She pointed to her father and her sisters, who were
beckoning to them in the distance and hastening to
come up with them.
“Well, and I myself?” answered Paul quickly.
“Have I not similar duties, similar responsibilities?
We are like two widowed heads of families. Will
you not love mine as much as I love yours?”
“True? is it true? You will let me stay
with them? I shall be Aline for you, and Bonne
Maman for all our children? Oh! then,” exclaimed
the dear creature, beaming with joy, “there
is my portrait—I give it to you! And
all my soul with it, too, and forever.”
About a week after his adventure with Moessard, that
new complication in the terrible muddle of his affairs,
Jansoulet, on leaving the Chamber, one Thursday, ordered
his coachman to drive him to Mora’s house.
He had not paid a visit there since the scuffle in
the Rue Royale, and the idea of finding himself in
the duke’s presence gave him, through his thick
skin, something of the panic that agitates a boy on
his way upstairs to see the head-master after a fight
in the schoolroom. However, the embarrassment
of this first interview had to be gone through.
They said in the committee-rooms that Le Merquier
had completed his report, a masterpiece of logic and
ferocity, that it meant an invalidation, and that
he was bound to carry it with a high hand unless Mora,
so powerful in the Assembly, should himself intervene
and give him his word of command. A serious matter,
and one that made the Nabob’s cheeks flush,
while in the curved mirrors of his brougham he studied
his appearance, his courtier’s smiles, trying
to think out a way of effecting a brilliant entry,
one of those strokes of good-natured effrontery which
had brought him fortune with Ahmed, and which served
him likewise in his relations with the French ambassador.
All this accompanied by beatings of the heart and
by those shudders between the shoulder-blades which
precede decisive actions, even when these are settled
within a gilded chariot.
When he arrived at the mansion by the river, he was
much surprised to notice that the porter on the quay,
as on the days of great receptions, was sending carriages
up the Rue de Lille, in order to keep a door free
for those leaving. Rather anxious, he wondered,
“What is there going on?” Perhaps a concert
given by the duchess, a charity bazaar, some festivity
from which Mora might have excluded him on account
of the scandal of his last adventure. And this
anxiety was augmented still further when Jansoulet,
after having passed across the principal court-yard
amid a din of slamming doors and a dull and continuous
rumble of wheels over the sand, found himself—after
ascending the steps—in the immense entrance-hall
filled by a crowd which did not extend beyond any
of the doors leading to the rooms; centring its anxious
going and coming around the porter’s table,
where all the famous names of fashionable Paris were
being inscribed. It seemed as though a disastrous
gust of wind had gone through the house, carrying off
a little of its calm, and allowing disquiet and danger
to filter into its comfort.
