Ursula by Honoré de Balzac (fox in socks read aloud TXT) 📕

more and more concentrated. She was seen to see; her forehead had a singular aspect; an inward effort appeared there; it seemed to clear or cloud by some mysterious power, the effects of which Minoret had seen in dying persons at moments when they appeared to have the gift of prophecy. Several times she made gestures which resembled those of Ursula.

"Question her," said the mysterious stranger, to Minoret, "she will tell you secrets you alone can know."

"Does Ursula love me?" asked Minoret.

"Almost as much as she loves God," was the answer. "But she is very unhappy at your unbelief. You do not believe in God; as if you could prevent his existence! His word fills the universe. You are the cause of her only sorrow.--Hear! she is playing scales; she longs to be a better musician than she is; she is provoked with herself. She is thinking, 'If I could sing, if my voice were fine, it would reach his ear when he is with his mother.'"

Doctor Minoret took out his pocket-book and noted the hour.

"Tell me what seeds she planted?"

"Mignonette, sweet-peas, balsams--"

"And what else?"

"Larkspur."

"Where is my money?"

"With your notary; but you invest it so as not to lose the interest of a single day."

"Yes, but where is the money that I keep for my monthly expenses?"

"You put it in a large book bound in red, entitled 'Pandects of Justinian, Vol. II.' between the last two leaves; the book is on the shelf of folios above the glass buffet. You have a whole row of them. Your money is in the last volume next to the salon--See! Vol. III. is before Vol. II.--but you have no money, it is all in--"

"--thousand-franc notes," said the doctor.

"I cannot see, they are folded. No, there are two notes of five hundred francs."

"You see them?"

"Yes."

"How do they look?"

"One is old and yellow, the other white and new."

This last phase of the inquiry petrified the doctor. He looked at Bouvard with a bewildered air; but Bouvard and the Swedenborgian, who were accustomed to the amazement of sceptics, were speaking together in a low voice and appeared not to notice him. Minoret begged them to allow him to return after dinner. The old philosopher wished to compose his mind and shake off this terror, so as to put this vast power to some new test, to subject it to more decisive experiments and obtain answers to certain questions, the truth of which should do away with every sort of doubt.

"Be here at nine o'clock this evening," said the stranger. "I will return to meet you."

Doctor Minoret was in so convulsed a state that he left the room without bowing, followed by Bouvard, who called to him from behind. "Well, what do you say? what do you say?"

"I think I am mad, Bouvard," answered Minoret from the steps of the porte-cochere. "If that woman tells the truth about Ursula,--and none but Ursula can know the things that sorceress has told me,--I shall say that _you are right_. I wish I had wings to fly to Nemours this minute and verify her words. But I shall hire a carriage and start at ten o'clock to-night. Ah! am I losing my senses?"

"What would you say if you knew of a life-long incurable disease healed in a moment; if you saw that great magnetizer bring sweat in torrents from an herpetic patient, or make a paralyzed woman walk?"

"Come and dine, Bouvard; stay with me till nine o'clock. I must find some decisive, undeniable test!"

"So be it, old comrade," answered the other.

The reconciled enemies dined in the Palais-Royal. After a lively conversation, which helped Minoret to evade the fever of the ideas which were ravaging his brain, Bouvard said to him:--

"If you admit in that woman the faculty of annihilating or of traversing space, if you obtain a certainty that here, in Paris, she sees and hears what is said and done in Nemours, you must admit all other magnetic facts; they are not more incredible than these. Ask her for some one proof which you know will satisfy you--for you might suppose that we obtained information to deceive you; but we cannot know, for instance, what will happen at nine o'clock in your goddaughter's bedroom. Remember, or write down, what the sleeper will see and hear, and then go home. Your little Ursula, whom I do not know, is not our accomplice, and if she tells you that she has said and done what you have written down--lower thy head, proud Hun!"

The two friends returned to the house opposite to the Assumption and found the somnambulist, who in her waking state did not recognize Doctor Minoret. The eyes of this woman closed gently before the hand of the Swedenborgian, which was stretched towards her at a little distance, and she took the attitude in which Minoret had first seen her. When her hand and that of the doctor were again joined, he asked her to tell him what was happening in his house at Nemours at that instant. "What is Ursula doing?" he said.

"She is undressed; she has just curled her hair; she is kneeling on her prie-Dieu, before an ivory crucifix fastened to a red velvet background."

"What is she saying?"

"Her evening prayers; she is commending herself to God; she implores him to save her soul from evil thoughts; she examines her conscience and recalls what she has done during the day; that she may know if she has failed to obey his commands and those of the church--poor dear little soul, she lays bare her breast!" Tears were in the sleeper's eyes. "She has done no sin, but she blames herself for thinking too much of Savinien. She stops to wonder what he is doing in Paris; she prays to God to make him happy. She speaks of you; she is praying aloud."

"Tell me her words." Minoret took his pencil and wrote, as the sleeper uttered it, the following prayer, evidently composed by the Abbe Chaperon.

"My God, if thou art content with thine handmaid, who worships thee and prays to thee with a love that is equal to her devotion, who strives not to wander from thy sacred paths, who would gladly die as thy Son died to glorify thy name, who desires to live in the shadow of thy will--O God, who knoweth the heart, open the eyes of my godfather, lead him in the way of salvation, grant him thy Divine grace, that he may live for thee in his last days; save him from evil, and let me suffer in his stead. Kind Saint Ursula, dear protectress, and you, Mother of God, queen of heaven, archangels, and saints in Paradise, hear me! join your intercessions to mine and have mercy upon us."

The sleeper imitated so perfectly the artless gestures and the inspired manner of his child that Doctor Minoret's eyes were filled with tears.

"Does she say more?" he asked.

"Yes."

"Repeat it."

"'My dear godfather; I wonder who plays backgammon with him in Paris.' She has blown out the light--her head is on the pillow--she turns to sleep! Ah! she is off! How pretty she looks in her little night-cap."

Minoret bowed to the great Unknown, wrung Bouvard by the hand, ran downstairs and hastened to a cab-stand which at that time was near the gates of a house since pulled down to make room for the Rue d'Alger. There he found a coachman who was willing to start immediately for Fontainebleau. The moment the price was agreed on, the old man, who seemed to have renewed his youth, jumped into the carriage and started. According to agreement, he stopped to rest the horse at Essonne, but arrived at Fontainebleau in time for the diligence to Nemours, on which he secured a seat, and dismissed his coachman. He reached home at five in the morning, and went to bed, with his life-long ideas of physiology, nature, and metaphysics in ruins about him, and slept till nine o'clock, so wearied was he with the events of his journey.


CHAPTER VII. A TWO-FOLD CONVERSION

On rising, the doctor, sure that no one had crossed the threshold of his house since he re-entered it, proceeded (but not without extreme trepidation) to verify his facts. He was himself ignorant of any difference in the bank-notes and also of the misplacement of the Pandect volumes. The somnambulist was right. The doctor rang for La Bougival.

"Tell Ursula to come and speak to me," he said, seating himself in the center of his library.

The girl came; she ran up to him and kissed him. The doctor took her on his knee, where she sat contentedly, mingling her soft fair curls with the white hair of her old friend.

"Do you want something, godfather?"

"Yes; but promise me, on your salvation, to answer frankly, without evasion, the questions that I shall put to you."

Ursula colored to the temples.

"Oh! I'll ask nothing that you cannot speak of," he said, noticing how the bashfulness of young love clouded the hitherto childlike purity of the girl's blue eyes.

"Ask me, godfather."

"What thought was in your mind when you ended your prayers last evening, and what time was it when you said them."

"It was a quarter-past or half-past nine."

"Well, repeat your last prayer."

The girl fancied that her voice might convey her faith to the sceptic; she slid from his knee and knelt down, clasping her hands fervently; a brilliant light illumined her face as she turned it on the old man and said:--

"What I asked of God last night I asked again this morning, and I shall ask it till he vouchsafes to grant it."

Then she repeated her prayer with new and still more powerful expression. To her great astonishment her godfather took the last words from her mouth and finished the prayer.

"Good, Ursula," said the doctor, taking her again on his knee. "When you laid your head on the pillow and went to sleep did you think to yourself, 'That dear godfather; I wonder who is playing backgammon with him in Paris'?"

Ursula sprang up as if the last trumpet had sounded in her ears. She gave a cry of terror; her eyes, wide open, gazed at the old man with awful fixity.

"Who are you, godfather? From whom do you get such power?" she asked, imagining that in his desire to deny God he had made some compact with the devil.

"What seeds did you plant yesterday in the garden?"

"Mignonette, sweet-peas, balsams--"

"And the last were larkspur?"

She fell on her knees.

"Do not terrify me!" she exclaimed. "Oh you must have been here--you were here, were you not?"

"Am I not always with you?" replied the doctor, evading her question, to save the strain on the young girl's mind. "Let us go to your room."

"Your legs are trembling," she said.

"Yes, I am confounded, as it were."

"Can it be that you believe in God?" she cried, with artless joy, letting fall the tears that gathered in her eyes.

The old man looked round the simple but dainty little room he had given to his Ursula. On the floor was a plain green carpet, very inexpensive, which