Part 14 (1/2)
”Yes, and now separated in body,” said Paul.
”Ah!” exclaimed the old man.
”Oh! against my wife's will,” added the count, hastily. ”I was forced to deceive her; she did not know that I was leaving her.”
”You have left her?”
”My pa.s.sage is taken; I sail for Calcutta on the 'Belle-Amelie.'”
”Two day's hence!” cried the notary. ”Then, Monsieur le comte, we shall never meet again.”
”You are only seventy-three, my dear Mathias, and you have the gout, the brevet of old age. When I return I shall find you still afoot. Your good head and heart will be as sound as ever, and you will help me to reconstruct what is now a shaken edifice. I intend to make a n.o.ble fortune in seven years. I shall be only forty on my return. All is still possible at that age.”
”You?” said Mathias, with a gesture of amazement,--you, Monsieur le comte, to undertake commerce! How can you even think of it?”
”I am no longer Monsieur le comte, dear Mathias. My pa.s.sage is taken under the name of Camille, one of my mother's baptismal names. I have acquirements which will enable me to make my fortune otherwise than in business. Commerce, at any rate, will be only my final chance. I start with a sum in hand sufficient for the redemption of my future on a large scale.”
”Where is that money?”
”A friend is to send it to me.”
The old man dropped his fork as he heard the word ”friend,” not in surprise, not scoffingly, but in grief; his look and manner expressed the pain he felt in finding Paul under the influence of a deceitful illusion; his practised eye fathomed a gulf where the count saw nothing but solid ground.
”I have been fifty years in the notariat,” he said, ”and I never yet knew a ruined man whose friend would lend him money.”
”You don't know de Marsay. I am certain that he has sold out some of his investments already, and to-morrow you will receive from him a bill of exchange for one hundred and fifty thousand francs.”
”I hope I may. If that be so, cannot your friend settle your difficulties here? You could live quietly at Lanstrac for five or six years on your wife's income, and so recover yourself.”
”No a.s.signment or economy on my part could pay off fifteen hundred thousand francs of debt, in which my wife is involved to the amount of five hundred and fifty thousand.”
”You cannot mean to say that in four years you have incurred a million and a half of debt?”
”Nothing is more certain, Mathias. Did I not give those diamonds to my wife? Did I not spend the hundred and fifty thousand I received from the sale of Madame Evangelista's house, in the arrangement of my house in Paris? Was I not forced to use other money for the first payments on that property demanded by the marriage contract? I was even forced to sell out Natalie's forty thousand a year in the Funds to complete the purchase of Auzac and Saint-Froult. We sold at eighty-seven, therefore I became in debt for over two hundred thousand francs within a month after my marriage. That left us only sixty-seven thousand francs a year; but we spent fully three times as much every year. Add all that up, together with rates of interest to usurers, and you will soon find a million.”
”Br-r-r!” exclaimed the old notary. ”Go on. What next?”
”Well, I wanted, in the first place, to complete for my wife that set of jewels of which she had the pearl necklace clasped by the family diamond, the 'Discreto,' and her mother's ear-rings. I paid a hundred thousand francs for a coronet of diamond wheat-ears. There's eleven hundred thousand. And now I find I owe the fortune of my wife, which amounts to three hundred and sixty-six thousand francs of her 'dot.'”
”But,” said Mathias, ”if Madame la comtesse had given up her diamonds and you had pledged your income you could have pacified your creditors and have paid them off in time.”
”When a man is down, Mathias, when his property is covered with mortgages, when his wife's claims take precedence of his creditors', and when that man has notes out for a hundred thousand francs which he must pay (and I hope I can do so out of the increased value of my property here), what you propose is not possible.”
”This is dreadful!” cried Mathias; ”would you sell Belle-Rose with the vintage of 1825 still in the cellars?”
”I cannot help myself.”
”Belle-Rose is worth six hundred thousand francs.”
”Natalie will buy it in; I have advised her to do so.”
”I might push the price to seven hundred thousand, and the farms are worth a hundred thousand each.”