Chapter 6 - Page 2

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