Paez" and "La Nuit d'Octobre," he believed in the power of trust to hold another true. Alas, he was hopelessly conventional! There is no one of us poor moths who is content with seeing his fellow singe his wings. No, each must plunge into the radius of consuming heat and learn its peril for himself. All of which is, no doubt, a wise ruling. For if experience could be handed down from father to son, and accepted on its face value, then the child of the third or fourth generation would be a demi-god, or even a full one, and there would be no further attraction in heaven, and no further menace in hell. The which morsel of morality may be allowed to pass, if only for contrast's sake. We were speaking of Thaïs de Trémonceau.
