“How can I stay in Angoulême after such a disgrace? And when I come out of prison, what will become of us? Where shall we go?”
Doubts as to his process began to occur to him, and he passed through an agony which none save inventors can understand. Going from doubt to doubt, David began to see his real position more clearly; and to himself he said, as the Cointets had said to old Séchard, as Petit-Claud had just said to Eve, “Suppose that all should go well, what does it amount to in practice? The first thing to be done is to take out a patent, and money is needed for that—and experiments must be tried on a large scale in a paper-mill, which means that the discovery must pass into other hands. Oh! Petit-Claud was right!”
A very vivid light sometimes dawns in the darkest prison.
“Pshaw!” said David; “I shall see Petit-Claud to-morrow no doubt,” and he turned and slept on the filthy mattress covered with coarse brown sacking.
So when Eve unconsciously played into the hands of the enemy that morning, she found her husband more than ready to listen to proposals. She put her arms about him and kissed him, and sat down on the edge of the bed (for there was but one chair of the poorest and commonest kind in the cell). Her eyes fell on the unsightly pail in a corner, and over the walls covered with inscriptions left by David’s predecessors, and tears filled the eyes that were red with weeping. She had sobbed long and very bitterly, but the sight of her husband in a felon’s cell drew fresh tears.
“And the desire of fame may lead one to this!” she cried. “Oh! my angel, give up your career. Let us walk together along the beaten track; we will not try to make haste to be rich, David.... I need very little to be very happy, especially now, after all that we have been through .... And if you only knew—the disgrace of arrest is not the worst.... Look.”
She held out Lucien’s letter, and when David had read it, she tried to comfort him by repeating Petit-Claud’s bitter comment.
“If Lucien has taken his life, the thing is done by now,” said David; “if he has not made away with himself by this time, he will not kill himself. As he himself says, ‘his courage cannot last longer than a morning——‘”
“But the suspense!” cried Eve, forgiving almost everything at the thought of death. Then she told her husband of the proposals which Petit-Claud professed to have received from the Cointets. David accepted them at once with manifest pleasure.
“We shall have enough to live upon in a village near L’Houmeau, where the Cointets’ paper-mill stands. I want nothing now but a quiet life,” said David. “If Lucien has punished himself by death, we can wait so long as father lives; and if Lucien is still living, poor fellow, he will learn to adapt himself to our narrow ways. The Cointets certainly will make money by my discovery; but, after all, what am I compared with our country? One man in it, that is all; and if the whole country is benefited, I shall be content. There! dear Eve, neither you nor I were meant to be successful in business. We do not care enough about making a profit; we have not the dogged objection to parting with our money, even when it is legally owing, which is a kind of virtue of the counting-house, for these two sorts of avarice are called prudence and a faculty of business.”