She rose the next morning at seven o'clock, very much to her husband's
astonishment.
"Are we not going to see your child? You promised me yesterday evening.
Perhaps you haven't got it any more to-day."
He sprang from the bed hastily. "It is not my child we are going to
see, but a physician, who will give us his opinion on your case."
She replied in the tone of a woman who was sure of herself: "I shall
ask nothing better."
Cachelin was instructed to inform the chief that his son-in-law was
ill, and Lesable and his wife advised by a neighbouring chemist, rang at
one o'clock exactly the office-bell of Dr. Lefilleul, author of several
works on the hygiene of generation.
They were shown into a salon decorated in white and gold, but scantily
furnished in spite of the number of chairs and sofas. They seated
themselves and waited. Lesable was excited, trembling, and also ashamed.
Their turn came at last, and they were shown into a sort of office, where
they were received by a short, stout man of dignified and ceremonious
demeanour.
He waited till they should explain their case, but Lesable had not
courage to utter a word, and blushed up to the roots of his hair. It
therefore devolved on his wife to speak, and with a resolute manner and
in a tranquil voice, she made known their errand.
"Monsieur, we have come to discover the reason why we cannot have
children. A large fortune depends upon this for us."
The consultation was long, minute, and painful. Cora alone seemed
unembarrassed, and submitted to the critical examination of the medical
expert, sustained by the great interest she had at stake.
After having studied for nearly two hours the constitutions of the
married pair, the practitioner said: "I discover nothing either abnormal
or special. Your case is by no means an uncommon one. There is as much
divergence in constitutions as in characters. When we see so many
households out of joint through incompatibility of temper, it is not
astonishing to see others sterile through incompatibility of physique.
Madame appears to be particularly well fitted for the offices of
motherhood. Monsieur, on his side, although presenting no conformation
outside of the general rule, seems to me enfeebled, perhaps the
consequence of his ardent desire to become a parent. Will you permit me
to make an auscultation?"
Lesable, greatly disturbed, removed his waistcoat, and the doctor glued
his ear to the thorax, and then to the back of his patient, tapping him
continuously from the throat to the stomach, and from the loins to the
nape of his neck. He discovered a slight irregularity in the action of
the heart, and even a menace to the right lung. "--It is necessary for
you to be very careful, Monsieur, very careful. This is anaemia, and comes
from exhaustion--nothing else. These conditions, although now
insignificant, may in a short time become incurable."
Lesable turned pale with anguish and begged for a prescription.
The doctor ordered a complicated régime consisting of iron, raw meat,
and soup, combined with exercise, rest, and a sojourn in the country
during the hot weather. He indicated, moreover, the symptoms that
proclaimed the desired fecundity, and initiated them into the secrets
which were usually practised with success in such cases.
The consultation cost forty francs.
When they were in the street, Cora burst out full of wrath:
"I have discovered what my fate is to be!"
Lesable made no reply. He was tormented by anxiety, he was recalling
and weighing each word of the physician. Had the doctor made a mistake,
or had he judged truly? He thought no more of the inheritance now, or the
desired offspring; it was a question of life or death. He seemed to hear a
whistling in his lungs, and his heart sounded as though it were beating in
his ears. In crossing the garden of the Tuileries he was overcome with
faintness and had to sit down to recover himself. His wife, as though to
humiliate him by her superior strength, remained standing in front of him,
regarding him from head to foot with pitying contempt. He breathed
heavily, exaggerating the effort by his fears, and with the fingers of his
left hand on his right wrist he counted the pulsations of the artery.
Cora, who was stamping with impatience, cried: "When will you be ready?
It's time to stop this nonsense!" He arose with the air of a martyr, and
went on his way without uttering a word.
When Cachelin was informed of the result of the consultation, his fury
knew no bounds. He bawled out: "We know now whose fault it is to a
certainty. Ah, well!" And he looked at his son-in-law with his ferocious
eyes as though he would devour him.
Lesable neither listened nor heard, being totally absorbed in thoughts
of his health and the menace to his existence. Father and daughter might
say what they pleased. They were not in his skin, and as for him he meant
to preserve his skin at all hazards. He had the various prescriptions of
the physician filled, and at each meal he produced an array of bottles
with the contents of which he dosed himself regardless of the sneers of
his wife and her father. He looked at himself in the glass every instant,
placed his hand on his heart each moment to study its action, and removed
his bed to a dark room which was used as a clothes closet to put himself
beyond the reach of carnal temptation.
He conceived for his wife a hatred mingled with contempt and disgust. All
women, moreover, appeared to him to be monsters, dangerous beasts, whose
mission it was to destroy men; and he thought no more of the will of Aunt
Charlotte, except as one recalls a past accident which might have been
fatal.
Some months passed. There remained but one year before the fatal term.
Cachelin had suspended in the dining-room an enormous calendar, from
which he effaced a day each morning, raging at the impotence of his
son-in-law, who was allowing this great fortune to escape week by week.
And the thought that he would have to drudge at the office all his life,
and limit his expenses to the pitiful sum of two thousand francs a year,
filled him with a passion of anger that found vent in the most violent
abuse. He could not look at Lesable without shaking with rage, with a
brutal desire to beat, to crush, to trample on him. He hated him with an
inordinate hatred. Every time he saw him open the door and enter the room,
it seemed to him that a robber had broken into the house and robbed him of
a sacred inheritance. He hated him more than his most mortal enemy, and he
despised him at the same time for his weakness, and above all for the
baseness which caused him to sacrifice their common hope of posterity to
the fear of his health. Lesable, in fact, lived as completely apart from
his wife as if no tie united them. He never approached or touched her; he
avoided even looking at her, as much through shame as through fear.
Cachelin, every morning asked his daughter: "Well, how about your
husband? Has he made up his mind?"