The deplorable state of Madame Mignon's health was caused in part by the catastrophe to which the absence of her husband was due. Grief had taken three years to break down the docile German woman; but it was a grief that gnawed at her heart like a worm at the core of a sound fruit. It is easy to reckon up its obvious causes. Two children, dying in infancy, had a double grave in a soul that could never forget. The exile of her husband to Siberia was to such a woman a daily death. The failure of the rich house of Wallenrod, and the death of her father, leaving his coffers empty, was to Bettina, then uncertain about the fate of her husband, a terrible blow. The joy of Charles's return came near killing the tender German flower. After that the second fall of the Empire and the proposed expatriation acted on her feelings like a renewed attack of the same fever. At last, however, after ten years of continual prosperity, the comforts of her house, which was the finest in Havre, the dinners, balls, and fetes of a prosperous merchant, the splendors of the villa Mignon, the unbounded respect and consideration enjoyed by her husband, his absolute affection, giving her an unrivalled love in return for her single-minded love for him,--all these things brought the woman back to life. At the moment when her doubts and fears at last left her, when she could look forward to the bright evening of her stormy life, a hidden catastrophe, buried in the heart of the family, and of which we shall presently make mention, came as the precursor of renewed trials.
In January, 1826, on the day when Havre had unanimously chosen Charles Mignon as its deputy, three letters, arriving from New York, Paris, and London, fell with the destruction of a hammer upon the crystal palace of his prosperity. In an instant ruin like a vulture swooped down upon their happiness, just as the cold fell in 1812 upon the grand army in Russia. One night sufficed Charles Mignon to decide upon his course, and he spent it in settling his accounts with Dumay. All he owned, not excepting his furniture, would just suffice to pay his creditors.
"Havre shall never see me doing nothing," said the colonel to the lieutenant. "Dumay, I take your sixty thousand francs at six per cent."
"Three, my colonel."
"At nothing, then," cried Mignon, peremptorily; "you shall have your share in the profits of what I now undertake. The 'Modeste,' which is no longer mine, sails to-morrow, and I sail in her. I commit to you my wife and daughter. I shall not write. No news must be taken as good news."
Dumay, always subordinate, asked no questions of his colonel. "I
think," he said to Latournelle with a knowing little glance, "that my colonel has a plan laid out."
The following day at dawn he accompanied his master on board the "Modeste" bound for Constantinople. There, on the poop of the vessel, the Breton said to the Provencal,--
"What are your last commands, my colonel?"
"That no man shall enter the Chalet," cried the father with strong emotion. "Dumay, guard my last child as though you were a bull-dog.
Death to the man who seduces another daughter! Fear nothing, not even the scaffold--I will be with you."
"My colonel, go in peace. I understand you. You shall find Mademoiselle Mignon on your return such as you now give her to me, or I shall be dead. You know me, and you know your Pyrenees hounds. No man shall reach your daughter. Forgive me for troubling you with words."
The two soldiers clasped arms like men who had learned to understand each other in the solitudes of Siberia.