“Are you going to sleep in that?” she inquired.
“Yes.”
“Holy Virgin! What a beautiful altar cloth it would make for the parish church! Oh, my dear young gentleman, you should give it to the Church, and you will save your soul, which you are like to lose for that thing. Oh! how nice you look in it. I will go and call mademoiselle to look at you.”
“Come now, Nanon, since that is your name, will you hold your tongue, and let me go to bed. I will set my things straight tomorrow, and as you have taken such a fancy to my gown, you shall have a chance to save your soul. I am too good a Christian to take it away with me when I go; you shall have it, and you can do whatever you like with it.”
Nanon stood stock still, staring at Charles; she could not bring herself to believe that he really meant what he said.
“You are going to give that grand dressing-gown to me!” she said, as she turned to go. “The gentleman is dreaming already. Good night.”
“Good night, Nanon.—What ever am I doing here?” said Charles to himself, as he dropped off to sleep. “My father is no fool; I have not been sent here for nothing. Pooh! ‘serious business tomorrow,’ as some old Greek wiseacre used to say.”
“Sainte Vierge! how nice he is!” said Eugénie to herself in the middle of her prayers, and that night they remained unfinished.
Mme. Grandet alone lay down to rest, with no thought in her quiet mind. Through the door in the thin partition she could hear her husband pacing to and fro in his room. Like all sensitive and timid women, she had thoroughly studied the character of her lord and master. Just as the sea-mew foresees the coming storm, she knew by almost imperceptible signs that a tempest was raging in Grandet’s mind, and, to use her own expression, she “lay like one dead” at such seasons. Grandet’s eyes turned towards his sanctum; he looked at the door, which was lined with sheet iron on the inner side (he himself had seen to that), and muttered, “What a preposterous notion this is of my brother’s, to leave his child to me! A pretty legacy! I haven’t twenty crowns to spare, and what would twenty crowns be to a popinjay like that, who looked at my weatherglass as if it wasn’t fit to light the fire with?”
And Grandet, meditating on the probable outcome of this mournful dying request, was perhaps more perturbed in spirit than the brother who had made it.
“Shall I really have that golden gown?” Nanon said, and she fell asleep wrapped around in her altar cloth, dreaming for the first time in her life of shining embroideries and flowered brocade, just as Eugénie dreamed of love.
In a girl’s innocent and uneventful life there comes a mysterious hour of joy when the sunlight spreads through the soul, and it seems to her that the flowers express the thoughts that rise within her, thoughts that are quickened by every heart beat, only to blend in a vague feeling of longing, when the days are filled with innocent melancholy and delicious happiness. Children smile when they see the light for the first time, and when a girl dimly divines the presence of love in the world she smiles as she smiled in her babyhood. If light is the first thing that we learn to love, is not love like light in the heart? This moment had come for Eugénie; she saw the things of life clearly for the first time. Early rising is the rule in the country, so, like most other girls, Eugénie was up betimes in the morning; this morning she rose earlier than usual, said her prayers, and began to dress; her toilette was henceforth to possess an interest unknown before. She began by brushing her chestnut hair, and wound the heavy plaits about her head, careful that no loose ends should escape from the braided coronet which made an appropriate setting for a face both frank and shy, a simple coiffure which harmonized with the girlish outlines.
As she washed her hands again and again in the cold spring water that roughened and reddened the skin, she looked down at her pretty rounded arms and wondered what her cousin did to have hands so soft and so white, and nails so shapely. She put on a pair of new stockings, and her best shoes, and laced herself carefully, without passing over a single eyelet-hole. For the first time in her life, in fact, she wished to look her best, and felt that it was pleasant to have a pretty new dress to wear, a becoming dress which was nicely made.
The church clock struck just as she had finished dressing; she counted the strokes, and was surprised to find that it was still only seven o’clock. She had been so anxious to have plenty of time for her toilette, that she had risen too early, and now there was nothing left to do. Eugénie, in her ignorance, never thought of studying the position of a tress of hair, and of altering it a dozen times to criticise its effect; she simply folded her arms, sat down by the window, and looked out upon the yard, the long strip of garden, and the terraced gardens up above upon the ramparts.
It was a somewhat dreary outlook thus shut in by the grim rock walls, but not without a charm of its own, the mysterious beauty of quiet over-shaded gardens, or of wild and solitary places. Under the kitchen window there was a well with a stone coping round it; a pulley was suspended above the water from an iron bracket overgrown by a vine; the vine-leaves were red and faded now that the autumn was nearly at an end,
