"Ah, my dear daughter!" he cried, "you save my life.I have thought of a last experiment, after which nothing more is possible.If, this time, I do not find the Absolute, I must renounce the search.Come to my arms, my darling child; I will make you the happiest woman upon earth.You give me glory; you bring me back to happiness; you bestow the power to heap treasures upon my children--yes! I will load you with jewels, with wealth."He kissed his daughter's forehead, took her hands and pressed them, and testified his joy by fondling caresses which to Marguerite seemed almost obsequious.During the dinner he thought only of her; he looked at her eagerly with the assiduous devotion displayed by a lover to his mistress: if she made a movement, he tried to divine her wish, and rose to fulfil it; he made her ashamed by the youthful eagerness of his attentions, which were painfully out of keeping with his premature old age.To all these cajoleries, Marguerite herself presented the contrast of actual distress, shown sometimes by a word of doubt, sometimes by a glance along the empty shelves of the sideboards in the dining-room.
"Well, well," he said, following her eyes, "in six months we shall fill them again with gold, and marvellous things.You shall be like a queen.Bah! nature herself will belong to us, we shall rise above all created beings--through you, you my Marguerite! Margarita," he said, smiling, "thy name is a prophecy.'Margarita' means a pearl.Sterne says so somewhere.Did you ever read Sterne? Would you like to have a Sterne? it would amuse you.""A pearl, they say, is the result of a disease," she answered; "we have suffered enough already.""Do not be sad; you will make the happiness of those you love; you shall be rich and all-powerful.""Mademoiselle has got such a good heart," said Lemulquinier, whose seamed face stretched itself painfully into a smile.
For the rest of the evening Balthazar displayed to his daughters all the natural graces of his character and the charms of his conversation.Seductive as the serpent, his lips, his eyes, poured out a magnetic fluid; he put forth that power of genius, that gentleness of spirit, which once fascinated Josephine and now drew, as it were, his daughters into his heart.When Emmanuel de Solis came he found, for the first time in many months, the father and the children reunited.The young professor, in spite of his reserve, came under the influence of the scene; for Claes's manners and conversation had recovered their former irresistible seduction!
Men of science, plunged though they be in abysses of thought and ceaselessly employed in studying the moral world, take notice, nevertheless, of the smallest details of the sphere in which they live.More out of date with their surroundings than really absent-minded, they are never in harmony with the life about them; they know and forget all; they prejudge the future in their own minds, prophesy to their own souls, know of an event before it happens, and yet they say nothing of all this.If, in the hush of meditation, they sometimes use their power to observe and recognize that which goes on around them, they are satisfied with having divined its meaning; their occupations hurry them on, and they frequently make false application of the knowledge they have acquired about the things of life.
Sometimes they wake from their social apathy, or they drop from the world of thought to the world of life; at such times they come with well-stored memories, and are by no means strangers to what is happening.
Balthazar, who joined the perspicacity of the heart to that of the brain, knew his daughter's whole past; he knew, or he had guessed, the history of the hidden love that united her with Emmanuel: he now showed this delicately, and sanctioned their affection by taking part in it.It was the sweetest flattery a father could bestow, and the lovers were unable to resist it.The evening passed delightfully,--contrasting with the griefs which threatened the lives of these poor children.When Balthazar retired, after, as we may say, filling his family with light and bathing them with tenderness, Emmanuel de Solis, who had shown some embarrassment of manner, took from his pockets three thousand ducats in gold, the possession of which he had feared to betray.He placed them on the work-table, where Marguerite covered them with some linen she was mending; and then he went to his own house to fetch the rest of the money.When he returned, Felicie had gone to bed.Eleven o'clock struck; Martha, who sat up to undress her mistress, was still with Felicie.
"Where can we hide it?" said Marguerite, unable to resist the pleasure of playing with the gold ducats,--a childish amusement which proved disastrous.
"I will lift this marble pedestal, which is hollow," said Emmanuel;"you can slip in the packages, and the devil himself will not think of looking for them there."Just as Marguerite was making her last trip but one from the work-table to the pedestal, carrying the gold, she suddenly gave a piercing cry, and let fall the packages, the covers of which broke as they fell, and the coins were scattered about the room.Her father stood at the parlor door; the avidity of his eyes terrified her.
"What are you doing," he said, looking first at his daughter, whose terror nailed her to the floor, and then at the young man, who had hastily sprung up,--though his attitude beside the pedestal was sufficiently significant.The rattle of the gold upon the ground was horrible, the scattering of it prophetic.
"I could not be mistaken," said Balthazar, sitting down; "I heard the sound of gold."He was not less agitated than the young people, whose hearts were beating so in unison that their throbs might be heard, like the ticking of a clock, amid the profound silence which suddenly settled on the parlor.
