The three little girls were also kneeling amid their bed-clothes. Two of them were between eight and ten years old, the third was not yet five. In their long white nightdresses, with their frail hands clasped and their serious and ecstatic faces, one would have taken them for little angels.
'And you must repeat after me what I am going to say. Listen! "O God, please reward Monsieur Saccard for all his kindness; let him live long and be happy!"'
Then, in their cherubs' voices, the adorably faulty lisping of childhood, the four girls, in an impulse of faith in which all their pure little beings were offered up, repeated simultaneously:
'O God, please reward Monsieur Saccard for all his kindness; let him live long and be happy!'
Madame Caroline experienced a sudden impulse to enter the room and hush those children, and forbid what she regarded as a blasphemous and cruel game. No, no! Saccard had no right to be loved; it was pollution to allow infancy to pray for his happiness. Then a great shudder stopped her; tears rose to her eyes. Why should she force those innocent beings, who as yet knew nothing of life, to espouse her quarrel, the wrath of her experience? Had not Saccard been good to them, he who was to some extent the creator of this establishment, and who sent them playthings every month? She was profoundly agitated, again finding in all this a proof that there is no man utterly blameworthy, no man who, amid all the evil which he may have done, has not also done much good. And while the little girls again took up their prayer, she went off, carrying away with her the sound of those angelic voices calling down the blessings of heaven upon the conscienceless man, the artisan of catastrophes, whose mad hands had just ruined a world.
As she at last alighted from her cab on the Boulevard du Palais, outside the Conciergerie, she discovered that in her emotion she had forgotten to bring the carnations which she had prepared that morning for her brother. There was a flower-girl near by, selling little bouquets of roses at two sous apiece; and she purchased one, and made Hamelin, who was very fond of flowers, smile when she told him of her thoughtlessness. That afternoon, however, she found him unusually sad. At first, during the earlier weeks of his imprisonment, he had been unable to believe that the charges against him were serious. His defence seemed to him a simple matter: he had been elected chairman against his will; he had had nothing to do with the financial operations, having been almost always absent from Paris and unable to exercise any control. But his conversations with his lawyer and the steps that Madame Caroline had taken, with no other result than weariness and vexation of spirit, had finally made him realise the frightful responsibilities that rested on him. He would be held partially responsible for the slightest illegalities that had been perpetrated; it would never be admitted that he had been ignorant of a single one of them; he would be regarded as Saccard's accomplice. And it was then that in his somewhat simple faith as a fervent Catholic he found a resignation and tranquillity of soul that astonished his sister. When she arrived from the outer world, from her anxious errands, from the midst of the harsh, turbid humanity which enjoyed freedom, it astonished her to find him peaceful and smiling in his bare cell, to the walls of which, like the pious child he was, he had nailed around a small black wooden crucifix four crudely coloured religious prints. However, as soon as one puts oneself in the hand of God there is no more rebellion; all undeserved suffering becomes a guarantee of salvation. Thus Hamelin's only sadness arose from the disastrous stoppage of his enterprises. Who would take up his work? Who would continue the resurrection of the East, so felicitously commenced by the United Steam Navigation Company and the Carmel Silver Mining Company? Who would construct the network of railways, from Broussa to Beyrout and Damascus, from Smyrna to Trebizond, which was to set young blood flowing through the veins of the Old World? For, despite everything, he still believed in it all; he said that the work begun could not die; he only felt grieved at no longer being the hand chosen by Heaven for its execution. And especially did his voice break when he sought to know in punishment of what fault God had not permitted him to found that great Catholic bank, which was destined to transform modern society, that treasury of the Holy Sepulchre which would restore a kingdom to the Pope and finally make a single nation of all the peoples, by taking from the Jews the sovereign power of money. And this also he predicted, this inevitable, invincible bank; he prophesied the coming of the just man with pure hands who would some day found it. And if on that Monday afternoon he seemed anxious, it must have simply been because, amidst all the serenity of a man accused and about to be convicted, he had reflected that on emerging from prison his hands would never be sufficiently clean to resume the great work.
He listened absent-mindedly while his sister explained to him that newspaper opinion seemed to be growing a little more favourable to him. And then, without any transition, looking at her with his dreamy eyes, he inquired, 'Why do you refuse to see him?'
She trembled; she clearly understood that he referred to Saccard. Shaking her head she answered No, and No again. Then, with considerable embarrassment, in a very low voice, he said:
'After what he has been to you, you cannot refuse; go and see him!'