The Alkahest Part 9

Emmanuel had accompanied his uncle when the latter came to examine the pictures of the House of Claes. Hearing from Martha that the Abbe de Solis was in the gallery, Marguerite, anxious to see so celebrated a man, invented an excuse to join her mother and gratify her curiosity.

Entering hastily, with the heedless gaiety young girls a.s.sume at times to hide their wishes, she encountered near the old abbe, clothed in black and looking decrepit and cadaverous, the fresh, delightful face of a young man. The naive glances of the youthful pair expressed their mutual astonishment. Marguerite and Emmanuel had no doubt seen each other in their dreams. Both lowered their eyes and raised them again with one impulse; each, by the action, made the same avowal. Marguerite took her mother's arm, and spoke to her to cover her confusion and find shelter under the maternal wing, turning her neck with a swan-like motion to keep sight of Emmanuel, who still supported his uncle on his arm. The light was cleverly arranged to give due value to the pictures, and the half-obscurity of the gallery encouraged those furtive glances which are the joy of timid natures. Neither went so far, even in thought, as the first note of love; yet both felt the mysterious trouble which stirs the heart, and is jealously kept secret in our youth from fastidiousness or modesty.

The first impression which forces a sensibility hitherto suppressed to overflow its borders, is followed in all young people by the same half-stupefied amazement which the first sounds of music produce upon a child. Some children laugh and think; others do not laugh till they have thought; but those whose hearts are called to live by poetry or love, listen stilly and hear the melody with a look where pleasure flames already, and the search for the infinite begins. If, from an irresistible feeling, we love the places where our childhood first perceived the beauties of harmony, if we remember with delight the musician, and even the instrument, that taught them to us, how much more shall we love the being who reveals to us the music of life? The first heart in which we draw the breath of love,--is it not our home, our native land? Marguerite and Emmanuel were, each to each, that Voice of music which wakes a sense, that hand which lifts the misty veil, and reveals the distant sh.o.r.es bathed in the fires of noonday.

When Madame Claes paused before a picture by Guido representing an angel, Marguerite bent forward to see the impression it made upon Emmanuel, and Emmanuel looked at Marguerite to compare the mute thought on the canvas with the living thought beside him. This involuntary and delightful homage was understood and treasured. The old abbe gravely praised the picture, and Madame Claes answered him, but the youth and the maiden were silent.

Such was their first meeting: the mysterious light of the picture gallery, the stillness of the old house, the presence of their elders, all contributed to trace upon their hearts the delicate lines of this vaporous mirage. The many confused thoughts that surged in Marguerite's mind grew calm and lay like a limpid ocean traversed by a luminous ray when Emmanuel murmured a few farewell words to Madame Claes. That voice, whose fresh and mellow tone sent nameless delights into her heart, completed the revelation that had come to her,--a revelation which Emmanuel, were he able, should cherish to his own profit; for it often happens that the man whom destiny employs to waken love in the heart of a young girl is ignorant of his work and leaves it unfinished.

Marguerite bowed confusedly; her true farewell was in the glance which seemed unwilling to lose so pure and lovely a vision. Like a child she wanted her melody. Their parting took place at the foot of the old staircase near the parlor; and when Marguerite re-entered the room she watched the uncle and the nephew till the street-door closed upon them.

Madame Claes had been so occupied with the serious matters which caused her conference with the abbe that she did not on this occasion observe her daughter's manner. When Monsieur de Solis came again to the house on the occasion of her illness, she was too violently agitated to notice the color that rushed into Marguerite's face and betrayed the tumult of a virgin heart conscious of its first joy. By the time the old abbe was announced, Marguerite had taken up her sewing and appeared to give it such attention that she bowed to the uncle and nephew without looking at them. Monsieur Claes mechanically returned their salutation and left the room with the air of a man called away by his occupations. The good Dominican sat down beside Madame Claes and looked at her with one of those searching glances by which he penetrated the minds of others; the sight of Monsieur Claes and his wife was enough to make him aware of a catastrophe.

"My children," said the mother, "go into the garden; Marguerite, show Emmanuel your father's tulips."

Marguerite, half abashed, took Felicie's arm and looked at the young man, who blushed and caught up little Jean to cover his confusion. When all four were in the garden, Felicie and Jean ran to the other side, leaving Marguerite, who, conscious that she was alone with young de Solis, led him to the pyramid of tulips, arranged precisely in the same manner year after year by Lemulquinier.

"Do you love tulips?" asked Marguerite, after standing for a moment in deep silence,--a silence Emmanuel seemed little disposed to break.

"Mademoiselle, these flowers are beautiful, but to love them we must perhaps have a taste of them, and know how to understand their beauties.

They dazzle me. Constant study in the gloomy little chamber in which I live, close to my uncle, makes me prefer those flowers that are softer to the eye."

Saying these words he glanced at Marguerite; but the look, full as it was of confused desires, contained no allusion to the lily whiteness, the sweet serenity, the tender coloring which made her face a flower.

"Do you work very hard?" she asked, leading him to a wooden seat with a back, painted green. "Here," she continued, "the tulips are not so close; they will not tire your eyes. Yes, you are right, those colors are dazzling; they give pain."

"Do I work hard?" replied the young man after a short silence, as he smoothed the gravel with his foot. "Yes; I work at many things. My uncle wished to make me a priest."

"Oh!" exclaimed Marguerite, naively.

"I resisted; I felt no vocation for it. But it required great courage to oppose my uncle's wishes. He is so good, he loves me so much! Quite recently he bought a subst.i.tute to save me from the conscription--me, a poor orphan!"

"What do you mean to be?" asked Marguerite; then, immediately checking herself as though she would unsay the words, she added with a pretty gesture, "I beg your pardon; you must think me very inquisitive."

"Oh, mademoiselle," said Emmanuel, looking at her with tender admiration, "except my uncle, no one ever asked me that question. I am studying to be a teacher. I cannot do otherwise; I am not rich. If I were princ.i.p.al of a college-school in Flanders I should earn enough to live moderately, and I might marry some single woman whom I could love.

That is the life I look forward to. Perhaps that is why I prefer a daisy in the meadows to these splendid tulips, whose purple and gold and rubies and amethysts betoken a life of luxury, just as the daisy is emblematic of a sweet and patriarchal life,--the life of a poor teacher like me."

"I have always called the daisies marguerites," she said.

Emmanuel colored deeply and sought an answer from the sand at his feet.

Embarra.s.sed to choose among the thoughts that came to him, which he feared were silly, and disconcerted by his delay in answering, he said at last, "I dared not p.r.o.nounce your name"--then he paused.

"A teacher?" she said.

"Mademoiselle, I shall be a teacher only as a means of living: I shall undertake great works which will make me n.o.bly useful. I have a strong taste for historical researches."

"Ah!"

That "ah!" so full of secret thoughts added to his confusion; he gave a foolish laugh and said:--

"You make me talk of myself when I ought only to speak of you."

"My mother and your uncle must have finished their conversation, I think," said Marguerite, looking into the parlor through the windows.

"Your mother seems to me greatly changed," said Emmanuel.

"She suffers, but she will not tell us the cause of her sufferings; and we can only try to share them with her."

Madame Claes had, in fact, just ended a delicate consultation which involved a case of conscience the Abbe de Solis alone could decide.

Foreseeing the utter ruin of the family, she wished to retain, unknown to Balthazar who paid no attention to his business affairs, part of the price of the pictures which Monsieur de Solis had undertaken to sell in Holland, intending to hold it secretly in reserve against the day when poverty should overtake her children. With much deliberation, and after weighing every circ.u.mstance, the old Dominican approved the act as one of prudence. He took his leave to prepare at once for the sale, which he engaged to make secretly, so as not to injure Monsieur Claes in the estimation of others.

The next day Monsieur de Solis despatched his nephew, armed with letters of introduction, to Amsterdam, where Emmanuel, delighted to do a service to the Claes family, succeeded in selling all the pictures in the gallery to the noted bankers Happe and Duncker for the ostensible sum of eighty-five thousand Dutch ducats and fifteen thousand more which were paid over secretly to Madame Claes. The pictures were so well known that nothing was needed to complete the sale but an answer from Balthazar to the letter which Messieurs Happe and Duncker addressed to him. Emmanuel de Solis was commissioned by Claes to receive the price of the pictures, which were thereupon packed and sent away secretly, to conceal the sale from the people of Douai.

Towards the end of September, Balthazar paid off all the sums that he had borrowed, released his property from enc.u.mbrance, and resumed his chemical researches; but the House of Claes was deprived of its n.o.blest ornament. Blinded by his pa.s.sion, the master showed no regret; he felt so sure of repairing the loss that in selling the pictures he reserved the right of redemption. In Josephine's eyes a hundred pictures were as nothing compared to domestic happiness and the satisfaction of her husband's mind; moreover, she refilled the gallery with other paintings taken from the reception-rooms, and to conceal the gaps which these left in the front house, she changed the arrangement of the furniture.

When Balthazar's debts were all paid he had about two hundred thousand francs with which to carry on his experiments. The Abbe de Solis and his nephew took charge secretly of the fifteen thousand ducats reserved by Madame Claes. To increase that sum, the abbe sold the Dutch ducats, to which the events of the Continental war had given a commercial value.

One hundred and sixty-five thousand francs were buried in the cellar of the house in which the abbe and his nephew resided.

Madame Claes had the melancholy happiness of seeing her husband incessantly busy and satisfied for nearly eight months. But the shock he had lately given her was too severe; she sank into a state of languor and debility which steadily increased. Balthazar was now so completely absorbed in science that neither the reverses which had overtaken France, nor the first fall of Napoleon, nor the return of the Bourbons, drew him from his laboratory; he was neither husband, father, nor citizen,--solely chemist.

Towards the close of 1814 Madame Claes declined so rapidly that she was no longer able to leave her bed. Unwilling to vegetate in her own chamber, the scene of so much happiness, where the memory of vanished joys forced involuntary comparisons with the present and depressed her, she moved into the parlor. The doctors encouraged this wish by declaring the room more airy, more cheerful, and therefore better suited to her condition. The bed in which the unfortunate woman ended her life was placed between the fireplace and a window looking on the garden. There she pa.s.sed her last days, sacredly occupied in training the souls of her young daughters, striving to leave within them the fire of her own.

Conjugal love, deprived of its manifestations, allowed maternal love to have its way. The mother now seemed the more delightful because her motherhood had blossomed late. Like all generous persons, she pa.s.sed through sensitive phases of feeling that she mistook for remorse.

Believing that she had defrauded her children of the tenderness that should have been theirs, she sought to redeem those imaginary wrongs; bestowing attentions and tender cares which made her precious to them; she longed to make her children live, as it were, within her heart; to shelter them beneath her feeble wings; to cherish them enough in the few remaining days to redeem the time during which she had neglected them.

The sufferings of her mind gave to her words and her caresses a glowing warmth that issued from her soul. Her eyes caressed her children, her voice with its yearning intonations touched their hearts, her hand showered blessings on their heads.

CHAPTER IX

The good people of Douai were not surprised that visitors were no longer received at the House of Claes, and that Balthazar gave no more fetes on the anniversary of his marriage. Madame Claes's state of health seemed a sufficient reason for the change, and the payment of her husband's debts put a stop to the current gossip; moreover, the political vicissitudes to which Flanders was subjected, the war of the Hundred-days, and the occupation of the Allied armies, put the chemist and his researches completely out of people's minds. During those two years Douai was so often on the point of being taken, it was so constantly occupied either by the French or by the enemy, so many foreigners came there, so many of the country-people sought refuge within its walls, so many lives were in peril, so many catastrophes occurred, that each man thought only of himself.

The Abbe de Solis and his nephew, and the two Pierquins, doctor and lawyer, were the only persons who now visited Madame Claes; for whom the winter of 1814-1815 was a long and dreary death-scene. Her husband rarely came to see her. It is true that after dinner he remained some hours in the parlor, near her bed; but as she no longer had the strength to keep up a conversation, he merely said a few words, invariably the same, sat down, spoke no more, and a dreary silence settled down upon the room. The monotony of this existence was broken only on the days when the Abbe de Solis and his nephew pa.s.sed the evening with Madame Claes.

While the abbe played backgammon with Balthazar, Marguerite talked with Emmanuel by the bedside of her mother, who smiled at their innocent joy, not allowing them to see how painful and yet how soothing to her wounded spirit were the fresh breezes of their virgin love, murmuring in fitful words from heart to heart. The inflection of their voices, to them so full of charm, to her was heart-breaking; a glance of mutual understanding surprised between the two threw her, half-dead as she was, back to the young and happy past which gave such bitterness to the present. Emmanuel and Marguerite with intuitive delicacy of feeling repressed the sweet half-childish play of love, lest it should hurt the saddened woman whose wounds they instinctively divined.

No one has yet remarked that feelings have an existence of their own, a nature which is developed by the circ.u.mstances that environ them, and in which they are born; they bear a likeness to the places of their growth, and keep the imprint of the ideas that influenced their development.

There are pa.s.sions ardently conceived which remain ardent, like that of Madame Claes for her husband: there are sentiments on which all life has smiled; these retain their spring-time gaiety, their harvest-time of joy, seasons that never fail of laughter or of fetes; but there are other loves, framed in melancholy, circled by distress, whose pleasures are painful, costly, burdened by fears, poisoned by remorse, or blackened by despair. The love in the heart of Marguerite and Emmanuel, as yet unknown to them for love, the sentiment that budded into life beneath the gloomy arches of the picture-gallery, beside the stern old abbe, in a still and silent moment, that love so grave and so discreet, yet rich in tender depths, in secret delights that were luscious to the taste as stolen grapes s.n.a.t.c.hed from a corner of the vineyard, wore in coming years the sombre browns and grays that surrounded the hour of its birth.

Fearing to give expression to their feelings beside that bed of pain, they unconsciously increased their happiness by a concentration which deepened its imprint on their hearts. The devotion of the daughter, shared by Emmanuel, happy in thus uniting himself with Marguerite and becoming by antic.i.p.ation the son of her mother, was their medium of communication. Melancholy thanks from the lips of the young girl supplanted the honeyed language of lovers; the sighing of their hearts, surcharged with joy at some interchange of looks, was scarcely distinguishable from the sighs wrung from them by the mother's sufferings. Their happy little moments of indirect avowal, of unuttered promises, of smothered effusion, were like the allegories of Raphael painted on a black ground. Each felt a certainty that neither avowed; they knew the sun was s.h.i.+ning over them, but they could not know what wind might chase away the clouds that gathered about their heads. They doubted the future; fearing that pain would ever follow them, they stayed timidly among the shadows of the twilight, not daring to say to each other, "Shall we end our days together?"

The tenderness which Madame Claes now testified for her children n.o.bly concealed much that she endeavored to hide from herself. Her children caused her neither fear nor pa.s.sionate emotion: they were her comforters, but they were not her life: she lived by them; she died through Balthazar. However painful her husband's presence might be to her, lost as he was for hours together in depths of thought from which he looked at her without seeing her, it was only during those cruel moments that she forgot her griefs. His indifference to the dying woman would have seemed criminal to a stranger, but Madame Claes and her daughters were accustomed to it; they knew his heart and they forgave him. If, during the daytime, Josephine was seized by some sudden illness, if she were worse and seemed near dying, Claes was the only person in the house or in the town who remained ignorant of it.

Lemulquinier knew it, but neither the daughters, bound to silence by their mother, nor Josephine herself let Balthazar know the danger of the being he had once so pa.s.sionately loved.

When his heavy step sounded in the gallery as he came to dinner, Madame Claes was happy--she was about to see him! and she gathered up her strength for that happiness. As he entered, the pallid face blushed brightly and recovered for an instant the semblance of health. Balthazar came to her bedside, took her hand, saw the misleading color on her cheek, and to him she seemed well. When he asked, "My dear wife, how are you to-day?" she answered, "Better, dear friend," and made him think she would be up and recovered on the morrow. His preoccupation was so great that he accepted this reply, and believed the illness of which his wife was dying a mere indisposition. Dying to the eyes of the world, in his alone she was living.

A complete separation between husband and wife was the result of this year. Claes slept in a distant chamber, got up early in the morning, and shut himself into his laboratory or his study. Seeing his wife only in presence of his daughters or of the two or three friends who came to visit them, he lost the habit of communicating with her. These two beings, formerly accustomed to think as one, no longer, unless at rare intervals, enjoyed those moments of communion, of pa.s.sionate unreserve which feed the life of the heart; and finally there came a time when even these rare pleasures ceased. Physical suffering was now a boon to the poor woman, helping her to endure the void of separation, which might have killed her had she been truly living. Her bodily pain became so great that there were times when she was joyful in the thought that he whom she loved was not a witness of it. She lay watching Balthazar in the evening hours, and knowing him happy in his own way, she lived in the happiness she had procured for him,--a shadowy joy, and yet it satisfied her. She no longer asked herself if she were loved, she forced herself to believe it; and she glided over that icy surface, not daring to rest her weight upon it lest it should break and drown her soul in a gulf of awful nothingness.

No events stirred the calm of this existence; the malady that was slowly consuming Madame Claes added to the household stillness, and in this condition of pa.s.sive gloom the House of Claes reached the first weeks of the year 1816. Pierquin, the lawyer, was destined, at the close of February, to strike the death-blow of the fragile woman who, in the words of the Abbe de Solis, was well-nigh without sin.

"Madame," said Pierquin, seizing a moment when her daughters could not hear the conversation, "Monsieur Claes has directed me to borrow three hundred thousand francs on his property. You must do something to protect the future of your children."