Fruitfulness Part 33

"Shall I go to fetch them?" Beauchene good-naturedly inquired.

"No, no! thanks. I did at first think of asking that service of you, but I have reflected. n.o.body but myself can break this horrible news to mamma. And nothing must be done as yet with regard to Charlotte. We will see about that by and by, when I come back. I only hope that death will have a little patience, so that I may find my poor brother still alive."

He leant forward and kissed Blaise, who with his eyes closed remained motionless, still breathing faintly. Then distractedly Denis printed another kiss upon his hand and hurried off.

Constance meantime was busying herself, calling the maid, and requesting her to bring some warm water in order that they might wash the sufferer's blood-stained brow. It was impossible to think of taking off his jacket; they had to content themselves with doing the little they could to improve his appearance pending the arrival of the doctor. And during these preparations, Beauchene, haunted, worried by the accident, again began to speak of it.

"It is incomprehensible. One can hardly believe such a stupid mischance to be possible. Down below the transmission gearing gets out of order, and this prevents the mechanician from sending the trap up again. Then, up above, Bonnard gets angry, calls, and at last decides to go down in a fury when he finds that n.o.body answers him. Then Morange arrives, flies into a temper, and goes down in his turn, exasperated at receiving no answer to his calls for Bonnard. Poor Bonnard! he's sobbing; he wanted to kill himself when he saw the fine result of his absence."

At this point Beauchene abruptly broke off and turned to Constance.

"But what about you?" he asked. "Morange told me that he had left you up above near the trap."

She was standing in front of her husband, in the full light which came through the window. And again did her eyelids beat while a little nervous twinge slightly twisted her mouth on the left side. That was all.

"I? Why I had gone down the pa.s.sage. I came back here at once, as Morange knows very well."

A moment previously, Morange, annihilated, his legs failing him, had sunk upon a chair. Incapable of rendering any help, he sat there silent, awaiting the end. When he heard Constance lie in that quiet fashion, he looked at her. The a.s.sa.s.sin was herself, he no longer doubted it. And at that moment he felt a craving to proclaim it, to cry it aloud.

"Why, he thought that he had begged you to remain there on the watch,"

Beauchene resumed, addressing his wife.

"At all events his words never reached me," Constance duly answered.

"Should I have moved if he had asked me to do that?" And turning towards the accountant she, in her turn, had the courage to fix her pale eyes upon him. "Just remember, Morange, you rushed down like a madman, you said nothing to me, and I went on my way."

Beneath those pale eyes, keen as steel, which dived into his own, Morange was seized with abject fear. All his weakness, his cowardice of heart returned. Could he accuse her of such an atrocious crime? He pictured the consequences. And then, too, he no longer knew if he were right or not; his poor maniacal mind was lost.

"It is possible," he stammered, "I may simply have thought I spoke. And it must be so since it can't be otherwise."

Then he relapsed into silence with a gesture of utter la.s.situde. The complicity demanded was accepted. For a moment he thought of rising to see if Blaise still breathed; but he did not dare. Deep peacefulness fell upon the room.

Ah! how great was the anguish, the torture in the cab, when Blaise brought Mathieu and Marianne back with him. He had at first spoken to them simply of an accident, a rather serious fall. But as the vehicle rolled along he had lost his self-possession, weeping and confessing the truth in response to their despairing questions. Thus, when they at last reached the factory, they doubted no longer, their child was dead. Work had just been stopped, and they recalled their visit to the place on the morrow of Maurice's death. They were returning to the same stillness, the same grave-like silence. All the rumbling life had suddenly ceased, the machines were cold and mute, the workshops darkened and deserted.

Not a sound remained, not a soul, not a puff of that steam which was like the very breath of the place. He who had watched over its work was dead, and it was dead like him. Then their affright increased when they pa.s.sed from the factory to the house amid that absolute solitude, the gallery steeped in slumber, the staircase quivering, all the doors upstairs open, as in some uninhabited place long since deserted. In the ante-room they found no servant. And it was indeed in the same tragedy of sudden death that they again partic.i.p.ated, only this time it was their own son whom they were to find in the same room, on the same bed, frigid, pale, and lifeless.

Blaise had just expired. Boutan was there at the head of the bed, holding the inanimate hand in which the final pulsation of blood was dying away. And when he saw Mathieu and Marianne, who had instinctively crossed the disorderly drawing-room, rushing into that bedchamber whose odor of nihility they recognized, he could but murmur in a voice full of sobs:

"My poor friends, embrace him; you will yet have a little of his last breath."

That breath had scarce ceased, and the unhappy mother, the unhappy father, had already sprung forward, kissing those lips that exhaled the final quiver of life, and sobbing and crying their distress aloud. Their Blaise was dead. Like Rose, he had died suddenly, a year later, on a day of festivity. Their heart wound, scarce closed as yet, opened afresh with a tragic rending. Amid their long felicity this was the second time that they were thus terribly recalled to human wretchedness; this was the second hatchet stroke which fell on the flourishing, healthy, happy family. And their fright increased. Had they not yet finished paying their acc.u.mulated debt to misfortune? Was slow destruction now arriving with blow following blow? Already since Rose had quitted them, her bier strewn with flowers, they had feared to see their prosperity and fruitfulness checked and interrupted now that there was an open breach.

And to-day, through that b.l.o.o.d.y breach, their Blaise departed in the most frightful of fashions, crushed as it were by the jealous anger of destiny. And now what other of their children would be torn away from them on the morrow to pay in turn the ransom of their happiness?

Mathieu and Marianne long remained sobbing on their knees beside the bed. Constance stood a few paces away, silent, with an air of quivering desolation. Beauchene, as if to combat that fear of death which made him shiver, had a moment previously seated himself at the little writing-table formerly used by Maurice, which had been left in the drawing-room like a souvenir. And he then strove to draw up a notice to his workpeople, to inform them that the factory would remain closed until the day after the funeral. He was vainly seeking words when he perceived Denis coming out of the bedroom, where he had wept all his tears and set his whole heart in the last kiss which he had bestowed on his departed brother. Beauchene called him, as if desirous of diverting him from his gloomy thoughts. "There, sit down here and continue this,"

said he.

Constance, in her turn entering the drawing-room, heard those words.

They were virtually the same as the words which her husband had p.r.o.nounced when making Blaise seat himself at that same table of Maurice's, on the day when he had given him the place of that poor boy, whose body almost seemed to be still lying on the bed in the adjoining room. And she recoiled with fright on seeing Denis seated there and writing. Had not Blaise resuscitated? Even as she had mistaken the twins one for the other that very afternoon on rising from the gay baptismal lunch, so now again she saw Blaise in Denis, the pair of them so similar physically that in former times their parents had only been able to distinguish them by the different color of their eyes. And thus it was as if Blaise returned and resumed his place; Blaise, who would possess the works although she had killed him. She had made a mistake; dead as he was, he would nevertheless have the works. She had killed one of those Froments, but behold another was born. When one died his brother filled up the breach. And her crime then appeared to her such a useless one, such a stupid one, that she was aghast at it, the hair on the nape of her neck standing up, while she burst into a cold sweat of fear, and recoiled as from a spectre.

"It is a notice for the workpeople," Beauchene repeated. "We will have it posted at the entrance."

She wished to be brave, and, approaching her husband, she said to him: "Draw it up yourself. Why give Blaise the trouble at such a moment as this?"

She had said "Blaise"; and once more an icy sensation of horror came over her. Unconsciously she had heard herself saying yonder, in the ante-room: "Blaise, where did I put my boa?" And it was Denis who had brought it to her. Of what use had it been for her to kill Blaise, since Denis was there? When death mows down a soldier of life, another is always ready to take the vacant post of combat.

But a last defeat awaited her. Mathieu and Marianne reappeared, while Morange, seized with a need of motion, came and went with an air of stupefaction, quite losing his wits amid his dreadful sufferings, those awful things which could but unhinge his narrow mind.

"I am going down," stammered Marianne, trying to wipe away her tears and to remain erect. "I wish to see Charlotte, and prepare and tell her of the misfortune. I alone can find the words to say, so that she may not die of the shock, circ.u.mstanced as she is."

But Mathieu, full of anxiety, sought to detain his wife, and spare her this fresh trial. "No, I beg you," he said; "Denis will go, or I will go myself."

With gentle obstinacy, however, she still went towards the stairs. "I am the only one who can tell her of it, I a.s.sure you--I shall have strength--"

But all at once she staggered and fainted. It became necessary to lay her on a sofa in the drawing-room. And when she recovered consciousness, her face remained quite white and distorted, and an attack of nausea came upon her. Then, as Constance, with an air of anxious solicitude, rang for her maid and sent for her little medicine-chest, Mathieu confessed the truth, which hitherto had been kept secret; Marianne, like Charlotte, was _enceinte_. It confused her a little, he said, since she was now three-and-forty years old; and so they had not mentioned it. "Ah! poor brave wife!" he added. "She wished to spare our daughter-in-law too great a shock; I trust that she herself will not be struck down by it."

_Enceinte_, good heavens! As Constance heard this, it seemed as if a bludgeon were falling on her to make her defeat complete. And so, even if she should now let Denis, in his turn, kill himself, another Froment was coming who would replace him. There was ever another and another of that race--a swarming of strength, an endless fountain of life, against which it became impossible to battle. Amid her stupefaction at finding the breach repaired when scarce opened, Constance realized her powerlessness and nothingness, childless as she was fated to remain. And she felt vanquished, overcome with awe, swept away as it were herself; thrust aside by the victorious flow of everlasting Fruitfulness.

XVIII

FOURTEEN months later there was a festival at Chantebled. Denis, who had taken Blaise's place at the factory, was married to Marthe Desvignes.

And after all the grievous mourning this was the first smile, the bright warm sun of springtime, so to say, following severe winter. Mathieu and Marianne, hitherto grief-stricken and clad in black, displayed a gayety tinged with soft emotion in presence of the sempiternal renewal of life.

The mother had been willing to don less gloomy a gown, and the father had agreed to defer no longer a marriage that had long since been resolved upon, and was necessitated by all sorts of considerations. For more than two years now Rose had been sleeping in the little cemetery of Janville, and for more than a year Blaise had joined her there, beneath flowers which were ever fresh. And the souvenir of the dear dead ones, whom they all visited, and who had remained alive in all their hearts, was to partic.i.p.ate in the coming festival. It was as if they themselves had decided with their parents that the hour for the espousals had struck, and that regret for their loss ought no longer to bar the joy of growth and increase.

Denis's installation at the Beauchene works in his brother's place had come about quite naturally. If he had not gone thither on leaving the science school where he had spent three years, it was simply because the position was at that time already held by Blaise. All his technical studies marked him out for the post. In a single day he had fitted himself for it, and he simply had to take up his quarters in the little pavilion, Charlotte having fled to Chantebled with her little Berthe directly after the horrible catastrophe. It should be added that Denis'

entry into the establishment offered a convenient solution with regard to the large sum of money lent to Beauchene, which, it had been arranged, should be reimbursed by a sixth share in the factory. That money came from the family, and one brother simply took the place of the other, signing the agreement which the deceased would have signed. With a delicate rect.i.tude, however, Denis insisted that out of his share of the profits an annuity should be a.s.signed to Charlotte, his brother's widow.

Thus matters were settled in a week, in the manner that circ.u.mstances logically demanded, and without possibility of discussion. Constance, bewildered and overwhelmed, was not even able to struggle. Her husband reduced her to silence by repeating: "What would you have me do? I must have somebody to help me, and it is just as well to take Denis as a stranger. Besides, if he worries me I will buy him out within a year and give him his dismissal!"

At this Constance remained silent to avoid casting his ignominy in his face, amid her despair at feeling the walls of the house crumble and fall, bit by bit, upon her.

Once installed at the works, Denis considered that the time had come to carry out the matrimonial plans which he had long since arranged with Marthe Desvignes. The latter, Charlotte's younger sister and at one time the inseparable friend of Rose, had been waiting for him for nearly three years now, with her bright smile and air of affectionate good sense. They had known one another since childhood, and had exchanged many a vow along the lonely paths of Janville. But they had said to one another that they would do nothing prematurely, that for the happiness of a whole lifetime one might well wait until one was old enough and strong enough to undertake family duties. Some people were greatly astonished that a young man whose future was so promising, and whose position at twenty-six years of age was already a superb one, should thus obstinately espouse a penniless girl. Mathieu and Marianne smiled, however, and consented, knowing their son's good reasons. He had no desire to marry a rich girl who would cost him more than she brought, and he was delighted at having discovered a pretty, healthy, and very sensible and skilful young woman, who would be at all times his companion, helpmate, and consoler. He feared no surprises with her, for he had studied her; she united charm and good sense with kindliness, all that was requisite for the happiness of a household. And he himself was very good-natured, prudent, and sensible, and she knew it and willingly took his arm to tread life's path with him, certain as she felt that they would thus walk on together until life's end should be reached, ever advancing with the same tranquil step under the divine and limpid sun of reason merged in love.

Great preparations were made at Chantebled on the day before the wedding. Nevertheless, the ceremony was to remain of an intimate character, on account of the recent mourning. The only guests, apart from members of the family, were the Seguins and the Beauchenes, and even the latter were cousins. So there would scarcely be more than a score of them altogether, and only a lunch was to be given. One matter which gave them some brief concern was to decide where to set the table, and how to decorate it. Those early days of July were so bright and warm that they resolved to place it out of doors under the trees. There was a fitting and delightful spot in front of the old shooting-box, the primitive pavilion, which had been their first residence on their arrival in the Janville district. That pavilion was indeed like the family nest, the hearth whence it had radiated over the surrounding region. As the pavilion had threatened ruin, Mathieu had repaired and enlarged it with the idea of retiring thither with Marianne, and Charlotte and her children, as soon as he should cede the farm to his son Gervais, that being his intention. He was, indeed, pleased with the idea of living in retirement like a patriarch, like a king who had willingly abdicated, but whose wise counsel was still sought and accepted. In place of the former wild garden a large lawn now stretched before the pavilion, surrounded by some beautiful trees, elms and hornbeams. These Mathieu had planted, and he had watched them grow; thus they seemed to him to be almost part of his flesh. But his real favorite was an oak tree, nearly twenty years of age and already st.u.r.dy, which stood in the centre of the lawn, where he had planted it with Marianne, who had held the slender sapling in position while he plied his spade on the day when they had founded their domain of Chantebled. And near this oak, which thus belonged to their robust family, there was a basin of living water, fed by the captured springs of the plateau--water whose crystalline song made the spot one of continual joy.

It was here then that a council was held on the day before the wedding.

Mathieu and Marianne repaired thither to see what preparations would be necessary, and they found Charlotte with a sketch-book on her knees, rapidly finishing an impression of the oak tree.

"What is that--a surprise?" they asked.

She smiled with some confusion. "Yes, yes, a surprise; you will see."

Then she confessed that for a fortnight past she had been designing in water colors a series of menu cards for the wedding feast. And, prettily and lovingly enough, her idea had been to depict children's games and children's heads; indeed, all the members of the family in their childish days. She had taken their likenesses from old photographs, and her sketch of the oak tree was to serve as a background for the portraits of the two youngest scions of the house--little Benjamin and little Guillaume.

Mathieu and Marianne were delighted with that fleet procession of little faces all white and pink which they perfectly recognized as they saw them pa.s.s before their eyes. There were the twins nestling in their cradle, locked in one another's arms; there was Rose, the dear lost one, in her little shift; there were Ambroise and Gervais, bare, and wrestling on a patch of gra.s.s; there were Gregoire and Nicolas birdnesting; there were Claire and the three other girls, Louise, Madeleine, and Marguerite, romping about the farm, quarrelling with the fowls, springing upon the horses' backs. But what particularly touched Marianne was the sketch of her last-born, little Benjamin, now nine months old, whom Charlotte had depicted reclining under the oak tree in the same little carriage as her own son Guillaume, who was virtually of the same age, having been born but eight days later.

"The uncle and the nephew," said Mathieu jestingly. "All the same, the uncle is the elder by a week."

As Marianne stood there smiling, soft tears came into her eyes, and the sketch shook in her happy hands.