“It has not occurred to you that your uncle has sold his investments and taken the young ’un out of quod!” cried Goupil. “He refused my master, but he did not refuse his madame. … Ah! your goose is cooked! The Vicomte will propose a marriage-contract instead of a promise to pay, and the doctor will make the husband settle on his goddaughter all the money he will have to give her to secure such a match.”
“It would not be such a bad stroke of business to marry Ursule to Monsieur Savinien,” said the butcher. “The old lady is having them to dine with her today; Tiennette came over to me at five in the morning to secure a fillet of beef.”
“Well, Dionis, this is a pretty piece of work!” said Massin, hurrying to meet the notary, who came out on to the Square.
“Why, what’s wrong?” said the notary. “All is well; your uncle has sold his securities, and Madame de Portenduère has asked me to go to her house to witness a deed acknowledging a loan of a hundred thousand francs from your uncle on a mortgage of her estates.”
“Yes; but if the young folks were to marry each other?”
“You might as well say if Goupil were to be my successor,” said the notary.
“Neither case is impossible,” said Goupil.
On returning from mass, the old lady sent Tiennette to desire her son to come to her room.
The little house had three rooms on the ground floor. Those of Madame de Portenduère and of her deceased husband were on the same side of the house, divided by a dressing-room with a borrowed light, and a small anteroom opening on to the stairs. The window of the third room, which had always been Savinien’s, looked out on the street, as did that of his father’s. The staircase lay behind it in such a way as to leave space for a little dressing-room adjoining, with a small round window to the courtyard.
Madame de Portenduère’s room, the gloomiest in the house, also looked on the yard; but the widow spent her life in the sitting-room on the ground floor, which communicated by a passage with the kitchen built on the further side of the courtyard; so that this room did duty both as drawing-room and dining-room.
The room that had been Monsieur de Portenduère’s remained in the state in which it had been left on the day of his death; the dead man alone was missing. Madame de Portenduère herself had made the bed, and laid upon it the captain’s uniform, with her husband’s sword, red ribbon, orders, and hat. The gold snuffbox out of which the Vicomte had taken his last pinch of snuff was on the table by the bed, with his prayerbook, his watch, and the cup he used to drink out of. His white hair, arranged in a frame in a single thick curl, hung above the crucifix and holy water cup over the bed. Finally, the trifling objects of his daily use were all in their place—his papers, furniture, Dutch spittoon, and field-glass hanging over the fireplace. The widow had stopped the antique clock at the hour of his death, which it thus recorded in perpetuity. The scent of his powder and snuff still hung in the air. The hearth was as he had left it. To go into the room was like seeing him again, on finding all the things that thus spoke of his habits. His tall cane with its gold knob still lay where he had left it, and his large doeskin gloves close beside it. On the console stood a vase of solid gold, coarsely executed, but worth a thousand crowns, a present from the port of Havana, which he had protected during the war of American Independence from an attack of the English, holding his own against a superior force, after getting the vessels under his convoy safe into harbor. As a reward the King of Spain had made him Knight of the Spanish Orders. For this achievement he was promoted on the first opportunity to the command of a squadron, and received the order of the Legion of Honor.
Then, on his next leave, he married his wife, with a fortune of two hundred thousand francs. But the Revolution stopped all further promotion, and Monsieur de Portenduère emigrated.
“Where is my mother?” asked Savinien of Tiennette.
“She is waiting for you in your father’s room,” said the old Bretonne.
Savinien could not repress a little shudder. He knew how rigid were his mother’s principles, her worship of honor, her loyalty, her faith in noble blood, and he foresaw a scene. So he went as if to lead a forlorn hope, his heart beating and his face almost pallid. In the twilight that filtered through the Venetian shutters he saw his mother dressed in black, and wearing a solemn mien in harmony with this chamber of the dead.
“Monsieur le Vicomte,” she said, rising as he entered, and taking his hand to lead him to the bedside, “there your father died—a man of honor; died without having anything to reproach himself with. His spirit is above. He must indeed have groaned there to see his son disgraced by imprisonment for debt. Under the old monarchy you would have been spared this mud-stain, by craving a lettre de cachet, by which you would have been shut up for a few days in a State prison.—However, you now stand before your father, who can hear you. You, knowing all you had done before being taken to that squalid prison, can you swear to me, before that Shade, and before God who sees all things, that you have done no dishonorable action, that your debts were the consequence of a young man’s follies—in short, that your honor is unspotted? If your blameless father were there, alive, in that armchair, if he could call you to account for your conduct, would
