Eugenie learned at that moment that the woman who loves must be able to hide her feelings. She did not answer.
“You will say nothing to him about it, Ma’ame Grandet, till I return,” said the old man. “I have to go and straighten the line of my hedge along the high-road. I shall be back at noon, in time for the second breakfast, and then I will talk with my nephew about his affairs. As for you, Mademoiselle Eugenie, if it is for that dandy you are crying, that’s enough, child. He’s going off like a shot to the Indies. You will never see him again.”
The father took his gloves from the brim of his hat, put them on with his usual composure, pushed them in place by shoving the fingers of both hands together, and went out.
“Mamma, I am suffocating!” cried Eugenie when she was alone with her mother; “I have never suffered like this.”
Madame Grandet, seeing that she turned pale, opened the window and let her breathe fresh air.
“I feel better!” said Eugenie after a moment.
This nervous excitement in a nature hitherto, to all appearance, calm and cold, reacted on Madame Grandet; she looked at her daughter with the sympathetic intuition with which mothers are gifted for the objects of their tenderness, and guessed all. In truth the life of the Hungarian sisters, bound together by a freak of nature, could scarcely have been more intimate than that of Eugenie and her mother,—always together in the embrasure of that window, and sleeping together in the same atmosphere.
“My poor child!” said Madame Grandet, taking Eugenie’s head and laying it upon her bosom.
At these words the young girl raised her head, questioned her mother by a look, and seemed to search out her inmost thought.
“Why send him to the Indies?” she said. “If he is unhappy, ought he not to stay with us? Is he not our nearest relation?”