“Lay all your distresses before God, and He perhaps will intervene to help us.”
For some minutes silence reigned. When Ursule, who dared not look at her godfather, presently raised her eyes to his face, she was deeply moved by seeing tears flowing down his withered cheeks. The tears of an old man are as terrible as those of a child are natural.
“What, oh, what is the matter with you?” she cried, falling at his feet and kissing his hands. “Do you not trust me?”
“I, who only wish to satisfy your every wish, am compelled to cause the first great sorrow of your life! I am as much grieved as you are! I never shed a tear but when my children died and my Ursule.—There, I will do anything you like!” he exclaimed.
Ursule, through her tears, gave her godfather a look that was like a flash of light. She smiled.
“Now, come into the drawing-room and contrive to keep your own counsel about all this, my child,” said the doctor, and he went out, leaving her alone in the study.
The fatherly soul was so weak before this smile that he was about to speak a word of hope which might have deluded his goddaughter.
At this moment Madame de Portenduère, alone with the curé in her chilly little ground-floor drawing-room, had just finished confiding her woes to the good priest, her only friend. She held in her hand some letters which the Abbé had returned to her after reading them, and which had been the crown of her misery. Seated in an armchair, on one side of the square table covered with the remains of the dessert, the old lady looked at the curé, who, on the other, huddled into a deep chair, was stroking his chin with that strange gesture peculiar to the stage valet, to mathematicians, and priests, as betraying meditation on a problem difficult of solution.
The little room, lighted by two windows looking on the street, and lined with wainscoting painted gray, was so damp that the lower panels displayed the geometrical crackle of decaying wood when it is no longer held together by paint. The floor, of red tiles rubbed smooth by the lady’s only servant, made little round hempen mats a necessity in front of each chair, and on one of these mats were the Abbé’s feet. The curtains, of light-green flowered damask, were drawn, and the shutters closed. Two wax-candles lighted the table; the rest of the room was half dark. Need it be said that between the windows a fine pastel by Latour showed the portrait of the famous Admiral de Portenduère, the rival of Suffren, of Kergarouët, of Guichen, of Simeuse? On the wainscot opposite the chimney might be seen the Vicomte de Portenduère and the old lady’s mother, a Kergarouët-Ploëgat.
Savinien, then, was great-nephew to Vice-Admiral Kergarouët, and cousin to the Comte de Portenduère, the Admiral’s grandson, both of them very rich. The Vice-Admiral lived in Paris, and the Comte de Portenduère at his château of the same name in Dauphiné. The Count, his cousin, represented the elder branch, and Savinien was the only scion of the younger branch of the Portenduères.
The Count, a man of past forty, married to a rich wife, had three children. His fortune, augmented several times by inheritance, brought him in, it was said, sixty thousand francs a year. He represented the department of the Isère as deputy, spending the winter in Paris, where he had repurchased the mansion of the Portenduères with the indemnity paid him under Villèle’s act. The Vice-Admiral had lately married his niece,2 Mademoiselle de Fontaine, solely to settle his fortune on her. Thus the young Vicomte’s errors had perhaps deprived him of the interest of two powerful friends.
Savinien, young and handsome, if he had entered the navy, with his name and the interest of an admiral and of a deputy to back him, might perhaps at three-and-twenty have been already first-lieutenant; but his mother, averse to seeing her only son engage in a military career, had had him educated at Nemours by one of the Abbé Chaperon’s curates, and had flattered herself that she might keep her son at her side till her death. She had hoped to marry him very prudently to a demoiselle d’Aiglemont, with twelve thousand francs a year; the name of Portenduère, and the farmlands of Bordières, justifying his pretensions to her hand. This moderate but judicious scheme, which might have reestablished the family in another generation, had been frustrated by events. The d’Aiglemonts were now ruined, and one of their daughters, Hélène, the eldest, had vanished without any explanation being offered by the family.
The tedium of a life devoid of outdoor interests, of purpose, and of action, with nothing to support it but the love of a son for his mother, so wearied Savinien that he burst his bonds, light as they were, and vowed he would never live in a country town; discovering, somewhat late, that his future did not lie in the Rue des Bourgeois. So at one-and-twenty he left his mother to introduce himself to his relations, and try his fortune in Paris.
The contrast between life at Nemours and life in the capital could not fail to be fatal to a youth of one-and-twenty, perfectly free, with no one to contradict him, of course greedy for pleasure, and to whom the name of Portenduère and the wealth of his connections opened every drawing-room. Convinced that his mother had somewhere stored the savings of twenty years, Savinien had soon squandered the six thousand francs she had given him to spend in Paris. This sum did not defray the expenses of the first six months, and by that time he owed twice as much to his lodging-keeper, his tailor, his bootmaker, to a man from whom he hired carriages and horses, to a jeweler, in short, to all the tradespeople who supply the luxury of youth. He had hardly
