Eugénie gave no sign.
“Did anyone ever see such a daughter! Can you be a child of mine? If you have parted with your money, you must have a receipt for it—”
“Was I free to do as I wished with it—Yes or No? Was it mine?”
“Why, you are a child.”
“I am of age.”
At first Grandet was struck dumb by his daughter daring to argue with him, and in this way! He turned pale, stamped, swore, and finding words at last, he shouted—
“Accursed serpent! Miserable girl! Oh! you know well that I love you, and you take advantage of it! You ungrateful child! She would rob and murder her own father! Pardieu! you would have thrown all we have at the feet of that vagabond with the morocco boots. By my father’s pruning-hook, I cannot disinherit you, but nom d’un tonneau, I can curse you; you and your cousin and your children. Nothing good can come out of this; do you hear? If it was to Charles that … But, no, that is impossible. What if that miserable puppy should have robbed me?”
He glared at his daughter, who was still silent and unmoved.
“She does not stir! She does not flinch! She is more of a Grandet than I am. You did not give your gold away for nothing, anyhow. Come, now; tell me about it?”
Eugénie looked up at her father; her satirical glance exasperated him.
“Eugénie, this is my house; so long as you are under your father’s roof you must do as your father bids yon. The priests command you to obey me.”
Eugénie bent her head again.
“You are wounding all my tenderest feelings,” he went on. “Get out of my sight until you are ready to obey me. Go to your room and stay there until I give you leave to come out of it. Nanon will bring you bread and water. Do you bear what I say? Go!”
Eugénie burst into tears, and fled away to her mother. Grandet took several turns in his garden without heeding the snow or the cold; then, suspecting that his daughter would be in his wife’s room, and delighted with the idea of catching them in flagrant disobedience to orders, he climbed the stairs as stealthily as a cat, and suddenly appeared in Mme. Grandet’s room. He was right; she was stroking Eugénie’s hair, and the girl lay with her face hidden in her mother’s breast.
“Poor child! Never mind, your father will relent.”
“She has no longer a father!” said the cooper. “Is it really possible, Mme. Grandet, that we have brought such a disobedient daughter into the world? A pretty bringing up; and pious, too, above all things! Well! how is it you are not in your room? Come, off to prison with you; to prison, miss.”
“Do you mean to take my daughter away from me, sir?” said Mme. Grandet, as she raised a flushed face and bright, feverish eyes.
“If you want to keep her, take her along with you, and the house will be rid of you both at once. … Tonnerre! Where is the gold? What has become of the gold?”
Eugénie rose to her feet, looked proudly at her father, and went into her room; the goodman turned the key in the door.
“Nanon!” he shouted, “you can rake out the fire in the parlor;” then he came back and sat down in an easy-chair that stood between the fire and his wife’s bedside, saying as he did so, “Of course she gave her gold to that miserable seducer Charles, who only cared for our money.”
Mme. Grandet’s love for her daughter gave her courage in the face of this danger; to all appearance she was deaf, dumb, and blind to all that was implied by this speech. She turned on her bed so as to avoid the angry glitter of her husband’s eyes.
“I knew nothing about all this,” she said. “Your anger makes me so ill, that if my forebodings come true I shall only leave this room when they carry me out feet foremost. I think you might have spared me this scene, sir. I, at all events, have never caused you any vexation. Your daughter loves you, and I am sure she is as innocent as a newborn babe; so do not make her miserable, and take back your word. This cold is terribly sharp; it might make her seriously ill.”
“I shall neither see her nor speak to her. She shall stop in her room on bread and water until she has done as her father bids her. What the devil! the head of a family ought to know when gold goes out of his house, and where it goes. She had the only rupees that there are in France, for aught I know; then there were genovines besides, and Dutch ducats—”
“Eugénie is our only child, and even if she had flung them into the water—”
“Into the water!” shouted the worthy cooper. “Into the water! Mme. Grandet, you are raving! When I say a thing, I mean it, as you know. If you want to have peace in the house, get her to confess to you, and worm this secret out of her. Women understand each other, and are cleverer at this sort of thing than we are. Whatever she may have done, I certainly shall not eat her. Is she afraid of me? If she had covered her cousin with gold from head to foot, he is safe on the high seas by this time, hein? We cannot run after him—”
“Really, sir …” his wife began.
But
