Page:Eekhoud - The New Carthage.djvu/87

Rh wheedled her lover so successfully that he had forced his daughter, a charming and affectionate girl, to contract a mesaillance with the son of his concubine. To the misconduct of the Pasha was attributed the moral affliction and the mysterious and incurable disease which caused the premature death of Madame Saint-Fardier. Athanasius and Gaston had inherited from their mother her agreeable features and a certain native distinction, but they were no more intelligent than the Baron de La Bellone, their grandfather, and the paternal immoralities had marked them with the stigmata that had obliterated the kings of France.

To Saint-Fardier, his pitiful offspring constituted a reproach, a living remorse. He had had a horror of them since he first saw them in their cradle, but his repugnance prevailed over his hatred, and he never dared to whip them. He kept them at a distance, confided them to the care of strangers, or left them to themselves, filled their pockets with money and sent them travelling, so that he might see as little of them as he possibly could. They ended by living their own life, as he lived his, by taking their meals and lodging outside the house, treating him simply as a banker, and even having business only with the cashier of the factory. It was not his fault that they had not become horrible scamps; that they came to be nothing but high livers infatuated with their own appearance, but not thoroughly rotten. In spite of their weak mentality, they could not forgive him for what they had vaguely heard of the death of their mother. The jockey-like pace of the Pasha made them blush. They avoided talking to him, frequented patrician society, looking to their mother's name as protection, and had themselves called Saint-Fardier de La Bellone.