by chance. I tell you, it is destiny awaking and striking!'
The story was indeed curious. Prematurely aged though she was, Seraphine, amid her growing insanity, continued to lead a wild, rackety life, and the strangest stories were related of her. A singular caprice of hers, given her own viciousness, was to join, as a lady patroness, a society whose purpose was to succor and moralize young offenders on their release from prison. And it was in this wise that she had become acquainted with Alexandre- Honore, now a big fellow of two-and-thirty, who had just completed a term of six years' imprisonment. He had ended by telling her his true story, speaking of Rougemont, naming Norine his mother, and relating the fruitless efforts that he had made in former years to discover his father, who was some immensely wealthy man. In the midst of it, Seraphine suddenly understood everything, and in particular why it was that his face had seemed so familiar to her. His striking resemblance to Beauchene sufficed to throw a vivid light upon the question of his parentage. For fear of worry, she herself told him nothing, but as she remembered how passionately Constance had at one time striven to find him, she went to her and acquainted her with her discovery.
'He knows nothing as yet,' Constance explained to Morange. 'My sister-in-law will simply send him here as if to a lady friend who will find him a good situation. It appears that he now asks nothing better than to work. If he has misconducted himself, the unhappy fellow, there have been many excuses for it! And, besides, I will answer for him as soon as he is in my hands; he will then only do as I tell him.'
All that Constance knew respecting Alexandre's recent years was a story which he had concocted and retailed to Seraphine-a story to the effect that he owed his long term of imprisonment to a woman, the real culprit, who had been his mistress and whom he had refused to denounce. Of course that imprisonment, whatever its cause, only accounted for six out of the twelve years which had elapsed since his disappearance, and the six others, of which he said nothing, might conceal many an act of ignominy and crime. On the other hand, imprisonment at least seemed to have had a restful effect on him; he had emerged from his long confinement, calmer and keener-witted, with the intention of spoiling his life no longer. And cleansed, clad, and schooled by Seraphine, he had almost become a presentable young man.
Morange at last looked up from the glowing embers, at which he had been staring so fixedly.
'Well, what do you want to do with him?' he inquired. 'Does he write a decent hand?'
'Yes, his handwriting is good. No doubt, however, he knows very little. It is for that reason that I wish to intrust him to you. You will polish him up for me and make him conversant with everything. My desire is that in a year or two he should know everything about the factory, like a master.'
At that last word which enlightened him, the accountant's good sense suddenly awoke. Amid the manias which were wrecking his mind, he had remained a man of figures with a passion for arithmetical accuracy, and he protested.
'Well, madame, since you wish me to assist you, pray tell me everything; tell me in what work we can employ this young man here. Really now, you surely cannot hope through him to regain possession of the factory, re- purchase the shares, and become sole owner of the place?'
Then, with the greatest logic and clearness, he showed how foolish such a dream would be, enumerating figures and fully setting forth how large a sum of money would be needed to indemnify Denis, who was installed in the place like a conqueror.
'Besides, dear madame, I don't understand why you should take that young man rather than another. He has no legal rights, as you must be aware. He could never be anything but a stranger here, and I should prefer an intelligent, honest man, acquainted with our line of business.'
Constance had set to work poking the fire logs with the tongs. When she at last looked up she thrust her face towards the other's, and said in a low voice, but violently: 'Alexandre is my husband's son, he is the heir. He is not the stranger. The stranger is that Denis, that son of the Froments, who has robbed us of our property! You rend my heart; you make it bleed, my friend, by forcing me to tell you this.'
The answer she thus gave was the answer of a conservative bourgeoise, who held that it would be more just if the inheritance should go to an illegitimate scion of the house rather than to a stranger. Doubtless the woman, the wife, the mother within her, bled even as she herself acknowledged, but she sacrificed everything to her rancor; she would drive the stranger away even if in doing so her own flesh should be lacerated. Then, too, it vaguely seemed to her that her husband's son must be in some degree her own, since his father was likewise the father of the son to whom she had given birth, and who was dead. Besides, she would make that young fellow her son; she would direct him, she would compel him to be hers, to work through her and for her.
'You wish to know how I shall employ him in the place,' she resumed. 'I myself don't know. It is evident that I shall not easily find the hundreds of thousands of francs which may be required. Your figures are accurate, and it is possible that we may never have the money to buy back the property. But, all the same, why not fight, why not try? And, besides-I will admit it-suppose we are vanquished, well then, so much the worse for the other. For I assure you that if this young man will only listen to me, he will then become the agent of destruction, the avenger and punisher, implanted in the factory to wreck it!'
With a gesture which summoned ruin athwart the walls, she finished expressing her abominable hopes. Among her vague plans, reared upon hate, was that of employing the wretched Alexandre as a destructive weapon, whose ravages would bring her some relief. Should she lose all other battles, that would assuredly be the final one. And she had attained to this pitch of madness through the boundless despair in which the loss of her only son had plunged her, withered, consumed by a love which she could not content, then demented, perverted to the point of crime.
Morange shuddered when, with her stubborn fierceness, she concluded: 'For twelve years past I have been waiting for a stroke of destiny, and here it is! I would rather perish than not draw from it the last chance of good fortune which it brings me!'
This meant that Denis's ruin was decided on, and would be effected if destiny were willing. And the old accountant could picture the disaster: innocent children struck down in the person of their father, a great and most unjust catastrophe, which made his kindly heart rise in rebellion. Would he allow that fresh crime to be committed without shouting aloud all that he knew? Doubtless the memory of the other crime, the first one, the monstrous buried crime about which they both kept silence, returned at that horrible moment and shone out disturbingly in his eyes, for she herself shuddered as if she could see it there, while with the view of mastering him she gazed at him fixedly. For a moment, as they peered into one another's eyes, they lived once more beside the murderous trap, and shivered in the cold gust which rose from the abyss. And this time again Morange, like a poor weak man overpowered by a woman's will, was vanquished, and did not speak.
'So it is agreed, my friend,' she softly resumed. 'I rely on you to take Alexandre, in the first place, as a clerk. You can see him here one evening at five o'clock, after dusk, for I do not wish him to know at first what interest I take in him. Shall we say the day after to-morrow?'
'Yes, the evening of the day after to-morrow, if it pleases you, dear madame.'
On the morrow Morange displayed so much agitation that the wife of the door-porter of the house where he resided, a woman who was ever watching him, imparted her fears to her husband. The old gentleman was certainly going to have an attack, for he had forgotten to put on his slippers when he came downstairs to fetch some water in the morning; and, besides, he went on talking to himself, and looked dreadfully upset. The most extraordinary incident of the day, however, was that after lunch Morange quite forgot himself, and was an hour late in returning to his office, a lack of punctuality which had no precedent, which, in the memory of everybody at the works, had never occurred before.
As a matter of fact, Morange had been carried away as by a storm, and, walking straight before him, had once more found himself on the Grenelle bridge, where Denis had one day saved him from the fascination of the water. And some force, some impulse had carried him again to the very same spot, and made him lean over the same parapet, gazing, in the same way as previously, at the flowing river. Ever since the previous evening he had been repeating the same words, words which he stammered in an undertone, and which haunted and tortured him. 'Would he allow that fresh crime to be committed without shouting aloud what he knew?' No doubt it was those words, of which he could not rid himself, that had made him forget to put on his slippers in the morning, and that had just now again dazed him to the point of preventing him from returning to the factory, as if he no longer recognized the entrance as he passed it. And if he were at present leaning over that water, had he not been impelled thither by an unconscious desire to have done with all his troubles, an instinctive hope of drowning the torment into which he was thrown by those stubbornly recurring words? Down below, at the bottom of the river, those words would at last cease; he would no longer repeat them; he would no longer hear them urging him to an
