英語聽力 學(xué)英語,練聽力,上聽力課堂! 注冊 登錄
> 在線聽力 > 有聲讀物 > 世界名著 > 譯林版·歐也妮·葛朗臺 >  內(nèi)容

雙語·歐也妮·葛朗臺 內(nèi)地的愛情

所屬教程:譯林版·歐也妮·葛朗臺

瀏覽:

2022年05月15日

手機(jī)版
掃描二維碼方便學(xué)習(xí)和分享

III

In the pure and monotonous life of young girls there comes a delicious hour when the sun sheds its rays into their soul, when the flowers express their thoughts, when the throbbings of the heart send upward to the brain their fertilizing warmth and melt all thoughts into a vague desire—day of innocent melancholy and of dulcet joys! When babes begin to see, they smile; when a young girl first perceives the sentiment of nature, she smiles as she smiled when an infant. If light is the first love of life, is not love a light to the heart? The moment to see within the veil of earthly things had come for Eugenie.

An early riser, like all provincial girls, she was up betimes and said her prayers, and then began the business of dressing—a business which henceforth was to have a meaning. First she brushed and smoothed her chestnut hair and twisted its heavy masses to the top of her head with the utmost care, preventing the loose tresses from straying, and giving to her head a symmetry which heightened the timid candor of her face; for the simplicity of these accessories accorded well with the innocent sincerity of its lines. As she washed her hands again and again in the cold water which hardened and reddened the skin, she looked at her handsome round arms and asked herself what her cousin did to make his hands so softly white, his nails so delicately curved. She put on new stockings and her prettiest shoes. She laced her corset straight, without skipping a single eyelet. And then, wishing for the first time in her life to appear to advantage, she felt the joy of having a new gown, well made, which rendered her attractive.

As she finished her toilet the clock of the parish church struck the hour; to her astonishment, it was only seven. The desire of having plenty of time for dressing carefully had led her to get up too early. Ignorant of the art of retouching every curl and studying every effect, Eugenie simply crossed her arms, sat down by the window, and looked at the court-yard, the narrow garden, and the high terraced walls that over-topped it: a dismal, hedged-in prospect, yet not wholly devoid of those mysterious beauties which belong to solitary or uncultivated nature.

Near the kitchen was a well surrounded by a curb, with a pulley fastened to a bent iron rod clasped by a vine whose leaves were withered, reddened, and shrivelled by the season. From thence the tortuous shoots straggled to the wall, clutched it, and ran the whole length of the house, ending near the wood-pile, where the logs were ranged with as much precision as the books in a library. The pavement of the court-yard showed the black stains produced in time by lichens, herbage, and the absence of all movement or friction. The thick walls wore a coating of green moss streaked with waving brown lines, and the eight stone steps at the bottom of the court-yard which led up to the gate of the garden were disjointed and hidden beneath tall plants, like the tomb of a knight buried by his widow in the days of the Crusades. Above a foundation of moss-grown, crumbling stones was a trellis of rotten wood, half fallen from decay;over them clambered and intertwined at will a mass of clustering creepers. On each side of the latticed gate stretched the crooked arms of two stunted apple-trees. Three parallel walks, gravelled and separated from each other by square beds, where the earth was held in by box-borders, made the garden, which terminated, beneath a terrace of the old walls, in a group of lindens. At the farther end were raspberry-bushes; at the other, near the house, an immense walnut-tree drooped its branches almost into the window of the miser’s sanctum. A clear day and the beautiful autumnal sun common to the banks of the Loire was beginning to melt the hoar-frost which the night had laid on these picturesque objects, on the walls, and on the plants which swathed the court-yard.

Eugenie found a novel charm in the aspect of things lately so insignificant to her. A thousand confused thoughts came to birth in her mind and grew there, as the sunbeams grew without along the wall. She felt that impulse of delight, vague, inexplicable, which wraps the moral being as a cloud wraps the physical body. Her thoughts were all in keeping with the details of this strange landscape, and the harmonies of her heart blended with the harmonies of nature.

When the sun reached an angle of the wall where the “Venus-hair” of southern climes drooped its thick leaves, lit with the changing colors of a pigeon’s breast, celestial rays of hope illumined the future to her eyes, and thenceforth she loved to gaze upon that piece of wall, on its pale flowers, its blue harebells, its wilting herbage, with which she mingled memories as tender as those of childhood. The noise made by each leaf as it fell from its twig in the void of that echoing court gave answer to the secret questionings of the young girl, who could have stayed there the livelong day without perceiving the flight of time.

Then came tumultuous heavings of the soul. She rose often, went to her glass, and looked at herself, as an author in good faith looks at his work to criticise it and blame it in his own mind.

“I am not beautiful enough for him!”

Such was Eugenie’s thought—a humble thought, fertile in suffering. The poor girl did not do herself justice; but modesty, or rather fear, is among the first of love’s virtues. Eugenie belonged to the type of children with sturdy constitutions, such as we see among the lesser bourgeoisie, whose beauties always seem a little vulgar;and yet, though she resembled the Venus of Milo, the lines of her figure were ennobled by the softer Christian sentiment which purifies womanhood and gives it a distinction unknown to the sculptors of antiquity. She had an enormous head, with the masculine yet delicate forehead of the Jupiter of Phidias, and gray eyes, to which her chaste life, penetrating fully into them, carried a flood of light. The features of her round face, formerly fresh and rosy, were at one time swollen by the small-pox, which destroyed the velvet texture of the skin, though it kindly left no other traces, and her cheek was still so soft and delicate that her mother’s kiss made a momentary red mark upon it. Her nose was somewhat too thick, but it harmonized well with the vermilion mouth, whose lips, creased in many lines, were full of love and kindness. The throat was exquisitely round. The bust, well curved and carefully covered, attracted the eye and inspired reverie. It lacked, no doubt, the grace which a fitting dress can bestow; but to a connoisseur the non-flexibility of her figure had its own charm. Eugenie, tall and strongly made, had none of the prettiness which pleases the masses; but she was beautiful with a beauty which the spirit recognizes, and none but artists truly love. A painter seeking here below for a type of Mary’s celestial purity, searching womankind for those proud modest eyes which Raphael divined, for those virgin lines, often due to chances of conception, which the modesty of Christian life alone can bestow or keep unchanged—such a painter, in love with his ideal, would have found in the face of Eugenie the innate nobleness that is ignorant of itself; he would have seen beneath the calmness of that brow a world of love; he would have felt, in the shape of the eyes, in the fall of the eyelids, the presence of the nameless something that we call divine. Her features, the contour of her head, which no expression of pleasure had ever altered or wearied, were like the lines of the horizon softly traced in the far distance across the tranquil lakes. That calm and rosy countenance, margined with light like a lovely full-blown flower, rested the mind, held the eye, and imparted the charm of the conscience that was there reflected.

Eugenie was standing on the shore of life where young illusions flower, where daisies are gathered with delights ere long to be unknown; and thus she said, looking at her image in the glass, unconscious as yet of love: “I am too ugly; he will not notice me.”

Then she opened the door of her chamber which led to the staircase, and stretched out her neck to listen for the household noises. “He is not up,” she thought, hearing Nanon’s morning cough as the good soul went and came, sweeping out the halls, lighting her fire, chaining the dog, and speaking to the beasts in the stable.

Eugenie at once went down and ran to Nanon, who was milking the cow.

“Nanon, my good Nanon, make a little cream for my cousin’s breakfast.”

“Why, mademoiselle, you should have thought of that yesterday,” said Nanon, bursting into a loud peal of laughter. “I can’t make cream. Your cousin is a darling, a darling! oh, that he is! You should have seen him in his dressing-gown, all silk and gold! I saw him, I did! He wears linen as fine as the surplice of monsieur le cure.”

“Nanon, please make us a galette.”

“And who’ll give me wood for the oven, and flour and butter for the cakes?” said Nanon, who in her function of prime-minister to Grandet assumed at times enormous importance in the eyes of Eugenie and her mother. “Mustn’t rob the master to feast the cousin. You ask him for butter and flour and wood: he’s your father, perhaps he’ll give you some. See! there he is now, coming to give out the provisions.”

Eugenie escaped into the garden, quite frightened as she heard the staircase shaking under her father’s step. Already she felt the effects of that virgin modesty and that special consciousness of happiness which lead us to fancy, not perhaps without reason, that our thoughts are graven on our foreheads and are open to the eyes of all. Perceiving for the first time the cold nakedness of her father’s house, the poor girl felt a sort of rage that she could not put it in harmony with her cousin’s elegance. She felt the need of doing something for him—what, she did not know. Ingenuous and truthful, she followed her angelic nature without mistrusting her impressions or her feelings. The mere sight of her cousin had wakened within her the natural yearnings of a woman—yearnings that were the more likely to develop ardently because, having reached her twenty-third year, she was in the plenitude of her intelligence and her desires. For the first time in her life her heart was full of terror at the sight of her father; in him she saw the master of the fate, and she fancied herself guilty of wrong-doing in hiding from his knowledge certain thoughts. She walked with hasty steps, surprised to breathe a purer air, to feel the sun’s rays quickening her pulses, to absorb from their heat a moral warmth and a new life.

As she turned over in her mind some stratagem by which to get the cake, a quarrel—an event as rare as the sight of swallows in winter—broke out between la Grande Nanon and Grandet. Armed with his keys, the master had come to dole out provisions for the day’s consumption.

“Is there any bread left from yesterday?” he said to Nanon.

“Not a crumb, monsieur.”

Grandet took a large round loaf, well floured and moulded in one of the flat baskets which they use for baking in Anjou, and was about to cut it, when Nanon said to him—

“We are five, to-day, monsieur.”

“That’s true,” said Grandet, “but your loaves weigh six pounds;there’ll be some left. Besides, these young fellows from Paris don’t eat bread, you’ll see.”

“Then they must eat frippe?” said Nanon.

Frippe is a word of the local lexicon of Anjou, and means any accompaniment of bread, from butter which is spread upon it, the commonest kind of frippe, to peach preserve, the most distinguished of all the frippes; those who in their childhood have licked the frippe and left the bread, will comprehend the meaning of Nanon’s speech.

“No,” answered Grandet, “they eat neither bread nor frippe;they are something like marriageable girls.”

After ordering the meals for the day with his usual parsimony, the goodman, having locked the closets containing the supplies, was about to go towards the fruit-garden, when Nanon stopped him to say—

“Monsieur, give me a little flour and some butter, and I’ll make a galette for the young ones.”

“Are you going to pillage the house on account of my nephew?”

“I wasn’t thinking any more of your nephew than I was of your dog—not more than you think yourself; for, look here, you’ve only forked out six bits of sugar. I want eight.”

“What’s all this, Nanon? I have never seen you like this before. What have you got in your head? Are you the mistress here? You sha’n’t have more than six pieces of sugar.”

“Well, then, how is your nephew to sweeten his coffee?”

“With two pieces; I’ll go without myself.”

“Go without sugar at your age! I’d rather buy you some out of my own pocket.”

“Mind your own business.”

In spite of the recent fall in prices, sugar was still in Grandet’s eyes the most valuable of all the colonial products; to him it was always six francs a pound. The necessity of economizing it, acquired under the Empire, had grown to be the most inveterate of his habits.

All women, even the greatest ninnies, know how to dodge and dodge to get their ends; Nanon abandoned the sugar for the sake of getting the galette.

“Mademoiselle!” she called through the window, “Do you want some galette?”

“No, no,” answered Eugenie.

“Come, Nanon,” said Grandet, hearing his daughter’s voice.“See here.”

He opened the cupboard where the flour was kept, gave her a cupful, and added a few ounces of butter to the piece he had already cut off.

“I shall want wood for the oven,” said the implacable Nanon.

“Well, take what you want,” he answered sadly; “but in that case you must make us a fruit-tart, and you’ll cook the whole dinner in the oven. In that way you won’t need two fires.”

“Goodness!” cried Nanon, “You needn’t tell me that.”

Grandet cast a look that was well-nigh paternal upon his faithful deputy.

“Mademoiselle,” she cried, when his back was turned, “we shall have the galette.”

Pere Grandet returned from the garden with the fruit and arranged a plateful on the kitchen-table.

“Just see, monsieur,” said Nanon, “what pretty boots your nephew has. What leather! Why it smells good! What does he clean it with, I wonder? Am I to put your egg-polish on it?”

“Nanon, I think eggs would injure that kind of leather. Tell him you don’t know how to black morocco; yes, that’s morocco. He will get you something himself in Saumur to polish those boots with. I have heard that they put sugar into the blacking to make it shine.”

“They look good to eat,” said the cook, putting the boots to her nose. “Bless me! if they don’t smell like madame’s eau-de-cologne. Ah! how funny!”

“Funny!” said her master. “Do you call it funny to put more money into boots than the man who stands in them is worth?”

“Monsieur,” she said, when Grandet returned the second time, after locking the fruit-garden, “won’t you have the pot-au-feu put on once or twice a week on account of your nephew?”

“Yes.”

“Am I to go to the butcher’s?”

“Certainly not. We will make the broth of fowls; the farmers will bring them. I shall tell Cornoiller to shoot some crows; they make the best soup in the world.”

“Isn’t it true, monsieur, that crows eat the dead?”

“You are a fool, Nanon. They eat what they can get, like the rest of the world. Don’t we all live on the dead? What are legacies?”

Monsieur Grandet, having no further orders to give, drew out his watch, and seeing that he had half an hour to dispose of before breakfast, he took his hat, went and kissed his daughter, and said to her:

“Do you want to come for a walk in the fields, down by the Loire? I have something to do there.”

Eugenie fetched her straw bonnet, lined with pink taffeta; then the father and daughter went down the winding street to the shore.

“Where are you going at this early hour?” said Cruchot, the notary, meeting them.

“To see something,” answered Grandet, not duped by the matutinal appearance of his friend.

When Pere Grandet went to “see something,” the notary knew by experience there was something to be got by going with him; so he went.

“Come, Cruchot,” said Grandet, “you are one of my friends. I’ll show you what folly it is to plant poplar-trees on good ground.”

“Do you call the sixty thousand francs that you pocketed for those that were in your fields down by the Loire, folly?” said Maitre Cruchot, opening his eyes with amazement. “What luck you have had! To cut down your trees at the very time they ran short of white-wood at Nantes, and to sell them at thirty francs!”

Eugenie listened, without knowing that she approached the most solemn moment of her whole life, and that the notary was about to bring down upon her head a paternal and supreme sentence.

Grandet had now reached the magnificent fields which he owned on the banks of the Loire, where thirty workmen were employed in clearing away, filling up, and levelling the spots formerly occupied by the poplars.

“Maitre Cruchot, see how much ground this tree once took up! Jean,” he cried to a laborer, “m-m-measure with your r-r-rule, b-both ways.”

“Four times eight feet,” said the man.

“Thirty-two feet lost,” said Grandet to Cruchot. “I had three hundred poplars in this one line, isn’t that so? Well, then, three h-h-hundred times thir-thirty-two lost m-m-me five hundred in h-h-hay;add twice as much for the side rows—fifteen hundred; the middle rows as much more. So we may c-c-call it a th-thousand b-b-bales of h-h-hay—”

“Very good,” said Cruchot, to help out his friend; “a thousand bales are worth about six hundred francs.”

“Say t-t-twelve hundred, be-c-cause there’s three or four hundred francs on the second crop. Well, then, c-c-calculate that t-twelve thousand francs a year for f-f-forty years with interest c-c-comes to—”

“Say sixty thousand francs,” said the notary.

“I am willing; c-c-comes t-t-to sixty th-th-thousand. Very good,” continued Grandet, without stuttering: “two thousand poplars forty years old will only yield me fifty thousand francs. There’s a loss. I have found that myself,” said Grandet, getting on his high horse. “Jean, fill up all the holes except those at the bank of the river;there you are to plant the poplars I have bought. Plant ‘em there, and they’ll get nourishment from the government,” he said, turning to Cruchot, and giving a slight motion to the wen on his nose, which expressed more than the most ironical of smiles.

“True enough; poplars should only be planted on poor soil,”said Cruchot, amazed at Grandet’s calculations.

“Y-y-yes, monsieur,” answered the old man satirically.

Eugenie, who was gazing at the sublime scenery of the Loire, and paying no attention to her father’s reckonings, presently turned an ear to the remarks of Cruchot when she heard him say—

“So you have brought a son-in-law from Paris. All Saumur is talking about your nephew. I shall soon have the marriage-contract to draw up, hey! Pere Grandet?”

“You g-g-got up very early to t-t-tell me that,” said Grandet, accompanying the remark with a motion of his wen. “Well, old c-c-comrade, I’ll be frank, and t-t-tell you what you want t-t-to know. I would rather, do you see, f-f-fling my daughter into the Loire than g-g-give her to her c-c-cousin. You may t-t-tell that everywhere—no, never mind; let the world t-t-talk.”

This answer dazzled and blinded the young girl with sudden light. The distant hopes upspringing in her heart bloomed suddenly, became real, tangible, like a cluster of flowers, and she saw them cut down and wilting on the earth. Since the previous evening she had attached herself to Charles by those links of happiness which bind soul to soul; from henceforth suffering was to rivet them. Is it not the noble destiny of women to be more moved by the dark solemnities of grief than by the splendors of fortune? How was it that fatherly feeling had died out of her father’s heart? Of what crime had Charles been guilty? Mysterious questions! Already her dawning love, a mystery so profound, was wrapping itself in mystery. She walked back trembling in all her limbs; and when she reached the gloomy street, lately so joyous to her, she felt its sadness, she breathed the melancholy which time and events had printed there. None of love’s lessons lacked.

A few steps from their own door she went on before her father and waited at the threshold. But Grandet, who saw a newspaper in the notary’s hand, stopped short and asked—

“How are the Funds?”

“You never listen to my advice, Grandet,” answered Cruchot.“Buy soon; you will still make twenty per cent in two years, besides getting an excellent rate of interest—five thousand a year for eighty thousand francs fifty centimes.”

“We’ll see about that,” answered Grandet, rubbing his chin.

“Good God!” exclaimed the notary.

“Well, what?” cried Grandet; and at the same moment Cruchot put the newspaper under his eyes and said: “Read that!”

“Monsieur Grandet, one of the most respected merchants in Paris, blew his brains out yesterday, after making his usual appearance at the Bourse. He had sent his resignation to the president of the Chamber of Deputies, and had also resigned his functions as a judge of the commercial courts. The failures of Monsieur Roguin and Monsieur Souchet, his broker and his notary, had ruined him.The esteem felt for Monsieur Grandet and the credit he enjoyed were nevertheless such that he might have obtained the necessary assistance from other business houses. It is much to be regretted that so honorable a man should have yielded to momentary despair,” etc.

“I knew it,” said the old wine-grower to the notary.

The words sent a chill of horror through Maitre Cruchot, who, notwithstanding his impassibility as a notary, felt the cold running down his spine as he thought that Grandet of Paris had possibly implored in vain the millions of Grandet of Saumur.

“And his son, so joyous yesterday—”

“He knows nothing as yet,” answered Grandet, with the same composure.

“Adieu! Monsieur Grandet,” said Cruchot, who now understood the state of the case, and went off to reassure Monsieur de Bonfons.

On entering, Grandet found breakfast ready. Madame Grandet, round whose neck Eugenie had flung her arms, kissing her with the quick effusion of feeling often caused by secret grief, was already seated in her chair on castors, knitting sleeves for the coming winter.

“You can begin to eat,” said Nanon, coming downstairs four steps at a time; “the young one is sleeping like a cherub. Isn’t he a darling with his eyes shut? I went in and I called him: no answer.”

“Let him sleep,” said Grandet; “he’ll wake soon enough to hear ill-tidings.”

“What is it?” asked Eugenie, putting into her coffee the two little bits of sugar weighing less than half an ounce which the old miser amused himself by cutting up in his leisure hours. Madame Grandet, who did not dare to put the question, gazed at her husband.

“His father has blown his brains out.”

“My uncle?” said Eugenie.

“Poor young man!” exclaimed Madame Grandet.

“Poor indeed!” said Grandet; “he isn’t worth a sou!”

“Eh! poor boy, and he’s sleeping like the king of the world!”said Nanon in a gentle voice.

Eugenie stopped eating. Her heart was wrung, as the young heart is wrung when pity for the suffering of one she loves overflows, for the first time, the whole being of a woman. The poor girl wept.

“What are you crying about? You didn’t know your uncle,” said her father, giving her one of those hungry tigerish looks he doubtless threw upon his piles of gold.

“But, monsieur,” said Nanon, “who wouldn’t feel pity for the poor young man, sleeping there like a wooden shoe, without knowing what’s coming?”

“I didn’t speak to you, Nanon. Hold your tongue!”

Eugenie learned at that moment that the woman who loves must be able to hide her feelings. She did not answer.

“You will say nothing to him about it, Ma’ame Grandet, till I return,” said the old man. “I have to go and straighten the line of my hedge along the high-road. I shall be back at noon, in time for the second breakfast, and then I will talk with my nephew about his affairs. As for you, Mademoiselle Eugenie, if it is for that dandy you are crying, that’s enough, child. He’s going off like a shot to the Indies. You will never see him again.”

The father took his gloves from the brim of his hat, put them on with his usual composure, pushed them in place by shoving the fingers of both hands together, and went out.

“Mamma, I am suffocating!” cried Eugenie when she was alone with her mother; “I have never suffered like this.”

Madame Grandet, seeing that she turned pale, opened the window and let her breathe fresh air.

“I feel better!” said Eugenie after a moment.

This nervous excitement in a nature hitherto, to all appearance, calm and cold, reacted on Madame Grandet; she looked at her daughter with the sympathetic intuition with which mothers are gifted for the objects of their tenderness, and guessed all. In truth the life of the Hungarian sisters, bound together by a freak of nature, could scarcely have been more intimate than that of Eugenie and her mother—always together in the embrasure of that window, and sleeping together in the same atmosphere.

“My poor child!” said Madame Grandet, taking Eugenie’s head and laying it upon her bosom.

At these words the young girl raised her head, questioned her mother by a look, and seemed to search out her inmost thought.

“Why send him to the Indies?” she said. “If he is unhappy, ought he not to stay with us? Is he not our nearest relation?”

“Yes, my child, it seems natural; but your father has his reasons:we must respect them.”

The mother and daughter sat down in silence, the former upon her raised seat, the latter in her little armchair, and both took up their work. Swelling with gratitude for the full heart-understanding her mother had given her, Eugenie kissed the dear hand, saying—

“How good you are, my kind mamma!”

The words sent a glow of light into the motherly face, worn and blighted as it was by many sorrows.

“You like him?” asked Eugenie.

Madame Grandet only smiled in reply. Then, after a moment’s silence, she said in a low voice: “Do you love him already? That is wrong.”

“Wrong?” said Eugenie. “Why is it wrong? You are pleased with him, Nanon is pleased with him; why should he not please me? Come, mamma, let us set the table for his breakfast.”

She threw down her work, and her mother did the same, saying,“Foolish child!”

But she sanctioned the child’s folly by sharing it.

Eugenie called Nanon.

“What do you want now, mademoiselle?”

“Nanon, can we have cream by midday?”

“Ah! midday, to be sure you can,” answered the old servant.

“Well, let him have his coffee very strong; I heard Monsieur des Grassins say that they make the coffee very strong in Paris. Put in a great deal.”

“Where am I to get it?”

“Buy some.”

“Suppose monsieur meets me?”

“He has gone to his fields.”

“I’ll run, then. But Monsieur Fessard asked me yesterday if the Magi had come to stay with us when I bought the wax candle. All the town will know our goings-on.”

“If your father finds it out,” said Madame Grandet, “he is capable of beating us.”

“Well, let him beat us; we will take his blows on our knees.”

Madame Grandet for all answer raised her eyes to heaven. Nanon put on her hood and went off. Eugenie got out some clean table-linen, and went to fetch a few bunches of grapes which she had amused herself by hanging on a string across the attic; she walked softly along the corridor, so as not to waken her cousin, and she could not help listening at the door to his quiet breathing.

“Sorrow is watching while he sleeps,” she thought.

She took the freshest vine-leaves and arranged her dish of grapes as coquettishly as a practised house-keeper might have done, and placed it triumphantly on the table. She laid hands on the pears counted out by her father, and piled them in a pyramid mixed with leaves. She went and came, and skipped and ran. She would have liked to lay under contribution everything in her father’s house; but the keys were in his pocket. Nanon came back with two fresh eggs. At sight of them Eugenie almost hugged her round the neck.

“The farmer from Lande had them in his basket. I asked him for them, and he gave them to me, the darling, for nothing, as an attention!”

After two hours’ thought and care, during which Eugenie jumped up twenty times from her work to see if the coffee were boiling, or to go and listen to the noise her cousin made in dressing, she succeeded in preparing a simple little breakfast, very inexpensive, but which, nevertheless, departed alarmingly from the inveterate customs of the house. The midday breakfast was always taken standing. Each took a slice of bread, a little fruit or some butter, and a glass of wine. As Eugenie looked at the table drawn up near the fire with an arm-chair placed before her cousin’s plate, at the two dishes of fruit, the egg-cup, the bottle of white wine, the bread, and the sugar heaped up in a saucer, she trembled in all her limbs at the mere thought of the look her father would give her if he should come in at that moment. She glanced often at the clock to see if her cousin could breakfast before the master’s return.

“Don’t be troubled, Eugenie; if your father comes in, I will take it all upon myself,” said Madame Grandet. Eugenie could not repress a tear.

“Oh, my good mother!” she cried, “I have never loved you enough.”

Charles, who had been tramping about his room for some time, singing to himself, now came down. Happily, it was only eleven o’clock. The true Parisian! he had put as much dandyism into his dress as if he were in the chateau of the noble lady then travelling in Scotland. He came into the room with the smiling, courteous manner so becoming to youth, which made Eugenie’s heart beat with mournful joy. He had taken the destruction of his castles in Anjou as a joke, and came up to his aunt gaily.

“Have you slept well, dear aunt? and you, too, my cousin?”

“Very well, monsieur; did you?” said Madame Grandet.

“I? Perfectly.”

“You must be hungry, cousin,” said Eugenie; “will you take your seat?”

“I never breakfast before midday; I never get up till then. However, I fared so badly on the journey that I am glad to eat something at once. Besides—” here he pulled out the prettiest watch Breguet ever made.

“Dear me! I am early, it is only eleven o’clock!”

“Early?” said Madame Grandet.

“Yes; but I wanted to put my things in order. Well, I shall be glad to have anything to eat—anything, it doesn’t matter what, a chicken, a partridge.”

“Holy Virgin!” exclaimed Nanon, overhearing the words.

“A partridge!” whispered Eugenie to herself; she would gladly have given the whole of her little hoard for a partridge.

“Come and sit down,” said his aunt.

The young dandy let himself drop into an easy-chair, just as a pretty woman falls gracefully upon a sofa. Eugenie and her mother took ordinary chairs and sat beside him, near the fire.

“Do you always live here?” said Charles, thinking the room uglier by daylight than it had seemed the night before.

“Always,” answered Eugenie, looking at him, “except during the vintage. Then we go and help Nanon, and live at the Abbaye des Noyers.”

“Don’t you ever take walks?”

“Sometimes on Sunday after vespers, when the weather is fine,”said Madame Grandet, “we walk on the bridge, or we go and watch the haymakers.”

“Have you a theatre?”

“Go to the theatre!” exclaimed Madame Grandet, “See a play!Why, monsieur, don’t you know it is a mortal sin?”

“See here, monsieur,” said Nanon, bringing in the eggs, “here are your chickens—in the shell.”

“Oh! fresh eggs,” said Charles, who, like all people accustomed to luxury, had already forgotten about his partridge, “that is delicious: now, if you will give me the butter, my good girl.”

“Butter! then you can’t have the galette.”

“Nanon, bring the butter,” cried Eugenie.

The young girl watched her cousin as he cut his sippets, with as much pleasure as a grisette takes in a melodrama where innocence and virtue triumph. Charles, brought up by a charming mother, improved, and trained by a woman of fashion, had the elegant, dainty, foppish movements of a coxcomb. The compassionate sympathy and tenderness of a young girl possess a power that is actually magnetic; so that Charles, finding himself the object of the attentions of his aunt and cousin, could not escape the influence of feelings which flowed towards him, as it were, and inundated him. He gave Eugenie a bright, caressing look full of kindness—a look which seemed itself a smile. He perceived, as his eyes lingered upon her, the exquisite harmony of features in the pure face, the grace of her innocent attitude, the magic clearness of the eyes, where young love sparkled and desire shone unconsciously.

“Ah! my dear cousin, if you were in full dress at the Opera, I assure you my aunt’s words would come true—you would make the men commit the mortal sin of envy, and the women the sin of jealousy.”

The compliment went to Eugenie’s heart and set it beating, though she did not understand its meaning.

“Oh! cousin,” she said, “you are laughing at a poor little country girl.”

“If you knew me, my cousin, you would know that I abhor ridicule; it withers the heart and jars upon all my feelings.”

Here he swallowed his buttered sippet very gracefully.

“No, I really have not enough mind to make fun of others; and doubtless it is a great defect. In Paris, when they want to disparage a man, they say: ‘He has a good heart.’ The phrase means: ‘The poor fellow is as stupid as a rhinoceros.’ But as I am rich, and known to hit the bull’s-eye at thirty paces with any kind of pistol, and even in the open fields, ridicule respects me.”

“My dear nephew, that bespeaks a good heart.”

“You have a very pretty ring,” said Eugenie; “is there any harm in asking to see it?”

Charles held out his hand after loosening the ring, and Eugenie blushed as she touched the pink nails of her cousin with the tips of her fingers.

“See, mamma, what beautiful workmanship.”

“My! there’s a lot of gold!” said Nanon, bringing in the coffee.

“What is that?” exclaimed Charles, laughing, as he pointed to an oblong pot of brown earthenware, glazed on the inside, and edged with a fringe of ashes, from the bottom of which the coffee-grounds were bubbling up and falling in the boiling liquid.

“It is boiled coffee,” said Nanon.

“Ah! my dear aunt, I shall at least leave one beneficent trace of my visit here. You are indeed behind the age! I must teach you to make good coffee in a Chaptal coffee-pot.”

He tried to explain the process of a Chaptal coffee-pot.

“Gracious! if there are so many things as all that to do,” said Nanon, “we may as well give up our lives to it. I shall never make coffee that way; I know that! Pray, who is to get the fodder for the cow while I make the coffee?”

“I will make it,” said Eugenie.

“Child!” said Madame Grandet, looking at her daughter.

The word recalled to their minds the sorrow that was about to fall upon the unfortunate young man; the three women were silent, and looked at him with an air of commiseration that caught his attention.

“Is anything the matter, my cousin?” he said.

“Hush!” said Madame Grandet to Eugenie, who was about to answer; “you know, my daughter, that your father charged us not to speak to monsieur—”

“Say Charles,” said young Grandet.

“Ah! you are called Charles? What a beautiful name!” cried Eugenie.

Presentiments of evil are almost always justified. At this moment Nanon, Madame Grandet, and Eugenie, who had all three been thinking with a shudder of the old man’s return, heard the knock whose echoes they knew but too well.

“There’s papa!” said Eugenie.

She removed the saucer filled with sugar, leaving a few pieces on the table-cloth; Nanon carried off the egg-cup; Madame Grandet sat up like a frightened hare. It was evidently a panic, which amazed Charles, who was wholly unable to understand it.

“Why! what is the matter?” he asked.

“My father has come,” answered Eugenie.

“Well, what of that?”

Monsieur Grandet entered the room, threw his keen eye upon the table, upon Charles, and saw the whole thing.

“Ha! ha! so you have been making a feast for your nephew;very good, very good, very good indeed!” he said, without stuttering.“When the cat’s away, the mice will play.”

“Feast!” thought Charles, incapable of suspecting or imagining the rules and customs of the household.

“Give me my glass, Nanon,” said the master

Eugenie brought the glass. Grandet drew a horn-handled knife with a big blade from his breeches’ pocket, cut a slice of bread, took a small bit of butter, spread it carefully on the bread, and ate it standing. At this moment Charlie was sweetening his coffee. Pere Grandet saw the bits of sugar, looked at his wife, who turned pale, and made three steps forward; he leaned down to the poor woman’s ear and said—

“Where did you get all that sugar?”

“Nanon fetched it from Fessard’s; there was none.”

It is impossible to picture the profound interest the three women took in this mute scene. Nanon had left her kitchen and stood looking into the room to see what would happen. Charles, having tasted his coffee, found it bitter and glanced about for the sugar, which Grandet had already put away.

“What do you want?” said his uncle.

“The sugar.”

“Put in more milk,” answered the master of the house; “your coffee will taste sweeter.”

Eugenie took the saucer which Grandet had put away and placed it on the table, looking calmly at her father as she did so. Most assuredly, the Parisian woman who held a silken ladder with her feeble arms to facilitate the flight of her lover, showed no greater courage than Eugenie displayed when she replaced the sugar upon the table. The lover rewarded his mistress when she proudly showed him her beautiful bruised arm, and bathed every swollen vein with tears and kisses till it was cured with happiness. Charles, on the other hand, never so much as knew the secret of the cruel agitation that shook and bruised the heart of his cousin, crushed as it was by the look of the old miser.

“You are not eating your breakfast, wife.”

The poor helot came forward with a piteous look, cut herself a piece of bread, and took a pear. Eugenie boldly offered her father some grapes, saying—

“Taste my preserves, papa. My cousin, you will eat some, will you not? I went to get these pretty grapes expressly for you.”

“If no one stops them, they will pillage Saumur for you, nephew. When you have finished, we will go into the garden; I have something to tell you which can’t be sweetened.”

Eugenie and her mother cast a look on Charles whose meaning the young man could not mistake.

“What is it you mean, uncle? Since the death of my poor mother”—at these words his voice softened—”no other sorrow can touch me.”

“My nephew, who knows by what afflictions God is pleased to try us?” said his aunt.

“Ta, ta, ta, ta,” said Grandet, “there’s your nonsense beginning. I am sorry to see those white hands of yours, nephew”;

and he showed the shoulder-of-mutton fists which Nature had put at the end of his own arms.

“There’s a pair of hands made to pick up silver pieces. You’ve been brought up to put your feet in the kid out of which we make the purses we keep our money in. A bad look-out! Very bad!”

“What do you mean, uncle? I’ll be hanged if I understand a single word of what you are saying.”

“Come!” said Grandet.

The miser closed the blade of his knife with a snap, drank the last of his wine, and opened the door.

“My cousin, take courage!”

The tone of the young girl struck terror to Charles’s heart, and he followed his terrible uncle, a prey to disquieting thoughts. Eugenie, her mother, and Nanon went into the kitchen, moved by irresistible curiosity to watch the two actors in the scene which was about to take place in the garden, where at first the uncle walked silently ahead of the nephew.

Grandet was not at all troubled at having to tell Charles of the death of his father; but he did feel a sort of compassion in knowing him to be without a penny, and he sought for some phrase or formula by which to soften the communication of that cruel truth. “You have lost your father,” seemed to him a mere nothing to say; fathers die before their children. But “you are absolutely without means,” —all the misfortunes of life were summed up in those words! Grandet walked round the garden three times, the gravel crunching under his heavy step. In the crucial moments of life our minds fasten upon the locality where joys or sorrows overwhelm us. Charles noticed with minute attention the box-borders of the little garden, the yellow leaves as they fluttered down, the dilapidated walls, the gnarled fruit-trees—picturesque details which were destined to remain forever in his memory, blending eternally, by the mnemonics that belong exclusively to the passions, with the recollections of this solemn hour.

“It is very fine weather, very warm,” said Grandet, drawing a long breath.

“Yes, uncle; but why—”

“Well, my lad,” answered his uncle, “I have some bad news to give you. Your father is ill—”

“Then why am I here?” said Charles. “Nanon,” he cried, “order post-horses! I can get a carriage somewhere?” he added, turning to his uncle, who stood motionless.

“Horses and carriages are useless,” answered Grandet, looking at Charles, who remained silent, his eyes growing fixed. “Yes, my poor boy, you guess the truth—he is dead. But that’s nothing; there is something worse: he blew out his brains.”

“My father!”

“Yes, but that’s not the worst; the newspapers are all talking about it. Here, read that.”

Grandet, who had borrowed the fatal article from Cruchot, thrust the paper under his nephew’s eyes. The poor young man, still a child, still at an age when feelings wear no mask, burst into tears.

“That’s good!” thought Grandet; “His eyes frightened me. He’ll be all right if he weeps—That is not the worst, my poor nephew,” he said aloud, not noticing whether Charles heard him, “that is nothing;you will get over it: but—”

“Never, never! My father! Oh, my father!”

“He has ruined you, you haven’t a penny.”

“What does that matter? My father! Where is my father?”

His sobs resounded horribly against those dreary walls and reverberated in the echoes. The three women, filled with pity, wept also; for tears are often as contagious as laughter. Charles, without listening further to his uncle, ran through the court and up the staircase to his chamber, where he threw himself across the bed and hid his face in the sheets, to weep in peace for his lost parents.

“The first burst must have its way,” said Grandet, entering the living-room, where Eugenie and her mother had hastily resumed their seats and were sewing with trembling hands, after wiping their eyes. “But that young man is good for nothing; his head is more taken up with the dead than with his money.”

Eugenie shuddered as she heard her father’s comment on the most sacred of all griefs. From that moment she began to judge him. Charles’s sobs, though muffled, still sounded through the sepulchral house; and his deep groans, which seemed to come from the earth beneath, only ceased towards evening, after growing gradually feebler.

“Poor young man!” said Madame Grandet.

Fatal exclamation! Pere Grandet looked at his wife, at Eugenie, and at the sugar-bowl. He recollected the extraordinary breakfast prepared for the unfortunate youth, and he took a position in the middle of the room.

“Listen to me,” he said, with his usual composure. “I hope that you will not continue this extravagance, Madame Grandet. I don’t give you MY money to stuff that young fellow with sugar.”

“My mother had nothing to do with it,” said Eugenie; “it was I who—”

“Is it because you are of age,” said Grandet, interrupting his daughter, “that you choose to contradict me? Remember, Eugenie—”

“Father, the son of your brother ought to receive from us—”

“Ta, ta, ta, ta!” exclaimed the cooper on four chromatic tones;“the son of my brother this, my nephew that! Charles is nothing at all to us; he hasn’t a farthing, his father has failed; and when this dandy has cried his fill, off he goes from here. I won’t have him revolutionize my household.”

“What is ‘failing,’ father?” asked Eugenie.

“To fail,” answered her father, “is to commit the most dishonorable action that can disgrace a man.”

“It must be a great sin,” said Madame Grandet, “and our brother may be damned.”

“There, there, don’t begin with your litanies!” said Grandet, shrugging his shoulders. “To fail, Eugenie,” he resumed, “is to commit a theft which the law, unfortunately, takes under its protection. People have given their property to Guillaume Grandet trusting to his reputation for honor and integrity; he has made away with it all, and left them nothing but their eyes to weep with. A highway robber is better than a bankrupt: the one attacks you and you can defend yourself, he risks his own life; but the other—in short, Charles is dishonored.”

The words rang in the poor girl’s heart and weighed it down with their heavy meaning. Upright and delicate as a flower born in the depths of a forest, she knew nothing of the world’s maxims, of its deceitful arguments and specious sophisms; she therefore believed the atrocious explanation which her father gave her designedly, concealing the distinction which exists between an involuntary failure and an intentional one.

“Father, could you not have prevented such a misfortune?”

“My brother did not consult me. Besides, he owes four millions.”

“What is a ‘million,’ father?” she asked, with the simplicity of a child which thinks it can find out at once all that it wants to know.

“A million?” said Grandet, “why, it is a million pieces of twenty sous each, and it takes five twenty sous pieces to make five francs.”

“Dear me!” cried Eugenie, “how could my uncle possibly have had four millions? Is there any one else in France who ever had so many millions?”

Pere Grandet stroked his chin, smiled, and his wen seemed to dilate.

“But what will become of my cousin Charles?”

“He is going off to the West Indies by his father’s request, and he will try to make his fortune there.”

“Has he got the money to go with?”

“I shall pay for his journey as far as—yes, as far as Nantes.”

Eugenie sprang into his arms.

“Oh, father, how good you are!”

She kissed him with a warmth that almost made Grandet ashamed of himself, for his conscience galled him a little.

“Will it take much time to amass a million?” she asked.

“Look here!” said the old miser, “you know what a napoleon is? Well, it takes fifty thousand napoleons to make a million.”

“Mamma, we must say a great many neuvaines for him.”

“I was thinking so,” said Madame Grandet.

“That’s the way, always spending my money!” cried the father.“Do you think there are francs on every bush?”

At this moment a muffled cry, more distressing than all the others, echoed through the garrets and struck a chill to the hearts of Eugenie and her mother.

“Nanon, go upstairs and see that he does not kill himself,” said Grandet. “Now, then,” he added, looking at his wife and daughter, who had turned pale at his words, “no nonsense, you two! I must leave you; I have got to see about the Dutchmen who are going away to-day. And then I must find Cruchot, and talk with him about all this.”

He departed. As soon as he had shut the door Eugenie and her mother breathed more freely. Until this morning the young girl had never felt constrained in the presence of her father; but for the last few hours every moment wrought a change in her feelings and ideas.

“Mamma, how many louis are there in a cask of wine?”

“Your father sells his from a hundred to a hundred and fifty francs, sometimes two hundred—at least, so I’ve heard say.”

“Then papa must be rich?”

“Perhaps he is. But Monsieur Cruchot told me he bought Froidfond two years ago; that may have pinched him.”

Eugenie, not being able to understand the question of her father’s fortune, stopped short in her calculations.

“He didn’t even see me, the darling!” said Nanon, coming back from her errand. “He’s stretched out like a calf on his bed and crying like the Madeleine, and that’s a blessing! What’s the matter with the poor dear young man!”

“Let us go and console him, mamma; if any one knocks, we can come down.”

Madame Grandet was helpless against the sweet persuasive tones of her daughter’s voice. Eugenie was sublime: she had become a woman.

The two, with beating hearts, went up to Charles’s room. The door was open. The young man heard and saw nothing; plunged in grief, he only uttered inarticulate cries.

“How he loves his father!” said Eugenie in a low voice.

In the utterance of those words it was impossible to mistake the hopes of a heart that, unknown to itself, had suddenly become passionate. Madame Grandet cast a mother’s look upon her daughter, and then whispered in her ear—

“Take care, you will love him!”

“Love him!” answered Eugenie. “Ah! if you did but know what my father said to Monsieur Cruchot.”

Charles turned over, and saw his aunt and cousin.

“I have lost my father, my poor father! If he had told me his secret troubles we might have worked together to repair them. My God! my poor father! I was so sure I should see him again that I think I kissed him quite coldly—”

Sobs cut short the words.

“We will pray for him,” said Madame Grandet. “Resign yourself to the will of God.”

“Cousin,” said Eugenie, “take courage! Your loss is irreparable;therefore think only of saving your honor.”

With the delicate instinct of a woman who intuitively puts her mind into all things, even at the moment when she offers consolation, Eugenie sought to cheat her cousin’s grief by turning his thoughts inward upon himself.

“My honor?” exclaimed the young man, tossing aside his hair with an impatient gesture as he sat up on his bed and crossed his arms.

“Ah! that is true. My uncle said my father had failed.”

He uttered a heart-rending cry, and hid his face in his hands.

“Leave me, leave me, cousin! My God! my God! Forgive my father, for he must have suffered sorely!”

There was something terribly attractive in the sight of this young sorrow, sincere without reasoning or afterthought. It was a virgin grief which the simple hearts of Eugenie and her mother were fitted to comprehend, and they obeyed the sign Charles made them to leave him to himself. They went downstairs in silence and took their accustomed places by the window and sewed for nearly an hour without exchanging a word. Eugenie had seen in the furtive glance that she cast about the young man’s room—that girlish glance which sees all in the twinkling of an eye—the pretty trifles of his dressing-case, his scissors, his razors embossed with gold. This gleam of luxury across her cousin’s grief only made him the more interesting to her, possibly by way of contrast. Never before had so serious an event, so dramatic a sight, touched the imaginations of these two passive beings, hitherto sunk in the stillness and calm of solitude.

“Mamma,” said Eugenie, “we must wear mourning for my uncle.”

“Your father will decide that,” answered Madame Grandet.

They relapsed into silence. Eugenie drew her stitches with a uniform motion which revealed to an observer the teeming thoughts of her meditation. The first desire of the girl’s heart was to share her cousin’s mourning.

About four o’clock an abrupt knock at the door struck sharply on the heart of Madame Grandet.

“What can have happened to your father?” she said to her daughter.

Grandet entered joyously. After taking off his gloves, he rubbed his hands hard enough to take off their skin as well, if his epidermis had not been tanned and cured like Russia leather—saving, of course, the perfume of larch-trees and incense. Presently his secret escaped him.

“Wife,” he said, without stuttering, “I’ve trapped them all! Our wine is sold! The Dutch and the Belgians have gone. I walked about the market-place in front of their inn, pretending to be doing nothing. That Belgian fellow—you know who I mean—came up to me. The owners of all the good vineyards have kept back their vintages, intending to wait; well, I didn’t hinder them. The Belgian was in despair; I saw that. In a minute the bargain was made. He takes my vintage at two hundred francs the puncheon, half down. He paid me in gold; the notes are drawn. Here are six louis for you. In three months wines will have fallen.”

These words, uttered in a quiet tone of voice, were nevertheless so bitterly sarcastic that the inhabitants of Saumur, grouped at this moment in the market-place and overwhelmed by the news of the sale Grandet had just effected, would have shuddered had they heard them. Their panic would have brought the price of wines down fifty per cent at once.

“Did you have a thousand puncheons this year, father?”

“Yes, little one.”

That term applied to his daughter was the superlative expression of the old miser’s joy.

“Then that makes two hundred thousand pieces of twenty sous each?”

“Yes, Mademoiselle Grandet.”

“Then, father, you can easily help Charles.”

The amazement, the anger, the stupefaction of Belshazzar when he saw the Mene-Tekel-Upharsinbefore his eyes is not to be compared with the cold rage of Grandet, who, having forgotten his nephew, now found him enshrined in the heart and calculations of his daughter.

“What’s this? Ever since that dandy put foot in my house everything goes wrong! You behave as if you had the right to buy sugar-plums and make feasts and weddings. I won’t have that sort of thing. I hope I know my duty at my time of life! I certainly sha’n’t take lessons from my daughter, or from anybody else. I shall do for my nephew what it is proper to do, and you have no need to poke your nose into it. As for you, Eugenie,” he added, facing her, “don’t speak of this again, or I’ll send you to the Abbaye des Noyers with Nanon, see if I don’t; and no later than to-morrow either, if you disobey me! Where is that fellow, has he come down yet?”

“No, my friend,” answered Madame Grandet.

“What is he doing then?”

“He is weeping for his father,” said Eugenie.

Grandet looked at his daughter without finding a word to say;after all, he was a father. He made a couple of turns up and down the room, and then went hurriedly to his secret den to think over an investment he was meditating in the public Funds. The thinning out of his two thousand acres of forest land had yielded him six hundred thousand francs: putting this sum to that derived from the sale of his poplars and to his other gains for the last year and for the current year, he had amassed a total of nine hundred thousand francs, without counting the two hundred thousand he had got by the sale just concluded. The twenty per cent which Cruchot assured him would gain in a short time from the Funds, then quoted at seventy, tempted him. He figured out his calculation on the margin of the newspaper which gave the account of his brother’s death, all the while hearing the moans of his nephew, but without listening to them.

Nanon came and knocked on the wall to summon him to dinner. On the last step of the staircase he was saying to himself as he came down—

“I’ll do it; I shall get eight per cent interest. In two years I shall have fifteen hundred thousand francs, which I will then draw out in good gold—Well, where’s my nephew?”

“He says he doesn’t want anything to eat,” answered Nanon;“that’s not good for him.”

“So much saved,” retorted her master.

“That’s so,” she said.

“Bah! he won’t cry long. Hunger drives the wolves out of the woods.”

The dinner was eaten in silence.

“My good friend,” said Madame Grandet, when the cloth was removed, “we must put on mourning.”

“Upon my word, Madame Grandet! what will you invent next to spend money on? Mourning is in the heart, and not in the clothes.”

“But mourning for a brother is indispensable; and the Church commands us to—”

“Buy your mourning out of your six louis. Give me a hat-band;that’s enough for me.”

Eugenie raised her eyes to heaven without uttering a word. Her generous instincts, slumbering and long repressed but now suddenly and for the first time awakened, were galled at every turn.

The evening passed to all appearance like a thousand other evenings of their monotonous life, yet it was certainly the most horrible. Eugenie sewed without raising her head, and did not use the workbox which Charles had despised the night before. Madame Grandet knitted her sleeves. Grandet twirled his thumbs for four hours, absorbed in calculations whose results were on the morrow to astonish Saumur.

No one came to visit the family that day. The whole town was ringing with the news of the business trick just played by Grandet, the failure of his brother, and the arrival of his nephew. Obeying the desire to gossip over their mutual interests, all the upper and middle-class wine-growers in Saumur met at Monsieur des Grassins, where terrible imprecations were being fulminated against the ex-mayor.

Nanon was spinning, and the whirr of her wheel was the only sound heard beneath the gray rafters of that silent hall.

“We don’t waste our tongues,” she said, showing her teeth, as large and white as peeled almonds.

“Nothing should be wasted,” answered Grandet, rousing himself from his reverie.

He saw a perspective of eight millions in three years, and he was sailing along that sheet of gold.

“Let us go to bed. I will bid my nephew good-night for the rest of you, and see if he will take anything.”

Madame Grandet remained on the landing of the first storey to hear the conversation that was about to take place between the goodman and his nephew. Eugenie, bolder than her mother, went up two stairs.

“Well, nephew, you are in trouble. Yes, weep, that’s natural. A father is a father; but we must bear our troubles patiently. I am a good uncle to you, remember that. Come, take courage! Will you have a little glass of wine?”

(Wine costs nothing in Saumur, and they offer it as tea is offered in China.)

“Why!” added Grandet, “you have got no light! That’s bad, very bad; you ought to see what you are about,” and he walked to the chimney-piece.

“What’s this?” he cried. “A wax candle! How the devil did they filch a wax candle? The spendthrifts would tear down the ceilings of my house to boil the fellow’s eggs.”

Hearing these words, mother and daughter slipped back into their rooms and burrowed in their beds, with the celerity of frightened mice getting back to their holes.

“Madame Grandet, have you found a mine?” said the man, coming into the chamber of his wife.

“My friend, wait; I am saying my prayers,” said the poor mother in a trembling voice.

“The devil take your good God!” growled Grandet in reply.

Misers have no belief in a future life; the present is their all in all. This thought casts a terrible light upon our present epoch, in which, far more than at any former period, money sways the laws and politics and morals. Institutions, books, men, and dogmas, all conspire to undermine belief in a future life—a belief upon which the social edifice has rested for eighteen hundred years. The grave, as a means of transition, is little feared in our day. The future, which once opened to us beyond the requiems, has now been imported into the present. To obtain per fas et nefas a terrestrial paradise of luxury and earthly enjoyment, to harden the heart and macerate the body for the sake of fleeting possessions, as the martyrs once suffered all things to reach eternal joys, this is now the universal thought—a thought written everywhere, even in the very laws which ask of the legislator, “What do you pay?” instead of asking him, “What do you think?” When this doctrine has passed down from the bourgeoisie to the populace, where will this country be?

“Madame Grandet, have you done?” asked the old man.

“My friend, I am praying for you.”

“Very good! Good-night; to-morrow morning we will have a talk.”

The poor woman went to sleep like a schoolboy who, not having learned his lessons, knows he will see his master’s angry face on the morrow. At the moment when, filled with fear, she was drawing the sheet above her head that she might stifle hearing, Eugenie, in her night-gown and with naked feet, ran to her side and kissed her brow.

“Oh! my good mother,” she said, “to-morrow I will tell him it was I.”

“No; he would send you to Noyers. Leave me to manage it; he cannot eat me.”

“Do you hear, mamma?”

“What?”

“He is weeping still.”

“Go to bed, my daughter; you will take cold in your feet: the floor is damp.”

Thus passed the solemn day which was destined to weight upon the whole life of the rich and poor heiress, whose sleep was never again to be so calm, nor yet so pure, as it had been up to this moment.

It often happens that certain actions of human life seem, literally speaking, improbable, though actual. Is not this because we constantly omit to turn the stream of psychological light upon our impulsive determinations, and fail to explain the subtile reasons, mysteriously conceived in our minds, which impelled them? Perhaps Eugenie’s deep passion should be analyzed in its most delicate fibres; for it became, scoffers might say, a malady which influenced her whole existence. Many people prefer to deny results rather than estimate the force of ties and links and bonds, which secretly join one fact to another in the moral order. Here, therefore, Eugenie’s past life will offer to observers of human nature an explanation of her naive want of reflection and the suddenness of the emotions which overflowed her soul. The more tranquil her life had been, the more vivid was her womanly pity, the more simple-minded were the sentiments now developed in her soul. Made restless by the events of the day, she woke at intervals to listen to her cousin, thinking she heard the sighs which still echoed in her heart. Sometimes she saw him dying of his trouble, sometimes she dreamed that he fainted from hunger. Towards morning she was certain that she heard a startling cry. She dressed at once and ran, in the dawning light, with a swift foot to her cousin’s chamber, the door of which he had left open. The candle had burned down to the socket. Charles, overcome by nature, was sleeping, dressed and sitting in an armchair beside the bed, on which his head rested; he dreamed as men dream on an empty stomach. Eugenie might weep at her ease; she might admire the young and handsome face blotted with grief, the eyes swollen with weeping, that seemed, sleeping as they were, to well forth tears. Charles felt sympathetically the young girl’s presence; he opened his eyes and saw her pitying him.

“Pardon me, my cousin,” he said, evidently not knowing the hour nor the place in which he found himself.

“There are hearts who hear you, cousin, and we thought you might need something. You should go to bed; you tire yourself by sitting thus.”

“That is true.”

“Well, then, adieu!”

She escaped, ashamed and happy at having gone there. Innocence alone can dare to be so bold. Once enlightened, virtue makes her calculations as well as vice. Eugenie, who had not trembled beside her cousin, could scarcely stand upon her legs when she regained her chamber. Her ignorant life had suddenly come to an end; she reasoned, she rebuked herself with many reproaches.“What will he think of me? He will think that I love him!” That was what she most wished him to think. An honest love has its own prescience, and knows that love begets love. What an event for this poor solitary girl thus to have entered the chamber of a young man! Are there not thoughts and actions in the life of love which to certain souls bear the full meaning of the holiest espousals?

An hour later she went to her mother and dressed her as usual. Then they both came down and sat in their places before the window waiting for Grandet, with that cruel anxiety which, according to the individual character, freezes the heart or warms it, shrivels or dilates it, when a scene is feared, a punishment expected—a feeling so natural that even domestic animals possess it, and whine at the slightest pain of punishment, though they make no outcry when they inadvertently hurt themselves. The goodman came down; but he spoke to his wife with an absent manner, kissed Eugenie, and sat down to table without appearing to remember his threats of the night before.

“What has become of my nephew? The lad gives no trouble.”

“Monsieur, he is asleep,” answered Nanon.

“So much the better; he won’t want a wax candle,” said Grandet in a jeering tone.

This unusual clemency, this bitter gaiety, struck Madame Grandet with amazement, and she looked at her husband attentively. The goodman—here it may be well to explain that in Touraine, Anjou, Pitou, and Bretagne the word “goodman,” already used to designate Grandet, is bestowed as often upon harsh and cruel men as upon those of kindly temperament, when either have reached a certain age; the title means nothing on the score of individual gentleness—the goodman took his hat and gloves, saying as he went out—

“I am going to loiter about the market-place and find Cruchot.”

“Eugenie, your father certainly has something on his mind.”

Grandet, who was a poor sleeper, employed half his nights in the preliminary calculations which gave such astonishing accuracy to his views and observations and schemes, and secured to them the unfailing success at sight of which his townsmen stood amazed. All human power is a compound of time and patience. Powerful beings will and wait. The life of a miser is the constant exercise of human power put to the service of self. It rests on two sentiments only—self-love and self-interest; but self-interest being to a certain extent compact and intelligent self-love, the visible sign of real superiority, it follows that self-love and self-interest are two parts of the same whole—egotism. From this arises, perhaps, the excessive curiosity shown in the habits of a miser’s life whenever they are put before the world. Every nature holds by a thread to those beings who challenge all human sentiments by concentrating all in one passion. Where is the man without desire? and what social desire can be satisfied without money?

Grandet unquestionably “had something on his mind,” to use his wife’s expression. There was in him, as in all misers, a persistent craving to play a commercial game with other men and win their money legally. To impose upon other people was to him a sign of power, a perpetual proof that he had won the right to despise those feeble beings who suffer themselves to be preyed upon in this world. Oh! who has ever truly understood the lamb lying peacefully at the feet of God?—touching emblem of all terrestrial victims, myth of their future, suffering and weakness glorified! This lamb it is which the miser fattens, puts in his fold, slaughters, cooks, eats, and then despises. The pasture of misers is compounded of money and disdain.

During the night Grandet’s ideas had taken another course, which was the reason of his sudden clemency. He had hatched a plot by which to trick the Parisians, to decoy and dupe and snare them, to drive them into a trap, and make them go and come and sweat and hope and turn pale—a plot by which to amuse himself, the old provincial cooper, sitting there beneath his gloomy rafters, or passing up and down the rotten staircase of his house in Saumur. His nephew filled his mind. He wished to save the honor of his dead brother without the cost of a penny to the son or to himself. His own funds he was about to invest for three years; he had therefore nothing further to do than to manage his property in Saumur. He needed some nutriment for his malicious activity, and he found it suddenly in his brother’s failure. Feeling nothing to squeeze between his own paws, he resolved to crush the Parisians in behalf of Charles, and to play the part of a good brother on the cheapest terms. The honor of the family counted for so little in this scheme that his good intentions might be likened to the interest a gambler takes in seeing a game well played in which he has no stake. The Cruchots were a necessary part of his plan; but he would not seek them—he resolved to make them come to him, and to lead up that very evening to a comedy whose plot he had just conceived, which should make him on the morrow an object of admiration to the whole town without its costing him a single penny.

內(nèi)地的愛情

少女們純潔而單調(diào)的生活中,必有一個美妙的時間,陽光會流入她們的心坎,花會對她們說話,心的跳動會把熱烈的生機(jī)傳給頭腦,把意念融為一種渺茫的欲望;真是哀而不怨,樂而忘返的境界!兒童睜眼看到世界就笑,少女在大自然中發(fā)現(xiàn)感情就笑,像她兒時一樣的笑。要是光明算得人生第一個戀愛對象,那么戀愛不就是心的光明嗎?歐也妮終于到了把世界上的東西看明白的時候了。

跟所有內(nèi)地姑娘一樣,她起身很早,禱告完畢,開始梳妝,從今以后梳妝是一件有意義的事情了。她先把栗色的頭發(fā)梳順溜,很仔細(xì)地把粗大的辮子盤上頭頂,不讓零星短發(fā)從辮子里散出來,發(fā)髻的式樣改成對稱,越發(fā)烘托出她一臉的天真與嬌羞;頭飾的簡樸與面部線條的單純配得很調(diào)和。拿清水洗了好幾次手,那是平日早已浸得通紅,皮膚也變得粗糙了的,她望著一雙滾圓的胳膊,私忖堂兄弟怎么能把手養(yǎng)得又軟又白,指甲修得那么好看。她換上新襪,套上最體面的鞋子;一口氣束好了胸,一個眼子都沒有跳過。總之,她有生以來第一次希望自己顯得漂亮,第一次懂得有一件裁剪合適、使她惹人注目的新衣衫的樂趣。

穿扮完了,她聽見教堂的鐘聲,很奇怪地只數(shù)到七下,因?yàn)橄胍谐浞值臅r間梳妝,不覺起得太早了。她既不懂一卷頭發(fā)可以做上十來次,來研究它的效果,就只能老老實(shí)實(shí)抱著手臂,坐在窗下望著院子、小園和城墻上居高臨下的平臺;一派凄涼的景色,也望不到遠(yuǎn)處,但也不無那種神秘的美,為冷靜的地方或荒涼的野外所特有的。

廚房旁邊有口井,圍著井欄,轆轤吊在一個彎彎的鐵桿上。繞著鐵桿有一株葡萄藤,那時枝條已經(jīng)枯萎,變紅;蜿蜒曲折的蔓藤從這兒爬上墻,沿著屋子,一直伸展到柴房頂上。堆在那里的木柴,跟藏書家的圖書一樣整齊。院子里因?yàn)殚L著青苔、野草,無人走動,日子久了,石板都是黑黝黝的。厚實(shí)的墻上披著綠蔭,波浪似的掛著長長的褐色枝條。院子底上,通到花園門有八級向上的石磴,東倒西歪,給高大的植物淹沒了,好似十字軍時代一個寡婦埋葬她騎士的古墓。剝落的石基上面,豎著一排腐爛的木柵,一半已經(jīng)毀了,卻還布滿各種藤蘿,亂七八糟地扭作一團(tuán)。柵門兩旁,伸出兩株瘦小的蘋果樹丫枝。園中有三條平行的小徑,鋪有細(xì)砂;小徑之間是花壇,四周種了黃楊,借此堵住花壇的泥土;園子地上是一片菩提樹蔭,靠在平臺腳下。一頭是些楊梅樹,另一頭是一株高大無比的胡桃樹,樹枝一直伸到箍桶匠的密室外面。那日正是晴朗的天氣,碰上洛阿河畔秋天常有的好太陽,使鋪在幽美的景物、墻垣、院子和花園里樹木上的初霜,開始融化。

歐也妮對那些素來覺得平淡無奇的景色,忽而體會到一種新鮮的情趣。千思百念,渺渺茫茫地在心頭涌起,外界的陽光一點(diǎn)點(diǎn)的照開去,胸中的思緒也越來越多。她終于感到一陣模糊的、說不出的愉快把精神包圍了,猶如外界的物體給云霧包圍了一樣。她的思緒,跟這奇特的風(fēng)景連細(xì)枝小節(jié)都配合上了,心中的和諧與自然界的融成一片。

一堵墻上掛著濃密的鳳尾草,草葉的顏色像鴿子的頸項(xiàng)一般時刻變化。陽光照到這堵墻上的時候,仿佛天國的光明照出了歐也妮將來的希望。從此她就愛這堵墻,愛看墻上的枯草,褪色的花,藍(lán)的燈籠花,因?yàn)槠渲杏兴鹈鄣幕貞?,跟童年往事一樣。有回聲的院子里,每逢她心中暗暗發(fā)問的時候,枝條上每片落葉的聲響就是回答。她可能整天待在這兒,不覺得時光飛逝。

然后她又心中亂糟糟的,騷動起來,不時站起身子,走過去照鏡,好比一個有良心的作家打量自己的作品,想吹毛求疵地挑剔一番。

“我的相貌配不上他!”

這是歐也妮的念頭,又謙卑又痛苦的念頭??蓱z的姑娘太瞧不起自己了;可是謙虛,或者不如說懼怕,的確是愛情的主要德行之一。像歐也妮那樣的小布爾喬亞,都是身體結(jié)實(shí),美得有點(diǎn)兒俗氣的;可是她雖然跟彌羅島上的愛神[1]相仿,卻有一般雋永的基督徒氣息,把她的外貌變得高雅,純凈,有點(diǎn)兒靈秀之氣,為古代雕刻家沒有見識過的。她的腦袋很大,前額帶點(diǎn)兒男相,可是很清秀,像斐狄阿斯[2]的丘比特雕像;貞潔的生活使她灰色的眼睛光芒四射。圓臉上嬌嫩紅潤的線條,生過天花之后變得粗糙了,幸而沒有留下痘瘢,只去掉了皮膚上絨樣的那一層,但依舊那么柔軟細(xì)膩,會給媽媽的親吻留下一道紅印。她的鼻子大了一點(diǎn)兒,可是配上朱紅的嘴巴倒很合適;滿是紋路的嘴唇,顯出無限的深情與善意。脖子是滾圓的。遮得密不透風(fēng)的飽滿的胸部,惹起人家的注意與幻想。當(dāng)然她因?yàn)檠b束的關(guān)系,缺少一點(diǎn)兒嫵媚;但在鑒賞家心目中,那個不甚靈活的姿態(tài)也別有風(fēng)韻。所以,高大壯健的歐也妮并沒有一般人喜歡的那種漂亮,但她的美是一望而知的,只有藝術(shù)家才會傾倒的。有的畫家希望在塵世找到圣潔如瑪利亞那樣的典型:眼神要像拉斐爾所揣摩到的那么不亢不卑;而理想中的線條,又往往是天生的,只有基督徒貞潔的生活才能培養(yǎng),保持。醉心于這種模型的畫家,會發(fā)現(xiàn)歐也妮臉上就有種天生的高貴,連她自己都不曾覺察的:安靜的額角下面,藏著整個的愛情世界;眼睛的模樣,眼皮的動作,有股說不出的神明的氣息。她的線條,面部的輪廓,從沒有為了快樂的表情而有所改變,而顯得疲倦,仿佛平靜的湖邊,水天相接之處那些柔和的線條。恬靜、紅潤的臉色,光彩像一朵盛開的花,使你心神安定,感覺到它那股精神的魅力,不由不凝眸注視。

歐也妮還在人生的邊上給兒童的幻象點(diǎn)綴得花團(tuán)錦簇,還在天真爛漫的,采朵雛菊占卜愛情的階段。她并不知道什么叫作愛情,只照著鏡子想:“我太丑了,他看不上我的!”

隨后她打開正對樓梯的房門,探著脖子聽屋子里的聲音。她聽見拿儂早上慣有的咳嗽,走來走去,打掃堂屋,生火,縛住狼狗,在牛房里對牲口說話。她想:

“他還沒有起來呢。”

她立刻下樓,跑到正在擠牛奶的拿儂前面。

“拿儂,好拿儂,做些乳酪給堂兄弟喝咖啡吧。”

“哎,小姐,那是要隔天做起來的,”拿儂大笑著說,“今天我沒法做乳酪了。哎,你的堂兄弟生得標(biāo)致,標(biāo)致,真標(biāo)致。你沒瞧見他穿了那件金線紡綢睡衣的模樣呢。嗯,我瞧見了。他細(xì)潔的襯衫跟本堂神父披的白祭衣一樣。”

“拿儂,那么咱們弄些千層餅吧。”

“烤爐用的木柴誰給呢?還有面包,還有牛油?”拿儂說。她以葛朗臺先生的總管資格,有時在歐也妮母女的心目中特別顯得有權(quán)有勢。“總不成為了款待你的堂兄弟,偷老爺?shù)臇|西。你可以問他要牛奶、面粉、木柴,他是你的爸爸,會給你的。哦,他下樓招呼食糧來啦……”

歐也妮聽見樓梯在父親腳下震動,嚇得往花園里溜了。一個人快樂到極點(diǎn)的時候,往往——也許不無理由——以為自己的心思全擺在臉上,給人家一眼就會看透;這種過分的羞怯與心虛,對歐也妮已經(jīng)發(fā)生作用??蓱z的姑娘終于發(fā)覺了自己的屋子冷冰冰的一無所有,怎么也配不上堂兄弟的風(fēng)雅,覺得很氣惱。她很熱烈地感到非給他做一點(diǎn)兒什么不可;做什么呢?不知道。天真,老實(shí),她聽?wèi){純樸的天性自由發(fā)揮,并沒對自己的印象和情感有所顧慮。一看見堂兄弟,女性的傾向就在她心中覺醒了,而且來勢特別猛烈,因?yàn)榈搅硕龤q,她的智力與欲望都已經(jīng)達(dá)到高峰。她第一次見了父親害怕,悟出自己的命運(yùn)原來操在他的手里,認(rèn)為有些心事瞞著他是一樁罪過。她腳步匆忙地在那兒走,很奇怪地覺得空氣比平時新鮮,陽光比平時更有生氣,給她精神上添上了些暖意,給了她新生命。

她正在想用什么計策弄到千層餅,長腳拿儂和葛朗臺卻斗起嘴來。他們之間的吵架是像冬天的燕子一樣少有的。老頭兒拿了鑰匙預(yù)備分配當(dāng)天的食物,問拿儂:

“昨天的面包還有的剩嗎?”

“連小屑子都沒有了,先生。”

葛朗臺從那只安育地方做面包用的平底籃里,拿出一個糊滿干面的大圓面包,正要動手去切,拿儂說:

“咱們今兒是五個人吃飯呢,先生。”

“不錯,”葛朗臺回答,“可是這個面包有六磅重,還有的剩呢。這些巴黎人簡直不吃面包,你等會兒瞧吧。”

“他們只吃餡子嗎?”拿儂問。

在安育一帶,俗語所說的餡子,是指涂在面包上的東西,包括最普通的牛油到最貴族化的桃子醬。凡是小時候舐光了餡子、面包剩下來的人,準(zhǔn)懂得上面的那句話的意思。

“不,”葛朗臺回答,“他們既不吃餡子,也不吃面包,就像快要出嫁的姑娘一樣。”

他吩咐了幾樣頂便宜的菜,關(guān)起雜貨柜正要走向水果房,拿儂把他攔住了說:

“先生,給我一些面粉跟牛油,替孩子們做一個千層餅吧。”

“為了我的侄兒,你想毀掉我的家嗎?”

“為你的侄兒,我并不比為你的狗多費(fèi)什么心,也不見得比你自己多費(fèi)心……你瞧,你只給我六塊糖!我要八塊呢。”

“哎喲!拿儂,我從來沒看見你這個樣子,這算什么意思?你是東家嗎?糖,就只有六塊。”

“那么侄少爺?shù)目Х壤锓攀裁矗?rdquo;

“兩塊嘍,我可以不用的。”

“在你這個年紀(jì)不用糖?我掏出錢來給你買吧。”

“不相干的事不用你管。”

那時糖雖然便宜,老箍桶匠始終覺得是最珍貴的舶來品,要六法郎一磅。帝政時代大家不得不省用糖,在他卻成了牢不可破的習(xí)慣。

所有的女人,哪怕是最蠢的,都會用手段來達(dá)到她們的目的:拿儂丟開了糖的問題,來爭取千層餅了。

“小姐,”她隔著窗子叫道,“你不是要吃千層餅嗎?”

“不要,不要。”歐也妮回答。

“好吧,拿儂,”葛朗臺聽見了女兒的聲音,“拿去吧。”

他打開面粉柜舀了一點(diǎn)兒給她,又在早先切好的牛油上面補(bǔ)了幾兩。

“還要烤爐用的木柴呢。”拿儂毫不放松。

“你要多少就拿多少吧,”他無可奈何地回答,“可是你得給我們做一個果子餅,晚飯也在烤爐上煮,不用生兩個爐子了。”

“嘿!那還用說!”

葛朗臺用著差不多像慈父一般的神氣,對忠實(shí)的管家望了一眼。

“小姐,”廚娘嚷道,“咱們有千層餅吃了。”

葛朗臺捧了許多水果回來,先把一盆的量放在廚房桌上。

“你瞧,先生,”拿儂對他說,“侄少爺?shù)难プ佣嗪每?,什么皮呀!多好聞哪!拿什么東西上油呢?要不要用你雞蛋清調(diào)的鞋油?”

“拿儂,我怕蛋清要弄壞這種皮的。你跟他說不會擦摩洛哥皮就是了……不錯,這是摩洛哥皮;他自己會到城里買鞋油給你的;聽說那種鞋油里面還摻白糖,叫它發(fā)亮呢。”

“這么說來,還可以吃的了?”拿儂把靴子湊近鼻尖,“喲!喲!跟太太的科隆水一樣香!好玩!”

“好玩!靴子比穿的人還值錢,你覺得好玩?”

他把果子房鎖上,又回到廚房。

“先生,”拿儂問,“你不想一禮拜來一兩次砂鍋,款待款待你的……”

“行。”

“那么我得去買肉了。”

“不用,你慢慢給我們燉個野味湯,佃戶不會讓你閑著的。不過我得關(guān)照高諾阿萊打幾只烏鴉,這個東西煮湯再好沒有了。”

“先生,烏鴉是吃死人的,可是真的?”

“你這個傻瓜,拿儂!它們還不是跟大家一樣有什么吃什么。難道我們就不吃死人了嗎?什么叫作遺產(chǎn)呢?”

葛朗臺老頭沒有什么吩咐了,掏出表來,看到早飯之前還有半點(diǎn)鐘工夫,便拿起帽子擁抱了一下女兒,對她說:

“你高興上洛阿河邊遛遛嗎,到我的草原上去?我在那邊有點(diǎn)兒事。”

歐也妮跑去戴上系有粉紅緞帶的草帽,然后父女倆走下七轉(zhuǎn)八彎的街道,直到廣場。

“一大早往哪兒去呀?”公證人克羅旭遇見了葛朗臺問。

“有點(diǎn)兒事。”老頭兒回答,心里也明白為什么他的朋友清早就出門。

當(dāng)葛朗臺老頭有點(diǎn)兒事的時候,公證人憑以往的經(jīng)驗(yàn),知道準(zhǔn)可跟他弄到些好處,因此就陪了他一塊兒走。

“你來,克羅旭,”葛朗臺說,“你是我的朋友,我要給你證明,在上好的土地上種白楊是多么傻……”

“這么說來,洛阿河邊那塊草原給你掙的六萬法郎,就不算一回事嗎?”克羅旭眨巴著眼睛問,“你還不夠運(yùn)氣?……樹木砍下的時候,正碰上南德城里白木奇缺,賣到三十法郎一株。”

歐也妮聽著,可不知她已經(jīng)臨到一生最重大的關(guān)頭,至高至上的父母之命,馬上要由公證人從老人嘴里逼出來了。

葛朗臺到了洛阿河畔美麗的草原上,三十名工人正在收拾從前種白楊的地方,把它填土,挑平。

“克羅旭先生,你來看一株白楊要占多少地。”他提高嗓門喚一個工人,“約翰,拿尺來把四……四……四邊量……量……一下!”

工人量完了說:“每邊八尺。”

“那就是糟蹋了三十二尺地,”葛朗臺對克羅旭說,“這一排上從前我有三百株白楊,是不是?對了……三百……乘三……三十二……尺……就……就……就是五……五……五百棵干草;加上兩旁的,一千五;中間的幾排又是一千五。就……就算一千堆干草吧。”

“像這類干草,”克羅旭幫著計算道,“一千堆值到六百法郎。”

“算……算……算它一千兩百法郎,因?yàn)楦钸^以后再長出來的,還好賣到三四百法郎。那么,你算算一年一千……千……兩百法郎,四十年……下……下……下來該多多少,加上你……你知道的利……利……利上滾利。”

“一起總該有六萬法郎吧。”公證人說。

“得啦!只……只有六萬法郎是不是?”老頭兒往下說,這一回可不再結(jié)結(jié)巴巴了,“不過,兩千株四十年的白楊還賣不到五萬法郎,這不就是損失?給我算出來嘍。”葛朗臺說到這里,大有自命不凡之概,“約翰,你把窟窿都填平,只留下河邊的那一排,把我買來的白楊種下去。種在河邊,它們就靠公家長大了。”他對克羅旭補(bǔ)上這句,鼻子上的肉瘤微微扯動一下,仿佛是挖苦得最兇的冷笑。

“自然嘍,白楊只好種在荒地上。”克羅旭這么說,心里給葛朗臺的算盤嚇住了。

“可不是,先生!”老箍桶匠帶著譏諷的口吻。

歐也妮只顧望著洛阿河邊奇妙的風(fēng)景,沒有留神父親的計算,可是不久克羅旭對她父親說的話,引起了她的注意:

“哎,你從巴黎招了一個女婿來啦,全個索漠都在談?wù)撃愕闹秲骸?煲形伊⒒闀税桑鹄项^?”

“你……你……你清……清……清早出來,就……就……就是要告訴我這個嗎?”葛朗臺說這句話的時候,扯動著肉瘤,“那么,老……老兄,我不瞞你,你……你要知……知道的,我可以告訴你。我寧可把……把……女……女……女兒丟在洛阿河里,也……也不愿把……把她給……給她的堂……堂……堂兄弟;你不……不……不妨說給人人……人……人家聽。啊,不必;讓他……他們?nèi)ズ?hellip;…胡……胡扯吧。”

這段話使歐也妮一陣眼花。遙遠(yuǎn)的希望剛剛在她心里萌芽,就開花,長成,結(jié)成一個花球,現(xiàn)在她眼看著剪成一片片的,扔在地下。從隔夜起,促成兩心相契的一切幸福的聯(lián)系,已經(jīng)使她舍不得查理;從今以后,卻要由苦難來加強(qiáng)他們的結(jié)合了??嚯y的崇高與偉大,要由她來擔(dān)受,幸運(yùn)的光華與她無緣,這不就是女子的莊嚴(yán)的命運(yùn)嗎?父愛怎么會在她父親心中熄滅的呢?查理犯了什么滔天大罪呢?不可思議的問題!她初生的愛情已經(jīng)夠神秘了,如今又包上了一團(tuán)神秘。她兩腿哆嗦著回家,走到那條黝黑的老街,剛才是那么喜氣洋洋的,此刻卻一片荒涼,她感到了時光流轉(zhuǎn)與人事紛紛留在那里的凄涼情調(diào)。愛情的教訓(xùn),她一樁都逃不了。

到了離家只有幾步路的地方,她搶著上前敲門,在門口等父親。葛朗臺瞥見公證人拿著原封未動的報紙,便問:

“公債行情怎么樣?”

“你不肯聽我的話,葛朗臺,”克羅旭回答說,“趕緊買吧,兩年之內(nèi)還有兩成可賺,并且利率很高,八萬法郎有五千息金。行市是八十法郎五十生丁。”

“慢慢再說吧。”葛朗臺摸著下巴。

公證人展開報紙,忽然叫道:“我的天!”

“什么事?”葛朗臺這么問的時候,克羅旭已經(jīng)把報紙送在他面前,說:“你念吧。”

巴黎商界巨子葛朗臺氏,昨日照例前往交易所,不料返寓后突以手槍擊中腦部,自殺殞命。死前曾致書眾議院議長及商事裁判所所長,辭去本兼各職。聞葛氏破產(chǎn),系受經(jīng)紀(jì)人蘇希及公證人洛庚之累。以葛氏地位及平素信用而論,原不難于巴黎商界中獲得支援,徐圖挽救;詎一時情急,遽爾出此下策,殊堪惋惜……

“我早知道了。”老頭兒對公證人說。

克羅旭聽了這話抽了一口冷氣。雖然當(dāng)公證人的都有鎮(zhèn)靜的功夫,但想到巴黎的葛朗臺也許央求過索漠的葛朗臺而被拒絕的時候,他不由得背脊發(fā)冷。

“那么他的兒子呢?昨天晚上還多么高興……”

“他還沒有知道。”葛朗臺依舊很鎮(zhèn)定。

“再見,葛朗臺先生。”克羅旭全明白了,立刻去告訴特·篷風(fēng)所長叫他放心。

回到家里,葛朗臺看到早飯預(yù)備好了。葛朗臺太太已經(jīng)坐在那張有木座的椅子上,編織冬天用的毛線套袖。歐也妮跑過去擁抱母親,熱烈的情緒,正如我們憋著一肚子說不出的苦惱的時候一樣。

“你們先吃吧,”拿儂從樓梯上連奔帶爬地下來說,“他睡得像個小娃娃。閉著眼睛,真好看!我進(jìn)去叫他,嗨,他一聲也不回。”

“讓他睡吧,”葛朗臺說,“他今天起得再晚,也趕得上聽他的壞消息。”

“什么事呀?”歐也妮問,一邊把兩小塊不知有幾克重的糖放入咖啡。那是老頭兒閑著沒事的時候切好在那里的,葛朗臺太太不敢動問,只望著丈夫。

“他父親一槍把自己打死了。”

“叔叔嗎?”歐也妮問。

“可憐這孩子哪。”葛朗臺太太嚷道。

“對啦,可憐,”葛朗臺接著說,“他一個錢都沒有了。”

“可是他睡的模樣,好像整個天下都是他的呢。”拿儂聲調(diào)很溫柔地說。

歐也妮吃不下東西。她的心給揪緊了,就像初次對愛人的苦難表示同情,而全身都為之波動的那種揪心。她哭了。

“你又不認(rèn)識你叔叔,哭什么?”她父親一邊說,一邊餓虎般地瞪了她一眼,他瞪著成堆的金子時想必也是這種眼神。

“可是,先生,”拿儂插嘴道,“這可憐的小伙子,誰見了不替他難受呢?他睡得像木頭一樣,還不知道飛來橫禍呢。”

“拿儂,我不跟你說話,別多嘴。”

歐也妮這時才懂得一個動了愛情的女子永遠(yuǎn)得隱瞞自己的感情。她不作聲了。

“希望你,太太,”老頭兒又說,“我出去的時候?qū)λ蛔侄疾挥锰帷N乙グ巡菰峡看舐芬贿叺耐翜习才乓幌?。我中飯時候回來跟侄兒談。至于你,小姐,要是你為了這個花花公子而哭,這樣也夠了。他馬上要到印度去,休想再看見他。”

父親從帽子邊上拿起手套,像平時一樣不動聲色地戴上,交叉著手指把手套扣緊,出門了。

歐也妮等到屋子里只剩她和母親兩個的時候,嚷道:

“啊!媽媽,我要死了。我從來沒有這么難受過。”

葛朗臺太太看見女兒臉色發(fā)白,便打開窗子叫她深呼吸。

“好一點(diǎn)兒了。”歐也妮過了一會兒說。

葛朗臺太太看到素來很冷靜、很安定的歐也妮,一下子居然神經(jīng)刺激到這個田地,她憑著一般母親對于孩子的直覺,馬上猜透了女兒的心。事實(shí)上,歐也妮母女倆的生命,比兩個肉體連在一塊的匈牙利孿生姊妹[3]還要密切,她們永遠(yuǎn)一塊兒坐在這個窗洞底下,一塊兒上教堂,睡在一座屋子里,呼吸著同樣的空氣。

“可憐的孩子!”葛朗臺太太把女兒的頭摟在懷里。

歐也妮聽了這話,仰起頭來望了望母親,揣摩她心里是什么意思,末了她說:

“干嗎要送他上印度去?他遭了難,不是正應(yīng)該留在這兒嗎?他不是我們的骨肉嗎?”

“是的,孩子,應(yīng)該這樣??墒悄愀赣H有他的理由,應(yīng)當(dāng)尊重。”

母父倆一聲不響地坐著,重新拿起活計,一個坐在有木座子的椅上,一個坐在小靠椅里。歐也妮為了感激母親深切的諒解,吻著她的手說:

“你多好,親愛的媽媽!”

這兩句話使母親那張因終身苦惱而格外憔悴的老臉,有了一點(diǎn)兒光彩。

“你覺得他長得體面嗎?”歐也妮問。

葛朗臺太太只微微笑了一下;過了一會兒她輕輕地說:

“你已經(jīng)愛上他了是不是?那可不好。”

“不好?為什么不好?”歐也妮說,“你喜歡他,拿儂喜歡他,為什么我不能喜歡他?喂,媽媽,咱們擺起桌子來預(yù)備他吃早飯吧。”

她丟下活計,母親也跟著丟下,嘴里卻說:

“你瘋了!”

但她自己也跟著發(fā)瘋,仿佛證明女兒并沒有錯。

歐也妮叫喚拿儂。

“又是什么事呀,小姐?”

“拿儂,乳酪到中午可以弄好了吧?”

“?。≈形鐔??行,行。”老媽子回答。

“還有,他的咖啡要特別濃,我聽見臺·格拉桑說,巴黎人都喝挺濃的咖啡。你得多放一些。”

“哪兒來這么些咖啡?”

“去買呀。”

“給先生碰到了怎么辦?”

“不會,他在草原上呢。”

“那么讓我快點(diǎn)兒去吧。不過番查老板給我白燭的時候,已經(jīng)問咱們家里是不是三王來朝了。這樣的花錢,滿城都要知道嘍。”

“你父親知道了,”葛朗臺太太說,“說不定要打我們呢。”

“打就打吧,咱們跪在地下挨打就是。”

葛朗臺太太一言不答,只抬起眼睛望了望天。拿儂戴上頭巾,出去了。歐也妮鋪上白桌布,又到頂樓上把她好玩地吊在繩上的葡萄摘下幾串。她在走廊里躡手躡腳,唯恐驚醒了堂兄弟,又禁不住把耳朵貼在房門上,聽一聽他平勻的呼吸,心里想:

“真叫作無事家中臥,禍從天上來。”

她從葡萄藤上摘下幾張最綠的葉子,像侍候筵席的老手一般,把葡萄裝得那么好看,然后得意揚(yáng)揚(yáng)地端到飯桌上。在廚房里,她把父親數(shù)好的梨全部擄掠了來,在綠葉上堆成一座金字塔。她走來走去,蹦蹦跳跳,恨不得把父親的家傾箱倒篋地搜刮干凈;可是所有的鑰匙都在他身上。拿儂揣著兩個鮮蛋回來了。歐也妮一看見蛋,簡直想跳上拿儂的脖子。

“我看見朗特的佃戶籃里有雞子,就問他要,這好小子,為了討好我就給我了。”

歐也妮把活計放下了一二十次,去看煮咖啡,聽堂兄弟的起床和響動;這樣花了兩小時的心血,她居然弄好一頓午餐,很簡單,也不多花錢,可是家里的老規(guī)矩已經(jīng)破壞完了,照例午餐是站著吃的,各人不過吃一些面包,一個果子,或是一些牛油,外加一杯酒?,F(xiàn)在壁爐旁邊擺著桌子,堂兄弟的刀叉前面放了一張靠椅,桌上擺了兩盆水果,一個蛋盅,一瓶白酒,面包,襯碟內(nèi)高高地堆滿了糖:歐也妮望著這些,想到萬一父親這時候回家瞪著她的那副眼光,不由得四肢哆嗦。因此她一刻不停地望著鐘,計算堂兄弟是否能夠在父親回來之前用完早餐。

“放心,歐也妮,要是你爸爸回來,一切歸我擔(dān)當(dāng)。”葛朗臺太太說。歐也妮忍不住掉下一滴眼淚,叫道:

“哦!好媽媽,怎么報答你呢?”

查理哼呀唱呀,在房內(nèi)不知繞了多少圈,終于下樓了,還好,時間不過十一點(diǎn)。這巴黎人!他穿扮得花哨,仿佛在蘇格蘭的那位貴婦人爵府上做客。他進(jìn)門時那副笑盈盈的怪和氣的神情,配上青春年少多么合適,叫歐也妮看了又快活又難受。意想中伯父的行宮別墅,早已成為空中樓閣,他卻嘻嘻哈哈地滿不在乎,很高興地招呼他的伯母:

“伯母,你昨夜睡得好嗎?還有你呢,大姊?”

“很好,侄少爺,你自己呢?”葛朗臺太太回答。

“我么?睡得好極了。”

“你一定餓了,弟弟,”歐也妮說,“來用早點(diǎn)吧。”

“中午以前我從來不吃東西,那時我才起身呢。不過路上的飯食太壞了,不妨隨便一點(diǎn)兒,而且……”

說著他掏出勃萊甘造的一只最細(xì)巧的平底表。

“咦,只有十一點(diǎn),我起早了。”

“早了?”葛朗臺太太問。

“是呀,可是我要整東西。也罷,有東西吃也不壞,隨便什么都行,家禽嘍,鷓鴣嘍。”

“啊,圣母瑪利亞!”拿儂聽了不禁叫起來。

“鷓鴣!”歐也妮心里想,她恨不得把全部私蓄去買一只鷓鴣。

“這兒坐吧。”伯母招呼他。

花花公子懶洋洋地倒在靠椅中,好似一個漂亮女子擺著姿勢坐在一張半榻上。歐也妮和母親端了兩張椅子在壁爐前面,坐在他旁邊。

“你們終年住在這兒嗎?”查理問。他發(fā)覺堂屋在白天比在燈光底下更丑了。

“是的,”歐也妮望著他回答,“除非收割葡萄的時候,我們?nèi)鸵幌履脙z,住在諾阿伊哀修道院里。”

“你們從來不出去遛遛嗎?”

“有時候,星期日做完了晚禱,天晴的話,”葛朗臺太太回答,“我們到橋邊去,或者在割草的季節(jié)去看割草。”

“這兒有戲院沒有?”

“看戲!”葛朗臺太太嚷道,“看戲子!哎喲,侄少爺,難道你不知道這是該死的罪孽嗎?”

“喂,好少爺,”拿儂捧著雞子進(jìn)來說,“請你嘗嘗帶殼子雞。”

“哦!新鮮的雞子?”查理叫道。他正像那些慣于奢華的人一樣,已經(jīng)把他的鷓鴣忘掉了,“好極了!可有些牛油嗎,好嫂子?”

“??!牛油!那么你們不想吃千層餅了?”老媽子說。

“把牛油拿來,拿儂!”歐也妮叫道。

少女留神瞧著堂兄弟把面包切成小塊,覺得津津有味,正如巴黎最多情的女工,看一出好人得勝的戲一樣。查理受過極有涵養(yǎng)的母親教養(yǎng),又給一個時髦女子琢磨過了,的確有些愛嬌而文雅的小動作,頗像一個風(fēng)騷的情婦。少女的同情與溫柔,真有磁石般的力量。查理一看見堂姊與伯母對他的體貼,覺得那股潮水般向他沖來的感情,簡直沒法抗拒。他對歐也妮又慈祥又憐愛地瞧了一眼,充滿了笑意。把歐也妮端詳之下,他覺得純潔的臉上線條和諧到極點(diǎn),態(tài)度天真,清朗有神的眼睛閃出年輕的愛情,只有愿望而沒有肉欲的成分。

“老實(shí)說,親愛的大姊,要是你盛裝坐在巴黎歌劇院的花樓里,我敢保證伯母的話沒有錯,你要叫男人動心,叫女人妒忌,他們?nèi)梅缸锬亍?rdquo;

這番恭維雖然使歐也妮莫名其妙,卻把她的心抓住了,快樂得直跳。

“噢!弟弟,你取笑我這個可憐的鄉(xiāng)下姑娘。”

“要是你識得我的脾氣,大姊,你就知道我是最恨取笑的人:取笑會使一個人的心干枯,傷害所有的情感。”

說罷他有模有樣地吞下一小塊涂著牛油的面包。

“對了,大概我沒有取笑人家的聰明,所以吃虧不少。在巴黎,‘他心地好呀’這樣的話,可以把一個人羞得無處容身。因?yàn)檫@句話的意思是‘其蠢似牛’。但是我,因?yàn)橛绣X,誰都知道我拿起隨便什么手槍,三十步外第一下就能打中靶子,而且還是在野地里,所以沒有人敢開我玩笑。”

“侄兒,這些話就證明你的心好。”

“你的戒指漂亮極了,”歐也妮說,“給我瞧瞧不妨事吧?”

查理伸手脫下戒指,歐也妮的指尖,和堂兄弟粉紅的指甲輕輕碰了一下,馬上臉紅了。

“媽媽,你看,多好的手工。”

“噢!多少金子啊。”拿儂端了咖啡進(jìn)來,說。

“這是什么?”查理笑著問,他指著一個又高又瘦的土黃色的陶壺,上過釉彩,里邊搪瓷的,四周堆著一圈灰土;里面的咖啡沖到面上又往底下翻滾。

“煮滾的咖啡呀。”拿儂回答。

“??!親愛的伯母,既然我在這兒住,至少得留下些好事做紀(jì)念。你們太落伍了!我來教你們怎樣用夏伯太咖啡壺來煮成好咖啡。”

接著他解釋用夏伯太咖啡壺的一套方法。

“哎喲,這樣麻煩,”拿儂說,“要花上一輩子的工夫。我才不高興這樣煮咖啡呢。不是嗎,我煮了咖啡,誰給咱們的母牛割草呢?”

“我來割。”歐也妮接口。

“孩子!”葛朗臺太太望著女兒。

這句話,把馬上要臨到這可憐的青年頭上的禍?zhǔn)?,提醒了大家,三個婦女一齊閉口,不勝憐憫地望著他,使他大吃一驚。

“什么事,大姊?”

歐也妮正要回答,被母親喝住了:

“噓!孩子,你知道父親會對先生說的……”

“叫我查理吧。”年輕的葛朗臺說。

“啊!你名叫查理?多美麗的名字!”歐也妮叫道。

凡是預(yù)感到的禍?zhǔn)?,差不多全會來的。拿儂,葛朗臺太太和歐也妮,想到老箍桶匠回家就會發(fā)抖的,偏偏聽到那么熟悉的門錘聲響了一下。

“爸爸來了!”歐也妮叫道。

她在桌布上留下了幾塊糖,把糖碟子收了。拿儂把盛雞蛋的盤子端走。葛朗臺太太筆直地站著,像一頭受驚的小鹿。這一場突如其來的驚慌,弄得查理莫名其妙。他問:

“嗨,嗨,你們怎么啦?”

“爸爸來了呀。”歐也妮回答。

“那又怎么樣?”

葛朗臺進(jìn)來,尖利的眼睛望了望桌子,望了望查理,什么都明白了。

“?。“?!你們替侄兒擺酒,好吧,很好,好極了!”他一點(diǎn)兒都不口吃地說,“貓兒上了屋,耗子就在地板上跳舞啦。”

“擺酒?”查理暗中奇怪。他想象不到這份人家的伙食和生活習(xí)慣。

“把我的酒拿來,拿儂。”老頭兒吩咐。

歐也妮端了一杯給他。他從荷包里掏出一把面子很闊的牛角刀,割了一塊面包,拿了一些牛油,很仔細(xì)地涂上了,就地站著吃起來。這時查理正把糖放入咖啡。葛朗臺一眼瞥見那么些糖,便打量著他的女人,她臉色發(fā)白地走了過來。他附在可憐的老婆耳邊問:

“哪兒來的這么些糖?”

“拿儂上番查鋪?zhàn)淤I的,家里沒有了。”

這默默無聲的一幕使三位女人怎樣地緊張,簡直難以想象。拿儂從廚房里跑出來,向堂屋內(nèi)張望,看看事情怎么樣。查理嘗了嘗咖啡,覺得太苦,想再加些糖,已經(jīng)給葛朗臺收起了。

“侄兒,你找什么?”老頭兒問。

“找糖。”

“沖些牛奶,咖啡就不苦了。”葛朗臺回答。

歐也妮把父親藏起的糖碟子重新拿來放上桌子,聲色不動地打量著父親。真的,一個巴黎女子幫助情人逃走,用嬌弱的胳膊拉住從窗口掛到地下的絲繩那種勇氣,也不見得勝過把糖重新放上桌子時歐也妮的勇氣??墒前屠枧邮怯谐陥蟮模利惖氖直凵厦扛軅难?,都會由情人用眼淚與親吻來滋潤,用快樂來治療;歐也妮被父親霹靂般的目光瞪著,驚慌到心都碎了,而這種秘密的痛苦,查理是永遠(yuǎn)不會得知的。

“你不吃東西嗎,太太?”葛朗臺問他的女人。

可憐的奴隸走過來恭恭敬敬地切了塊面包,撿了一只梨。歐也妮大著膽子請父親吃葡萄:

“爸爸,嘗嘗我的干葡萄吧!——弟弟,也吃一點(diǎn)兒好不好?這些美麗的葡萄,我特地為你摘來的。”

“哦!再不阻止的話,她們?yōu)榱四阋阉髂菗尮饽?,侄兒。你吃完了,咱們到花園里去;我有事跟你談,那可是不甜的嘍。”

歐也妮和母親對查理瞅了一眼,那種表情,查理馬上懂得了。

“你是什么意思,伯父?自從我可憐的母親去世以后……(說到母親二字他的聲音軟了下來),不會再有什么禍?zhǔn)铝?hellip;…”

“侄兒,誰知道上帝想用什么災(zāi)難來磨煉我們呢?”他的伯母說。

“咄,咄,咄,咄!”葛朗臺叫道,“又來胡說八道。——侄兒,我看到你這雙漂亮雪白的手真難受。”

他指著手臂盡處那雙羊肩般的手。

“明明是生來撈錢的手!你的教養(yǎng),卻把我們做公事包放票據(jù)用的皮,穿在你腳上。不行哪!不行哪!”

“伯父,你究竟什么意思?我可以賭咒,簡直一個字都不懂。”

“來吧。”葛朗臺回答。

吝嗇鬼把刀子折起,喝干了杯中剩下的白酒,開門出去。

“弟弟,拿出勇氣來呀!”

少女的聲調(diào)叫查理渾身冰冷,他跟著厲害的伯父出去,焦急得要命。拿儂和歐也妮母女,按捺不住好奇心,一齊跑到廚房,偷偷瞧著兩位演員,那幕戲就要在潮濕的小花園中演出了。伯父跟侄兒先是不聲不響地走著。

說出查理父親的死訊,葛朗臺并沒覺得為難,但知道查理一個錢都沒有了,倒有些同情,私下想怎樣措辭才能把悲慘的事實(shí)弄得和緩一些。“你父親死了”這樣的話,沒有什么大不了。為父的總死在孩子前面??墒?ldquo;你一點(diǎn)兒家產(chǎn)都沒有了”這句話,卻包括了世界上所有的苦難。老頭兒在園子中間咯咯作響的沙徑上已經(jīng)走到了第三圈。在一生的重要關(guān)頭,凡是悲歡離合之事發(fā)生的場所,總跟我們的心牢牢地黏在一塊。所以查理特別注意到小園中的黃楊,枯萎的落葉,剝落的圍墻,奇形怪狀的果樹,以及一切別有風(fēng)光的細(xì)節(jié);這些都將成為他不可磨滅的回憶,和這個重大的時間永久分不開。因?yàn)榧ち业那榫w有一種特別的記憶力。

葛朗臺深深呼了一口氣:

“天氣真熱,真好。”

“是的,伯父,可是為什么?……”

“是這樣的,孩子,”伯父接著說,“我有壞消息告訴你。你父親危險得很……”

“那么我還在這兒干嗎?”查理叫道,“拿儂,上驛站去要馬!我總該在這里弄到一輛車吧。”他轉(zhuǎn)身向伯父補(bǔ)上一句??墒遣刚局粍?。

“車呀馬呀都不中用了。”葛朗臺瞅著查理回答,查理一聲不出,眼睛發(fā)呆了。“是的,可憐的孩子,你猜著了。他已經(jīng)死了。這還不算,還有更嚴(yán)重的事呢,他是用手槍自殺的……”

“我的父親?”

“是的??墒沁@還不算。報紙上還有名有分地批評他呢。哦,你念吧。”

葛朗臺拿出問克羅旭借來的報紙,把那段駭人的新聞送在查理眼前??蓱z的青年這時還是一個孩子,還在極容易流露感情的年紀(jì),他眼淚涌了出來。

“啊,好啦,”葛朗臺私下想,“他的眼睛嚇了我一跳。現(xiàn)在他哭了,不要緊了。”

“這還不算一回事呢,可憐的侄兒,”葛朗臺高聲往下說,也不知道查理有沒有在聽他,“這還不算一回事呢,你慢慢會忘掉的,可是……”

“不會!永遠(yuǎn)不會!爸爸呀!爸爸呀!”

“他把你的家敗光了,你一個錢也沒有了。”

“那有什么相干?我的爸爸呢?……爸爸!”

圍墻中間只聽見號哭與抽噎的聲音凄凄慘慘響成一片,而且還有回聲。三個女人都感動得哭了:眼淚跟笑聲一樣會傳染的。查理不再聽他的伯父說話了,他沖進(jìn)院子,摸到樓梯,跑到房內(nèi)橫倒在床上,把被窩蒙著臉,預(yù)備躲開了親人痛哭一場。

“讓第一陣暴雨過了再說。”葛朗臺走進(jìn)堂屋道。這時歐也妮和母親急匆匆地回到原位,抹了抹眼淚,顫巍巍的手指重新做起活計來。“可是這孩子沒有出息,把死人看得比錢還重。”

歐也妮聽見父親對最圣潔的感情說出這種話,不禁打了個寒噤。從此她就開始批判父親了。查理的抽噎雖然沉了下去,在這所到處有回聲的屋子里仍舊聽得清清楚楚;仿佛來自地下的沉痛的呼號,慢慢地微弱,到傍晚才完全止住。

“可憐的孩子!”葛朗臺太太說。

這句慨嘆可出了事。葛朗臺老頭瞅著他的女人,瞅著歐也妮和糖碟子,記起了請倒霉侄兒吃的那頓豐盛的早餐,便站在堂屋中央,照例很鎮(zhèn)靜地說:

“啊!葛朗臺太太,希望你以后不要再亂花錢。我的錢不是給你買糖喂那個小渾蛋的。”

“不關(guān)母親的事,”歐也妮說,“是我……”

“你成年了就想跟我鬧別扭是不是?”葛朗臺截住了女兒的話,“歐也妮,你該想一想……”

“父親,你弟弟的兒子在你家里總不成連……”

“咄,咄,咄,咄!”老箍桶匠這四個字全是用的半音階,“又是我弟弟的兒子呀,又是我的侄兒呀。哼,查理跟咱們什么相干?他連一個子兒、半個子兒都沒有,他父親破產(chǎn)了。等這花花公子稱心如意地哭夠了,就叫他滾蛋;我才不讓他把我的家攪得天翻地覆呢。”

“父親,什么叫作破產(chǎn)?”

“破產(chǎn),”父親回答說,“是最丟人的事,比所有丟人的事還要丟人。”

“那一定是罪孽深重啰,”葛朗臺太太說,“我們的弟弟要入地獄了吧。”

“得了吧,你又來婆婆媽媽的,”他聳聳肩膀,“歐也妮,破產(chǎn)就是竊盜,可是有法律保護(hù)的竊盜。人家憑了琪奧默·葛朗臺的信用跟清白的名聲,把口糧交給他,他卻統(tǒng)統(tǒng)吞沒了,只給人家留下一雙眼睛落眼淚。破產(chǎn)的人比路劫的強(qiáng)盜還要不得:強(qiáng)盜攻擊你,你可以防衛(wèi),他也拼著腦袋;至于破產(chǎn)的人……總而言之,查理是丟盡了臉。”

這些話一直響到可憐的姑娘心里,全部說話的分量壓在她心頭。她天真老實(shí)的程度,不下于森林中的鮮花嬌嫩的程度,既不知道社會上的教條,也不懂似是而非的論調(diào),更不知道那些騙人的推理;所以她完全相信父親的解釋,不知他是有心把破產(chǎn)說得那么卑鄙,不告訴她有計劃的破產(chǎn)跟迫不得已的破產(chǎn)是不同的。

“那么父親,那樁倒霉事兒你沒有法子阻攔嗎?”

“兄弟并沒有跟我商量,而且他虧空四百萬呢。”

“什么叫作一百萬,父親?”她那種天真,好像一個要什么就有什么的孩子。

“一百萬?”葛朗臺說,“那就是一百萬個二十銅子的錢,五個二十銅子的錢才能湊成五法郎。”

“天哪!天哪!叔叔怎么能有四百萬呢?法國可有人有這么幾百萬幾百萬的嗎?”

葛朗臺老頭摸摸下巴,微微笑著,肉瘤似乎脹大了些。

“那么堂兄弟怎么辦呢?”

“到印度去,照他父親的意思,他應(yīng)該想法在那兒發(fā)財。”

“他有沒有錢上那兒去呢?”

“我給他路費(fèi)……送他到……是的,送他到南德。”

歐也妮跳上去勾住了父親的脖子。

“??!父親,你真好,你!”

她擁抱他的那股勁兒,差一點(diǎn)兒叫葛朗臺慚愧,他的良心有些不好過了。

“賺到一百萬要很多時候吧?”她問。

“哦,”箍桶匠說,“你知道什么叫作一塊拿破侖[4]吧;一百萬就得五萬拿破侖。”

“媽媽,咱們得替他念‘九天經(jīng)’吧?”

“我已經(jīng)想到了。”母親回答。

“又來了!老是花錢,”父親嚷道,“??!你們以為家里幾千幾百的花不完嗎?”

這時頂樓上傳來一聲格外凄慘的悲啼,把歐也妮和她的母親嚇呆了。

“拿儂,上去瞧瞧:別讓他自殺了。”葛朗臺這句話把母女倆聽得臉色發(fā)白,他卻轉(zhuǎn)身吩咐她們,“啊!你們,別胡鬧。我要走了,跟咱們的荷蘭客人打交道去,他們今天動身。過后我得去看克羅旭,談?wù)勥@些事。”

他走了。葛朗臺帶上大門,歐也妮和母親呼吸都自由了。那天以前,女兒在父親前面從來不覺得拘束;但幾小時以來,她的感情跟思想時時刻刻都在變化。

“媽媽,一桶酒能賣多少法郎?”

“你父親的價錢是一百到一百五十,聽說有時賣到兩百。”

“那么他有一千四百桶收成的時候……”

“老實(shí)說,孩子,我不知道那可以賣到多少;你父親從來不跟我談他的生意。”

“這么說來,爸爸應(yīng)該有錢哪。”

“也許是吧。不過克羅旭先生跟我說,他兩年以前買了法勞豐。大概他現(xiàn)在手頭不寬。”

歐也妮對父親的財產(chǎn)再也弄不清了。她的計算便至此為止。

“他連看也沒看到我,那小少爺!”拿儂下樓說,“他躺在床上像頭小牛,哭得像圣女瑪特蘭納,真想不到!這可憐的好少爺干嗎這樣傷心呀?”

“我們趕快去安慰安慰他吧,媽媽;等有人敲門,我們就下樓。”

葛朗臺太太抵抗不了女兒那么悅耳的聲音。歐也妮變得偉大了,已經(jīng)是成熟的女人了。

兩個人忐忑地上樓,走向查理的臥房。房門打開在那里。查理什么都沒有看見,什么都沒有聽見。他浸在淚水中間,不成音節(jié)地在那里哼哼唧唧。

“他對他父親多好!”歐也妮輕輕地說。

這句話的音調(diào),明明顯出她不知不覺已經(jīng)動了情,存著希望。葛朗臺太太慈祥地望了女兒一眼,附在她耳邊悄悄地說:

“小心,你要愛上他了。”

“愛他!”歐也妮答道,“你沒有聽見父親說的話呢!”

查理翻了一個身,看見了伯母跟堂姊。

“父親死了,我可憐的父親!要是他把心中的苦難告訴我,我跟他兩個可以想法子挽回啊。我的上帝!我的好爸爸!我以為不久就會看到他的,臨走對他就沒有什么親熱的表示……”

他一陣嗚咽,說不下去了。

“我們?yōu)樗\告就是了,”葛朗臺太太說,“你得聽從主的意思。”

“弟弟,勇敢些!父親死了是挽回不來的;現(xiàn)在應(yīng)該挽回你的名譽(yù)……”

女人的本能和乖巧,對什么事都很機(jī)靈,在安慰人家的時候也是如此;歐也妮想叫堂兄弟關(guān)切他自己,好減輕一些痛苦。

“我的名譽(yù)?”他猛地把頭發(fā)一甩,抱著胳膊在床上坐起。

“?。〔诲e。伯父說我父親是破產(chǎn)了。”

他凄厲地大叫一聲,把手蒙住了臉。

“你走開,大姊,你走開!我的上帝,我的上帝!饒恕我的父親吧,他已經(jīng)太痛苦了。”

年輕人的真實(shí)的、沒有計算、沒有作用的痛苦的表現(xiàn),真是又慘又動人。查理揮手叫她們走開的時候,歐也妮和母親兩顆單純的心,都懂得這是一種不能讓旁人參與的痛苦。她們下樓,默默地回到窗下的座位上,不聲不響地工作了一小時。憑著少女們一眼之間什么都看清了的眼睛,歐也妮早已瞥見堂兄弟美麗的梳妝用具,金鑲的剪刀和剃刀之類。在痛苦的氣氛中看到這種奢華氣派,使她對比之下更關(guān)切查理。母女倆一向過著平靜與孤獨(dú)的生活,從來沒有一樁這樣嚴(yán)重的事,一個這樣驚心動魄的場面,刺激過她們的幻想。

“媽媽,”歐也妮說,“咱們應(yīng)該替叔叔戴孝吧?”

“你父親會決定的。”葛朗臺太太回答。

她們又不作聲了。歐也妮一針一針縫著,有規(guī)律的動作很可使一個旁觀的人覺察她內(nèi)容豐富的冥想。這可愛的姑娘第一個愿望,是想跟堂兄弟一起守喪。

四點(diǎn)光景,門上來勢洶洶地敲了一陣,把葛朗臺太太駭?shù)眯膬褐碧?,對女兒說:

“你父親什么事呀?”

葛朗臺高高興興地進(jìn)來,脫下手套,兩手拼命地搓,幾乎把皮膚都擦破,幸而他的表皮像俄國皮那樣上過硝似的,只差沒有加過香料。他踱來踱去,一刻不停地看鐘。臨了他心頭的秘密泄露了,一點(diǎn)兒也不口吃地說:

“告訴你,太太,他們都中了我的計。咱們的酒賣掉了!荷蘭人跟比國人今兒動身,我在廣場上閑蕩,在他們的旅館前面,裝作無聊的神氣。你認(rèn)識的那家伙就來找我。所有出產(chǎn)好葡萄的人都壓著貨不肯賣,我自然不去阻攔他們。咱們的比國人可是慌了。我看得清清楚楚。結(jié)果是兩百法郎一桶成交,一半付現(xiàn)。收到的貨款全是黃金。合同已經(jīng)簽下,這六個路易[5]是給你的傭金。再過三個月,酒價一定要跌。”

他說最后一句的時候語氣很鎮(zhèn)靜,可是話中帶刺。索漠的人這時擠在廣場上,葛朗臺的酒脫手的消息已經(jīng)把他們嚇壞了,要是再聽到上面的話,他們一定會氣得發(fā)抖。人心的慌亂可能使酒價跌去一半。

“今年你不是有一千桶酒嗎,父親?”歐也妮問。

“是啊,小乖乖。”

這個稱呼是老箍桶匠快樂到了極點(diǎn)的表示。

“可以賣到二十萬法郎嘍?”

“是的,葛朗臺小姐。”

“這樣,父親,你很容易幫查理的忙了。”

當(dāng)初巴比倫王拜太查,看到神秘的手在墻上預(yù)告他的死亡時,他的憤怒與驚愕也不能跟這時葛朗臺的怒火相比。他早已把侄兒忘得一干二凈,卻發(fā)覺侄兒始終盤踞在女兒心里,在女兒的計算之中。

“啊,好!這個花花公子一進(jìn)了我的家,什么都顛倒了。你們擺闊,買糖果,花天酒地地請客。我可不答應(yīng)。到了這個年紀(jì),我總該知道怎么做人了吧!并且也輪不到女兒,輪不到誰來教訓(xùn)我。應(yīng)該怎樣對付我的侄兒,我就怎樣對付。不用你們管。——至于你,歐也妮,”他轉(zhuǎn)過身子對她說,“再不許提到他,要不,我把你跟拿儂一起送到諾阿伊哀修道院去,看我做得到做不到;你再哼一聲,明天就打發(fā)你走。——他在哪兒,這孩子?下過樓沒有?”

“沒有,朋友。”葛朗臺太太回答。

“他在干什么?”

“哭他的父親哪。”歐也妮回答。

葛朗臺瞪著女兒,想不出話來。他好歹也是父親啊。在堂屋里轉(zhuǎn)了兩下,他急急忙忙上樓,躲進(jìn)密室去考慮買公債的計劃。連根砍掉的兩千阿爾邦的林木,賣到六十萬法郎;加上白楊,上年和當(dāng)年的收入,以及最近成交的二十萬法郎買賣,總數(shù)大概有九十萬。公債行情是七十法郎,短時期內(nèi)好賺二分利,他很想試一試。他拿起記載兄弟死訊的那張報紙,寫下數(shù)目計算起來,雖然聽到侄兒的呻吟,也沒有聽進(jìn)耳朵。

拿儂跑來敲敲墻壁請主人下樓,晚飯已經(jīng)預(yù)備好了。走到穹隆下面樓梯的最后一級,葛朗臺心里想:

“既然有八厘利,我一定做這筆生意。兩年以后可以有一百五十萬金洋從巴黎提回來。——哎,侄兒在哪里?”

“他說不要吃飯,”拿儂說,“真是不顧身體。”

“省省我的糧食也好。”主人回答。

“是吧。”她說。

“嘿!他不會永遠(yuǎn)哭下去的。肚子餓了,樹林里的狼也躲不住呢。”

晚飯時候,大家好古怪地不出一聲。等到桌布拿掉了,葛朗臺太太才說:

“好朋友,咱們該替兄弟戴孝吧。”

“真是,太太,你只曉得想出花錢的玩意兒。戴孝在乎心,不在乎衣服。”

“可是兄弟的孝不能不戴,教會吩咐我們……”

“就在你六個路易里支出,買你們的孝服吧。我只要一塊黑紗就行。”

歐也妮抬起眼睛向上望了望,一言不發(fā)。她慷慨的天性素來潛伏著,受著壓制,第一遭覺醒了,又時時刻刻受到傷害。

這一晚,表面上跟他們單調(diào)生活中無數(shù)的夜晚一樣,但卻是最難受的一晚。歐也妮頭也不抬地做她的活計,也不動用隔夜被查理看得一文不值的針線匣。葛朗臺太太編織她的套袖。葛朗臺坐在一邊把大拇指繞動了四小時,想著明天會叫索漠全城吃驚的計算,出神了。

那晚誰也沒有上門。滿城都在談?wù)摳鹄逝_的那一下辣手,他兄弟的破產(chǎn),和侄子的到來。為了需要對共同的利益嘮叨一番,索漠城內(nèi)所有中上階層的葡萄園主,都擠在臺·格拉桑府上,對前任區(qū)長破口大罵。

拿儂照例績麻,堂屋的灰色的樓板下面,除了紡車聲,更沒有別的聲響。

“哎,哎,咱們都愛惜舌頭,舍不得用哪。”她說著,露出一排又白又大的牙齒,像光杏仁。

“是呀,什么都得愛惜。”葛朗臺如夢方醒似的回答。

他遠(yuǎn)遠(yuǎn)里看到三年以后的八百萬家私,他在一片黃金的海上載沉載浮。

“咱們睡覺吧。我代表大家去向侄兒說一聲晚安,順便瞧瞧他要不要吃點(diǎn)兒東西。”

葛朗臺太太站在二層樓的樓梯臺上,想聽聽老頭兒跟查理說些什么。歐也妮比母親大膽,更走上兩級。

“喂,侄兒,你心里難受是不是?好吧,你哭吧,這是常情。父親總是父親??墒俏覀冇龅娇嚯y就得耐心忍受。你在這里哭,我卻在替你打算。你瞧,做伯父的對你多好。來,拿出勇氣來。要不要喝一小杯酒呢?”

索漠的酒是不值錢的:請人喝酒就像印度人請喝茶。

“哎,”葛朗臺接著說,“你沒有點(diǎn)火。要不得,要不得!做什么事都得看個清楚啊。”

說著他走到壁爐架前面。

“喲!這不是白燭嗎?哪兒來的白燭?娘兒們?yōu)榱颂孢@個孩子煮雞蛋,把我樓板都會拆掉呢!”

一聽到這幾句,母女倆趕緊回房,鉆在床上,像受驚的耗子逃回老巢一樣快。

“葛朗臺太太,你有金山銀山不是?”丈夫走進(jìn)妻子的臥房問。

“朋友,我在禱告,等一會兒好不好?”可憐的母親聲音異樣地回答。

“見他的鬼,你的好天爺!”葛朗臺咕嚕著說。

凡是守財奴都只知道眼前,不相信來世。葛朗臺這句話,把現(xiàn)在這個時代赤裸裸地暴露了出來。金錢控制法律,控制政治,控制風(fēng)俗,到了前所未有的程度。學(xué)校,書籍,人物,主義,一切都在破壞對來世的信仰,破壞這一千八百年以來的社會基礎(chǔ)。如今墳?zāi)怪皇且粋€無人懼怕的階段。死后的未來,給提到現(xiàn)在來了。不管什么義與不義,只要能夠達(dá)到塵世的天堂,享盡繁華之福,化心肝為鐵石,胼手胝足地去爭取暫時的財富,像從前的殉道者為了未來的幸福而受盡苦難一樣。這是今日最普遍的,到處都揭示著的思想,甚至法律上也這樣寫著。法律不是問立法者“你想些什么?”而是問“你出多少代價?”等到這種主義從布爾喬亞傳布到平民大眾的時候,真不知我們的國家要變成什么模樣。

“太太,你完了沒有?”老箍桶匠問。

“朋友,我還在為你祈禱呢。”

“好吧!再見。明兒早上再談。”

可憐的女人睡下時,仿佛小學(xué)生沒有念熟功課,生怕醒來看到老師生氣的面孔。正當(dāng)她懷著鬼胎鉆入被窩,蒙住耳朵時,歐也妮穿著襯衣,光著腳,跑到床前,吻著她的前額說:

“噢!好媽媽,明天我跟他說,一切都是我做的。”

“不行,他會送你到諾阿伊哀。還是讓我來對付,他不會把我吃掉的。”

“你聽見沒有,媽媽?”

“什么?”

“他老是在哭哪。”

“去睡覺吧,孩子。你光著腳要受涼了,地磚潮得很呢。”

這一重大的日子就這樣過去了。有錢而可憐的獨(dú)養(yǎng)女兒,一輩子都忘不了這一日;從今以后,她的睡眠再沒有從前那么酣暢、那么深沉了。

人生有些行為,雖然千真萬確,但從事情本身看,往往像是不可能的。大概我們對于一些自發(fā)的決心,從沒加以心理的剖析,對于促成那些行為的神秘的原因,沒有加以說明。歐也妮深刻的熱情,也許要在她最微妙的組織中去分析;因?yàn)樗臒崆椋缫话銗弁诳嗟娜怂f的,變成了一種病,使她終身受到影響。許多人寧可否認(rèn)事情的結(jié)局,不愿估計一下把許多精神現(xiàn)象暗中聯(lián)系起來的關(guān)系、樞紐和連鎖的力量。在懂得觀察人性的人,看了歐也妮的過去,就知道她會天真到毫無顧忌,會突如其來地流露感情。她過去的生活越平靜,女子的憐憫,這最有機(jī)智的情感,在她心中發(fā)展得越猛烈。所以被白天的事情擾亂之下,她夜里驚醒了好幾次,探聽堂兄弟的聲息,以為又聽到了從隔天起一直在她心中響著的哀嘆;忽而她看見他悲傷得閉住了氣,忽而夢見他差不多要餓死了。黎明時分,她確實(shí)聽到一聲可怕的呼喊,便立刻穿衣,在晨光中躡手躡腳地趕到堂兄弟房里。房門打開著,白燭一直燒到盤底上。查理疲倦至極,在靠椅中和衣睡著,腦袋倒在床上。他像一般空肚子的人一樣做著夢。歐也妮此時盡可哭個痛快,盡可仔細(xì)鑒賞這張年輕秀美的臉,臉上刻畫著痛苦的痕跡,眼睛哭腫了,雖然睡著,似乎還在流淚。查理睡夢中受到精神的感應(yīng),覺得歐也妮來了,便睜開眼睛,看見她滿臉同情地站在面前。

“噢,大姊,對不起。”他顯然不知道什么時間,也不知道身在何處。

“弟弟,這里還有幾顆真誠的心聽到你的聲音,我們以為你需要什么呢。你該好好地睡,這樣坐著太累了。”

“是的。”

“那么再見吧。”

她趕緊溜走,覺得跑到這兒來又高興又害臊。只有天真才會做出這種冒失的事。要是心里明白的話,連德行也會像罪惡一般做種種計較的。歐也妮在堂兄弟面前并沒發(fā)抖,一回到自己屋里卻兩腿站不直了。渾渾噩噩的生活突然告終,她左思右想地考慮起來,把自己大大地埋怨了一番。“他對我要怎么想呢!以為我愛上了他吧。”其實(shí)這正是她最希望的。坦白的愛情自有它的預(yù)感,知道愛能生愛。幽居獨(dú)處的姑娘,居然偷偷跑進(jìn)一個青年的屋子,這是何等的大事!在愛情中間,有些思想,有些行為,對某些心靈不就等于神圣的婚約嗎?

一小時以后,她走進(jìn)母親房內(nèi),像平時一樣服侍她起床。然后她倆坐在窗下老位置上等候葛朗臺,焦急的情緒正如一個人害怕責(zé)罵與懲戒的時候,心發(fā)冷發(fā)熱,或者揪緊或者膨脹,看各人的氣質(zhì)而定。這種情緒也很自然,連家畜也感覺到:它們自己不小心而受了傷可以不哼一聲,犯了過失挨了打,一點(diǎn)兒痛苦就會使它們號叫。老頭兒下樓了,心不在焉地跟太太說話,擁抱了一下歐也妮,坐上飯桌,仿佛已經(jīng)忘記了隔夜恐嚇的話。

“侄兒怎么啦?這孩子倒不打攪人。”

“先生,他睡著呢。”拿儂回答。

“再好沒有,他用不到白燭了。”葛朗臺用譏諷的口氣說。

這種反常的寬大,帶些諷刺的高興,使葛朗臺太太不勝驚奇,留神瞧著她的丈夫。老頭兒……(這兒似乎應(yīng)當(dāng)提醒讀者,在都蘭、安育、博愛都、布勒塔尼這些區(qū)域,老頭兒這個名稱——我們已經(jīng)好幾次用來稱呼葛朗臺了——用于最淳厚的人,同時也用于最殘忍的人,只要他們到了相當(dāng)?shù)哪挲g。所以這個稱呼對個人的慈悲仁厚毫無關(guān)系。)老頭兒拿起帽子、手套,說:

“我要到廣場上去溜達(dá)一下,好碰到咱們的幾位克羅旭。”

“歐也妮,你父親心中一定有事。”母親對女兒說。

的確,不大需要睡眠的葛朗臺,夜里大半時間都在做種種初步的盤算。這些盤算,使他的見解、觀察、計劃,特別來得準(zhǔn)確,而且百發(fā)百中,做一樣成功一樣,叫索漠人驚嘆不已。人類所有的力量,只是耐心加上時間的混合。所謂強(qiáng)者是既有意志,又能等待時機(jī)。守財奴的生活,便是不斷地運(yùn)用這種力量為自我效勞。他只依賴兩種情感:自尊心與利益。但利益既是自尊心的實(shí)際表現(xiàn),又是真正優(yōu)越的憑據(jù),所以自尊心與利益是一物的兩面,都從自私自利來的。因此,凡是守財奴都特別耐人尋味,只要有高明的手段把他烘托出來。這種人物涉及所有的情感,可以說集情感之大成,而我們個個人都跟他們一脈相通。哪里有什么全無欲望的人?而沒有金錢,哪個欲望能夠滿足?

葛朗臺的確心中有事,照他妻子的說法。像所有的守財奴一樣,他非跟人家鉤心斗角,把他們的錢合法地賺過來不可,這在他是一種無時或已的需要。搜刮旁人,豈非施展自己的威力,使自己老是可以有名有分地瞧不起那些過于懦弱的、給人吃掉的人嗎?躺在上帝面前的那平安恬靜的羔羊,真是塵世的犧牲者最動人的寫照,象征了犧牲者在彼世界的生活,證明懦弱與受苦受到何等的光榮。可是這些微言奧旨有誰懂得?守財奴只知道把這頭羔羊養(yǎng)得肥肥的,把它關(guān)起來,宰它,烤它,吃掉它,輕蔑它。金錢與鄙薄,才是守財奴的養(yǎng)料。

夜里,老頭兒的念頭換了一個方向;這是他表示寬大的緣故。他想好了一套陰謀詭計,預(yù)備開巴黎人的玩笑,折磨他們,

用戶搜索

瘋狂英語 英語語法 新概念英語 走遍美國 四級聽力 英語音標(biāo) 英語入門 發(fā)音 美語 四級 新東方 七年級 賴世雄 zero是什么意思深圳市新瑞物流園英語學(xué)習(xí)交流群

  • 頻道推薦
  • |
  • 全站推薦
  • 推薦下載
  • 網(wǎng)站推薦