treasures from me! I go in time: we live together no longer; you hide your thoughts and actions from me. How is it that you fear me? Have I ever given you one word, one look, one gesture of reproach? And yet, you have sold your last pictures, you have sold even the wine in your cellar, you are borrowing money on your property, and have said no word to me. Ah! I go from life weary of life. If you are doing wrong, if you delude yourself in following the unattainable, have I not shown you that my love could share your faults, could walk beside you and be happy, though you led me in the paths of crime? You loved me too well, –that was my glory; it is now my death. Balthazar, my illness has lasted long; it began on the day when here, in this place where I am about to die, you showed me that Science was more to you than Family. And now the end has come; your wife is dying, and your fortune lost. Fortune and wife were yours,–you could do what you willed with your own; but on the day of my death my property goes to my children, and you cannot touch it; what will then become of you? I am telling you the truth; I owe it to you. Dying eyes see far; when I am gone will anything outweigh that cursed passion which is now your life? If you have sacrificed your wife, your children will count but little in the scale; for I must be just and own you loved me above all. Two millions and six years of toil you have cast into the gulf,–and what have you found?”
At these words Claes grasped his whitened head in his hands and hid his face.
“Humiliation for yourself, misery for your children,” continued the dying woman. “You are called in derision ‘Claes the alchemist’; soon it will be ‘Claes the madman.’ For myself, I believe in you. I know you great and wise; I know your genius: but to the vulgar eye genius is mania. Fame is a sun that lights the dead; living, you will be unhappy with the unhappiness of great minds, and your children will be ruined. I go before I see your fame, which might have brought me consolation for my lost happiness. Oh, Balthazar! make my death less bitter to me, let me be certain that my children will not want for bread– Ah, nothing, nothing, not even you, can calm my fears.”
“I swear,” said Claes, “to–“
“No, do not swear, that you may not fail of your oath,” she said, interrupting him. “You owed us your protection; we have been without it seven years. Science is your life. A great man should have neither wife nor children; he should tread alone the path of sacrifice. His virtues are not the virtues of common men; he belongs to the universe, he cannot belong to wife or family; he sucks up the moisture of the earth about him, like a majestic tree–and I, poor plant, I could not rise to the height of your life, I die at its feet. I have waited for this last day to tell you these dreadful thoughts: they came to me in the lightnings of desolation and anguish. Oh, spare my children! let these words echo in your heart. I cry them to you with my last breath. The wife is dead, dead; you have stripped her slowly, gradually, of her feelings, of her joys. Alas! without that cruel care could I have lived so long? But those poor children did not forsake me! they have grown beside my anguish, the mother still survives. Spare them! Spare my children!”
“Lemulquinier!” cried Claes in a voice of thunder.
The old man appeared.
“Go up and destroy all–instruments, apparatus, everything! Be careful, but destroy all. I renounce Science,” he said to his wife.
“Too late,” she answered, looking at Lemulquinier. “Marguerite!” she cried, feeling herself about to die.
Marguerite came through the doorway and uttered a piercing cry as she saw her mother’s eyes now glazing.
“MARGUERITE!” repeated the dying woman.
The exclamation contained so powerful an appeal to her daughter, she invested that appeal with such authority, that the cry was like a dying bequest. The terrified family ran to her side and saw her die; the vital forces were exhausted in that last conversation with her husband.
Balthazar and Marguerite stood motionless, she at the head, he at the foot of the bed, unable to believe in the death of the woman whose virtues and exhaustless tenderness were known fully to them alone. Father and daughter exchanged looks freighted with meaning: the daughter judged the father, and already the father trembled, seeing in his daughter an instrument of vengeance. Though memories of the love with which his Pepita had filled his life crowded upon his mind, and gave to her dying words a sacred authority whose voice his soul must ever hear, yet Balthazar knew himself helpless in the grasp of his attendant genius; he heard the terrible mutterings of his passion, denying him the strength to carry his repentance into action: he feared himself.
When the grave had closed upon Madame Claes, one thought filled the minds of all,–the house had had a soul, and that soul was now departed. The grief of the family was so intense that the parlor, where the noble woman still seemed to linger, was closed; no one had the courage to enter it.
CHAPTER X
Society practises none of the virtues it demands from individuals: every hour it commits crimes, but the crimes are committed in words; it paves the way for evil actions with a jest; it degrades nobility of soul by ridicule; it jeers at sons who mourn their fathers, anathematizes those who do not mourn them enough, and finds diversion (the hypocrite!) in weighing the dead bodies before they are cold.
The evening of the day on which Madame Claes died, her friends cast a few flowers upon her memory in the intervals of their games of whist, doing homage to her noble qualities as they sorted their hearts and spades. Then, after a few lachrymal phrases,–the fi, fo, fum of collective grief, uttered in precisely the same tone, and with neither more nor less of feeling, at all hours and in every town in France, –they proceeded to estimate the value of her property. Pierquin was the first to observe that the death of this excellent woman was a mercy, for her husband had made her unhappy; and it was even more fortunate for her children: she was unable while living to refuse her money to the husband she adored; but now that she was dead, Claes was debarred from touching it. Thereupon all present calculated the fortune of that poor Madame Claes, wondered how much she had laid by (had she, in fact, laid by anything?), made an inventory of her jewels, rummaged in her wardrobe, peeped into her drawers, while the afflicted family were still weeping and praying around her death-bed.
Pierquin, with an appraising eye, stated that Madame Claes’s possessions in her own right–to use the notarial phrase–might still be recovered, and ought to amount to nearly a million and a half of francs; basing this estimate partly on the forest of Waignies,–whose timber, counting the full-grown trees, the saplings, the primeval growths, and the recent plantations, had immensely increased in value during the last twelve years,–and partly on Balthazar’s own property, of which enough remained to “cover” the claims of his children, if the liquidation of their mother’s fortune did not yield sufficient to release him. Mademoiselle Claes was still, in Pierquin’s slang, “a four-hundred-thousand-franc girl.” “But,” he added, “if she doesn’t marry,–a step which would of course separate her interests and permit us to sell the forest and auction, and so realize the property of the minor children and reinvest it where the father can’t lay hands on it, –Claes is likely to ruin them all.”
Thereupon, everybody looked about for some eligible young man worthy to win the hand of Mademoiselle Claes; but none of them paid the lawyer the compliment of suggesting that he might be the man. Pierquin, however, found so many good reasons to reject the suggested matches as unworthy of Marguerite’s position, that the confabulators glanced at each other and smiled, and took malicious pleasure in prolonging this truly provincial method of annoyance. Pierquin had already decided that Madame Claes’s death would have a favorable effect upon his suit, and he began mentally to cut up the body in his own interests.
“That good woman,” he said to himself as he went home to bed, “was as proud as a peacock; she would never gave given me her daughter. Hey, hey! why couldn’t I manage matters now so as to marry the girl? Pere Claes is drunk on carbon, and takes no care of his children. If, after convincing Marguerite that she must marry to save the property of her brothers and sister, I were to ask him for his daughter, he will be glad to get rid of a girl who is likely to thwart him.”
He went to sleep anticipating the charms of the marriage contract, and reflecting on the advantages of the step and the guarantees afforded for his happiness in the person he proposed to marry. In all the provinces there was certainly not a better brought-up or more delicately lovely young girl than Mademoiselle Claes. Her modesty, her grace, were like those of the pretty flower Emmanuel had feared to name lest he should betray the secret of his heart. Her sentiments were lofty, her principles religious, she would undoubtedly make him a faithful wife: moreover, she not only flattered the vanity which influences every man more or less in the choice of a wife, but she gratified his pride by the high consideration which her family, doubly ennobled, enjoyed in Flanders,–a consideration which her husband of course would share.
The next day Pierquin extracted from his strong-box several thousand-franc notes, which he offered with great friendliness to Balthazar, so as to relieve him of pecuniary annoyance in the midst of his grief. Touched by this delicate attention, Balthazar would, he thought, praise his goodness and his personal qualities to Marguerite. In this he was mistaken. Monsieur Claes and his daughter thought it was a very natural action, and their sorrow was too absorbing to let them even think of the lawyer.
Balthazar’s despair was indeed so great that persons who were disposed to blame his conduct could not do otherwise than forgive him,–less on account of the Science which might have excused him, than for the remorse which could not undo his deeds. Society is satisfied by appearances: it takes what it gives, without considering the intrinsic worth of the article. To the world real suffering is a show, a species of enjoyment, which inclines it to absolve even a criminal; in its thirst for emotions it acquits without judging the man who raises a laugh, or he who makes it weep, making no inquiry into their methods.
Marguerite was just nineteen when her father put her in charge of the household; and her brothers and sister, whom Madame Claes in her last moments exhorted to obey their elder sister, accepted her authority with docility. Her mourning attire heightened the dewy whiteness of her skin, just as the sadness of her expression threw into relief the gentleness and patience of her manner. From the first she gave proofs of feminine courage, of inalterable serenity, like that of angels appointed to shed peace on suffering hearts by a touch of their waving palms. But although she trained herself, through a premature perception of duty, to hide her personal grief, it was none the less bitter; her calm exterior was not in keeping with the deep trouble of her thoughts, and she was destined to undergo, too early in life, those terrible outbursts of feeling which no heart is wholly able to subdue: her father was to hold her incessantly under the pressure of natural youthful generosity on the one hand, and the dictates of imperious duty on the other. The cares which came upon her the very day of her mother’s death threw her into a struggle with the interests of life at an age when young girls are thinking only of its pleasures. Dreadful discipline of suffering, which is never lacking to angelic natures!
The love which rests on money or on vanity is the most persevering of passions. Pierquin resolved to win the heiress without delay. A few days after Madame Claes’s death he took occasion to speak to Marguerite, and began operations with a cleverness which might have succeeded if love had not given her the power of clear insight and saved her from mistaking appearances that were all the more specious because Pierquin displayed his natural kindheartedness,–the kindliness of a notary who thinks himself loving while he protects a client’s money. Relying on his rather distant relationship and his constant habit of managing the business and sharing the secrets of the Claes family, sure of the esteem and friendship of the father, greatly assisted by the careless inattention of that servant of science who took no thought for the marriage of his daughter, and not suspecting that Marguerite could prefer another,–Pierquin unguardedly enabled her to form a judgment on a suit in which there was no passion except that of self-interest, always odious to a young soul, and which he was not clever enough to conceal. It was he who on this occasion was naively above-board, it was she who dissimulated,–simply because he thought he was dealing with a defenceless girl, and wholly misconceived the privileges of weakness.
“My dear cousin,” he said to Marguerite, with whom he was walking about the paths of the little garden, “you know my heart, you understand how truly I desire to respect the painful feelings which absorb you at this moment. I have too sensitive a nature for a lawyer; I live by my heart only, I am forced to spend my time on the interests of others when I would fain let myself enjoy the sweet emotions which make life happy. I suffer deeply in being obliged to talk to you of subjects so discordant with your state of mind, but it is necessary. I have thought much about you during the last few days. It is evident that through a fatal delusion the fortune of your brothers and sister and your own are in jeopardy. Do you wish to save your family from complete ruin?”
“What must I do?” she asked, half-frightened by his words.
“Marry,” answered Pierquin.
“I shall not marry,” she said.
“Yes, you will marry,” replied the notary, “when you have soberly thought over the critical position in which you are placed.”
“How can my marriage save–“
“Ah! I knew you would consider it, my dear cousin,” he exclaimed, interrupting her. “Marriage will emancipate you.”
“Why should I be emancipated?” asked Marguerite.
“Because marriage will put you at once into possession of your property, my dear little cousin,” said the lawyer in a tone of triumph. “If you marry you take your share of your mother’s property. To give it to you, the whole property must be liquidated; to do that, it becomes necessary to sell the forest of Waignies. That done, the proceeds will be capitalized, and your father, as guardian, will be compelled to invest the fortune of his children in such a way that Chemistry can’t get hold of it.”
“And if I do not marry, what will happen?” she asked.
“Well,” said the notary, “your father will manage your estate as he pleases. If he returns to making gold, he will probably sell the timber of the forest of Waignies and leave his children as naked as the little Saint Johns. The forest is now worth about fourteen hundred thousand francs; but from one day to another you are not sure your father won’t cut it down, and then your thirteen hundred acres are not worth three hundred thousand francs. Isn’t it better to avoid this almost certain danger by at once compelling the division of property on your marriage? If the forest is sold now, while Chemistry has gone to sleep, your father will put the proceeds into the Grand-Livre. The Funds are at 59; those dear children will get nearly five thousand francs a year for every fifty thousand francs: and, inasmuch as the property of minors cannot be sold out, your brothers and sister will find their fortunes doubled in value by the time they come of age. Whereas, in the other case,–faith, no one knows what may happen: your father has already impaired your mother’s property; we shall find out the deficit when we come to make the inventory. If he is in debt to her estate, you will take a mortgage on his, and in that way something may be recovered–“
“For shame!” said Marguerite. “It would be an outrage on my father. It is not so long since my mother uttered her last words that I have forgotten them. My father is incapable of robbing his children,” she continued, giving way to tears of distress. “You misunderstand him, Monsieur Pierquin.”
“But, my dear cousin, if your father gets back to chemistry–“
“We are ruined; is that what you mean?”
“Yes, utterly ruined. Believe me, Marguerite,” he said, taking her hand which he placed upon his heart, “I should fail of my duty if I did not persist in this matter. Your interests alone–“
“Monsieur,” said Marguerite, coldly withdrawing her hand, “the true interests of my family require me not to marry. My mother thought so.”
“Cousin,” he cried, with the earnestness of a man who sees a fortune escaping him, “you commit suicide; you fling your mother’s property into a gulf. Well, I will prove the devotion I feel for you: you know not how I love you. I have admired you from the day of that last ball, three years ago; you were enchanting. Trust the voice of love when it speaks to you of your own interests, Marguerite.” He paused. “Yes, we must call a family council and emancipate you–without consulting you,” he added.
“But what is it to be emancipated?”
“It is to enjoy your own rights.”
“If I can be emancipated without being married, why do you want me to marry? and whom should I marry?”
Pierquin tried to look tenderly at his cousin, but the expression contrasted so strongly with his hard eyes, usually fixed on money, that Marguerite discovered the self-interest in his improvised tenderness.
“You would marry the person who–pleases you–the most,” he said. “A husband is indispensable, were it only as a matter of business. You are now entering upon a struggle with your father; can you resist him all alone?”
“Yes, monsieur; I shall know how to protect my brothers and sister when the time comes.”
“Pshaw! the obstinate creature,” thought Pierquin. “No, you will not resist him,” he said aloud.
“Let us end the subject,” she said.
“Adieu, cousin, I shall endeavor to serve you in spite of yourself; I will prove my love by protecting you against your will from a disaster which all the town foresees.”
“I thank you for the interest you take in me,” she answered; “but I entreat you to propose nothing and to undertake nothing which may give pain to my father.”
Marguerite stood thoughtfully watching Pierquin as he departed; she compared his metallic voice, his manners, flexible as a steel spring, his glance, servile rather than tender, with the mute melodious poetry in which Emmanuel’s sentiments were wrapped. No matter what may be said, or what may be done, there exists a wonderful magnetism whose effects never deceive. The tones of the voice, the glance, the passionate gestures of a lover may be imitated; a young girl can be deluded by a clever comedian; but to succeed, the man must be alone in the field. If the young girl has another soul beside her whose pulses vibrate in unison with hers, she is able to distinguish the expressions of a true love. Emmanuel, like Marguerite, felt the influence of the chords which, from the time of their first meeting had gathered ominously about their heads, hiding from their eyes the blue skies of love. His feeling for the Elect of his heart was an idolatry which the total absence of hope rendered gentle and mysterious in its manifestations. Socially too far removed from Mademoiselle Claes by his want of fortune, with nothing but a noble name to offer her, he saw no chance of ever being her husband. Yet he had always hoped for certain encouragements which Marguerite refused to give before the failing eyes of her dying mother. Both equally pure, they had never said to one another a word of love. Their joys were solitary joys tasted by each alone. They trembled apart, though together they quivered beneath the rays of the same hope. They seemed to fear themselves, conscious that each only too surely belonged to the other. Emmanuel trembled lest he should touch the hand of the sovereign to whom he had made a shrine of his heart; a chance contact would have roused hopes that were too ardent, he could not then have mastered the force of his passion. And yet, while neither bestowed the vast, though trivial, the innocent and yet all-meaning signs of love that even timid lovers allow themselves, they were so firmly fixed in each other’s hearts that both were ready to make the greatest sacrifices, which were, indeed, the only pleasures their love could expect to taste.
Since Madame Claes’s death this hidden love was shrouded in mourning. The tints of the sphere in which it lived, dark and dim from the first, were now black; the few lights were veiled by tears. Marguerite’s reserve changed to coldness; she remembered the promise exacted by her mother. With more freedom of action, she nevertheless became more distant. Emmanuel shared his beloved’s grief, comprehending that the slightest word or wish of love at such a time transgressed the laws of the heart. Their love was therefore more concealed than it had ever been. These tender souls sounded the same note: held apart by grief, as formerly by the timidities of youth and by respect for the sufferings of the mother, they clung to the magnificent language of the eyes, the mute eloquence of devoted actions, the constant unison of thoughts,–divine harmonies of youth, the first steps of a love still in its infancy. Emmanuel came every morning to inquire for Claes and Marguerite, but he never entered the dining-room, where the family now sat, unless to bring a letter from Gabriel or when Balthazar invited him to come in. His first glance at the young girl contained a thousand sympathetic thoughts; it told her that he suffered under these conventional restraints, that he never left her, he was always with her, he shared her grief. He shed the tears of his own pain into the soul of his dear one by a look that was marred by no selfish reservation. His good heart lived so completely in the present, he clung so firmly to a happiness which he believed to be fugitive, that Marguerite sometimes reproached herself for not generously holding out her hand and saying, “Let us at least be friends.”
Pierquin continued his suit with an obstinacy which is the unreflecting patience of fools. He judged Marguerite by the ordinary rules of the multitude when judging of women. He believed that the words marriage, freedom, fortune, which he had put into her mind, would geminate and flower into wishes by which he could profit; he imagined that her coldness was mere dissimulation. But surround her as he would with gallant attentions, he could not hide the despotic ways of a man accustomed to manage the private affairs of many families with a high hand. He discoursed to her in those platitudes of consolation common to his profession, which crawl like snails over the suffering mind, leaving behind them a trail of barren words which profane its sanctity. His tenderness was mere wheedling. He dropped his feigned melancholy at the door when he put on his overshoes, or took his umbrella. He used the tone his long intimacy authorized as an instrument to work himself still further into the bosom of the family, and bring Marguerite to a marriage which the whole town was beginning to foresee. The true, devoted, respectful love formed a striking contrast to its selfish, calculating semblance. Each man’s conduct was homogenous: one feigned a passion and seized every advantage to gain the prize; the other hid his love and trembled lest he should betray his devotion.
Some time after the death of her mother, and, as it happened, on the same day, Marguerite was enabled to compare the only two men of whom she had any opportunity of judging; for the social solitude to which she was condemned kept her from seeing life and gave no access to those who might think of her in marriage. One day after breakfast, a fine morning in April, Emmanuel called at the house just as Monsieur Claes was going out. The aspect of his own house was so unendurable to Balthazar that he spent part of every day in walking about the ramparts. Emmanuel made a motion as if to follow him, then he hesitated, seemed to gather up his courage, looked at Marguerite and remained. The young girl felt sure that he wished to speak with her, and asked him to go into the garden; then she sent Felicie to Martha, who was sewing in the antechamber on the upper floor, and seated herself on a garden-seat in full view of her sister and the old duenna.
“Monsieur Claes is as much absorbed by grief as he once was by science,” began the young man, watching Balthazar as he slowly crossed the court-yard. “Every one in Douai pities him; he moves like a man who has lost all consciousness of life; he stops without a purpose, he gazes without seeing anything.”
“Every sorrow has its own expression,” said Marguerite, checking her tears. “What is it you wish to say to me?” she added after a pause, coldly and with dignity.
“Mademoiselle,” answered Emmanuel in a voice of feeling, “I scarcely know if I have the right to speak to you as I am about to do. Think only of my desire to be of service to you, and give me the right of a teacher to be interested in the future of a pupil. Your brother Gabriel is over fifteen; he is in the second class; it is now necessary to direct his studies in the line of whatever future career he may take up. It is for your father to decide what that career shall be: if he gives the matter no thought, the injury to Gabriel would be serious. But then, again, would it not mortify your father if you showed him that he is neglecting his son’s interests? Under these circumstances, could you not yourself consult Gabriel as to his tastes, and help him to choose a career, so that later, if his father should think of making him a public officer, an administrator, a soldier, he might be prepared with some special training? I do not suppose that either you or Monsieur Claes would wish to bring Gabriel up in idleness.”
“Oh, no!” said Marguerite; “when my mother taught us to make lace, and took such pains with our drawing and music and embroidery, she often said we must be prepared for whatever might happen to us. Gabriel ought to have a thorough education and a personal value. But tell me, what career is best for a man to choose?”
“Mademoiselle,” said Emmanuel, trembling with pleasure, “Gabriel is at the head of his class in mathematics; if he would like to enter the Ecole Polytechnique, he could there acquire the practical knowledge which will fit him for any career. When he leaves the Ecole he can choose the path in life for which he feels the strongest bias. Thus, without compromising his future, you will have saved a great deal of time. Men who leave the Ecole with honors are sought after on all sides; the school turns out statesmen, diplomats, men of science, engineers, generals, sailors, magistrates, manufacturers, and bankers. There is nothing extraordinary in the son of a rich or noble family preparing himself to enter it. If Gabriel decides on this course I shall ask you to–will you grant my request? Say yes!”
“What is it?”
“Let me be his tutor,” he answered, trembling.
Marguerite looked at Monsieur de Solis; then she took his hand, and said, “Yes”–and paused, adding presently in a broken voice:–
“How much I value the delicacy which makes you offer me a thing I can accept from you. In all that you have said I see how much you have thought for us. I thank you.”
Though the words were simply said, Emmanuel turned away his head not to show the tears that the delight of being useful to her brought to his eyes.
“I will bring both boys to see you,” he said, when he was a little calmer; “to-morrow is a holiday.”
He rose and bowed to Marguerite, who followed him into the house; when he had crossed the court-yard he turned and saw her still at the door of the dining-room, from which she made him a friendly sign.
After dinner Pierquin came to see Monsieur Claes, and sat down between father and daughter on the very bench in the garden where Emmanuel had sat that morning.
“My dear cousin,” he said to Balthazar, “I have come to-night to talk to you on business. It is now forty-two days since the decease of your wife.”
“I keep no account of time,” said Balthazar, wiping away the tears that came at the word “decease.”
“Oh, monsieur!” cried Marguerite, looking at the lawyer, “how can you?”
“But, my dear Marguerite, we notaries are obliged to consider the limits of time appointed by law. This is a matter which concerns you and your co-heirs. Monsieur Claes has none but minor children, and he must make an inventory of his property within forty-five days of his wife’s decease, so as to render in his accounts at the end of that time. It is necessary to know the value of his property before deciding whether to accept it as sufficient security, or whether we must fall back on the legal rights of minors.”
Marguerite rose.
“Do not go away, my dear cousin,” continued Pierquin; “my words concern you–you and your father both. You know how truly I share your grief, but to-day you must give your attention to legal details. If you do not, every one of you will get into serious difficulties. I am only doing my duty as the family lawyer.”
“He is right,” said Claes.
“The time expires in two days,” resumed Pierquin; “and I must begin the inventory to-morrow, if only to postpone the payment of the legacy-tax which the public treasurer will come here and demand. Treasurers have no hearts; they don’t trouble themselves about feelings; they fasten their claws upon us at all seasons. Therefore for the next two days my clerk and I will be here from ten till four with Monsieur Raparlier, the public appraiser. After we get through the town property we shall go into the country. As for the forest of Waignies, we shall be obliged to hold a consultation about that. Now let us turn to another matter. We must call a family council and appoint a guardian to protect the interests of the minor children. Monsieur Conyncks of Bruges is your nearest relative; but he has now become a Belgian. You ought,” continued Pierquin, addressing Balthazar, “to write to him on this matter; you can then find out if he has any intention of settling in France, where he has a fine property. Perhaps you could persuade him and his daughter to move into French Flanders. If he refuses, then I must see about making up the council with the other near relatives.”
“What is the use of an inventory?” asked Marguerite.
“To put on record the value and the claims of the property, its debts and its assets. When that is all clearly scheduled, the family council, acting on behalf of the minors, makes such dispositions as it sees fit.”
“Pierquin,” said Claes, rising from the bench, “do all that is necessary to protect the rights of my children; but spare us the distress of selling the things that belonged to my dear–” he was unable to continue; but he spoke with so noble an air and in a tone of such deep feeling that Marguerite took her father’s hand and kissed it.
“To-morrow, then,” said Pierquin.
“Come to breakfast,” said Claes; then he seemed to gather his scattered senses together and exclaimed: “But in my marriage contract, which was drawn under the laws of Hainault, I released my wife from the obligation of making an inventory, in order that she might not be annoyed by it: it is very probable that I was equally released–“
“Oh, what happiness!” cried Marguerite. “It would have been so distressing to us.”
“Well, I will look into your marriage contract to-morrow,” said the notary, rather confused.
“Then you did not know of this?” said Marguerite.
This remark closed the interview; the lawyer was far too much confused to continue it after the young girl’s comment.
“The devil is in it!” he said to himself as he crossed the court-yard. “That man’s wandering memory comes back to him in the nick of time, –just when he needed it to hinder us from taking precautions against him! I have cracked my brains to save the property of those children. I meant to proceed regularly and come to an understanding with old Conyncks, and here’s the end of it! I shall lose ground with Marguerite, for she will certainly ask her father why I wanted an inventory of the property, which she now sees was not necessary; and Claes will tell her that notaries have a passion for writing documents, that we are lawyers above all, above cousins or friends or relatives, and all such stuff as that.”
He slammed the street door violently, railing at clients who ruin themselves by sensitiveness.
Balthazar was right. No inventory could be made. Nothing, therefore, was done to settle the relation of the father to the children in the matter of property.
CHAPTER XI
Several months went by and brought no change to the House of Claes. Gabriel, under the wise management of his tutor, Monsieur de Solis, worked studiously, acquired foreign languages, and prepared to pass the necessary examinations to enter the Ecole Polytechnique. Marguerite and Felicie lived in absolute retirement, going in summer to their father’s country place as a measure of economy. Monsieur Claes attended to his business affairs, paid his debts by borrowing a considerable sum of money on his property, and went to see the forest at Waignies.
About the middle of the year 1817, his grief, slowly abating, left him a prey to solitude and defenceless under the monotony of the life he was leading, which heavily oppressed him. At first he struggled bravely against the allurements of Science as they gradually beset him; he forbade himself even to think of Chemistry. Then he did think of it. Still, he would not actively take it up, and only gave his mind to his researches theoretically. Such constant study, however, swelled his passion which soon became exacting. He asked himself whether he was really bound not to continue his researches, and remembered that his wife had refused his oath. Though he had pledged his word to himself that he would never pursue the solution of the great Problem, might he not change that determination at a moment when he foresaw success? He was now fifty-nine years old. At that age a predominant idea contracts a certain peevish fixedness which is the first stage of monomania.
Circumstances conspired against his tottering loyalty. The peace which Europe now enjoyed encouraged the circulation of discoveries and scientific ideas acquired during the war by the learned of various countries, who for nearly twenty years had been unable to hold communication. Science was making great strides. Claes found that the progress of chemistry had been directed, unknown to chemists themselves, towards the object of his researches. Learned men devoted to the higher sciences thought, as he did, that light, heat, electricity, galvanism, magnetism were all different effects of the same cause, and that the difference existing between substances hitherto considered simple must be produced by varying proportions of an unknown principle. The fear that some other chemist might effect the reduction of metals and discover the constituent principle of electricity,–two achievements which would lead to the solution of the chemical Absolute,–increased what the people of Douai called a mania, and drove his desires to a paroxysm conceivable to those who devote themselves to the sciences, or who have ever known the tyranny of ideas.
Thus it happened that Balthazar was again carried away by a passion all the more violent because it had lain dormant so long. Marguerite, who watched every evidence of her father’s state of mind, opened the long-closed parlor. By living in it she recalled the painful memories which her mother’s death had caused, and succeeded for a time in re-awaking her father’s grief, and retarding his plunge into the gulf to the depths of which he was, nevertheless, doomed to fall. She determined to go into society and force Balthazar to share in its distractions. Several good marriages were proposed to her, which occupied Claes’s mind, but to all of them she replied that she should not marry until after she was twenty-five. But in spite of his daughter’s efforts, in spite of his remorseful struggles, Balthazar, at the beginning of the winter, returned secretly to his researches. It was difficult, however, to hide his operations from the inquisitive women in the kitchen; and one morning Martha, while dressing Marguerite, said to her:–
“Mademoiselle, we are as good as lost. That monster of a Mulquinier –who is a devil disguised, for I never saw him make the sign of the cross–has gone back to the garret. There’s monsieur on the high-road to hell. Pray God he mayn’t kill you as he killed my poor mistress.”
“It is not possible!” exclaimed Marguerite.
“Come and see the signs of their traffic.”
Mademoiselle Claes ran to the window and saw the light smoke rising from the flue of the laboratory.
“I shall be twenty-one in a few months,” she thought, “and I shall know how to oppose the destruction of our property.”
In giving way to his passion Balthazar necessarily felt less respect for the interests of his children than he formerly had felt for the happiness of his wife. The barriers were less high, his conscience was more elastic, his passion had increased in strength. He now set forth in his career of glory, toil, hope, and poverty, with the fervor of a man profoundly trustful of his convictions. Certain of the result, he worked night and day with a fury that alarmed his daughters, who did not know how little a man is injured by work that gives him pleasure.
Her father had no sooner recommenced his experiments than Marguerite retrenched the superfluities of the table, showing a parsimony worthy of a miser, in which Josette and Martha admirably seconded her. Claes never noticed the change which reduced the household living to the merest necessaries. First he ceased to breakfast with the family; then he only left his laboratory when dinner was ready; and at last, before he went to bed, he would sit some hours in the parlor between his daughters without saying a word to either of them; when he rose to go upstairs they wished him good-night, and he allowed them mechanically to kiss him on both cheeks. Such conduct would have led to great domestic misfortunes had Marguerite not been prepared to exercise the authority of a mother, and if, moreover, she were not protected by a secret love from the dangers of so much liberty.
Pierquin had ceased to come to the house, judging that the family ruin would soon be complete. Balthazar’s rural estates, which yielded sixteen thousand francs a year, and were worth about six hundred thousand, were now encumbered by mortgages to the amount of three hundred thousand francs; for, in order to recommence his researches, Claes had borrowed a considerable sum of money. The rents were exactly enough to pay the interest of the mortgages; but, with the improvidence of a man who is the slave of an idea, he made over the income of his farm lands to Marguerite for the expenses of the household, and the notary calculated that three years would suffice to bring matters to a crisis, when the law would step in and eat up all that Balthazar had not squandered. Marguerite’s coldness brought Pierquin to a state of almost hostile indifference. To give himself an appearance in the eyes of the world of having renounced her hand, he frequently remarked of the Claes family in a tone of compassion:–
“Those poor people are ruined; I have done my best to save them. Well, it can’t be helped; Mademoiselle Claes refused to employ the legal means which might have rescued them from poverty.”
Emmanuel de Solis, who was now principal of the college-school in Douai, thanks to the influence of his uncle and to his own merits which made him worthy of the post, came every evening to see the two young girls, who called the old duenna into the parlor as soon as their father had gone to bed. Emmanuel’s gentle rap at the street-door was never missing. For the last three months, encouraged by the gracious, though mute gratitude with which Marguerite now accepted his attentions, he became at his ease, and was seen for what he was. The brightness of his pure spirit shone like a flawless diamond; Marguerite learned to understand its strength and its constancy when she saw how inexhaustible was the source from which it came. She loved to watch the unfolding, one by one, of the blossoms of his heart, whose perfume she had already breathed. Each day Emmanuel realized some one of Marguerite’s hopes, and illumined the enchanted regions of love with new lights that chased away the clouds and brought to view the serene heavens, giving color to the fruitful riches hidden away in the shadow of their lives. More at his ease, the young man could display the seductive qualities of his heart until now discreetly hidden, the expansive gaiety of his age, the simplicity which comes of a life of study, the treasures of a delicate mind that life has not adulterated, the innocent joyousness which goes so well with loving youth. His soul and Marguerite’s understood each other better; they went together to the depths of their hearts and found in each the same thoughts,–pearls of equal lustre, sweet fresh harmonies like those the legends tell of beneath the waves, which fascinate the divers. They made themselves known to one another by an interchange of thought, a reciprocal introspection which bore the signs, in both, of exquisite sensibility. It was done without false shame, but not without mutual coquetry. The two hours which Emmanuel spent with the sisters and old Martha enabled Marguerite to accept the life of anguish and renunciation on which she had entered. This artless, progressive love was her support. In all his testimonies of affection Emmanuel showed the natural grace that is so winning, the sweet yet subtile mind which breaks the uniformity of sentiment as the facets of a diamond relieve, by their many-sided fires, the monotony of the stone,–adorable wisdom, the secret of loving hearts, which makes a woman pliant to the artistic hand that gives new life to old, old forms, and refreshes with novel modulations the phrases of love. Love is not only a sentiment, it is an art. Some simple word, a trifling vigilance, a nothing, reveals to a woman the great, the divine artist who shall touch her heart and yet not blight it. The more Emmanuel was free to utter himself, the more charming were the expressions of his love.
“I have tried to get here before Pierquin,” he said to Marguerite one evening. “He is bringing some bad news; I would rather you heard it from me. Your father has sold all the timber in your forest at Waignies to speculators, who have resold it to dealers. The trees are already felled, and the logs are carried away. Monsieur Claes received three hundred thousand francs in cash as a first instalment of the price, which he has used towards paying his bills in Paris; but to clear off his debts entirely he has been forced to assign a hundred thousand francs of the three hundred thousand still due to him on the purchase-money.”
Pierquin entered at this moment.
“Ah! my dear cousin,” he said, “you are ruined. I told you how it would be; but you would not listen to me. Your father has an insatiable appetite. He has swallowed your woods at a mouthful. Your family guardian, Monsieur Conyncks, is just now absent in Amsterdam, and Claes has seized the opportunity to strike the blow. It is all wrong. I have written to Monsieur Conyncks, but he will get here too late; everything will be squandered. You will be obliged to sue your father. The suit can’t be long, but it will be dishonorable. Monsieur Conyncks has no alternative but to institute proceedings; the law requires it. This is the result of your obstinacy. Do you now see my prudence, and how devoted I was to your interests?”
“I bring you some good news, mademoiselle,” said young de Solis in his gentle voice. “Gabriel has been admitted to the Ecole Polytechnique. The difficulties that seemed in the way have all been removed.”
Marguerite thanked him with a smile as she said:–
“My savings will now come in play! Martha, we must begin to-morrow on Gabriel’s outfit. My poor Felicie, we shall have to work hard,” she added, kissing her sister’s forehead.
“To-morrow you shall have him at home, to remain ten days,” said Emmanuel; “he must be in Paris by the fifteenth of November.”
“My cousin Gabriel has done a sensible thing,” said the lawyer, eyeing the professor from head to foot; “for he will have to make his own way. But, my dear cousin, the question now is how to save the honor of the family: will you listen to what I say this time?”
“No,” she said, “not if it relates to marriage.”
“Then what will you do?”
“I?–nothing.”
“But you are of age.”
“I shall be in a few days. Have you any course to suggest to me,” she added, “which will reconcile our interests with the duty we owe to our father and to the honor of the family?”
“My dear cousin, nothing can be done till your uncle arrives. When he does, I will call again.”
“Adieu, monsieur,” said Marguerite.
“The poorer she is the more airs she gives herself,” thought the notary. “Adieu, mademoiselle,” he said aloud. “Monsieur, my respects to you”; and he went away, paying no attention to Felicie or Martha.
“I have been studying the Code for the last two days, and I have consulted an experienced old lawyer, a friend of my uncle,” said Emmanuel, in a hesitating voice. “If you will allow me, I will go to Amsterdam to-morrow and see Monsieur Conyncks. Listen, dear Marguerite–“
He uttered her name for the first time; she thanked him with a smile and a tearful glance, and made a gentle inclination of her head. He paused, looking at Felicie and Martha.
“Speak before my sister,” said Marguerite. “She is so docile and courageous that she does not need this discussion to make her resigned to our life of toil and privation; but it is best that she should see for herself how necessary courage is to us.”
The two sisters clasped hands and kissed each other, as if to renew some pledge of union before the coming disaster.
“Leave us, Martha.”
“Dear Marguerite,” said Emmanuel, letting the happiness he felt in conquering the lesser rights of affection sound in the inflections of his voice, “I have procured the names and addresses of the purchasers who still owe the remaining two hundred thousand francs on the felled timber. To-morrow, if you give consent, a lawyer acting in the name of Monsieur Conyncks, who will not disavow the act, will serve an injunction upon them. Six days hence, by which time your uncle will have returned, the family council can be called together, and Gabriel put in possession of his legal rights, for he is now eighteen. You and your brother being thus authorized to use those rights, you will demand your share in the proceeds of the timber. Monsieur Claes cannot refuse you the two hundred thousand francs on which the injunction will have been put; as to the remaining hundred thousand which is due to you, you must obtain a mortgage on this house. Monsieur Conyncks will demand securities for the three hundred thousand belonging to Felicie and Jean. Under these circumstances your father will be obliged to mortgage his property on the plain of Orchies, which he has already encumbered to the amount of three hundred thousand francs. The law gives a retrospective priority to the claims of minors; and that will save you. Monsieur Claes’s hands will be tied for the future; your property becomes inalienable, and he can no longer borrow on his own estates because they will be held as security for other sums. Moreover, the whole can be done quietly, without scandal or legal proceedings. Your father will be forced to greater prudence in making his researches, even if he cannot be persuaded to relinquish them altogether.”
“Yes,” said Marguerite, “but where, meantime, can we find the means of living? The hundred thousand francs for which, you say, I must obtain a mortgage on this house, would bring in nothing while we still live here. The proceeds of my father’s property in the country will pay the interest on the three hundred thousand francs he owes to others; but how are we to live?”
“In the first place,” said Emmanuel, “by investing the fifty thousand francs which belong to Gabriel in the public Funds you will get, according to present rates, more than four thousand francs’ income, which will suffice to pay your brother’s board and lodging and all his other expenses in Paris. Gabriel cannot touch the capital until he is of age, therefore you need not fear that he will waste a penny of it, and you will have one expense the less. Besides, you will have your own fifty thousand.”
“My father will ask me for them,” she said in a frightened tone; “and I shall not be able to refuse him.”
“Well, dear Marguerite, even so, you can evade that by robbing yourself. Place your money in the Grand-Livre in Gabriel’s name: it will bring you twelve or thirteen thousand francs a year. Minors who are emancipated cannot sell property without permission of the family council; you will thus gain three years’ peace of mind. By that time your father will either have solved his problem or renounced it; and Gabriel, then of age, will reinvest the money in your own name.”
Marguerite made him explain to her once more the legal points which she did not at first understand. It was certainly a novel sight to see this pair of lovers poring over the Code, which Emmanuel had brought with him to show his mistress the laws which protected the property of minors; she quickly caught the meaning of them, thanks to the natural penetration of women, which in this case love still further sharpened.
Gabriel came home to his father’s house on the following day. When Monsieur de Solis brought him up to Balthazar and told of his admission to the Ecole Polytechnique, the father thanked the professor with a wave of his hand, and said:–
“I am very glad; Gabriel may become a man of science.”
“Oh, my brother,” cried Marguerite, as Balthazar went back to his laboratory, “work hard, waste no money; spend what is necessary, but practise economy. On the days when you are allowed to go out, pass your time with our friends and relations; contract none of the habits which ruin young men in Paris. Your expenses will amount to nearly three thousand francs, and that will leave you a thousand francs for your pocket-money; that is surely enough.”
“I will answer for him,” said Emmanuel de Solis, laying his hand on his pupil’s shoulder.
A month later, Monsieur Conyncks, in conjunction with Marguerite, had obtained all necessary securities from Claes. The plan so wisely proposed by Emmanuel de Solis was fully approved and executed. Face to face with the law, and in presence of his cousin, whose stern sense of honor allowed no compromise, Balthazar, ashamed of the sale of the timber to which he had consented at a moment when he was harassed by creditors, submitted to all that was demanded of him. Glad to repair the almost involuntary wrong that he had done to his children, he signed the deeds in a preoccupied way. He was now as careless and improvident as a Negro who sells his wife in the morning for a drop of brandy, and cries for her at night. He gave no thought to even the immediate future, and never asked himself what resources he would have when his last ducat was melted up. He pursued his work and continued his purchases, apparently unaware that he was now no more than the titular owner of his house and lands, and that he could not, thanks to the severity of the laws, raise another penny upon a property of which he was now, as it were, the legal guardian.
The year 1818 ended without bringing any new misfortune. The sisters paid the costs of Jean’s education and met all the expenses of the household out of the thirteen thousand francs a year from the sum placed in the Grand-Livre in Gabriel’s name, which he punctually remitted to them. Monsieur de Solis lost his uncle, the abbe, in December of that year.
Early in January Marguerite learned through Martha that her father had sold his collection of tulips, also the furniture of the front house, and all the family silver. She was obliged to buy back the spoons and forks that were necessary for the daily service of the table, and these she now ordered to be stamped with her initials. Until that day Marguerite had kept silence towards her father on the subject of his depredations, but that evening after dinner she requested Felicie to leave her alone with him, and when he seated himself as usual by the corner of the parlor fireplace, she said:–
“My dear father, you are the master here, and can sell everything, even your children. We are ready to obey you without a murmur; but I am forced to tell you that we are without money, that we have barely enough to live on, and that Felicie and I are obliged to work night and day to pay for the schooling of little Jean with the price of the lace dress we are now making. My dear father, I implore you to give up your researches.”
“You are right, my dear child; in six weeks they will be finished; I shall have found the Absolute, or the Absolute will be proved undiscoverable. You will have millions–“
“Give us meanwhile the bread to eat,” replied Marguerite.
“Bread? is there no bread here?” said Claes, with a frightened air. “No bread in the house of a Claes! What has become of our property?”
“You have cut down the forest of Waignies. The ground has not been cleared and is therefore unproductive. As for your farms at Orchies, the rents scarcely suffice to pay the interest of the sums you have borrowed–“
“Then what are we living on?” he demanded.
Marguerite held up her needle and continued:–
“Gabriel’s income helps us, but it is insufficient; I can make both ends meet at the close of the year if you do not overwhelm me with bills that I do not expect, for purchases you tell me nothing about. When I think I have enough to meet my quarterly expenses some unexpected bill for potash, or zinc, or sulphur, is brought to me.”
“My dear child, have patience for six weeks; after that, I will be judicious. My little Marguerite, you shall see wonders.”
“It is time you should think of your affairs. You have sold everything,–pictures, tulips, plate; nothing is left. At least, refrain from making debts.”
“I don’t wish to make any more!” he said.
“Any more?” she cried, “then you have some?”
“Mere trifles,” he said, but he dropped his eyes and colored.
For the first time in her life Marguerite felt humiliated by the lowering of her father’s character, and suffered from it so much that she dared not question him.
A month after this scene one of the Douai bankers brought a bill of exchange for ten thousand francs signed by Claes. Marguerite asked the banker to wait a day, and expressed her regret that she had not been notified to prepare for this payment; whereupon he informed her that the house of Protez and Chiffreville held nine other bills to the same amount, falling due in consecutive months.
“All is over!” cried Marguerite, “the time has come.”
She sent for her father, and walked up and down the parlor with hasty steps, talking to herself:–
“A hundred thousand francs!” she cried. “I must find them, or see my father in prison. What am I to do?”
Balthazar did not come. Weary of waiting for him, Marguerite went up to the laboratory. As she entered she saw him in the middle of an immense, brilliantly-lighted room, filled with machinery and dusty glass vessels: here and there were books, and tables encumbered with specimens and products ticketed and numbered. On all sides the disorder of scientific pursuits contrasted strongly with Flemish habits. This litter of retorts and vaporizers, metals, fantastically colored crystals, specimens hooked upon the walls or lying on the furnaces, surrounded the central figure of Balthazar Claes, without a coat, his arms bare like those of a workman, his breast exposed, and showing the white hair which covered it. His eyes were gazing with horrible fixity at a pneumatic trough. The receiver of this instrument was covered with a lens made of double convex glasses, the space between the glasses being filled with alchohol, which focussed the light coming through one of the compartments of the rose-window of the garret. The shelf of the receiver communicated with the wire of an immense galvanic battery. Lemulquinier, busy at the moment in moving the pedestal of the machine, which was placed on a movable axle so as to keep the lens in a perpendicular direction to the rays of the sun, turned round, his face black with dust, and called out,–
“Ha! mademoiselle, don’t come in.”
The aspect of her father, half-kneeling beside the instrument, and receiving the full strength of the sunlight upon his head, the protuberances of his skull, its scanty hairs resembling threads of silver, his face contracted by the agonies of expectation, the strangeness of the objects that surrounded him, the obscurity of parts of the vast garret from which fantastic engines seemed about to spring, all contributed to startle Marguerite, who said to herself, in terror,–
“He is mad!”
Then she went up to him and whispered in his ear, “Send away Lemulquinier.”
“No, no, my child; I want him: I am in the midst of an experiment no one has yet thought of. For the last three days we have been watching for every ray of sun. I now have the means of submitting metals, in a complete vacuum, to concentrated solar fires and to electric currents. At this very moment the most powerful action a chemist can employ is about to show results which I alone–“
“My father, instead of vaporizing metals you should employ them in paying your notes of hand–“
“Wait, wait!”
“Monsieur Merkstus has been here, father; and he must have ten thousand francs by four o’clock.”
“Yes, yes, presently. True, I did sign a little note which is payable this month. I felt sure I should have found the Absolute. Good God! If I could only have a July sun the experiment would be successful.”
He grasped his head and sat down on an old cane chair; a few tears rolled from his eyes.
“Monsieur is quite right,” said Lemulquinier; “it is all the fault of that rascally sun which is too feeble,–the coward, the lazy thing!”
Master and valet paid no further attention to Marguerite.
“Leave us, Mulquinier,” she said.
“Ah! I see a new experiment!” cried Claes.
“Father, lay aside your experiments,” said his daughter, when they were alone. “You have one hundred thousand francs to pay, and we have not a penny. Leave your laboratory; your honor is in question. What will become of you if you are put in prison? Will you soil your white hairs and the name of Claes with the disgrace of bankruptcy? I will not allow it. I shall have strength to oppose your madness; it would be dreadful to see you without bread in your old age. Open your eyes to our position; see reason at last!”
“Madness!” cried Balthazar, struggling to his feet. He fixed his luminous eyes upon his daughter, crossed his arms on his breast, and repeated the word “Madness!” so majestically that Marguerite trembled.
“Ah!” he cried, “your mother would never have uttered that word to me. She was not ignorant of the importance of my researches; she learned a science to understand me; she recognized that I toiled for the human race; she knew there was nothing sordid or selfish in my aims. The feelings of a loving wife are higher, I see it now, than filial affection. Yes, Love is above all other feelings. See reason!” he went on, striking his breast. “Do I lack reason? Am I not myself? You say we are poor; well, my daughter, I choose it to be so. I am your father, obey me. I will make you rich when I please. Your fortune? it is a pittance! When I find the solvent of carbon I will fill your parlor with diamonds, and they are but a scintilla of what I seek. You can well afford to wait while I consume my life in superhuman efforts.”
“Father, I have no right to ask an account of the four millions you have already engulfed in this fatal garret. I will not speak to you of my mother whom you killed. If I had a husband, I should love him, doubtless, as she loved you; I should be ready to sacrifice all to him, as she sacrificed all for you. I have obeyed her orders in giving myself wholly to you; I have proved it in not marrying and compelling you to render an account of your guardianship. Let us dismiss the past and think of the present. I am here now to represent the necessity which you have created for yourself. You must have money to meet your notes–do you understand me? There is nothing left to seize here but the portrait of your ancestor, the Claes martyr. I come in the name of my mother, who felt herself too feeble to defend her children against their father; she ordered me to resist you. I come in the name of my brothers and my sister; I come, father, in the name of all the Claes, and I command you to give up your experiments, or earn the means of pursuing them hereafter, if pursue them you must. If you arm yourself with the power of your paternity, which you employ only for our destruction, I have on my side your ancestors and your honor, whose voice is louder than that of chemistry. The Family is greater than Science. I have been too long your daughter.”
“And you choose to be my executioner,” he said, in a feeble voice.
Marguerite turned and fled away, that she might not abdicate the part she had just assumed: she fancied she heard again her mother’s voice saying to her, “Do not oppose your father too much; love him well.”
CHAPTER XII
“Mademoiselle has made a pretty piece of work up yonder,” said Lemulquinier, coming down to the kitchen for his breakfast. “We were just going to put our hands on the great secret, we only wanted a scrap of July sun, for monsieur,–ah, what a man! he’s almost in the shoes of the good God himself!–was almost within THAT,” he said to Josette, clicking his thumbnail against a front tooth, “of getting hold of the Absolute, when up she came, slam bang, screaming some nonsense about notes of hand.”
“Well, pay them yourself,” said Martha, “out of your wages.”
“Where’s the butter for my bread?” said Lemulquinier to the cook.
“Where’s the money to buy it?” she answered, sharply. “Come, old villain, if you make gold in that devil’s kitchen of yours, why don’t you make butter? ‘Twouldn’t be half so difficult, and you could sell it in the market for enough to make the pot boil. We all eat dry bread. The young ladies are satisfied with dry bread and nuts, and do you expect to be better fed than your masters? Mademoiselle won’t spend more than one hundred francs a month for the whole household. There’s only one dinner for all. If you want dainties you’ve got your furnaces upstairs where you fricassee pearls till there’s nothing else talked of in town. Get your roast chickens up there.”
Lemulquinier took his dry bread and went out.
“He will go and buy something to eat with his own money,” said Martha; “all the better,–it is just so much saved. Isn’t he stingy, the old scarecrow!”
“Starve him! that’s the only way to manage him,” said Josette. “For a week past he hasn’t rubbed a single floor; I have to do his work, for he is always upstairs. He can very well afford to pay me for it with the present of a few herrings; if he brings any home, I shall lay hands on them, I can tell him that.”
“Ah!” exclaimed Martha, “I hear Mademoiselle Marguerite crying. Her wizard of a father would swallow the house at a gulp without asking a Christian blessing, the old sorcerer! In my country he’d be burned alive; but people here have no more religion than the Moors in Africa.”
Marguerite could scarcely stifle her sobs as she came through the gallery. She reached her room, took out her mother’s letter, and read as follows:–
My Child,–If God so wills, my spirit will be within your heart when you read these words, the last I shall ever write; they are full of love for my dear ones, left at the mercy of a demon whom I have not been able to resist. When you read these words he will have taken your last crust, just as he took my life and squandered my love. You know, my darling, if I loved your father: I die loving him less, for I take precautions against him which I never could have practised while living. Yes, in the depths of my coffin I shall have kept a resource for the day when some terrible misfortune overtakes you. If when that day comes you are reduced to poverty, or if your honor is in question, my child, send for Monsieur de Solis, should he be living,–if not, for his nephew, our good Emmanuel; they hold one hundred and seventy thousand francs which are yours and will enable you to live.
If nothing shall have subdued his passion; if his children prove no stronger barrier than my happiness has been, and cannot stop his criminal career,–leave him, leave your father, that you may live. I could not forsake him; I was bound to him. You, Marguerite, you must save the family. I absolve you for all you may do to defend Gabriel and Jean and Felicie. Take courage; be the guardian angel of the Claes. Be firm,–I dare not say be pitiless; but to repair the evil already done you must keep some means at hand. On the day when you read this letter, regard yourself as ruined already, for nothing will stay the fury of that passion which has torn all things from me.
My child, remember this: the truest love is to forget your heart. Even though you be forced to deceive your father, your dissimulation will be blessed; your actions, however blamable they may seem, will be heroic if taken to protect the family. The virtuous Monsieur de Solis tells me so; and no conscience was ever purer or more enlightened than his. I could never have had the courage to speak these words to you, even with my dying breath.
And yet, my daughter, be respectful, be kind in the dreadful struggle. Resist him, but love him; deny him gently. My hidden tears, my inward griefs will be known only when I am dead. Kiss my dear children in my name when the hour comes and you are called upon to protect them.
May God and the saints be with you!
Josephine.
To this letter was added an acknowledgment from the Messieurs de Solis, uncle and nephew, who thereby bound themselves to place the money entrusted to them by Madame Claes in the hands of whoever of her children should present the paper.
“Martha,” cried Marguerite to the duenna, who came quickly; “go to Monsieur Emmanuel de Solis, and ask him to come to me.–Noble, discreet heart! he never told me,” she thought; “though all my griefs and cares are his, he never told me!”
Emmanuel came before Martha could get back.
“You have kept a secret from me,” she said, showing him her mother’s letter.
Emmanuel bent his head.
“Marguerite, are you in great trouble?” he asked.
“Yes,” she answered; “be my support,–you, whom my mother calls ‘our good Emmanuel.'” She showed him the letter, unable to repress her joy in knowing that her mother approved her choice.
“My blood and my life were yours on the morrow of the day when I first saw you in the gallery,” he said; “but I scarcely dared to hope the time might come when you would accept them. If you know me well, you know my word is sacred. Forgive the absolute obedience I have paid to your mother’s wishes; it was not for me to judge her intentions.”
“You have saved us,” she said, interrupting him, and taking his arm to go down to the parlor.
After hearing from Emmanuel the origin of the money entrusted to him, Marguerite confided to him the terrible straits in which the family now found themselves.
“I must pay those notes at once,” said Emmanuel. “If Merkstus holds them all, you can at least save the interest. I will bring you the remaining seventy thousand francs. My poor uncle left me quite a large sum in ducats, which are easy to carry secretly.”
“Oh!” she said, “bring them at night; we can hide them when my father is asleep. If he knew that I had money, he might try to force it from me. Oh, Emmanuel, think what it is to distrust a father!” she said, weeping and resting her forehead against the young man’s heart.
This sad, confiding movement, with which the young girl asked protection, was the first expression of a love hitherto wrapped in melancholy and restrained within a sphere of grief: the heart, too full, was forced to overflow beneath the pressure of this new misery.
“What can we do; what will become of us? He sees nothing, he cares for nothing,–neither for us nor for himself. I know not how he can live in that garret, where the air is stifling.”
“What can you expect of a man who calls incessantly, like Richard III., ‘My kingdom for a horse’?” said Emmanuel. “He is pitiless; and in that you must imitate him. Pay his notes; give him, if you will, your whole fortune; but that of your sister and of your brothers is neither yours nor his.”
“Give him my fortune?” she said, pressing her lover’s hand and looking at him with ardor in her eyes; “you advise it, you!–and Pierquin told a hundred lies to make me keep it!”
“Alas! I may be selfish in my own way,” he said. “Sometimes I long for you without fortune; you seem nearer to me then! At other times I want you rich and happy, and I feel how paltry it is to think that the poor grandeurs of wealth can separate us.”
“Dear, let us not speak of ourselves.”
“Ourselves!” he repeated, with rapture. Then, after a pause, he added: “The evil is great, but it is not irreparable.”
“It can be repaired only by us: the Claes family has now no head. To reach the stage of being neither father nor man, to have no consciousness of justice or injustice (for, in defiance of the laws, he has dissipated–he, so great, so noble, so upright–the property of the children he was bound to defend), oh, to what depths must he have fallen! My God! what is this thing he seeks?”
“Unfortunately, dear Marguerite, wrong as he is in his relation to his family, he is right scientifically. A score of men in Europe admire him for the very thing which others count as madness. But nevertheless you must, without scruple, refuse to let him take the property of his children. Great discoveries have always been accidental. If your father ever finds the solution of the problem, it will be when it costs him nothing; in a moment, perhaps, when he despairs of it.”
“My poor mother is happy,” said Marguerite; “she would have suffered a thousand deaths before she died: as it was, her first encounter with Science killed her. Alas! the strife is endless.”
“There is an end,” said Emmanuel. “When you have nothing left, Monsieur Claes can get no further credit; then he will stop.”
“Let him stop now, then,” cried Marguerite, “for we are without a penny!”
Monsieur de Solis went to buy up Claes’s notes and returned, bringing them to Marguerite. Balthazar, contrary to his custom, came down a few moments before dinner. For the first time in two years his daughter noticed the signs of a human grief upon his face: he was again a father, reason and judgment had overcome Science; he looked into the court-yard, then into the garden, and when he was certain he was alone with his daughter, he came up to her with a look of melancholy kindness.
“My child,” he said, taking her hand and pressing it with persuasive tenderness, “forgive your old father. Yes, Marguerite, I have done wrong. You spoke truly. So long as I have not FOUND I am a miserable wretch. I will go away from here. I cannot see Van Claes sold,” he went on, pointing to the martyr’s portrait. “He died for Liberty, I die for Science; he is venerated, I am hated.”
“Hated? oh, my father, no,” she cried, throwing herself on his breast; “we all adore you. Do we not, Felicie?” she said, turning to her sister who came in at the moment.
“What is the matter, dear father?” said his youngest daughter, taking his hand.
“I have ruined you.”
“Ah!” cried Felicie, “but our brothers will make our fortune. Jean is always at the head of his class.”
“See, father,” said Marguerite, leading Balthazar in a coaxing, filial way to the chimney-piece and taking some papers from beneath the clock, “here are your notes of hand; but do not sign any more, there is nothing left to pay them with–“
“Then you have money?” whispered Balthazar in her ear, when he recovered from his surprise.
His words and manner tortured the heroic girl; she saw the delirium of joy and hope in her father’s face as he looked about him to discover the gold.
“Father,” she said, “I have my own fortune.”
“Give it to me,” he said with a rapacious gesture; “I will return you a hundred-fold.”
“Yes, I will give it to you,” answered Marguerite, looking gravely at Balthazar, who did not know the meaning she put into her words.
“Ah, my dear daughter!” he cried, “you save my life. I have thought of a last experiment, after which nothing more is possible. If, this time, I do not find the Absolute, I must renounce the search. Come to my arms, my darling child; I will make you the happiest woman upon earth. You give me glory; you bring me back to happiness; you bestow the power to heap treasures upon my children–yes! I will load you with jewels, with wealth.”
He kissed his daughter’s forehead, took her hands and pressed them, and testified his joy by fondling caresses which to Marguerite seemed almost obsequious. During the dinner he thought only of her; he looked at her eagerly with the assiduous devotion displayed by a lover to his mistress: if she made a movement, he tried to divine her wish, and rose to fulfil it; he made her ashamed by the youthful eagerness of his attentions, which were painfully out of keeping with his premature old age. To all these cajoleries, Marguerite herself presented the contrast of actual distress, shown sometimes by a word of doubt, sometimes by a glance along the empty shelves of the sideboards in the dining-room.
“Well, well,” he said, following her eyes, “in six months we shall fill them again with gold, and marvellous things. You shall be like a queen. Bah! nature herself will belong to us, we shall rise above all created beings–through you, you my Marguerite! Margarita,” he said, smiling, “thy name is a prophecy. ‘Margarita’ means a pearl. Sterne says so somewhere. Did you ever read Sterne? Would you like to have a Sterne? it would amuse you.”
“A pearl, they say, is the result of a disease,” she answered; “we have suffered enough already.”
“Do not be sad; you will make the happiness of those you love; you shall be rich and all-powerful.”
“Mademoiselle has got such a good heart,” said Lemulquinier, whose seamed face stretched itself painfully into a smile.
For the rest of the evening Balthazar displayed to his daughters all the natural graces of his character and the charms of his conversation. Seductive as the serpent, his lips, his eyes, poured out a magnetic fluid; he put forth that power of genius, that gentleness of spirit, which once fascinated Josephine and now drew, as it were, his daughters into his heart. When Emmanuel de Solis came he found, for the first time in many months, the father and the children reunited. The young professor, in spite of his reserve, came under the influence of the scene; for Claes’s manners and conversation had recovered their former irresistible seduction!
Men of science, plunged though they be in abysses of thought and ceaselessly employed in studying the moral world, take notice, nevertheless, of the smallest details of the sphere in which they live. More out of date with their surroundings than really absent-minded, they are never in harmony with the life about them; they know and forget all; they prejudge the future in their own minds, prophesy to their own souls, know of an event before it happens, and yet they say nothing of all this. If, in the hush of meditation, they sometimes use their power to observe and recognize that which goes on around them, they are satisfied with having divined its meaning; their occupations hurry them on, and they frequently make false application of the knowledge they have acquired about the things of life. Sometimes they wake from their social apathy, or they drop from the world of thought to the world of life; at such times they come with well-stored memories, and are by no means strangers to what is happening.
Balthazar, who joined the perspicacity of the heart to that of the brain, knew his daughter’s whole past; he knew, or he had guessed, the history of the hidden love that united her with Emmanuel: he now showed this delicately, and sanctioned their affection by taking part in it. It was the sweetest flattery a father could bestow, and the lovers were unable to resist it. The evening passed delightfully, –contrasting with the griefs which threatened the lives of these poor children. When Balthazar retired, after, as we may say, filling his family with light and bathing them with tenderness, Emmanuel de Solis, who had shown some embarrassment of manner, took from his pockets three thousand ducats in gold, the possession of which he had feared to betray. He placed them on the work-table, where Marguerite covered them with some linen she was mending; and then he went to his own house to fetch the rest of the money. When he returned, Felicie had gone to bed. Eleven o’clock struck; Martha, who sat up to undress her mistress, was still with Felicie.
“Where can we hide it?” said Marguerite, unable to resist the pleasure of playing with the gold ducats,–a childish amusement which proved disastrous.
“I will lift this marble pedestal, which is hollow,” said Emmanuel; “you can slip in the packages, and the devil himself will not think of looking for them there.”
Just as Marguerite was making her last trip but one from the work-table to the pedestal, carrying the gold, she suddenly gave a piercing cry, and let fall the packages, the covers of which broke as they fell, and the coins were scattered about the room. Her father stood at the parlor door; the avidity of his eyes terrified her.
“What are you doing,” he said, looking first at his daughter, whose terror nailed her to the floor, and then at the young man, who had hastily sprung up,–though his attitude beside the pedestal was sufficiently significant. The rattle of the gold upon the ground was horrible, the scattering of it prophetic.
“I could not be mistaken,” said Balthazar, sitting down; “I heard the sound of gold.”
He was not less agitated than the young people, whose hearts were beating so in unison that their throbs might be heard, like the ticking of a clock, amid the profound silence which suddenly settled on the parlor.
“Thank you, Monsieur de Solis,” said Marguerite, giving Emmanuel a glance which meant, “Come to my rescue and help me to save this money.”
“What gold is this?” resumed Balthazar, casting at Marguerite and Emmanuel a glance of terrible clear-sightedness.
“This gold belongs to Monsieur de Solis, who is kind enough to lend it to me that I may pay our debts honorably,” she answered.
Emmanuel colored and turned as though to leave the room: Balthazar caught him by the arm.
“Monsieur,” he said, “you must not escape my thanks.”
“Monsieur, you owe me none. This money belongs to Mademoiselle Marguerite, who borrows it from me on the security of her own property,” Emmanuel replied, looking at his mistress, who thanked him with an almost imperceptible movement of her eyelids.
“I shall not allow that,” said Claes, taking a pen and a sheet of paper from the table where Felicie did her writing, and turning to the astonished young people. “How much is it?” His eager passion made him more astute than the wiliest of rascally bailiffs: the sum was to be his. Marguerite and Monsieur de Solis hesitated.
“Let us count it,” he said.
“There are six thousand ducats,” said Emmanuel.
“Seventy thousand francs,” remarked Claes.
The glance which Marguerite threw at her lover gave him courage.
“Monsieur,” he said, “your note bears no value; pardon this purely technical term. I have to-day lent Mademoiselle Claes one hundred thousand francs to redeem your notes of hand which you had no means of paying: you are therefore unable to give me any security. These one hundred and seventy thousand francs belong to Mademoiselle Claes, who can dispose of them as she sees fit; but I have lent them on a pledge that she will sign a deed securing them to me on her share of the now denuded land of the forest of Waignies.”
Marguerite turned away her head that her lover might not see the tears that gathered in her eyes. She knew Emmanuel’s purity of soul. Brought up by his uncle to the practice of the sternest religious virtues, the young man had an especial horror of falsehood: after giving his heart and life to Marguerite Claes he now made her the sacrifice of his conscience.
“Adieu, monsieur,” said Balthazar, “I thought you had more confidence in a man who looked upon you with the eyes of a father.”
After exchanging a despairing look with Marguerite, Emmanuel was shown out by Martha, who closed and fastened the street-door.
The moment the father and daughter were alone Claes said,–
“You love me, do you not?”
“Come to the point, father. You want this money: you cannot have it.”
She began to pick up the coins; her father silently helped her to gather them together and count the sum she had dropped; Marguerite allowed him to do so without manifesting the least distrust. When two thousand ducats were piled on the table, Balthazar said, with a desperate air,–
“Marguerite, I must have that money.”
“If you take it, it will be robbery,” she replied coldly. “Hear me, father: better kill us at one blow than make us suffer a hundred deaths a day. Let it now be seen which of us must yield.”
“Do you mean to kill your father?”
“We avenge our mother,” she said, pointing to the spot where Madame Claes died.
“My daughter, if you knew the truth of the matter, you would not use those words to me. Listen, and I will endeavor to exlain the great problem–but no, you cannot comprehend me,” he cried in accents of despair. “Come, give me the money; believe for once in your father. Yes, I know I caused your mother pain: I have dissipated–to use the word of fools–my own fortune and injured yours; I know my children are sacrificed for a thing you call madness; but my angel, my darling, my love, my Marguerite, hear me! If I do not now succeed, I will give myself up to you; I will obey you as you are bound to obey me; I will do your will; you shall take charge of all my property; I will no longer be the guardian of my children; I pledge myself to lay down my authority. I swear by your mother’s memory!” he cried, shedding tears.
Marguerite turned away her head, unable to bear the sight. Claes, thinking she meant to yield, flung himself on his knees beside her.
“Marguerite, Marguerite! give it to me–give it!” he cried. “What are sixty thousand francs against eternal remorse? See, I shall die, this will kill me. Listen, my word is sacred. If I fail now I will abandon my labors; I will leave Flanders,–France even, if you demand it; I will go away and toil like a day-laborer to recover, sou by sou, the fortunes I have lost, and restore to my children all that Science has taken from them.”
Marguerite tried to raise her father, but he persisted in remaining on his knees, and continued, still weeping:–
“Be tender and obedient for this last time! If I do not succeed, I will myself declare your hardness just. You shall call me a fool; you shall say I am a bad father; you may even tell me that I am ignorant and incapable. And when I hear you say those words I will kiss your hands. You may beat me, if you will, and when you strike I will bless you as the best of daughters, remembering that you have given me your blood.”
“If it were my blood, my life’s blood, I would give it to you,” she cried; “but can I let Science cut the throats of my brothers and sister? No. Cease, cease!” she said, wiping her tears and pushing aside her father’s caressing hands.
“Sixty thousand francs and two months,” he said, rising in anger; “that is all I want: but my daughter stands between me and fame and wealth. I curse you!” he went on; “you are no daughter of mine, you are not a woman, you have no heart, you will never be a mother or a wife!– Give it to me, let me take it, my little one, my precious child, I will love you forever,”–and he stretched his hand with a movement of hideous energy towards the gold.
“I am helpless against physical force; but God and the great Claes see us now,” she said, pointing to the picture.
“Try to live, if you can, with your father’s blood upon you,” cried Balthazar, looking at her with abhorrence. He rose, glanced round the room, and slowly left it. When he reached the door he turned as a beggar might have done and implored his daughter with a gesture, to which she replied by a negative motion of her head.
“Farewell, my daughter,” he said, gently, “may you live happy!”
When he had disappeared, Marguerite remained in a trance which separated her from earth; she was no longer in the parlor; she lost consciousness of physical existence; she had wings, and soared amid the immensities of the moral world, where Thought contracts the limits both of Time and Space, where a divine hand lifts the veil of the Future. It seemed to her that days elapsed between each footfall of her father as he went up the stairs; then a shudder of dread went over her as she heard him enter his chamber. Guided by a presentiment which flashed into her soul with the piercing keenness of lightning, she ran up the stairway, without light, without noise, with the velocity of an arrow, and saw her father with a pistol at his head.
“Take all!” she cried, springing towards him.
She fell into a chair. Balthazar, seeing her pallor, began to weep as old men weep; he became like a child, he kissed her brow, he spoke in disconnected words, he almost danced with joy, and tried to play with her as a lover with a mistress who has made him happy.
“Enough, father, enough,” she said; “remember your promise. If you do not succeed now, you pledge yourself to obey me?”
“Yes.”
“Oh, mother!” she cried, turning towards Madame Claes’s chamber, “YOU would have given him all–would you not?”
“Sleep in peace,” said Balthazar, “you are a good daughter.”
“Sleep!” she said, “the nights of my youth are gone; you have made me old, father, just as you slowly withered my mother’s heart.”
“Poor child, would I could re-assure you by explaining the effects of the glorious experiment I have now imagined! you would then comprehend the truth.”
“I comprehend our ruin,” she said, leaving him.
The next morning, being a holiday, Emmanuel de Solis brought Jean to spend the day.
“Well?” he said, approaching Marguerite anxiously.
“I yielded,” she replied.
“My dear life,” he said, with a gesture of melancholy joy, “if you had withstood him I should greatly have admired you; but weak and feeble, I adore you!”
“Poor, poor Emmanuel; what is left for us?”
“Leave the future to me,” cried the young man, with a radiant look; “we love each other, and all is well.”
CHAPTER XIII
Several months went by in perfect tranquillity. Monsieur de Solis made Marguerite see that her petty economies would never produce a fortune, and he advised her to live more at ease, by taking all that remained of the sum which Madame Claes had entrusted to him for the comfort and well-being of the household.
During these months Marguerite fell a prey to the anxieties which beset her mother under like circumstances. However incredulous she might be, she had come to hope in her father’s genius. By an inexplicable phenomenon, many people have hope when they have no faith. Hope is the flower of Desire, faith is the fruit of Certainty. Marguerite said to herself, “If my father succeeds, we shall be happy.” Claes and Lemulquinier alone said: “We shall succeed.” Unhappily, from day to day the Searcher’s face grew sadder. Sometimes, when he came to dinner he dared not look at his daughter; at other times he glanced at her in triumph. Marguerite employed her evenings in making young de Solis explain to her many legal points and difficulties. At last her masculine education was completed; she was evidently preparing herself to execute the plan she had resolved upon if her father were again vanquished in his duel with the Unknown (X).
About the beginning of July, Balthazar spend a whole day sitting on a bench in the garden, plunged in gloomy meditation. He gazed at the mound now bare of tulips, at the windows of his wife’s chamber; he shuddered, no doubt, as he thought of all that his search had cost him: his movements betrayed that his thoughts were busy outside of Science. Marguerite brought her sewing and sat beside him for a while before dinner.
“You have not succeeded, father?”
“No, my child.”
“Ah!” said Marguerite, in a gentle voice. “I will not say one word of reproach; we are both equally guilty. I only claim the fulfilment of your promise; it is surely sacred to you–you are a Claes. Your children will surround you with love and filial respect; but you now belong to me; you owe me obedience. Do not be uneasy; my reign will be gentle, and I will endeavor to bring it quickly to an end. Father, I am going to leave you for a month; I shall be busy with your affairs; for,” she said, kissing him on his brow, “you are now my child. I take Martha with me; to-morrow Felicie will manage the household. The poor child is only seventeen, and she will not know how to resist you; therefore be generous, do not ask her for money; she has only enough for the barest necessaries of the household. Take courage: renounce your labors and your thoughts for three or four years. The great problem may ripen towards discovery; by that time I shall have gathered the money that is necessary to solve it,–and you will solve it. Tell me, father, your queen is clement, is she not?”
“Then all is not lost?” said the old man.
“No, not if you keep your word.”
“I will obey you, my daughter,” answered Claes, with deep emotion.
The next day, Monsieur Conyncks of Cambrai came to fetch his great-niece. He was in a travelling-carriage, and would only remain long enough for Marguerite and Martha to make their last arrangements. Monsieur Claes received his cousin with courtesy, but he was obviously sad and humiliated. Old Conyncks guessed his thoughts, and said with blunt frankness while they were breakfasting:–
“I have some of your pictures, cousin; I have a taste for pictures,–a ruinous passion, but we all have our manias.”
“Dear uncle!” exclaimed Marguerite.
“The world declares that you are ruined, cousin; but the treasure of a Claes is there,” said Conyncks, tapping his forehead, “and here,” striking his heart; “don’t you think so? I count upon you: and for that reason, having a few spare ducats in my wallet, I put them to use in your service.”
“Ah!” cried Balthazar, “I will repay you with treasures–“
“The only treasures we possess in Flanders are patience and labor,” replied Conyncks, sternly. “Our ancestor has those words engraved upon his brow,” he said, pointing to the portrait of Van Claes.
Marguerite kissed her father and bade him good-bye, gave her last directions to Josette and to Felicie, and started with Monsieur Conyncks for Paris. The great-uncle was a widower with one child, a daughter twelve years old, and he was possessed of an immense fortune. It was not impossible that he would take a wife; consequently, the good people of Douai believed that Mademoiselle Claes would marry her great-uncle. The rumor of this marriage reached Pierquin, and brought him back in hot haste to the House of Claes.
Great changes had taken place in the ideas of that clever speculator. For the last two years society in Douai had been divided into hostile camps. The nobility formed one circle, the bourgeoisie another; the latter naturally inimical to the former. This sudden separation took place, as a matter of fact, all over France, and divided the country into two warring nations, whose jealous squabbles, always augmenting, were among the chief reasons why the revolution of July, 1830, was accepted in the provinces. Between these social camps, the one ultra-monarchical, the other ultra-liberal, were a number of functionaries of various kinds, admitted, according to their importance, to one or the other of these circles, and who, at the moment of the fall of the legitimate power, were neutral. At the beginning of the struggle between the nobility and the bourgeoisie, the royalist “cafes” displayed an unheard-of splendor, and eclipsed the liberal “cafes” so brilliantly that these gastronomic fetes were said to have cost the lives of some of their frequenters who, like ill-cast cannon, were unable to withstand such practice. The two societies naturally became exclusive.
Pierquin, though rich for a provincial lawyer, was excluded from aristocratic circles and driven back upon the bourgeoisie. His self-love must have suffered from the successive rebuffs which he received when he felt himself insensibly set aside by people with whom he had rubbed shoulders up to the time of this social change. He had now reached his fortieth year, the last epoch at which a man who intends to marry can think of a young wife. The matches to which he was able to aspire were all among the bourgeoisie, but ambition prompted him to enter the upper circle by means of some creditable alliance.
The isolation in which the Claes family were now living had hitherto kept them aloof from these social changes. Though Claes belonged to the old aristocracy of the province, his preoccupation of mind prevented him from sharing the class antipathies thus created. However poor a daughter of the Claes might be, she would bring to a husband the dower of social vanity so eagerly desired by all parvenus. Pierquin therefore returned to his allegiance, with the secret intention of making the necessary sacrifices to conclude a marriage which should realize all his ambitions. He kept company with Balthazar and Felicie during Marguerite’s absence; but in so doing he discovered, rather late in the day, a formidable competitor in Emmanuel de Solis. The property of the deceased abbe was thought to be considerable, and to the eyes of a man who calculated all the affairs of life in figures, the young heir seemed more powerful through his money than through the seductions of the heart–as to which Pierquin never made himself uneasy. In his mind the abbe’s fortune restored the de Solis name to all its pristine value. Gold and nobility of birth were two orbs which reflected lustre on one another and doubled the illumination.
The sincere affection which the young professor testified for Felicie, whom he treated as a sister, excited Pierquin’s spirit of emulation. He tried to eclipse Emmanuel by mingling a fashionable jargon and sundry expressions of superficial gallantry with anxious elegies and business airs which sat more naturally on his countenance. When he declared himself disenchanted with the world he looked at Felicie, as if to let her know that she alone could reconcile him with life. Felicie, who received for the first time in her life the compliments of a man, listened to this language, always sweet however deceptive; she took emptiness for depth, and needing an object on which to fix the vague emotions of her heart, she allowed the lawyer to occupy her mind. Envious perhaps, though quite unconsciously, of the loving attentions with which Emmanuel surrounded her sister, she doubtless wished to be, like Marguerite, the object of the thoughts and cares of a man.
Pierquin readily perceived the preference which Felicie accorded him over Emmanuel, and to him it was a reason why he should persist in his attentions; so that in the end he went further than he at first intended. Emmanuel watched the beginning of this passion, false perhaps in the lawyer, artless in Felicie, whose future was at stake. Soon, little colloquies followed, a few words said in a low voice behind Emmanuel’s back, trifling deceptions which give to a look or a word a meaning whose insidious sweetness may be the cause of innocent mistakes. Relying on his intimacy with Felicie, Pierquin tried to discover the secret of Marguerite’s journey, and to know if it were really a question of her marriage, and whether he must renounce all hope; but, notwithstanding his clumsy cleverness in questioning them, neither Balthazar nor Felicie could give him any light, for the good reason that they were in the dark themselves: Marguerite in taking the reins of power seemed to have followed its maxims and kept silence as to her projects.
The gloomy sadness of Balthazar and his great depression made it difficult to get through the evenings. Though Emmanuel succeeded in making him play backgammon, the chemist’s mind was never present; during most of the time this man, so great in intellect, seemed simply stupid. Shorn of his expectations, ashamed of having squandered three fortunes, a gambler without money, he bent beneath the weight of ruin, beneath the burden of hopes that were betrayed rather than annihilated. This man of genius, gagged by dire necessity and upbraiding himself, was a tragic spectacle, fit to touch the hearts of the most unfeeling of men. Even Pierquin could not enter without respect the presence of that caged lion, whose eyes, full of baffled power, now calmed by sadness and faded from excess of light, seemed to proffer a prayer for charity which the mouth dared not utter. Sometimes a lightning flash crossed that withered face, whose fires revived at the conception of a new experiment; then, as he looked about the parlor, Balthazar’s eyes would fasten on the spot where his wife had died, a film of tears rolled like hot grains of sand across the arid pupils of his eyes, which thought had made immense, and his head fell forward on his breast. Like a Titan he had lifted the world, and the world fell on his breast and crushed him.
This gigantic grief, so manfully controlled, affected Pierquin and Emmanuel powerfully, and each felt moved at times to offer this man the necessary money to renew his search,–so contagious are the convictions of genius! Both understood how it was that Madame Claes and Marguerite had flung their all into this gulf; but reason promptly checked the impulse of their hearts, and their emotion was spent in efforts at consolation which still further embittered the anguish of the doomed Titan.
Claes never spoke of his eldest daughter, and showed no interest in her departure nor any anxiety as to her silence in not writing either to him or to Felicie. When de Solis or Pierquin asked for news of her he seemed annoyed. Did he suspect that Marguerite was working against him? Was he humiliated at having resigned the majestic rights of paternity to his own child? Had he come to love her less because she was now the father, he the child? Perhaps there were many of these reasons, many of these inexpressible feelings which float like vapors through the soul, in the mute disgrace which he laid upon Marguerite. However great may be the great men of earth, be they known or unknown, fortunate or unfortunate in their endeavors, all have likenesses which belong to human nature. By a double misfortune they suffer through their greatness not less than through their defects; and perhaps Balthazar needed to grow accustomed to the pangs of wounded vanity. The life he was leading, the evenings when these four persons met together in Marguerite’s absence, were full of sadness and vague, uneasy apprehensions. The days were barren like a parched-up soil; where, nevertheless, a few flowers grew, a few rare consolations, though without Marguerite, the soul, the hope, the strength of the family, the atmosphere seemed misty.
Two months went by in this way, during which Balthazar awaited the return of his daughter. Marguerite was brought back to Douai by her uncle who remained at the house instead of returning to Cambrai, no doubt to lend the weight of his authority to some coup d’etat planned by his niece. Marguerite’s return was made a family fete. Pierquin and Monsieur de Solis were invited to dinner by Felicie and Balthazar. When the travelling-carriage stopped before the house, the four went to meet it with demonstrations of joy. Marguerite seemed happy to see her home once more, and her eyes filled with tears as she crossed the court-yard to reach the parlor. When embracing her father she colored like a guilty wife who is unable to dissimulate; but her face recovered its serenity as she looked at Emmanuel, from whom she seemed to gather strength to complete a work she had secretly undertaken.
Notwithstanding the gaiety which animated all present during the dinner, father and daughter watched each other with distrust and curiosity. Balthazar asked his daughter no questions as to her stay in Paris, doubtless to preserve his parental dignity. Emmanuel de Solis imitated his reserve; but Pierquin, accustomed to be told all family secrets, said to Marguerite, concealing his curiosity under a show of liveliness:–
“Well, my dear cousin, you have seen Paris and the theatres–“
“I have seen little of Paris,” she said; “I did not go there for amusement. The days went by sadly, I was so impatient to see Douai once more.”
“Yes, if I had not been angry about it she would not have gone to the Opera; and even there she was uneasy,” said Monsieur Conyncks.
It was a painful evening; every one was embarrassed and smiled vaguely with the artificial gaiety which hides such real anxieties. Marguerite and Balthazar were a prey to cruel, latent fears which reacted on the rest. As the hours passed, the bearing of the father and daughter grew more and more constrained. Sometimes Marguerite tried to smile, but her motions, her looks, the tones of her voice betrayed a keen anxiety. Messieurs Conyncks and de Solis seemed to know the meaning of the secret feelings which agitated the noble girl, and they appeared to encourage her by expressive glances. Balthazar, hurt at being kept from a knowledge of the steps that had been taken on his behalf, withdrew little by little from his children and friends, and pointedly kept silence. Marguerite would no doubt soon disclose what she had decided upon for his future.
To a great man, to a father, the situation was intolerable. At his age a man no longer dissimulates in his own family; he became more and more thoughtful, serious, and grieved as the hour approached when he would be forced to meet his civil death. This evening covered one of those crises in the inner life of man which can only be expressed by imagery. The thunderclouds were gathering in the sky, people were