In the newspapers! This horrible scandal upon the very ruins of her house! It was not enough, then, that the ancient fortune should have crumbled to dust; everything must roll in the mud as well. Ah! might not the honour of the name at least be saved? And with a mechanical movement she opened the casket. The ear-rings, the bracelet, three rings appeared, brilliants and rubies, in old-fashioned settings.
Busch had eagerly drawn near. His eyes softened with a caressing gentleness. 'Oh!' said he, 'these are not worth ten thousand francs. Let me look at them.'
His sensual passion for precious stones had burst forth, and he was already taking the jewels up one by one, turning them over, holding them in the air, with his fat, trembling, loving fingers. The purity of the rubies especially seemed to throw him into an ecstasy; and those old brilliants, although their cutting was sometimes unskilful, of what a marvellous water they were!
'Six thousand francs!' said he, in the hard voice of an auctioneer, hiding his emotion under this estimate. 'I only count the stones; the settings are merely fit for the melting pot. Well, we will be satisfied with six thousand francs.'
But it was too severe a sacrifice for the Countess. Her violence revived; she took the jewels away from him and held them tight in her convulsed hands. No, no! it was too much to require that she should also throw into the gulf those few stones, which her mother had worn, and which her daughter was to have worn on her wedding day. Burning tears started from her eyes, and streamed down her cheeks, in such tragic grief that Léonie, her heart touched, distracted with pity, began tugging at Busch's coat to force him to go off. She herself wished to leave, feeling that it was not right to give so much pain to that poor old lady, who seemed so good. Busch, however, watched the scene very coldly, now confident that he would carry the jewels off with him, knowing, as he did, by long experience that fits of crying, with women, betoken the collapse of the will; and so he waited.
Perhaps the frightful scene would have been prolonged if at that moment a distant, stifled voice had not burst into sobs. It was Alice, calling from the alcove: 'Oh! mamma, they are killing me! Give them everything, let them take everything away! Oh! mamma, let them go away! They are killing me, they are killing me!'
Then the Countess made a gesture of desperate abandonment, the gesture of one who would have given her very life. Her daughter had heard; her daughter was dying of shame. That sufficed, and she flung the jewels at Busch, and hardly gave him time to lay the Count's acknowledgment upon the table in exchange, but pushed him out of the room, after Léonie, who had already disappeared. Then the unhappy woman again opened the alcove, and let her head fall upon Alice's pillow; and there they remained, both exhausted, overwhelmed, mingling their tears.
Swayed by a feeling of revolt, Madame Caroline had been for a moment on the point of intervening. Could she allow that wretch to strip those two poor women in that fashion? But she had just heard the shameful story, and what could be done to avoid the scandal? For she knew him to be a man to carry out his threats. She herself felt ashamed in his presence, in the complicity of the secrets which they shared. Ah! what suffering, what filth! A feeling of embarrassment came over her; why had she hastened to this room, since she could find neither words to say nor help to offer? All the phrases that came to her lips, questions, mere allusions with regard to the terrible event of the day before, seemed to her out of place, cruel in presence of the suffering victim. And what help could she have offered which would not have seemed like derisive charity, she who was also ruined, already embarrassed as to how she might contrive to live pending the issue of the trial? At last she advanced, with eyes full of tears and arms open, overcome by infinite compassion, wild emotion which made her whole being tremble.
Those two miserable, fallen, hopeless creatures in that vulgar lodging-house alcove were all that remained of the ancient race of the Beauvilliers, formerly so powerful, exercising sovereign sway. That race had owned estates as large as a kingdom; twenty leagues along the Loire had belonged to it—castles, meadows, arable land, forests. But this immense landed fortune had gradually dwindled with the progress of the centuries, and the Countess had just engulfed the last shreds of it in one of those tempests of modern speculation of which she had no comprehension: at first the twenty thousand francs which she had saved, accumulated for her daughter sou by sou, then the sixty thousand francs borrowed on Les Aublets, and then the farm itself. The mansion in the Rue Saint-Lazare would not pay her creditors. Her son had died far from her and ingloriously. Her daughter had been brought home to her in a pitiable condition, perhaps also destined soon to die. And the Countess, formerly so noble, tall, and slender, perfectly white, with her grand past-century air; was now nothing but a poor old woman, destroyed, shattered by all this devastation; while Alice, without beauty or youth, displaying her elongated scarecrow neck, had a gleam of madness in her eyes—madness mingled with mortal grief as she mourned over the irreparable. And they both sobbed, sobbed on, without a pause.
Then Madame Caroline did not say a word, but simply took hold of them and pressed them tightly to her heart. It was the only thing that she could do; she wept with them. And the two unfortunates understood her; their tears began to course more gently. Though no consolation was possible, would it not still be necessary to live, to live on in spite of everything?