The Eight Strokes of the Clock, Maurice Leblanc [summer books TXT] 📗

Madame d’Imbleval had fainted in her turn. And, when Mlle. Boussignol, having settled the two mothers, but half-crazed with fatigue, her brain in a whirl, returned to the newborn children, she realized with horror that she had wrapped them in similar binders, thrust their feet into similar woolen socks and laid them both, side by side, in the same cradle, so that it was impossible to tell Louis d’Imbleval from Jean Vaurois!⁠ ⁠… To make matters worse, when she lifted one of them out of the cradle, she found that his hands were cold as ice and that he had ceased to breathe. He was dead. What was his name and what the survivor’s?⁠ ⁠… Three hours later, the doctor found the two women in a condition of frenzied delirium, while the nurse was dragging herself from one bed to the other, entreating the two mothers to forgive her. She held me out first to one, then to the other, to receive their caresses⁠—for I was the surviving child⁠—and they first kissed me and then pushed me away; for, after all, who was I? The son of the widowed Madame d’Imbleval and the late merchant-captain or the son of the widowed Madame Vaurois and the late commercial traveller? There was not a clue by which they could tell.⁠ ⁠… The doctor begged each of the two mothers to sacrifice her rights, at least from the legal point of view, so that I might be called either Louis d’Imbleval or Jean Vaurois. They refused absolutely. ‘Why Jean Vaurois, if he’s a d’Imbleval?’ protested the one. ‘Why Louis d’Imbleval, if he’s a Vaurois?’ retorted the other. And I was registered under the name of Jean Louis, the son of an unknown father and mother.”

Prince Rénine had listened in silence. But Hortense, as the story approached its conclusion, had given way to a hilarity which she could no longer restrain and suddenly, in spite of all her efforts, she burst into a fit of the wildest laughter:

“Forgive me,” she said, her eyes filled with tears, “do forgive me; it’s too much for my nerves.⁠ ⁠…”

“Don’t apologize, madame,” said the young man, gently, in a voice free from resentment. “I warned you that my story was laughable; I, better than anyone, know how absurd, how nonsensical it is. Yes, the whole thing is perfectly grotesque. But believe me when I tell you that it was no fun in reality. It seems a humorous situation and it remains humorous by the force of circumstances; but it is also horrible. You can see that for yourself, can’t you? The two mothers, neither of whom was certain of being a mother, but neither of whom was certain that she was not one, both clung to Jean Louis. He might be a stranger; on the other hand, he might be their own flesh and blood. They loved him to excess and fought for him furiously. And, above all, they both came to hate each other with a deadly hatred. Differing completely in character and education and obliged to live together because neither was willing to forego the advantage of her possible maternity, they lived the life of irreconcilable enemies who can never lay their weapons aside.⁠ ⁠… I grew up in the midst of this hatred and had it instilled into me by both of them. When my childish heart, hungering for affection, inclined me to one of them, the other would seek to inspire me with loathing and contempt for her. In this manor-house, which they bought on the old doctor’s death and to which they added the two wings, I was the involuntary torturer and their daily victim. Tormented as a child, and, as a young man, leading the most hideous of lives, I doubt if anyone on earth ever suffered more than I did.”

“You ought to have left them!” exclaimed Hortense, who had stopped laughing.

“One can’t leave one’s mother; and one of those two women was my mother. And a woman can’t abandon her son; and each of them was entitled to believe that I was her son. We were all three chained together like convicts, with chains of sorrow, compassion, doubt and also of hope that the truth might one day become apparent. And here we still are, all three, insulting one another and blaming one another for our wasted lives. Oh, what a hell! And there was no escaping it. I tried often enough⁠ ⁠… but in vain. The broken bonds became tied again. Only this summer, under the stimulus of my love for Geneviève, I tried to free myself and did my utmost to persuade the two women whom I call mother. And then⁠ ⁠… and then! I was up against their complaints, their immediate hatred of the wife, of the stranger, whom I was proposing to force upon them.⁠ ⁠… I gave way. What sort of a life would Geneviève have had here, between Madame d’Imbleval and Madame Vaurois? I had no right to victimize her.”

Jean Louis, who had been gradually becoming excited, uttered these last words in a firm voice, as though he would have wished his conduct to be ascribed to conscientious motives and a sense of duty. In reality, as Rénine and Hortense clearly saw, his was an unusually weak nature, incapable of reacting against a ridiculous position from which he had suffered ever since he was a child and which he had come to look upon as final and irremediable. He endured it as a man bears a cross which he has no right to cast aside; and at the same time he was ashamed of it. He had never spoken of it to Geneviève, from dread of ridicule; and afterwards, on returning to his prison, he had remained there out of habit and weakness.

He sat down to a writing-table and quickly wrote a letter which he handed to Rénine:

“Would you be kind enough to give this note to Mlle. Aymard and beg her once more to forgive me?”

Rénine did not move and, when the other pressed