Madeleine would have wept at last before the likeness like an inconsolable widow, had not an event transpired to lift her and William from the sorrowful life they were leading. Another month, and they would doubtless have quarrelled outright, and cursed the day of their meeting. They were saved by circumstances.
William received a letter from Véteuil summoning him in all haste. His father was dying. Madeleine, touched at his grief, clasped him in a warm, affectionate embrace, and, for an hour, they sat once more hand in hand. He set out, full of anxiety, telling the young woman that he would write and that she was to wait for his return.
CHAPTER V.
MONSIEUR DE VIARGUE was dead. The truth had been concealed from William in order that the sad news might he broken gently.
Long after, the circumstances connected with this poor man’s death would make the servants of La Noiraude shudder. The day before, the count had shut himself up as usual in his laboratory. As she did not see him come down at night, Geneviève seemed surprised; but he sometimes worked late, and took some food up with him, so the old woman did not disturb him for dinner. That evening, however, she felt a presentiment of something wrong; the window of the laboratory, which usually shone over the country, like one of the red mouths of the infernal regions, remained in darkness the whole night.
Next day, Geneviève, feeling very uneasy, went and listened at the door. She could hear nothing, not a sound, not a breath. Alarmed at this silence, she shouted out, but there was no reply. She noticed then that the door was simply closed; this detail terrified her, for the count always double locked it when he went in. She entered. In the middle of the room, Monsieur de Viargue was lying dead on his back, his legs all stiff, his arms apart and convulsed; the grinning head, disfigured with livid spots, was thrown back, exposing the neck which was covered also with long yellow marks. In the fall, the skull had knocked against the floor; a little stream of blood was trickling on and forming a tiny pool right under the stove. The death-straggle hardly seemed to have lasted more than a few seconds.
At the sight of the dead body, Geneviève fell back with a shriek. She leaned against the wall and mumbled a short prayer. What terrified her most, were the marks on the face and the neck which looked like contusions; the devil had strangled her master at last, the imprint of his fingers clearly proved it. She had long been expecting this event; when she had seen the count shut himself up, she had murmured: “He is going again to invoke the Accursed One: Satan will be even with him; one of these nights, he will take him by the throat and so have his soul at once.” Her prediction was being realised, and she shuddered as she thought of the terrible struggle which must have brought about the death of the heretic. Her ardent imagination pictured the devil to her eyes, hairy and black, seizing his victim by the throat, tearing out his soul and then disappearing up the chimney.
The shriek she had uttered brought the servants. These domestics whom Monsieur de Viargue had carefully chosen from the most illiterate in the country, were convinced, like Geneviève, that their master had died in a conflict with the demon. They carried him down and laid him on a bed, with shudders of terror, as they trembled to see some unclean animal come forth from the black, open mouth of the corpse. It was firmly believed, for miles round, that the count was a sorcerer, and that the devil had carried him off. The doctor who came to inquire into the cause of death, explained it otherwise; he could see by the appearance of the livid spots which disfigured the skin, that it was a case of poisoning, and his curiosity as a medical man was singularly piqued by the strange nature of these yellow marks, the presence of which the action of no known poison could explain: he thought rightly that the old chemist must have poisoned himself by the aid of some new agent discovered by him during the course of his long researches. This doctor was a prudent man; he made a sketch of the marks from his love for science, and kept the secret of this violent death to himself. He attributed the decease to an attack of apoplexy, wishing by this to avoid the scandal there must have been, had any mention of Monsieur de Viargue’s suicide been made. There is always an interested respect for the memory of the rich and the influential.
William arrived an hour before the funeral. His grief was great. The count had always treated him with coldness, and when he lost him, he could not feel that the snapping of the bonds of an affection which had never been very close could tear his heart; but the poor fellow was then in such a feverish state of mind that he wept bitterly. After the restless and painful days which he had just spent with Madeleine, the least sorrow would melt him to tears. Perhaps two months before, he would not have even sobbed.
On the return from the funeral, Geneviève took him up to her room. There, with the cruel calmness of her fanaticism, she told him that she had been guilty of sacrilege, in allowing his father to be buried in consecrated ground. Unfeelingly, she related to him, after her fashion, the story of that death which she attributed to the devil. Perhaps she would not have given these details over the hardly closed grave of the count, had she not wished to draw a moral from them; she adjured the young man, and solemnly implored him to swear that he would never form a compact with hell. William swore to everything she asked. He listened to her with a stupefied look, crushed by his grief, unable to understand why she spoke of Satan, and feeling himself going mad at the tale, uttered in her shrill voice, of his father’s struggle with the devil. He listened quietly to what she said about the spots on the face and neck of the dead body, but he became quite pale, not daring yet to accept the thought which presented itself to his mind.
He was informed, just at this moment, that somebody wished to speak to him. In the hall, William found the doctor, who had investigated the cause of death. Then, this man, after beating about the bush for a long time, told him the horrible truth; be added, that if he had allowed himself to conceal it from the public, he had thought it his duty to declare everything to the deceased’s son. The young man, chilled by such a confidence, thanked him for his concealment of the facts. He was not weeping now, he was looking before him with a fixed and gloomy gaze; it seemed to him that an unfathomable abyss was opening at his feet.
He was going away staggering like one drunk, when the doctor held him back. This man had not come simply, as he said, to inform him of the real truth. Impelled by an irresistible wish to penetrate into the count’s laboratory, he had seen that a better opportunity would never occur: the son was to show him into that sanctuary, the door of which had always been closed to him by the father, during his lifetime.
“Excuse me,” he said to William, “if I mention these matters to you at a moment like this. But I am afraid that tomorrow it will be too late to investigate certain details. The marks which I noticed on Monsieur de Viargue, were of such a peculiar nature, that I am totally ignorant of the poison which could have produced them — I beg you to be kind enough to allow me to visit the room in which the corpse was found; that will enable me, no doubt, to give you more precise information.”
William asked for the key of the laboratory, and went up with the doctor. Had he been asked, he would have taken him anywhere, to the stables, to the cellars, without manifesting the least surprise, without knowing even what he was doing.
But, when he entered the laboratory, the look of this room astonished him so, that the shock roused him from his stupor. The big chamber was so strangely altered, that be hardly knew it again. When he had been in it before, about three years ago, the day that his father had forbidden him all work and all connection with science, it was in a perfect state of order and cleanliness: the tiles in the stove shone bright; the copper and glass-work of the apparatus reflected the clear light from the big window; the shelves that ran round the walls were covered with bottles, phials, and receivers of every description: on the middle of the table had stood piles of huge books, all open, and bundles of manuscripts. He still remembered the impression of reverential surprise produced on him by the sight of this study-workshop, littered methodically, so to speak, with quite a multitude of objects. There reposed the fruits of a long life of labour, the precious secrets of a philosopher who had questioned nature for more than half a century, never wishing to confide to anyone the results of his ardent curiosity.
As William penetrated into the laboratory, he expected to find again, in their place, the apparatus and the shelves, the books and the manuscripts. He entered