Джозеф Конрад - Suspense

“Austerlitz has done it.”

Miss Latham raised her lustrous dark eyes with an inquiring expression, and murmured, “Papa?”

Sir Charles got up and seized his stick. “Nothing, my dear, nothing.” He wanted to be alone. But on going out of the room he stopped by the embroidery–frame, and bending down kissed the forehead of his daughter—his English daughter. No issue of a great battle could affect her future. As to the other girl, she was lost to him and it couldn’t be helped. A battle had destroyed the fairness of her life. This was the disadvantage of having been born French or, indeed, of belonging to any other nation of the continent. There were forces there that pushed people to rash or unseemly actions; actions that seemed dictated by despair and therefore wore an immoral aspect. Sir Charles understood Adèle d’Armand even better than he understood his own daughter, or at least he understood her with greater sympathy. She had a generous nature. She was too young, too inexperienced to know what she was doing when she took in hand the disposal of her own person in favour of that apparently Piedmontese upstart with his obscure name and his mysteriously acquired fortune. “I only hope the fortune is there,” thought Sir Charles with grim scepticism. But as to that there could be no doubt, judging from the further letters he received from his old friend. After a short but brilliant period of London life the upstart had carried Adèle off to France. He had bought an estate in Piedmont, which was his native country, and another with a splendid house near Paris. Sir Charles was not surprised to hear a little later that the marquise and the marquis had also returned to France. The time of persecution was over; most of the great Royalist families were returning, unreconciled in sentiment, if wavering in their purposes. That his old friend should ever be dazzled by imperial grandeurs, Sir Charles could not believe. Though he had abandoned his daughter to an upstart, he was too good a Royalist to abandon his principles, for which certainly he would have died if that had been of any use. But he had returned to France. Most of his exiled friends had returned too, and Sir Charles understood very well that the marquis and his wife wanted to be somewhere near their daughter. This departure closed a long chapter in his life, and afterwards Sir Charles hardly ever mentioned his French friends. The only positive thing which Henrietta knew was that Adèle d’Armand had married an upstart, and had returned to France. She had communicated that knowledge to her brother, who had stared with evident surprise but had made no comment. Living away from home at school, and afterwards in Cambridge, his father’s French friends had remained for him as shadowy figures on the shifting background of a very poignant, very real, and intense drama of contemporary history, dominated by one enormously vital, and in its greatness, immensely mysterious individuality—the only man of his time.

Cosmo Latham at the threshold of life had adopted neither of the contrasted views of the Emperor Napoleon entertained by his contemporaries. For him, as for his father before him, the world offered a scene of conflicting emotions, in which facts appraised by reason preserved a mysterious complexity and a dual character. One evening during an artless discussion with young men of his own age, it had occurred to him to say that Bonaparte seemed to be the only man amongst a lot of old scarecrows. “Look how he knocks them over,” he had explained. A moment of silence followed. Then a voice objected.

“Then perhaps he is not so great as some of you try to make him out.”

“I didn’t mean that exactly,” said Cosmo, in a sobered tone. “Nobody can admire that man more than I do. Perhaps the world may be none the worse for a scarecrow here and there left on the borders of what is right or just. I only wished to express my sense of the moving force in his genius.”

“What does he stand for?” asked the same voice.

Cosmo shook his head. “Many things, and some of them too obvious to mention. But I can’t help thinking that there are some which we cannot see yet.”

“And some of them that are dead already,” retorted his interlocutor. “They died in his very hands. But there is one thing for which he stands and that will never die. You seem to have forgotten it. It is the spirit of hostility to this nation; to what we here in this room, with our different views and opinions, stand for in the last instance.”

“Oh, that,” said Cosmo confidently. “What we stand for isn’t an old scarecrow. Great as he is, he will never knock that over. His arm is not long enough, however far his thoughts may go. He has got to work with common men.”

“I don’t know what you mean. What else are we? I believe you admire him.”

“I do,” confessed Cosmo sturdily.

This did not prevent him from joining the army in Spain before the year was out, and that without asking for Sir Charles’s approval. Sir Charles condemned severely the policy of using the forces of the Crown in the Peninsula. He did not like the ministry of the day, and he had a strong prejudice against all the Wellesleys to whose aggrandisement this whole policy seemed affected. But when at the end of a year and a half, after the final victory of Toulouse, his son appeared in Yorkshire, the two made up for the past coolness by shaking hands warmly for nearly a whole minute. Cosmo really had done very little campaigning, and soon declared to his father his wish to leave the army. There would be no more fighting for years and years, he argued, and though he did not dislike fighting in a good cause, he had no taste for mere soldiering. He wanted to see something of the world which had been closed to us for so long. Sir Charles, ageing and dignified, leaned on his stick on the long terrace.

“All the world was never closed to us,” he said.

“I wasn’t thinking of the East, sir,” explained Cosmo. “I heard some people talk about its mystery, but I think Europe is mysterious enough just now, and even more interesting.”

Sir Charles nodded his bare grey head in the chill evening breeze.

“France, Germany,” he murmured.

Cosmo thought that he would prefer seeing something of Italy first. He would go north afterwards.

“Through Vienna, I suppose,” suggested Sir Charles, with an impassive face.

“I don’t think so, sir,” said Cosmo frankly. “I don’t care much for the work which is going on there, and perhaps still less for the men who are putting their hands to it.”

This time Sir Charles’s slow nod expressed complete agreement. He too had no liking for the work that was about to begin there. But no objection could be raised against Italy. He had known Italy well thirty or more years ago, but it must have been changed out of his knowledge. He remained silent, gazing at the wide landscape of blue wooded rises and dark hollows under the gorgeous colours of the sunset. They began to die out.

“You may travel far before you see anything like this,” he observed to his son. “And don’t be in a hurry to leave us. You have only just come home. Remember I am well over sixty.”

Cosmo was quite ready to surrender himself to the peace of his Yorkshire home, so different from the strenuous atmosphere of the last campaign in the south of France. Autumn was well advanced before he fixed the day for his departure. On his last day at home Sir Charles addressed him with perfect calmness:

“When you pass into Italy you must not fail to see my old friend, the Marquis d’Armand. The French king has appointed him as ambassador in Turin. It’s a sign of high favour, I believe. He will be either in Turin or Genoa….” Sir Charles paused, then after a perfectly audible sigh, added with an effort: “The marquise is dead. I knew her in her youth. She was a marvellous woman….” Sir Charles checked himself, and then with another effort: “But the daughter of my old friend is, I believe, with her father now, a married daughter, the Countess of Montevesso.”