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Meanwhile she sat tranquilly sewing garments for the children of the poor, and listening abstractedly to the grumblings of Monsieur Latournelle when Dumay held the thirteenth card or drew out his last trump. Her religious faith drove Modeste for a time into a singular track of thought. "Faith," she thought, "can move mountains; Christ has said so.
At these words a truce of silence came between the pair; the mother's blighted eyes rained tears which Modeste could not check, though she threw herself upon her knees, and cried: "Forgive me! oh, forgive me, mother!" At this instant the excellent Dumay was coming up the hill of Ingouville on the double-quick, a fact quite abnormal in the present life of the cashier.
The pair had four children, of whom only two daughters survived at the time when he poured his griefs into the Breton's heart. Dumay loved these little ones without having seen them, solely through the sympathy so well described by Charlet, which makes a soldier the father of every child. The eldest, named Bettina Caroline, was born in 1805; the other, Marie Modeste, in 1808.
"He is on his way home," said Madame Mignon; "but let us keep the secret to ourselves. When my husband learns how faithful Butscha has been to us, how he has shown us the warmest and the most disinterested friendship when others have given us the cold shoulder, he will not let you alone provide for him, Dumay.
I shall never survive it." And Modeste, really taken with a chill, was forced to go to bed, causing serious uneasiness to her mother, Madame Latournelle, and Madame Dumay, who took good care of her during the journey of the lieutenant to Paris, to which city the logic of events compels us to transport our drama for a moment.
My intention is to buy back the estate of La Bastie, and to entail it, so as to establish an estate yielding at least a hundred thousand francs a year, and then to ask the king to grant that one of my sons-in-law may succeed to my name and title. You know, my poor Dumay, what a terrible misfortune overtook us through the fatal reputation of a large fortune, my daughter's honor was lost.
This terrible and double misfortune made Dumay, not less devoted, but more anxious about Modeste, now the only daughter of the father who was unaware of his loss. Madame Dumay, idolizing Modeste, like other women deprived of their children, cast her motherliness about the girl, yet without disregarding the commands of her husband, who distrusted female intimacies. Those commands were brief.
"The burden of proof is now on you, madame," said Dumay, calmly; "it is for you to prove that we are mistaken." Discovering that the matter in question was only Modeste's honor, Gobenheim took his hat, made his bow, and walked off, carrying his ten sous with him, there being evidently no hope of another rubber. "Exupere, and you too, Butscha, may leave us," said Madame Latournelle.
And here you come among us and ask us to expire with grief at this commonplace affair." "You call yourself a poet!" cried Dumay, "but don't you feel what you write?" "Good heavens! if we endured the joys or the woes we sing we should be as worn out in three months as a pair of old boots," said the poet, smiling.
The entrance to the Chalet is by a little trellised iron door, the uprights of which, ending in lance-heads, show for a few inches above the fence and its hedge. Dumay consoled himself for the toils of business in taking care of this hot-house, whose exotic treasures were one of Modeste's joys.
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