Very much later, in truth, for M. Chebe had reflected:

"My son-in-law is so good-natured! If I leave him with this swindler, who knows what he may get out of him?"

And he remained on guard. The actor was furious. It was impossible to postpone the matter to some other day, for Risler told them that he was going the next day to spend the next month at Savigny.

"A month at Savigny!" exclaimed M. Chebe, incensed at the thought of his son-in-law escaping him. "How about business?"

"Oh! I shall come to Paris every day with Georges. Monsieur Gardinois is very anxious to see his little Sidonie."

M. Chebe shook his head. He considered it very imprudent. Business is business. A man ought to be on the spot, always on the spot, in the breach. Who could say?--the factory might take fire in the night. And he repeated sententiously: "The eye of the master, my dear fellow, the eye of the master," while the actor--who was little better pleased by this intended departure--opened his great eyes; giving them an expression at once cunning and authoritative, the veritable expression of the eye of the master.

At last, about midnight, the last Montrouge omnibus bore away the tyrannical father-in-law, and Delobelle was able to speak.

"Let us first look at the prospectus," he said, preferring not to attack the question of figures at once; and with his eyegla.s.ses on his nose, he began, in a declamatory tone, always upon the stage: "When one considers coolly the decrepitude which dramatic art has reached in France, when one measures the distance that separates the stage of Moliere--"

There were several pages like that. Risler listened, puffing at his pipe, afraid to stir, for the reader looked at him every moment over his eyegla.s.ses, to watch the effect of his phrases. Unfortunately, right in the middle of the prospectus, the cafe closed. The lights were extinguished; they must go.--And the estimates?--It was agreed that they should read them as they walked along. They stopped at every gaslight.

The actor displayed his figures. So much for the hall, so much for the lighting, so much for poor-rates, so much for the actors. On that question of the actors he was firm.

"The best point about the affair," he said, "is that we shall have no leading man to pay. Our leading man will be Bibi." (When Delobelle mentioned himself, he commonly called himself Bibi.) "A leading man is paid twenty thousand francs, and as we have none to pay, it's just as if you put twenty thousand francs in your pocket. Tell me, isn't that true?"

Risler did not reply. He had the constrained manner, the wandering eyes of the man whose thoughts are elsewhere. The reading of the estimates being concluded, Delobelle, dismayed to find that they were drawing near the corner of the Rue des Vieilles-Haudriettes, put the question squarely. Would Risler advance the money, yes or no?

"Well!--no," said Risler, inspired by heroic courage, which he owed princ.i.p.ally to the proximity of the factory and to the thought that the welfare of his family was at stake.

Delobelle was astounded. He had believed that the business was as good as done, and he stared at his companion, intensely agitated, his eyes as big as saucers, and rolling his papers in his hand.

"No," Risler continued, "I can't do what you ask, for this reason."

Thereupon the worthy man, slowly, with his usual heaviness of speech, explained that he was not rich. Although a partner in a wealthy house, he had no available funds. Georges and he drew a certain sum from the concern each month; then, when they struck a balance at the end of the year they divided the profits. It had cost him a good deal to begin housekeeping: all his savings. It was still four months before the inventory. Where was he to obtain the 30,000 francs to be paid down at once for the theatre? And then, beyond all that, the affair could not be successful.

"Why, it must succeed. Bibi will be there!" As he spoke, poor Bibi drew himself up to his full height; but Risler was determined, and all Bibi's arguments met the same refusal--"Later, in two or three years, I don't say something may not be done."

The actor fought for a long time, yielding his ground inch by inch. He proposed revising his estimates. The thing might be done cheaper. "It would still be too dear for me," Risler interrupted. "My name doesn't belong to me. It is a part of the firm. I have no right to pledge it.

Imagine my going into bankruptcy!" His voice trembled as he uttered the word.

"But if everything is in my name," said Delobelle, who had no superst.i.tion. He tried everything, invoked the sacred interests of art, went so far as to mention the fascinating actresses whose alluring glances--Risler laughed aloud.

"Come, come, you rascal! What's that you're saying? You forget that we're both married men, and that it is very late and our wives are expecting us. No ill-will, eh?--This is not a refusal, you understand.--By the way, come and see me after the inventory. We will talk it over again. Ah! there's Pere Achille putting out his gas.--I must go in. Good-night."

It was after one o'clock when the actor returned home. The two women were waiting for him, working as usual, but with a sort of feverish activity which was strange to them. Every moment the great scissors that Mamma Delobelle used to cut the bra.s.s wire were seized with strange fits of trembling, and Desiree's little fingers, as she mounted an insect, moved so fast that it made one dizzy to watch them. Even the long feathers of the little birds scattered about on the table before her seemed more brilliant, more richly colored, than on other days. It was because a lovely visitor named Hope had called upon them that evening.

She had made the tremendous effort required to climb five dark flights of stairs, and had opened the door of the little room to cast a luminous glance therein. However much you may have been deceived in life, those magic gleams always dazzle you.

"Oh! if your father could only succeed!" said Mamma Delobelle from time to time, as if to sum up a whole world of happy thoughts to which her reverie abandoned itself.

"He will succeed, mamma, never fear. Monsieur Risler is so kind, I will answer for him. And Sidonie is very fond of us, too, although since she was married she does seem to neglect her old friends a little. But we must make allowance for the difference in our positions. Besides, I never shall forget what she did for me."

And, at the thought of what Sidonie had done for her, the little cripple applied herself with even more feverish energy to her work. Her electrified fingers moved with redoubled swiftness. You would have said that they were running after some fleeing, elusive thing, like happiness, for example, or the love of some one who loves you not.

"What was it that she did for you?" her mother would naturally have asked her; but at that moment she was only slightly interested in what her daughter said. She was thinking exclusively of her great man.

"No! do you think so, my dear? Just suppose your father should have a theatre of his own and act again as in former days. You don't remember; you were too small then. But he had tremendous success, no end of recalls. One night, at Alencon, the subscribers to the theatre gave him a gold wreath. Ah! he was a brilliant man in those days, so lighthearted, so glad to be alive. Those who see him now don't know him, poor man, misfortune has changed him so. Oh, well! I feel sure that all that's necessary is a little success to make him young and happy again.

And then there's money to be made managing theatres. The manager at Nantes had a carriage. Can you imagine us with a carriage? Can you imagine it, I say? That's what would be good for you. You could go out, leave your armchair once in a while. Your father would take us into the country. You would see the water and the trees you have had such a longing to see."

"Oh! the trees," murmured the pale little recluse, trembling from head to foot.

At that moment the street door of the house was closed violently, and M.

Delobelle's measured step echoed in the vestibule. There was a moment of speechless, breathless anguish. The women dared not look at each other, and mamma's great scissors trembled so that they cut the wire crooked.

The poor devil had unquestionably received a terrible blow. His illusions crushed, the humiliation of a refusal, the jests of his comrades, the bill at the cafe where he had breakfasted on credit during the whole period of his managership, a bill which must be paid--all these things occurred to him in the silence and gloom of the five flights he had to climb. His heart was torn. Even so, the actor's nature was so strong in him that he deemed it his duty to envelop his distress, genuine as it was, in a conventional tragic mask.

As he entered, he paused, cast an ominous glance around the work-room, at the table covered with work, his little supper waiting for him in a corner, and the two dear, anxious faces looking up at him with glistening eyes. He stood a full minute without speaking--and you know how long a minute's silence seems on the stage; then he took three steps forward, sank upon a low chair beside the table, and exclaimed in a hissing voice:

"Ah! I am accursed!"

At the same time he dealt the table such a terrible blow with his fist that the "birds and insects for ornament" flew to the four corners of the room. His terrified wife rose and timidly approached him, while Desiree half rose in her armchair with an expression of nervous agony that distorted all her features.

Lolling in his chair, his arms hanging despondently by his sides, his head on his chest, the actor soliloquized--a fragmentary soliloquy, interrupted by sighs and dramatic hiccoughs, overflowing with imprecations against the pitiless, selfish bourgeois, those monsters to whom the artist gives his flesh and blood for food and drink.

Then he reviewed his whole theatrical life, his early triumphs, the golden wreath from the subscribers at Alencon, his marriage to this "sainted woman," and he pointed to the poor creature who stood by his side, with tears streaming from her eyes, and trembling lips, nodding her head dotingly at every word her husband said.

In very truth, a person who never had heard of the ill.u.s.trious Delobelle could have told his history in detail after that long monologue. He recalled his arrival in Paris, his humiliations, his privations. Alas!

he was not the one who had known privation. One had but to look at his full, rotund face beside the thin, drawn faces of the two women. But the actor did not look so closely.

"Oh!" he said, continuing to intoxicate himself with declamatory phrases, "oh! to have struggled so long. For ten years, fifteen years, have I struggled on, supported by these devoted creatures, fed by them."

"Papa, papa, hush," cried Desiree, clasping her hands.

"Yes, fed by them, I say--and I do not blush for it. For I accept all this devotion in the name of sacred art. But this is too much. Too much has been put upon me. I renounce the stage!"

"Oh! my dear, what is that you say?" cried Mamma Delobelle, rushing to his side.

"No, leave me. I have reached the end of my strength. They have slain the artist in me. It is all over. I renounce the stage."

If you had seen the two women throw their arms about him then, implore him to struggle on, prove to him that he had no right to give up, you could not have restrained your tears. But Delobelle resisted.

He yielded at last, however, and promised to continue the fight a little while, since it was their wish; but it required many an entreaty and caress to carry the point.

CHAPTER IX. AT SAVIGNY

It was a great misfortune, that sojourn of the two families at Savigny for a month.

After an interval of two years Georges and Sidonie found themselves side by side once more on the old estate, too old not to be always like itself, where the stones, the ponds, the trees, always the same, seemed to cast derision upon all that changes and pa.s.ses away. A renewal of intercourse under such circ.u.mstances must have been disastrous to two natures that were not of a very different stamp, and far more virtuous than those two.

As for Claire, she never had been so happy; Savigny never had seemed so lovely to her. What joy to walk with her child over the greensward where she herself had walked as a child; to sit, a young mother, upon the shaded seats from which her own mother had looked on at her childish games years before; to go, leaning on Georges's arm, to seek out the nooks where they had played together. She felt a tranquil contentment, the overflowing happiness of placid lives which enjoy their bliss in silence; and all day long her skirts swept along the paths, guided by the tiny footsteps of the child, her cries and her demands upon her mother's care.