At midnight, as Goupil was quitting the Massins’ house, he was seized in the street by two strangers, who thrashed him soundly and disappeared. Goupil never breathed a word about this nocturnal scene, and gave the lie to an old woman who, looking out of her window, fancied she had recognized him.
All these great little events were watched by the Justice, who clearly saw that Goupil had some mysterious power over Minoret, and promised himself that he would find out the reason of it.
Though public opinion in the little town acknowledged Ursule’s perfect innocence, she recovered but slowly. In this state of physical prostration, which left her soul and mind free, she became the passive medium of certain phenomena of which the effects indeed were terrible, and of a nature to attract the attention of science, if science had only been taken into the secret. Ten days after Madame de Portenduère’s visit, Ursule had a dream which presented the characteristics of a supernatural vision, as much in its moral facts as in its physical conditions, so to speak.
Her godfather, old Doctor Minoret, appeared to her, and signed to her to follow him; she dressed and went with him, through the darkness, as far as the house in the Rue des Bourgeois, where she found everything, to the most trivial details, just as they had been at the time of her godfather’s death. The old man wore the clothes he had had on the day before he died; his face was pale, not a sound was heard as he moved; nevertheless, Ursule distinctly heard his voice, though it was faint, as if repeated by a distant echo. The doctor led his ward into the Chinese pavilion, where he made her raise the marble top of the little Boule chiffonier, as she had done the day of his death; but instead of finding nothing there, she saw the letter her godfather had desired her to fetch. She unsealed it and read it, as well as the will in Savinien’s favor.
“The letters of the writing,” she said to the curé, “shone as though they had been traced withi sunbeams; they scorched my eyes.”
When she looked up at her uncle to thank him, she saw a kindly smile on his pale lips. Then, in his weak but quite clear voice, the spectre showed her Minoret in the passage listening to his secret, unscrewing the lock, and taking the packet of papers. Then, with his right hand, he took hold of the girl and obliged her to walk with the tread of the dead to follow Minoret home to his house. Ursule crossed the town, went into the posting-house, and up to Zélie’s room, where the spectre made her see the spoiler unsealing the letters, reading and burning them.
“He could only make the third match bum,” said Ursule, “to set light to the papers, and he buried the ashes among the cinders. After that, my godfather took me back to our house, and I saw Monsieur Minoret-Levrault steal into the library, where he took, out of the third volume of the Pandects, the three bonds bearing twelve thousand francs a year, as well as the money saved in the house, all in bank notes. Then my guardian said to me: ‘All the torments that have brought you to the brink of the grave are his work, but God wills that you should be happy. You will not die yet; you will marry Savinien. If you love me, if you love Savinien, you will ask for the restoration of your fortune by my nephew. Swear that you will.’ ”
Shining like the Lord at His Transfiguration, the spectre had had such a violent effect on Ursule’s mind, in the oppressed state in which she was at the time, that she promised all her uncle asked her to be rid of the nightmare. She woke to find herself standing in the middle of her room, in front of the portrait of her godfather, which she had had brought there when she was ill. She went to bed again, and to sleep after great excitement, remembering this strange vision when she woke; but she dared not speak of it. Her refined good sense, and her delicacy of feeling, took offence at the thought of revealing a dream of which the cause and object were her own pecuniary interests; she naturally attributed it to La Bougival’s chat, as she was going to sleep, of the doctor’s liberality, and the convictions her old nurse still cherished on the subject.
But the dream returned with aggravated details, which made her dread it greatly. The second time her godfather laid his ice-cold hand on her shoulder, causing her the acutest pain, an indescribable sensation. “The dead must be obeyed!” he said in sepulchral tones.
“And tears,” she added, “fell from his hollow blank eyes.”
The third time the dead man took her by her long plaits of hair, and showed her Minoret talking with Goupil, and promising him money if he would take Ursule to Sens. Then she made up her mind to tell her three dreams to the Abbé Chaperon.
“Monsieur le Curé,” she said to him one evening, “do you believe that the dead can walk?”
“My child, sacred history, profane history, modern history bear witness in many passages to their appearing. Still, the Church has never made it an article of faith; and as to science, in France it laughs it to scorn.”
“What do you believe?”
“The power of God, my child, in infinite.”
“Did my godfather ever speak to you of these things?”
“Yes; often. He had completely changed his views of such matters. His conversion dated from the day, as he told me twenty times, when a
