While these events were taking place the post master had hurried home to
open the mysterious package and know its contents.
To my dear Ursula Mirouet, daughter of my natural half-brother, Joseph
Mirouet, and Dinah Grollman:--
My dear Angel,--The fatherly affection I bear you--and which you have
so fully justified--came not only from the promise I gave your father
to take his place, but also from your resemblance to my wife, Ursula
Mirouet, whose grace, intelligence, frankness, and charm you constantly
recall to my mind. Your position as the daughter of a natural son of my
father-in-law might invalidate all testamentary bequests made by me in
your favor--
“The old rascal!” cried the post master.
Had I adopted you the result might also have been a lawsuit, and I
shrank from the idea of transmitting my fortune to you by marriage, for
I might live years and thus interfere with your happiness, which is
now delayed only by Madame de Portenduere. Having weighted these
difficulties carefully, and wishing to leave you enough money to secure
to you a prosperous existence--
“The scoundrel, he has thought of everything!”
--without injuring my heirs--
“The Jesuit! as if he did not owe us every penny of his money!”--I
intend you to have the savings from my income which I have for the last
eighteen years steadily invested, by the help of my notary, seeking
to make you thereby as happy as any one can be made by riches. Without
means, your education and your lofty ideas would cause you unhappiness.
Besides, you ought to bring a liberal dowry to the fine young man who
loves you. You will therefore find in the middle of the third volume
of Pandects, folio, bound in red morocco (the last volume on the first
shelf above the little table in the library, on the side of the room
next the salon), three certificates of Funds in the three-per-cents,
made out to bearer, each amounting to twelve thousand francs a year--
“What depths of wickedness!” screamed the post master. “Ah! God would
not permit me to be so defrauded.”
Take these at once, and also some uninvested savings made to this date,
which you will find in the preceding volume. Remember, my darling child,
that you must obey a wish that has made the happiness of my whole life;
a wish that will force me to ask the intervention of God should
you disobey me. But, to guard against all scruples in your dear
conscience--for I well know how ready it is to torture you--you will
find herewith a will in due form bequeathing these certificates to
Monsieur Savinien de Portenduere. So, whether you possess them in your
own name, or whether they come to you from him you love, they will be,
in every sense, your legitimate property.
Your godfather, Denis Minoret.
To this letter was annexed the following paper written on a sheet of
stamped paper.
This is my will: I, Denis Minoret, doctor of medicine, settled in
Nemours, being of sound mind and body, as the date of this document will
show, do bequeath my soul to God, imploring him to pardon my errors in
view of my sincere repentance. Next, having found in Monsieur le Vicomte
Savinien de Portenduere a true and honest affection for me, I bequeath
to him the sum of thirty-six thousand francs a year from the Funds, at
three per cent, the said bequest to take precedence of all inheritance
accruing to my heirs.
Written by my own hand, at Nemours, on the 11th of January, 1831.
Denis Minoret.
Without an instant’s hesitation the post master, who had locked himself
into his wife’s bedroom to insure being alone, looked about for the
tinder-box, and received two warnings from heaven by the extinction of
two matches which obstinately refused to light. The third took fire. He
burned the letter and the will on the hearth and buried the vestiges of
paper and sealing-wax in the ashes by way of superfluous caution. Then,
allured by the thought of possessing thirty-six thousand francs a year
of which his wife knew nothing, he returned at full speed to his uncle’s
house, spurred by the only idea, a clear-cut, simple idea, which was
able to piece and penetrate his dull brain. Finding the house invaded by
the three families, now masters of the place, he trembled lest he
should be unable to accomplish a project to which he gave no reflection
whatever, except so far as to fear the obstacles.
“What are you doing here?” he said to Massin and Cremiere. “We can’t
leave the house and the property to be pillaged. We are the heirs, but
we can’t camp here. You, Cremiere, go to Dionis at once and tell him to
come and certify to the death; I can’t draw up the mortuary certificate
for an uncle, though I am assistant-mayor. You, Massin, go and ask old
Bongrand to attach the seals. As for you, ladies,” he added, turning to
his wife and Mesdames Cremiere and Massin, “go and look after Ursula;
then nothing can be stolen. Above all, close the iron gate and don’t let
any one leave the house.”
The women, who felt the justice of this remark, ran to Ursula’s bedroom,
where they found the noble girl, so cruelly suspected, on her knees
before God, her face covered with tears. Minoret, suspecting that the
women would not long remain with Ursula, went at once to the library,
found the volume, opened it, took the three certificates, and found in
the other volume about thirty bank notes. In spite of his brutal nature
the colossus felt as though a peal of bells were ringing in each ear.
The blood whistled in his temples as he committed the theft; cold as the
weather was, his shirt was wet on his back; his legs gave way under him
and he fell into a chair in the salon as if an axe had fallen on his
head.
“How the inheritance of money loosens a man’s tongue! Did you hear
Minoret?” said Massin to Cremiere as they hurried through the town. “‘Go
here, go there,’ just as if he knew everything.”
“Yes, for a dull beast like him he had a certain air of--”
“Stop!” said Massin, alarmed at a sudden thought. “His wife is there;
they’ve got some plan! Do you do both errands; I’ll go back.”
Just as the post master fell into the chair he saw at the gate the
heated face of the clerk of the court who returned to the house of death
with the celerity of a weasel.
“Well, what is it now?” asked the post master, unlocking the gate for
his co-heir.
“Nothing; I have come back to be present at the sealing,” answered
Massin, giving him a savage look.
“I wish those seals were already on, so that we could go home,” said
Minoret.
“We shall have to put a watcher over them,” said Massin. “La Bougival
is capable of anything in the interests of that minx. We’ll put Goupil
there.”
“Goupil!” said the post master; “put a rat in the meal!”
“Well, let’s consider,” returned Massin. “To-night they’ll watch the
body; the seals can be affixed in an hour; our wives could look after
them. To-morrow we’ll have the funeral at twelve o’clock. But the
inventory can’t be made under a week.”
“Let’s get rid of that girl at once,” said the colossus; “then we can
safely leave the watchman of the town-hall to look after the house and
the seals.”
“Good,” cried Massin. “You are the head of the Minoret family.”
“Ladies,” said Minoret, “be good enough to stay in the salon; we can’t
think of our dinner to-day; the seals must be put on at once for the
security of all interests.”
He took his wife apart and told her Massin’s proposition about Ursula.
The women, whose hearts were full of vengeance against the minx, as they
called her, hailed the idea of turning her out. Bongrand arrived with
his assistants to apply the seals, and was indignant when the request
was made to him, by Zelie and Madame Massin, as a near friend of the
deceased, to tell Ursula to leave the house.
“Go and turn her out of her father’s house, her benefactor’s house
yourselves,” he cried. “Go! you who owe your inheritance to the
generosity of her soul; take her by the shoulders and fling her into
the street before the eyes of the whole town! You think her capable of
robbing you? Well, appoint a watcher of the seals; you have a right to
do that. But I tell you at once I shall put no seals on Ursula’s room;
she has a right to that room, and everything in it is her own property.
I shall tell her what her rights are, and tell her too to put everything
that belongs to her in this house in that room--Oh! in your presence,”
he said, hearing a growl of dissatisfaction among the heirs.
“What do you think of that?” said the collector to the post master and
the women, who seemed stupefied by the angry address of Bongrand.
“Call _him_ a magistrate!” cried the post master.
Ursula meanwhile was sitting on her little sofa in a half-fainting
condition, her head thrown back, her braids unfastened, while every now
and then her sobs broke forth. Her eyes were dim and their lids swollen;
she was, in fact, in a state of moral and physical prostration which
might have softened the hardest hearts--except those of the heirs.
“Ah! Monsieur Bongrand, after my happy birthday comes death and
mourning,” she said, with the poetry natural to her. “You know, _you_,
what he was. In twenty years he never said an impatient word to me.
I believed he would live a hundred years. He has been my mother,” she
cried, “my good, kind mother.”
These simple thoughts brought torrents of tears from her eyes,
interrupted by sobs; then she fell back exhausted.
“My child,” said the justice of peace, hearing the heirs on the
staircase. “You have a lifetime before you in which to weep, but you
have now only a moment to attend to your interests. Gather everything
that belongs to you in this house and put it into your own room at once.
The heirs insist on my affixing the seals.”
“Ah! his heirs may take everything if they choose,” cried Ursula,
sitting upright under an impulse of savage indignation. “I have
something here,” she added, striking her breast, “which is far more
precious--”
“What is it?” said the post master, who with Massin at his heels now
showed his brutal face.
“The remembrances of his virtues, of his life, of his words--an image of
his celestial soul,” she said, her eyes and face glowing as she raised
her hand with a glorious gesture.
“And a key!” cried Massin, creeping up to her like a cat and seizing a
key which fell from the bosom of her dress in her sudden movement.
“Yes,” she said, blushing, “that is the key of his study; he sent me
there at the moment he was dying.”
The two men glanced at each other with horrid smiles, and then at
Monsieur Bongrand, with a meaning look of degrading suspicion. Ursula
who intercepted it, rose to her feet, pale as if the blood had left her
body. Her eyes sent forth the lightnings that perhaps can issue only at
some cost of life, as she said in a choking voice:--
“Monsieur Bongrand, everything in this room is mine through the kindness
of my godfather; they may have it all; I have nothing on me but the
clothes I wear. I shall leave the house and never return to it.”
She went to her godfather’s room, and no entreaties could make her leave
it,--the heirs, who now began to be slightly ashamed of their conduct,
endeavoring to persuade her. She requested Monsieur Bongrand to engage
two rooms for her at the “Vieille Poste” inn until she could find some
lodging in town where she could live with La Bougival. She returned to
her own room for her prayer-book, and spent the night, with the abbe,
his assistant, and Savinien, in weeping and praying beside her uncle’s
body. Savinien came, after his mother had gone to bed, and knelt,
without a word, beside his Ursula. She smiled at him sadly, and thanked
him for coming faithfully to share her troubles.
“My child,” said Monsieur Bongrand, bring her a large package, “one of
your uncle’s heirs has taken these necessary articles from your drawers,
for the seals cannot be opened for several days; after that you will
recover everything that belongs to you. I have, for your own sake,
placed the seals on your room.”
“Thank you,” she replied, pressing his hand. “Look at him again,--he
seems to sleep, does he not?”
The old man’s face wore that flower of fleeting beauty which rests upon
the features of the dead who die a painless death; light appeared to
radiate from it.
“Did he give you anything secretly before he died?” whispered M.
Bongrand.
“Nothing,” she said; “he spoke only of a letter.”
“Good! it will certainly be found,” said Bongrand. “How fortunate for
you that the heirs demanded the sealing.”
At daybreak Ursula bade adieu to the house where her happy youth was
passed; more particularly, to the modest chamber in which her love
began. So dear to her was it that even in this hour of darkest grief
tears of regret rolled down her face for the dear and peaceful haven.
With one last glance at Savinien’s windows she left the room and the
house, and went to the inn accompanied by La Bougival, who carried the
package, by Monsieur Bongrand, who gave her his arm, and by Savinien,
her true protector.
Thus it happened that in spite of all his efforts and cautions the worst
fears of the justice of peace were realized; he was now to see Ursula
without means and at the mercy of her benefactor’s heirs.
The next afternoon the whole town attended the doctor’s funeral. When
the conduct of the heirs to his adopted daughter was publicly known,
a vast majority of the people thought it natural and necessary. An
inheritance was involved; the good man was known to have hoarded;
Ursula might think she had rights; the heirs were only defending their
property; she had humbled them enough during their uncle’s lifetime, for
he had treated them like dogs and sent them about their business.
Desire Minoret, who was not going to do wonders in life (so said those
who envied his father), came down for the funeral. Ursula was unable to
be present, for she was in bed with a nervous fever, caused partly by
the insults of the heirs and partly by her heavy affliction.
“Look at that hypocrite weeping,” said some of the heirs, pointing to
Savinien, who was deeply affected by the doctor’s death.
“The question is,” said Goupil, “has he any good grounds for weeping.
Don’t laugh too soon, my friends; the seals are not yet removed.”
“Pooh!” said Minoret, who had good reason to know the truth, “you are
always frightening us about nothing.”
As the funeral procession left the church to proceed to the cemetery, a
bitter mortification was inflicted on Goupil; he tried to take Desire’s
arm, but the latter withdrew it and turned away from his former comrade
in presence of all Nemours.
“I won’t be angry, or I couldn’t get revenge,” thought the notary’s
clerk, whose dry heart swelled in his bosom like a sponge.
Before breaking the seals and making the inventory, it took some time
for the procureur du roi, who is the legal guardian of orphans, to
commission Monsieur Bongrand to act in his place. After that was done
the settlement of the Minoret inheritance (nothing else being talked of
in the town for ten days) began with all the legal formalities. Dionis
had his pickings; Goupil enjoyed some mischief-making; and as the
business was profitable the sessions were many. After the first of these
sessions all parties breakfasted together; notary, clerk, heirs, and
witnesses drank the best wines in the doctor’s cellar.
In the provinces, and especially in little towns where every one lives
in his own house, it is sometimes very difficult to find a lodging. When
a man buys a business of any kind the dwelling-house is almost always
included in the purchase. Monsieur Bongrand saw no other way of removing
Ursula from the village inn than to buy a small house on the Grand’Rue
at the corner of the bridge over the Loing. The little building had a
front door opening on a corridor, and one room on the ground-floor with
two windows on the street; behind this came the kitchen, with a glass
door opening to an inner courtyard about thirty feet square. A small
staircase, lighted on the side towards the river by small windows, led
to the first floor where there were three chambers, and above these were
two attic rooms. Monsieur Bongrand borrowed two thousand francs from
La Bougival’s savings to pay the first instalment of the price,--six
thousand francs,--and obtained good terms for payment of the rest.
As Ursula wished to buy her uncle’s books, Bongrand knocked down the
partition between two rooms on the bedroom floor, finding that their
united length was the same as that of the doctor’s library, and gave
room for his bookshelves.
Savinien and Bongrand urged on the workmen who were cleaning, painting,
and otherwise renewing the tiny place, so that before the end of March
Ursula was able to leave the inn and take up her abode in the ugly
house; where, however, she found a bedroom exactly like the one she had
left; for it was filled with all her furniture, claimed by the justice
of peace when the seals were removed. La Bougival, sleeping in the
attic, could be summoned by a bell placed near the head of the
young girl’s bed. The room intended for the books, the salon on the
ground-floor and the kitchen, though still unfurnished, had been hung
with fresh papers and repainted, and only awaited the purchases which
the young girl hoped to make when her godfather’s effects were sold.
Though the strength of Ursula’s character was well known to the abbe and
Monsieur Bongrand, they both feared the sudden change from the comfort
and elegancies to which her uncle had accustomed her to this barren and
denuded life. As for Savinien he wept over it. He did, in fact, make
private payments to the workman and to the upholsterer, so that Ursula
should perceive no difference between the new chamber and the old one.
But the young girl herself, whose happiness now lay in Savinien’s own
eyes, showed the gentlest resignation, which endeared her more and more
to her two old friends, and proved to them for the hundredth time that
no troubles but those of the heart could make her suffer. The grief she
felt for the loss of her godfather was far too deep to let her even feel
the bitterness of her change of fortune, though it added fresh obstacles
to her marriage. Savinien’s distress in seeing her thus reduced did her
so much harm that she whispered to him, as they came from mass on the
morning on the day when she first went to live in her new house:
“Love could not exist without patience; let us wait.”
As soon as the form of the inventory was drawn up, Massin, advised by
Goupil (who turned to him under the influence of his secret hatred to
the post master), summoned Monsieur and Madame de Portenduere to pay off
the mortgage which had now elapsed, together with the interest accruing
thereon. The old lady was bewildered at a summons to pay one hundred
and twenty-nine thousand five hundred and seventeen francs within
twenty-four hours under pain of execution on her house. It was
impossible for her to borrow the money. Savinien went to Fontainebleau
to consult a lawyer.
“You are dealing with a bad set of people who will not compromise,” was
the lawyer’s opinion. “They intend to sue in the matter and get your
farm at Bordieres. The best way for you would be to make a voluntary
sale of it and so escape costs.”
This dreadful news broke down the old lady. Her son very gently
pointed out to her that had she consented to his marriage in Minoret’s
life-time, the doctor would have left his property to Ursula’s husband
and they would to-day have been opulent instead of being, as they now
were, in the depths of poverty. Though said without reproach, this
argument annihilated the poor woman even more than the thought of
her coming ejectment. When Ursula heard of this catastrophe she was
stupefied with grief, having scarcely recovered from her fever, and the
blow which the heirs had already dealt her. To love and be unable to
succor the man she loves,--that is one of the most dreadful of all
sufferings to the soul of a noble and sensitive woman.
“I wished to buy my uncle’s house,” she said, “now I will buy your
mother’s.”
“Can you?” said Savinien. “You are a minor, and you cannot sell out your
Funds without formalities to which the procureur du roi, now your legal
guardian, would not agree. We shall not resist. The whole town will be
glad to see the discomfiture of a noble family. These bourgeois are like
hounds after a quarry. Fortunately, I still have ten thousand francs
left, on which I can support my mother till this deplorable matter is
settled. Besides, the inventory of your godfather’s property is not yet
finished; Monsieur Bongrand still thinks he shall find something for
you. He is as much astonished as I am that you seem to be left without
fortune. The doctor so often spoke both to him and to me of the
future he had prepared for you that neither of us can understand this
conclusion.”
“Pooh!” she said; “so long as I can buy my godfather’s books and
furniture and prevent their being dispersed, I am content.”
“But who knows the price these infamous creatures will set on anything
you want?”
Nothing was talked of from Montargis to Fontainebleau but the million
for which the Minoret heirs were searching. But the most minute search
made in every corner of the house after the seals were removed, brought
no discovery. The one hundred and twenty-nine thousand francs of the
Portenduere debt, the capital of the fifteen thousand a year in the
three per cents (then quoted at 76), the house, valued at forty thousand
francs, and its handsome furniture, produced a total of about six
hundred thousand francs, which to most persons seemed a comforting sum.
But what had become of the money the doctor must have saved?
Minoret began to have gnawing anxieties. La Bougival and Savinien, who
persisted in believing, as did the justice of peace, in the existence
of a will, came every day at the close of each session to find out from
Bongrand the results of the day’s search. The latter would sometimes
exclaim, before the agents and the heirs were fairly out of hearing,
“I can’t understand the thing!” Bongrand, Savinien, and the abbe often
declared to each other that the doctor, who received no interest from
the Portenduere loan, could not have kept his house as he did on fifteen
thousand francs a year. This opinion, openly expressed, made the post
master turn livid more than once.
“Yet they and I have rummaged everywhere,” said Bongrand,--“they to find
money, and I to find a will in favor of Monsieur de Portenduere. They
have sifted the ashes, lifted the marbles, felt of the slippers, bored
into the wood-work of the beds, emptied the mattresses, ripped up the
quilts, turned his eider-down inside-out, examined every inch of paper
piece by piece, searched the drawers, dug up the cellar floor--and I
have urged on their devastations.”
“What do you think about it?” said the abbe.
“The will has been suppressed by one of the heirs.”
“But where’s the property?”
“We may whistle for it!”
“Perhaps the will is hidden in the library,” said Savinien.
“Yes, and for that reason I don’t dissuade Ursula from buying it. If it
were not for that, it would be absurd to let her put every penny of her
ready money into books she will never open.”
At first the whole town believed the doctor’s niece had got possession
of the unfound capital; but when it was known positively that fourteen
hundred francs a year and her gifts constituted her whole fortune the
search of the doctor’s house and furniture excited a more wide-spread
curiosity than before. Some said the money would be found in bank bills
hidden away in the furniture, others that the old man had slipped them
into his books. The sale of the effects exhibited a spectacle of the
most extraordinary precautions on the part of the heirs. Dionis, who was
doing duty as auctioneeer, declared, as each lot was cried out, that
the heirs only sold the article (whatever it was) and not what it might
contain; then, before allowing it to be taken away it was subjected to a
final investigation, being thumped and sounded; and when at last it left
the house the sellers followed with the looks a father might cast upon a
son who was starting for India.
“Ah, mademoiselle,” cried La Bougival, returning from the first session
in despair, “I shall not go again. Monsieur Bongrand is right, you could
never bear the sight. Everything is ticketed. All the town is coming
and going just as in the street; the handsome furniture is being ruined,
they even stand upon it; the whole place is such a muddle that a hen
couldn’t find her chicks. You’d think there had been a fire. Lots of
things are in the courtyard; the closets are all open, and nothing in
them. Oh! the poor dear man, it’s well he died, the sight would have
killed him.”
Bongrand, who bought for Ursula certain articles which her uncle
cherished, and which were suitable for her little house, did not appear
at the sale of the library. Shrewder than the heirs, whose cupidity
might have run up the price of the books had they known he was buying
them for Ursula, he commissioned a dealer in old books living in Melun
to buy them for him. As a result of the heir’s anxiety the whole library
was sold book by book. Three thousand volumes were examined, one by one,
held by the two sides of the binding and shaken so that loose papers
would infallibly fall out. The whole amount of the purchases on Ursula’s
account amounted to six thousand five hundred francs or thereabouts.
The book-cases were not allowed to leave the premises until carefully
examined by a cabinet-maker, brought down from Paris to search for
secret drawers. When at last Monsieur Bongrand gave orders to take the
books and the bookcases to Mademoiselle Mirouet’s house the heirs were
tortured with vague fears, not dissipated until in course of time they
saw how poorly she lived.
Minoret bought up his uncle’s house, the value of which his co-heirs ran
up to fifty thousand francs, imagining that the post master expected
to find a treasure in the walls; in fact the house was sold with a
reservation on this subject. Two weeks later Minoret disposed of his
post establishment, with all the coaches and horses, to the son of
a rich farmer, and went to live in his uncle’s house, where he spent
considerable sums in repairing and refurnishing the rooms. By making
this move he thoughtlessly condemned himself to live within sight of
Ursula.
“I hope,” he said to Dionis the day when Madame de Portenduere was
summoned to pay her debt, “that we shall soon be rid of those nobles;
after they are gone we’ll drive out the rest.”
“That old woman with fourteen quarterings,” said Goupil, “won’t want to
witness her own disaster; she’ll go and die in Brittany, where she can
manage to find a wife for her son.”
“No,” said the notary, who had that morning drawn out a deed of sale at
Bongrand’s request. “Ursula has just bought the house she is living in.”
“That cursed fool does everything she can to annoy me!” cried the post
master imprudently.
“What does it signify to you whether she lives in Nemours or not?” asked
Goupil, surprised at the annoyance which the colossus betrayed.
“Don’t you know,” answered Minoret, turning as red as a poppy, “that my
son is fool enough to be in love with her? I’d give five hundred francs
if I could get Ursula out of this town.”