The Alkahest Part 14

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 gla.s.s vessels: here and there were books, and tables enc.u.mbered 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 gla.s.ses, the s.p.a.ce between the gla.s.ses 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 G.o.d! 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 a.s.sumed: 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 sc.r.a.p of July sun, for monsieur,--ah, what a man! he's almost in the shoes of the good G.o.d 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 b.u.t.ter 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 b.u.t.ter? '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 frica.s.see 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 G.o.d 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 pa.s.sion; 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 pa.s.sion 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.