must go to Ambroise’s to warn my mother and father. Since he still breathes, perhaps they will arrive soon enough to embrace him.”
“Shall I go to fetch them?” Beauchene goodnaturedly inquired.
“No, no! thanks. I did at first think of asking that service of you, but I have reflected. Nobody but myself can break this horrible news to mamma. And nothing must be done as yet with regard to Charlotte. We will see about that by and by, when I come back. I only hope that death will have a little patience, so that I may find my poor brother still alive.”
He leant forward and kissed Blaise, who with his eyes closed remained motionless, still breathing faintly. Then distractedly Denis printed another kiss upon his hand and hurried off.
Constance meantime was busying herself, calling the maid, and requesting her to bring some warm water in order that they might wash the sufferer’s bloodstained brow. It was impossible to think of taking off his jacket; they had to content themselves with doing the little they could to improve his appearance pending the arrival of the doctor. And during these preparations, Beauchene, haunted, worried by the accident, again began to speak of it.
“It is incomprehensible. One can hardly believe such a stupid mischance to be possible. Down below the transmission gearing gets out of order, and this prevents the mechanician from sending the trap up again. Then, up above, Bonnard gets angry, calls, and at last decides to go down in a fury when he finds that nobody answers him. Then Morange arrives, flies into a temper, and goes down in his turn, exasperated at receiving no answer to his calls for Bonnard. Poor Bonnard! he’s sobbing; he wanted to kill himself when he saw the fine result of his absence.”
At this point Beauchene abruptly broke off and turned to Constance. “But what about you?” he asked. “Morange told me that he had left you up above near the trap.”
She was standing in front of her husband, in the full light which came through the window. And again did her eyelids beat while a little nervous twinge slightly twisted her mouth on the left side. That was all.
“I? Why I had gone down the passage. I came back here at once, as Morange knows very well.”
A moment previously, Morange, annihilated, his legs failing him, had sunk upon a chair. Incapable of rendering any help, he sat there silent, awaiting the end. When he heard Constance lie in that quiet fashion, he looked at her. The assassin was herself, he no longer doubted it. And at that moment he felt a craving to proclaim it, to cry it aloud.
“Why, he thought that he had begged you to remain there on the watch,” Beauchene resumed, addressing his wife.
“At all events his words never reached me,” Constance duly answered. “Should I have moved if he had asked me to do that?” And turning towards the accountant she, in her turn, had the courage to fix her pale eyes upon him. “Just remember, Morange, you rushed down like a madman, you said nothing to me, and I went on my way.”
Beneath those pale eyes, keen as steel, which dived into his own, Morange was seized with abject fear. All his weakness, his cowardice of heart returned. Could he accuse her of such an atrocious crime? He pictured the consequences. And then, too, he no longer knew if he were right or not; his poor maniacal mind was lost.
“It is possible,” he stammered, “I may simply have thought I spoke. And it must be so since it can’t be otherwise.”
Then he relapsed into silence with a gesture of utter lassitude. The complicity demanded was accepted. For a moment he thought of rising to see if Blaise still breathed; but he did not dare. Deep peacefulness fell upon the room.
Ah! how great was the anguish, the torture in the cab, when Blaise brought Mathieu and Marianne back with him. He had at first spoken to them simply of an accident, a rather serious fall. But as the vehicle rolled along he had lost his self-possession, weeping and confessing the truth in response to their despairing questions. Thus, when they at last reached the factory, they doubted no longer, their child was dead. Work had just been stopped, and they recalled their visit to the place on the morrow of Maurice’s death. They were returning to the same stillness, the same grave-like silence. All the rumbling life had suddenly ceased, the machines were cold and mute, the workshops darkened and deserted. Not a sound remained, not a soul, not a puff of that steam which was like the very breath of the place. He who had watched over its work was dead, and it was dead like him. Then their affright increased when they passed from the factory to the house amid that absolute solitude, the gallery steeped in slumber, the staircase quivering, all the doors upstairs open, as in some uninhabited place long since deserted. In the anteroom they found no servant. And it was indeed in the same tragedy of sudden death that they again participated, only this time it was their own son whom they were to find in the same room, on the same bed, frigid, pale, and lifeless.
Blaise had just expired. Boutan was there at the head of the bed, holding the inanimate hand in which the final pulsation of blood was dying away. And when he saw Mathieu and Marianne, who had instinctively crossed the disorderly drawingroom, rushing into that bedchamber whose odor of nihility they recognized, he could but murmur in a voice full of sobs:
“My poor friends, embrace him; you will yet have a little of his last breath.”
That breath had scarce ceased, and the unhappy mother, the unhappy father, had already sprung forward, kissing those lips that exhaled the final quiver of life, and sobbing and crying their distress aloud. Their Blaise was dead. Like Rose, he had died suddenly, a year later, on a day of festivity. Their heart wound, scarce closed as yet, opened afresh with a tragic rending. Amid their long felicity this was the second time that they were thus terribly recalled to human wretchedness; this was the second hatchet stroke which fell on the flourishing, healthy, happy family. And their fright increased. Had they not yet finished paying their accumulated debt to misfortune? Was slow destruction now arriving with blow following blow? Already since Rose had quitted them, her bier strewn with flowers, they had feared to see their prosperity and fruitfulness checked and interrupted now that there was an open breach. And to-day, through that bloody breach, their Blaise departed in the most frightful of fashions, crushed as it were by the jealous anger of destiny. And now what other of their children would be torn away from them on the morrow to pay in turn the ransom of their happiness?
Mathieu and Marianne long remained sobbing on their knees beside the bed. Constance stood a few paces away, silent, with an air of quivering desolation. Beauchene, as if to combat that fear of death which made him shiver, had a moment previously seated himself at the little writing-table formerly used by Maurice, which had been left in the drawingroom like a souvenir. And he then strove to draw up a notice to his workpeople, to inform them that the factory would remain closed until the day after the funeral. He was vainly seeking words when he perceived Denis coming out of the bedroom, where he had wept all his tears and set his whole heart in the last kiss which he had bestowed on his departed brother. Beauchene called him, as if desirous of diverting him from his gloomy thoughts. “There, sit down here and continue this,” said he.
Constance, in her turn entering the drawingroom, heard those words. They were virtually the same as the words which her husband had pronounced when making Blaise seat himself at that same table of Maurice’s, on the day when he had given him the place of that poor boy, whose body almost seemed to be still lying on the bed in the adjoining room. And she recoiled with fright on seeing Denis seated there and writing. Had not Blaise resuscitated? Even as she had mistaken the twins one for the other that very afternoon on rising from the gay baptismal lunch, so now again she saw Blaise in Denis, the pair of them so similar physically that in former times their parents had only been able to distinguish them by the different color of their eyes. And thus it was as if Blaise returned and resumed his place; Blaise, who would possess the works although she had killed him. She had made a mistake; dead as he was,
