“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.”