第46章

"My friend, I do not blame you.You made me happy--too happy, for Ihave not been able to bear the contrast between our early married life, so full of joy, and these last days, so desolate, so empty, when you are not yourself.The life of the heart, like the life of the body, has its functions.For six years you have been dead to love, to the family, to all that was once our happiness.I will not speak of our early married days; such joys must cease in the after-time of life, but they ripen into fruits which feed the soul,--confidence unlimited, the tender habits of affection: you have torn those treasures from me! I go in time: we live together no longer; you hide your thoughts and actions from me.How is it that you fear me? Have Iever given you one word, one look, one gesture of reproach? And yet, you have sold your last pictures, you have sold even the wine in your cellar, you are borrowing money on your property, and have said no word to me.Ah! I go from life weary of life.If you are doing wrong, if you delude yourself in following the unattainable, have I not shown you that my love could share your faults, could walk beside you and be happy, though you led me in the paths of crime? You loved me too well, --that was my glory; it is now my death.Balthazar, my illness has lasted long; it began on the day when here, in this place where I am about to die, you showed me that Science was more to you than Family.

And now the end has come; your wife is dying, and your fortune lost.

Fortune and wife were yours,--you could do what you willed with your own; but on the day of my death my property goes to my children, and you cannot touch it; what will then become of you? I am telling you the truth; I owe it to you.Dying eyes see far; when I am gone will anything outweigh that cursed passion which is now your life? If you have sacrificed your wife, your children will count but little in the scale; for I must be just and own you loved me above all.Two millions and six years of toil you have cast into the gulf,--and what have you found?"At these words Claes grasped his whitened head in his hands and hid his face.

"Humiliation for yourself, misery for your children," continued the dying woman."You are called in derision 'Claes the alchemist'; soon it will be 'Claes the madman.' For myself, I believe in you.I know you great and wise; I know your genius: but to the vulgar eye genius is mania.Fame is a sun that lights the dead; living, you will be unhappy with the unhappiness of great minds, and your children will be ruined.I go before I see your fame, which might have brought me consolation for my lost happiness.Oh, Balthazar! make my death less bitter to me, let me be certain that my children will not want for bread-- Ah, nothing, nothing, not even you, can calm my fears.""I swear," said Claes, "to--"

"No, do not swear, that you may not fail of your oath," she said, interrupting him."You owed us your protection; we have been without it seven years.Science is your life.A great man should have neither wife nor children; he should tread alone the path of sacrifice.His virtues are not the virtues of common men; he belongs to the universe, he cannot belong to wife or family; he sucks up the moisture of the earth about him, like a majestic tree--and I, poor plant, I could not rise to the height of your life, I die at its feet.I have waited for this last day to tell you these dreadful thoughts: they came to me in the lightnings of desolation and anguish.Oh, spare my children! let these words echo in your heart.I cry them to you with my last breath.

The wife is dead, dead; you have stripped her slowly, gradually, of her feelings, of her joys.Alas! without that cruel care could I have lived so long? But those poor children did not forsake me! they have grown beside my anguish, the mother still survives.Spare them! Spare my children!""Lemulquinier!" cried Claes in a voice of thunder.

The old man appeared.

"Go up and destroy all--instruments, apparatus, everything! Be careful, but destroy all.I renounce Science," he said to his wife.

"Too late," she answered, looking at Lemulquinier."Marguerite!" she cried, feeling herself about to die.

Marguerite came through the doorway and uttered a piercing cry as she saw her mother's eyes now glazing.

"MARGUERITE!" repeated the dying woman.

The exclamation contained so powerful an appeal to her daughter, she invested that appeal with such authority, that the cry was like a dying bequest.The terrified family ran to her side and saw her die;the vital forces were exhausted in that last conversation with her husband.

Balthazar and Marguerite stood motionless, she at the head, he at the foot of the bed, unable to believe in the death of the woman whose virtues and exhaustless tenderness were known fully to them alone.

Father and daughter exchanged looks freighted with meaning: the daughter judged the father, and already the father trembled, seeing in his daughter an instrument of vengeance.Though memories of the love with which his Pepita had filled his life crowded upon his mind, and gave to her dying words a sacred authority whose voice his soul must ever hear, yet Balthazar knew himself helpless in the grasp of his attendant genius; he heard the terrible mutterings of his passion, denying him the strength to carry his repentance into action: he feared himself.

When the grave had closed upon Madame Claes, one thought filled the minds of all,--the house had had a soul, and that soul was now departed.The grief of the family was so intense that the parlor, where the noble woman still seemed to linger, was closed; no one had the courage to enter it.