“Really, sir, have I any more authority over her than you have? She has never said a word about it to me. She takes after you.”
“Goodness! your tongue is hung in the middle this morning! Tut, tut, tut; you are going to fly in my face, I suppose? Perhaps you and she are both in it.”
He glared at his wife.
“Really, M. Grandet, if you want to kill me, you have only to keep on as you are doing. I tell you, sir, and if it were to cost me my life, I would say it again—you are too hard on your daughter; she is a great deal more sensible than you are. The money belonged to her; she could only have made a good use of it, and our good works ought to be known to God alone. Sir, I implore you, take Eugénie back into favor. It will lessen the effect of the shock your anger gave me, and perhaps will save my life. My daughter, sir; give me back my daughter!”
“I am off,” he said. “It is unbearable here in my house, when a mother and daughter talk and argue as if … Brooouh! Pouah! You have given me bitter New Year’s gifts, Eugénie!” he called. “Yes, yes, cry away! You shall repent it, do you hear? What is the good of taking the sacrament six times a quarter if you give your father’s gold away on the sly to an idle rascal who will break your heart when you have nothing else left to give him? You will find out what he is, that Charles of yours, with his morocco boots and his standoff airs. He can have no heart and no conscience either, when he dares to carry off a poor girl’s money without the consent of her parents.”
As soon as the street-door was shut, Eugénie stole out of her room and came to her mother’s bedside.
“You were very brave for your daughter’s sake,” she said.
“You see where crooked ways lead us, child! … You have made me tell a lie.”
“Oh! mother, I will pray to God to let all the punishment fall on me.”
“Is it true?” asked Nanon, coming upstairs in dismay, “that mademoiselle here is to be put on bread and water for the rest of her life?”
“What does it matter, Nanon?” asked Eugénie calmly.
“Why, before I would eat ‘kitchen’ while the daughter of the house is eating dry bread, I would … no, no, it won’t do.”
“Don’t say a word about it, Nanon,” Eugénie warned her.
“It would stick in my throat; but you shall see.”
Grandet dined alone for the first time in twenty-four years.
“So you are a widower, sir,” said Nanon. “It is a very dismal thing to be a widower when you have a wife and daughter in the house.”
“I did not speak to you, did I? Keep a still tongue in your head, or you will have to go. What have you in that saucepan that I can hear boiling away on the stove?”
“Some dripping that I am melting down—”
“There will be some people here this evening; light the fire.”
The Cruchots and their friends, Mme. des Grassins and her son, all came in about eight o’clock, and to their amazement saw neither Mme. Grandet nor her daughter.
“My wife is not very well today, and Eugénie is upstairs with her,” replied the old cooper, without a trace of perturbation on his face.
After an hour spent in more or less trivial talk, Mme. des Grassins, who had gone upstairs to see Mme. Grandet, came down again to the dining-room, and was met with a general inquiry of “How is Mme. Grandet?”
“She is very far from well,” the lady said gravely. “Her health seems to me to be in a very precarious state. At her time of life you ought to take great care of her, papa Grandet.”
“We shall see,” said the vinegrower abstractedly, and the whole party took leave of him. As soon as the Cruchots were out in the street and the door was shut behind them, Mme. des Grassins turned to them and said, “Something has happened among the Grandets. The mother is very ill; she herself has no idea how ill she is, and the girl’s eyes are red, as if she had been crying for a long while. Are they wanting to marry her against her will?”
That night, when the cooper had gone to bed, Nanon, in list slippers, stole up to Eugénie’s room, and displayed a raised pie, which she had managed to bake in a saucepan.
“Here, mademoiselle,” said the kind soul, “Cornoiller brought a hare for me. You eat so little that the pie will last you for quite a week, and there is no fear of its spoiling in this frost. You shall not live on dry bread, at any rate; it is not at all good for you.”
“Poor Nanon!” said Eugénie, as she pressed the girl’s hand.
“I have made it very dainty and nice, and he never found out about it. I paid for the lard and the bay-leaves out of my six francs; I can surely do as I like with my own money,” and the old servant fled, thinking that she heard Grandet stirring.
Several months went by. The cooper went to see his wife at various times in the day, and never mentioned his daughter’s name—never saw her, nor made the slightest allusion to her. Mme. Grandet’s health grew worse and worse; she had not once left her room since that terrible January morning. But nothing shook the old coopers determination; he was hard, cold, and unyielding as a block of granite. He came and went,
