“And then, when I was so abominably deceived by the Baron, for really between old rips like us our friend’s mistress should be sacred, I swore I would have his wife. It is but justice. The Baron could say nothing; we are certain of impunity. You showed me the door like a mangy dog at the first words I uttered as to the state of my feelings; you only made my passion—my obstinacy, if you will—twice as strong, and you shall be mine.”
“Indeed; how?”
“I do not know; but it will come to pass. You see, madame, an idiot of a perfumer—retired from business—who has but one idea in his head, is stronger than a clever fellow who has a thousand. I am smitten with you, and you are the means of my revenge; it is like being in love twice over. I am speaking to you quite frankly, as a man who knows what he means. I speak coldly to you, just as you do to me, when you say, ‘I never will be yours,’ In fact, as they say, I play the game with the cards on the table. Yes, you shall be mine, sooner or later; if you were fifty, you should still be my mistress. And it will be; for I expect anything from your husband!”
Madame Hulot looked at this vulgar intriguer with such a fixed stare of terror, that he thought she had gone mad, and he stopped.
“You insisted on it, you heaped me with scorn, you defied me—and I have spoken,” said he, feeling that he must justify the ferocity of his last words.
“Oh, my daughter, my daughter,” moaned the Baroness in a voice like a dying woman’s.
“Oh! I have forgotten all else,” Crevel went on. “The day when I was robbed of Josepha I was like a tigress robbed of her cubs; in short, as you see me now.—Your daughter? Yes, I regard her as the means of winning you. Yes, I put a spoke in her marriage—and you will not get her married without my help! Handsome as Mademoiselle Hortense is, she needs a fortune——”
“Alas! yes,” said the Baroness, wiping her eyes.
“Well, just ask your husband for ten thousand francs,” said Crevel, striking his attitude once more. He waited a minute, like an actor who has made a point.
“If he had the money, he would give it to the woman who will take Josepha’s place,” he went on, emphasizing his tones. “Does a man ever pull up on the road he has taken? In the first place, he is too sweet on women. There is a happy medium in all things, as our King has told us. And then his vanity is implicated! He is a handsome man!—He would bring you all to ruin for his pleasure; in fact, you are already on the highroad to the workhouse. Why, look, never since I set foot in your house have you been able to do up your drawing-room furniture. ‘Hard up’ is the word shouted by every slit in the stuff. Where will you find a son-in-law who would not turn his back in horror of the ill-concealed evidence of the most cruel misery there is—that of people in decent society? I have kept shop, and I know. There is no eye so quick as that of the Paris tradesman to detect real wealth from its sham.—You have no money,” he said, in a lower voice. “It is written everywhere, even on your man-servant’s coat.
“Would you like me to disclose any more hideous mysteries that are kept from you?”
“Monsieur,” cried Madame Hulot, whose handkerchief was wet through with her tears, “enough, enough!”
“My son-in-law, I tell you, gives his father money, and this is what I particularly wanted to come to when I began by speaking of your son’s expenses. But I keep an eye on my daughter’s interests, be easy.”
“Oh, if I could but see my daughter married, and die!” cried the poor woman, quite losing her head.
“Well, then, this is the way,” said the ex-perfumer.
Madame Hulot looked at Crevel with a hopeful expression, which so completely changed her countenance, that this alone ought to have touched the man’s feelings and have led him to abandon his monstrous schemes.
“You will still be handsome ten years hence,” Crevel went on, with his arms folded; “be kind to me, and Mademoiselle Hulot will marry. Hulot has given me the right, as I have explained to you, to put the matter crudely, and he will not be angry. In three years I have saved the interest on my capital, for my dissipations have been restricted. I have three hundred thousand francs in the bank over and above my invested fortune—they are yours——”
“Go,” said Madame Hulot. “Go, monsieur, and never let me see you again. But for the necessity in which you placed me to learn the secret of your cowardly conduct with regard to the match I had planned for Hortense—yes, cowardly!” she repeated, in answer to a gesture from Crevel. “How can you load a poor girl, a pretty, innocent creature, with such a weight of enmity? But for the necessity that goaded me as a mother, you would never have spoken to me again, never again have come within my doors. Thirty-two years of an honorable and loyal life shall not be swept away by a blow from Monsieur Crevel——”
“The retired perfumer, successor to Cesar Birotteau at the Queen of the Roses, Rue Saint-Honore,” added Crevel, in mocking tones. “Deputy-mayor, captain in the National Guard, Chevalier of the Legion of Honor—exactly what my predecessor was!”
“Monsieur,” said the Baroness, “if, after twenty years of constancy, Monsieur Hulot is tired of his wife, that is nobody’s concern but mine. As you see, he has kept his infidelity a mystery, for I did not know that he had succeeded you in the affections of Mademoiselle Josepha——”
“Oh, it has cost him a pretty penny, madame. His singing-bird has cost him more than a hundred thousand francs in these two years. Ah, ha! you have not seen the end of it!”
“Have done with all this, Monsieur Crevel. I will not, for your sake, forego the happiness a mother knows who can embrace her children without a single pang of remorse in her heart, who sees herself respected and loved by her family; and I will give up my soul to God unspotted——”
“Amen!” exclaimed Crevel, with the diabolical rage that embitters the face of these pretenders when they fail for the second time in such an attempt. “You do not yet know the latter end of poverty—shame, disgrace.—I have tried to warn you; I would have saved you, you and your daughter. Well, you must study the modern parable of the Prodigal Father from A to Z. Your tears and your pride move me deeply,” said Crevel, seating himself, “for it is frightful to see the woman one loves weeping. All I can promise you, dear Adeline, is to do nothing against your interests or your husband’s. Only never send to me for information. That is all.”
“What is to be done?” cried Madame Hulot.
Up to now the Baroness had bravely faced the threefold torment which this explanation inflicted on her; for she was wounded as a woman, as a mother, and as a wife. In fact, so long as her son’s father-in-law was insolent and offensive, she had found the strength in her resistance to the aggressive tradesman; but the sort of good-nature he showed, in spite of his exasperation as a mortified adorer and as a humiliated National Guardsman, broke down her nerve, strung to the point of snapping. She wrung her hands, melted into tears, and was in a state of such helpless dejection, that she allowed Crevel to kneel at her feet, kissing her hands.
“Good God! what will become of us!” she went on, wiping away her tears. “Can a mother sit still and see her child pine away before her eyes? What is to be the fate of that splendid creature, as strong in her pure life under her mother’s care as she is by every gift of nature? There are days when she wanders round the garden, out of spirits without knowing why; I find her with