"Yes, his handwriting is good. No doubt, however, he knows very little. It is for that reason that I wish to intrust him to you. You will polish him up for me and make him conversant with everything. My desire is that in a year or two he should know everything about the factory, like a master."
At that last word which enlightened him, the accountant's good sense suddenly awoke. Amid the manias which were wrecking his mind, he had remained a man of figures with a passion for arithmetical accuracy, and he protested.
"Well, madame, since you wish me to assist you, pray tell me everything; tell me in what work we can employ this young man here. Really now, you surely cannot hope through him to regain possession of the factory, re-purchase the shares, and become sole owner of the place?"
Then, with the greatest logic and clearness, he showed how foolish such a dream would be, enumerating figures and fully setting forth how large a sum of money would be needed to indemnify Denis, who was installed in the place like a conqueror.
"Besides, dear madame, I don't understand why you should take that young man rather than another. He has no legal rights, as you must be aware. He could never be anything but a stranger here, and I should prefer an intelligent, honest man, acquainted with our line of business."
Constance had set to work poking the fire logs with the tongs. When she at last looked up she thrust her face towards the other's, and said in a low voice, but violently: "Alexandre is my husband's son, he is the heir. He is not the stranger. The stranger is that Denis, that son of the Froments, who has robbed us of our property! You rend my heart; you make it bleed, my friend, by forcing me to tell you this."
The answer she thus gave was the answer of a conservative bourgeoise, who held that it would be more just if the inheritance should go to an illegitimate scion of the house rather than to a stranger. Doubtless the woman, the wife, the mother within her, bled even as she herself acknowledged, but she sacrificed everything to her rancor; she would drive the stranger away even if in doing so her own flesh should be lacerated. Then, too, it vaguely seemed to her that her husband's son must be in some degree her own, since his father was likewise the father of the son to whom she had given birth, and who was dead. Besides, she would make that young fellow her son; she would direct him, she would compel him to be hers, to work through her and for her.
"You wish to know how I shall employ him in the place," she resumed. "I myself don't know. It is evident that I shall not easily find the hundreds of thousands of francs which may be required. Your figures are accurate, and it is possible that we may never have the money to buy back the property. But, all the same, why not fight, why not try? And, besides—I will admit it—suppose we are vanquished, well then, so much the worse for the other. For I assure you that if this young man will only listen to me, he will then become the agent of destruction, the avenger and punisher, implanted in the factory to wreck it!"
With a gesture which summoned ruin athwart the walls, she finished expressing her abominable hopes. Among her vague plans, reared upon hate, was that of employing the wretched Alexandre as a destructive weapon, whose ravages would bring her some relief. Should she lose all other battles, that would assuredly be the final one. And she had attained to this pitch of madness through the boundless despair in which the loss of her only son had plunged her, withered, consumed by a love which she could not content, then demented, perverted to the point of crime.
Morange shuddered when, with her stubborn fierceness, she concluded: "For twelve years past I have been waiting for a stroke of destiny, and here it is! I would rather perish than not draw from it the last chance of good fortune which it brings me!"