Lucien looked curiously at his protector.
“Here, in this calèche beside the Abbé Carlos Herrera, canon of Toledo, secret envoy from His Majesty Ferdinand VII to his Majesty the King of France, bearer of a despatch thus worded it may be—‘When you have delivered me, hang all those whom I favor at this moment, more especially the bearer of this despatch, for then he can tell no tales’—well, beside this envoy sits a young man who has nothing in common with that poet recently deceased. I have fished you out of the water, I have brought you to life again, you belong to me as the creature belongs to the creator, as the afreets of fairytales belong to the genii, as the janissary to the Sultan, as the soul to the body. I will sustain you in the way to power with a strong hand; and at the same time I promise that your life shall be a continual course of pleasure, honors, and enjoyment. You shall never want for money. You shall shine, you shall go bravely in the eyes of the world; while I, crouching in the mud, will lay a firm foundation for the brilliant edifice of your fortunes. For I love power for its own sake. I shall always rejoice in your enjoyment, forbidden to me. In short, my self shall become yourself! Well, if a day should come when this pact between man and the tempter, this agreement between the child and the diplomatist should no longer suit your ideas, you can still look about for some quiet spot, like that pool of which you were speaking, and drown yourself; you will only be as you are now, or a little more or a little less wretched and dishonored.”
“This is not like the Archbishop of Granada’s homily,” said Lucien as they stopped to change horses.
“Call this concentrated education by what name you will, my son, for you are my son, I adopt you henceforth, and shall make you my heir; it is the Code of ambition. God’s elect are few and far between. There is no choice, you must bury yourself in the cloister (and there you very often find the world again in miniature) or accept the Code.”
“Perhaps it would be better not to be so wise,” said Lucien, trying to fathom this terrible priest.
“What!” rejoined the canon. “You begin to play before you know the rules of the game, and now you throw it up just as your chances are best, and you have a substantial godfather to back you! And you do not even care to play a return match? You do not mean to say that you have no mind to be even with those who drove you from Paris?”
Lucien quivered; the sounds that rang through every nerve seemed to come from some bronze instrument, some Chinese gong.
“I am only a poor priest,” returned his mentor, and a grim expression, dreadful to behold, appeared for a moment on a face burned to a copper-red by the sun of Spain, “I am only a poor priest; but if I had been humiliated, vexed, tormented, betrayed, and sold as you have been by the scoundrels of whom you have told me, I should do like an Arab of the desert—I would devote myself body and soul to vengeance. I might end by dangling from a gibbet, garroted, impaled, guillotined in your French fashion, I should not care a rap; but they should not have my head until I had crushed my enemies under my heel.”
Lucien was silent; he had no wish to draw the priest out any further.
“Some are descended from Cain and some from Abel,” the canon concluded; “I myself am of mixed blood—Cain for my enemies, Abel for my friends. Woe to him that shall awaken Cain! After all, you are a Frenchman; I am a Spaniard, and, what is more, a canon.”
“What a Tartar!” thought Lucien, scanning the protector thus sent to him by Heaven.
There was no sign of the Jesuit, nor even of the ecclesiastic, about the Abbé Carlos Herrera. His hands were large, he was thickset and broad-chested, evidently he possessed the strength of a Hercules; his terrific expression was softened by benignity assumed at will; but a complexion of impenetrable bronze inspired feelings of repulsion rather than attachment for the man.
The strange diplomatist looked somewhat like a bishop, for he wore powder on his long, thick hair, after the fashion of the Prince de Talleyrand; a gold cross, hanging from a strip of blue ribbon with a white border, indicated an ecclesiastical dignitary. The outlines beneath the black silk stockings would not have disgraced an athlete. The exquisite neatness of his clothes and person revealed an amount of care which a simple priest, and, above all, a Spanish priest, does not always take with his appearance. A three-cornered hat lay on the front seat of the carriage, which bore the arms of Spain.
In spite of the sense of repulsion, the effect made by the man’s appearance was weakened by his manner, fierce and yet winning as it was; he evidently laid himself out to please Lucien, and the winning manner became almost
