Fruitfulness Part 25

As soon as Madame Angelin had clasped Marianne's hands with her own trembling fingers, she also uttered in low, stammering accents, those despairing words: "Ah! what a frightful misfortune, an only son!"

Her eyes filled with tears, and she would not sit down before going for a moment to see the body in the adjoining room. When she came back, sobbing in her handkerchief, she sank into an armchair between Marianne and her husband. He remained there motionless, staring fixedly with his dim eyes. And silence fell again throughout the lifeless house, whither the rumble of the works, now deserted, fireless and frozen, ascended no longer.

But Beauchene, followed by Blaise, at last made his appearance. The heavy blow he had received seemed to have made him ten years older.

It was as if the heavens had suddenly fallen upon him. Never amid his conquering egotism, his pride of strength and his pleasures, had he imagined such a downfall to be possible. Never had he been willing to admit that Maurice might be ill--such an idea was like casting a doubt upon his own strength; he thought himself beyond the reach of thunderbolts; misfortune would never dare to fall on him. And at the first overwhelming moment he had found himself weak as a woman, weary and limp, his strength undermined by his dissolute life, the slow disorganization of his faculties. He had sobbed like a child before his dead son, all his vanity crushed, all his calculations destroyed. The thunderbolt had sped by, and nothing remained. In a minute his life had been swept away; the world was now all black and void. And he remained livid, in consternation at it all, his bloated face swollen with grief, his heavy eyelids red with tears.

When he perceived the Froments, weakness again came upon him, and he staggered towards them with open arms, once more stifling with sobs.

"Ah! my dear friends, what a terrible blow! And I wasn't here! When I got here he had lost consciousness; he did not recognize me--. Is it possible? A lad who was in such good health! I cannot believe it. It seems to me that I must be dreaming, and that he will get up presently and come down with me into the workshops!"

They kissed him, they pitied him, struck down like this upon his return from some carouse or other, still intoxicated, perhaps, and tumbling into the midst of such an awful disaster, his prostration increased by the stupor following upon debauchery. His beard, moist with his tears, still stank of tobacco and musk.

Although he scarcely knew the Angelins, he pressed them also in his arms. "Ah! my poor friends, what a terrible blow! What a terrible blow!"

Then Blaise in his turn came to kiss his parents. In spite of his grief, and the horrible night he had spent, his face retained its youthful freshness. Yet tears coursed down his cheeks, for, working with Maurice day by day, he had conceived real friendship for him.

The silence fell again. Morange, as if unconscious of what went on around him, as if he were quite alone there, continued walking softly hither and thither like a somnambulist. Beauchene, with haggard mien, went off, and then came back carrying some little address-books. He turned about for another moment, and finally sat down at a writing-table which had been brought out of Maurice's room. Little accustomed as he was to grief, he instinctively sought to divert his mind, and began searching in the little address-books for the purpose of drawing up a list of the persons who must be invited to the funeral. But his eyes became blurred, and with a gesture he summoned Blaise, who, after going into the bedchamber to glance at his wife's sketch, was now returning to the drawing-room. Thereupon the young man, standing erect beside the writing-table, began to dictate the names in a low voice; and then, amid the deep silence sounded a low and monotonous murmur.

The minutes slowly went by. The visitors were still waiting for Constance. At last a little door of the death-chamber slowly opened, and she entered that chamber noiselessly, without anybody knowing that she was there. She looked like a spectre emerging out of the darkness into the pale light of the tapers. She had not yet wept; her face was livid, contracted, hardened by cold rage. Her little figure, instead of bending, seemed to have grown taller beneath the injustice of destiny, as if borne up by furious rebellion. Yet her loss did not surprise her.

She had immediately felt that she had expected it, although but a minute before the death she had stubbornly refused to believe it possible. But the thought of it had remained latent within her for long months, and frightful evidence thereof now burst forth. She suddenly heard the whispers of the unknown once more, and understood them; she knew the meaning of those shivers which had chilled her, those vague, terror-fraught regrets at having no other child! And that which had been threatening her had come; irreparable destiny had willed it that her only son, the salvation of the imperilled home, the prince of to-morrow, who was to share his empire with her, should be swept away like a withered leaf. It was utter downfall; she sank into an abyss. And she remained tearless; fury dried her tears within her. Yet, good mother that she had always been, she suffered all the torment of motherliness exasperated, poisoned by the loss of her child.

She drew near to Charlotte and paused behind her, looking at the profile of her dead son resting among the flowers. And still she did not weep.

She slowly gazed over the bed, filled her eyes with the dolorous scene, then carried them again to the paper, as if to see what would be left her of that adored son--those few pencil strokes--when the earth should have taken him forever. Charlotte, divining that somebody was behind her, started and raised her head. She did not speak; she had felt frightened. But both women exchanged a glance. And what a heart pang came to Constance, amid that display of death, in the presence of the void, the nothingness that was hers, as she gazed on the other's face, all love and health and beauty, suggesting some youthful star, whence promise of the future radiated through the fine gold of wavy hair.

But yet another pang came to Constance at that moment: words which were being whispered in the drawing-room, near the door of the bedchamber, reached her distinctly. She did not move, but remained erect behind Charlotte, who had resumed her work. And eagerly lending ear, she listened, not showing herself as yet, although she had already seen Marianne and Madame Angelin seated near the doorway, almost among the folds of the hangings.

"Ah!" Madame Angelin was saying, "the poor mother had a presentiment of it, as it were. I saw that she felt very anxious when I told her my own sad story. There is no hope for me; and now death has pa.s.sed by, and no hope remains for her."

Silence ensued once more; then, prompted by some connecting train of thought, she went on: "And your next child will be your eleventh, will it not? Eleven is not a number; you will surely end by having twelve!"

As Constance heard those words she shuddered in another fit of that fury which dried up her tears. By glancing sideways she could see that mother of ten children, who was now expecting yet an eleventh child. She found her still young, still fresh, overflowing with joy and health and hope.

And she was there, like the G.o.ddess of fruitfulness, nigh to the funeral bier at that hour of the supreme rending, when she, Constance, was bowed down by the irretrievable loss of her only child.

But Marianne was answering Madame Angelin: "Oh I don't think that at all likely. Why, I'm becoming an old woman. You forget that I am already a grandmother. Here, look at that!"

So saying, she waved her hand towards the servant of her daughter-in-law, Charlotte, who, in accordance with the instructions she had received, was now bringing the little Berthe in order that her mother might give her the breast. The servant had remained at the drawing-room door, hesitating, disliking to intrude on all that mourning; but the child good-humoredly waved her fat little fists, and laughed lightly. And Charlotte, hearing her, immediately rose and tripped across the salon to take the little one into a neighboring room.

"What a pretty child!" murmured Madame Angelin. "Those little ones are like nosegays; they bring brightness and freshness wherever they come."

Constance for her part had been dazzled. All at once, amid the semi-obscurity, starred by the flames of the tapers, amid the deathly atmosphere, which the odor of the roses rendered the more oppressive, that laughing child had set a semblance of budding springtime, the fresh, bright atmosphere of a long promise of life. And it typified the victory of fruitfulness; it was the child's child, it was Marianne reviving in her son's daughter. A grandmother already, and she was only forty-one years old! Marianne had smiled at that thought. But the hatchet-stroke rang out yet more frightfully in Constance's heart. In her case the tree was cut down to its very root, the sole scion had been lopped off, and none would ever sprout again.

For yet another moment she remained alone amid that nothingness, in that room where lay her son's remains. Then she made up her mind and pa.s.sed into the drawing-room, with the air of a frozen spectre. They all rose, kissed her, and shivered as their lips touched her cold cheeks, which her blood was unable to warm. Profound compa.s.sion wrung them, so frightful was her calmness. And they sought kind words to say to her, but she curtly stopped them.

"It is all over," said she; "there is nothing to be said. Everything is ended, quite ended."

Madame Angelin sobbed, Angelin himself wiped his poor fixed, blurred eyes. Marianne and Mathieu shed tears while retaining Constance's hands in theirs. And she, rigid and still unable to weep, refused consolation, repeating in monotonous accents: "It is finished; nothing can give him back to me. Is it not so? And thus there remains nothing; all is ended, quite ended."

She needed to be brave, for visitors would soon be arriving in a stream.

But a last stab in the heart was reserved for her. Beauchene, who since her arrival had begun to cry again, could no longer see to write.

Moreover, his hand trembled, and he had to leave the writing-table and fling himself into an armchair, saying to Blaise: "There sit down there, and continue to write for me."

Then Constance saw Blaise seat himself at her son's writing-table, in his place, dip his pen in the inkstand and begin to write with the very same gesture that she had so often seen Maurice make. That Blaise, that son of the Froments! What! her dear boy was not yet buried, and a Froment already replaced him, even as vivacious, fast-growing plants overrun neighboring barren fields. That stream of life flowing around her, intent on universal conquest, seemed yet more threatening; grandmothers still bore children, daughters suckled already, sons laid hands upon vacant kingdoms. And she remained alone; she had but her unworthy, broken-down, worn-out husband beside her; while Morange, the maniac, incessantly walking to and fro, was like the symbolical spectre of human distress, one whose heart and strength and reason had been carried away in the frightful death of his only daughter. And not a sound came from the cold and empty works; the works themselves were dead.

The funeral ceremony two days later was an imposing one. The five hundred workmen of the establishment followed the hea.r.s.e, notabilities of all sorts made up an immense cortege. It was much noticed that an old workman, father Moineaud, the oldest hand of the works, was one of the pall-bearers. Indeed, people thought it touching, although the worthy old man dragged his legs somewhat, and looked quite out of his element in a frock coat, stiffened as he was by thirty years' hard toil. In the cemetery, near the grave, Mathieu felt surprised on being approached by an old lady who alighted from one of the mourning-coaches.

"I see, my friend," said she, "that you do not recognize me."

He made a gesture of apology. It was Seraphine, still tall and slim, but so fleshless, so withered that one might have thought she was a hundred years old. Cecile had warned Mathieu of it, yet if he had not seen her himself he would never have believed that her proud insolent beauty, which had seemed to defy time and excesses, could have faded so swiftly.

What frightful, withering blast could have swept over her?

"Ah! my friend," she continued, "I am more dead than the poor fellow whom they are about to lower into that grave. Come and have a chat with me some day. You are the only person to whom I can tell everything."

The coffin was lowered, the ropes gave out a creaking sound, and there came a little thud--the last. Beauchene, supported by a relative, looked on with dim, vacant eyes. Constance, who had had the bitter courage to come, and had now wept all the tears in her body, almost fainted. She was carried away, driven back to her home, which would now forever be empty, like one of those stricken fields that remain barren, fated to perpetual sterility. Mother earth had taken back her all.

And at Chantebled Mathieu and Marianne founded, created, increased, and multiplied, again proving victorious in the eternal battle which life wages against death, thanks to that continual increase, both of offspring and of fertile land, which was like their very existence, their joy and their strength. Desire pa.s.sed like a gust of flame, desire divine and fruitful, since they possessed the power of love, kindliness, and health. And their energy did the rest--that will of action, that quiet bravery in the presence of the labor that is requisite, the labor that has made and that regulates the world.

Still, during those two years it was not without constant battling that victory remained to them. At last it was complete. Piece by piece Seguin had sold the entire estate, of which Mathieu was now king, thanks to his prudent system of conquest, that of increasing his empire by degrees as he gradually felt himself stronger. The fortune which the idler had disdained and dissipated had pa.s.sed into the hands of the toiler, the creator. There were 1250 acres, spreading from horizon to horizon; there were woods intersected by broad meadows, where flocks and herds pastured; there was fat land overflowing with harvests, in the place of marshes that had been drained; there was other land, each year of increasing fertility, in the place of the moors which the captured springs now irrigated. The Lepailleurs' uncultivated enclosure alone remained, as if to bear witness to the prodigy, the great human effort which had quickened that desert of sand and mud, whose crops would henceforth nourish so many happy people. Mathieu devoured no other man's share; he had brought his share into being, increasing the common wealth, subjugating yet another small portion of this vast world, which is still so scantily peopled and so badly utilized for human happiness.

The farm, the homestead, had sprung up and grown in the centre of the estate like a prosperous township, with inhabitants, servants, and live stock, a perfect focus of ardent triumphal life. And what sovereign power was that of the happy fruitfulness which had never wearied of creating, which had yielded all these beings and things that had been increasing and multiplying for twelve years past, that invading town which was but a family's expansion, those trees, those plants, those grain crops, those fruits whose nourishing stream ever rose under the dazzling sun! All pain and all tears were forgotten in that joy of creation, the accomplishment of due labor, the conquest of the future conducting to the infinite of Action.

Then, while Mathieu completed his work of conquest, Marianne during those two years had the happiness of seeing a daughter born to her son Blaise, even while she herself was expecting another child. The branches of the huge tree had begun to fork, pending the time when they would ramify endlessly, like the branches of some great royal oak spreading afar over the soil. There would be her children's children, her grandchildren's children, the whole posterity increasing from generation to generation. And yet how carefully and lovingly she still a.s.sembled around her her own first brood, from Blaise and Denis the twins, now one-and-twenty, to the last born, the wee creature who sucked in life from her bosom with greedy lips. There were some of all ages in the brood--a big fellow, who was already a father; others who went to school; others who still had to be dressed in the morning; there were boys, Ambroise, Gervais, Gregoire, and another; there were girls, Rose, nearly old enough to marry; Claire, Louise, Madeleine, and Marguerite, the last of whom could scarcely toddle. And it was a sight to see them roam over the estate like a troop of colts, following one another at varied pace, according to their growth. She knew that she could not keep them all tied to her ap.r.o.n-strings; it would be sufficient happiness if the farm kept two or three beside her; she resigned herself to seeing the younger ones go off some day to conquer other lands. Such was the law of expansion; the earth was the heritage of the most numerous race.

Since they had number on their side, they would have strength also; the world would belong to them. The parents themselves had felt stronger, more united at the advent of each fresh child. If in spite of terrible cares they had always conquered, it was because their love, their toil, the ceaseless travail of their heart and will, gave them the victory.

Fruitfulness is the great conqueress; from her come the pacific heroes who subjugate the world by peopling it. And this time especially, when at the lapse of those two years Marianne gave birth to a boy, Nicolas, her eleventh child, Mathieu embraced her pa.s.sionately, triumphing over every sorrow and every pang. Yet another child; yet more wealth and power; yet an additional force born into the world; another field ready for to-morrow's harvest.

And 'twas ever the great work, the good work, the work of fruitfulness spreading, thanks to the earth and thanks to woman, both victorious over destruction, offering fresh means of subsistence each time a fresh child was born, and loving, willing, battling, toiling even amid suffering, and ever tending to increase of life and increase of hope.

XV

AMID the deep mourning life slowly resumed its course at the Beauchene works. One effect of the terrible blow which had fallen on Beauchene was that for some weeks he remained quietly at home. Indeed, he seemed to have profited by the terrible lesson, for he no longer coined lies, no longer invented pressing business journeys as a pretext for dissipation.

He even set to work once more, and busied himself about the factory, coming down every morning as in his younger days. And in Blaise he found an active and devoted lieutenant, on whom he each day cast more and more of the heavier work. Intimates were most struck, however, by the manner in which Beauchene and his wife drew together again. Constance was most attentive to her husband; Beauchene no longer left her, and they seemed to agree well together, leading a very retired life in their quiet house, where only relatives were now received.

Constance, on the morrow of Maurice's sudden death, was like one who has just lost a limb. It seemed to her that she was no longer whole; she felt ashamed of being, as it were, disfigured. Mingled, too, with her loving sorrow for Maurice there was humiliation at the thought that she was no longer a mother, that she no longer had any heir-apparent to her kingdom beside her. To think that she had been so stubbornly determined to have but one son, one child, in order that he might become the sole master of the family fortune, the all-powerful monarch of the future.

Death had stolen him from her, and the establishment now seemed to be less her own, particularly since that fellow Blaise and his wife and his child, representing those fruitful and all-invading Froments, were installed there. She could no longer console herself for having welcomed and lodged them, and her one pa.s.sionate, all-absorbing desire was to have another son, and thereby reconquer her empire.

This it was which led to her reconciliation with her husband, and for six months they lived together on the best of terms. Then, however, came another six months, and it was evident that they no longer agreed so well together, for Beauchene took himself off at times under the pretext of seeking fresh air, and Constance remained at home, feverish, her eyes red with weeping.

One day Mathieu, who had come to Grenelle to see his daughter-in-law, Charlotte, was lingering in the garden playing with little Berthe, who had climbed upon his knees, when he was surprised by the sudden approach of Constance, who must have seen him from her windows. She invented a pretext to draw him into the house, and kept him there nearly a quarter of an hour before she could make up her mind to speak her thoughts.

Then, all at once, she began: "My dear Mathieu, you must forgive me for mentioning a painful matter, but there are reasons why I should do so.

Nearly fifteen years ago, I know it for a fact, my husband had a child by a girl who was employed at the works. And I also know that you acted as his intermediary on that occasion, and made certain arrangements with respect to that girl and her child--a boy, was it not?"

She paused for a reply. But Mathieu, stupefied at finding her so well informed, and at a loss to understand why she spoke to him of that sorry affair after the lapse of so many years, could only make a gesture by which he betrayed both his surprise and his anxiety.

"Oh!" said she, "I do not address any reproach to you; I am convinced that your motives were quite friendly, even affectionate, and that you wished to hush up a scandal which might have been very unpleasant for me. Moreover, I do not desire to indulge in recriminations after so long a time. My desire is simply for information. For a long time I did not care to investigate the statements whereby I was informed of the affair.

But the recollection of it comes back to me and haunts me persistently, and it is natural that I should apply to you. I have never spoken a word on the subject to my husband, and indeed it is best for our tranquillity that I should not attempt to extort a detailed confession from him. One circ.u.mstance which has induced me to speak to you is that on an occasion when I accompanied Madame Angelin to a house in the Rue de Miromesnil, I perceived you there with that girl, who had another child in her arms.

So you have not lost sight of her, and you must know what she is doing, and whether her first child is alive, and in that case where he is, and how he is situated."

Mathieu still refrained from replying, for Constance's increasing feverishness put him on his guard, and impelled him to seek the motive of such a strange application on the part of one who was as a rule so proud and so discreet. What could be happening? Why did she strive to provoke confidential revelations which might have far-reaching effects?