_IV.--The Hour of Darkness_

For some considerable time Balthazar avoided experimental chemistry, and confined himself to theoretical speculations. He took long walks on the ramparts; was gloomy, restless, and preoccupied at home. Marguerite endeavoured to distract his thoughts. One day the old servant, Martha, said to her: "All is over with us; master is on the road to h.e.l.l again!"

And she pointed to clouds of smoke issuing from the laboratory chimney.

Marguerite lived as carefully as a nun; all expenses were cut down. She denied herself ordinary comforts to prepare for the crash. Thanks to Emmanuel, the boys were now advancing in their studies, and their future was at least unclouded. But Balthazar had developed the gambler"s recklessness. He sold a forest; he mortgaged his house and silver; he had no more food than a n.i.g.g.e.r who sells his wife for a gla.s.s of brandy in the morning, and weeps over his loss at night. Once Marguerite spoke to her father. She acknowledged that he was master, that his children would obey him at all costs; but he must know that they scarcely had bread in the house.

"Bread!" he cried; "no bread in the house of a Claes! Where is all our property, then?"

She told him how he had sold everything.

"Then, how do we live?"

She held up her needle.

Time went on, and fresh debts hammered at the door of the Maison Claes.

At last Marguerite was obliged to face her father, and charge him with madness.

"Madness!" he cried, firing up and springing to his feet. There was something so majestic and commanding in his att.i.tude that made Marguerite tremble at his feet. "Your mother would never have used that word; she always attached due importance to my scientific researches."

She could not bear his reproaches, and fled from him. She felt that the time had come, for they were now on the verge of beggary, to break the seal of her mother"s letter. That letter expressed the most divine love, praying that G.o.d would permit her spirit to be with Marguerite while she read the words of this last message; and it told her that the Abbe Solis, if living, or his nephew, held for her a sum of a hundred and seventy thousand francs, and on this sum she must live, and leave her father if he refused to abandon his researches. "I could never have said these words," Josephine had written; "not even on the brink of the grave." And she entreated her child to be reverent in withstanding her father, and if resistance was inevitable to resist him on her knees. The abbe was dead, but Emmanuel held the money. In their discussions about the management of this sum, the two young people drew closer together.

The poor father, brought to ruin, confessed his madness, and uttered the terrible despair of a beaten scientist. To comfort him, Marguerite said that his debts would be paid with her money. His face lit up. "You have money! Give it to me; I will make you rich." Once more the madness returned.

Emmanuel came with three thousand ducats in his pockets. They were hiding them in the hollow column of a pedestal, when, looking up, Marguerite saw her father observing them. "I heard gold," he said, advancing. To save her, Emmanuel lied. He sinned against his conscience for her sake. The money, he said belonged to him, and he had lent it to Marguerite. When he was gone, Claes said: "I must have that money."

"If you take it," answered Marguerite, "you will be a thief."

He knelt to her; she would not relent. He caressed her; she called G.o.d to look down upon them if he stole the money. He rose, bade her a sorrowful farewell, and left the room. Something warned her; she hurried after him, to find him with a pistol at his head. "Take all I possess,"

she cried. Embracing her, he promised that if he failed this time he would deliver himself into her hands.

Time pa.s.sed and the Absolute was not discovered. A wealthy cousin of Claes, M. Conyncks, came to Douai in his travelling carriage, and soon after he and Marguerite journeyed to Paris. When she returned, it was to announce that, through M. Conynck"s influence, Balthazar had been appointed receiver of taxes in Brittany, and must set out at once to take up the appointment.

"You drive me out of my own house!" he exclaimed, with anger. At first he refused to go, furious and indignant; but she persisted, and he had to surrender. He went with Lemulquinier to his laboratory for the last time. The two old men were very sad as they released the gases and evaporated acids.

"Ah, look," said Claes, pausing before a capsule connected with the wires of a battery; "if only we could watch out the end of this experiment! Carbon and sulphur. Crystallisation should take place; the carbon might certainly result in a crystal ..."

While Claes was in exile, fortune came to the family. The son Gabriel, a.s.sisted by M. Conyncks, had made a large sum of money as the engineer of a ca.n.a.l. Emmanuel de Solis had given Marguerite the fortune he inherited from ancestors in Spain. Pierquin, who had turned his attention to Marguerite"s younger sister, had proved himself kind to the family. Once again the Maison Claes was in prosperity, with pictures on its walls, and with handsome furniture in its state apartments.

When Conyncks and Marguerite went to fetch the father, they found him old and broken. The child was greatly touched by his appearance, and questioned him alone. She discovered that instead of saving money, he was heavily in debt, and that he had been seeking the Absolute as industriously in Brittany as in the attic of the Maison Claes.

On his return, the old man brightened and became glad. The ancient home gave him joy. He embraced his children, looked around the happy house of his fathers, and exclaimed: "Ah, Josephine, if only you were here to admire our Marguerite!" The marriages of Marguerite and Felicie, the younger sister, were hurried forward. During the reading of the contracts Lemulquinier suddenly burst into the room, crying: "Monsieur!

Monsieur!"

Claes whispered to his daughter that the servant had lent him all his savings--20,000 francs--and had doubtless come to claim them on learning that the master was once more a rich man. But Lemulquinier cried: "Monsieur! Monsieur!"

"Well?" demanded Claes.

In the trembling hand of the old servant lay a diamond. Claes rushed towards him.

"I went to the laboratory," began the servant--Claes looked up at him quickly, as though to say: "You were the first to go there!"--"and I found in the capsule we left behind us this diamond! The battery has done it without our help!"

"Forgive me!" cried Claes, turning to his children and his guests. "This will drive me mad! Cursed exile! G.o.d has worked in my laboratory, and I was not there to see! A miracle has taken place! I might have seen it--I have missed it for ever!" Suddenly he checked, and advancing to Marguerite, presented her with the diamond. "My angel," he said gently, "this belongs to you." Then, to the notary: "Let us proceed."

_V.--Discovery of the Absolute_

Happiness reigned in the Maison Claes, Balthazar conducted a few but inexpensive experiments, and surrendered himself more and more to the happiness of home life. It was as if the devil had been exorcised. The death of relatives presently carried Emmanuel and Marguerite to Spain, and their return was delayed by the birth of a child. When they did arrive in Flanders, one morning towards the end of September, they found the house in the Rue de Paris shut up, and a ring at the bell brought no one to open the door. A shopkeeper near at hand said that M. Claes had left the house with Lemulquinier about an hour ago. Emmanuel went in search of them, while a locksmith opened the door of the Maison Claes.

The house was as if the Absolute in the form of fire had pa.s.sed through all its rooms. Pictures, furniture, carpets, hangings, carvings--all were swept clean away. Marguerite wept as she looked about her, and forgave her father. She went downstairs to await his coming. How he must have suffered in this bare house! Fear filled her heart. Had his reason failed him? Should she see him enter--a tottering and enfeebled old man, broken by the sufferings which he had borne so proudly for science? As she waited, the past rose before her eyes--the long past of struggle against their enemy, the Absolute; the long past, when she was a child, and her mother had been now so joyous and now so sorrowful.

But she did not realise the calamity of her father"s tragedy--a tragedy at once sublime and miserable. To the people of Douai he was not a scientific genius wrestling with Nature for her hidden mysteries, but a wicked old spendthrift, greedy like a miser for the Philosopher"s Stone.

Everybody in Douai, from the aristocracy to the bourgeoisie to the people, knew all about old Claes, "the alchemist." His home was called the "Devil"s House." People pointed at him, shouted after him in the street. Lemulquinier said that these were murmurs of applause for genius.

It happened that on this morning of Marguerite"s return, Balthazar and Lemulquinier sat down on a bench in the Place Saint-Jacques to rest in the sun. Some children pa.s.sing to school saw the two old men, talked about them, laughed together, and presently approached. One of them, who carried a basket, and was eating a piece of bread and b.u.t.ter, said to Lemulquinier: "Is it true you make diamonds and pearls?"

Lemulquinier patted the urchin"s cheek.

"Yes, little fellow, it is true," he said. "Stick to your books, get knowledge, and perhaps we will give you some."

They began to crowd round, and became more daring.

"You should show respect to a great man," said Lemulquinier. At this the children laughed aloud, and began to shout: "Sorcerers! Old sorcerers!"

Lemulquinier sprang up with his stick raised, and the children, beating a retreat, gathered up mud and stones. A workman, seeing Lemulquinier making for the children with a stick, came to their rescue with the dangerous cry: "Down with sorcerers!"

Thus emboldened, the children made a savage attack upon the two old men with a shower of stones. At this moment Emmanuel came upon the scene. He was too late. Claes had been suddenly jerked from the ideal world in which he theorised and toiled into the real world of men. The shock was too much for him; he sank into the arms of Lemulquinier, paralysed.

He lived in this condition for some time, expressing all his affection and grat.i.tude to Marguerite by pressing her hand with his cold fingers.

She refurnished the house, and surrounded him with comforts. His children were affectionate to him. They came and sat by his bedside, and took their meals in his room. His great happiness was listening to Emmanuel"s reading of the newspapers.

One night he became very much worse, and the doctor was summoned in haste. The stricken man made violent efforts to speak. His lips trembled, but no sound issued. His eyes were on fire with the thoughts he could not utter. His face was haggard with agony. Drops of perspiration oozed out of his forehead. His hands twitched convulsively in the despair of his mind.

On the following morning his children saluted him with deepest and most lingering love, knowing that the last hour was at hand. His face did not light; he made none of his usual responses to their tender affection.

Pierquin signalled to Emmanuel, and he broke the wrapper of the newspaper, and was about to read aloud in order to distract Claes, when his eyes were arrested by the heading:

DISCOVERY OF THE ABSOLUTE

In a low voice he read the intelligence to his wife. It narrated that a famous mathematician in Poland had made terms for selling the secret of the Absolute, which he had discovered. As Emmanuel ceased to read, Marguerite asked for the paper; but Claes had heard the almost whispered words.

Of a sudden the dying man lifted himself up on his elbows. To his frightened family his glance was like the flash of lightning. The fringe of hair above his forehead stood up; every line in his countenance quivered with excitement, a thrill of pa.s.sion moved across his face and made it sublime.

He lifted a hand, which was clenched with excitement, and uttering the cry of Archimedes--"Eureka!"--fell back with the heaviness of a dead body, and expired with an agonised groan. His eyes, till the doctor closed them, expressed a frenzied despair. It was his agony that he could not bequeath to science the solution of the great riddle which was only revealed to him as the veil was rent asunder by the hand of Death.

WILLIAM BECKFORD