The Alkahest Part 15

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 G.o.d 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.--n.o.ble, 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 n.o.ble, so upright--the property of the children he was bound to defend), oh, to what depths must he have fallen! My G.o.d! 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 cla.s.s."

"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 a.s.siduous 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.