The will to live (Les Roquevillard)

by Henry Bordeaux

PART III

I
THE COMPANION IN ARMS

WHEN Margaret Roquevillard came into her father’s study, as she did each day, to light the lamp and draw the curtains, and take up if she could some special share of his burdens for him, she found him gazing out of the window, watching the rapidly declining daylight.

“Is that you, Margaret?” he said. “There’s no light any more for working.”

He made excuses for his reverie as if it were a weakness in him, but Margaret knew the cause of this preoccupation, though he would not confess it.

“Those gentlemen have not come yet?” she asked.

“I expect them any moment now,” he said. “They were to see Maurice in prison this afternoon.”

“Who is going to make the main argument? Will it be Mr. Hamel?”

“No. Mr. Hamel is the president of the benchers in our order. Maurice being a member of the bar, I begged the president to conduct his case. It’s a tradition of the bar. Mr. Hamel will give us the prestige of his half a century of professional honour, but he thinks he is too old, and too much of a specialist in questions of civil law, to make the argument. He wants Battard to do that. Battard has the highest reputation of any member of our bar in jury trials.”

The young woman made a little face at the mention of Mr. Battard’s name.

“I’ve heard him, father. You speak much better than he does.”

But the old lawyer replied almost crossly: “I don’t speak well, little girl. I simply say what I have to say.”

“Why don’t you defend him yourself, father?”

“That wouldn’t do at all. Don’t you see it wouldn’t, Margaret?”

She came to him, and, putting a hand on his shoulder, leant her head against his breast.

“Father, have you forgiven Maurice?”

“He hasn’t asked me.”

“That’s because he feels so badly.”

“Yes, no doubt. Fate can give us cruel blows. He at least has been responsible for his own ill-luck.”

“Remember mamma.”

He bent down and kissed her on the forehead.

“Don’t ask me to be weak, Margaret. I have been to see him twice at the gaol. I found him walled up in his pride. He gave me no sign of regret for what he’d done, and all the woe he’s caused us. I am waiting only for one word from him to be ready to forgive him, yet we exchanged only a few insignificant remarks.”

“When I go to see him he cries about mother with me. He doesn’t dare with you.”

“It’s his place to speak first. I shall wait.”

Margaret could not see, with her head bent, the sweetly sad look that spread over his old face, and softened the severity of his words. She repeated:

“He feels very badly. He’s unhappy.”

“And aren’t we?” asked Mr. Roquevillard.

He raised the girl’s head gently.

“What have you been doing this afternoon, Margaret?” he asked in his turn, changing the subject.

“I took little Julian for a walk. Then I wrote a long letter to Hubert.”

“Ah, so did I.”

The fate of Hubert was still a source of some anxiety to them. The last letter from the Soudan had brought news that the young officer was down with fever, ill in an isolated cabin, without a doctor. He made light himself of this unlucky piece of work, not taking it seriously, but a certain note of detachment in his letter, contrasted with a more than ordinarily affectionate way of putting his good-byes, struck both father and sister, and deeply affected them. They were silent, their hearts shaken. Margaret lighted the lamp, to chase away the darkness that was so full of evil omens. As she drew the curtains together some one knocked at the door.

“It’s they,” said Mr. Roquevillard.

And the girl had just time to disappear through the door that led into the apartment as her father went forward to receive his visitors. Mr. Hamel came in first, followed by Mr. Battard.

The president of the benchers enjoyed a respect and esteem at the bar in Chambéry which were the natural deserts of great age, great knowledge of the law and a dignified private life. He was a man of seventy-five, so thin that he rattled round in his threadbare frock-coat, a garment which he used to declare obstinately would last as long as he did. In winter time he draped himself in an antiquated overcoat, never bothering to put his arms through the sleeves. Above his shaven face a crown of white hair stood out in disorder, and his colourless cheeks were almost transparently thin. His tall figure was bent like those too slender poplars that are twisted by the wind, but his character was upright and unbroken. Nothing could ever have swerved him from the lines of conduct which the traditions of his family, in the best sense of the word, and his firm convictions had laid down for him at an early age. Cold and distant in bearing, a man of few words, he showed as much rigidity in his principles as proud courtesy in the relations of his daily life, displaying his high-mindedness as much in the ordinary circumstances as in the more important matters of existence. Good fortune and bad he had met with an even temper. Yet he had known more of bad fortune than of good in his later years, at the end of his life’s journey, when a man deserves repose. The unfortunate speculations of a son had ruined him, but he had set himself again quite simply to the task of gaining his daily bread. Rarely appearing in court, he was the counsellor most sought for in delicate matters by those who expected what was equitable and right. One seldom saw him outside of his office, a poor and shabby room, where one went with special cases for arbitrage and settlement as to a sovereign judge. When he left his office it was always in the evening, to walk rapidly to church, his air chilly and hurried, indifferent to the world about him, listening only to the voice of God, whose summons he waited for with patience and resignation.

One of those ancient friendships, by which people sharing the same kind of life and trials are united as strongly as by the ties of blood, united the old lawyer and Mr. Roquevillard, despite the great disparity in their ages. He had watched over the professional début of Mr. Roquevillard, who in turn had looked out for him in the wreck that later overwhelmed his material fortunes, holding out against his creditors, obtaining delays, organising sales and payments to the best advantage. When the younger man was laid low in his turn the elder came out of his retreat, conscious though he was of the chill and feebleness of his years.

Mr. Battard, by his reputation, was a natural second. This young man—for thus the old man called him in spite of his forty-five years—always caused him some anxiety, by reason of a certain cynicism in his conversation, and a tendency to take up cases for the fees he could get from them; but at the bar he was as formidable as a host, by turns ironical and flowery, mocking and eloquent. He would modulate his voice like a tenor, posturing like a favourite actor, and took at once the chief rôle, showing off his fine beard, his regular features, his finely polished bald head as if they were insignia of rank, stirring things up, flinging himself about, dominating the whole stage, and finally, with the cleverness of a conjurer, sweeping up jury and opposing counsel at once in the folds of his robe, which he flourished round him like a battle standard. This incontestable superiority in the court-room must be taken account of, and Mr. Hamel, a humble follower of truth, who detested all the trappings of eloquence and declamation, stilled his personal preferences to make the acquittal of his friend’s son more sure.

Even though Mr. Roquevillard had always kept Mr. Battard at a distance, and in the court-room would pitilessly turn inside out all this cleverness and seductiveness, by simple tactics that consisted in going straight to the point of things with the swiftness of a charge of cavalry, such was the force of professional loyalty that Mr. Battard had eagerly accepted the defence of Maurice, and had already shown himself active and resolute in his plans for it.

After they had shaken hands the president summed up the situation in a few words:

“You see, my dear friend, that I have begged our learned brother Battard to come to our assistance. I am old, and I don’t know how to move people. He will make the argument and I shall assist him. We have studied the brief together and seen your son in prison. One difficulty presents itself.”

“What is that?” asked the anxious father.

“Battard can explain it to you better than I.”

This latter gentleman stirred his fine head importantly, but contented himself with a short and simple explanation, sensible enough to know that fine effects were useless outside the court-room.

“Yes, I’ve studied the brief. The material fact of abuse of confidence is shown by the notary’s declaration, and by the report of the commissioner of police. I have found no proofs against your son, but grave presumptions. He was aware of the deposit of the money, he was the last of them all to leave the office, and had got possession of the keys. He might have got the secret of the combination from the memorandum book, in which the head clerk had written it; he had not much in the way of personal resources, and he was bent on eloping with his chief’s wife. With this they have cooked up a regular accusation. Add his departure to a foreign country, his silence, his tardy return. The deposition of the said Philippeaux especially is full of malice. This boy must have been jealous of his more favoured colleague. I suspect him of an unfortunate passion for Mrs. Frasne. A dangerous woman, that. A little thin, but fine eyes. Not my type at all.”

A coarse strain in his make-up prevented him from realising that this reflection was misplaced, that the presence of the father of the accused should have made him more reserved in his remarks. He began again after a pause:

“It’s not enough to protest that he is innocent. The theft being admitted, the jury will look for a culprit. We must point one out to them. The offensive, I have often noticed, is more certain in results than the defensive. It distracts the jury’s mind, and fixes it somewhere else. I have tried it often with success. Now, in this kind of case, the true culprit is plainly designated.”

He spread out a code on the table, and turned over the leaves. His two hearers listened to him without interruption.

“Observe that Mrs. Frasne runs no risk. She is covered by Article 880: Abstractions committed by husbands at the expense of their wives, by wives at the expense of their husbands ... can give rise only to civil actions for damages.”

“We know that,” observed Mr. Hamel.

“Within the family there is no theft. To fix suspicion on Mrs. Frasne at the trial is not denouncing her. But there is something better still. My instinct rarely deceives me. I have seen the Frasnes’ marriage contract. I had a shrewd idea I should discover something there. Through the enterprise of an attorney at Grenoble, I arranged a little investigation, and I discovered there proof that Mrs. Frasne, in taking one hundred thousand francs from her husband’s safe, believed she was only taking what belonged to her.”

“I don’t understand,” said Mr. Roquevillard, interrupting.

“You’ll see what I mean. It’s so clear it blinds you. Her husband, in this marriage contract, agreed to a settlement of one hundred thousand francs.”

“In case of her survival?”

“No, immediate. But naturally it was revocable in case of divorce, and the husband retained control of it. The arrangement was for a separate maintenance account. Nevertheless, Mrs. Frasne, ignorant of the law, might have supposed that this money was actually hers, and that in leaving her husband’s household she had the right to take it away with her. It was an absurd way of looking at it, but for that very reason just the way a woman would have worked it out: in this way I explain to myself why the thief took particular pains to appropriate only one hundred thousand francs out of an envelope enclosing a deposit of one hundred and twenty thousand. That was not theft, it was reimbursement. Mrs. Frasne believed she was availing herself of her just rights.”

“Yes,” concluded Mr. Roquevillard, interested in so solid an argument, “the contract explains all.”

“And it is acquittal, certain and incontestable,” declared Mr. Battard, growing animated, and beginning to wave his long arms. “What jury would hold out against such a demonstration? I’ve very rarely held so many trump cards in my hand.”

“You don’t always defend the innocent,” insinuated the president.

“Innocent or guilty, it’s the proof which counts. Here we have it.”

The father of the accused, who wanted a complete rehabilitation, next took up the subject.

“The discovery of the contract is indeed a good point for the defence. Your eloquence, Battard, will make the best use of it, and we can count on ultimate success. But there is one thing I must ask you at once to bring out in your argument. Maurice did not go away with Mrs. Frasne without resources of his own. He had more than five thousand francs with him, borrowed for the most part from his two sisters, his great-uncle Stephen and his aunt Camille Roquevillard, who will testify to it if necessary. In the village of Orta, where they stayed, he received, further, a cheque for eight thousand francs remitted by the Society of Credit, from the Chambéry branch, who will produce the cancelled voucher for us. These explanations are indispensable from two points of view. In the first place, they anticipate a possible new accusation, which the plaintiff, abandoning Article 408 on the abuse of confidence, may base on Article 380 in fine. Theft between married persons doesn’t come within the scope of the law, that’s understood; but the penal code adds: ‘With respect to all other individuals who shall have received or applied to their own use all or any part of the things stolen, they shall be punished as if guilty of theft.’ There must be nothing equivocal on this head. And this paragraph will not apply at all if my son is cleared from all suspicion of having lived with this woman at her expense. I hold this absolutely essential to the preservation of his honour.”

“Very good,” approved Mr. Hamel.

“Very good,” repeated Mr. Battard indifferently.

And Mr. Roquevillard, whose face had been glowing with excitement, grew serene again with the hope of passing safely through the test, and concluded in two words:

“Now we are armed, and victory is certain.”

The president’s eyes, pale blue and dim with age, were lifted sadly.

“My friend, haven’t you forgotten the difficulty I spoke of at the beginning of our interview?”

It was the old agony coming back again.

“What difficulty?”

Mr. Battard at once assumed the first place again, never having willingly given it up.

“There you are. Our fine plan, and I have not a single doubt of its success, collapses on account of your son’s obstinacy.”

“My son’s obstinacy?”

“Exactly. We have just explained to him in prison our plan to save him. Do you know what he said to us?”

“I’m afraid I can guess.”

“He said he formally objected to having Mrs. Frasne’s name mentioned in his defence, and that if it is, he will assume all the blame himself at once.”

“I was afraid of it,” muttered Mr. Roquevillard beneath his breath.

“I tried in vain to make him see the absurdity of this chivalry, to explain that he was not accusing anybody, since Mrs. Frasne was not punishable under the law. I told him that what his mistress had done could even be explained by her inexperience of business, her erroneous interpretation of her marriage contract. It was all useless. I ran against an invincible obstinacy.”

“Did he give you any reasons?”

“Just one—his honour.”

“Honour is one reason.”

“No, it’s only a sentiment. In courts of justice we must not take the point of view of honour, but of the law.”

The president, who did not approve this theory, presented the question in another form.

“It’s Mrs. Frasne’s honour especially that he takes into account. To save his own honour he must establish the fact that he has neither stolen a sum of money nor profited by the theft of some one else. He can prove the first by argument from Mrs. Frasne’s marriage contract, and the second by an affidavit from the International Bank of Milan, where Mrs. Frasne’s funds were deposited. But he objects categorically to this line of proof.”

“Did you speak of it to him yourself?”

“I did, and I told him that he was running a great danger to go before a jury thus unarmed.”

“What did he say to you?”

“That he would not let Mrs. Frasne be accused of anything whatsoever, and that he forbade his defender even to utter her name. We found him immovable. ‘Well, then,’ Mr. Battard objected to him, ‘how do you wish us to defend you?’ ‘How can any one think me guilty?’ he replied proudly. ‘Let them consider where I come from, and who I am. That ought to be enough.’”

“What a child!” began Mr. Battard, stroking his fine beard contentedly. “Undoubtedly an honourable family is a potent argument, and I count on making good use of it at the trial. But it is accessory to the main argument, as it were. It doesn’t go to the bottom of the matter. One doesn’t use parents for arguments. You might as well use dead ancestors.”

“They bear witness for our characters,” replied Mr. Hamel, not without some solemnity.

“There is a guilty party,” continued Mr. Battard. “Don’t let us forget that. Willingly or unwillingly, the jury will look for one. If it isn’t the lover it’s the mistress. If it isn’t the mistress it’s the lover. We have proofs that it is the mistress. Shall we refuse to produce them? There’s no sense in it. I warned your son, my good brother, that I could not consent to defend him on these conditions, and I have come to say the same to you. You know how warmly I should have undertaken it, that I should have brought to bear my utmost pains upon it. Tried on these lines, what can be done? As you see, I am deeply affected by this decision, but it is impossible for me to present myself in court thus bound.”

The unfortunate father of the accused held out his hand.

“I lose very valuable assistance,” he said; “perhaps even the boy’s safety. But the defence must not be fettered.”

Both lawyers were equally moved, despite the lack of mutual sympathy between them. One cannot share the same professional life, the same conflicts, the same mental preoccupations, without some trace of sympathy remaining.

“See him yourself,” said Mr. Battard again, rising. “Perhaps you can get him to consent where we have failed.”

“No, I am afraid not.”

“If you succeed in persuading him, I am at your service still, and you can count on my finest efforts. It’s nearly six now, so I must be excused. I’ve a business engagement that I must keep.”

Mr. Roquevillard went with him to the door, and thanked him again on the threshold.

“We have been on opposite sides sometimes, brother Battard, but I shan’t forget that in this most important matter of my life you unhesitatingly put your devotion and talent at my disposal.”

“No, no, not at all,” replied the great trial lawyer, astonished at his own good will; “I thought to come out of it better than this. It was a fine case. See if you can persuade your son. I’ll take it up again for you.”

When Mr. Roquevillard returned to his office Mr. Hamel had gone up to the fire and was poking the coals absent-mindedly. He sat down opposite to him, and both stayed there a long time thinking, saying nothing.

“My voice has never carried very far,” said the president, pursuing his inward reasonings, “and age has broken it. I’ve never known how to do anything but make things clear, not move people. However, I shall be on hand. I’ll say a few words about the family of the accused, and dwell on his own good character. But there must be some one else to make the argument. I can only be your assistant, my friend.”

He did not offer any opinion on Maurice’s attitude, perhaps did not explain it to himself. He maintained that defiant, not to say disdainful, attitude toward women which you find often in the latter days of an austere and well-disciplined life. The honour of a Mrs. Frasne did not seem to him worthy of so much consideration. There was a story told of him as illustrating the excess of this trait in him, namely, that he had bowed once to a lady of doubtful reputation on the street, and she had taken great credit to herself for it, since his respect carried such great weight everywhere; and that when he heard about it afterwards he never again saluted anybody in the city’s streets for fear of repeating his mistake.

“Will the jury guess the generous reason of his silence, do you think?” Mr. Roquevillard asked himself aloud, knowing his son better. “It isn’t likely.”

“It’s impossible,” declared Mr. Hamel plainly. “Your son will be lost, though there’s no reason for shielding this person. But haven’t we the right to defend him in spite of himself?”

“How do you mean?”

“A defence is obligatory at trials, as you know, as well as I. In default of a lawyer of the accused’s own choosing, the president appoints an official one for him. If Mr. Battard is officially appointed, and it will be enough if I, as president, mention him to the presiding judge, he will be completely at liberty again to make his argument. Yet he would run the risk of being repudiated by his client.”

“But such a repudiation would influence the jury unfavourably.”

“I don’t see any other way. At least——”

And the fine old man stopped talking, deaf to the repeated questions put to him by Mr. Roquevillard.

“The case is lost,” the latter murmured at last.

Then Mr. Hamel rose: “You believe in God, my friend, like me. Ask help from Him. He will give you inspiration. Your son is innocent. He must be acquitted. His real fault is not one that calls for man’s justice. It touches only himself, and unhappily his family.”

As he prepared to go, his face already toward the door, he turned back again, and all of a sudden held put his hands to his professional brother, an unusual gesture showing the tenderness that had lain concealed beneath this stiff energy of his for so many years. It was surprising and sweet, like an expression of freshness and purity on an old woman’s face, or flowers that go on blooming even after the snow has come. The two men embraced each other with emotion.

“You at least won’t abandon us,” said Mr. Roquevillard. “Thank you.”

“I don’t forget,” replied the old man.

And flinging his overcoat round his shoulders, its empty sleeves flapping, he went away hastily down the corridor, his host scarcely able to keep up with him and show him to the door.

Left alone, Mr. Roquevillard seated himself at his work-table, where so many difficulties, material and moral, had been worked out before, his head in his hands, seeking for some way in which to save his son, without whose safety the whole line of Roquevillards would be lost as well. He was less arbitrary, more indulgent, and more apt than Mr. Hamel to understand men and life, shut up as the latter had been with his transcendental prejudices as in a tower; and he recognised in Maurice’s resolution that tenacity and sense of responsibility which from generation to generation had created and maintained the strength of the Roquevillard family. That the boy was using this same force to destroy it was the pity of the thing. To create his individual happiness he had compromised the past and future of his people, though their distinctive traits, nevertheless, showed even in his faults. His father acquitted him of cowardliness and baseness, reflecting that the young man might maintain the family traditions at their right level, and use for their normal ends the faculties that he had so perverted, if he could only take again his proper place in his home and in society. At all costs he must be rescued and completely freed from this love that he would not repudiate.

“At least——” repeated Mr. Roquevillard, who had been struck by this mysterious phrase of Mr. Hamel. What had he meant by this reservation?

He raised his bent head, and, leaning back in his easy-chair, gazed straight in front of him. His eyes rested on the map of La Vigie hanging on the wall, outside the circle of the lamplight, and barely distinguishable in the shadow. It brought his land before him in the guise of ancestor and counsellor. And yet at the same time the cruel syllogisms of Mr. Battard echoed persistently in his mind.

“There has been a theft. Therefore, there is a guilty person. Who is it? If it isn’t the lover it’s the mistress. He won’t have the mistress accused, therefore it will be the lover. How could he reply to this argument in a way to convince the jury’s rustic brains?”

And suddenly, as he traced the blurred outlines of the map, he thought an idea broke forth in it, like a light in the darkness.

“If we suppress the fact of theft, then no one will be guilty. The jury will have to acquit him. How can we do away with the theft?”

And La Vigie spoke to him.

Some moments later Margaret knocked discreetly at his door.

“Come in,” he said. “I’m alone.”

“Well, father, what have you decided?”

He explained the new danger which arose from Maurice’s obstinacy. “Mr Battard gives us up. He declines to plead,” he said finally.

“Then who will defend him?” she asked, quite confused, “and how?”

“Don’t distress yourself yet, little girl,” he said. “I think I know a way.”

“What is it?”

“I’ll tell you later. Let me stay here now and think it over. It will involve making a great sacrifice.”

“Make it quickly, father.”

The girl’s eyes burned with such a light that all her pure and generous soul shone through it.

“Dear little girl,” he murmured proudly.

She smiled at him, with the rare smile of those who have lived long with sorrow.

“Father,” she said, “I have always thought you would be the one to defend him.”

II
THE FAMILY COUNCIL

“AM I in the way?” asked Margaret.

She stopped on the threshold of her father’s office, seeing such a numerous company gathered there.

“I was going to look for you,” said her father. “You belong here with us.”

A tall, withered old man, with his coat closely buttoned up, who was leaning on the mantelpiece, beneath which a bright fire was burning, threw out in a high head voice:

“In my time they didn’t admit women to the family councils.”

“It isn’t a woman that’s compromised the family, however,” came the brisk reply from the depths of an armchair, where sat a rather vigorous, well-matured lady dressed in black.

But it was purely a discussion of principles with both of them, for they promptly made truce and welcomed the girl with a good grace. Margaret greeted each member of the family circle in turn. First came her great-uncle Stephen Roquevillard, who, though older than Mr. Hamel, carried the burden of his eighty years quite lightly; then her aunt by marriage, Mrs. Camille Roquevillard; then her cousin Leo, the latter’s son, a young manufacturer at Pontcharra in Dauphiné; and finally Charles Marcellaz, who had arrived that morning from Lyons.

Outside the windows a heavy sky, charged with snow, seemed to hang low above the castle, almost crushing it. Already the clouds swung round the turret, and the leafless trees stretched their supplicating branches upward. Only the ivy on the tower of the archives preserved its tint of eternal spring. The room, in spite of its four windows, seemed filled with the bitterness of the day. The book-cases, the portraits, the landscape by Hugard, seemed to wear a look of sadness. The latest law reports, piled on a stand, had not been bound, like those of the preceding years. The big table, covered with briefs, one of them still open, displaying its citations and extracts from the statutes, showed a continuity of work which even the gravest cares had not interrupted; while a fresh bunch of chrysanthemums, placed before a photograph of Mrs. Valentine Roquevillard, revealed the daily care given it by a woman’s hand.

The lawyer begged his guests to be seated. He seemed to reflect a moment, his head bent. He had aged greatly in the past year. The hair of his head and his short, stiff moustache were turning grey. Two lines appeared around his mouth; his neck beneath his collar was thin and hollow. His cheeks were more dull in tint and the flesh less firm. All these signs of physical failing Margaret never saw without an aching at her heart. What a difference there was between the man who sat there now at his table, lost in his thoughts, and that other form robustly erect and joyful outlined against the sky on the hilltop at last summer’s vintage.

When he stood up, with a single gesture he was himself again. Beneath the deep arch of his eyebrows his gaze shone out imperiously as of old, difficult to withstand, fixing itself on the faces of his hearers with an embarrassing precision. The moment he began to speak his new attitude showed that he was the head and front of the family, not easily put down or overborne by many trials.

“I have called you together,” he began, “because our family is in danger. Now, we all bear the same name, excepting Charles Marcellaz, who stands in the place of a son to me because he represents my daughter Germaine. Felicie and Hubert are too far away to be consulted, but their lives testify to such self-sacrifice that their opinions need not be asked. I know they are disinterested.”

“You have good news of the captain?” inquired Mrs. Camille Roquevillard. Her nephew’s uniform had always impressed her favourably, and she was incapable of thinking of more than one person at a time.

Margaret answered her.

“No news for some time, and the last was not very good. He had come down with fever.”

“Court opens December 6th,” began Mr. Roquevillard again, “about three weeks from now. Maurice’s case comes up at the beginning of the session.”

“It’s only a formality,” said Leo, who was proud of managing a rather large factory at twenty-eight, and affected a practical and positive turn of mind that reduced everything to its net results. “An acquittal is certain.”

The old lawyer closed the young man’s mouth with a categorical “No!” His daughter shivered. The men looked at each other, surprised and anxious.

“How do you mean? Why is it ‘No’?”

“Since he’s not guilty.”

“Since it was Mrs. Frasne who took the money.”

The last remark came from Charles Marcellaz, mentioning the common foe by name.

“The wretch!” added the widow, raising her eyes to the ceiling, and inwardly regretting that Mrs. Frasne’s name had been uttered in Margaret’s presence. She divided women simply into two categories, the virtuous and the wanton, though she did not investigate the origin of the children that she rescued. Unlike so many intellectual and emancipated women of to-day, her horizon was limited, but not her charity or devotion.

“Acquittal is not certain,” resumed the head of the family, “on account of the conditions which my son imposes as to his defence. I have seen him several times in the gaol. His will is unshakable. He will not consent to any defence unless the name of Mrs. Frasne is kept out of it.”

With one accord the manufacturer and the old attorney rebelled against this:

“It’s impossible. He’s mad.”

“It’s treachery.”

“He ought not to be listened to.”

“So much the worse. Leave him to his fate.”

This last cowardly advice came from his cousin Leo. Mr. Roquevillard shut him up with a hurt and angry look, which melted promptly into one of sorrow. The family was in disaccord if one member of it repudiated the joint claims upon it. But in the silence which followed old Uncle Stephen remarked softly:

“Myself, I think Maurice is right.”

Mr. Roquevillard, upon this unexpected interjection, continued his explanations.

“This generosity might be understood by a jury selected from the ranks of the well-to-do. It won’t go down with simple farmers. The main point with them will be the disappearance of the money. It’s a sum the very figure of which will dazzle them. They are more alive to outrages against property than to those against persons. This sum, they will argue, could have been stolen only by him or her. If by her, he would say so, and they should acquit him. In case of doubt, they would still acquit him. He doesn’t dare accuse her, therefore he himself is the thief. They have not the same conception of honour as ourselves.”

“Honour, honour!” repeated Leo twice over, the too evident disdain of his uncle at his remarks having irritated him. “It’s important, above all things, to avoid a verdict that will dishonour us, his family. I don’t admit any honour but that, myself, honour as recognised by the law.”

The oldest member of the family stared insolently at the young man from Lyons.

“I beg of you to say no more,” he murmured in a voice that whistled through his scanty row of teeth.

“Why?” objected the manufacturer, who showed no deference for age.

“Why,” said Uncle Stephen, “because you no longer understand the meaning of certain words.”

“Exactly. Words. Big words, when it’s you who are using them,” retorted Leo.

By way of conciliation, Charles Marcellaz contributed a legal explanation:

“Mrs. Frasne is guilty, but her act doesn’t come within the scope of the law. Theft committed by a wife to the injury of her husband doesn’t permit of any action. In accusing Mrs. Frasne, Maurice doesn’t expose her to any risk, and his testimony is strictly in accordance with the truth.”

But Uncle Stephen, whose far-away youth had been a stormy one, pronounced as a court of last resort:

“You don’t accuse a woman under any pretext, if you’ve been her lover. I recognise your son, Francis.”

The widow Roquevillard, since the beginning of the conference, had been chiding her son below her breath for the views he took. He got his downright intelligence from her, but not her kindness. She made up her mind now to support him openly against this old man who preached such a strange morality.

“Would you have us respect such creatures?” she asked.

The head of the family silenced the futile quarrel with a wave of his hand.

“Let me finish,” he said. “When the time comes I’ll ask you for your opinions. Maurice is opposed to any accusation against Mrs. Frasne. It does not concern us now whether he is right or wrong, because his mind is made up, and we can do nothing with him. If the defence goes beyond the limit he has set for it, he will take the blame upon himself, he says, rather than sanction her being named. He would rather charge himself with the crime than that. What will happen in these circumstances? That is the question, and nothing else. The jury, forced to accept the material fact of theft, which cannot be denied, impressed by the loss of so considerable an amount of money, will seek, I foresee it, a guilty party. Disarmed in the case of Mrs. Frasne, they will turn upon my son. Whether they admit extenuating circumstances for him or not, it’s disgrace.”

“Oh, father!” exclaimed Margaret involuntarily.

“The danger is very great. Do you take it all in? Now, I have thought perhaps of a way to avert this danger.”

The girl, whom her father had not instructed as to his plans before the family gathering, took heart again.

“Cost what it may, father, it must be done.”

“Here it is. In cases where abuse of confidence is involved, I have always found that restitution brings acquittal. A jury is especially sensitive to the loss of money. Suppress this loss and it’s scarcely necessary to indicate a guilty party. No prejudice, no sanction: no conviction, no sentence. It’s an association of ideas that’s habitual with a jury.”

His son-in-law summed things up:

“You want to restore to Mr. Frasne the money that his wife took away from him?”

“That’s it.”

“One hundred thousand francs!” cried Leo. “It’s quite a figure.”

And Charles Marcellaz protested at once:

“But it’s as much as to admit that Maurice did wrong. He pays the money back, therefore he was guilty of taking it.”

“No, not that. The man who goes bail for a debtor isn’t that debtor. Through his lawyer Maurice will explain to the jurors that, although he isn’t willing to accuse anybody, he intends to be beyond suspicion himself. If Mr. Frasne is reimbursed, there is no more theft. To leave Mr. Frasne uncovered is, I suspect, to free my son.”

“Good, Francis,” approved Uncle Stephen, shaking his head like a great bald bird.

This mark of esteem decided the widow upon a friendly demonstration.

“I don’t understand all these tricks very well,” she said, “but good repute is worth more than golden girdles, and my heart is with you, Francis.”

Her son was only reassured by the word “heart,” which committed one to nothing. He exchanged a look with young Charles Marcellaz which signified, “These old people treat money with a high hand; as if there were anything else that gives a family importance or a chance to grow.” Feeling that he was supported on this question, Charles inquired softly:

“One hundred thousand francs—can you pay back that much, father?”

“That’s another question,” replied Mr. Roquevillard, a little dryly, beginning to grow a bit weary of these preliminaries. “I shall come to that presently. First the principles, then the means of applying them.”

But of his own accord, being already decided, he reversed this order, by adding:

“If necessary I shall sell La Vigie.”

It was the last sacrifice of all. Margaret knew the heroism of it, and grew quite pale. Charles, divided between respect and self-interest, admiration and indignation, hesitated, hunted for a way out through this flood of contrary sentiments, and receiving an ironical glance of the eye from Leo, began to argue:

“Sell La Vigie! You haven’t time before December 6th. Or at best you’ll sell for a wretched price. La Vigie is worth one hundred and sixty thousand at the very lowest, without the woods that you bought four years ago in Saint Cassin.”

These objections the lawyer had doubtless put to himself already, for he was prepared with his answer:

“It’s possible,” he said simply. “And if not, then it can be mortgaged.”

“Yes, at five or four and one-half per cent. Five probably, if you want it immediately. Business men won’t fail to take advantage of you. And the land yields scarcely three, whereas you only need one frost or hail-storm to ruin your crops. You have too much experience, father, not to know that mortgaging is an incurable disease for land, a fatal one. Country property is a great risk nowadays for one who does not live off the land, or hasn’t a good income to insure him against loss from bad seasons or competition. It’s compromising the future irrevocably. And La Vigie is the family’s patrimony, sacred to the future, and ought not to be touched.”

Mr. Roquevillard let Charles finish his speech, though he had grown impatient under it.

“No one loves and understands the land better than I,” he replied, raising his tone a little. “No one has listened to its counsels, put his ear to its breast when it has been sick, more truly than I have. And yet I am the one to be reproached with having forgotten it. Let me tell you then, if you don’t know it already, that in the human plan of things there is a divine order that must be respected. Over and above material legacies I place, for my part, the heritage of morality. It is not the patrimony that makes a family, but the long line of generations that have created and maintained the patrimony. If a family is dispossessed, it can found a new estate elsewhere. If it has lost its traditions, its faith, its joint responsibility, its honour, if it is reduced to an assemblage of individuals ruled by contrary interests and following their own destinies rather than the family’s, then it is a body emptied of its soul, a corpse that reeks of death, and the finest estates can never make it live again. A piece of land can be regained by purchase; the virtue of a race is not for sale. That is why the loss of La Vigie affects me less than the danger to my son and my name. But because La Vigie has been from one century to another the portion of the Roquevillards I was not willing to interrupt so continuous a transmission without warning, and consulting all of you. I have given you my own opinion first: I was wrong. Give me yours now as I call your names, honestly. I don’t say I shall follow your advice if it is opposed to mine. I am the head of the family and must take the responsibility myself. But a decision that with one blow shatters the work of so many generations is a grave one, and it will be a comfort to me to have the approval of our family council.”

By the silence that followed these words he realised that the group around him had seized the importance of the occasion. He glanced toward the map of La Vigie on the wall, with its notations of the new lands successively added to it, and the dates of the contracts under which they had been made. So often during the preparation of his cases his gaze had dwelt on this map, not to trace its lines and figures, but to summon up the vision of its woods and fields and vines, with their tillage and vintages. A bit of the land, with all its agricultural work and the movement of the seasons over it, lived in its narrow frame, the mere black lines of which were potent over his imagination.

He turned his eyes from it, and through the windows, under the lowering sky, could see the castle of the old dukes, built gradually through the various epochs of its history, half dismantled now, but still imposing in its guerdon of the past. Better than any documents or archives, than any manuals or chronologies, it made one stop and think, because of the very fact that it remained standing like a witness in the flesh. Of itself it called up memories of ancient Savoy, and the times of his ancestors and rude wars, while the pointed arches of the Sainte-Chapelle symbolised the pious impulses of their hearts. What is left of the dead, with all their acts and sentiments, if these material signs, through which they realise and recall themselves, do not exist for us? Did La Vigie, its lands cleared, subdued, added to and restored, count for nothing in the destiny of the Roquevillards? And when it should be abandoned, would not its mainstay, the visible scene of its continuity, be lacking to his race? In landed properties one generation hands on the spade to another as ancient couriers used to pass the torch. And here was the last chief letting it fall.

But the lawyer turned his head away, spurning all hesitation. The patrimony was not all the family any more than prayer was the church, or courage a prison cell. Hubert and Felicie carried far away from their native soil, to the Soudan or to China, the vital energy that tradition had handed down to them. Maurice, restored again to his normal life, would root out his fault with toil. And as for Margaret, the flame of a devoted life burned steadily in her.

He addressed himself first to his daughter, as the youngest of the company, thinking to hear his thoughts echoed in her reply.

“You, Margaret,” he said, “speak first.”

“I, father? Everything that you do will be all right. Save Maurice, I implore you. If you think the sale of La Vigie is necessary, don’t hesitate. We don’t need a fortune. In any case, take my share. Don’t worry about me. I need very little to live on, and I’ll pull through somehow.”

“I knew it,” said Mr. Roquevillard approvingly.

He caressed Margaret’s hand softly, while he questioned his nephew next.

“And you, Leo. Remember your father,” he added, mistrusting him a little.

The young man assumed the important manner of one who has arrived, a man who has accomplished things, but who will give you his receipt for success just the same. He would tell these ignorant old men something about the ways of modern life, and the new conditions that make it so swift and real and egotistical.

“My dear uncle,” he began, “you are one of those old-timers who start up crusades everywhere and tilt at windmills. You don’t accomplish anything by ruining yourself. You ought to look at things in a more practical light. This very moment Maurice is blackmailing you with his ‘honour.’ Mrs. Frasne’s honour isn’t worth one hundred thousand francs. My nice cousin is blustering in his prison. When he comes into court he’ll sing smaller. I’m not a lawyer, but I’ve often read the accounts of criminal trials in the newspapers, as every one does now. Even the most obstinate prisoners will turn on their victim or accomplices at the last moment to save themselves. The fear of an unfavourable verdict is the beginning of wisdom for them. Maurice is an intelligent boy, with everything to live for: he’ll understand. If by any chance he doesn’t, well, so much the worse for him, after all. It’s a sad thing to say before you, uncle, and I’m very sorry for it; but he would have it so, and I know you like frankness. His danger is all his own. A family isn’t jointly and severally responsible for the faults of one member. That’s one of those absurd theories that have been definitely relegated to the past in our day. ‘Each one for himself,’ is the new motto. No account’s taken of another’s debts, whether it’s your father or your brother or your son. If I earn money, it’s mine, and my good and bad acts are mine. There’s plenty of work looking out for your own happiness, without adding the terrible weight of twenty generations to it. Advance Maurice’s share to him if you insist on it, but hold back his brothers’ and sisters’, and something for yourself in your old age. As for La Vigie, I’d sell it as a matter of fact, if you can get a good price for it, not to buy the jury’s sympathy with it, but because land’s no good any more except to some peasant who worries it like a rat. Industry, machines—that’s the future, for individuals and for society, too.”

Old Uncle Stephen, upon this harangue, let out a little sharp laugh, and mumbled:

“He talks well. A little long-winded, but he talks well.”

The widow, for her part, much agitated, put her hands together and implored the Lord’s assistance.

“You have finished?” asked Mr. Roquevillard, not without a hint of rudeness.

“I’m through.”

“If I’ve understood you correctly then, you’d be perfectly willing to throw Maurice overboard.”

“Excuse me, uncle; he jumps overboard. If he were reasonable, he could easily enough get out of the law’s clutches, safe and sound. But he doesn’t want to be reasonable. I’m always for being reasonable, myself.”

The head of the family turned toward his son-in-law.

“And you, Charles, are you also reasonable?”

Marcellaz hesitated before beginning his reply. He had always chafed a little at his father-in-law’s superiority; the superiority of his wife’s family over his own struck him on each comparison, and irritated him, especially since he had gone back again to the country of his origin. He was an industrious and economical young lawyer, building up his children’s future obstinately, and appeared jealous and watchful of his painfully acquired and moderate fortune. Business had absorbed him, making him limited and hard. But he loved Germaine, and if he mistrusted agitations and did not like to have his sensibilities stirred up, it was not because he did not have any. He hesitated, deploring the past, and hating this situation that did not solve itself.

“Why does Maurice prefer Mrs. Frasne to us even in gaol?” he began. “It’s absurd, since she doesn’t run any risk of punishment. He betrays his family for a false point of honour. One hundred thousand francs! To raise all that money, isn’t it beyond your power? You mustn’t attempt the impossible.”

“But suppose you must attempt the impossible to save him?” put in Margaret.

“Well, then,” concluded Mr. Roquevillard, who wanted a positive answer, “you also, Charles, advise me to desert my son?”

Marcellaz lowered his head, to avoid the ironical eyes of young Leo, and murmured shamefacedly:

“No, just the same.”

When he raised his head again he was surprised by the look in his father-in-law’s eyes. Their habitually masterful expression was veiled and tender, with an unaccustomed sweetness, as of one surprised by the flow of a stream whose humble source he has discovered beneath some bit of verdure.

“Your turn, Thérèse,” he said next.

The widow, since her son’s speech, had not heard a single word of what was said, and the question did not have to be repeated. She was governed by a sure instinct, and did not confuse herself with principles, which she applied better than she could define them. Like most women, she promptly substituted personalities for questions of theory, a method which at least had the merit of keeping abstract solutions at safe distance and scattering metaphysical mists. Throughout the debate she had retained but one word, but that one was a good one. She couldn’t speak to more than one person at a time, and so she laid hold on Leo, regardless of the other members of the assembly.

“Each one for himself, did you say?” she began. “If your uncle here had practised that fine maxim, my boy, you would not this moment be at the head of a factory that brings you in hundreds and hundreds of francs.”

“Mother, you’re laughing at me,” interrupted Leo, his self-esteem wounded by this sally.

But the good lady was off, and nothing could stop her.

“No, no, you know what I mean to say. I’ve already told you the story, and if you’ve forgotten it I’ll refresh your memory. Fifteen years ago your father invested all his savings in the factory he was starting, and then the orders stopped coming in and there came a day when he had to suspend payments. The industry was a new one in the district, and no one had any confidence in it. He went to see your Uncle Francis, here, and explained his danger to him. Francis lent him at once without interest the twenty thousand francs he needed, and needed so badly that we were threatened with being closed out. That’s how we were saved, my boy. From that evil hour I’ve had a great horror of poverty. May God forgive me, if that’s what has made you selfish and mistrustful.”

“Well, well, I didn’t remember,” admitted Leo, with an ill grace.

His mother was filled full of her subject, and was not to be wheedled by this concession, though ordinarily she always yielded to her son’s arguments after a little fussing. When two people live much with each other they don’t pay much attention to themselves, and are quite surprised sometimes, when some grave matter supplies occasion, to find themselves at variance. Nowadays it is a difference which is more and more frequent between one generation and the next, on account of the loosening of family ties and the rapid transformation of ideas.

The gist of her next remarks was ostensibly intended for her brother-in-law.

“I’m only related to you by marriage, Francis, but I bear the same name, and am mindful of it. I’ll put twenty thousand francs at your disposal if you need it in your turn. I don’t understand a bit of your histories, but I know you’re in misfortune. As for Mrs. Frasne, she’s a hussy!”

“Dear aunty, I love you,” said Margaret.

And Mr. Roquevillard added:

“Thank you, Thérèse. I shall probably not need it. I’m happy to think I can count on you if necessary.”

Last of all, old Uncle Stephen outlined his opinion in a slow but firm voice, which cracked like an old bell every now and then as he tried to force it.

“The father is the arbiter of his family and property, Francis. You have all the responsibility, you needn’t ask leave from any one. I was younger than your father. We were orphans at an early age, and he brought us children up and helped us in every way, for he was the heir and head of the family. In those days—it was under the Sardinian rule, before the annexation—daughters received only their legal share, and they were not married for their money. The patrimony went all to one member of the family, and its obligations could not be neglected by the one who inherited it. He had to look out for the younger ones, endowing and establishing them in life, besides seeing to the infirm and needy and the old folk. These young people to-day don’t know what the patrimony meant then, when it was the material force of the family, the whole family grouped about one head, assured of living and enduring because it held together. To-day what use is there in keeping an estate together? If you don’t sell it, the law will take a hand and scatter it when you die. With a forced division of estates there is no more patrimony. What with each one being for himself on the one hand, and the continuous prying and meddling of the state, on the other hand, in all the doings of one’s life, there is no more family. We shall see what this society of individuals subject to the state will make of things.”

He gave a circumspect and scornful little laugh, and ended up with less general considerations.

“However, you’re right to set our honour above money. You’re right, too, to give us warning. We were with you in your prosperity. Fate strikes you down, and we must be with you there, too. I haven’t very much for my part. Outside my legal pension I’ve scarcely more than twenty-five or thirty thousand francs in securities, the income of which helps me to get along. I’m already very old. After I’m gone it’s yours—it’s yours now if you want it.”

Mr. Roquevillard, much moved, replied simply:

“I’m proud of your approval, uncle, and touched by your support. My work will now be easier to carry through. This sacrifice of money will mean Maurice’s acquittal: my experience makes me believe that firmly. I don’t see how I can save La Vigie. Counting up everything, I am worth——”

“This doesn’t concern us further,” said Uncle Stephen, rising.

“I ought to tell you, on the contrary. I want you all to know in case La Vigie goes out of the Roquevillards’ hands one day that it hasn’t been without sorrow, or because there was no necessity. You are my witnesses. La Vigie is worth at least one hundred and sixty thousand francs. My Saint Cassinwoods are appraised at twenty thousand. Germaine had a dot of sixty thousand francs.”

“Ought I to return it all to you or only part of it?” inquired Charles Marcellaz timidly, his generosity the more to be commended because regrets, remorse and hesitation went with it. “It is invested at a certain figure in a share of the law practice I bought at Lyons.”

“By no means, my dear Charles. It belongs to you and Germaine outright, and you have three children to look out for. When Felicie went into the convent we bought annuities for her with twenty thousand francs, and we had reserved a like sum for Margaret’s dot. Of this she has already had eight thousand francs, which she sent to her brother.”

“One hundred and eight thousand,” counted up Leo, who had been sulking, beneath his breath. “He comes high.”

He was not aware as yet of the little loans from their sinking funds of which his own mother and the old magistrate had been guilty the preceding year.

“Father,” said Margaret, “dispose of my dot. I shall never marry.”

“Women are meant to be married,” declared the widow.

But Margaret added resolutely: “I have my diploma. I shall work. I’ll start a school.”

“Women oughtn’t to inherit, according to my ideas,” put in Uncle Stephen, “but I’ll moderate my principles in Margaret’s favour. She shall have my forty thousand francs when I die.”

“Thirty thousand,” corrected Leo, appraising his loss.

“No, forty,” replied the old man, suppressing his avarice definitely but painfully in the common crisis. “I put it lower just now inadvertently. It’s as much as forty-five, to be done with it. I’ll make a new will. I had made you my heir, Francis.”

“I thank you for Margaret, uncle. But I shall not touch her dot, which isn’t enough anyway, unless it’s impossible to realise on La Vigie promptly and at good terms. It will be better to sell the estate, if possible, than to mortgage it. I’ve thought it all out. The returns from land nowadays are precarious. With modern transportation facilities there is competition from such a distance that we can’t any longer count on profits. I prefer to make Margaret’s future sure, and let my sons arrange their own schemes of life. If I can’t find any one to buy, then the land can always be given as security for a loan.”

“We can give you good security, too,” the widow assured him.

“Exactly,” acquiesced Uncle Stephen.

The family council was over. Friendly farewells were exchanged by all excepting Leo, who still showed a little coldness to his uncle.

“It’s always the security that is lost,” he observed to his mother on the staircase.

“I’d pay it gladly,” said the latter flatly.

“Oh, you. You’re too good,” retorted her son.

“And you’re too ungrateful,” said his mother.

“It was my father that was helped out of a hole. Not I.”

“You or your father. Doesn’t it come to the same thing?”

“No.”

Charles escorted Mr. Stephen Roquevillard home, and Maurice’s father was left alone with his daughter. Outside the house the light was growing dim. Mist was cloaking the turret and the tower of the archives, as with an evening mantle. The office was filled with the special sadness that comes with the end of a winter’s day. Margaret put another log on the fire.

“I’m glad it’s over,” said her father. “It passed off well, I thought.”

But Margaret thought indignantly of her cousin Leo.

“That Leo is bad,” she said. “I detest him.”

“His mother is a fine woman,” was her father’s comment.

They were silent. Then both of them glanced at the map of La Vigie on the wall. Instead of a faded sheet of paper, they saw a vision of the place again under the beautiful sunlight of the vintage time, with all its golden vines, the harvested fields, the pastures ready to be tilled, the great comfortable house. The estate which they had sentenced to be sold was making its last appeal to them.

Like Maurice on the Calvary of Lemenc, before he had gone away from them, but with a different sort of love, a love from which all selfish thought of happiness was purged, they said good-bye to La Vigie.

III
MR. FRASNE’S CLEVER TRANSACTION

NOTHING was being talked about in all Chambéry but the clever transaction of Mr. Frasne. It was especially the favourite topic of conversation at the reception given by Mr. and Mrs. Sassenay one evening in celebration of the eighteenth birthday of their daughter Jeanne. One of the characteristics of provincial society seems to be that the men take the occupations and preoccupations of the city into company with them, clinging to the excitements of their business in the midst of social pleasures. At the Sassenays’ they one and all abandoned the ladies to the rivalries of clothes, and between the waltzes made off hastily into corners to take up the burden of their financial slanders and professional cares. On this special occasion, the family drama which had shaken the Roquevillards’ long standing social status, with its climax due to come off the day after to-morrow—it was the evening of December 4th—at the sitting of the court of assizes, was stirring public comment to its depths. Public opinion in Chambéry was tired, no doubt, of the well-founded and continuous ascendancy of the Roquevillards. It was worked up with the desire for levelling down, which is one of the modern zeals, as well as irritation at the persistent pride that refused to plead for itself or beg for sympathy even in misfortune. People, in short, were on the watch for the final collapse of a race which at other times had been considered an ornament to the city.

In the smoking-room were gathered men of law, doctors, manufacturers, capitalists; a few of them now and then, as the first strains of a waltz sounded, made for the group of girls and younger women seated in the drawing-room, like an assaulting party issuing in victorious sallies from a place besieged, to return again shortly to their masculine circle. Only one of them all knew nothing of this lucky speculation of the notary, which some found fault with and others praised, namely, the Viscount de la Mortellerie. His excuse was that he had tarried too long in the fourteenth century, with the history of the ducal castle that he was writing. In vain he tried to interest his neighbours in the ingenuity of Amedeus V, who in 1328 had wooden conduits arranged to bring water from the fountain of Saint Martri to his vast kitchens, where it gushed out in an enormous stone basin, which served also as a pool for the salmon that were destined for the ducal table. People would not listen to this babbler who was almost six hundred years behind the times. Mr. Latache, president of the Chamber of Notaries, sententious, ceremonious, bored, upholding the dignity of his life and business reputation, bore the brunt of the attack made by the little lawyer Coulanges. This latter, a scented, curled and powdered little individual, had assumed the defense of Mr. Frasne on behalf of the younger school.

“No, no,” declared Mr. Latache solemnly, “the criminal action follows the civil in such matters. Frasne should have waited for the jury’s verdict before accepting reparation for material damage. Or rather, since he has been fully indemnified, he should withdraw his complaint altogether. He ought not to mix up money matters with his vengeance.”

“Pardon me, pardon me,” parried the bubbling lawyer, fencing promptly. “Let us reason the thing out, I beg of you. Mr. Frasne made a complaint against Maurice Roquevillard of embezzlement in the sum of one hundred thousand francs, and instituted a civil suit against him. The elder Roquevillard offered to restore this sum to him before the arrest, and you blame him now for accepting it?”

“I don’t blame him for accepting it, but as he has taken it, I blame him for keeping up his suit. And I don’t understand Mr. Roquevillard.”

“Oh, he knows his son is guilty, and he buys the jury’s indulgence in this way. As for Mr. Frasne, since conviction is always uncertain at trials, he prefers a bird in the hand to two in the bush. Besides, at the hearing, he will make capital out of this payment, as if it were an admission of guilt. It’s a very strong presumption.”

“It’s a great advantage to Frasne certainly. I can’t explain Roquevillard’s motives, but just the same he’s too experienced to leave such a weapon in his adversary’s hands without having taken precaution on his own part. The receipt which he must have demanded surely provides that if he discharges the obligation of a third party, it’s irrelevant whether that third party is his son or not.”

“As a matter of fact, the receipt does make this reservation, and in the most formal terms,” announced another lawyer, Mr. Paillet, coming up at this moment and entering into the discussion without loss of time.

“I supposed as much,” said Mr. Latache triumphantly. “And rather than affix his signature to a paper containing such a restriction, Mr. Frasne would have been better advised to leave it to the decision of the court.”

But Mr. Coulanges was not ready to surrender yet.

“What does such a receipt prove?” he objected. “Would you give up one hundred thousand francs for some one you didn’t know?”

The lookers-on agreed that he was right, and testified to their opinion by a flattering murmur of approval, as much as to say that indeed such a piece of generosity must have come from some imperious necessity. Nevertheless, his success was short-lived. Mr. Paillet swept it away for him like a conjurer making a nutmeg disappear before their eyes. He was a gay, round, fat man, who knew everything, poking in everywhere and telling everything he knew.

“I see,” he said, “that you don’t, any of you, know of Mr. Frasne’s finest stroke.”

“Tell us about it.”

“Well, well.”

He held his company by the importance of the news he brought. But the orchestra tuned up for an everlasting set of landers, and he abandoned his scandalised hearers in a craven manner, rolling off like a ball to the feet of the lady whom he had asked to be his partner. From the recess of the window the gentlemen who remained behind, for lack of anything better, watched the evolutions of the various couples, assuming a detached and judicial air as the dancers of both sexes advanced and retreated, saluted or turned according to the rhythm of the music and the various figures. Among the dancers was Jeanne Sassenay, her cheeks like roses, her hair rebelling against its neat and careful dressing. Quite graceful and childlike in a pale blue dress cut slightly low in the neck and showing a bit of white flesh caressed by the crystal lights, she was putting her whole mind on keeping the figures straight. Her whole being glowed with her pleasure and the importance of the evening.

She excited a variety of comments from the lookers-on:

“Not bad looking, that little girl,” said one.

“Very thin: look at her shoulder blades,” said another.

“Only eighteen,” remarked a third.

“Oh, she’ll marry soon.”

“Why?”

“She has a large dot.”

“Yes, but her brother has piled up debts.”

“Whom will she marry?”

“No one knows yet. They talk of Raymond Bercy.”

“Who was engaged to Miss Roquevillard?”

“He’s just beginning his doctor’s practice.”

“Exactly; he hasn’t killed any one yet.”

After the final galop the lawyer Paillet, finding himself thirsty, conducted his companion to the refreshment-room, where he drank some champagne and ate a pâté de foie gras sandwich; and thus restored, condescended to reappear before the circle, where his desertion was severely appreciated. But he held out against them laughingly.

“If you scold me you shan’t learn anything.”

“Well, then, we’re listening.”

“You were still at the point where Mr. Roquevillard had restored one hundred thousand francs to Mr. Frasne.”

“It was interesting, wasn’t it?”

“Not very, compared with what you’re going to hear next.”

The first notes of a polka sounded, and he turned his head. His hearers trembled lest he should have the heart to leave them a second time with their mouths watering. Quite a group decided to mass themselves near the door and bar his passage.

“You’re warm. It wouldn’t be wise,” observed Mr. Latache.

And the lawyer Coulanges, adopting a different method, began to cast doubts upon the famous piece of news that had been promised them. Thereupon the news gatherer opened his mouth to let loose his prey.

“Very well, then. You don’t know that Mr. Frasne acquires for nothing the fine estate of La Vigie, worth about two hundred thousand francs.”

Exclamations of incredulity met him on all sides.

“You don’t say so!”

“You’re laughing at us.”

Mr. Battard and Mr. Vallerois, the district attorney, who had been chatting at a distance, came up at this moment, their ears alert for news.

“Exactly,” said the orator. “For nothing.”

“But how?”

“Like this: Mr. Roquevillard, in order to secure the money he wanted, advertised La Vigie for sale. Mr. Doudan, the notary, offered him one hundred thousand francs for it, payable immediately, but reserving the right to keep the name of the true purchaser secret for a fortnight. A fortnight—bear this in mind. Mr. Roquevillard, who hadn’t much time or choice before the trial, accepted. He could not hope for anything better in so brief an interval. Now, through the indiscretion of a clerk, it has leaked out—I learned it just now—that the real purchaser was Mr. Frasne. Mr. Frasne, if you please, spends one hundred thousand francs with one hand and receives it back with the other, and finds himself to boot, by a simple trick the proprietor of a magnificent estate for nothing.”

This machiavellian ruse was too far beyond the common run of bourgeois artifice not to provoke astonishment. They did not hunt for the moral point of it, neither did they sound the depths of the Roquevillards’ sacrifice of the family patrimony. Mr. Frasne had gone through a sorry crisis; his home, if not his fortune, had been ruined, and he had devoted his energies to the only thing that was still susceptible of diverting him—business—as an artist finds his consolation in art or a rich woman hers in charity. Interesting combinations of contracts or figures established an alibi for his sad thoughts. He forgot his own weariness for the moment in unravelling the affairs of his clients, with a satisfaction like that of a skilful fighter in the battle of interests. The case of La Vigie had inspired him to a bit of audaciously clever tactics that he could not resist. He had hoped the secret of it would be guarded until after the assizes. But what secret can be kept in a town of less than twenty thousand inhabitants, where it is regarded as pretentious and original to lead one’s personal life as one likes?

Mr. Latache was the first to give his views on the transaction, in two words, which, coming from the President of the Chamber of Discipline, were worth a speech.

“It’s not just.”

“Why do you say that?” retorted Mr. Coulanges. “An estate was for sale. Some one bought it. It’s the law.”

Nevertheless, the sagacious manœuvre of Mr. Frasne won, after all, only a small measure of approbation, and this from the youthful camp, which plays its enthusiasm to-day, like its funds, on solid wickets. He had succeeded too well in his material enterprise, and the gallery, severe in manners and practical in its good sense, was more sorry about his conduct now than it had been diverted by his wife’s flight with Maurice.

Besides, he came from Dauphiné, and in the eyes of a community accustomed to particularise, that made a stranger of him, whom such gains enriched at the expense of their own province. People had not been vexed, to be sure, by the humiliation of the Roquevillards, because the high esteem in which the family was generally held irritated the mediocrities, but they were surprised to find the Roquevillards making the disaster worse, astonished to think they consummated their ruin with their own hands. Why this disinterestedness if Maurice was not guilty, and if he was, why this admission? For they were not aware of the resolution the young man had taken. Mr. Hamel was very secretive, and as for Mr. Battard, his silence was calculated: an epicure of cases that made talk, he still hoped that his support would be called for.

At the same time he was excited by these revelations, and could not refrain from talking in his turn. The special circle where the affair had been under discussion was now disturbed, the dance being finished, by new arrivals. Conversation began again here and there, breaking out in little separate groups, like smothered fire that sparkles and scatters. The district attorney, Mr. Vallerois, rejoined Mr. Battard in the embrasure of a window.

“You will hold the cards when you plead now,” he said. “You can riddle Mrs. Frasne’s husband with sarcasm.”

“It isn’t certain yet that I shall make the argument,” replied the lawyer.

“What! You are not to make the argument?”

Mr. Battard had to explain his confidences, which had escaped him without thinking, by going further into the thing.

“That young duffer Maurice doesn’t wish to be seriously defended. He prefers to look out for his mistress’s honour.”

He pronounced these last words with disdainful irony, explaining to the attentive magistrate that the accused man threatened to contradict in advance any reference to Mrs. Frasne as the guilty party.

“If you don’t argue, then who will?”

“I don’t know. Mr. Hamel doubtless.”

His tone showed hardly any more respect for the aged lawyer than for the guilty woman. The former’s age and feebleness were thrown into high relief by the single mocking mention of his name.

After some moments of silence Mr. Vallerois concluded:

“I understand what Roquevillard’s driving at now. He’s suppressing the theft to save his son. It’s his last chance. He doesn’t hesitate to sacrifice his fortune. It’s very fine.”

Not very much interested in this praise, Mr. Battard sketched a vague gesture that was susceptible of various interpretations.

“All this is between you and me,” he said, to recapture his professional secret.

And with his beard carefully displayed against his shirt front, he made his way up to a group of ladies, stepping slowly and majestically, like a peacock preparing himself for a promenade with his mates.

Left alone, the magistrate made no haste to search out another guest to talk with. He still thought admiringly of Mr. Roquevillard, recalling the man’s sorrowful and valiant life since that day in the office when he had been told of Mr. Frasne’s complaint. Even then he had shown himself unselfish and proudly prepared for sacrifices.

“Why am I the only one here,” Mr. Vallerois asked himself, “to appreciate this great force of character? There isn’t a man here can hold a candle to him, yet these gentlemen just now treated him so loftily, as if misfortune had made him small and insignificant. The provinces are vindictive and envious.”

Along these simple lines that were being laid down, he reflected, the drama would be a moving one, very entertaining for the spectators. Young Maurice, appearing disarmed before the jury, betrayed his family, and his father was sacrificing the old estate for a song to save the prodigal son. But if the counsel for the accused had his lips sealed, another voice, more powerful than his, could make itself heard instead. After the prosecutor’s speech for the plaintiff, was it not the duty of the public minister to present the case in his turn? Instead of relying upon “justice,” according to the formula sacred to this sort of business, more private than public, was it not his duty to intervene with some effect and set forth once and for all the luckless preponderating rôle, the unique rôle, of Mrs. Frasne, the only one who had been guilty of any abuse of confidence, even though she could not be condemned for it? What a fine opportunity to serve truth, to render unto each according to his works, to carry a little joy into this so sorely tried household of the Roquevillards.

All these reflections crowded through Mr. Vallerois’s brain, but he himself was disposed of by the circumstances of the thing: a general advocate would occupy the place of the public minister at the assizes, and not he. The case of Maurice Roquevillard did not properly concern him further. Besides, he had been blamed for the unusual measure he had taken with the notary last year, for it had not been kept a secret very long. What was the use of mixing in an affair that did not concern him, from which nothing but unpleasantness could arise? For the sake of peace his sympathy was well enough trained to be content with doing nothing.

Rather than sound the whole depth of his egotism, or pass harsh judgment on it, he hastily rejoined the throng of guests, happy to feel that there were people round him. The presence of our fellow creatures is a comfort to us when we have been tempted to take the measure of our pettiness. That is a kind of temptation which is always reserved for the best of us to yield to.

The movement toward the refreshment tables had now begun, and there was a coming and going through the two drawing-rooms, the ante-chamber and the dining-room, prolonging itself, with frequent delays as the young people found opportunities for flirtation. Some of them, all for dancing, called noisily for the orchestra again. Some of the young girls showed already that they were clever and happy in the tricks and coquetry that land a husband some day. Some of them, though only a few, so far as a cursory glance could tell, did not bother to see whether a man wore an engagement ring or not before they trained their artful batteries on him. The eyes of youth flashed under the chandeliers, as sparkling as the jewels which shone in hair or corsage, on wrists or fingers. Among the men’s black coats the clear bits of colour and mellow outlines of the women’s frocks stood out like water-colours.

In which category did Miss Jeanne Sassenay belong, determinedly making off with Raymond Bercy, the fiancé last year of Miss Roquevillard, while her mother’s vigilant eye followed her with solicitude and some surprise? Her little head was like a Greek statue’s, borne so elegantly and easily above its stone shoulders: was it so scatter-brained it could not even cherish the memory of her abandoned friend? Were her cool blue eyes, with their clear glances, only indifferent and not sincere? Her cheeks glowed with the exercise of dancing, but she was not smiling, she was wrinkling her eyebrows, and shut her lips tight, as if she were making some important decision. It was an air that contrasted quaintly with her pretty, childlike manner.

“I haven’t danced with you yet,” the young man was saying. “Won’t you give me a waltz?”

“No,” she replied emphatically, first looking round to see that they were quite alone.

“Why not? Are all your waltzes taken?”

“No, not all.”

He did not think her serious, and was not chilled by her coolness.

“I’m warned, then. Many thanks,” he laughed.

She gave one of those tired “ughs,” like workmen lifting a heavy weight, and then began to talk all at once, full of her subject:

“Indeed I must warn you, sir. Your mother has talked to mamma. And mamma has no secrets from me. If she ever has any, I guess them. Very well, then, I’ll never, do you hear, never consent to marry you.”

“I beg your pardon, mademoiselle, I have not asked for your hand,” the young man retorted in astonishment.

“Your mother has been over the ground, as they say so prettily,” she resumed.

“Mothers make a great many plans for their sons. This one, however flattering it is, doesn’t correspond with my intentions.”

“Oh, so much the worse,” said Jeanne.

“I’m not thinking of marrying,” he said.

“You’re wrong there,” said the girl, the reproach sounding queer and almost funny from her childish mouth.

“When one has the luck in life to meet a young girl like Margaret Roquevillard,” she added, “one oughtn’t to wreck such happiness one’s self.”

So this was what she had been driving at. He understood. She should have known from the change in his face that she had struck home, but at her tender age vision is not clear enough to read the inner feelings through the features. She was accordingly hardly moderate in heaping up her boarding-school disdain upon him.

“It’s always shabby, my dear sir, to desert a fiancée. And when she is in trouble it’s perfectly abominable.”

What right had she to scold him so violently? Raymond Bercy was irritated by it all, and yet, at the bottom of his heart, was conscious of a bitter-sweet pleasure in hearing Margaret spoken of. His anger and bitterness crept into his retort.

“I didn’t appoint you to judge me, mademoiselle,” he said, “but if you talk to me in the name of another, my reply is that——”

“I’m not speaking in any one’s name——”

“That you are misinformed. It wasn’t I who broke our engagement. I would gladly have kept it.”

“You would have kept it? Oh, when the sun is shining, you men, all of you, are always on hand; and when it rains, there isn’t a soul of you about.”

“But you are too unjust, after all. I shall lose my patience with you.”

She was as far as ever from keeping still, going on to worry him, like a wasp that hovers round you and tries to sting.

“It’s a great mistake for a man to get cross,” she said.

“I don’t have to report to you, Miss Sassenay. Let me tell you, however, that Miss Roquevillard broke our engagement of her own free will.”

“Out of generosity.”

“Without any consideration for my feelings or the pain it gave me.”

“In such circumstances you shouldn’t have let her break it,” declared Jeanne. Her cheeks had grown quite red, and her self-possession was gone. She was contradicting herself furiously, and he, too, was scarcely more calm than she was.

“And if her brother is convicted?” he demanded.

“’Tis a fine case, isn’t it?”

“Oh, really, do you think so, Miss Sassenay?”

“Yes, really. As for me, if I were in love it would be all the same to me if my fiancé were sent to the galleys. I’d follow him, do you hear, sir. And if I had to commit some crime to be sent after him, I’d commit it. Biff, boom! Just like that!”

“You’re a child,” he commented; then brusquely he changed his tone, and whispered in a heavy voice:

“Do you think I have no regrets for her?”

She changed as quickly as he had, triumphantly, and was almost on the point of falling on his neck. Mrs. Sassenay, surprising this by-play from a distance, was distressed by what she saw, and blamed herself for her neglect.

“Oh, I knew quite well, sir,” said Jeanne, “that you couldn’t want to marry me. Good, then, be off with you. Run and tell Margaret. Beg her for my sake to forgive you. Take your place again quickly in the family before the trial comes on. Afterwards it will be too late. It will do more good than prescribing all sorts of nasty medicines for your sick people.”

“Thanks.”

“Be off then, at once.”

“But it’s half-past eleven,” argued Raymond.

“To-morrow, then.”

Mrs. Sassenay, meanwhile, making her way toward her daughter, was stopped by a group of people in animated conversation. The group was growing larger every minute.

“Are you sure?” asked Mr. Vallerois of a young officer whose uniform bore the epaulettes of the general staff.

“Quite sure,” said the officer. “The news reached our division at six o’clock. The general went in person to call on Mr. Roquevillard.”

“In person,” corroborated Mr. Coulanges, who had been astonished and impressed by this official step toward one who was down and out like Mr. Roquevillard.

Mrs. Sassenay turned to her neighbour, Mr. Latache, for information.

“What news are they talking about?” she inquired.

“Of the death of Lieutenant Roquevillard,” was the reply. “He died of yellow fever in the Soudan.”

“How unfortunate that family is!” murmured Mrs. Sassenay, moved with pity.

“Are they not, indeed!” said Mr. Latache.

So cruel a grief centred all the women’s sympathy on the Roquevillards, and removed the hostility of the men, though people had been complacent witnesses of the family’s material and moral decadence. They had merely wanted to take the Roquevillards down a peg or two, but fate was crushing them with no compassion or reprieve. The partisans of Mr. Frasne and his clever operation were silent, the district attorney expressing the sentiment of them all in the phrase:

“Poor things!”

Shortly after this colloquy Jeanne Sassenay disappeared. In vain her mother searched for her through the rooms. In the vestibule she perceived Raymond Bercy hastily getting into his overcoat.

“Are you going already?” she asked.

“Yes, Mrs. Sassenay,” he replied, with no further explanation of his precipitate departure.

She thought she guessed the young man’s trouble, and connected the circumstances with her daughter’s disappearance, beginning to be seriously worried.

“Have you seen Jeanne?” she asked of her husband, whom she met at the entrance to the drawing-room.

“No. Are you looking for her?”

Mr. Sassenay was a frankly active and loyal man, but quite destitute of psychology; he could overcome the greatest material obstacles, but was incapable of stopping to analyse sentiments. His wife judged it useless to tell him of her fears, and contented herself with enjoining him to look after their guests. For her own part she went straight to her daughter’s room. She entered, and the moment she turned the switch of the electric light she discovered Jeanne there—all crumpled up and shrunken in an armchair, weeping regardless of her rumpled frock.

“Jeanne, what’s the matter?” she asked at once, beginning to pet her.

“Oh, mamma,” wailed the girl.

It was the cry of a little child that is soon quieted.

“Why are you crying, Jeanne?” asked her mother.

“I keep thinking of Margaret’s troubles while I’m dancing,” she explained.

Mrs. Sassenay breathed more freely. She knew how fond her daughter was of Margaret Roquevillard. But as the sobs did not stop she asked gently:

“Are you thinking of Lieutenant Hubert?”

“Yes. He was nice ... we used to play tennis together. He was always the best player.”

The cause of the girl’s grief did not lie in that quarter.

“Poor Margaret!” she added, changing her subject half unconsciously. “I liked Maurice, who is in prison, better than Hubert. He’ll be acquitted, won’t he?”

“I hope so, dear.”

“An innocent man who is acquitted, or even one who is condemned—there’s something fine about it, isn’t there, mamma?”

“Are you sure he’s innocent?”

“Margaret’s brother? How can you ask it?”

Mrs. Sassenay smiled at this assurance and indignation, which she had provoked on purpose. All the time she was petting and soothing her daughter, her memory was recalling a long-ago talk she had had with Mrs. Roquevillard on the subject of their children. “One day perhaps,” the saintly woman had said to her, “if Maurice is worthy of it, I will ask your child’s hand for him. She will be near you.”

Maurice had not been worthy, but his prestige of other days was still potent over this too generous little girl. That was the danger. It must be looked out for. And while she promised herself to be careful, Jeanne’s mother thought in spite of herself of those other Roquevillards, the dead and the living; so deserving, and so sorely tried.

The noise of the orchestra came up to the room half muffled.

“Dry your eyes, Jeanne. Gently, so. A little powder. There. You’re looking very well this evening. Now let’s go back quickly to the drawing-room. People will notice our absence.”

“That’s true, mamma, and I promised this waltz.”

And growing suddenly serene again, the girl preceded her mother down the hall.

At that very hour Raymond Bercy, completely upset by the death of his friend Hubert, was pacing the hundred steps opposite the Roquevillards’ house, to and fro. The roof of the castle, covered with snow, showed vaguely in the starlight. The tower of the archives and the turret seemed to watch like sentinels over the sleeping town. Through the four windows of the study which he knew so well a thin light filtered between the blinds. In there Margaret and her father were suffering together, struck once more to their very hearts.

He longed to go in and join them, but he dared not. His broken engagement, his parents’ objections, what the world would think, all sorts of obscure and selfish motives, had held him back. But in the cold night, in the course of this walk which he kept up so late, he came to know his heart better, knew that sorrow and pity, more than joy, make love increase.

IV
THE COUNSEL OF THE SOIL

SOME decision must be made. Mr. Roquevillard had been stunned since last evening by his son’s loss, of which he had heard in a laconic official note, saying that Hubert had died in his country’s service, far from any help, in an advanced post. His father had not even the supreme consolation of giving way to his sorrow. Hubert had gone away to the colonies to seek out danger and win some glory that should brighten the family’s tarnished name, and so he was the last victim of Maurice’s heedless wrongs against them all. Maurice, himself, to-morrow, was to appear in court, and there was still the struggling with the wilful difficulties of his defence. No doubt the sacrifice of the family estate would have its effect. No doubt the reparation made to the plaintiff would render acquittal certain, or at any rate probable, and turn the tables in favour of the accused. But even acquittal must not be wrung from the jury through pity or through favour. To come back again to his own fireside, to deserve honour again in the city or at the bar, to continue a tradition and hand it down in his turn, the young man must leave the court-house stripped of every injurious suspicion, discharged from every fault against the law and honour. And how was this to be accomplished without mentioning the name of Mrs. Frasne?

It was true that Mr. Battard, after the sale of La Vigie, had gone back on his refusal to plead.

“It has cost you more than it’s worth,” he had said, with professional cynicism. “But your generosity will soften the jury’s minds. They’re the sort who will split hairs about an egg and hang an orchard thief, but weep like calves when they learn you’ve sold your land to indemnify the plaintiff. They may even be capable, if they stop to think, of convicting your son just the same, on account of the bad example that you give them, if Mr. Frasne’s clever transaction, when it is made known in court in the final argument, doesn’t probably precipitate a furious envy in them that will be in your favour.”

For Mr. Battard thought very ill of justice and humanity, but knew the case, and offered his services. His reputation made him a coadjutor that could not be refused. At five o’clock he was to come and have a last talk in Mr. Roquevillard’s office, with Mr. Hamel, on the main lines of his argument. Nevertheless, Maurice’s father had no confidence in the power of Mr. Battard’s showy and sceptical art to sustain the cause of a whole race.

After luncheon, at which he and Margaret hardly touched their food, he rose and went out for a walk. His too heavy sorrow smothered him within doors. Outside he should be able to think more clearly. The air would revive his thoughts, restore his spent forces and beaten energy. As he reached the door Margaret called him.

“Father.”

He turned quickly. Margaret, since his wife’s death, and even before it, had been his confidante and counsellor, his supreme comforter in life. Since the departure of little Julian, whose father had taken him back to Lyons the morning after the family council, Margaret and her father had been left to face each other all alone in the gradually emptied house. All that night again, almost till morning, they had talked of Hubert, weeping for him and praying. When Margaret came up to him now he put his hand on her beautiful hair and let it linger there. She understood that he was saying a blessing for her, quite low, and her eyes, so easily misted now, so used to tears, grew moist once more.

“Father,” she asked, “what have you decided on for Maurice?”

“Battard is ready to defend him. He’s coming at five o’clock with Hamel. I’m going out to think over my last instructions to them in the open air.”

“You don’t want me to go with you?”

“No, little girl. Don’t worry about me. I’ll work while I’m walking. We haven’t time for burying our dead. The living need us.”

“Well, then, I’ll go to the gaol and do my part there.”

“Yes, you can tell the sad news to him.”

“Poor Maurice, how he will suffer!”

“Less than we do.”

“Oh, no, father. As much as we do, and more than we do. He will reproach himself.”

“He may well do so. Hubert is gone because of him.”

“Exactly, father. We cry, you and I, without self-reproach. Shall I say nothing to him for you?”

“No, nothing.”

“Father——”

“Tell him—tell him to remember that he is the last of the Roquevillards.”

He went out, passing by the castle and on into the country. It was a fine winter’s day, with the sun shining on the snow. Mechanically he took the Lyons road that led to La Vigie, his customary walk. It led through the village of Cognin, and, beyond the sawmills near the Saint Charles bridge, settled into a long defile between the Vimines and Saint Cassin hills, spurs of the mountains of Lepine and Corbelet, coming out at last by the pass of the Echelles. From this place on, lost in his meditations, Mr. Roquevillard followed the rural path on the left which was the way to La Vigie. He crossed the old bridge thrown over the Hyères, now a thin stream of water between too icy borders, the leafless poplars and willow trees no longer hiding it. After a brief circuit he found himself in a fold of the deserted valley, shut in by the slopes of Montagnole, whose bell-tower he could see outlined against the sky. But he took no note of the solitude. On the contrary, he walked more lightly, and was conscious of some lightening of his sorrow, too. Was he not at home here, at home on either side? And did not the good earth bring him the comfort of its old safe friendship, of his childhood memories whose grace it cherished, of all the human past which had remade it after nature finished? In this vineyard on the left, with its shrouded vines—he could distinguish the stakes and the wires that ran between them—he had always gathered the grapes at autumn. On the right, beyond the stream which served as common boundary between him and his neighbour, this dismantled hill, with a single tree standing over it, had borne the woods of beeches red and white, and the oaks, which he had bought with his savings to enlarge his holdings and had ordered cut not long ago. At the top of the ascent he would reach the old house that he had restored, its very age testifying to the hardiness of his race and its taste for solid things. He would enter by the farm, pat the children’s heads, drink a little glass of brandy of his own distilling, with the farmer, who did not object to alcohol; above all, his gaze would sweep the whole horizon, where the storm-tossed mountain forms and fertile plains, with a lake in the distance, made a composition of motionless and inspiring lines; then the nearer horizon of La Vigie with its divers tillages.

He walked briskly, lost thus in his thoughts. On this familiar soil his steps had again their old brisk ring, as in the days when he had felt like a young man despite his years, happily surrounded by those he loved and confident in their love and life.

Suddenly he stopped.

“But I am no longer at home here,” he thought abruptly. “La Vigie is sold. The Roquevillards are no longer masters there. What am I doing? I must get out of this.”

And he turned in his path, his head bent low, like a tramp caught in an orchard.

He stopped at the stream which separated Cognin from Saint Cassin. He cleared it at a bound, and found himself this time on a piece of land which had been outside the straight line of cultivation on the estate, and had not been included in the bill of sale. It remained henceforth his only landed property. At the foot of the slope he stopped a moment to get his breath, like a company that comes upon some shelter in retreat. Then he began to clamber up the slope, not without difficulty, for he slipped and had to thrust his cane in the ground to hold his balance. The path, faintly marked at best, ended by losing itself altogether, and he made his way as well as he could in the direction of the solitary tree that stood out clear against the sky on the summit. It was an old oak, which had been spared, not for its age nor the fine effect of its height and branches, but on account of a beginning of dry rot that impaired its saleability. Its clinging leaves, all tightened and shrivelled up after the manner of oaks, the better to defend themselves against the wind, were loath even now to fall, their rusty tints appearing here and there beneath the rime. Along the hillside the tree trunks cut by the woodsmen, but not carted away before winter came on, lay like corpses in the snow, some still clothed in their bark, others already stripped.

Finally Mr. Roquevillard reached the point he had been making for. He touched with his hand, as if it had been a friend, the tree that had drawn him this far, admiring its grandeur and pride.

“You are like me,” he reflected, mopping his brow. “You have seen your companions struck down, and are left alone. But we are condemned. Time is the axe that will soon fell us.”

He had been a little retarded in climbing up the hill, and though the afternoon was not far advanced, the sun was already declining toward the Lepine chain. December days are so short, and the nearness of the mountains cut them shorter still. From the hill he could see the same view almost as from La Vigie: the Signal facing him, and below it the receding valley of the Echelles; on the right, in the background, beyond the plain, the lake of Bourget, the Revard range, and the Nivolet with its regular gradations. The snow made the outlines less distinct, blurring the foreground till the landscape was all soft and uniform. Threats of evening tinted it a delicate rose, spreading over all things the hue of living flesh.

In spite of the clear air, Mr. Roquevillard felt the cold, and buttoned up his overcoat. Now that he was no longer warm from walking he was again conscious of his age and sorrow. Why had he climbed this hill? Its slope seemed to him like a cemetery, with its felled trees scattered over the white ground. Did he come here, opposite the old place abandoned now after the care of so many centuries, to gaze upon its ruin and mourn the death of its hopes? Across the valley he could distinguish the lands and buildings that had been his heritage. The house, which only a year ago had sheltered all the reassembled, joyful family, was closed now: never again should he pass its doors.

Silence and solitude were all round him on this funereal, leafless hillock where he stood. About him, within him, it was Death. And as a vanquished chief calls the roll of his soldiers after battle, he summoned up his sorrows one by one: his wife’s life had been crushed out, borne down by her troubles; his daughter Felicie given up to God, far away over the seas and lost to him; Hubert, his firstborn, his best boy, struck down in full youth, far from France and all that were dear to him; Germaine, leaving her native country; Margaret, vowed to celibacy by her poverty; and finally Maurice, the last of the Roquevillards, on whom the future of the race depended, thrown into prison upon an infamous charge; threatened with conviction even though the paternal lands had been sacrificed to save him. In vain had sixty years been given to the nurture of this family. Decimated, crushed by the fault of a single member, it lay prone now at the foot of La Vigie, like the trunks of these trees half bedded in the snow. To him whose robust force and faith had looked for victory, defeat and shame had been dealt out.

In his discouragement he leant against the oak, his brother in misfortune. He gave a long, despairing groan, the groan of a tree which totters beneath the raining blows of the axe before it falls. The unheeding earth and sky were immobile in their quiet colours; he felt himself abandoned.

Two tears rolled down his cheeks—a man’s tears, the more rare and moving because they are a confession of humility and weakness, falling slowly in the cold air, half frozen on his unwarmed cheeks. He did not dream that he wept. He only realised it upon perceiving a human form slowly climbing the hillside toward him. He dried his eyes, lest he should be surprised in his sorrow. It was the figure of a woman gathering dead wood and faggots. Bending over the white earth, she could not see him; only when she got near the oak she straightened up a little and recognised him.

“Master Francis!” she murmured.

“Mother Fauchois!” he exclaimed.

She came nearer, and put down her burden; searched for the right thing to say, and finding nothing, began to weep, not silently, but with loud sobs.

“Why do you cry?” asked Mr. Roquevillard.

“For you, Master Francis.”

“For me?”

“Yes.”

He had never confided his grief to any one; his pride and reserve kept pity at a distance; but he accepted it from this poor old woman, and gave her his hand. “You’ve heard of all my troubles?”

“Yes, Master Francis.”

“The last of them?”

“Yes—through a man from Saint Cassin, who came back from town this morning.”

“Ah, I see.”

They were silent; then Mother Fauchois began her lamentations again in a loud voice. It is not the way of the primitive to be silent in sorrow.

“Master Hubert, so gallant, so nice and young, so good to everybody! He used to come into the kitchen and watch the dishes and laugh with us. And madame—madame was one of the good God’s saints. They are the sort you find in Paradise, Master Francis.”

Mr. Roquevillard stood motionless and silent, envying the dead who were at rest. Mother Fauchois went prattling on again:

“And Master Maurice, they’ll give him back to you? It’s to-morrow the trial comes off,” she added, quite low, with her peasant’s dread of justice.

He saw her cross herself, praying for the Lord’s help for him, and involuntarily he recalled her daughter who had been condemned for theft. He inquired about her gently, for his tried soul was cleansed now of all contempt or pride.

“And your daughter, have you good news from her?”

“She’s come back to me, Master Francis.”

“I’m glad of that.”

“Oh, she doesn’t deserve any credit for it. She had to. She came back from Lyons quite sick. She doesn’t want to get well.”

“What’s the matter with her?”

“She was very sick after her baby was born.”

“A baby? Is she married?”

“No, Master Francis. But she has a baby. A little darling, very lively; plays all day long. I wouldn’t look at the little angel at first, on account of the disgrace, you understand. But when I saw it it gave one little laugh and made my heart leap. Now it’s all the pleasure I have left.”

“Is it a girl?”

“A girl? You’d say it was a boy, sure enough, a big boy, very plump.”

“It’s quite an expense for you.”

“For sure. But when I come home and see this urchin with his bottle it makes me feel as good as a glass of your wine. It makes life feel warm and pleasant again.”

“You’re pretty old to work now,” said Mr. Roquevillard.

“Exactly. I’m no good for anything else any more.”

Even from her wretchedness she could draw comfort, and misfortune brought her a supreme interest for her last days. His mind was distracted from his own trouble by her story, and he marvelled at the courage of the poor woman, who, without knowing it, set him an example of bravery and forgiveness. She stooped down to lift her bundle again to her shoulders.

“Good-bye, Master Francis.”

“Where are you going?”

“To Cognin, to take my wood to the baker’s.”

“Wait a moment.”

He took out a five-franc piece, wanting to help her in her misfortunes, but she would not accept it.

“Take it, I want you to,” he said.

“Master Francis,” she answered, “La Vigie doesn’t belong to you any more, if what they say is true.”

The lawyer’s brow clouded over.

“No, La Vigie isn’t mine any more. Take the money just the same. It will bring me luck.”

She saw that she was humiliating him by her refusal, and held out her hand. Then she went on down the hillside, bending her knees at each step to keep from slipping. He watched her figure growing smaller in the distance, until it was no more than a dark spot against the background of the valley. Her going left him alone again, but changed. This poor old woman here had returned to him a hundredfold the succour and strength that he had given her a year ago at the vintage time.

While they had been talking together evening had come on. All nature, motionless and as if congealed beneath the snow, submitted to the solemn and mysterious calm that precedes the flight of day. The outlines of the mountains melted more and more into the borders of the pale sky. Not a sound broke the silence, more impressive in its aloof stillness than the roaring of a storm.

At the foot of the hill the little stream slipped slyly by under a thin bed of ice, where it had broken and reformed again. The earth, all of an even hue, seemed shrouded in its whiteness, like a jewel wrapped in cotton-wool.

Mr. Roquevillard fixed his gaze upon La Vigie, that closed and deserted relic of the race that had possessed it. The prospect held and fascinated him. Mother Fauchois had reawakened the instincts of battle in him, had turned away despair from him. The head of the family thrust sorrow from him, to think of the child that was now his charge in life. He must seek some means of saving Maurice. But his yearning gaze fell back blankly before this cruelly cold, clear emptiness of space that was all around him: it gave back no message to him, no word such as the spring or summer or even the autumn of life’s seasons might have uttered to him. How should he defend his son with no weapons but memories of the past? What help could he expect from this deserted soil, this race that had gone down into the tomb? “One doesn’t argue through the dead,” Mr. Battard had said to him on learning of Maurice’s determination.

The sun, touching the line of the mountain ridge, shed its last glory. On the mountain slopes the piledup snow seemed to kindle beneath its fire and grow crimson, as if awakened from its lethargy. Last of all, the still horizon line stirred beneath the light. Silent and immaculate it yielded to the touch of life and gave it forth. The trembling earth separated itself distinctly from the sky, whose pale blue spread into a thousand tints under its dominant gold. Nearer by, the rime that covered the trees and shrubs reflected the rays of the setting sun like crystals that gather up in their tiny space the myriad lights of a chandelier.

Mr. Roquevillard, his eye fixed on La Vigie, beheld this phenomenon of the resurrection. For a few minutes nature lived again beneath the caresses of the evening. Once more the blood coursed through its marble face. Along the vines, on the summit of the hill, where the almost horizontal beams of the sun struck more directly, the dispossessed proprietor could make out now, instead of a piece of land uniform in its whiteness, the distinguishing marks of the different places he had put under cultivation; and behold, here and there were trees, tall poplars standing calm and proud like palms, lindens with tapering branches, thin birches, massive chestnuts, delicate fruit trees puny of limb yet so expert in bearing their branches; trees, but just now nameless and lost in mist, which seemed to him to surge forth again like living beings.

And he was no longer conscious of being alone there, for he knew names for these phantoms. With swelling breast he summoned up all the successive generations that had cleared these lands, the hands that built this mansion and these farm buildings, this rustic work, that had laid the foundation of this domain, from the first shirt-sleeves of the oldest peasant to the lawyer’s robes and the togas of the senate of Savoy. The high plateau which spread before him was invested like a fortress by the hosts of ancestors that had planted with their wheat and rye and oats and orchards and vines in this corner of the earth traditions of uprightness and honour, examples of courage and nobility. And as the products of these their lands had scattered their good repute abroad, so this tradition lighted up the city down there within the circle of the mountains where the shadows were beginning to fall upon it, and the province which it had served and protected and even in certain moments of its history made illustrious; shed lustre even upon their native land, whose power was made of the continuity and hardihood of such breeds of men as they were. “One doesn’t argue through the dead,” he repeated a second time. “With the dead, no; but with the living, yes. They are there, all of them. Not one but will answer to his name. The earth has opened up to let them pass. I will overleap this valley that lies between us. I am going to join them.”

And he measured the already darkened hollow of the vale, as if these phantoms all were massed there before him.

The shadows were laying hold of nature. Already all the plain belonged to them. They rose. Only the mountains were still defiant, especially the storeyed Nivolet that faced the setting sun and received all its flame, glowing with the purple and violet snow like heated metal.

Stooping toward the foot of the hill, Mr. Roquevillard followed this struggle. And all at once his whole being started. With the darkness the shades were mounting, all the shades. They had left La Vigie, they were coming. Just now he had seen them gathered there in the valley’s depths. They were bringing him their presences, their help and testimony. There were some of them on all the hillsides. It was as if an army were rallying round their chief as he stood there at the foot of the old oak. And when all the army was assembled, he could hear it heralding a victory for him.

“We who have loved and laboured, fought and suffered, strove not for our own selfish ends, not for a personal result achieved or missed by any one of us, but for an end more permanent than that, an end beyond ourselves, encompassing all the family. What we have saved thus for the common fund we have given into your care to be handed on. It is not La Vigie. Land can be gained by the sweat of one’s brow, bought with money. The soul of our race you bear within you. We are confident that you will defend it. What are you saying, in your despair, of solitude and death? Will you render us your account and tell us whence you came? From Death? But the family is the very negation of death. While you live we all live. And when you shall join us in your turn, you will live again, you must live again, in those that have been born of you. See: at this deciding moment, we are all here. Put off your sorrow as we have lifted up the stones from above our graves. For you, do you hear, is reserved the honour of defending and saving the last of the Roquevillards. You will speak in our name. Afterwards, when your tasks are done, you can rejoin us here in the peace of God.”

Mr. Roquevillard put out his hand and supported himself against the oak. The darkness was storming Le Nivolet, its last terrace, with a cross upon it, flaming once more before it should go out. A great calm settled on his soul, and he accepted in good faith this mission laid upon him by the past.

“Maurice, your defender shall be no one but myself.... And I’ll not mention the name of Mrs. Frasne.”

He moved away from the spot where the tree stood, noting the situation as he left the place.

“I’ll rebuild here,” he thought, “I, or my son.”

V
MARGARET’S BETROTHAL

HUBERT’S death had completely upset Maurice, breaking at last the pride that separated him from his family. Margaret, on her way home from bearing the sad news to him in prison, walked through the streets seeing nothing, shut up in her grief. At her own door she asked the servant:

“Has Mr. Roquevillard come in yet?”

She was hastening to her father’s comfort now as she had gone to Maurice’s, with that power of bearing up in moral sorrow which is less exceptional in a woman than in a man, and permitted her to be of comfort instead of breaking down.

“Not yet, Miss Margaret,” was the answer.

She was surprised, and began to be a little anxious.

“Not yet?”

And yet she had stayed a long time at the gaol, and evening was coming on. Mr. Roquevillard had gone out only for a short walk. He expected Mr. Hamel and Mr. Battard at five o’clock, to make the last arrangements with them for to-morrow’s trial. His prolonged absence under such circumstances was strange.

“But there is a gentleman in the drawing-room who asked to see you,” the servant now added.

“To see me?”

“Yes, miss.”

“Who is it?”

“He told me his name, but I don’t remember it. A doctor.”

She was a girl from the country, not yet quite used to her new ways, and unfamiliar with the names and faces of the town’s people.

“You ought not to have let him in, Melanie,” said Margaret reproachfully. “To-day of all days.”

“That’s right, miss, I thought so, too. But he would not go away. He brought a message for you.”

Margaret went into the drawing-room against her will, keeping on her hat and mourning veil as a hint to the importunate visitor to depart. She found herself face to face with Raymond Bercy.

“Miss Roquevillard,” he murmured, as much overcome as she was.

She recoiled from him instinctively, and he espied the movement, and with an entreating voice he tried to make her stay.

“Miss Margaret, forgive me for having come. I learned last night of your sorrow. Then——”

“Mr. Bercy,” she said, coming forward.

This one formal phrase, firmly uttered, kept him at a distance, seemed to deny him the right to plead. Like her father, she deprecated pity. The man who had been betrothed to her bent his head, disconcerted, and kept silent.

“Why did you insist upon seeing me, sir, to-day?” she said again more gently.

He raised his eyes to her, with an imploring and humble look.

“Because to-morrow it would have been too late,” he sighed.

“Too late? To-morrow? You’ve something to tell me? Is it about Maurice?”

She forgot herself, in an instant, never dreaming that the matter could concern her. Had not all ties between herself and Raymond Bercy been broken off for more than a year? Were they not broken that day when he had not hesitated, in his mother’s house, to break his engagement to her and save the honour of his name? The young man had made no attempt to recapture her affection or her promise to him. Developments had broken on them like a tempest: the accusation by Mr. Frasne, Mrs. Roquevillard’s death, Maurice’s sentence for contempt, the shame and ruin of the family that resulted from it, and, last cruelty of all, the loss of the firstborn son, their future hope and stay. It was more than enough to justify one’s giving up, keeping away from people, forgetting. Was it not the privilege of unhappiness to hide itself? She had enjoyed her tears and her affliction by herself. She had jealously extracted the very essence of her grief, not sharing it with any one. By what right did this man come here again to impose his useless presence and his futile sympathy upon her? But no doubt something else had determined him upon this measure. Perhaps he knew something that would be of value in the defence of her accused brother. On such a pretext, and on this only, she could excuse him for having forced the guards and introduced himself into the house.

He made, no haste to explain himself. He was visibly under the dominion of some great inner trouble.

“Tell me your business, please,” she said.

“It’s nothing to do with Maurice,” he replied blankly.

“What is it then?”

She made a step toward him, and threw back the veil, which had embarrassed her movements and half concealed her. Coming to him thus, straight and rigid, she seemed to him more distant still. Her face, between the black of her dress and her bonnet, stood out so pale, with bruised eyes and lips like a single red line, that he felt her far away from him and sorrowful. He feared lest he should not move her, yet he was greedy to bring her the comfort of his passionate tenderness. He kept back his tears, and summoning all his courage, began to speak, stammering at first, then going on in a voice which little by little grew more firm:

“Miss Roquevillard, listen to me. You must listen. Then you can understand and forgive me. I must speak to you, and speak to-day. I respect your grief. I feel it with you. I have suffered, too, myself, ever since the day.... And my suffering has made me understand others better. I loved you. Oh, don’t stop me! Let me finish. Yes, I loved you. I could not see any future for myself except with you. But I encountered so much opposition at home, so many obstacles, on account—on account of your brother. My mother, who is so good at heart, gives in to every prejudice. My father was set on my career. He is a man of science only. He lives in his office, or rather with his sick people. He’s not the ruler of his house. And I—oh, no, I don’t want to go on accusing other people to excuse my fault. I’ve been a coward, an abominable coward. But I have been well punished for it. I haven’t stood up for you—I haven’t known how to defend you.”

She had attempted at several points to interrupt him with a gesture. Erect again and unconsciously disdainful, she looked him in the face. In her action she showed the haughty air that came naturally to the Roquevillards and had won them so many enemies. But it was mitigated by the veiled melancholy in her eyes, and the mystic expression that came to her from her mother.

“I have not asked you to defend me,” she replied, simply.

“That’s true, Margaret....”

He gave up formality in his emotion, speaking to her as he had used to do in the time when they had been betrothed.

“I even wanted you to despise me,” he added.

“I don’t despise any one, sir.”

“You wounded me so, just in looking at me, that day when you gave me back my promise. You have been so hard....”

“I, hard?”

She pronounced the two words almost in a whisper, deeming all reply useless, inwardly revolted by such injustice.

“Yes,” he replied. “I never understood before that it was right to be proud in misfortune. And I cursed you, but my heart was broken. And I accused you, instead of avowing the wretchedness of my doubts and my mean caring for what people thought. I have changed greatly, I swear to you. And now I admire you, I revere you, adore you. Yes. Don’t say anything. Let me finish. I have tried to forget you. My parents would have had me marry some one else, to have me settle down, as they said. I couldn’t. I love only you, and always shall.”

“I beg of you, sir.”

“What little good I can do, you are the cause of. Little by little I shall raise myself to your level. Men like me, all men, hover between good and evil, between devotion and selfishness. They don’t reflect, they are carried away by all the mediocrity of life. But sometimes one impulse is enough to lift them out of themselves. Your love has given me that impulse, Margaret.”

He stopped, waiting for a word of hope. She lowered her eyes, and the veil, which she no longer held back, fell down to her shoulder, throwing a little shadow on one side of her face. He murmured like a prayer:

“Margaret, take back what you’ve said. Consent to be my wife. I love you. For all your sorrow I love you all the more.”

He saw a shudder run all through her.

“It’s impossible. Don’t ask me that,” she replied unhesitatingly.

Dismayed by this refusal, when a remnant of vanity in him still persuaded him that the course he took was generous, he cried out in distress:

“My life’s happiness, and I’m not to ask you for it?”

She moved nearer to him, and her voice took on a new sweetness as she said to him:

“Another wife will give you this happiness. I’m sure of it. I want it for you.”

“There’s no other woman but you in my eyes.”

“No, no, it’s impossible. Don’t torment me.”

“Impossible? Why, Margaret? Why discourage me? You don’t love me? One day perhaps I shall know how to make you love me. You shake your head? Good God, Margaret, will you send me away without a reason?”

She seemed to search for an answer, and hesitated; then found a way round the difficulty. He watched anxiously for what she should say.

“I’m not the same girl I was last year,” she began.

“I don’t understand.”

“I’ve no dot any more.”

“Is that it? Margaret, I don’t deserve to have you treat me like this. There’s something in you, in your eyes, like a radiant flame of life. When I look at you I feel courage in me, a desire for good, and a disdain for all the petty satisfactions that material things can give. Beside this, this faith that you give me, which will be my strength, what is money?”

“And if to-morrow——”

As she did not go on with the phrase he repeated:

“If to-morrow?”

“If a still greater misfortune awaits us to-morrow, if to-morrow my brother Maurice is declared guilty?”

“I came to-day on account of that danger. I wanted to claim the honour of supporting your father to-morrow at the trial like a son. I had to see you to-day.”

“Ah!” she murmured, thunderstruck.

He could see from the tone of this simple exclamation that all the indifference she had shown him was falling away at last. On her pale face, whose every expression he had followed, he distinguished suddenly sympathy and gratitude, perhaps something further still. Happiness was there—uncertain, clouded, but still there. And its presence stirred his heart.

Margaret fortified him in this hope by holding out her hand to him.

“I thank you, Raymond,” she said, not afraid to call him by his name as she used to do. “I am touched, deeply touched.”

They were not quite the words he had expected from her. He watched her in an anxious ecstasy, entreatingly. As she kept silent, he murmured timidly:

“Why thank me, when I love you? It seems to me that loving you is worth more than—— Margaret, will you really be my wife?” he added, like a sigh.

There were compassion and sorrow in her beautiful pale face as she answered:

“Raymond, I can’t.”

“You can’t? Then—then you are in love with some one else?”

“Ah, my friend!”

“Yes, you are in love with some one else. Some one who has not been a coward like me, who has known how to divine your thoughts, to understand you, to be worthy of you, while I—well, I have lost my happiness by my own fault. It’s just, but it means unhappiness to one who loves you.”

He stopped and gave a heavy sob.

“Raymond,” she said, trembling, “I beg of you. Don’t talk like this.”

“I don’t accuse you. I’m the guilty one. And your happiness is dearer to me than my own.”

“Raymond, listen to me.”

He was beaten, and with sinking heart he let himself fall heavily into an armchair, hiding his head in his hands, heedless of the show of weakness he made with his tears. She took off her hat with a rapid movement, as a sick-nurse puts off unnecessary garments the better to do her work, and taking hold of his hands, she pulled them aside masterfully.

“Look at me, Raymond.”

She gave her commands, not imperiously, after the fashion of her father, but with persuasive sweetness. She was not constrained any more, no longer assumed the defensive, but came to him in all simplicity. Mechanically he submitted to her ascendancy, and obeyed her. The moment he looked at her, indeed, he ceased to weep. The girl appeared as if transfigured. A look of ecstasy lighted up her pallor. Her eyes glowed with an expression more than human, the expression of those who find peace beyond the agitations and passions that are the moving testimony of our life. She bore in her living features the same serenity that one sees on the faces of the dead that are asleep with God. There was no further trace of sorrow on her bloodless cheeks, or in her bruised eyes, only a deep calm, unalterable, almost frightening.

“Margaret, what is it?” he implored in anguish, like one who cries out to a comrade upon the brink of an abyss.

“Raymond, listen to me,” she repeated. “Yes, I love some one else.”

“Ah, I knew it!”

“Another, of whom you cannot be jealous. I shall never marry. I shall never be the wife of any one. I shall take another path. And yet I am so imperfect that just now when you were speaking to me, I was guilty of a feeling of pride. I am proud still. It is a fault of my people. But we have been so tried, we truly have had to grow a little stiff.”

A frail smile outlined itself at the corner of her mouth, then disappeared, as if to leave the purity of her motionless features undisturbed. She went on, while he said nothing, subdued by the mysterious potency that spread around her:

“No, I shall not forget that you have chosen the hour of my greatest distress to come to me.”

He mourned over her like a child. “I love you.”

“I must not love any more, Raymond. I have heard another call than yours. I’m going to tell you a secret that no one knows, not even my father. I don’t hesitate to tell it to you. Keep it for me. When I lost my mother I promised God to take her place in our home that has been so ravaged by misfortune.”

“Haven’t you done that?”

“I’m not through yet.”

“Will marriage prevent your filling that rôle? We shall not leave Chambéry.”

“You can’t give only half of yourself, Raymond. I have renounced my personal happiness. And from the day I renounced it I have felt a great force in me.”

He gave a violent start, in protest.

“But there’s no sense in it, Margaret. You have no right to deny yourself like this. You will live after your father’s gone. Your brother when he’s acquitted to-morrow will lead his own life, apart from you. And you, what will become of you all alone? What’s the use of sacrificing yourself for needless scruples?”

“My father has been smitten to the heart. My brother is always in danger. Don’t take away any of my courage by telling me I shall not be useful to them.”

Raymond gave in and ceased to struggle. He felt warned intuitively of his defeat, from the look in Margaret’s eyes still more than from her words, yet he tried to put off the moment of defeat. With a timid and softened voice he begged her for a delay.

“And if I wait for you, will you marry me?” he said. “If I remain faithful to you until the time when you have fulfilled your task for your family, will you come to me? I love you so much that rather than lose you I shall know how to be patient. It will be cruel and sweet together. Won’t you, Margaret?”

The girl’s eyes clouded a moment at this romantic and heroic proposal. He saw she was more human, and he believed she was yielding to him. He conceived a new hope from it, which her reply dissipated with its first words.

“No, Raymond, I shan’t consent to build my future on your sorrow. It’s impossible. You have not understood me entirely. I have given myself to God. Don’t try to take me back.”

“Ah, Margaret!”

“To give myself to God is to give myself to all those that suffer.”

“I understand now. You want to join some religious order.”

“I don’t know yet. There are very many ways of serving God. Don’t tell any one yet what I’ve told you. You’re crying. Don’t cry, Raymond. God will console you, as he has consoled me.”

“No, not me.”

And between two sobs he asked her:

“What are you going to do?”

“As long as my father lives I shall help him. As long as Maurice needs me I shall stand by him. At my mother’s death-bed I promised that. Afterwards I’ll devote my strength to the unfortunate, to the old, or maybe to children that have lost their parents. Perhaps I’ll keep a school here for little poor children. I don’t know. I can’t tell now. I mustn’t try to hurry up the future. It will come of itself. You see, now you know all my secrets.”

“And I,” he murmured, “what will become of me? You’re thinking of comforting all wretchedness and you forget mine.”

“Raymond!”

“I am more unhappy than the poorest people there are. They at least have had no glimpse of happiness, but I have, and am cast down after having known joy.”

“No, Raymond, you must have no regrets for me. I was not meant for marriage. God has warned me of it, though it’s been a little hard. For you he has another wife in store, no doubt, who will make you happier than I could.”

“You’re like no other woman, Margaret. You’re not the kind one forgets. You’re not the kind one can replace.”

Darkness was coming into the drawing-room with the waning day, and in the shadow, where the outlines of her black dress were dimmed, the girl’s face shone forth like a last remnant of the light, a light which scarcely animated her pale features. It was as if in touching her cheek one should fear to feel, instead of living warmth, the chill of marble in them.

‘Yes,“ she said, ”you will forget me. You must, and besides, I wish it.”

He looked at her in dismay, like a traveller who beholds from afar the summit that he cannot reach.

“You can’t control my memories,” he said.

“Then remember me without bitter thoughts, as if I were a sister that you had lost.”

“No, Margaret, not without bitterness. You lifted up my thoughts, elevated my heart. They will only fall back now.”

She was moved by this speech, and it was with a grave and almost solemn tone that she responded:

“If you loved me, if you truly loved me, you would give me the supreme joy of thinking that my vocation was not to be useless, for you no less than for others. You can’t be cast down forever over my refusal: it doesn’t really touch you. It can neither wound you nor take from you. My memory ought to be sweet to you, and not spoil your life. For I have loved you, Raymond, my friend. I looked forward contentedly to our wedding-day, and content is the confidence of the soul, our security for the future. An unexpected upheaval has separated us. I’ve seen God’s summons in it. If it is not His will that I should bring you happiness, if He has tested you in your turn, let me believe that this very trial will make you strong, make you grow, and ennoble you. If I, imperfect as I am, have served to elevate you, don’t tell me that you are going to slip back. I shall pray so hard for you.”

She was absorbed in her entreaty, and did not notice that he had slowly bent his knee before her, till suddenly she felt the young man’s lips pressed to her hand.

“What are you doing, Raymond? Get up, I beg of you,” she cried.

She saw him there at her feet and was surprised by this new resolution that he revealed to her. His face seemed no longer tortured and sorrowful, only serious and sad. He had succumbed in spite of himself to the stern and peaceful influence of her faith—that faith which is more potent even over others than ourselves.

“I was not worthy of you,” he murmured. “But I loved you so. No man is worthy of you. That is my consolation,” he added, as he rose, paying her this last homage.

She turned her head as if to put away such praise.

“No, dear friend, you mustn’t talk any more to me like this.”

The completion of the sacrifice was attained. They felt its poignancy with an almost physical sensation, and were hushed. An oppressive stillness followed, charged with melancholy. In the midst of it the maid came into the room, which had now grown quite dark. She had some trouble to see where her mistress was, her shadow was so merged in the darkness.

“Miss Margaret,” she said.

“What is it, Melanie?”

“Those gentlemen have come.”

“Oh! Did you show them into the office?”

“Yes, miss.”

“And Mr. Roquevillard has not come in yet?”

“No, miss.”

“Ask them to wait a few minutes. Mr. Roquevillard will be back soon.”

The delay was becoming disquieting, however, to Margaret. Raymond Bercy was conscious of the fact that the girl’s thoughts were far from him.

“Already!” he thought.

Just now, at least, when she had gently put away his love, he had had a place in her thoughts and heart. Even the sorrow that she caused him brought him nearer to her, was dear because it came from her. He looked at her a last time, with despairing eyes, as if to measure the whole extent of his loss, and leave its impress on his memory. And realising that this was the end, he murmured:

“Good-bye, Margaret.”

She held out her hand to him.

“Good-bye, dear friend. Go in peace. In my prayers each day I’ll join your name with my family’s. Do you want me to?”

“I am grateful, Margaret. I had conceived a great hope, and I have shattered it myself.”

“God willed it, and not you. May God guard you,” she answered gravely.

He bent his head and went out. When she found herself alone she leaned her forehead on her hands a moment, then straightened up again. Then she went to her father’s office, and begged Mr. Hamel and Mr. Battard to be patient a few minutes longer. Finally, as anxiety swayed her more and more, and she was even getting ready to go out and search, she heard the key grating in the outer lock. She hurried toward the door.

“Father, it’s you at last,” she cried.

Mr. Roquevillard, who had walked fast, wiped away the perspiration that gathered on his forehead despite the cold.

“Margaret, have those gentlemen come?” he asked.

“Yes. They’re waiting for you.”

“Good. I’ll go and see them.”

In the lighted hall father and daughter found themselves face to face and were surprised at the change each noted in the other. From having left each other morally discouraged and fagged out, they were surprised now, each of them, to find on the other’s face a sort of victorious serenity over fear and sorrow, a spiritual illumination that made them firm and confident. The father had heard the call of the past rising to him from the depths of the eternal generations. The daughter had heard the voice of God.

VI
THE DEFENDER

MR. ROQUEVILLARD burst into his office like a whirlwind, and his two colleagues rose from their discussion immediately and came forward to meet him. They could not conceal their surprise on finding, instead of a man struck down by despair over the death of his oldest son, the Roquevillard of other times, the man so redoubtable at the bar, to whom one went with difficult and stirring cases, on whose clear judgment and firm conclusions one could always depend. Here again was the man whose dominating character one chafed under sometimes as one quailed before his piercing glance.

“I have made you wait,” he said easily, dispensing with excuses.

In his presence, Mr. Hamel, with his crown of white hair, his delicate features, and the slightly affected and distinguished air that composed his venerable whole, and Mr. Battard, with his spreading beard, his air of assuming everywhere the first rank, seemed, nevertheless, both to recognise their leader; one with good will, the other grudgingly. All assumptions of superiority fell away before these other and more incontestable tokens.

“My good friend,” murmured the elder man, his hand stretched out.

“My dear colleague,” was the formula of the younger.

They conveyed their condolences to him, one cordially and with emotion, the other in trite phrases.

“Yes,” replied their host, stopping them with a motion of his hand, “I have only one son left. That one I am going to save. I must save him; and here’s the plan I have decided on.”

This last consultation had been called by the three lawyers to check up some definite plan of defence together, and lo, the opinion of a single one was prevailing in advance, without other consultation.

“Ah!” exclaimed the president, subdued by so much confidence and firmness.

“Decided?” repeated Mr. Battard with an air of doubt, divided between respect for his friend’s mourning and a sense of his own importance.

Mr. Roquevillard disclosed his idea promptly, in few words; he was very quiet, and his voice had grown young again.

“You two will assist me, both of you. But I shall make the argument myself,” he said.

“You!”

“You!”

Astonishment and irritation were reflected in the two exclamations. Mr. Hamel looked at his old companion in arms with his colourless eyes, the flame of life now no more than a trembling light in them, though it was still so pure; while the jury lawyer, unpleasantly affected by his dismissal from a case that would have given him a sensational chance for resounding argument, forgot the circumstances of the trial, and the misfortunes of the temporarily beaten family, and could think only of the opportunity for personal success that was ruthlessly snatched from him.

“Yes, I,” said Mr. Roquevillard. “I shall reclaim my son so energetically that they’ll give him back to me. They can’t refuse to give a father back his son.”

Having thus dictated his orders for the combat, he exerted himself next to bring round his allies to his way of thinking, for he could, if he liked, modify his imperious manner, and was not without skill in the art of leading men. He was certain of the assistance of the president, and so he turned his attention specially to Mr. Battard, who might escape him.

“You will be there, both of you, please. I count on you. If I ask to take your place, Battard, it isn’t because I rank my skill above yours. But there are certain things which it is my sad privilege alone to explain to the jury.”

“What things?”

“That’s my secret. You’ll hear it all to-morrow. I believe I can convince the jury of my son’s innocence without mentioning the name of Mrs. Frasne.”

“By making reparation for the injury?”

“No, by direct argument.”

“I don’t understand.”

“You’ll see to-morrow. However, if you detect any weakening in my voice or argument, if my speech makes you fear a failure, you must tell me. I submit myself entirely to your great experience in jury trials. You have wonderful presence of mind. These judges’ faces are an open book to you. You know the brief as well as I, or better than I do. You were ready with it. You can supplement my efforts. I shall feel myself strong, thus supported. Will you be so kind?”

The dismissed lawyer stroked his beard carefully, and hid his vexation beneath an air of indifference.

“My dear brother, what is the use?” he said. “My cooperation would be useless to you. You don’t really need anybody but yourself. You’re assuming without hesitation the highest and most difficult responsibilities. Permit me to consider my mission terminated.”

The two lawyers, during this interchange, had remained standing. Mr. Hamel, seated by the chimney corner, followed them with somewhat troubled eyes, taking no part in their discussion. Mr. Roquevillard moved a step nearer to his younger colleague, and put his hand affectionately on his shoulder.

“I know that I’m asking a great favour of you, Battard. In claiming the honour of defending my son myself, I want you to understand that it’s my name I count upon defending. I don’t undervalue the help your worth and competence and eloquence would have been to me. But in my place you would do the same as I. Give me this token of your friendship and disinterestedness, as well as your esteem. In that way you’ll show me that you take what I’m saying in good faith, I beg you.”

Mr. Battard kept running his nervous fingers through his fine beard. He was weighing the pros and cons, swayed in turn by fraternal and professional traditions, and by a wounded vanity that ill accommodated itself to second place. He had almost imposed his assistance and services on the defence. He counted, if not on his client’s being saved, at least on a personal triumph for himself: the court-room would be filled to overflowing, chiefly with ladies, who would be keen to hear him, no doubt. Instead of beholding him in his glory, holding forth as a leader, this select public would find him seated like a secretary at Roquevillard’s side, subservient to that dangerous rival who had dealt him so many hard legal knocks in the past. Was it becoming in him to accept so humiliating a position? On the other hand, his presence would not be useless in the trial. The prisoner’s father had probably been seized by some fine sudden zeal, had deluded himself probably with some sudden turn of argument that fascinated him. He dared not tell the secret of it, and perhaps he had conceived it under the influence of a grief that was beginning to affect his moral and intellectual vigour. This fictitious ardour that animated him might fall flat at any moment, without any warning, and be followed by the most lamentable depression. How could this man, crushed as he was by ruinous ill luck, deprived so tragically of his eldest son only last night, bear all the burden of defending his last child from disgrace and conviction? How could he expect or hope to make the vigorous, the violent effort demanded by such an argument, and after so short a preparation? It wasn’t probable that he could. This new decision must be explained as coming from some mystic excitement arising from his sorrow. He, Battard, must hold himself in readiness to take up the case at the last moment. Wisdom counselled it. The interests of the defence, which, with a lawyer, must supersede all others, especially all thoughts of self, showed what conduct he must follow, beyond any question.

But the strange confidence which Roquevillard showed in his face halted these generous fancies.

“No,” explained Mr. Battard, “I can’t oblige you in this way. I’m sorry for it. Either I assume and keep the entire responsibility of the argument, or I retire from the case altogether.”

“It’s my son’s case. It’s right that I should not give up his defence.”

Mr. Hamel rose from his armchair, and intervened opportunely.

“In my capacity as president of the benchers, my dear brother, I hasten to request your assistance. I understand your hesitations. In any other circumstances I should understand your refusal. Mr. Roquevillard may have particular reasons for desiring to make the argument for his son, even though generally the case of defending one’s own is confided to others. But he is tried and tired with the weight of his misfortunes, and he runs the risk of presuming too much upon his force of will. You must be on hand, too. This is the way things look to me, and I insist upon it.”

The moment duty instead of flattery was invoked, authority instead of persuasion, the jury lawyer definitely threw aside his scruples. All his self-assurance came back to him, and he thrust the old man aside almost rudely.

“No, no; it’s impossible. I offered my complete assistance. It must be that or nothing. The plans of the defence have been changed without my being consulted. A line of argument that seems to be decisive is being hidden from me. In these conditions the only thing I can do is to retire from the case, and I retire.”

His hardened face showed only wounded pride. He turned toward Mr. Roquevillard, and added with laborious condescension:

“Do you want the notes to my argument? They will save you some trouble. They are at your service.”

“My dear colleague and friend, think it over further. Don’t leave us in the midst of battle.”

“My resolution is taken,” repeated Mr. Battard.

“Absolutely?”

“Absolutely.”

Throughout this last attempt on Mr. Hamel’s part, Mr. Roquevillard had maintained that same air of pride and tranquillity which just now had so disconcerted his two visitors. The president, more concerned than he over the consequences of this defection, still sought, in spite of his natural antipathy for Mr. Battard, to retain his help.

“I beg you not to deprive us of your aid,” he said.

“I am very sorry, indeed, to disappoint you, believe me,” answered Battard.

“Then,” said the father of the accused, deliberately and without any show of emotion, “I’ll ask you for the papers in the case. I want especially the written report of the police commissioner, the abstract of the deposition, the terms of the arrest for defalcation.”

This disinvestiture completed the offence to Mr. Battard’s pride. He did not know how to yield to entreaties, but by a very human contradiction neither did he resign himself gracefully to having people supersede him. He took leave of his two colleagues with badly disguised irritation. Outside the office, on the steps of the entrance door, his host got hold of his hand almost by force, and shook it, thanking him warmly for having consented to efface himself. But in this friendly demonstration Mr. Battard only saw the last affront of all, and he ran about town injuring the Roquevillards’ cause in the public mind by telling people of the father’s mental aberration, and the probable conviction of the son to-morrow.

Mr. Hamel could not dissemble his sadness at the departure; his doubts and anxiety, which his age made more grievous, appeared plainly. Was it not very imprudent to dismiss wilfully this pastmaster of the assizes? Were they not only too likely to pay for this imprudence? Why make this eleventh-hour change, and stir up trouble and disorganisation in their camp? He formulated these criticisms in a firm and courteous vein, but plainly they were superfluous. He put an end to them, and added on a melancholy note:

“My friend, you came in just now with your face illuminated, as if with some inner inspiration. I knew by looking at you that you would not listen to any one. Where had you been?”

“To La Vigie,” replied Mr. Roquevillard, who had borne the old man’s reproaches respectfully. “The dead spoke to me there. They did not want a charlatan to weigh their reputation against the faults of one descendant.”

“The dead?”

“Yes, my dead. The dead who founded my race, the dead who have maintained it. They shall be the guerdon of our house in to-morrow’s trial. From the first of my name, down to my firstborn Hubert, they have sacrificed so much in the common good; would you have their sacrifices not counted?”

Mr. Hamel reflected, then rose. “I believe in the law of reversion, and I understand. But will the jurors?”

“Indeed they must,” replied his host, with such assurance that the old man’s doubts were stilled by it.

“Something is working out in you,” he said, “and it acts on those you talk with and convinces them. Yes, your defence of your son will be better than that of any other advocate. You have the will and the authority. It will be an honour for me to assist you to-morrow. Good-bye. I will go now and let you work.”

He draped his shabby overcoat over his thin shoulders, and with a suddenly furtive air made for the door, his host following him.

“Margaret!” called Mr. Roquevillard, after having let the president out.

The girl was waiting in the next room for the moment when her father should be ready for her, and appeared at once.

“Here I am.”

“Come in. I want to talk with you.”

He led her into his study and questioned her rapidly.

“You went to see Maurice in prison?”

“Yes, father; we cried together.”

“Cried? Yes, my heart is broken, too. Yet I don’t cry. To-morrow night I shall be free to weep my fill; till then I shall not shed a tear.”

Margaret was a little frightened by the uplifted look that lightened and rejuvenated the dear face, on which she had seen so many disasters leave their mark; but she profited by it promptly to complete her work of reconciliation.

“Father, Maurice longs for his place again in your heart.”

“He has never lost it.”

“I knew it. Do you forgive him?”

“I forgave him a long time ago.”

“Ah!”

“The evening he came back, little girl. Did you doubt your father?”

“Oh, no, father. But why not say so to him?”

“He hasn’t asked me to.”

“He does ask you, though. He wants you to handle his defence on your own lines, without restrictions. He knows you will be careful of his honour.”

“Without restriction? It’s too late now.”

“Why too late?”

“Because I have dismissed Mr. Battard, his advocate.”

“Who will defend him?”

“I.”

“Ah,” said Margaret, throwing herself into his arms, “I had given up hope of that. I have always wanted it.”

And her father, already preoccupied as he was with his new and pressing task, folded her to his breast. “You have always had faith in me, little girl. Go fetch me all the family record books now, even the oldest ones.”

While she was gone there was delivered to him the brief sent back by Mr. Battard, according to his promise. He opened it and turned over the leaves, glancing at the clock as he did so.

“Almost six. Shall I have the time?”

And he reflected sadly on the long task ahead of him with the commonplace books. There were so many that Margaret had to make several journeys to get them all.

“Here they all are,” said the girl. “There are a great many of them, and some quite old ones.”

Five hundred years of labour and good repute were shut up within their leaves. Last of all she handed her father a memorandum book less voluminous than the others.

“In this one,” she explained, blushing a little, “I have summed up myself the principal features of our history, especially the services that have been rendered to our country. It’s a kind of abridgment in less intimate terms.”

“You guessed that we should need it some day?”

“No, father, I wrote it last winter, in revolt against the harsh judgments that were made on us. I read bits of it to mamma, while she was in bed, and she approved of it.”

“And all the time you were preparing a defence for Maurice.”

“With that, father?”

“Yes. Now, let me get to work.”

Then as she was going away he called her back.

“Margaret, I’ve something else to tell you.”

She came back to him quickly. He said nothing at first, but looked her all over with that father’s look that gives love instead of taking it, protects instead of being covetous; he was noticing not only her pallor, but the calmness of her features and the new sweet serenity of their expression.

“I passed Raymond Bercy as I came in, little girl. He was down there by the carriage entrance, standing perfectly still, and I could see that he was much moved and preoccupied. He bowed to me, and made a step toward me, as if to speak to me, but it was too late. I had already passed him.”

Margaret did not seem at all impressed by this news, and answered:

“He had been here, and was just going away, father.”

“I see. And what did he want?”

“He wanted to be with you to-morrow at the trial, and help you.”

“What an idea! In what way could he help?”

“As a son.”

“As a son? Then he had made a proposal to you?”

“Yes, father.”

“And you were not going to tell me about it? God has taken pity on us. Our excess of misfortune has touched Him. Raymond’s conduct is very fine. He hasn’t waited for us to be publicly cleared of all disgrace before he came to us. And what did you say to him?”

“I refused him.”

Mr. Roquevillard gave an astonished movement and drew the girl nearer to him, looking deep into her great clear eyes.

“Refused him? Why? But I can guess: you were thinking of me. You are sacrificing yourself for your father. Your father won’t accept the sacrifice, sweetheart. I have told you often that parents must subordinate their lives to their children’s: that’s the natural order, not the contrary.”

“Father,” she murmured, “I love you so well. You know it. However, you deceive yourself, I assure you.”

“It was not for me you refused him?”

“No, father.”

A pure flame radiated from her eyes over all her colourless face, and he understood his daughter’s soul. Had he not once already had to read these signs? God was taking his children from him one by one. What a fever of renunciation and self-immolation stirred and burned in them! Must there not be in these successive sacrifices enough to furnish the redemption of the culprit, Maurice? He recalled one summer morning, in the glaring light on the docks at Marseilles, when he had watched the steamer sail away for China with Felicie on board. And he pressed Margaret closer to his trembling heart.

“You, too,” he murmured simply.

She clasped her arms around his neck, and whispered to him, quite low, with a kiss:

“Not yet, father.”

“After I am gone?”

“Yes.”

He held her a moment closer against him, as he had done when she was a little girl in the old days and he had put protecting arms about her. He loved the feeling that she was his yet, but hesitated to accept the delay his daughter’s love imposed on her. Facing the glass in his cabinet, he could see the image of the group they formed. With one stroke it showed the changes that had been wrought in him within one year’s time.

“To-morrow,” he reflected, “I shall have saved Maurice, and my task will be finished. It won’t be long after that. I shan’t make old bones.”

Bending over the clear face, he pressed his lips there, as a sign of his acceptance. Then, coming back again to what was uppermost in his mind, he banished tenderness, and made his arrangements for the battle.

“Have dinner at eight,” he ordered. “I’ve almost two hours ahead of me, time to refresh myself on the details of this brief, which I know pretty well already. I’ll go to bed at nine, and get up at three in the morning. From three to nine, before the opening of court, I’ll get my argument in hand.”

“Very well, father. There’s a letter from Lyons from Germaine. Her heart is with us.”

“You can read it to me at dinner,” he said.

“Charles will be here to-morrow on the one-o’clock train. He can’t come sooner.”

“I expected him.”

“I’ll leave you now, father.”

As the door shut upon her, he seized eagerly a photograph of Hubert that stood on the table, and gazed long at the features of his firstborn.

“Forgive me, Hubert,” he said deep down in his heart, “I’m thinking only of your brother now. You must not think that I’ve forgotten you. You see, I am not free. To-morrow I’ll call to you and speak to you and weep for you. To-morrow I shall be yours. This evening I belong to all our race.”

Gently he set the picture down again. And putting aside his sorrow for the immediate necessities of the present, he began his work.

VII
JEANNE SASSENAY

AT the trial, in obedience to her father’s instructions, Margaret Roquevillard gave evidence, under the head of information, as to the money from her trousseau funds which she had lent to Maurice the evening of his departure for Italy, as well as what she had sent to him at Orta. Her testimony over, she had gone home in all haste, as if the fuss made about her generosity filled her with shame. In a feeble way she was to have been of use in the defence of Maurice, and she reproached herself with having shown so much weakness, with having replied so timidly to the interrogations of the presiding judge. Her courage was of the inner kind, and ill adjusted itself to public show. She deplored her modesty now, for to herself it seemed like cowardice, and she was afraid of having impaired the force of her statements by the hesitating way in which she made them.

What had taken place in the court-room before she was led in and after her flight? She could not have told anything about it; she was only conscious of an invincible fear from her first brief contact with justice. She had been shut up in a room with the other witnesses, and had heard the bailiff’s voice calling them one by one, and had seen them go out, her great-uncle Stephen and her Aunt Thérèse just before her. Her turn came last, and she had been conducted to the bar trembling like a new recruit pushed out before the footlights. She had seen a great crowd facing her as she came in, upstairs and down on the floor and in the balcony, a multitude of eyes staring at her, wounding and overwhelming her. All Chambéry was there, spying pitilessly on a young girl’s fear, as they had spied eagerly of late on her family’s death agony. She found herself at last before three magistrates in their red robes, with the rows of jurors on their right. She had thought she should faint when she gave her name, but her father’s voice had caught her ears, that firm, warm voice which she knew so well. It had fortified her instantly, like a cordial. The old advocate was standing erect in front of Maurice, whom he seemed to be protecting, and his presence was so calm that she was at once surprised and quieted by the contagion of it. He put in quite simple terms the questions to be put to her. She had made barely audible replies, and then had fled like a poor bird fluttering off into the brushwood.

“Father will be displeased with me,” she thought in self-reproach. “What a command he has over himself! How he controls himself, and how they all fear him! He stood up twice, and each time I felt a deeper silence in the room. His eyes flashed fire. He seemed young again. He is our whole strength and will.”

At half-past twelve Mr. Roquevillard came home for lunch.

“Serve us quickly, Melanie,” he called out from the doorway. “I’ve not much time.”

The look of battle was in his eyes, a frown on his brow, his gaze direct and piercing. The muscles of his face were taut, and his recent sorrow and anxiety had made him look much older; but his commanding will checked for the time being the ravages of age and fatigue and trouble.

“Well, father?” inquired Margaret piteously.

He reassured her in a few words.

“The hearing reopens in two hours.”

“It’s not over yet?”

“No, no.”

“What’s happened?”

“Didn’t you see anything of it, little girl?”

“Oh, no, father. I came away. Tell me every thing. See, I’m still trembling.”

“You mustn’t tremble, Margaret. Be brave.”

At table, while he ate his lunch rapidly, but with no appetite, he went over the arguments for her.

“You didn’t understand very much, no doubt,” he said, “about the selection of the jury, the administering of the oath to them, the challenging, and the calling of the witnesses.”

“I was near you in the hall, father. When I heard my name I rose, and they led me into a room, where I found Uncle Stephen and Aunt Thérèse.”

“The room where the witnesses wait,” said her father. “Then the depositions began, after the reading of the bill of accusations and the written report made by the police commissioner, stating the theft of one hundred thousand francs. Then came the examination of Maurice. He declared his innocence, but all the time refused to accuse any one else, in spite of the president’s insistence. Of the witnesses for the prosecution, the chief clerk at the Frasne office was the most obstinate against us. He’s the one named Philippeaux, who must hate us, I don’t know why. He testified with a perfect mania for denouncing and compromising Maurice. He tried to make incontrovertible proofs out of presumptions which he inverted and perverted wickedly.”

“What presumptions, father?”

“Knowledge of the deposit of money in the safe, the possible, though not proven, discovery of the combination in a note-book, Maurice’s staying late in the office with the keys the evening of the theft, his lack of personal resources, his departure for foreign territory, the impossibility of imagining any other criminal, et cetera. The other clerks repeated his testimony like well-learned lessons, though with less details and certainty. Finally Mrs. Frasne’s former maid, whom they must have cajoled in some way, pretended that, in her master’s absence, her mistress never went into the offices. What does that prove? Would Mrs. Frasne have called in her maids to help her embezzle? But I mustn’t accuse her myself, either.”

“And yet Maurice is no longer opposed to your doing so, father.”

“I won’t do it, though. We have paid her ransom. Let her keep it and never come back again. I had called as witnesses for the defence, besides yourself, your great-uncle Stephen and my sister-in-law Thérèse to establish the fact that Maurice had not gone away without funds; also the employee of the Society of Credit, the one who made out for you, some time last October, the draft for eight thousand francs on the International Bank of Milan to Maurice’s order; finally Mr. Doudain, the notary.”

“Why was he called?”

“To corroborate the payment of one hundred thousand francs that I turned over to him for Mr. Frasne. He told also the name of the real purchaser of La Vigie. The president, after having conferred with Mr. Latache, president of the chamber of notaries, released him from his professional secret, and he had to tell the truth to the jurors about Mr. Frasne’s fruitful speculations.”

“Was it Mr. Frasne, then, who bought La Vigie?” asked the girl; “for himself, to go and live there instead of us?”

“Didn’t you know it?”

“I couldn’t believe it. There are so many things that I don’t understand. Even last year at the vintage he appeared to be going round making an inspection. He ferreted round everywhere.”

“Yes, little girl, he’s the one who takes the Roquevillards’ place there now, and carries on our traditions. The whole place is his, gratis.”

His voice sounded bitter for a moment, then he continued again with his story.

“His lawyer began speaking at eleven.”

“Who was his lawyer, father?”

“A Mr. Porterieux, from Lyons. There was no one of the bar in Chambéry who would take the case.”

“On your account, father?”

“No doubt.”

“And what did he dare to say about Maurice?”

“He’s a clever man, though, with a very insinuating manner and a kind of cold and calculated violence. He began by tracing a very unflattering portrait of Maurice—a modern young man whom nothing could check, very much imbued with the idea of individual rights; keen to develop his personality and achieve happiness in his own way, whether it trampled down other people’s or not; a young man who would not be bound by the rules of organised society; in short, one of those intellectual anarchists who pass so easily from words and ideas to deeds. ‘Ask his comrades,’ he went on, ‘his friends. They cannot deny that in his daily talk he disparages and tears to pieces the established order of things, and that his special admiration is the pernicious theories of a German philosopher for whom a superior type of humanity, the superman, builds his fortune on the ruin and sorrow of the common lot, the humble and the feeble. And it was not a secret from any one in Chambéry that he was not on good terms with his father, and chafed under his authority.’”

“He said that?” murmured Margaret, in a shocked voice.

“Yes; I’m giving you the tone of his address. Even from myself he drew an adverse argument. From our family he got another; the accused could not, he said, invoke the excuse of a bad education, a lack of instruction, a bad example, or the extenuating circumstances of an unhappy childhood, which might have spoiled his character forever. I pass over his premeditated and self-interested seduction of Mrs. Frasne.”

“Self-interested?”

“Yes, in his moral nihilism Maurice coveted at the same time both the wife and the money, unscrupulously. Having thus made the abuse of Mr. Frasne’s confidence seem probable, or believing he had, Mr. Porterieux took up the accusation, and what he did not hesitate to call its material proofs. Mrs. Frasne consented to run away, he said. Her husband was absent, the day propitious, the opportunity unique. Her lover, unprovided with any personal fortune, sought, and had to seek, for some way to defray the expenses of their voyage. He knew that a deposit had been made from the proceeds of the sale of Belvade; he discovered in a memorandum book the secret of the safe; he had the keys given to him, and arranged to be left alone in the office. He took the money and fled to foreign parts with his mistress. Not only was he guilty, but the only one guilty.”

“And Mrs. Frasne?”

“Mrs. Frasne? Let him accuse her, let him just dare to accuse her. He had nothing to say at the examination, he says nothing at the trial. ‘I defy him to incriminate her,’ concluded the advocate, perhaps imprudently informed by Mr. Battard of Maurice’s generous obstinacy: and this silence, too, which is virtually an admission, condemns him.”

From the dining-room they had passed into the study. Margaret, in this bitter and yet impartial review of the plaintiff’s argument which her father made, heard the rumble of her father’s fury and despair, and was upset by it completely.

“Father,” she murmured, “aren’t we lost? Have you still hope?”

“As if I hadn’t!”

“When will it be over?”

“At two o’clock, in forty minutes more, Mr. Porterieux will resume his argument.”

“Hasn’t he done enough harm to us?”

“It appears not. He has one more argument to enlarge on.”

“What is it?”

“The new admission that comes, according to him, from my making restitution of the one hundred thousand francs. By three o’clock I suppose my turn comes. At four or four-thirty I shall be done.”

And he added, in an easy tone, to reassure her:

“Charles’s train gets in at one. Your brother-in-law ought to be here now.”

A little later, in fact, Charles rang the bell.

“What news, my dear father?” he asked as he came in. “Germaine cried this morning when she said good-bye to me, and the three children imitated her. Your telegram last night caused us so much sorrow. Poor Hubert!”

“I was waiting for you, Charles. Your place is by my side. Margaret will talk to you about things while she gets your lunch. Let me be by myself a few minutes. Be ready at five minutes to two.”

“I’ll be ready. And oh, I must warn you that I’ve made my arrangements for restoring half of Germaine’s dot to you. Later you shall have it all.”

The young lawyer made this announcement with rather an ill grace, being a man little accustomed to benevolence, and trying to disguise it. He, too, had been overborne by sympathy for the common cause; but as his mind followed his heart protestingly, he did not like to advertise his defeat.

“I won’t accept it, my dear Charles,” replied Mr. Roquevillard. He was more moved by this cooperation than the opposition that he had been prepared to combat, and he added:

“Embrace me, Charles.”

Thus family ties were stronger than ever in misfortune.

The advocate shut himself up for a quarter of an hour to gather up the threads of his arguments. The review he had made for Margaret, under the influence of high nervous excitement, had served as an outlet for the anger and shame that had been accumulating in him all morning as he listened to the infamous accusations made against his son. Now his nerves relaxed, and the pounding of his heart grew calm, like the sea when the wind falls. When the moment came for going back to the court-house Margaret saw that his face was less stormy, and that his glance had again the serenity which his visit last evening to La Vigie had given him.

“Until to-night, father,” she said. “May God help you.”

On the doorstep he replied briskly: “Until to-night, little girl—with Maurice.”

The girl had just shut herself in her room to pray when Jeanne Sassenay called at the house.

“Miss Margaret, if you please,” she demanded of the servant who opened the door.

The maid, more rigid and circumspect since Raymony Bercy’s invasion, dismissed this inopportune question in a peremptory tone.

“Miss Margaret is tired. She is seeing no one.”

“So much the worse. I’ll come in, nevertheless.”

And passing by the frightened servant before she had time to bar the way, Jeanne went through the hall on a run, as far as her friend’s room, which she knew of old. She knocked smartly, entered and threw herself into Margaret’s arms.

“It’s I, Margaret,” she said. “Don’t send me away. It’s not Melanie’s fault.”

“You, Jeanne? Why are you here?”

“Because you are alone and tired. Such a lot of people have gone to the hearing, just as if it were a party. And so I—well, I thought my place was here with you. I love you so much.”

Margaret patted her friend’s cheek.

“You are good, Jeanne.”

“Oh, no. It’s just that I’ve so much friendship for you. When I was quite little even, I admired you. And I should like so much to be like you.”

Then in a mysterious tone she changed the subject abruptly.

“Just imagine,” she said, “those ladies all dressed themselves up so for the court-house. As carefully as if they were going to a matinée.”

“Who?”

“Oh, all of them.”

“Yes,” said Miss Roquevillard bitterly. “It’s a question of our honour—quite a spectacle.”

Jeanne Sassenay took her hand.

“I’m not anxious, myself,” she said; and in a learned tone she cut the whole debate short: “On the whole, what do they reproach your brother with that’s so serious? That he ran away with some one? That’s nothing.”

In spite of her sadness Margaret could not keep back a smile, and Jeanne took this for encouragement to go on.

“You know quite well a woman doesn’t let herself be removed as if she were a spot on your clothes. If any one tried to carry me off I’d scratch and bite and hurt him frightfully.... Unless I was going away with him anyway.”

“Keep still, Jeanne.”

“Oh, you never can tell. When you’re in love you’ll do anything. To be in love—it’s something terrible.”

“Jeanne, what do you know about being in love?”

“Why shouldn’t I know? I’m not a little girl any more.”

Thereupon Miss Sassenay gave a poke to her hat, which was losing its balance on her blonde hair, verified the curls that fell over her forehead, and assumed an air of great detachment, to hide her blushing, as she asked:

“He doesn’t love that bad woman any more, does he?”

“Maurice? I don’t believe so.”

“Are you sure?”

“He never speaks of her.”

“She’s never seen him again?”

“No.”

“So much the better. I detest her. In the first place, she wasn’t so good-looking as all that. Fine eyes, yes, but she used them a little too much. And her smiles, and her sly looks, and her grimaces! She was always balancing her head, and craning her neck, and heaving her shoulders and wriggling her hips.”

She got out of her chair quickly and walked across the room in imitation of Mrs. Frasne, caricaturing the gestures and the constant play of movement by which the woman’s inner restlessness was betrayed.

“Jeanne, please stop,” cried Margaret.

“No, no,” continued the girl, fairly launched now. “I tell you brunettes can’t be compared with blondes, for colouring or for grace either. You, Margaret, with your chestnut hair, have the beauty of them all, but you don’t do anything to help yourself.... And then, I detest her anyway....”

“Detest whom, Jeanne?”

“Mrs. Frasne, of course. She’s a fatal woman, and brings bad luck. Your brother has been well punished. She has made him unhappy. She didn’t love him. She’s the one they should have put in jail. As for your brother, they’ll acquit him. You know papa and mamma are for him. Papa looked glum about it at first, but I scolded him. I should have liked to go and see the acquittal. You must congratulate him for me. It must be fine to be acquitted.”

She was babbling on without stopping. Margaret gently interrupted her.

“Will you pray with me, Jeanne?” she asked.

“If you wish.”

The two girls knelt side by side. But scarcely had they begun their orisons before some one knocked at the door.

“It’s the postman,” said the maid, handing some letters to Margaret.

“Will you permit me?” the latter asked of her companion. “It was Hubert’s day.... Oh, a letter from him.... I half expected one.”

With trembling hands she unsealed the envelope, which was postmarked from the Soudan. From the other side of the gates of Death the young officer was taking his part in the family drama. There are few sensations so poignant as that of receiving tidings from those who are no more. Margaret, whose shy patience had hitherto been like calm, let a long moan escape her as she read. Jeanne, discreet and much moved herself, did not dare console her. By her own force of will the girl controlled herself. This was not the time to be weak or give way. Had not her father shown her the proper way to act?

“Hubert!” she murmured.

She seemed to hesitate a moment what to do.

“I must—I think I must go to the court-house, at once,” she said.

“Why?” asked Jeanne.

“Oh, because Hubert, too, has thought of us.”

“Hubert?”

“Yes. He knew he was going to die. In the first part of his letter he tries to deceive us, to cheer us up. And then—and then he writes—there, wait a moment. God help me! I can’t see any more. He writes: ‘If, however, I must stay here always, I offer my life in sacrifice for the honour of our name, for Maurice’s salvation....’ You see, he gives me my orders. I must go.”

Jeanne burst into tears. Already Margaret, in an uplifted mood, was putting on her hat and veil. “I am sure father needs this letter. I can’t hesitate about it.”

Some mysterious connivance seemed at work in the family, between the living and the dead, something that mysteriously made them work together and united them across space and time.

“I’ll go with you,” said her friend, as resolute as she.

“Yes, come,” said Margaret. “I shall be braver if you come with me.”

And the two girls hurried out, passing along by the castle, its glowing walls warm in the winter sunshine; they took a short route through little streets, and beyond the market reached the court-house in a few minutes.

“The court-room, sir?” asked Margaret humbly of the doorkeeper.

“There, madame, on the ground floor. But the hall is full. You can’t get in.”

“But we must go in,” Jeanne Sassenay interrupted, with great assurance. “We have a letter, a very important one, to give to the lawyer for the defence, A very important document.”

“Impossible, ladies. The argument is going on. It’s too late. Who are you?”

The sister of the accused raised her veil.

“Miss Roquevillard.”

“Oh, very good. Follow me.”

Impressed by this name, he led them as far as the door reserved for the use of witnesses.

“You can just open the door, miss. The lawyer’s bench will be before you, a little to the left. Afterwards you can go out that way, or maybe you can find a seat.”

And being a prudent and timid functionary, he added, as he left the two girls:

“But be sure and don’t say it was me who let you in.”

Margaret, who went first, put her hand on the latch. She could hear the voice of some one speaking on the other side. It was not her father’s voice. Behind this door, the destiny of her brother, Maurice, the fate of all the Roquevillards, was running its course at this hour. On behalf of Hubert she was bringing up the last reserves.

VIII
THE VOICE OF THE DEAD

THE girls entered. It was a little more than half-past two o’clock: Mr. Porterieux, venomous and insolent, was finishing his argument. In the galleries and on the floor the public was crowded; people of fashion and from the lower ranks confused together, eager to seize upon the warm quarry of which this lawyer, like an expert and cruel hunter, was laying bare for them the palpitating heart. People noticed the presence of the young girls, who hesitated to come further forward, once inside the door.

“They are on the lookout for husbands,” explained the lawyer Coulanges, who, assisted by Mr. Paillet in the first row of the balcony, did the honours of the trial to several ladies of society. It was an occasion on which he believed that a certain show of wit was expected of him.

“Dear me!” cried one of the ladies, choking with indignation. “Just look at that brazen girl.”

While Margaret was approaching her father and handing him Hubert’s letter, her companion, Jeanne, with a quiet boldness, had the satisfaction of defying the whole town by turning ostentatiously toward Maurice Roquevillard, in his seat of shame, and waving her hand to him with the most gracious smile.

She was immediately rewarded for her courage by the look of gratitude that lighted up the young man’s face, a face that had grown thin and drawn and as if contracted by the impassiveness which he had forced himself to wear under his injuries and calumnies. The little incident was over in a moment, but already excited the commentaries of the entire room. Margaret, with her head bent, had no suspicion of it. She, too, had saluted her brother, but more discreetly, and now murmured in her friend’s ear:

“Let’s go.”

“Oh, no, I’m going to stay,” replied the latter, only too eager to be present and hear the speeches.

Mr. Roquevillard, with a brief gesture, indicated some empty places on the witness bench for them. The sun came in through the windows, leaving the jurors, who were seated facing the light, in shadow, but it lit up especially the court, the advocate-general, the lawyers and the prisoner, as if it were a light thrown on the stage during some performance in a theatre. Mr. Porterieux appeared in a full blaze as he was summing up and condensing in a final charge the various items of his argument. He repeated and reaffirmed the list of his accumulated presumptions, and still another time paraded as indisputable avowals the silence of the accused as to Mrs. Frasne and the payment of the one hundred thousand francs. Finally he called loudly, as if it were some right due him, for a severe and withering sentence on this young man who practised such a utilitarian love, who, like a new Cherubino in a practical epoch, did not hesitate to make off at one and the same time with the husband’s funds and the wife’s honour. His peroration, delivered with a complete semblance of anger and indignation, provoked a numerous and mysterious murmur in the room as he sat down, coming from the lips of all the crowd, without anything to show where it had begun, like the sound of waves. His argument had been a perfect volley of poisoned arrows, following each other directly and incessantly. One would even have said that across the son he aimed at the father, too, whom he represented as driven by shame to make his restitution; that through the son and father he sought to attaint the whole race and sink it in the mire with the unhappy Maurice. He had shown himself more incensed against his victims than was necessary, a too implacable enemy, ready to trample their dead bodies under foot. Of a verity the notary had chosen his spokesman well. He could not have desired more gall and venom in a single mouth. Mr. Roquevillard, now and then during this speech, when the worst thrusts were delivered, turned quietly toward his son or son-in-law, reassuring them by his calm and even countenance, and showing that his soul was not distressed by this tempest that waged about him.

“I call upon the advocate-general to speak,” articulated the presiding judge, in a mournful voice, as much as to say, What use is there in a second charge?

Mr. Vallerois, attracted by curiosity, had come into court and seated himself behind the advocate-general, Mr. Barré, who was in the section reserved for the public minister. He bent forward to address some words to his colleague on the floor. But the latter seemed to scorn his advice as importunate, and confined his remarks to saying that he relied upon the good sense of the jurors to find for the plaintiff, the case being already adjudged against the defendant by default.

“I call upon the defence,” began the president more briskly, evidently pleased to have escaped a long harangue.

“Are you ready?” asked Mr. Hamel of Mr. Roquevillard, who was seated by his side.

“Yes, of course. Why?”

“Then you speak first. If necessary, I’ll supplement you.”

Mr. Roquevillard saw that the old gentleman was still reeling beneath an attack whose methods, according to his old-time traditions, were inadmissible, and proposed to reserve his efforts in case his colleague should be overcome by emotion in his speech or his argument be inferior or incomplete.

During these special conferences, bits of conversation broke out again here and there among the audience, rising and spreading like dust in the wake of a procession.

“The Roquevillards,” remarked the lawyer Coulanges, who ranged himself on Mr. Frasne’s side, “will never raise their heads again after such a drubbing.”

“Oh, well, now,” objected Mr. Paillet, who was always in a good humour, “wait till you hear the father’s reply, and then look out for Mr. Porterieux.”

A man of the people, a frequenter of court trials, overheard him.

“Yes, the old man is tough,” he commented more racily.

And Mr. Paillet laughed and insisted:

“You’ll see whether he knows how to bite yet, and if his teeth are sharp.”

“He looks very tired,” murmured a lady compassionately.

“Say, rather, he looks quite broken up,” replied Mr. Coulanges, tidying some small matter about his clothes. “Two old men aren’t worth one young one,” he added, with a manner that was as much as to say, “especially with women.” Then he pointed down to the two lawyers, who were exchanging their observations not far from where Mr. Battard sat, with his fingers in his beard, watching to see the defence’s final downfall.

Mr. Roquevillard took off his lawyer’s cap and stood up. He glanced in turn, quite deliberately, at his daughter and his son, and gathered hope and confidence from the sight of them. Silence fell on the room immediately, a silence deep and throbbing with expectation, that made people hold their breath and their hearts stand still. This man with the almost white hair, this old man with his record of more than sixty years of probity and talent and upright living, who stood forth as the sole representative of so many generations of honourable and patriotic men, uttered, by the mere act of rising to his feet, an eloquent protest against the calumnies and defamation with which the long argument for the plaintiff had tried to overwhelm his race. Had they not insinuated even that La Vigie had been sold to pay back money that had not all been squandered by the thief? It was a protest made before a word was spoken, and one that all the Battards in the world could not have impressed more forcefully upon the audience.

The court-room clock marked the hour of three. The old lawyer had risen slowly to his feet, and now drew himself to his full height; his head, erect, showed clearly in the broad band of light marked out by the rays of the pale sun, too pale now to inconvenience those on whom it fell. His high, bare forehead, his finely accentuated features, dulled by age, but nevertheless still full of pride, his stiffly curled moustache, made up a fighter’s face, a leader’s, that one could not behold without an impression of forcefulness and keen and eager living. But the flame that dwelt habitually in his deep eyes, once so sharply imperious, now shone with complete serenity rather than with any lust of conquest.

“Broken down, do you say? Just look at him,” protested the lady under Mr. Coulanges’s escort.

“And yet I don’t recognise him any more,” observed Mr. Paillet.

Margaret and Mr. Hamel, on the contrary, all attention, and quite vibrating with anxiety, recognised in him the same superhuman exaltation that he had brought back from that strange walk to La Vigie the night before. He began his remarks in a voice that was rather low, a fact which inspired Mr. Battard, not without some satisfaction, it must be confessed, to remark that: “His fine organ isn’t what it was.”

Then, abruptly, as a curtain is drawn apart, his voice opened up clearly, sounded the rallying call, the summons to the dead, who last evening on the icy shadowed slopes of the hills had made up his phantom army. There was a living silence in the room, heavy and storm-laden, and he plowed through it like a vessel through the sea.

To pass judgment on the prisoner, he said, it was incumbent on the jurors to know him, and to know him they must go back to what he came from. For it was the uncertain destiny of man, born in such and such a corner of the earth, of such and such a race, to follow a predestined course, and by his own force of will to work his way through to efficiency and his destined end.

“You who come from lines of honest forefathers, and yourselves have founded families, must listen to this history of a family that I shall tell you, before you decide upon your verdict....”

To the peasants from the plains and mountains, of whom the jury was composed, who, by nature and reflection, could not but be sensible to this actual human chronicle, the truthfulness and example of it striking true to their honest minds, he then told the long story of successive Roquevillards: the first ancestor of them all, who had laid the first stone of the old house, planting the roots of his tree of life in his native soil, the struggle of successive generations adding their efforts, one to another, clearing the ground by the sweat of their brows, showing their doggedness with the stubborn soil, or in the face of intemperate or hurtful seasons, the chance destruction of crops by hail or frost, their sobriety and content with a few things, their thrift, which, at the expense of their personal enjoyment, made provision for the future—a thrift at once disinterested and in itself an act of faith in the coming generations. Thus the beautiful estate of La Vigie, whose vines and woods and fields and orchards produced so abundantly, laughing in the sunlight, in the time of harvest, represented the economy and endurance of a whole race, straight as a line of tall and growing poplars. For land that is cultivated by man assumes a human face, and when we behold our properties we are gazing on the countenances of our ancestors. And yet to what end had all this collective labour of the Roquevillards been reduced? To-day their domain belonged to the plaintiff, their adversary, who had gotten it for nothing. Had the Roquevillards laboured for five hundred years to make this present to him? No, but with their patrimony which they had patiently and painfully built up they were ransoming this last Roquevillard of them all. Who, then, had been despoiled, and which was the thief? For one hundred thousand francs paid down Mr. Frasne was receiving, accepting, a property worth almost twice that sum. Who was getting rich, then? Who was being ruined? In the name of the dead who paid this ransom, the accused must be acquitted.

But was not a family just a great material force, visibly expressed in the continuity of its patrimony, by its mutual obligations permitting the payment of the debts of some by the fruits of others’ toil? Was it not indeed something else, too, less palpable but more sacred—a solid chain of traditions, a common heritage of honour, probity and courage? What use was it to transmit life if you were not to supply it with a worthy setting, support and comfort from the past, opportunity for a well-stored future? For to transmit life was to admit life’s immortality.

And he recited the public services of the Roquevillards, all the outward ways of existence, useful and sometimes illustrious even, that their forefathers had followed. This one, the county magistrate, had died at his post during an epidemic in the town, which he had been the foremost in resisting. Another, later, in a period of troubles and disorders, had administered the finances of Chambéry and restored order in its involved affairs. Whole-hearted magistrates of the Savoyan Senate, soldiers killed by the enemy in the great wars, they had worn, beneath toga or uniform alike, the same bold, brave hearts that had beat beneath the peasant blouses of the first forefathers of them all. The last of them all, Hubert, dying for his country, alone in a strange land, far from all who were dear to him, under a fierce and hostile sun, had given voice to the final vow of his race when he had written: “I offer my life as a sacrifice for the honour of our name and my brother’s safety.”

Could the gentlemen of the jury reject this offering? As well forget all the victims for centuries past that had signalised the constantly renewing virtues of this family, like the fires which cleansed their fields at evening of the withered herbage. He threw the weight of accumulated merits in the balance and made the scales tip.

The entire army of the dead, who had come down from La Vigie the evening before, to leap across the valley in the dark and join their chief as he stood erect at the foot of the old tree on the Saint Cassin plain, filed by in a long parade.

To the merits of the dead he added the virtues of the living. This was not a time to be modest and defer to reticence. He would give all honour to Felicie in the hospital at Hanoi, and again to his sisters, who had made themselves poor in order to suppress even the suspicion of fraud on their brother’s part. For the payment delivered into Mr. Frasne’s hands had not, and could not be, in the eyes of the culprit’s family or of the jurors, either a restitution or an admission, but a definite rejection of all complicity in the theft, even an unknowing or involuntary one.

He barely excused himself for enumerating and insisting upon the rendering of so many services, and reproaching the plaintiff with ingratitude for neglecting them. On the other side they had not scrupled to forget them, or worse still, to make them appear as faults on the part of the accused. What the plaintiff really wanted to do was to build on the pretended guilt of the defendant and overwhelm with one blow the defences of his past; he was unjust enough to deny the accused the right to its protection. Yet the merits of a race constitute a true defence of it until and unless the sum of its demerits weighs it down, unless it wilfully provokes its own downfall. Was there any one who pretended to believe that the sum of the Roquevillards’ demerits had yet borne them down? No, the dead could go moral bail for this last of the Roquevillards, as they had just supplied his material bail in the sacrifice of La Vigie. Even if he had his faults, his judges could not justly declare him guilty in this instance.

How indeed could he be guilty now? By what phenomenon could the descendant of so many honest men be suddenly stirred to crime? What definite proof could they furnish of his crime? What weight, in the face of the moral presumptions of his family and surroundings, which flowed round him like the water of a torrent, could they give these miserable presumptions that chance had hatched out and circumstances twisted incriminatingly? The keys of the office—they had passed from hand to hand. The number of the safe’s combination—how could the defendant have hunted it out, guessed its use? And when had the clerk Philippeaux written it in his memorandum book? Did the jurors dwell on his lack of personal resources? He had himself paid all the expenses of the journey, large and small, without exception, either with money that he had taken away with him, as to which the examination of witnesses had given a full account, or with what he had received at Orta. The hotel bills which the defence had recovered and exhibited proved this. What, then, had been done with the stolen one hundred thousand francs, if all his expenses had been defrayed by advances from his family? If he had put it away somewhere, as was insinuated, why had he come back and surrendered himself to the law the moment word came to him of the judgment that had been entered against him by default?

Nothing was left of the accusation against him, nothing but the animus of revenge, a spirit of revenge that could not even resist the temptation to make a profit out of its own humiliation. It was a singular affair, indeed, in which the victim carried off the spoils from the pretended thief.

Mr. Roquevillard brought his argument to an end in a few words:

“Gentlemen of the jury, I have finished. In the name of all our families’ dead, whose long line makes up our everliving honour, in the name of our land slowly acquired and laboriously cultivated by succeeding generations, but given up to-day and fully sacrificed to consolidate our honour, I ask you to restore to me my son. Give him back to me, not for pity’s sake, but in justice; not as a favour, but with all your hearts. All his race and I myself will answer to you for his innocence....”

He sat down. He had spoken only an hour. When his voice, which had been calm and sonorous, always under control, rising and swelling like the grave notes of a hymn, ceased speaking, there was a prolonged silence in the room for some moments, the solemn and religious silence that one hears in church. People had heard, not the explosion of wrath and bitterness that they had expected as their due from this redoubtable old lawyer in answer to the hateful violence of Mr. Porterieux: not the scandal of a lover’s recriminations against his mistress that they had counted on; but a proud defence that disdained invective, confident in its authoritative, moral force, admirable and moving along its straight and simple lines, like the proportions of those serene and motionless statues that purify desire and stir the spirit. And the name of Mrs. Frasne had not once been uttered.

All of a sudden a cry rang out:

“Hurrah for the Roquevillards!”

It came from Mother Fauchois, and she threw her whole heart into it. The crowd in the court-room had been overborne, dominated and conquered; it broke into long applause. While the presiding judge rapped on his desk to check this demonstration, which nevertheless had put the irritated Mr. Battard to flight, Mr. Vallerois leaned forward once more to Mr. Barré. The latter now asked leave to speak, as Mr. Hamel had declined, excusing himself from availing himself of his right to speak in rebuttal after having neglected to use his right to sum up.

“I have heard, like you,” Mr. Barré said in substance, addressing the jurors, “the plea made by Mr. Roquevillard. No, the guilty party is not this young man here. And since the accused has had the generosity not to designate any one, I’ll not myself indicate things any further. I will denounce, however, the too clever machinations of this plaintiff, who disarms our sympathy by having used his private sorrows to build up a fortune. Make haste and bring in a verdict of acquittal for Maurice Roquevillard; restore him to his father, who is an honour to our bar. If the young man has been reprehensible in his private life, he need not nevertheless be retained any longer on this charge of abuse of confidence.”

The day was waning, leaving the whole room filled with the evening light. The jury retired to its deliberations, and brought in immediately a unanimous verdict of acquittal.

“Bravo!” cried Jeanne Sassenay approvingly, in a loud voice.

“Father,” murmured Margaret softly, “mamma would be so happy.”

And the spectators, turning and going out, exchanged their comments on the way. Mr. Latache, winding up his remarks before a little group, shook his head sententiously.

“It’s a good rap over the knuckles for Mr. Frasne,” he said. “After being publicly reprimanded by the public minister, he ought to shut up his offices and leave the country.”

“He’ll sell La Vigie again,” declared Mr. Paillet.

The lady whom Mr. Coulanges was seeing home expressed her delight at the way things had turned out, to take her cavalier down a peg or two, a pastime in which she seemed to find great pleasure.

“And the little Sassenay girl will buy it back. She has a big dot. Did you notice the look she gave the young prisoner, the triumphant Maurice? She’s going to marry him.”

“Yes, that will be the way of it,” said Mr. Coulanges, gloomily summing things up; “the Roquevillards have always been lucky.”

IX
THE WILL TO LIVE

THE good will of the presiding judge hastened the formalities of liberation, and while the crowd, having left the court-room, massed itself in the space outside the court-house, to watch for Maurice and his defender to come out, and to cheer them, the more enthusiastically because their remorse was tardily shown, Mr. Roquevillard was waiting for his son in the inner court. He was alone, for he had asked Charles Marcellaz to see Mr. Hamel home. The struggle over, he felt tired and worn, and was lost in his meditations. A timid voice called to him:

“Father.”

“Is it you, Maurice?”

Instead of throwing themselves into each other’s arms, quite simply, they stood motionless, as if frozen. The lack of some first gesture is enough sometimes to create separations, to make obstacles. On his son’s face the father read admiration, gratitude, filial piety; on the father’s face the son read love and goodness, but also the new stigmata of weariness and age. They said nothing; sorrowfully, with a shyness they could not overcome.

In the street outside they heard the noise of cheers.

“Come,” said Mr. Roquevillard brusquely.

He led Maurice to the other side of the courtyard, where a gate opened on a public garden, luckily now deserted. He crossed it with rapid steps, hurried quickly over the iron footbridge beneath which rolled the muddy waters of the Leysse, and the two men reached the cemetery presently without having exchanged a word.

The cemetery at Chambéry lies to the eastward of the town, at the beginning of the vast plain which stretches as far as Lake Bourget; over it the rocky hill of Lemenc stands guard, and beyond that the regularly storeyed peaks of Le Nivolet. The shadows of night were already settling down over the sacred field, and little by little reaching the hills, but the setting sun still covered the mountain, stirring its whiteness as with a flow of blood—one of those fine winter evenings that are cold and calm, naked as marble images, and of a divine purity.

Maurice could distinguish, opposite him, the thin columns of the Calvary where his heart’s love had overwhelmed him. A last ray of light threw their outlines into relief, then they seemed to recede against the walls of the little monument and lose themselves in it.

“How far away it all is!” he thought.

Some cypress trees, with branches like lance-heads, sprinkled with hoar-frost, stood grave as sentinels set to guard the enclosure. Passing these, they went on and on, past the graves of the poor, scarcely distinguished by the mounds beneath the snow, until they came finally to the broad avenue of perpetual concessions.

“Father, I know where we are going,” murmured Maurice at last, thinking of his mother.

“We’re going to our family tomb,” explained Mr. Roquevillard; “to thank our dead for having saved you.”

“Father, it was you that saved me,” said Maurice.

“I was speaking in their name.”

As they drew near the end of their pilgrimage, they made out, across the empty graveyard, a black figure kneeling before the gravestone which stood just before a wall covered with inscriptions.

“Father, look; there’s some one there,” said Maurice.

“It’s Margaret! She has got here ahead of us.”

The girl heard the dull noise of their footsteps on the trodden snow, and turned her head. She blushed on recognising them, and rose, as if she would go and not be in the way at their first interview.

“I came here to be near mamma,” she said.

“Don’t go,” her father bade her gently.

Along the slopes of Le Nivolet the evening was mounting upward. Only the snow on the higher levels still fought with the shadows, the light slipping and flowing over it in a cascade of gold and purple. With one last flash, as if of apotheosis, the victorious shadow scaled the highest grade and occupied the summit.

The wall opposite them bore a single family name, their own, but beneath it there were given names and dates in great number. A branch of perennial ivy climbed over it with its green leaves, and fell half forward, like a crown of spring.

“Listen,” said Mr. Roquevillard. His face bore the same stamp of serenity as at the trial. “It’s night,” he said, “and we are in the field of the dead. And yet from every corner of the earth you hear only the strongest words of life. Look, before the shadows hide it; all round you spreads the country that your heart loves best. And here, too, lies your family, at rest.”

In his turn Maurice knelt, and remembering his mother, who had gone without farewell to him, and his brother, who had made the sacrifice of his life for him, he hid his face in his hands. But his father touched him on the shoulder, and spoke to him in a firm voice.

“My boy,” he said, “I am an old man now. You will soon succeed me. You must listen to me now, this day, when I feel it is my duty to speak to you. Here are the symbols of all that is enduring. To care for the dead is in a sense the fulfilling of our immortal destiny. What is a man’s life, what is my life, if past and future don’t give it its true meaning? You had forgotten this when you went in search of your individual destiny. There is no set destiny for the individual, no greatness in life, except in servitude. We serve our family, we serve our country, God, art, science, an ideal. Shame on the man who only serves himself! You, Maurice, you have found your strongest support in us, but your dependence too. Man’s honour lies in accepting his due place in life.”

Maurice, rising from his knees, saw the Calvary of Lemenc before him in the twilight, and the thought came to him sadly, “What of love?”

His father guessed what he was thinking of.

“Such a little thing, dear boy,” he said, “may divide the honest and the dishonest impulses in a man. Love breaks this barrier down. The family keeps it strong. And yet, even at this hour, Maurice, I won’t speak ill of love, if only you know how to understand it. Love is our heart’s sigh for all that lies beyond our grasp. Cherish this longing in your heart. It is yours to cherish. You will find it again in doing good deeds, in nature, in fulfilling your destiny without fear or frailty. Don’t misunderstand it. Don’t mistake it any more. Before you give your love to a woman, remember your mother, think of your sister; think of the happiness that may be in store for you some day of having a daughter of your own to bring up. I was glad when you were born, and at your brother’s birth and your sisters’ I rejoiced. With all my strength I have protected you. At my death, I tell you, you will feel as if a wall had crumbled down before you, and left you face to face with life. Then you will understand me better.”

“Father,” murmured Maurice, breaking down. “I shall not be unworthy of you.”

“My boy!” replied Mr. Roquevillard quite simply. And Margaret, seeing them at last in each other’s arms, remembered the vow she had made her mother.

In the deepening sky, toward La Vigie, an early star began to shed its light. Mr. Roquevillard, holding to his heart this son whom he had won back, this last and only son, marked it as a sign of hope. And in the darkened graveyard, where he had come to return the dead their visit to him of the night before, even though he felt that he was menaced, too, by death, the head of the family made his confession of faith in life.