Eugenie Grandet, Honoré de Balzac [the reader ebook TXT] 📗

/>
"Ta, ta, ta, ta! nonsense; you never die in your family! Eugenie, what have you done with your gold?" he cried, rushing upon her.

"Monsieur," said the daughter, falling at Madame Grandet's knees, "my mother is ill. Look at her; do not kill her."

Grandet was frightened by the pallor which overspread his wife's face, usually so yellow.

"Nanon, help me to bed," said the poor woman in a feeble voice; "I am dying--"

Nanon gave her mistress an arm, Eugenie gave her another; but it was only with infinite difficulty that they could get her upstairs, she fell with exhaustion at every step. Grandet remained alone. However, in a few moments he went up six or eight stairs and called out,--

"Eugenie, when your mother is in bed, come down."

"Yes, father."

She soon came, after reassuring her mother.

"My daughter," said Grandet, "you will now tell me what you have done with your gold."

"My father, if you make me presents of which I am not the sole mistress, take them back," she answered coldly, picking up the napoleon from the chimney-piece and offering it to him.

Grandet seized the coin and slipped it into his breeches' pocket.

"I shall certainly never give you anything again. Not so much as that!" he said, clicking his thumb-nail against a front tooth. "Do you dare to despise your father? have you no confidence in him? Don't you know what a father is? If he is nothing for you, he is nothing at all. Where is your gold?"

"Father, I love and respect you, in spite of your anger; but I humbly ask you to remember that I am twenty-three years old. You have told me often that I have attained my majority, and I do not forget it. I have used my money as I chose to use it, and you may be sure that it was put to a good use--"

"What use?"

"That is an inviolable secret," she answered. "Have you no secrets?"

"I am the head of the family; I have my own affairs."

"And this is mine."

"It must be something bad if you can't tell it to your father, Mademoiselle Grandet."

"It is good, and I cannot tell it to my father."

"At least you can tell me when you parted with your gold?"

Eugenie made a negative motion with her head.

"You had it on your birthday, hein?"

She grew as crafty through love as her father was through avarice, and reiterated the negative sign.

"Was there ever such obstinacy! It's a theft," cried Grandet, his voice going up in a crescendo which gradually echoed through the house. "What! here, in my own home, under my very eyes, somebody has taken your gold!--the only gold we have!--and I'm not to know who has got it! Gold is a precious thing. Virtuous girls go wrong sometimes, and give--I don't know what; they do it among the great people, and even among the bourgeoisie. But give their gold!--for you have given it to some one, hein?--"

Eugenie was silent and impassive.

"Was there ever such a daughter? Is it possible that I am your father? If you have invested it anywhere, you must have a receipt--"

"Was I free--yes or no--to do what I would with my own? Was it not mine?"

"You are a child."

"Of age."

Dumbfounded by his daughter's logic, Grandet turned pale and stamped and swore. When at last he found words, he cried: "Serpent! Cursed girl! Ah, deceitful creature! You know I love you, and you take advantage of it. She'd cut her father's throat! Good God! you've given our fortune to that ne'er-do-well,--that dandy with morocco boots! By the shears of my father! I can't disinherit you, but I curse you,--you and your cousin and your children! Nothing good will come of it! Do you hear? If it was to Charles--but, no; it's impossible. What! has that wretched fellow robbed me?--"

He looked at his daughter, who continued cold and silent.

"She won't stir; she won't flinch! She's more Grandet than I'm Grandet! Ha! you have not given your gold for nothing? Come, speak the truth!"

Eugenie looked at her father with a sarcastic expression that stung him.

"Eugenie, you are here, in my house,--in your father's house. If you wish to stay here, you must submit yourself to me. The priests tell you to obey me." Eugenie bowed her head. "You affront me in all I hold most dear. I will not see you again until you submit. Go to your chamber. You will stay there till I give you permission to leave it. Nanon will bring you bread and water. You hear me--go!"

Eugenie burst into tears and fled up to her mother. Grandet, after marching two or three times round the garden in the snow without heeding the cold, suddenly suspected that his daughter had gone to her mother; only too happy to find her disobedient to his orders, he climbed the stairs with the agility of a cat and appeared in Madame Grandet's room just as she was stroking Eugenie's hair, while the girl's face was hidden in her motherly bosom.

"Be comforted, my poor child," she was saying; "your father will get over it."

"She has no father!" said the old man. "Can it be you and I, Madame Grandet, who have given birth to such a disobedient child? A fine education,--religious, too! Well! why are you not in your chamber? Come, to prison, to prison, mademoiselle!"

"Would you deprive me of my daughter, monsieur?" said Madame Grandet, turning towards him a face that was now red with fever.

"If you want to keep her, carry her off! Clear out--out of my house, both of you! Thunder! where is the gold? what's become of the gold?"

Eugenie rose, looked proudly at her father, and withdrew to her room. Grandet turned the key of the door.

"Nanon," he cried, "put out the fire in the hall."

Then he sat down in an armchair beside his wife's fire and said to her,--

"Undoubtedly she has given the gold to that miserable seducer, Charles, who only wanted our money."

"I knew nothing about it," she answered, turning to the other side of the bed, that she might escape the savage glances of her husband. "I suffer so much from your violence that I shall never leave this room, if I trust my own presentiments, till I am carried out of it in my coffin. You ought to have spared me this suffering, monsieur,--you, to whom I have caused no pain; that is, I think so. Your daughter loves you. I believe her to be as innocent as the babe unborn. Do not make her wretched. Revoke your sentence. The cold is very severe; you may give her some serious illness."

"I will not see her, neither will I speak to her. She shall stay in her room, on bread and water, until she submits to her father. What the devil! shouldn't a father know where the gold in his house has gone to? She owned the only rupees in France, perhaps, and the Dutch ducats and the _genovines_--"

"Monsieur, Eugenie is our only child; and even if she had thrown them into the water--"

"Into the water!" cried her husband; "into the water! You are crazy, Madame Grandet! What I have said is said; you know that well enough. If you want peace in this household, make your daughter confess, pump it out of her. Women understand how to do that better than we do. Whatever she has done, I sha'n't eat her. Is she afraid of me? Even if she has plastered Charles with gold from head to foot, he is on the high seas, and nobody can get at him, hein!"

"But, monsieur--" Excited by the nervous crisis through which she had passed, and by the fate of her daughter, which brought forth all her tenderness and all her powers of mind, Madame Grandet suddenly observed a frightful movement of her husband's wen, and, in the very act of replying, she changed her speech without changing the tones of her voice,--"But, monsieur, I have not more influence over her than you have. She has said nothing to me; she takes after you."

"Tut, tut! Your tongue is hung in the middle this morning. Ta, ta, ta, ta! You are setting me at defiance, I do believe. I daresay you are in league with her."

He looked fixedly at his wife.

"Monsieur Grandet, if you wish to kill me, you have only to go on like this. I tell you, monsieur,--and if it were to cost me my life, I would say it,--you do wrong by your daughter; she is more in the right than you are. That money belonged to her; she is incapable of making any but a good use of it, and God alone has the right to know our good deeds. Monsieur, I implore you, take Eugenie back into favor; forgive her. If you will do this you will lessen the injury your anger has done me; perhaps you will save my life. My daughter! oh, monsieur, give me back my daughter!"

"I shall decamp," he said; "the house is not habitable. A mother and daughter talking and arguing like that! Broooouh! Pouah! A fine New Year's present you've made me, Eugenie," he called out. "Yes, yes, cry away! What you've done will bring you remorse, do you hear? What's the good of taking the sacrament six times every three months, if you give away your father's gold secretly to an idle fellow who'll eat your heart out when you've nothing else to give him? You'll find out some day what your Charles is worth, with his morocco boots and supercilious airs. He has got neither heart nor soul if he dared to carry off a young girl's treasure without the consent of her parents."

When the street-door was shut, Eugenie came out of her room and went to her mother.

"What courage you have had for your daughter's sake!" she said.

"Ah! my child, see where forbidden things may lead us. You forced me to tell a lie."

"I will ask God to punish only me."

"Is it true," cried Nanon, rushing in alarmed, "that mademoiselle is to be kept on bread and water for the rest of her life?"

"What does that signify, Nanon?" said Eugenie tranquilly.

"Goodness! do you suppose I'll eat _frippe_ when the daughter of the house is eating dry bread? No, no!"

"Don't say a word about all this, Nanon," said Eugenie.

"I'll be as mute as a fish; but you'll see!"

* * * * *


Grandet dined alone for the first time in twenty-four years.

"So you're a widower, monsieur," said Nanon; "it must be disagreeable to be a widower with two women in the house."

"I did not speak to you. Hold your jaw, or I'll turn you off! What is that I hear boiling in your saucepan on the stove?"

"It is grease I'm trying out."

"There will be some company to-night. Light the fire."

The Cruchots, Madame des Grassins, and her son arrived at the usual hour of eight, and were surprised to see neither Madame Grandet nor her daughter.

"My wife is not very well, and Eugenie is with her," said