“Do you believe in ghosts?” Zélie asked the curé.
“Do you believe in dividends?” replied the curé, smiling.
“Sharpers—all of them!” thought Zélie; “they want to get round us. The old priest, the old Justice, and that rascally little Savinien have arranged it all. There are no more dreams in it than there are hairs in the palm of my hand.” She courtesied twice with curt abruptness, and went away.
“I know why Savinien went to Fontainebleau,” said Ursule to the Abbé Chaperon, and she informed him of the duel, begging him to use his influence to prevent it.
“And Madame Minoret proposed to you to marry her son?” asked the old man.
“Yes.”
“Minoret has probably confessed his crime to his wife,” added the curé.
The Justice, who came in at this moment, heard of the proceedings and the offer made by Zélie, whose hatred of Ursule was known to him, and he glanced at the curé as much as to say—“Come out; I want to speak to you about Ursule out of her hearing.”
“Savinien will hear that you have refused eighty thousand francs a year and the cock of the walk of Nemours!” he said.
“Is that any sacrifice?” answered she. “Is anything a sacrifice to those who truly love? And is there any merit in my refusing the son of a man we despise? If others can make a virtue of their aversions, that should not be the moral code of a girl brought up by a Jordy, an Abbé Chaperon, and our dear doctor!” and she looked up at the portrait.
Bongrand took Ursule’s hand and kissed it.
“Do you know,” said the Justice to the curé when they were in the street, “what Madame Minoret came for?”
“What?” said the priest, looking at his friend with a keen eye that only revealed curiosity.
“She wanted to make a kind of restitution.”
“Then, do you think—?” began the Abbé Chaperon.
“I do not think, I am sure—there, only look.” The Justice pointed to Minoret, who was coming towards them on his way home, for on leaving Ursule’s house the two friends had turned up the High Street.
“Having to plead in court, I have naturally studied many cases of remorse, but I never saw one to compare with this. What can have produced that flaccid pallor in cheeks of which the skin was as tight as a drum, bursting with the coarse, rude health of a man without a care? What has set dark rings round those eyes, and deadened their rustic twinkle? Could you have believed that there would ever be a wrinkle on that brow, or that that colossus could ever have felt his brain reel? At last he is conscious of a heart! I know the phases of remorse, my dear curé, as you know those of repentance. Those that have hitherto come under my observation were awaiting punishment, or condemned to endure it, to settle their score with the world; they were resigned, or breathed vengeance. But here we have remorse without expiation; remorse pure and simple, greedy of its prey, and rending it.—You are not yet aware,” said the Justice, stopping Minoret, “that Mademoiselle Mirouët has just refused your son’s hand?”
“But,” added the curé, “you may be easy; she will prevent his duel with Monsieur de Portenduère.”
“Ah! my wife has been successful,” said Minoret; “I am very glad. I was more dead than alive.”
“You are indeed so altered that you are not like yourself,” said the Justice.
Minoret looked from one to the other to see if the curé had betrayed him, but the Abbé preserved a fixity of countenance, a calm melancholy, that reassured the guilty man.
“And the change is all the more surprising,” the lawyer went on, “because you ought to be perfectly happy. Why, here you are, lord of le Rouvre, to which you have added les Bordières, all your farms, your mills, your meadows. You have a hundred thousand francs a year in consols—”
“I hold no consols,” said Minoret, hastily.
“Bah!” said the Justice. “Why, it is just the same with that as with your son’s love for Ursule. One day he will have nothing to say to her, and the next asks her to marry him. After having tried to kill Ursule with misery, you want to have her for a daughter-in-law! My dear sir, there is something at the bottom of all this!”
Minoret wanted to answer; he tried to find words, he could only bring out:
“You are funny. Monsieur le Juge de Paix.—Good day, gentlemen.”
And he slowly turned down the Rue des Bourgeois.
“He has stolen our poor Ursule’s fortune. But how can we prove it?”
“God grant—” said the curé.
“God has endowed us with a feeling which is now speaking in that man,” replied the Justice, “But we call that presumptive evidence, and human justice requires something more.”
The Abbé Chaperon kept silence, as a priest. As happens in such cases, he thought much more often than he wished of the robbery Minoret had almost confessed, and of Savinien’s happiness, so evidently delayed by Ursule’s lack of fortune; for the old lady owned in secret to her spiritual director how wrong she had been not to consent to her son’s marriage during the doctor’s lifetime.
Next day, as he came down the altar steps after Mass, he was struck by an idea, which came upon him with the force of a voice calling to him. He signed to Ursule to wait for him, and went home with her without breakfasting.
“My dear child,” said he, “I want to see the two volumes in which your godfather, as you dream of him, says that he placed the certificates and notes.”
Ursule and the curé went upstairs to the library and took down the third volume of the Pandects. On opening it, the curé observed, not without surprise, the mark left by some papers on the pages, which,
