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Ah! if I could but see my daughter!" cried the poor woman. "But whom is it possible for her to love?" asked the notary. "I'll answer for my Exupere." "It can't be Gobenheim," said Dumay, "for since the colonel's departure he has not spent nine hours a week in this house. Besides, he doesn't even notice Modeste that five-franc piece of a man!
Exupere was to start the next morning for Paris to begin the study of law. This impending departure had induced Latournelle to propose him to his friend Dumay as an accomplice in the important conspiracy which these directions indicate. "Is Mademoiselle Modeste suspected of having a lover?" asked Butscha in a timid voice of Madame Latournelle.
Modeste was a pure young girl, inquisitive after knowledge, understanding her destiny, and filled with chastity, the Virgin of Spain rather than the Madonna of Raphael. She raised her head when she heard Dumay say to Exupere, "Come here, young man." Seeing them together in the corner of the salon she supposed they were talking of some commission in Paris.
At this moment Exupere tore through the garden and the house, plunged into the salon like an avalanche, and said to Dumay in an audible whisper, "The young man is here!" Dumay sprang for his pistols and rushed out. "Good God! suppose he kills him!" cried Madame Dumay, bursting into tears. "What is the matter?" asked Modeste, looking innocently at her friends and not betraying the slightest fear.
"Exupere," he said to his son, "you must try to carry out intelligently a little manoeuvre which I shall explain to you, but you are not to ask the meaning of it; and if you guess the meaning I command you to toss it into that Styx which every lawyer and every man who expects to have a hand in the government of his country is bound to keep within him for the secrets of others.
"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.
Then she looked at the friends who surrounded her, as if surprised by their silence, and exclaimed in her natural manner, "Why are you not playing?" with a glance at the green table which the imposing Madame Latournelle called the "altar." "Yes, let us play," said Dumay, having sent off Exupere.
"How handsome he is, that son of mine!" she says to her little friend Modeste, as they walk to church, with the beautiful Exupere in front of them. "He is like you," Modeste Mignon answers, very much as she might have said, "What horrid weather!"
Exupere, the spring of the trap, was wholly ignorant of the piece in which he was to play a part. Gobenheim, by reason of his character, remained in a state of indifference equal to that displayed by Modeste. To a spectator who understood the situation, this contrast between the ignorance of some and the palpitating interest of others would have seemed quite poetic.
As to the insignificant youth on whom the clerk of the court bestowed in baptism his Norman name of "Exupere," Madame Latournelle is still so surprised at becoming his mother, at the age of thirty-five years and seven months, that she would still provide him, if it were necessary, with her breast and her milk, an hyperbole which alone can fully express her impassioned maternity.
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