Agathe was so overwhelmed by despair that the old lady and Joseph were obliged to make light of Philippe’s crime by telling her that such things occur in every family.
“But he is eight-and-twenty,” cried Agathe; “he is no longer a child!” a cry of anguish betraying what the poor woman thought of her son’s conduct.
“I assure you, mother, that he thinks of nothing but your grief and the wrong he has done,” said Joseph.
“Oh, great God! Bring him back. Only let him live, and I will forgive him all!” cried the poor mother, who in fancy beheld a horrible picture of Philippe dragged dead out of the river.
For some minutes awful silence reigned. The day was spent in dreadful suspense. All three flew to the sitting-room window at the least noise, and gave themselves up to endless conjectures.
While his family were in this despair, Philippe was calmly setting everything in order in his office. He had the impudence to hand in his accounts, saying that, for fear of mischance, he had kept eleven thousand francs at his lodgings. The rascal left at four o’clock, taking five hundred francs more from the cashbox, and coolly went up to the gambling tables, where he had not been seen since his appointment, for he had at least understood that a cashier must not frequent a gambling hell. His subsequent conduct will show that he resembled his grandfather Rouget rather than his admirable father. He might perhaps have made a good general; but in private life he was one of those deep-dyed scoundrels who shelter their audacity and their evil deeds behind the screen of strict legality, and under the reticence of the family roof.
Philippe was perfectly calm during this critical venture. At first he won, and picked up as much as six thousand francs; but he let himself be dazzled by the hope of ending his anxieties at one stroke. He left the game of trente-et-quarante on hearing that at the roulette table there had been a run of sixteen on the black; he staked five thousand francs on the red, and black turned up again for the seventeenth time. The Colonel then staked his remaining thousand francs on the black, and won. Notwithstanding this astonishing intuition of the chances, his head was not clear; he felt this, and yet he would go on; but the spirit of divination which guides players, enlightening them by flashes, was already exhausted. It was now intermittent—the gamester’s ruin. Intuition, like the rays of the sun, acts only in an inflexibly straight line; it can guess right only on condition of never diverting its gaze; the freaks of chance disturb it. Philippe lost everything. After so severe an ordeal the most reckless spirit or the boldest must collapse.
As he went home Philippe thought the less of his promise to kill himself, because he had never really meant it. He had forgotten his lost appointment, his impaired deposit-money, his mother, and Mariette—the cause of his ruin; he walked on mechanically. When he went in, his mother, bathed in tears, Madame Descoings, and Joseph threw their arms round his neck, hugged him, and led him with rejoicing to a seat by the fire.
“Good!” thought he; “the announcement has had its effect.”
The wretch put on an appropriately dolorous face, with all the more ease because his evening’s play had considerably upset him. On seeing her atrocious Benjamin pale and dejected, his mother knelt down by him, kissing his hands, pressing them to her heart, and looking long in his face with her eyes full of tears.
“Philippe,” she said in a choked voice, “promise not to kill yourself; we will forget everything.”
Philippe looked at his unnerved brother, at Madame Descoings with a tear in her eye, and he said to himself, “They are good souls!” Then he lifted up his mother, seated her on his knee, clasped her to his heart, and whispered as he kissed her, “You have given me new life!”
Madame Descoings contrived to produce a very good dinner, adding a couple of bottles of old wine and a little West Indian liqueur, a treasure remaining from her former stock-in-trade.
“Agathe, we must let him smoke his cigars,” said she at dessert. And she handed Philippe some cigars.
The two poor souls believed that by giving this fellow every comfort he would learn to love his home and stay there, and they tried to accustom themselves to tobacco smoke, which they abominated. This immense sacrifice was not even suspected by Philippe.
Next day Agathe had aged by ten years. Her alarms once relieved, reflection followed, and the poor woman had not closed an eye throughout that dreadful night. She was now reduced to an income of six hundred francs. Madame Descoings, like all fat women who love good eating, had an obstinate catarrh and cough, and was growing heavy; her step on the stairs sounded like a pavior’s hammer; she might die at a moment’s notice, and four thousand francs would perish with her. Was it not preposterous to count on that source of supply? What was to be done? What would become of her? Agathe, resolved to be a sick-nurse rather than to be a burden on her children, was not thinking of herself. But what would Philippe do, reduced to his five hundred francs of pension attached to the Cross of the Legion of Honor?
By contributing a thousand crowns a year for the last eleven years, Madame Descoings had more
