第56章

"All is over!" cried Marguerite, "the time has come."She sent for her father, and walked up and down the parlor with hasty steps, talking to herself:--"A hundred thousand francs!" she cried."I must find them, or see my father in prison.What am I to do?"Balthazar did not come.Weary of waiting for him, Marguerite went up to the laboratory.As she entered she saw him in the middle of an immense, brilliantly-lighted room, filled with machinery and dusty glass vessels: here and there were books, and tables encumbered with specimens and products ticketed and numbered.On all sides the disorder of scientific pursuits contrasted strongly with Flemish habits.This litter of retorts and vaporizers, metals, fantastically colored crystals, specimens hooked upon the walls or lying on the furnaces, surrounded the central figure of Balthazar Claes, without a coat, his arms bare like those of a workman, his breast exposed, and showing the white hair which covered it.His eyes were gazing with horrible fixity at a pneumatic trough.The receiver of this instrument was covered with a lens made of double convex glasses, the space between the glasses being filled with alchohol, which focussed the light coming through one of the compartments of the rose-window of the garret.The shelf of the receiver communicated with the wire of an immense galvanic battery.Lemulquinier, busy at the moment in moving the pedestal of the machine, which was placed on a movable axle so as to keep the lens in a perpendicular direction to the rays of the sun, turned round, his face black with dust, and called out,--"Ha! mademoiselle, don't come in."

The aspect of her father, half-kneeling beside the instrument, and receiving the full strength of the sunlight upon his head, the protuberances of his skull, its scanty hairs resembling threads of silver, his face contracted by the agonies of expectation, the strangeness of the objects that surrounded him, the obscurity of parts of the vast garret from which fantastic engines seemed about to spring, all contributed to startle Marguerite, who said to herself, in terror,--"He is mad!"

Then she went up to him and whispered in his ear, "Send away Lemulquinier.""No, no, my child; I want him: I am in the midst of an experiment no one has yet thought of.For the last three days we have been watching for every ray of sun.I now have the means of submitting metals, in a complete vacuum, to concentrated solar fires and to electric currents.

At this very moment the most powerful action a chemist can employ is about to show results which I alone--""My father, instead of vaporizing metals you should employ them in paying your notes of hand--""Wait, wait!"

"Monsieur Merkstus has been here, father; and he must have ten thousand francs by four o'clock.""Yes, yes, presently.True, I did sign a little note which is payable this month.I felt sure I should have found the Absolute.Good God! If I could only have a July sun the experiment would be successful."He grasped his head and sat down on an old cane chair; a few tears rolled from his eyes.

"Monsieur is quite right," said Lemulquinier; "it is all the fault of that rascally sun which is too feeble,--the coward, the lazy thing!"Master and valet paid no further attention to Marguerite.

"Leave us, Mulquinier," she said.

"Ah! I see a new experiment!" cried Claes.

"Father, lay aside your experiments," said his daughter, when they were alone."You have one hundred thousand francs to pay, and we have not a penny.Leave your laboratory; your honor is in question.What will become of you if you are put in prison? Will you soil your white hairs and the name of Claes with the disgrace of bankruptcy? I will not allow it.I shall have strength to oppose your madness; it would be dreadful to see you without bread in your old age.Open your eyes to our position; see reason at last!""Madness!" cried Balthazar, struggling to his feet.He fixed his luminous eyes upon his daughter, crossed his arms on his breast, and repeated the word "Madness!" so majestically that Marguerite trembled.

"Ah!" he cried, "your mother would never have uttered that word to me.

She was not ignorant of the importance of my researches; she learned a science to understand me; she recognized that I toiled for the human race; she knew there was nothing sordid or selfish in my aims.The feelings of a loving wife are higher, I see it now, than filial affection.Yes, Love is above all other feelings.See reason!" he went on, striking his breast."Do I lack reason? Am I not myself? You say we are poor; well, my daughter, I choose it to be so.I am your father, obey me.I will make you rich when I please.Your fortune? it is a pittance! When I find the solvent of carbon I will fill your parlor with diamonds, and they are but a scintilla of what I seek.You can well afford to wait while I consume my life in superhuman efforts.""Father, I have no right to ask an account of the four millions you have already engulfed in this fatal garret.I will not speak to you of my mother whom you killed.If I had a husband, I should love him, doubtless, as she loved you; I should be ready to sacrifice all to him, as she sacrificed all for you.I have obeyed her orders in giving myself wholly to you; I have proved it in not marrying and compelling you to render an account of your guardianship.Let us dismiss the past and think of the present.I am here now to represent the necessity which you have created for yourself.You must have money to meet your notes--do you understand me? There is nothing left to seize here but the portrait of your ancestor, the Claes martyr.I come in the name of my mother, who felt herself too feeble to defend her children against their father; she ordered me to resist you.I come in the name of my brothers and my sister; I come, father, in the name of all the Claes, and I command you to give up your experiments, or earn the means of pursuing them hereafter, if pursue them you must.If you arm yourself with the power of your paternity, which you employ only for our destruction, I have on my side your ancestors and your honor, whose voice is louder than that of chemistry.The Family is greater than Science.I have been too long your daughter.""And you choose to be my executioner," he said, in a feeble voice.

Marguerite turned and fled away, that she might not abdicate the part she had just assumed: she fancied she heard again her mother's voice saying to her, "Do not oppose your father too much; love him well."