“No, dear,” answered Mme. Grandet.
“Why, what is he doing then?”
“He is crying for his father,” Eugénie said.
Grandet looked at his daughter, and found nothing to say. There was some touch of the father even in him. He took one or two turns up and down, and then went straight to his strongroom to think over possible investments. He had thoughts of buying consols. Those two thousand acres of woodland had brought him in six hundred thousand francs; then there was the money from the sale of the poplars, there was last year’s income from various sources, and this year’s savings, to say nothing of the bargain which he had just concluded; so that, leaving those two hundred thousand francs out of the question, he possessed a lump sum of nine hundred thousand livres. That twenty percent, to be made in so short a time upon his outlay, tempted him. Consols stood at seventy. He jotted down his calculations on the margin of the paper that had brought the news of his brother’s death; the moans of his nephew sounded in his ears the while, but he did not hear them; he went on with his work till Nanon thumped vigorously on the thick wall to summon her master to dinner. On the last step of the staircase beneath the archway, Grandet paused and thought.
“There is the interest beside the eight percent.—I will do it. Fifteen hundred thousand francs in two years’ time, in gold from Paris too, full weight.—Well, what has become of my nephew?”
“He said he did not want anything,” replied Nanon, “He ought to eat, or he will fall ill.”
“It is so much saved,” was her master’s comment.
“Lord! yes,” she replied.
“Pooh! he will not keep on crying forever. Hunger drives the wolf from the wood.”
Dinner was a strangely silent meal. When the cloth had been removed, Mme. Grandet spoke to her husband.
“We ought to go into mourning, dear.”
“Really, Mme. Grandet, you must be hard up for ways of getting rid of money. Mourning is in the heart; it is not put on with clothes.”
“But for a brother, mourning is indispensable, and the Church bids us—”
“Then buy mourning out of your six louis; a band of crape will do for me; you can get me a band of crape.”
Eugénie said nothing, and raised her eyes to heaven. Her generous instincts, so long repressed and dormant, had been suddenly awakened, and every kindly thought had been harshly checked as it had arisen. Outwardly this evening passed just as thousands of others had passed in their monotonous lives, but for the two women it was the most painful that they had ever spent. Eugénie sewed without raising her head; she took no notice of the workbox which Charles had looked at so scornfully yesterday evening. Mme. Grandet knitted away at her cuffs. Grandet sat twirling his thumbs, absorbed in schemes which should one day bring about results that would startle Saumur. Four hours went by. Nobody dropped in to see them. As a matter of fact, the whole town was ringing with the news of Grandet’s sharp practice, following on the news of his brother’s failure and his nephew’s arrival. So imperatively did Saumur feel the need to thrash these matters thoroughly out, that all the vinegrowers, great or small, were assembled beneath the des Grassins’ roof, and frightful were the imprecations which were launched at the head of their late Mayor.
Nanon was spinning; the whir of her wheel was the only sound in the great room beneath the gray-painted rafters.
“Our tongues don’t go very fast,” she said, showing her large teeth, white as blanched almonds.
“There is no call for them to go,” answered Grandet, roused from his calculations.
He beheld a vision of the future—he saw eight millions in three years’ time—he had set forth on a long voyage upon a golden sea.
“Let us go to bed. I will go up and wish my nephew a good night from you all, and see if he wants anything.”
Mme. Grandet stayed on the landing outside her room door to hear what her worthy husband might say to Charles. Eugénie, bolder than her mother, went a step or two up the second flight.
“Well, nephew, you are feeling unhappy? Yes, cry, it is only natural, a father is a father. But we must bear our troubles patiently. Whilst you have been crying, I have been thinking for you; I am a kind uncle, you see. Come, don’t lose heart. Will you take a little wine? Wine costs nothing at Saumur; it is common here; they offer it as they might offer you a cup of tea in the Indies.—But you are all in the dark,” Grandet went on. “That’s bad, that’s bad; one ought to see what one is doing.”
Grandet went to the chimneypiece.
“What!” he cried, “a wax candle! Where the devil have they fished that from? I believe the wenches would pull up the floor of my house to cook eggs for that boy.”
Mother and daughter, hearing these words, fled to their rooms, and crept into their beds like frightened mice.
“Mme. Grandet, you have a lot of money somewhere, it seems,” said the vinegrower, walking into his wife’s rooms.
“I am saying my prayers, dear; wait a little,” faltered the poor mother.
“The devil take your pious notions!” growled Grandet.
Misers have no belief in a life to come, the present is all in all to them. But if this thought gives an insight into the miser’s springs of action, it possesses a wider application, it throws a pitiless light upon our own era—for money is the one all-powerful force, ours is preeminently the epoch when money is the lawgiver, socially and politically. Books and institutions, theories and practice, all alike combine to weaken the belief in a future life, the foundation on which the social edifice has been slowly reared for eighteen hundred years. The grave has almost
