The Best Works of Balzac. Оноре де Бальзак

Чтение книги онлайн.

СКАЧАТЬ guard, a god without his rays.

      His dress emphasized the ideas suggested by the peculiarities of his mien and face. Soul, body, and garb were in harmony, and calculated to impress the coldest imagination. He wore a sort of sleeveless gown of black cloth, fastened in front, and falling to the calf, leaving the neck bare with no collar. His doublet and boots were likewise black. On his head was a black velvet cap like a priest’s, sitting in a close circle above his forehead, and not showing a single hair. It was the strictest mourning, the gloomiest habit a man could wear. But for a long sword that hung by his side from a leather belt which could be seen where his surcoat hung open, a priest would have hailed him as a brother. Though of no more than middle height, he appeared tall; and, looking him in the face he seemed a giant.

      “The clock has struck, the boat is waiting; will you not come?”

      At these words, spoken in bad French, but distinctly audible in the silence, a little noise was heard in the other top room, and the young man came down as lightly as a bird.

      When Godefroid appeared, the lady’s face turned crimson; she trembled, started, and covered her face with her white hands.

      Any woman might have shared her agitation at the sight of this youth of about twenty, of a form and stature so slender that at a first glance he might have been taken for a mere boy, or a young girl in disguise. His black cap—like the beret worn by the Basque people—showed a brow as white as snow, where grace and innocence shone with an expression of divine sweetness—the light of a soul full of faith. A poet’s fancy would have seen there the star which, in some old tale, a mother entreats the fairy godmother to set on the forehead of an infant abandoned, like Moses, to the waves. Love lurked in the thousand fair curls that fell over his shoulders. His throat, truly a swan’s throat, was white and exquisitely round. His blue eyes, bright and liquid, mirrored the sky. His features and the mould of his brow were refined and delicate enough to enchant a painter. The bloom of beauty, which in a woman’s face causes men such indescribable delight, the exquisite purity of outline, the halo of light that bathes the features we love, were here combined with a masculine complexion, and with strength as yet but half developed, in the most enchanting contrast. His was one of those melodious countenances which even when silent speak and attract us. And yet, on marking it attentively, the incipient blight might have been detected which comes of a great thought or a passion, the faint yellow tinge that made him seem like a young leaf opening to the sun.

      No contrast could be greater or more startling than that seen in the companionship of these two men. It was like seeing a frail and graceful shrub that has grown from the hollow trunk of some gnarled willow, withered by age, blasted by lightning, standing decrepit; one of those majestic trees that painters love; the trembling sapling takes shelter there from storms. One was a god, the other was an angel; one the poet that feels, the other the poet that expresses—a prophet in sorrow, a levite in prayer.

      They went out together without speaking.

      “Did you mark how he called him to him?” cried the sergeant of the watch when the footsteps of the couple were no longer audible on the strand. “Are not they a demon and his familiar?”

      “Phooh!” puffed Jacqueline. “I felt smothered! I never marked our two lodgers so carefully. ‘Tis a bad thing for us women that the Devil can wear so fair a mien!”

      “Ay, cast some holy water on him,” said Tirechair, “and you will see him turn into a toad.—I am off to tell the office all about them.”

      On hearing this speech, the lady roused herself from the reverie into which she had sunk, and looked at the constable, who was donning his red-and-blue jacket.

      “Whither are you off to?” she asked.

      “To tell the justices that wizards are lodging in our house very much against our will.”

      The lady smiled.

      “I,” said she, “am the Comtesse de Mahaut,” and she rose with a dignity that took the man’s breath away. “Beware of bringing the smallest trouble on your guests. Above all, respect the old man; I have seen him in the company of your Lord the King, who entreated him courteously; you will be ill advised to trouble him in any way. As to my having been here—never breathe a word of it, as you value your life.”

      She said no more, but relapsed into thought.

      Presently she looked up, signed to Jacqueline, and together they went up into Godefroid’s room. The fair Countess looked at the bed, the carved chairs, the chest, the tapestry, the table, with a joy like that of the exile who sees on his return the crowded roofs of his native town nestling at the foot of a hill.

      “If you have not deceived me,” she said to Jacqueline, “I promise you a hundred crowns in gold.”

      “Behold, madame,” said the woman, “the poor angel is confiding—here is all his treasure.”

      As she spoke, Jacqueline opened a drawer in the table and showed some parchments.

      “God of mercy!” cried the Countess, snatching up a document that caught her eye, on which she read, Gothofredus Comes Gantiacus (Godefroid, Count of Ghent).

      She dropped the parchment, and passed her hand over her brow; then, feeling, no doubt, that she had compromised herself by showing so much emotion, she recovered her cold demeanor.

      “I am satisfied,” said she.

      She went downstairs and out of the house. The constable and his wife stood in their doorway, and saw her take the path to the landing-place.

      A boat was moored hard by. When the rustle of the Countess’ approach was audible, a boatman suddenly stood up, helped the fair laundress to take her seat in it, and rowed with such strength as to make the boat fly like a swallow down the stream.

      “You are a sorry fellow,” said Jacqueline, giving the officer’s shoulder a familiar slap. “We have earned a hundred gold crowns this morning.”

      “I like harboring lords no better than harboring wizards. And I know not, of the two, which is the more like to bring us to the gallows,” replied Tirechair, taking up his halbert. “I will go my rounds over by Champfleuri; God protect us, and send me to meet some pert jade out in her bravery of gold rings to glitter in the shade like a glow-worm!”

      Jacqueline, alone in the house, hastily went up to the unknown lord’s room to discover, if she could, some clue to this mysterious business. Like some learned men who give themselves infinite pains to complicate the clear and simple laws of nature, she had already invented a chaotic romance to account for the meeting of these three persons under her humble roof. She hunted through the chest, examined everything, but could find nothing extraordinary. She saw nothing on the table but a writing-case and some sheets of parchment; and as she could not read, this discovery told her nothing. A woman’s instinct then took her into the young man’s room, and from thence she descried her two lodgers crossing the river in the ferry boat.

      “They stand like two statues,” said she to herself. “Ah, ha! They are landing at the Rue du Fouarre. How nimble he is, the sweet youth! He jumped out like a bird. By him the old man looks like some stone saint in the Cathedral.—They are going to the old School of the Four Nations. Presto! they are out of sight.—And this is where he lives, poor cherub!” she went on, looking about the room. “How smart and winning he is! Ah! your fine gentry are made of other stuff than we are.”

      And Jacqueline went down again after smoothing down the bed-coverlet, dusting СКАЧАТЬ