"Earn your living. Give up the stage."

Thereupon, as time was flying, Desire Delobelle summoned all her courage and called softly:

"Papa-papa"

At his daughter's first summons the great man hurried to her side. He entered Desiree's bedroom, radiant and superb, very erect, his lamp in his hand and a camellia in his b.u.t.tonhole.

"Good evening, Zizi. Aren't you asleep?"

His voice had a joyous intonation that produced a strange effect amid the prevailing gloom. Desiree motioned to him not to speak, pointing to her sleeping mother.

"Put down your lamp--I have something to say to you."

Her voice, broken by emotion, impressed him; and so did her eyes, for they seemed larger than usual, and were lighted by a piercing glance that he had never seen in them.

He approached with something like awe.

"Why, what's the matter, Bichette? Do you feel any worse?"

Desiree replied with a movement of her little pale face that she felt very ill and that she wanted to speak to him very close, very close.

When the great man stood by her pillow, she laid her burning hand on the great man's arm and whispered in his ear. She was very ill, hopelessly ill. She realized fully that she had not long to live.

"Then, father, you will be left alone with mamma. Don't tremble like that. You knew that this thing must come, yes, that it was very near.

But I want to tell you this. When I am gone, I am terribly afraid mamma won't be strong enough to support the family just see how pale and exhausted she is."

The actor looked at his "sainted wife," and seemed greatly surprised to find that she did really look so badly. Then he consoled himself with the selfish remark:

"She never was very strong."

That remark and the tone in which it was made angered Desiree and strengthened her determination. She continued, without pity for the actor's illusions:

"What will become of you two when I am no longer here? Oh! I know that you have great hopes, but it takes them a long while to come to anything. The results you have waited for so long may not arrive for a long time to come; and until then what will you do? Listen! my dear father, I would not willingly hurt you; but it seems to me that at your age, as intelligent as you are, it would be easy for you--I am sure Monsieur Risler Aine would ask nothing better."

She spoke slowly, with an effort, carefully choosing her words, leaving long pauses between every two sentences, hoping always that they might be filled by a movement, an exclamation from her father. But the actor did not understand.

"I think that you would do well," pursued Desiree, timidly, "I think that you would do well to give up--"

"Eh?--what?--what's that?"

She paused when she saw the effect of her words. The old actor's mobile features were suddenly contracted under the lash of violent despair; and tears, genuine tears which he did not even think of concealing behind his hand as they do on the stage, filled his eyes but did not flow, so tightly did his agony clutch him by the throat. The poor devil began to understand.

She murmured twice or thrice:

"To give up--to give up--"

Then her little head fell back upon the pillow, and she died without having dared to tell him what he would do well to give up.

CHAPTER XIX. APPROACHING CLOUDS

One night, near the end of January, old Sigismond Pla.n.u.s, cashier of the house of Fromont Jeune and Risler Aine, was awakened with a start in his little house at Montrouge by the same teasing voice, the same rattling of chains, followed by that fatal cry:

"The notes!"

"That is true," thought the worthy man, sitting up in bed; "day after to-morrow will be the last day of the month. And I have the courage to sleep!"

In truth, a considerable sum of money must be raised: a hundred thousand francs to be paid on two obligations, and at a moment when, for the first time in thirty years, the strong-box of the house of Fromont was absolutely empty. What was to be done? Sigismond had tried several times to speak to Fromont Jeune, but he seemed to shun the burdensome responsibility of business, and when he walked through the offices was always in a hurry, feverishly excited, and seemed neither to see nor hear anything about him. He answered the old cashier's anxious questions, gnawing his moustache:

"All right, all right, my old Pla.n.u.s. Don't disturb yourself; I will look into it." And as he said it, he seemed to be thinking of something else, to be a thousand leagues away from his surroundings. It was rumored in the factory, where his liaison with Madame Risler was no longer a secret to anybody, that Sidonie deceived him, made him very unhappy; and, indeed, his mistress's whims worried him much more than his cashier's anxiety. As for Risler, no one ever saw him; he pa.s.sed his days shut up in a room under the roof, overseeing the mysterious, interminable manufacture of his machines.

This indifference on the part of the employers to the affairs of the factory, this absolute lack of oversight, had led by slow degrees to general demoralization. Some business was still done, because an established house will go on alone for years by force of the first impetus; but what ruin, what chaos beneath that apparent prosperity?

Sigismond knew it better than any one, and as if to see his way more clearly amid the mult.i.tude of painful thoughts which whirled madly through his brain, the cashier lighted his candle, sat down on his bed, and thought, "Where were they to find that hundred thousand francs?"

"Take the notes back. I have no funds to meet them."

No, no! That was not possible. Any sort of humiliation was preferable to that.

"Well, it's decided. I will go to-morrow," sighed the poor cashier.

And he tossed about in torture, unable to close an eye until morning.

Notwithstanding the late hour, Georges Fromont had not yet retired. He was sitting by the fire, with his head in his hands, in the blind and dumb concentration due to irreparable misfortune, thinking of Sidonie, of that terrible Sidonie who was asleep at that moment on the floor above. She was positively driving him mad. She was false to him, he was sure of it,--she was false to him with the Toulousan tenor, that Cazabon, alias Cazaboni, whom Madame Dobson had brought to the house.

For a long time he had implored her not to receive that man; but Sidonie would not listen to him, and on that very day, speaking of a grand ball she was about to give, she had declared explicitly that nothing should prevent her inviting her tenor.

"Then he's your lover!" Georges had exclaimed angrily, his eyes gazing into hers.

She had not denied it; she had not even turned her eyes away.

And to think that he had sacrificed everything to that woman--his fortune, his honor, even his lovely Claire, who lay sleeping with her child in the adjoining room--a whole lifetime of happiness within reach of his hand, which he had spurned for that vile creature! Now she had admitted that she did not love him, that she loved another. And he, the coward, still longed for her. In heaven's name, what potion had she given him?

Carried away by indignation that made the blood boil in his veins, Georges Fromont started from his armchair and strode feverishly up and down the room, his footsteps echoing in the silence of the sleeping house like living insomnia. The other was asleep upstairs. She could sleep by favor of her heedless, remorseless nature. Perhaps, too, she was thinking of her Cazaboni.

When that thought pa.s.sed through his mind, Georges had a mad longing to go up, to wake Risler, to tell him everything and destroy himself with her. Really that deluded husband was too idiotic! Why did he not watch her more closely? She was pretty enough, yes, and vicious enough, too, for every precaution to be taken with her.

And it was while he was struggling amid such cruel and unfruitful reflections as these that the devil of anxiety whispered in his ear:

"The notes! the notes!"

The miserable wretch! In his wrath he had entirely forgotten them.

And yet he had long watched the approach of that terrible last day of January. How many times, between two a.s.signations, when his mind, free for a moment from thoughts of Sidonie, recurred to his business, to the realities of life-how many times had he said to himself, "That day will be the end of everything!" But, as with all those who live in the delirium of intoxication, his cowardice convinced him that it was too late to mend matters, and he returned more quickly and more determinedly to his evil courses, in order to forget, to divert his thoughts.

But that was no longer possible. He saw the impending disaster clearly, in its full meaning; and Sigismond Pla.n.u.s's wrinkled, solemn face rose before him with its sharply cut features, whose absence of expression softened their harshness, and his light German-Swiss eyes, which had haunted him for many weeks with their impa.s.sive stare.

Well, no, he had not the hundred thousand francs, nor did he know where to get them.

The crisis which, a few hours before, seemed to him a chaos, an eddying whirl in which he could see nothing distinctly and whose very confusion was a source of hope, appeared to him at that moment with appalling distinctness. An empty cash-box, closed doors, notes protested, ruin, are the phantoms he saw whichever way he turned. And when, on top of all the rest, came the thought of Sidonie's treachery, the wretched, desperate man, finding nothing to cling to in that shipwreck, suddenly uttered a sob, a cry of agony, as if appealing for help to some higher power.