Come, let us have dinner,” he added, scarcely knowing what he said, “everything is ours.”
“Poor dear father!”
He rose and went over to her, and took her face in his hands, and set a kiss on the plaits of hair.
“If you only knew, little one, how happy you can make me — how little it takes to make me happy!
Will you come and see me sometimes? I shall be just above, so it is only a step.
Promise me, say that you will!”
“Yes, dear father.”
“Say it again.”
“Yes, I will, my kind father.”
“Hush! hush! I should make you say it a hundred times over if I followed my own wishes.
Let us have dinner.”
The three behaved like children that evening, and Father Goriot’s spirits were certainly not the least wild.
He lay at his daughter’s feet, kissed them, gazed into her eyes, rubbed his head against her dress; in short, no young lover could have been more extravagant or more tender.
“You see!” Delphine said with a look at Eugene, “so long as my father is with us, he monopolizes me.
He will be rather in the way sometimes.”
Eugene had himself already felt certain twinges of jealousy, and could not blame this speech that contained the germ of all ingratitude.
“And when will the rooms be ready?” asked Eugene, looking round.
“We must all leave them this evening, I suppose.”
“Yes, but to-morrow you must come and dine with me,” she answered, with an eloquent glance.
“It is our night at the Italiens.”
“I shall go to the pit,” said her father.
It was midnight.
Mme. de Nucingen’s carriage was waiting for her, and Father Goriot and the student walked back to the Maison Vauquer, talking of Delphine, and warming over their talk till there grew up a curious rivalry between the two violent passions.
Eugene could not help seeing that the father’s self-less love was deeper and more steadfast than his own.
For this worshiper Delphine was always pure and fair, and her father’s adoration drew its fervor from a whole past as well as a future of love.
They found Mme. Vauquer by the stove, with Sylvie and Christophe to keep her company; the old landlady, sitting like Marius among the ruins of Carthage, was waiting for the two lodgers that yet remained to her, and bemoaning her lot with the sympathetic Sylvie.
Tasso’s lamentations as recorded in Byron’s poem are undoubtedly eloquent, but for sheer force of truth they fall far short of the widow’s cry from the depths.
“Only three cups of coffee in the morning, Sylvie!
Oh dear! to have your house emptied in this way is enough to break your heart.
What is life, now my lodgers are gone?
Nothing at all. Just think of it! It is just as if all the furniture had been taken out of the house, and your furniture is your life.
How have I offended heaven to draw down all this trouble upon me?
And haricot beans and potatoes laid in for twenty people!
The police in my house too!
We shall have to live on potatoes now, and Christophe will have to go!”
The Savoyard, who was fast asleep, suddenly woke up at this, and said, “Madame,” questioningly.
“Poor fellow!” said Sylvie, “he is like a dog.”
“In the dead season, too! Nobody is moving now.
I would like to know where the lodgers are to drop down from.
It drives me distracted.
And that old witch of a Michonneau goes and takes Poiret with her!
What can she have done to make him so fond of her? He runs about after her like a little dog.”
“Lord!” said Sylvie, flinging up her head, “those old maids are up to all sorts of tricks.”
“There’s that poor M. Vautrin that they made out to be a convict,” the widow went on. “Well, you know that is too much for me, Sylvie; I can’t bring myself to believe it.
Such a lively man as he was, and paid fifteen francs a month for his coffee of an evening, paid you very penny on the nail too.”
“And open-handed he was!” said Christophe.
“There is some mistake,” said Sylvie.
“Why, no there isn’t! he said so himself!” said Mme. Vauquer.
“And to think that all these things have happened in my house, and in a quarter where you never see a cat go by.
On my word as an honest woman, it’s like a dream.