During the dinner, which was magnificent and admirably well served, the duke obtained a signal advantage over Canalis. Modeste, who had received her habit and other equestrian equipments the night before, spoke of taking rides about the country. A turn of the conversation led her to express the wish to see a hunt with hounds, a pleasure she had never yet enjoyed. The duke at once proposed to arrange a hunt in one of the crown forests, which lay a few leagues from Havre. Thanks to his intimacy with the Prince de Cadignan, Master of the Hunt, he saw his chance of displaying an almost regal pomp before Modeste’s eyes, and alluring her with a glimpse of court fascinations, to which she could be introduced by marriage. Glances were exchanged between the duke and the two demoiselles d’Herouville, which plainly said, “The heiress is ours!” and the poet, who detected them, and who had nothing but his personal splendors to depend on, determined all the more firmly to obtain some pledge of affection at once. Modeste, on the other hand, half-frightened at being thus pushed beyond her intentions by the d’Herouvilles, walked rather markedly apart with Melchior, when the company adjourned to the park after dinner. With the pardonable curiosity of a young girl, she let him suspect the calumnies which Helene had poured into her ears; but on Canalis’s exclamation of anger, she begged him to keep silence about them, which he promised.
“These stabs of the tongue,” he said, “are considered fair in the great world. They shock your upright nature; but as for me, I laugh at them; I am even pleased. These ladies must feel that the duke’s interests are in great peril, when they have recourse to such warfare.”
Making the most of the advantage Modeste had thus given him, Canalis entered upon his defence with such warmth, such eagerness, and with a passion so exquisitely expressed, as he thanked her for a confidence in which he could venture to see the dawn of love, that she found herself suddenly as much compromised with the poet as she feared to be with the grand equerry. Canalis, feeling the necessity of prompt action, declared himself plainly. He uttered vows and protestations in which his poetry shone like a moon, invoked for the occasion, and illuminating his allusions to the beauty of his mistress and the charms of her evening dress. This counterfeit enthusiasm, in which the night, the foliage, the heavens and the earth, and Nature herself played a part, carried the eager lover beyond all bounds; for he dwelt on his disinterestedness, and revamped in his own charming style, Diderot’s famous apostrophe to “Sophie and fifteen hundred francs!” and the well-worn “love in a cottage” of every lover who knows perfectly well the length of the father-inlaw’s purse.
“Monsieur,” said Modeste, after listening with delight to the melody of this concerto; “the freedom granted to me by my parents has allowed me to listen to you; but it is to them that you must address yourself.”
“But,” exclaimed Canalis, “tell me that if I obtain their consent, you will ask nothing better than to obey them.”
“I know beforehand,” she replied, “that my father has certain fancies which may wound the proper pride of an old family like yours. He wishes to have his own title and name borne by his grandsons.”
“Ah! dear Modeste, what sacrifices would I not make to commit my life to the guardian care of an angel like you.”
“You will permit me not to decide in a moment the fate of my whole life,” she said, turning to rejoin the demoiselles d’Herouville.
Those noble ladies were just then engaged in flattering the vanity of little Latournelle, intending to win him over to their interests. Mademoiselle d’Herouville, to whom we shall in future confine the family name, to distinguish her from her niece Helene, was giving the notary to understand that the post of judge of the Supreme Court in Havre, which Charles X. would bestow as she desired, was an office worthy of his legal talent and his well-known probity. Butscha, meanwhile, who had been walking about with La Briere, was greatly alarmed at the progress Canalis was evidently making, and he waylaid Modeste at the lower step of the portico when the whole party returned to the house to endure the torments of their inevitable whist.
“Mademoiselle,” he said, in a low whisper, “I do hope you don’t call him Melchior.”
“I’m very near it, my Black Dwarf,” she said, with a smile that might have made an angel swear.
“Good God!” exclaimed Butscha, letting fall his hands, which struck the marble steps.
“Well! and isn’t he worth more than that spiteful and gloomy secretary in whom you take such an interest?” she retorted, assuming, at the mere thought of Ernest, the haughty manner whose secret belongs exclusively to young girls — as if their virginity lent them wings to fly to heaven. “Pray, would your little La Briere accept me without a fortune?” she said, after a pause.
“Ask your father,” replied Butscha, who walked a few steps from the house, to get Modeste at a safe distance from the windows. “Listen to me, mademoiselle. You know that he who speaks to you is ready to give not only his life but his honor for you, at any moment, and at all times. Therefore you may believe in him; you can confide to him that which you may not, perhaps, be willing to say to your father. Tell me, has that sublime Canalis been making you the disinterested offer that you now fling as a reproach at poor Ernest?”
“Yes.”
“Do you believe it?”
“That question, my manikin,” she replied, giving him one of the ten or a dozen nicknames she had invented for him, “strikes me as undervaluing the strength of my self-love.”
“Ah, you are laughing, my dear Mademoiselle Modeste; then there’s no danger: I hope you are only making a fool of him.”
“Pray what would you think of me, Monsieur Butscha, if I allowed myself to make fun of those who do me the honor to wish to marry me? You ought to know, master Jean, that even if a girl affects to despise the most despicable attentions, she is flattered by them.”
“Then I flatter you?” said the young man, looking up at her with a face that was illuminated like a city for a festival.
“You?” she said; “you give me the most precious of all friendships — a feeling as disinterested as that of a mother for her child. Compare yourself to no one; for even my father is obliged to be devoted to me.” She paused. “I cannot say that I love you, in the sense which men give to that word, but what I do give you is eternal and can know no change.”
“Then,” said Butscha, stooping to pick up a pebble that he might kiss the hem of her garment, “suffer me to watch over you as a dragon guards a treasure. The poet was covering you just now with the lace-work of his precious phrases, the tinsel of his promises; he chanted his love on the best strings of his lyre, I know he did. If, as soon as this noble lover finds out how small your fortune is, he makes a sudden change in his behavior, and is cold and embarrassed, will you still marry him? shall you still esteem him?”
“He would be another Francisque Althor,” she said, with a gesture of bitter disgust.
“Let me have the pleasure of producing that change of scene,” said Butscha. “Not only shall it be sudden, but I believe I can change it back and make your poet as loving as before — nay, it is possible to make him blow alternately hot and cold upon your heart, just as gracefully as he has talked on both sides of an argument in one evening without ever finding it out.”
“If you are right,” she said, “who can be trusted?”
“One who truly loves you.”
“The little duke?”
Butscha looked at Modeste. The pair walked some distance in silence; the girl was impenetrable and not an eyelash quivered.
“Mademoiselle, permit me to be the exponent of the thoughts that are lying at the bottom of your heart like sea-mosses under the waves, and which you do not choose to gather up.”
“Eh!” said Modeste, “so my intimate friend and counsellor thinks himself a mirror, does he?”
“No, an echo,” he answered, with a gesture of sublime humility. “The duke loves you, but he loves you too much. If I, a dwarf, have understood the infinite delicacy of your heart, it would be repugnant to you to be worshipped like a saint in her shrine. You are eminently a woman; you neither want a man perpetually at your feet of whom you are eternally sure, nor a selfish egoist like Canalis, who will always prefer himself to you. Why? ah, that I don’t know. But I will make myself a woman, an old woman, and find out the meaning of the plan which I have read in your eyes, and which perhaps is in the heart of every girl. Nevertheless, in your great soul you feel the need of worshipping. ............