CHAPTER XV
A FATHER STEPS IN
The Comte de La Bastie was at this moment overwhelmed with the sorrows
which lay in wait for him as their prey. He had learned from his
daughter's letter of Bettina's death and of his wife's infirmity, and
Dumay related to him, when they met, his terrible perplexity as to
Modeste's love affairs.
"Leave me to myself," he said to his faithful friend.
As the lieutenant closed the door, the unhappy father threw himself on
a sofa, with his head in his hands, weeping those slow, scanty tears
which suffuse the eyes of a man of sixty, but do not fall,--tears soon
dried, yet quick to start again,--the last dews of the human autumn.
"To have children, to have a wife, to adore them--what is it but to
have many hearts and bare them to a dagger?" he cried, springing up
with the bound of a tiger and walking up and down the room. "To be a
father is to give one's self over, bound hand and foot to sorrow. If I
meet that D'Estourny I will kill him. To have daughters!--one gives
her life to a scoundrel, the other, my Modeste, falls a victim to
whom? a coward, who deceives her with the gilded paper of a poet.
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