Delphine was touched; she laid her head on her sister’s shoulder, and cried too.
“Then it is all true,” she said.
Anastasie bowed her head, Mme. de Nucingen flung her arms about her, kissed her tenderly, and held her sister to her heart.
“I shall always love you and never judge you, Nasie,” she said.
“My angels,” murmured Goriot faintly. “Oh, why should it be trouble that draws you together?”
This warm and palpitating affection seemed to give the Countess courage.
“To save Maxime’s life,” she said, “to save all my own happiness, I went to the money-lender you know of, a man of iron forged in hell-fire; nothing can melt him; I took all the family diamonds that M. de Restaud is so proud of—his and mine too—and sold them to that M. Gobseck. Sold them! Do you understand? I saved Maxime, but I am lost. Restaud found it all out.”
“How? Who told him? I will kill him,” cried Goriot.
“Yesterday he sent to tell me to come to his room. I went. ... ‘Anastasie,’ he said in a voice—oh! such a voice; that was enough, it told me everything—‘where are your diamonds?’—‘In my room——’—‘No,’ he said, looking straight at me, ‘there they are on that chest of drawers——’ and he lifted his handkerchief and showed me the casket. ‘Do you know where they came from?’ he said. I fell at his feet.... I cried; I besought him to tell me the death he wished to see me die.”
“You said that!” cried Goriot. “By God in heaven, whoever lays a hand on either of you so long as I am alive may reckon on being roasted by slow fires! Yes, I will cut him in pieces like...”
Goriot stopped; the words died away in his throat.
“And then, dear, he asked something worse than death of me. Oh! heaven preserve all other women from hearing such words as I heard then!”
“I will murder that man,” said Goriot quietly. “But he has only one life, and he deserves to die twice.—And then, what next?” he added, looking at Anastasie.
“Then,” the Countess resumed, “there was a pause, and he looked at me. ‘Anastasie,’ he said, ‘I will bury this in silence; there shall be no separation; there are the children. I will not kill M. de Trailles. I might miss him if we fought, and as for other ways of getting rid of him, I should come into collision with the law. If I killed him in your arms, it would bring dishonor on those children. But if you do not want to see your children perish, nor their father nor me, you must first of all submit to two conditions. Answer me. Have I a child of my own?’ I answered, ‘Yes,’—‘Which?’—‘Ernest, our eldest boy.’—‘Very well,’ he said, ‘and now swear to obey me in this particular from this time forward.’ I swore. ‘You will make over your property to me when I require you to do so.’”
“Do nothing of the kind!” cried Goriot. “Aha! M. de Restaud, you could not make your wife happy; she has looked for happiness and found it elsewhere, and you make her suffer for your own ineptitude? He will have to reckon with me. Make yourself easy, Nasie. Aha! he cares about his heir! Good, very good. I will get hold of the boy; isn’t he my grandson? What the blazes! I can surely go to see the brat! I will stow him away somewhere; I will take care of him, you may be quite easy. I will bring Restaud to terms, the monster! I shall say to him, ‘A word or two with you! If you want your son back again, give my daughter her property, and leave her to do as she pleases.’”
“Father!”
“Yes. I am your father, Nasie, a father indeed! That rogue of a great lord had better not ill-treat my daughter. Tonnerre! What is it in my veins? There is the blood of a tiger in me; I could tear those two men to pieces! Oh! children, children! so this is what your lives are! Why, it is death!... What will become of you when I shall be here no longer? Fathers ought to live as long as their children. Ah! Lord God in heaven! how ill Thy world is ordered! Thou hast a Son, if what they tell us is true, and yet Thou leavest us to suffer so through our children. My darlings, my darlings! to think that trouble only should bring you to me, that I should only see you with tears on your faces! Ah! yes, yes, you love me, I see that you love me. Come to me and pour out your griefs to me; my heart is large enough to hold them all. Oh! you might rend my heart in pieces, and every fragment would make a father’s heart. If only I could bear all your sorrows for you! ... Ah! you were so happy when you were little and still with me....”
“We have never been happy since,” said Delphine. “Where are the old days when we slid down the sacks in the great granary?”
“That is not all, father,” said Anastasie in Goriot’s ear. The old man gave a startled shudder. “The diamonds only sold for a hundred thousand francs. Maxime is hard pressed. There are twelve thousand francs still to pay. He has given me his word that he will be steady and give up play in future. His love is all that I have left in the world. I have paid such a fearful price for it that I should die if I lose him now. I have sacrificed my fortune, my honor, my peace of mind, and my children for him. Oh! do something, so that at the least Maxime may be at large and live undisgraced in the world, where he will assuredly make a career for himself. Something more than my happiness is at stake; the children have nothing, and if he is sent to Sainte-Pelagie all his prospects will be ruined.”
“I haven’t the money, Nasie. I have nothing—nothing left. This is the end of everything. Yes, the world is crumbling into ruin, I am sure. Fly! Save yourselves! Ah!—I have still my silver buckles left, and half-a-dozen silver spoons and forks, the first I ever had in my life. But I have nothing else except my life annuity, twelve hundred francs...”
“Then what has become of your money in the funds?”
“I sold out, and only kept a trifle for my wants. I wanted twelve thousand francs to furnish some rooms for Delphine.”
“In your own house?” asked Mme. de Restaud, looking at her sister.
“What does it matter where they were?” asked Goriot. “The money is spent now.”
“I see how it is,” said the Countess. “Rooms for M. de Rastignac. Poor Delphine, take warning by me!”
“M. de Rastignac is incapable of ruining the woman he loves, dear.”
“Thanks! Delphine. I thought you would have been kinder to me in my troubles, but you never did love me.”
“Yes, yes, she loves you, Nasie,” cried Goriot; “she was saying so only just now. We were talking about you, and she insisted that you were beautiful, and that she herself was only pretty!”
“Pretty!” said the Countess. “She is as hard as a marble statue.”
“And if I am?” cried Delphine, flushing up, “how have you treated me? You would not recognize me; you closed the doors of every house against me; you have never let an opportunity of mortifying me slip by. And when did I come, as you were always doing, to drain our poor father, a thousand francs at a time, till he is left as you see him now? That is all your doing, sister! I myself have seen my father as often as I could. I have not turned him out of the house, and then come and fawned upon him when I wanted money. I did not so much as know that he had spent those twelve thousand francs on me. I am economical, as you know; and when papa has made me presents, it has never been because I came and begged for them.”
“You were better off than I. M. de Marsay was rich, as you have reason to know. You always were as slippery as gold. Good-bye; I have neither sister nor——”
“Oh! hush, hush, Nasie!” cried her father.
“Nobody else would repeat what everybody has ceased to believe. You are an unnatural sister!” cried Delphine.
“Oh, children, children! hush! hush! or I will kill myself before your eyes.”
“There, Nasie, I forgive you,” said Mme. de Nucingen; “you are very unhappy. But I am kinder than you are. How could you say that just when I was ready to do anything in the world to help you, even to be reconciled with my husband, which for my own sake I——Oh! it is just like you; you have behaved cruelly to me all through these nine years.”
“Children, children, kiss each other!” cried the father. “You are angels, both of you.”
“No. Let me alone,” cried the Countess shaking off the hand that her father had laid on her arm. “She is more merciless than my husband. Any one might think she was a model of all the virtues herself!”
“I would rather have people think that I owed money to M. de Marsay than own that M. de Trailles had cost me more than two hundred thousand francs,” retorted Mme. de Nucingen.
“Delphine!” cried the Countess, stepping towards her sister.
“I shall tell you the truth about yourself if you begin to slander me,” said the Baroness coldly.
