Madame Caroline was so profoundly astounded by this awful story that it seemed to her as if all the blood in her heart were freezing. She thought of the young miscreant's parentage, and shuddered at the remembrance that Saccard was his father.
'I do not wish to reproach you, madame,' concluded the Princess, 'for it would be unjust to hold you in the least degree responsible. Only, you really had in this boy a very terrible protégé.' And, as if a connection of ideas had arisen in her mind, she added: 'One cannot live with impunity amid certain surroundings. I myself had the greatest qualms of conscience, and felt myself an accomplice when that Bank lately went to pieces, heaping up so many ruins and so many iniquities. Yes, I ought never to have allowed my house to become the cradle of such abomination. But the evil is done, the house will be purified, and I—oh! I am no more—God will forgive me.'
Her pale smile, of hope at last realised, had reappeared on her features, and with a gesture she foreshadowed her departure from the world, the end of the part which she had played as a good invisible fairy—her disappearance for evermore.
Madame Caroline had caught hold of her hands and was pressing and kissing them, so upset by remorse and pity that she stammered out disjointed words. 'You do wrong to excuse me,' she said; 'I am guilty—that poor girl, I must see her, I will go to see her at once.'
And thereupon she went off, leaving the Princess and her old servant to begin their packing for the great departure, which was to separate them after forty years of life together.
Two days previously, on the Saturday, the Countess de Beauvilliers had resigned herself to the course of abandoning her mansion to her creditors. For six months past she had not been able to pay the interest on the mortgage, and, what with costs of all sorts and the ever-present threat of foreclosure and enforced sale, the situation had become intolerable. Accordingly, her lawyer had advised her to let everything go, and to retire to some small lodging, where she might live on next to nothing, whilst he endeavoured to liquidate her affairs. She would not have yielded; even to the very annihilation of her race, the downfall of the ceilings upon her head she would have persisted, perhaps, in her efforts to keep up her station, and to make it appear that she was still possessed of means, had not a fresh misfortune all at once prostrated her. Her son Ferdinand, the last of the Beauvilliers—that useless young fellow, who, kept apart from all employment in France, had become a Pontifical Zouave in order to escape from his nullity and idleness—had died ingloriously at Rome, his blood so impoverished, his system so severely tried by the oppressive sun, that, already ill, suffering from a complaint of the chest, he had not been able to fight at Mentana.[28]
When the tidings of his death reached the Countess she felt a void within her, a collapse of all her ideas, all her plans—all the laboriously raised scaffolding which for so many years had so proudly upheld the honour of her name. Four and twenty hours sufficed; the walls cracked, and a spectacle of distressing misery stood revealed among the ruins. The old horse was sold; the cook alone remained, doing her shopping in a dirty apron, buying two sous' worth of butter and a quart of dry beans; whilst the Countess was perceived on the footway wearing a muddy skirt and boots which let in the water. It was the advent of pauperism in a single night; and such was the force of the disaster that it swept away even the pride of this woman, who believed so firmly in the good old times, and who had so long warred with the century in which she lived. She and her daughter had taken refuge in the Rue de la Tour-des-Dames, in the house of an old wardrobe dealer who had become a devotee and let out furnished rooms to priests. In this house the two women secured a large, bare room of dignified, mournful aspect. At the further end of it was an alcove, in which stood a couple of small beds; and when one had shut the folding doors with which this alcove was provided—doors covered with paper similar to that on the walls—the room became transformed into a parlour. This circumstance had somewhat consoled the poor creatures.
On the Saturday, however, the Countess had not been installed in the place for a couple of hours when an unexpected and extraordinary visit again plunged her into anguish. Alice fortunately had just gone out. The visitor was Busch, with his flat dirty face, greasy frock-coat, and white cravat twisted like a cord. Warned by his scent that the favourable moment had come, he had finally decided to push forward that old affair of the acknowledgment of ten thousand francs which the Count de Beauvilliers had signed in favour of Léonie Cron.
With a glance at the apartment, he took in the widow's situation. Had he waited too long? he wondered. However, like a man capable, on occasion, of urbanity and patience, he explained the case at length to the frightened Countess. This was really her husband's handwriting, was it not? It clearly told the story, upon which, by the way, he did not insist. Nor did he even conceal the fact that, fifteen years having elapsed, he did not believe that she was legally obliged to pay. However that might be, he was simply his client's representative, and knew that she was resolved to test the question in the law courts, and raise the most frightful scandal, unless the matter were compromised. When the Countess, ghastly pale, struck to the heart by the revival of the frightful past, expressed astonishment that they had waited so long before applying to her, he invented a story, saying that the acknowledgment had been lost, and found again at the bottom of a trunk; and, as she definitively refused to look into the matter, he went off, still evincing great politeness and saying that he would return with his client, though not on the morrow, as she would not then be at liberty, but either on the following Monday or Tuesday.
When the Monday came the Countess de Beauvilliers had quite forgotten that ill-dressed man and his cruel story, distracted as she was by the awful calamity which had befallen her daughter, who had been brought home to her delirious, and whom she had put to bed and nursed with tear-dimmed eyes. At last Alice had fallen asleep, and the mother had just sat down, exhausted, crushed by the unrelenting fury of fate, when Busch again presented himself, accompanied this time by Léonie.