“Can he have been putting money by?” he asked himself. “Or is he scheming out, at this moment, some way of not paying me?”
With this notion in his head, he tried to find out whether David had any money with him; he wanted to be paid something on account. The old man’s inquisitiveness roused his son’s distrust; David remained close buttoned up to the chin.
Next day, old Séchard made the apprentice move all his own household stuff up into the attic until such time as an empty market cart could take it out on the return journey into the country; and David entered into possession of three bare, unfurnished rooms on the day that saw him installed in the printing-house, without one sou wherewith to pay his men’s wages. When he asked his father, as a partner, to contribute his share towards the working expenses, the old man pretended not to understand. He had found the printing-house, he said, and he was not bound to find the money too. He had paid his share. Pressed close by his son’s reasoning, he answered that when he himself had paid Rouzeau’s widow he had not had a penny left. If he, a poor, ignorant working man, had made his way, Didot’s apprentice should do still better. Besides, had not David been earning money, thanks to an education paid for by the sweat of his old father’s brow? Now surely was the time when the education would come in useful.
“What have you done with your ‘polls?’ ” he asked, returning to the charge. He meant to have light on a problem which his son left unresolved the day before.
“Why, had I not to live?” David asked indignantly, “and books to buy besides?”
“Oh! you bought books, did you? You will make a poor man of business. A man that buys books is hardly fit to print them,” retorted the “bear.”
Then David endured the most painful of humiliations—the sense of shame for a parent; there was nothing for it but to be passive while his father poured out a flood of reasons—sordid, whining, contemptible, money-getting reasons—in which the niggardly old man wrapped his refusal. David crushed down his pain into the depths of his soul; he saw that he was alone; saw that he had no one to look to but himself; saw, too, that his father was trying to make money out of him; and in a spirit of philosophical curiosity, he tried to find out how far the old man would go. He called old Séchard’s attention to the fact that he had never as yet made any inquiry as to his mother’s fortune; if that fortune would not buy the printing-house, it might go some ways towards paying the working expenses.
“Your mother’s fortune?” echoed old Séchard; “why, it was her beauty and intelligence!”
David understood his father thoroughly after that answer; he understood that only after an interminable, expensive, and disgraceful lawsuit could he obtain any account of the money which by rights was his. The noble heart accepted the heavy burden laid upon it, seeing clearly beforehand how difficult it would be to free himself from the engagements into which he had entered with his father.
“I will work,” he said to himself. “After all, if I have a rough time of it, so had the old man; besides, I shall be working for myself, shall I not?”
“I am leaving you a treasure,” said Séchard, uneasy at his son’s silence.
David asked what the treasure might be.
“Marion!” said his father.
Marion, a big country girl, was an indispensable part of the establishment. It was Marion who damped the paper and cut it to size; Marion did the cooking, washing, and marketing; Marion unloaded the paper carts, collected accounts, and cleaned the ink-balls; and if Marion had but known how to read, old Séchard would have put her to set up type into the bargain.
Old Séchard set out on foot for the country. Delighted as he was with his sale of the business, he was not quite easy in his mind as to the payment. To the throes of the vendor, the agony of uncertainty as to the completion of the purchase inevitably succeeds. Passion of every sort is essentially Jesuitical. Here was a man who thought that education was useless, forcing himself to believe in the influence of education. He was mortgaging thirty thousand francs upon the ideas of honor and conduct which education should have developed in his son; David had received a good training, so David would sweat blood and water to fulfil his engagements; David’s knowledge would discover new resources; and David seemed to be full of fine feelings, so—David would pay! Many a parent does in this way, and thinks that he has acted a father’s part; old Séchard was quite of that opinion by the time that he had reached his vineyard at Marsac, a hamlet some four leagues out of Angoulême. The previous owner had built a nice little house on the bit of property, and from year to year had added other bits of land to it, until in 1809 the old “bear” bought the whole, and went thither, exchanging the toil of the printing press for the labor of the winepress. As he put it himself, “he had been in that line so long that he ought to know something about it.”
During the first twelvemonth of rural retirement, Séchard senior showed a careful countenance among his vine props; for he was always in his vineyard now, just as, in the old days, he had lived in his shop, day in, day out. The prospect of thirty thousand francs was even more intoxicating than sweet wine; already in imagination he fingered the coin. The less the claim
