Modeste Mignon, Honoré de Balzac [booksvooks txt] 📗

my brains out," exclaimed Dumay.

"Why so, Dumay?" said the blind woman.

"Ah, madame, I could never meet my colonel's eye if he did not find his daughter--now his only daughter--as pure and virtuous as she was when he said to me on the vessel, 'Let no fear of the scaffold hinder you, Dumay, if the honor of my Modeste is at stake.'"

"Ah! I recognize you both," said Madame Mignon in a voice of strong emotion.

"I'll wager my salvation that Modeste is as pure as she was in her cradle," exclaimed Madame Dumay.

"Well, I shall make certain of it," replied her husband, "if Madame la Comtesse will allow me to employ certain means; for old troopers understand strategy."

"I will allow you to do anything that shall enlighten us, provided it does no injury to my last child."

"What are you going to do, Jean?" asked Madame Dumay; "how can you discover a young girl's secret if she means to hide it?"

"Obey me, all!" cried the lieutenant, "I shall need every one of you."

If this rapid sketch were clearly developed it would give a whole picture of manners and customs in which many a family could recognize the events of their own history; but it must suffice as it is to explain the importance of the few details heretofore given about persons and things on the memorable evening when the old soldier had made ready his plot against the young girl, intending to wrench from the recesses of her heart the secret of a love and a lover seen only by a blind mother.


CHAPTER V. THE PROBLEM STILL UNSOLVED

An hour went by in solemn stillness broken only by the cabalistic phrases of the whist-players: "Spades!" "Trumped!" "Cut!" "How are honors?" "Two to four." "Whose deal?"--phrases which represent in these days the higher emotions of the European aristocracy. Modeste continued to work, without seeming to be surprised at her mother's silence. Madame Mignon's handkerchief slipped from her lap to the floor; Butscha precipitated himself upon it, picked it up, and as he returned it whispered in Modeste's ear, "Take care!" Modeste raised a pair of wondering eyes, whose puzzled glance filled the poor cripple with joy unspeakable. "She is not in love!" he whispered to himself, rubbing his hands till the skin was nearly peeled off. At this moment Exupere tore through the garden and the house, plunged into the salon like an avalanche, and said to Dumay in an audible whisper, "The young man is here!" Dumay sprang for his pistols and rushed out.

"Good God! suppose he kills him!" cried Madame Dumay, bursting into tears.

"What is the matter?" asked Modeste, looking innocently at her friends and not betraying the slightest fear.

"It is all about a young man who is hanging round the house," cried Madame Latournelle.

"Well!" said Modeste, "why should Dumay kill him?"

"Sancta simplicita!" ejaculated Butscha, looking at his master as proudly as Alexander is made to contemplate Babylon in Lebrun's great picture.

"Where are you going, Modeste?" asked the mother as her daughter rose to leave the room.

"To get ready for your bedtime, mamma," answered Modeste, in a voice as pure as the tones of an instrument.

"You haven't paid your expenses," said the dwarf to Dumay when he returned.

"Modeste is as pure as the Virgin on our altar," cried Madame Latournelle.

"Good God! such excitements wear me out," said Dumay; "and yet I'm a strong man."

"May I lose that twenty-five sous if I have the slightest idea what you are about," remarked Gobenheim. "You seem to me to be crazy."

"And yet it is all about a treasure," said Butscha, standing on tiptoe to whisper in Gobenheim's ear.

"Dumay, I am sorry to say that I am still almost certain of what I told you," persisted Madame Mignon.

"The burden of proof is now on you, madame," said Dumay, calmly; "it is for you to prove that we are mistaken."

Discovering that the matter in question was only Modeste's honor, Gobenheim took his hat, made his bow, and walked off, carrying his ten sous with him,--there being evidently no hope of another rubber.

"Exupere, and you too, Butscha, may leave us," said Madame Latournelle. "Go back to Havre; you will get there in time for the last piece at the theatre. I'll pay for your tickets."

When the four friends were alone with Madame Mignon, Madame Latournelle, after looking at Dumay, who being a Breton understood the mother's obstinacy, and at her husband who was fingering the cards, felt herself authorized to speak up.

"Madame Mignon, come now, tell us what decisive thing has struck your mind."

"Ah, my good friend, if you were a musician you would have heard, as I have, the language of love that Modeste speaks."

The piano of the demoiselles Mignon was among the few articles of furniture which had been moved from the town-house to the Chalet. Modeste often conjured away her troubles by practising, without a master. Born a musician, she played to enliven her mother. She sang by nature, and loved the German airs which her mother taught her. From these lessons and these attempts at self-instruction came a phenomenon not uncommon to natures with a musical vocation; Modeste composed, as far as a person ignorant of the laws of harmony can be said to compose, tender little lyric melodies. Melody is to music what imagery and sentiment are to poetry, a flower that blossoms spontaneously. Consequently, nations have had melodies before harmony,--botany comes later than the flower. In like manner, Modeste, who knew nothing of the painter's art except what she had seen her sister do in the way of water-color, would have stood subdued and fascinated before the pictures of Raphael, Titian, Rubens, Murillo, Rembrandt, Albert Durer, Holbein,--in other words, before the great ideals of many lands. Lately, for at least a month, Modeste had warbled the songs of nightingales, musical rhapsodies whose poetry and meaning had roused the attention of her mother, already surprised by her sudden eagerness for composition and her fancy for putting airs into certain verses.

"If your suspicions have no other foundation," said Latournelle to Madame Mignon, "I pity your susceptibilities."

"When a Breton girl sings," said Dumay gloomily, "the lover is not far off."

"I will let you hear Modeste when she is improvising," said the mother, "and you shall judge for yourselves--"

"Poor girl!" said Madame Dumay, "If she only knew our anxiety she would be deeply distressed; she would tell us the truth,--especially if she thought it would save Dumay."

"My friends, I will question my daughter to-morrow," said Madame Mignon; "perhaps I shall obtain more by tenderness than you have discovered by trickery."

Was the comedy of the "Fille mal Gardee" being played here,--as it is everywhere and forever,--under the noses of these faithful spies, these honest Bartholos, these Pyrenean hounds, without their being able to ferret out, detect, nor even surmise the lover, the love-affair, or the smoke of the fire? At any rate it was certainly not the result of a struggle between the jailers and the prisoner, between the despotism of a dungeon and the liberty of a victim,--it was simply the never-ending repetition of the first scene played by man when the curtain of the Creation rose; it was Eve in Paradise.

And now, which of the two, the mother or the watch-dog, had the right of it?

None of the persons who were about Modeste could understand that maiden heart--for the soul and the face we have described were in harmony. The girl had transported her existence into another world, as much denied and disbelieved in in these days of ours as the new world of Christopher Columbus in the sixteenth century. Happily, she kept her own counsel, or they would have thought her crazy. But first we must explain the influence of the past upon her nature.

Two events had formed the soul and developed the mind of this young girl. Monsieur and Madame Mignon, warned by the fate that overtook Bettina, had resolved, just before the failure, to marry Modeste. They chose the son of a rich banker, formerly of Hamburg, but established in Havre since 1815,--a man, moreover, who was under obligations to them. The young man, whose name was Francois Althor, the dandy of Havre, blessed with a certain vulgar beauty in which the middle classes delight, well-made, well-fleshed, and with a fine complexion, abandoned his betrothed so hastily on the day of her father's failure that neither Modeste nor her mother nor either of the Dumays had seen him since. Latournelle ventured a question on the subject to Jacob Althor, the father; but he only shrugged his shoulders and replied, "I really don't know what you mean."

This answer, told to Modeste to give her some experience of life, was a lesson which she learned all the more readily because Latournelle and Dumay made many and long comments on the cowardly desertion. The daughters of Charles Mignon, like spoiled children, had all their wishes gratified; they rode on horseback, kept their own horses and grooms, and otherwise enjoyed a perilous liberty. Seeing herself in possession of an official lover, Modeste had allowed Francisque to kiss her hand, and take her by the waist to mount her. She accepted his flowers and all the little proofs of tenderness with which it is proper to surround the lady of our choice; she even worked him a purse, believing in such ties,--strong indeed to noble souls, but cobwebs for the Gobenheims, the Vilquins, and the Althors.

Some time during the spring which followed the removal of Madame Mignon and her daughter to the Chalet, Francisque Althor came to dine with the Vilquins. Happening to see Modeste over the wall at the foot of the lawn, he turned away his head. Six weeks later he married the eldest Mademoiselle Vilquin. In this way Modeste, young, beautiful, and of high birth, learned the lesson that for three whole months of her engagement she had been nothing more than Mademoiselle Million. Her poverty, well known to all, became a sentinel defending the approaches to the Chalet fully as well as the prudence of the Latournelles or the vigilance of Dumay. The talk of the town ran for a time on Mademoiselle Mignon's position only to insult her.

"Poor girl! what will become of her?--an old maid, of course."

"What a fate! to have had the world at her feet; to have had the chance to marry Francisque Althor,--and now, nobody willing to take her!"

"After a life of luxury, to come down to such poverty--"

And these insults were not uttered in secret or left to Modeste's imagination; she heard them spoken more than once by the young men and the young women of Havre as they walked to Ingouville, and, knowing that Madame Mignon and her daughter lived at the Chalet, talked of them as they passed the house. Friends of the Vilquins expressed surprise that the mother and daughter were willing to live on among the scenes of their former splendor. From her open window behind the closed blinds Modeste sometimes heard such insolence as this:--

"I am sure I can't think how they can live there," some one would say as he paced the villa lawn,--perhaps to assist Vilquin in getting rid of his tenant.

"What do you suppose they live on? they haven't any means of earning money."

"I am told the old woman has gone blind."

"Is Mademoiselle Mignon still pretty? Dear me, how dashing she used to be! Well, she hasn't any horses