第70章

Marguerite superintended the buildings, and looked after her contracts and leases with the good sense, activity, and perseverance, which women know so well how to call up when they are actuated by a strong sentiment.By the fifth year she was able to apply thirty thousand francs from the rental of the farms, together with the income from the Funds standing in her brother's name, and the proceeds of her father's property, towards paying off the mortgages on that property, and repairing the devastation which her father's passion had wrought in the old mansion of the Claes.This redemption went on more rapidly as the interest account decreased.Emmanuel de Solis persuaded Marguerite to take the remaining one hundred thousand francs of his uncle's bequest, and by joining to it twenty thousand francs of his own savings, pay off in the third year of her management a large slice of the debts.This life of courage, privation, and endurance was never relaxed for five years; but all went well,--everything prospered under the administration and influence of Marguerite Claes.

Gabriel, now holding an appointment under government as engineer in the department of Roads and Bridges, made a rapid fortune, aided by his great-uncle, in a canal which he was able to construct; moreover, he succeeded in pleasing his cousin Mademoiselle Conyncks, the idol of her father, and one of the richest heiresses in Flanders.In 1824 the whole Claes property was free, and the house in the rue de Paris had repaired its losses.Pierquin made a formal application to Balthazar for the hand of Felicie, and Monsieur de Solis did the same for that of Marguerite.

At the beginning of January, 1825, Marguerite and Monsieur Conyncks left Douai to bring home the exiled father, whose return was eagerly desired by all, and who had sent in his resignation that he might return to his family and crown their happiness by his presence.

Marguerite had often expressed a regret at not being able to replace the pictures which had formerly adorned the gallery and the reception-rooms, before the day when her father would return as master of his house.In her absence Pierquin and Monsieur de Solis plotted with Felicie to prepare a surprise which should make the younger sister a sharer in the restoration of the House of Claes.The two bought a number of fine pictures, which they presented to Felicie to decorate the gallery.Monsieur Conyncks had thought of the same thing.Wishing to testify to Marguerite the satisfaction he had taken in her noble conduct and in the self-devotion with which she had fulfilled her mother's dying mandate, he arranged that fifty of his fine pictures, among them several of those which Balthazar had formerly sold, should be brought to Douai in Marguerite's absence, so that the Claes gallery might once more be complete.

During the years that had elapsed since Balthazar Claes left his home, Marguerite had visited her father several times, accompanied by her sister or by Jean.Each time she had found him more and more changed;but since her last visit old age had come upon Balthazar with alarming symptoms, the gravity of which was much increased by the parsimony with which he lived that he might spend the greater part of his salary in experiments the results of which forever disappointed him.Though he was only sixty-five years of age, he appeared to be eighty.His eyes were sunken in their orbits, his eyebrows had whitened, only a few hairs remained as a fringe around his skull; he allowed his beard to grow, and cut it off with scissors when its length annoyed him; he was bent like a field-laborer, and the condition of his clothes had reached a degree of wretchedness which his decrepitude now rendered hideous.Thought still animated that noble face, whose features were scarcely discernible under its wrinkles; but the fixity of the eyes, a certain desperation of manner, a restless uneasiness, were all diagnostics of insanity, or rather of many forms of insanity.

Sometimes a flash of hope gave him the look of a monomaniac; at other times impatient anger at not seizing a secret which flitted before his eyes like a will o' the wisp brought symptoms of madness into his face; or sudden bursts of maniacal laughter betrayed his irrationality: but during the greater part of the time, he was sunk in a state of complete depression which combined all the phases of insanity in the cold melancholy of an idiot.However fleeting and imperceptible these symptoms may have been to the eye of strangers, they were, unfortunately, only too plain to those who had known Balthazar Claes sublime in goodness, noble in heart, stately in person,--a Claes of whom, alas, scarcely a vestige now remained.

Lemulquinier, grown old and wasted like his master with incessant toil, had not, like him, been subjected to the ravages of thought.The expression of the old valet's face showed a singular mixture of anxiety and admiration for his master which might easily have misled an onlooker.Though he listened to Balthazar's words with respect, and followed his every movement with tender solicitude, he took charge of the servant of science very much as a mother takes care of her child, and even seemed to protect him, because in the vulgar details of life, to which Balthazar gave no thought, he actually did protect him.These old men, wrapped in one idea, confident of the reality of their hope, stirred by the same breath, the one representing the shell, the other the soul of their mutual existence, formed a spectacle at once tender and distressing.

When Marguerite and Monsieur Conyncks arrived, they found Claes living at an inn.His successor had not been kept waiting, and was already in possession of his office.