“My father is going out,” said Eugénie to herself. She had heard all that had passed from the head of the staircase.
Silence reigned once more in the house. The rattle of the wheels in the streets of sleeping Saumur grew more and more distant, and at last died away. Then it was that a sound seemed to reach Eugénie’s heart before it fell on her ears, a wailing sound that rang through the thin walls above—it came from her cousin’s room. There was a thin line of light, scarcely wider than a knife edge, beneath his door; the rays slanted through the darkness and left a bright gleaming bar along the balusters of the crazy staircase.
“He is unhappy,” she said, as she went up a little further.
A second moan brought her to the landing above. The door stood ajar; she thrust it open. Charles was sleeping in the rickety old armchair, his head drooped over to one side, his hand hung down and nearly touched the floor, the pen that he had let fall lay beneath his fingers. Lying in this position, his breath came in quick, sharp jerks that startled Eugénie. She entered hastily.
“He must be very tired,” she said to herself, as she saw a dozen sealed letters lying on the table. She read the addresses—MM. Farry, Breilman and Co., carriage builders
; M. Buisson, tailor
; and so forth.
“Of course, he has been settling his affairs, so that he may leave France as soon as possible,” she thought.
Her eyes fell upon two unsealed letters. One of them began—“My dear Annette …” she felt dazed, and could see nothing more for a moment. Her heart beat fast, her feet seemed glued to the floor.
“His dear Annette! He loves, he is beloved! … Then there is no more hope! … What does he say to her?” These thoughts flashed through her heart and brain. She read the words everywhere: on the walls, on the very floor, in letters of fire.
“Must I give him up already? No, I will not read the letter, I ought not to stay … And yet, even if I did read it?”
She looked at Charles, gently took his head in her hands, and propped it against the back of the chair. He submitted like a child, who even while he is sleeping knows that it is his mother who is bending over him, and, without waking, feels his mother’s kisses. Like a mother, Eugénie raised the drooping hand, and, like a mother, laid a soft kiss on his hair. “Dear Annette!” A mocking voice shrieked the words in her ear.
“I know that perhaps I may be doing wrong, but I will read that letter,” she said.
Eugénie turned her eyes away; her high sense of honor reproached her. For the first time in her life there was a struggle between good and evil in her soul. Hitherto she had never done anything for which she needed to blush. Love and curiosity silenced her scruples. Her heart swelled higher with every phrase as she read; her quickened pulses seemed to send a sharp, tingling glow through her veins, and to heighten the vivid emotions of her first love.
My dear Annette—Nothing should have power to separate us save this overwhelming calamity that has befallen me, a calamity that no human foresight could have predicted. My father has died by his own hand; his fortune and mine are both irretrievably lost. I am left an orphan at an age when, with the kind of education I have received, I am almost a child; and, nevertheless, I must now endeavor to show myself a man, and to rise from the dark depths into which I have been hurled. I have been spending part of my time tonight in revolving plans for my future. If I am to leave France as an honest man, as of course I mean to do, I have not a hundred francs that I can call my own with which to tempt fate in the Indies or in America. Yes, my poor Anna, I am going in quest of fortune to the most deadly foreign climes. Beneath such skies, they say, fortunes are rapidly and surely made. As for living on in Paris, I could not bring myself to do it. I could not face the coldness, the contempt, and the affronts that a ruined man, the son of a bankrupt, is sure to receive. Great heaven! to owe two millions! … I should fall in a duel before a week had passed. So I shall not return to Paris. Your love—the tenderest, the most devoted love that ever ennobled the heart of man—would not seek to draw me back. Alas! my darling, I have not money enough to take me to you, that I might give and receive one last kiss, a kiss that should put strength into me for the task that lies before me …
“Poor Charles, I did well to read this. I have money, and he shall have it,” said Eugénie. She went on with the letter when she could see for her tears.
I have not even begun to think of the hardships of poverty. Supposing that I find I have the hundred louis to pay for my passage out, I have not a sou to lay out on a trading venture. Yet, no; I shall not have a hundred louis, nor yet a hundred sous; I have no idea whether anything will be left when I have settled all my debts in Paris. If there is nothing, I shall simply go to Nantes and work my passage out. I will begin at the bottom of the ladder, like many another man of energy who has gone out to the Indies as a penniless
