After that day Count Paz explained to Clémentine all her affairs, made himself her tutor, taught her the difficulties of managing her property, the real cost of things, and the way to avoid being too extensively robbed by her people. She might trust Constantine, and make him her majordomo. Thaddeus had trained Constantine. By the month of May he thought the Countess perfectly capable of administering her fortune; for Clémentine was one of those clear-sighted women whose instincts are alert, with an inborn genius for household rule.
The situation thus naturally brought about by Thaddeus took a sudden turn most distressing for him, for his sufferings were not so light as he made them seen. The hapless lover had not reckoned with accident. Adam fell very seriously ill. Thaddeus, instead of leaving, installed himself as his friend’s sick-nurse. His devotedness was indefatigable. A woman who had had an interest in looking through the telescope of foresight would have seen in the Captain’s heroism the sort of punishment which noble souls inflict on themselves to subdue their involuntary thoughts of sin; but women see everything or nothing, according to their frame of mind; love is their sole luminary.
For forty-five days Paz watched and nursed Mitgislas without seeming to have a thought of Malaga, for the excellent reason that he never did think of her. Clémentine, seeing Adam at death’s door, and yet not dead, had a consultation of the most famous doctors.
“If he gets through this,” said the most learned of the physicians, “it can only be by an effort of nature. It lies with those who nurse him to watch for the moment and aid nature. The Count’s life is in the hands of his attendants.”
Thaddeus went to communicate this verdict to Clémentine, who was sitting in the Chinese pavilion, as much to rest after her fatigues as to leave the field free for the doctors, and not to be in their way. As he trod the graveled paths leading from the boudoir to the rockery on which the Chinese summer house was built, Clémentine’s lover felt as though he were in one of the gulfs described by Alighieri. The unhappy man had never foreseen the chance of becoming Clémentine’s husband, and he had bogged himself in a swamp of mud. When he reached her his face was set, sublime in its despair. Like Medusa’s head, it communicated terror.
“He is dead?” said Clémentine.
“They have given no hope; at least, they leave it to nature. Do not go in just yet. They are still there, and Bianchon himself is examining him.”
“Poor fellow!—I wonder whether I have ever worried him,” she said.
“You have made him very happy; be quite easy on that point,” said Thaddeus; “and you have been indulgent to him—”
“The loss will be irreparable.”
“But, dear lady, supposing the Count should die, had you not formed your opinion of him?”
“I do not love him blindly,” she said; “but I loved as a wife ought to love her husband.”
“Then,” said Thaddeus, in a voice new to Clémentine’s experience of him, “you ought to feel less regret than if you were losing one of those men who are a woman’s pride, her love, her whole life! You may be frank with such a friend as I am. … I shall regret him—I! Long before your marriage I had made him my child, and I have devoted my life to him. I shall have no interest left on earth. But life still has charms for a widow of four-and-twenty.”
“Why, you know very well that I love no one,” said she, with the roughness of sorrow.
“You do not know yet what it is to love,” said Thaddeus.
“Oh! husband for husband, I have sense enough to prefer a child like my poor Adam to a superior man. For nearly a month now we have been asking ourselves, ‘Will he live?’ These fluctuations have prepared me, as they have you, for this end. I may be frank with you?—Well, then, I would give part of my life to save Adam’s. Does not independence for a woman, here in Paris, mean liberty to be gulled by the pretence of love in men who are ruined or profligate? I have prayed God to spare me my husband—so gentle, such a good fellow, so little fractious, and who was beginning to be a little afraid of me.”
“You are honest, and I like you the better for it,” said Thaddeus, taking Clémentine’s hands, which she allowed him to kiss. “In such a solemn moment there is indescribable satisfaction in finding a woman devoid of hypocrisy. It is possible to talk to you.—Consider the future; supposing God should not listen to you—and I am one of those who are most ready to cry to Him: Spare my friend!—for these fifty nights past have not made my eyes heavy, and if thirty days’ and thirty nights’ more care are needed, you, madame, may sleep while I watch. I will snatch him from death, if, as they say, he can be saved by care. But if, in spite of you, in spite of me, the Count is dead. Well, then, if you were loved, or worshiped, by a man whose heart and character were worthy of yours—”
“I have perhaps madly wished to be loved, but I have never met—”
“Supposing you were mistaken.”
Clémentine looked steadily at Thaddeus, suspecting him less of loving her than of a covetous dream; she poured contempt on him by a glance, measuring him from head to foot, and crushed him with two words, “Poor Malaga!” pronounced in those tones such as fine ladies alone can find in the gamut of their contempt.
She rose and left Thaddeus fainting, for she did not turn round, but walked with great dignity back to her boudoir, and thence up to her husband’s room.
An hour later Paz returned to the sick man’s bedside, and gave all his care to the Count, as though he had not received his own deathblow.
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