The Alkahest, Honoré de Balzac [life books to read .txt] 📗

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