At this instant Ursule came to tell the friends that Dionis wished to see the doctor.
“Dionis already!” exclaimed Minoret, looking at the Justice. “Yes,” he said to Ursule; “let him be shown in.”
“I will bet my spectacles to a brimstone match that he is your heirs’ stalking-horse. They breakfasted together at the posting-house, and something has been plotted there.”
The notary, following Ursule, came out into the garden. After the usual civilities and a few commonplace remarks, Dionis begged for a moment’s private conversation. Ursule and Bongrand went into the drawing-room.
“We must think about it!—I shall see!” said Bongrand to himself, echoing the doctor’s last words. “That is what clever people think; then death overtakes them, and they leave those who are dearest to them in the greatest difficulties!”
The distrust a man of business feels of a man of talent is extraordinary. He cannot admit that the greater includes the less. But this very distrust, perhaps, implies praise. Seeing these superior minds inhabiting the high peaks of human thought, men of business do not believe them capable of descending to the infinitely small details which, like interest in the world of finance, or microscopic creatures in natural history, at last accumulate till they equal the capital, or constitute a world. It is a mistake. The man of feeling and the man of genius see everything.
Bongrand, nettled by the doctor’s persistent silence, but urged, no doubt, by Ursule’s interests; which he feared were compromised, determined to protect her against her rivals. He was in despair at not knowing what was going on between the old man and Dionis.
“However pure-minded Ursule may be,” thought he, as he looked at her, “there is one point on which young girls are wont to have their own ideas of jurisprudence and morality. Let us try!”—“The Minoret-Levraults,” said he to Ursule, as he settled his spectacles, “are quite capable of proposing that you should marry their son.”
The poor child turned pale. She had been too well brought up, and had too much perfect delicacy, to go and listen to what her uncle and Dionis were saying; but after a short deliberation she thought she might go into the room, thinking that if she were in the way her godfather would make her understand it. The Chinese summerhouse, which was the doctor’s private study, had the shutters of the glass door left open. Ursule’s idea was that she would go herself to close them. She apologized for leaving the lawyer alone in the drawing-room; but he smiled and said:
“Do so, do so.”
Ursule went to the steps leading from the Chinese summerhouse down to the garden, and there she stood for some minutes slowly closing the Venetian shutters and looking at the sunset. Then she heard this answer spoken by the doctor as he came towards the summerhouse:
“My heirs would be delighted to see me possessed of real estate and mortgages. They fancy that my fortune would be much more safely invested. I can guess all they could say; and you, perhaps, are their representative. But, my dear sir, my arrangements are unalterable. My heirs will have the capital of the fortune I brought here with me; they may accept that as a certainty, and leave me in peace. If either of them should make any change in what I believe it to be my duty to do for that child” (and he pointed to his goddaughter), “I will come back from the other world to torment him!—So Monsieur Savinien de Portenduère may remain in prison if his release depends on me,” added the doctor. “I shall not sell any of my securities.”
As she heard the last words of this speech, Ursule felt the first, the only grief she bad ever known. She rested her forehead against the shutter, and clung to it for support.
“Good heavens! what ails her?” cried the old doctor; “she is colorless. Such emotion just after dinner might kill her!”
He put out his arm to hold Ursule, who fell almost fainting.
“Good evening, monsieur; leave me,” he said to the notary.
He carried his goddaughter to a huge easy-chair, dating from Louis XV, which stood in his study, seized a phial of ether from his medicine store, and made her inhale it-
“Go and take my place, my friend,” said he to Bongrand, who was alarmed; “I must stay with her.”
The Justice walked to the gate with the notary, asking him, but without any show of eagerness, “What has come over Ursule?”
“I do not know,” said Monsieur Dionis. “She was standing on the steps listening to us; and when her uncle refused to lend the necessary sum to release young Portenduère, who is in prison for debt—for he had not a Monsieur Bongrand to defend him as Monsieur du Rouvre had—she turned pale and tottered. Does she love him? Can there be—?”
“At fifteen!” said Bongrand, interrupting Dionis.
“She was born in February 1814. In four months she will be sixteen.”
“But she has never seen her neighbor,” replied the Justice. “No, it is just an attack.”
“An attack of the heart,” said the notary.
Dionis was much delighted by his discovery; it would avert the dreaded marriage by which the doctor might have frustrated the hopes of his heirs, while Bongrand saw his castles in the air in ruins; he had long dreamed of a marriage between his own son and Ursule.
“If the poor child should be in love with that youth, it would be unfortunate for her. Madame de Portenduère is a Bretonne, and crazy about noble birth,” replied the Justice, after a pause.
“Happily—for the honor of the Portenduères,” said the notary, who had nearly betrayed himself.
To do the worthy and honorable lawyer full justice, it must be said that, on his way from the gate to the drawing-room, he gave up, not without regret for his son’s loss, the hope he had cherished of one day calling Ursule his daughter. He intended to give his son six thousand francs a year as
