He asked Madame Magnotte when the English lady was going to leave, but she could not tell.
"She talks of leaving from day to day," said madame; "it will no doubt be soon. I am sorry to lose her. She is very gentle, and gives no trouble to any one. But she is sad—ah, how sad she is! She has suffered, monsieur."
Gustave agreed to this. Yes, she had suffered; but what, and how?
He watched her closely, but she was always the same. She no longer spent her evenings in the salon, but in her own apartment. He saw her only at dinner-time, and had no opportunity of speaking to her.
At last the day came upon which he missed her at the usual hour. He sat through the tedious meal without speaking; eating a little, drinking a little, mechanically, but with no consciousness of what he ate or drank. There was a mist before his eyes, a confusion of voices in his ears; but the faculties of sight and hearing seemed suspended. The agony he suffered during that miserable hour was bitter as death.
"O, my God, how I love her!" he said to himself, while Raoul's bass roar brayed in his ear on one side, and Leon's shrill squeal tortured him on the other.
He made his way to Madame Magnotte directly after dinner.
"She is gone?" he exclaimed.
"But who, my friend? Ah, yes; it is of that poor Madame Meynell you speak. How you are interested in her! No, she is not gone, poor woman. She remains always. She has the air of a person who knows not her own mind. Yet I am sure she thinks of going. To-day, for the first time, she has been writing letters. Reine came to tell me she had seen her occupied in her own room for the first time. It is not her habit to occupy herself."
Gustave's heart gave a great jump. She was not gone; he might see her again—if it were but a glimpse of her pale face looking out of the diligence as it drove out of the Cour de Messageries. One look, one glance; it would be something to carry in his heart all his life. All his life! He looked forward and shuddered. What a dreary life it must needs be! Côtenoir, Beaubocage, Madelon, the law; to plead, to read papers, to study dry as dust books. He shrank appalled from the contemplation of that dreary desert of existence—a life without her.
She had been writing letters—doubtless letters to her friends to announce her return. Her departure must be very near at hand.
Gustave refused to go out that evening. His fellow-students were bent on a night's pleasure at a dancing-garden then in vogue, where there would be twinkling lamps and merry music under the May moon. The lamp-lit parterres, the joyous waltzes, had no attractions for Gustave Lenoble. He haunted the dull salon, dim and dreary in the twilight; for Madame Magnotte was chary of lamps and candles, and prolonged to its utmost limits the pensive interval between day and night. He walked softly up and down the room, unheeded by the ladies clustered in a group by one of the windows. Restless and unhappy, he could neither go nor stay. She was not coming down to the salon this evening. He had clung to the faint hope that she might appear; but the faint hope died away in his breast as the night deepened. What purpose could be served by his remaining in that dismal room? He was no nearer her than he would have been in the remotest wilds of Central America. He would go out—not to the odious dancing-garden, but to the cool dark streets, where the night wind might blow this fever from his brain.
He left the room suddenly, and hurried downstairs. At the bottom of the staircase he almost stumbled against a woman, who turned and looked at him in the light of a little oil-lamp that hung over the door of the portress's lodge.
It was the Englishwoman, deadly pale, and with a wild look in her face that Gustave had never seen there before. She gave him no sign of recognition, but passed out of the courtyard, and walked rapidly away. That unusual look in her face, the strangeness of the fact that she should be leaving the house at this hour, inspired him with a vague terror, and he followed her, not stealthily, without a thought that he was doing any wrong by such an act—rather, indeed, with the conviction that he had a right so to follow her.
She walked very quickly—at a more rapid pace than Gustave would have supposed possible for so fragile a creature. She chose the lonelier streets, and Gustave had no difficulty in following her; she never looked back, but went straight on her course, without pause or slackening of her pace, as if with a settled purpose.
"Where can she be going?" Gustave asked himself; and an answer, vague, hideous, terrible, suggested itself to his mind. The idea that occurred to him was one that would scarcely have occurred to an Englishman under the same circumstances, but to a Frenchman it was a very familiar idea.
It was dark now—the darkness that reigns between early sunset and late moonrise. As the lonely woman went farther along the dreary streets parallel with the quay, the dreadful suspicion grew stronger in Gustave's mind. From that instant he had but one thought; in that moment he put away from him for ever all sense of obligation to Madelon Frehlter; he shook off father, mother, sister, old associations, home ties, ambition, fortune—he lived alone for this woman, and the purpose of his life was to save her from despair and death.
They emerged upon the quay at last. The long stretch of pavement was deserted. Ah, now she looked back—she looked on every side with wild unseeing eyes—and now there could be little doubt as to the purpose that brought her here. She crossed the road, and went upon the bridge, Gustave following close; in the next minute she was standing on the stone bench, a tremulous, fluttering figure, with arms stretched towards the water; in a breath she was clasped to Gustave's breast, clasped by arms that meant to hold her for ever.
The shock of that surprise utterly unnerved the wretched creature. She shivered violently, and struggled to free herself from those strong arms.
"Let me go!" she cried in English. "Let me go!" And then, finding herself powerless, she turned and looked at her captor. "M. Lenoble! O, why do you persecute me? Why do you follow me?"
"Because I want to save you."
"To save me! To snatch me back when I was going to find rest—an end for my weary life! O yes, I know that it is a sinful end; but my life has been all sin."
"Your life all sin! Foolish one, I will never believe that."
"It is true," she cried, with passionate self-reproach. "The sin of selfishness, and pride, and disobedience. There is no fate too hard for me—but, O, my fate is very hard! Why did you keep me from that river? You do not know how miserable my life is—you do not know. I paid my last penny to Madame Magnotte this morning. I have no money to take me back to England, even if I dared go there—and I dare not. I have prayed for courage, for strength to go back, but my prayers have not been heard; and there is nothing for me but to die. What would be the sin of my throwing myself into that river! I must die; I shall die of starvation in the streets."
"No, no," cried Gustave passionately; "do you think I have dragged you back from death to give you to loneliness and despair? My dear one, you are mine—mine by right of this night. These arms that have kept you from death shall shelter you,—ah, let them shelter you! These hands shall work for you. My love, my love! you cannot tell how dear you are to me. If there must be want or trouble for either of us, it shall come to me first."
He had placed her on the stone bench, bewildered and unresisting, and had seated himself by her side. The fragile figure, shivering still, even in the mild atmosphere of the spring night, was sustained by his encircling arm. He felt that she was his, irrevocably and entirely—given to him by the Providence which would have seemed to have abandoned her, but for the love it had implanted for her in this one faithful heart. His tone had all the pleading tenderness of a lover's, but it had something more—an authority, a sense of possession.
"Providence sent me here to save you," he said, with that gentle yet authoritative tone; "I am your providence, am I not, dearest? Fate made me love you—fondly, hopelessly, as I thought. Yesterday you seemed as far away from me as those pale stars, shining up yonder—as incomprehensible as that faint silvery mist above the rising moon—and to-night you are my own."
He knew not what ties might be broken by this act. He had indeed a vague consciousness that the step which he was now taking would cause a lifelong breach between himself and his father. But the time had gone by in which he could count the cost.
"Let me go back, M. Lenoble," the Englishwoman said presently. The faintness of terror was passing away, and she spoke almost calmly. "Let me go back to the house. It is you that have saved me from a dreadful sin. I promise you that I will not again think of committing that deadly sin. I will wait for the end to come. Let me go, my kind friend. Ah, no, no; do not detain me! Forget that you have ever known me."
"That is not in my power. I will take you back to the Pension Magnotte directly; but you must first promise to be my wife."
"Your wife! O, no, no, no! That is impossible."
"Because you do not love me," said Gustave, with mournful gravity.
"Because I am not worthy of you."
Humiliation and self-reproach unspeakable were conveyed in those few words.
"You are worth all the stars to me. If I had them in my hands, those lamps shining up there, I would throw them away, to hold you," said the student passionately. "You cannot understand my love, perhaps. I seem a stranger to you, and all I say sounds wild and foolish. My love, it is true as the heaven above us—true as life or death—death that was so near you just now. I have loved you ever since that bleak March morning on which I saw you sitting under the leafless trees yonder. You held me from that moment. I was subjugated—possessed—yours at once and for ever. I would not confess even to myself that my heart had resigned itself to you; but I know now that it was so from the first. Is there any hope that you will ever pay me back one tithe of my love?"
"You love me," the Englishwoman repeated slowly, as if the words were almost beyond her comprehension,—"you loveme, a creature so lost, so friendless! Ah, but you do not know my wretched story!"
"I do not ask to know it. I only ask one question—will you be my wife?"
"You must be mad to offer your name, your honour to me."
"Yes, I am mad—madly in love. And I am waiting for your answer. You will be my wife? My angel, you will say yes! It is not much that I offer you—a life of uncertainty, perhaps even of poverty; but a fond and constant heart, and a head and hands that will work for you while God gives them strength. It is better than the river."
All that was thoughtless and hopeful in his disposition was expressed in these words. The woman to whom he pleaded was weakened by sorrow, and the devotion of this brave true heart brought her strength, comfort, almost hope.
"Will you be my friend?" she said gently. "Your words seem to bring me back to life. I wanted to die because I was so wretched, so lonely. I have friends in England—friends who were once all that is dear and kind; but I dare not go to them. I think a cruel look from one of those friends would kill me with a pain more bitter than any other death could give. And I have no right to hope for kind looks from them. Yours are the only words of friendship I have heard for a long time."
"And you will give me the right to work for you—to protect you? You will be my wife?"
"I would rather be your servant," she answered, with sad humility. "What right have I to accept so great a sacrifice? What folly can be so foolish as your love for me—if it is indeed love, and not a wild fancy of to-night!"
"It is a fancy that will last my life."
"Ah, you do not know how such fancies change."
"I know nothing except that mine is changeless. Come, my love, it isgrowing late and cold. Let me take you home. The portress will wonder.You must slip past her quietly with your veil down. Did you give oldMargot your key when you came down stairs to-night?"
"No, it is in my pocket. I was not thinking—I—"
She stopped with a sudden shudder. Gustave understood that shudder; he also shuddered. She had left her room that night possessed by the suicide's madness; she had left it to come straight to death. Happily his strong arm had come between her and that cruel grave by which they were still lingering.
They walked slowly back to the Rue Grande-Mademoiselle under the light of the newly-risen moon. The Englishwoman's wasted hand rested for the first time on M. Lenoble's arm. She was his—his by the intervention and by the decree of Providence! That became a conviction in the young man's mind. He covered her late return to the house with diplomatic art, engaging the portress in conversation while the dark figure glided past in the dim lamplight. On the staircase he paused to bid her good night.
"You will walk with me in the Luxembourg garden to-morrow morning, dearest," he said. "I have so much to say—so much. Until then, adieu!"
He kissed her hand, and left her on the threshold of her apartment, and then went to his own humble bachelor's chamber, singing a little drinking song in his deep manly voice, happy beyond all measure.
They walked together next day in the gardens of the Luxembourg. The poor lonely creature whom Gustave had rescued seemed already to look up to him as a friend and protector, if not in the character of a future husband. It was no longer this fair stranger who held possession of Gustave; it was Gustave who had taken possession of her. The stronger nature had subjugated the weaker. So friendless, so utterly destitute—penniless, helpless, in a strange land, it is little matter for wonder that Susan Meynell accepted the love that was at once a refuge and a shelter.
"Let me tell you my wretched story," she pleaded, as she walked under the chestnut-trees by her lover's side. "Let me tell you everything. And if, when you have heard what an unhappy creature I am, you still wish to give me your heart, your name, I will be obedient to your wish. I will not speak to you of gratitude. If you could understand how debased an outcast I seemed to myself last night when I went to the river, you would know how I must feel your goodness. But you can never understand—you can never know what you seem to me."
And then in a low voice, and with infinite shame and hesitation, she told him her story.
"My father was a tradesman in the city of London," she said. "We were very well off, and my home ought to have been a happy one. Ah, how happy such a home would seem to me now! But I was idle and frivolous and discontented in those days, and was dissatisfied with our life in the city because it seemed dull and monotonous to me. When I look back now and remember how poor a return I gave for the love that was given to me—my mother's anxiety, my father's steady, unpretending kindness—I feel how well I have deserved the sorrows that have come to me since then."
She paused here, but Gustave did not interrupt her. His interest was too profound for any conventional expression. He was listening to the story of his future wife's youth. That there could be any passage in that history which would hinder him from claiming this woman as his wife was a possibility he did not for a moment contemplate. If there were shame involved in the story, as Madame Meynell's manner led him to suppose there must be, so much the worse was it for him, since the shame must be his, as she was his.
"When my father and mother died, I went into Yorkshire to live with my married sister. I cannot find words to tell you how kind they were to me—my sister and her husband. I had a little money left me by my father, and I spent the greater part of it on fine dress, and on foolish presents to my sister and her children. I was happier in Yorkshire than I had been in London; for I saw more people, and my life seemed gayer and brighter than in the city. One day I saw a gentleman, the brother of a nobleman who lived in the neighbourhood of my sister's house. We met by accident in a field on my brother-in-law's farm, where the gentleman was shooting; and after that he came to the house. He had seen my sister before, and made some excuse for renewing his acquaintance. He came very often, and before long he asked me to marry him; and I promised to be his wife, with my sister's knowledge and consent. She loved me so dearly, and was so proud of me out of her dear love, that she saw nothing wonderful in this engagement, especially as Mr. Kingdon, the gentleman I am speaking of, was a younger son, and by no means a rich man."
Again she stopped, and waited a little before continuing her story. Only by a gentle pressure of the tremulous hand resting on his arm did Gustave express his sympathy.
"I cannot tell you, how happy I was in those days—so bright, so brief. I cannot tell you how I loved Montague Kingdon. When I look back to that time of my life, it seems like a picture standing out against a background of darkness, with some strange vivid light shining upon it. It was arranged between Montague and my sister that we should be married as soon as his brother, Lord Durnsville, had paid his debts. The payment of the debts was an old promise of Lord Durnsville's, and an imprudent marriage on his brother's part might have prevented the performance of it. This is what Montague told my sister Charlotte. She begged him to confide in her husband, my kind brother-in-law, but this he refused to do. There came a day very soon after this when James Halliday, my brother-in-law, was told about Montague Kingdon's visits to the farm. He came home and found Mr. Kingdon with us; and then there was a dreadful scene between them. James forbade Mr. Kingdon ever again to set foot in his house. He scolded my sister, he warned me. It was all no use. I loved Montague Kingdon as you say you love me—foolishly, recklessly. I could not disbelieve or doubt him. When he told me of his plans for our marriage, which was to be kept secret until Lord Durnsville had paid his debts, I consented to leave Newhall with him to be married in London. If he had asked me for my life, I must have given it to him. And how should I disbelieve his promises when I had lived only amongst people who were truth itself? He knew that I had friends in London, and it was arranged between us that I was to be married from the house of one of them, who had been my girlish companion, and who was now well married. I was to write, telling her of my intended journey to town; and on the following night I was to leave Newhall secretly with Montague Kingdon. I was to make my peace with my sister and her husband after my marriage. How shall I tell you the rest? From the first to last he deceived me. The carriage that was, as I believed, to have taken us to London, carried us to Hull. From Hull we crossed to Hamburg. From that time my story is all shame and misery. I think my heart broke in the hour in which I discovered that I had been cheated. I loved him, and clung to him long after I knew him to be selfish and false and cruel. It seemed to be a part of my nature to love him. My life was not the kind of life one reads of in novels. It was no existence of splendour and luxury and riot, but one long struggle with debt and difficulty. We lived abroad—not for our pleasure, but because Mr. Kingdon could not venture to appear in England. His brother, Lord Durnsville, had never promised to pay his debts. That was a falsehood invented to deceive my sister. For seven long weary years I was his slave, a true and faithful slave; his nurse in illness, his patient drudge at all times. We had been wandering about France for two years, when he brought me to Paris; and it was here he first began to neglect me. O, if you could know the dreary days and nights I have spent at the hotel on the other side of the river, where we lived, you would pity me."
"My dear love, my heart is all pity for you," said Gustave. "Do not tell me any more. I can guess the end of the story. There came a day in which neglect gave place to desertion."
"Yes; Mr. Kingdon left me one day without a warning word to break the blow. I had been waiting and watching for him through two weary days and nights, when there came a letter to tell me he was on his way to Vienna with a West Indian gentleman and his daughter. He was to be married to the daughter. It was his poverty, he told me, which compelled this step. He advised me to go back to my friends in Yorkshire. To go back!—as if he did not know that death would be easier to me. There was a small sum of money in the letter, on which I have lived since that time. When you first met me here, I had not long received that letter."
This was the end of her story. In the depth of her humiliation she dared not lift her eyes to the face of her companion; but she felt his hand clasp hers, and knew that he was still her friend. This was all she asked of Providence.
To Gustave Lenoble the story had been unutterably painful. He had hoped to hear a tragedy untarnished by shame, and the shame was very bitter to him. This woman whom he loved so fondly was no spotless martyr, the victim of inevitable fate, beautiful and sublime in her affliction. She was only a weak vain, village beauty who had suffered herself to be lured away from her peaceful home by the falsehoods of a commonplace scoundrel.
The story was common, the shame was common, but it seemed to M. Lenoble that the woman by his side was his destiny; and then, prompt to the rescue of offended pride, of outraged love—tortured to think that she, so distant and pure a creature to him, should have been trampled in the dust by another—came the white-winged angel Pity. By her weakness, by her humiliation, by the memory of her suffering, Pity conjured him to love her so much the more dearly.
"My darling," he said softly, "it is a very sad story, and you and I will never speak of it again. We will bury the memory of Montague Kingdon in the deepest grave that was ever dug for bitter remembrances; and we will begin a new life together."
This was the end of M. Lenoble's wooing. He could not speak of his love any more while the sound of Montague Kingdon's name had but lately died away on Susan Meynell's lips. He had taken her to himself, with all her sorrows and sins, in the hour in which he snatched her from death; and between these two there was no need of passionate protestations or sentimental rapture.
M. Lenoble speedily discovered that the law had made no provision for the necessities of a chivalrous young student eager to unite himself with a friendless foreign woman, who could not produce so much as one of the thirty witnesses required to establish her identity. A very little consideration showed Gustave that a marriage between him and Susan Meynell in France was an impossibility. He explained this, and asked her if she would trust him as she had trusted Montague Kingdon. In Jersey the marriage might easily be solemnised. Would she go with him to Jersey, to stay there so long as the English law required for the solemnization of their union?
"Why should you take so much trouble about me?" said Susan, in her low sad voice. "You are too good, too generous. I am not worth so much care and thought from you."
"Does that mean that you will not trust me, Susan?"
"I would trust you with my life in a desert, thousands of miles from the rest of mankind—with a happier life than mine. I have no feeling in my heart but love for you, and faith in you."
After this the rest was easy. The lovers left the Pension Magnotte one bright summer morning, and journeyed to Jersey, where, after a fortnight's sojourn, the English Protestant church united them in the bonds of matrimony.
Susan was a Protestant, Gustave a Catholic, but the difference of religion divided them no more than the difference of country. They came back to Paris directly after the marriage, and M. Lenoble took a very modest lodging for himself and his wife in a narrow street near the Pantheon—a fourth story, very humbly furnished. M. Lenoble had provided for himself an opportunity of testing the truth of that adage which declares that a purse large enough for one is also large enough for two.
After those stormy emotions which accompany the doing of a desperate deed, there comes in the minds of men a dead calm. The still small voice of Wisdom, unheard while Passion's tempest was raging, whispers grave counsel or mild reproof; and Folly, who, seen athwart the storm-cloud, sublime in the glare of the lightning, seemed inspiration, veils her face in the clear, common light of day.
Let it not for a moment be supposed that with M. Lenoble time and reflection brought repentance in their train. It was not so. The love which he felt for his English wife was no capricious emotion; it was a passion deep and strong as destiny. The worst that afterthought could reveal to him was the fact that the step he had taken was a very desperate one. Before him lay an awful necessity—the necessity of going to Beaubocage to tell those who loved him how their air-built castles had been shattered by this deed of his.
The letters from Cydalise—nay, indeed, more than one letter from his mother, with whom letter-writing was an exceptional business—had of late expressed much anxiety. In less than a month the marriage-contract would be made ready for his signature. Every hour's delay was a new dishonour. He told his wife that he must go home for a few days; and she prepared his travelling gear, with a sweet dutiful care that seemed to him like the ministration of an angel.
"My darling girl, can I ever repay you for the happiness you have brought me!" he exclaimed, as he watched the slight girlish figure flitting about the room, busy with the preparations for his journey.
And then he thought of Madelon Frehlter—commonplace, stiff, and unimpressionable—the most conventional of school-girls, heavy in face, in figure, in step, in mind even, as it had seemed to him, despite his sister's praises.
He had been too generous to tell Susan of his engagement, of the brilliant prospects he forfeited by his marriage, or the risk which he ran of offending his father by that rash step. But to-night, when he thought of Madelon's dulness and commonness, it seemed to him as if Susan had in manner rescued him from a dreadful fate—as maidens were rescued from sea-monsters in the days of Perseus and Heracles.
"Madelon is not unlike a whale," he thought. "They tell us that whales are of a sagacious and amiable temper,—and Cydalise was always talking of Madelon's good sense and amiablity. I am sure it is quite as easy to believe in the unparalleled virtues of the whale as in the unparalleled virtues of Madelon Frehlter."
His valise was packed, and he departed for Beaubocage, after a sad and tender parting from his wife. The journey was a long one in those days, when no express train had yet thundered across the winding Seine, cleaving its iron way through the bosom of fertile Norman valleys. M. Lenoble had ample time for reflection as he jogged along in the ponderous diligence; and his heart grew more and more heavy as the lumbering vehicle approached nearer to the town of Vevinord, whence he was to make his way to the paternal mansion as best he might.
He walked to Beaubocage, attended by a peasant lad, who carried his portmanteau. The country was very pleasant in the quiet summer evening, but conscious guilt oppressed the heart and perplexity disturbed the mind of M. Gustave Lenoble, and his spirits were in nowise elevated by the walk.
Lights in the lower chambers gleamed dimly athwart the trim garden at Beaubocage. One faint twinkling candle shone in a little pepper-castor turret, his sister's room. The thought of their glad welcome smote his heart. How could he shape the words that must inform them of their disappointment? And then he thought of the gentle pensive wife in the Parisian lodging, so grateful for his devotion, so tender and submissive,—the wife he had rescued from death and eternal condemnation, as it seemed to his pious Catholic mind. The thought of this dear one gave him courage.
"I owe much to my parents," he thought to himself, "but not the privilege to sell me for money. The marriage they want to bring about would be a sordid barter of my heart and my honour."
In a few minutes after this he was standing in the little salon at Beaubocage, with his mother and sister hanging about him and caressing him, his father standing near, less demonstrative, but evidently well pleased by this unexpected arrival of the son and heir.
"I heard thy voice in the hall," cried Cydalise, "and flew down from my room to welcome thee. It seems to me that one can fly on these occasions. And how thou art looking well, and how thou art handsome, and how I adore thee!" cries the damsel, more ecstatic than an English sister on a like occasion. "Dost thou know that we began to alarm ourselves about thee? Thy letters became so infrequent, so cold. And all the while thou didst plot this surprise for us. Ah, how it is sweet to see thee again!"
And then the mother took up the strain, and anon was spoken the dreaded name of Madelon. She too would be glad—she too had been anxious. The prodigal made no answer. He could not speak, his heart sank within him, he grew cold and pale; to inflict pain on those who loved him was a sharper pain than death.
"Gustave!" cried the mother, in sudden alarm, "thou growest pale—thou art ill! Look then, François, thy son is ill!"
"No, mother, I am not ill," the young man replied gravely. He kissed his mother, and put her gently away from him. In all the years of her after-life she remembered that kiss, cold as death, for it was the farewell kiss of her son.
"I wish to speak a few words with you alone, father," said Gustave.
The father was surprised, but in no manner alarmed by this request. He led the way to his den, a small and dingy chamber, where there were some dusty editions of the French classics, and where the master of Beaubocage kept accounts and garden-seeds and horse-medicines.
When they were gone, the mother and sister sat by one of the open windows, waiting for them. Without all was still. Distant lights glimmered through the summer twilight, the lighted windows of Côtenoir.
"How pleased Madelon will be," said Cydalise, looking towards those glimmering windows. She had really taught herself to believe that the demoiselle Frehlter was a most estimable young person; but she would have been glad to find more enthusiasm, more brightness and vivacity, in her future sister-in-law.
The interview between the father and son seemed long to Madame Lenoble and Cydalise. The two women were curious—nay, indeed, somewhat anxious.
"I fear he has made debts," said the mother, "and is telling thy father of his follies. I know not how they are to be paid, unless with the dowry of Madelon, and that would seem a dishonourable use of her money."
It was half an hour before any sound broke the stillness of that quiet house. Twilight had thickened into night, when there came a banging of doors and heavy footsteps in the hall. The door of the salon was opened, and M. Lenoble came in alone. At the same moment the outer door closed heavily.
M. Lenoble went straight to the open window and closed the Venetian shutters. He went from thence to the second window, the shutters whereof he fastened carefully, while the women stared at him wonderingly, for it was not his habit to perform this office.
"I am shutting out a vagabond," he said, in a cold, cruel voice.
"Where is Gustave?" cried the mother, alarmed.
"He is gone."
"But he is coming back, is he not, directly?"
"Never while I live!" answered M. Lenoble. "He has married an English adventuress, and is no longer any son of mine."
Seven years after that miserable summer night at Beaubocage on which Gustave Lenoble was disowned by his father, a man and woman, with a boy five years of age, were starving in a garret amongst the housetops and chimneys of Rouen. In the busy city these people lived lonely as in a forest, and were securely hidden from the eyes of all who had ever known them. The man—haggard, dying—cherished a pride that had grown fiercer as the grip of poverty tightened upon him. The woman lived only for her husband and her child.
The man was Gustave Lenoble. The world had gone ill with him since he cast his destiny into the lap of the woman he loved. In all these years no olive-bearing dove had spanned the gulf that yawned between the prodigal and his father. The seigneur of Beaubocage had been marble. A narrow-minded old man, living his narrow life, and nursing one idea with fanatical devotion, was of all men the least likely to forgive. Vain had been the tears and entreaties of mother and sister. The doors of that joyless dwelling on the fertile flats beyond Vevinord were sealed against the offender with a seal not to be broken, even had he come thither to plead for pardon, which he did not.
"My father would have sold me as negro slaves are soldlà-bas," he said, on those rare occasions when he opened his old wounds, which were to the last unhealed: "I am glad that I escaped the contemptible barter."
He was in very truth glad. Poverty and hardship seemed to him easier to bear than the dreary prosperity of Côtenoir and a wife he could not have loved. The distinguishing qualities of this man's mind were courage and constancy. There are such noble souls born into the world, some to shine with lustre supernal, many to burn and die in social depths, obscure as ocean's deepest cavern.
In his love for the woman he had chosen Gustave Lenoble never wavered. He worked for her, he endured for her, he hoped against hope for her sake; and it was only when bodily strength failed that this nameless foot-soldier began to droop and falter in life's bitter battle. Things had gone ill with him. He had tried his fate as an advocate in Paris, in Caen, in Rouen—but clients would not come. He had been a clerk, now in one counting-house, now in another, and Susan and he had existed somehow during the seven years of their married life.
They clung to each other with affection that seemed to grow with every new sorrow; nor did love exhibit any inclination to spread his wings and take flight from the window, though poverty came in every day at the door, and sat by the hearth, a familiar companion and inevitable guest.
The mother and sister contrived to help this poor castaway with the veriest scrapings of a miserly household. The old man, soured by his great disappointment, grew sordid and covetous with increasing years, and the lives of the women were hard and hopeless. By little cheats, and petty contrivances, and pitiful falsifications of financial statements, they managed to scrape together a few louis now and then for the struggling exile; and to do this was the sole delight of their patient lives. They contrived also to correspond secretly with Gustave, and were informed of the birth of his son.
"Ah, if thou couldst see how beautiful he is," wrote the father, "this child of pure and true love, thou wouldst no longer regret my breach of faith with Madelon Frehlter. I knew not until now how like infant children are to angels. I knew not how true to nature are the angels in the pictures of Raffaelle and Murillo. Thou knowest the print of Murillo's Assumption; the picture is in the Louvre. If thou canst remember that picture, dear mother, thou hast but to recall the face of one of the cherubim about the feet of our Lady, and thou hast the portrait of my boy. He opens his eyes, and looks at me as I write. Ah! that he and I and my Susan were with thee in the little salon at Beaubocage—my sister, Susan, you, and I united round this darling's cradle. He has been born in poverty, but his birth has made us very happy."
The sentiment of this letter was no spurious or transient feeling. For this child Gustave Lenoble evinced an unchanging fondness. It was indeed no part of his nature to change. The little one was his comfort in affliction, his joy during every brief interval of prosperity. When the battle was well nigh fought, and he began to feel himself beaten; his chief anxieties, his ever-returning fears, were for his wife and child.
To Susan the thought of parting from him was a despair too deep for tears. She would have been something less than woman if she had not loved her husband with more than common affection. She watched the change that illness brought in the frank face, the stalwart figure; and little by little the awful truth came home to her. The hour was at hand in which she must lose him.
"If you could have rest, Gustave, better medical advice, more comforts, you would soon be strong again. I am sure your father would not refuse to forgive you now. Write to him, dearest. Go back to Beaubocage, and let your mother and sister nurse you. I will stay here with the little one. It shall be forgotten that you have a wife and child."
"No, dear one; I will not desert you, even for a day, to buy back my father's love. I would rather be here with you than in the pleasantest home without you. But we must face the future, Susan; we must be brave and wise, for the little one's sake. You are not so strong that you can afford to trust blindly in your power to protect him by-and-by. I have written a letter to my father. He has proved himself a hard man to me, cruel and obdurate beyond all my fears; but I know he is not altogether heartless. When I am dead, you will take the letter in one hand, the child in the other, and go to Beaubocage. I believe he will adopt the boy, and that the little one will give him the comfort and happiness he hoped from me. He must be very lonely; and I cannot doubt that his heart will melt when he sees the child's face, and hears that he has no longer a son. As for yourself, my poor girl, I see for you no hope except in the old Yorkshire home, and the friends you fear to see again."
"I no longer fear them," said his wife, with unwonted energy, "I could not go to them seven years ago; but I can go to them as your wife."
"Ah, thank God, the poor name is worth something for you."
"Yes, dear; and I will go back to them—to-morrow."
"To-morrow!"
"To-morrow, Gustave. I have been selfish and cruel to delay so long. The old dread of seeing my sister's reproachful face has been strong enough to hold me back, when a little courage might have enabled me to help you. The burden has been all on you, and I have done nothing. O, what a wretch I must have been to sit idly by and see you suffer, and make no effort to help you!"
"But, my darling, you have not been idle. You have been the dearest and most industrious of wives, and have helped me to bear my burden. You have done more, dear—you have made my burden pleasant to me."
"I will try to lighten it, Gustave," cried Susan, with excitement. "O, why, why did I never try before! My sister and her husband are well off—rich perhaps. If they are still living, if no cruel changes have come to pass at Newhall, they could help us with a little money. They might even give us a home. I will start for England to-morrow."
"Nay, my dear, you are not strong enough to travel so far alone. It seems, indeed, a happy thought this of your rich relations; but you must not undertake such a journey. You might write."
"No, Gustave, I will trust to no letter; I will go. It will be no pain for me to humble myself for your sake. I will go straight to my sister. I know what a tender compassionate heart it is that I shall appeal to."
There was much discussion; but Susan was resolute. To scrape together the money for the journey she made efforts that were heroic in a nature so weak as hers. She went to the Monte de Piété with the last of her little treasures, that one dear trinket to which she had clung even when hunger was at the door—the gimmal or alliance ring that Gustave had placed upon her finger before God's altar—the double symbolic circlet which bore on one side her name, on the other her husband's. This dearest of all her possessions she surrendered for a few francs, to make up the sum needful for her journey.
What it cost her to do this, what it cost her to tear herself away from her sick husband and her only child, who shall say? There are pangs that cannot be counted, agonies that will come within no calculation—the infinite of pain. She went. Two kind souls, a labourer and his wife, lodgers in the same garret-story, promised to care for and help the invalid and child. There is no desolation in which a child will not find a friend.
The journey was long and fatiguing; the anguish of her poor aching heart almost too much for endurance—a heart so heavy that even hope could scarce flutter it. It was dull damp weather, though in the middle of summer. The solitary traveller caught cold on the journey, and arrived in London in a high fever. Ill, faint, and helpless, the great city seemed to her unspeakably dismal—most stony of all stony-hearted mothers to this wretched orphan. She could go no farther than the darksome city inn where the coach from Southampton brought her. She had comeviâHavre. Here she sank prostrate, and had barely sufficient strength to write an incoherent letter to her sister, Mrs. Halliday, of Newhall Farm, near Huxter's Cross, Yorkshire.
The sister came as fast as the fastest coach on the great northern road could carry her. There was infinite joy in that honest sisterly heart over this one sinner's repentance. Fourteen years had gone by since the young city-bred beauty had fled with that falsest of men, and most hardened of profligates, Montague Kingdon; and tidings from Susan were unlooked for and thrilling as a message from the grave.
Alas for the adverse fate of Susan Meynell! The false step of her youth had set her for ever wrong upon life's highway. When kind Mrs. Halliday came, Gustave Lenoble's wife was past her help; wandering in her mind; a girl again, but newly run away from her peaceful home; and with no thought save of remorse for her misdeeds.
The seven years of her married life seemed to have faded out of her mind. She raved of Montague Kingdon's baseness, of her own folly, her vain regret, her yearning for pardon; but of the dying husband in the garret at Rouen she uttered no word. And so, with her weary head upon her sister's breast, she passed away, her story untold, no wedding-ring on her wasted finger to bear witness that she died an honest man's wife; no letters or papers in her poor little trunk to throw light on the fourteen years in which she had been a castaway.
Mrs. Halliday stayed in London to see the wanderer laid in the quiet city churchyard where her family rested, and where for her was chosen an obscure corner in which she might repose forgotten and unknown.
But not quite nameless. Mrs. Halliday could not leave the grave unmarked by any record of the sister she had loved. The stone above the grave of Gustave's wife bore her maiden name, and the comforting familiar text about the one sinner who repenteth.
For a week of long days and longer nights there was no step sounded on the stair, no opening or shutting of a door in the old dilapidated house where he lay languishing on the brink of an open grave, that did not move Gustave Lenoble with a sudden emotion of hope. But the footsteps came and went, the doors were opened and shut again and again, and the traveller so waited, so hoped for did not return.
The boy—the brave bright son, who seemed to inherit all that was noblest and best in his father's nature—pined for his mother. The man endured a martyrdom worse than the agony of Damiens, the slow tortures of La Barre. What had befallen her? That she could desert him or his child was a possibility that never shaped itself in his mind.Thatdrop of poison was happily wanting in his cup; and the bitterness of death was sweet compared to the scorpion-sting of such a supposition.
She did not return. Calamity in some shape had overtaken her—calamity dire as death; for, with life and reason, she could not have failed to send some token, some tidings, to those she loved. The sick man waited a week after the day on which he had begun to expect her return. At the end of that time he rose, with death in his face, and went out to look for her—to look for her in Rouen; for her whom the instinct of his heart told him was far away from that city—as far as death from life. He went to the Cour de Messageries, and loitered and waited amidst the bustle of arriving and departing diligences, with a half-imbecile hope that she would alight from one of them. The travellers came and went, pushing and hustling him in their selfish haste. When night came he went back to his garret. All was quiet. The boy slept with the children of his good neighbour, and was comforted by the warmth of that strange hearth.
Gustave lit his candle, a last remaining morsel.
"You will last my time, friend," he said, with a wan smile.
He seated himself at the little table, pushed aside the medicine-bottles, searched for a stray sheet of letter-paper, and then began to write.
He wrote to his mother, telling her that death was at hand, and that the time had come in which she must succour her son's orphan child. With this he enclosed a letter to his father—that letter of which he had spoken to his wife, and which had been written in the early days of his illness. This packet he directed to Madame Lenoble, at Beaubocage. There was no longer need for secrecy.
"When those letters are delivered I shall be past blame, and past forgiveness," he thought.
In the morning he was dead.
The neighbours posted the letter. The neighbours comforted and protected the child for two days; and then there came a lady, very sad, very quiet, who wept bitterly in the stillness of that attic chamber where Gustave Lenoble lay; and who afterwards, with a gentle calmness of manner that was very sweet to see, made all necessary arrangements for a humble, but not a mean or ignominious, funeral.
"He was my brother," she said to the good friends of the neighbouring garret. "We did our best to help him, my mother and I; but we little thought how bitterly he wanted help. The brave heart would not suffer us to know that."
And then she thanked them with much tenderness for their charity to the dead man; and with these good people she went on foot through the narrow streets of the city to see her brother laid in his grave.
Until this was done the mournful lady, who was not yet thirty years of age, and of a placid nun-like beauty, abandoned herself to no transport of love for her orphan nephew; but when that last office of affection had been performed, she took the little one on her knees, and folded him to her breast, and gave him her heart, as she had given it long ago to his father; for this gentle unselfish creature was one who must needs have some shrine at which to offer her daily sacrifice of self. Already she was beginning to think how the orphan was to be cared for and the widow also, for whose return she looked daily.
For the return of Susan Lenoble Cydalise waited at Rouen several days after the funeral. She had, happily, an old school-fellow comfortably established in the city; and in the house of this old friend she found a home. No one but her mother and this friend, whom she could trust, knew of the business that had brought her from Beaubocage. In seven years the father had never uttered his only son's name; in all the seven years that name had never been spoken in his hearing.
When three weeks had gone by since the departure of Susan for England, all hope of her return was abandoned by Mademoiselle Lenoble and the neighbours who had known the absent woman.
"She had the stamp of death on her face when she went away," said the labourer's wife, "as surely as it was on him that she left. I told her she had no strength for the journey; but she would go: there was no moving her from that. She had rich friendslà-bas, who might help her husband. It was for that she went. That thought seemed to give her a kind of fever, and the strength of fever."
"And there has come no letter—nothing?"
"Nothing, mademoiselle."
On this Cydalise determined to return to Beaubocage. She could not well leave the child longer on the hands of these friendly people, even by paying for his maintenance, which she insisted on doing, though they would fain have shared their humblepot-à-feuand coarse loaf with him unrecompensed. She determined on a desperate step. She would take her brother's orphan child back with her, and leave the rest to Providence—to the chance of some sudden awakening of natural affection in a heart that had long languished in a kind of torpor that was almost death.
The little fellow pined sadly for those dear familiar faces, those tender soothing voices, that had vanished so suddenly from his life. But the voice of his aunt was very sweet and tender, and had a tone that recalled the father who was gone. With this kind aunt he left Rouen in the lumbering old vehicle that plied daily betwixt that city and Vevinord.
"Thou canst call me Cydalise for a while, my little one," she said to him; for she did not wish the child to proclaim the relationship between them yet awhile.
Ah, what bitter tears the two women shed over the soft fair curls of that little head, when they had the boy all to themselves in the turret chamber at Beaubocage, on whose white walls the eyes of Cydalise had opened almost every morning of her pure eventless life!
"Why dost thou cry so, madame?" the child asked of his grandmother, as she held him in her arms, kissing and weeping over him; "and what have they done with my father—and mamma too? She went away one day, but she told me that she would come back, so quickly, ah, so quickly! and the days passed, and they shut papa in his room, and would not let me go to him; and mamma did not come, though I asked the Blessed Virgin to send her back to me."
"Dear child, thy father and mother are in a brighter place than this hard world, where they had so much sorrow," Madame Lenoble answered, gently.
"Yes, they were often sorry," murmured the boy thoughtfully. "It was because of money; but then, when there was no money, mamma cried and kissed me, and kissed papa, and the good papa kissed us both, and somehow it always ended in happiness."
François Lenoble was, happily, absent on this day of tribulation. The women took their fill of sorrow, but it was sorrow mingled with a strange bitter sweetness that was almost joy. The seigneur of Beaubocage had gone to dine, as he still often did, with his old friend Baron Frehlter; for the breach of faith which had caused a lifelong disunion of father and son had not divided the two proprietors. Nay, indeed the Baron had been generous enough to plead the cause of the castaway.
"A man cannot dispose at will of his affections, my friend," he urged; "and it was more generous in your son to break faith with my daughter before marriage than after."
Mademoiselle Frehlter had not broken her heart on account of her lover's falsehood. She had been sufficiently indignant on the occasion, and had been more impatient of her mother's pet priest and pet poodle during the brief period in which she wore the willow. She had recovered her good humour, however, on being wooed by a young subaltern in a cavalry regiment stationed at Vevinord, the offshoot of a grander house than that of Lenoble, and whose good looks and good lineage had ultimately prevailed with the Baron. That gentleman had by no means too good an opinion of the son-in-law thus forced upon him; but peace was the highest good (with unlimited tobacco) to which his Germanic soul aspired; and for the sake of peace in the present he was content to hazard his daughter's happiness in the future.
"Thatis very brilliant," he said of M. Paul de Nérague, the young lieutenant of light cavalry; "but it is not solid, like Gustave. Your son is honest, candid—a brave heart. It is for that I would have given him Madelon. But it is Providence which disposes of us, as our good father St. Velours tells us often; and one must be content. Young Nérague pleases my daughter, and I must swallow him, though for me he smells too strong of the barracks:ça flaire la caserne, mon ami."
That odour of the barracks which distinguished the sub-lieutenant Paul de Nérague became more odious after his marriage with the virtuous Madelon, when he was established—niché, as he himself called it—in very comfortable, though somewhat gruesome, apartments at Côtenoir. His riotous deportment, his hospitable disposition (as displayed in the frequent entertainment of his brothers-in-arms at the expense of his father-in-law), his Don Juan-like demeanour in relation to the housemaids and kitchen-wenches of the château—innocent enough in the main, but on that account so much the more audacious—struck terror to the hearts of Madame Frehlter and her daughter; and the elder lady was much gratified by that thirst for foreign territory which carried the greater part of the French army and the regiment of the vivacious Paul to the distant wilds of Algeria.
The virtuous Madelon was too stolid to weep for her husband. But even her stolidity was not proof against the fiery influence of jealousy, and, waking and sleeping, her visions were of veiled damsels of Orient assailing the too inflammable heart of Lieutenant de Nérague.
The young officer was yet absent at that period in which Cydalise returned from Rouen with her brother's child.
The little boy was sleeping peacefully in a cot beside his aunt's bed (it had been his father's cot thirty years ago) when François Lenoble returned from Côtenoir that night.
It was not till the next day that he saw the child. He had been making his usual morning's round in the gardens and orchards, when he came into the salon, and saw the little boy seated near his grandmother's chair, playing with some dominoes. Something—perhaps the likeness to his dead son—the boy's black clothes, for Cydalise had contrived to dress him in decent mourning—struck suddenly on the old man's heart. "Who is that boy?" he asked, with a strange earnestness.
"Your son Gustave's only child," answered his wife gently,—"his orphan child."
François Lenoble looked at her, and from her to the boy; tried to speak, but could not; beckoned the child, and then dropped heavily into a chair and sobbed aloud. Until this moment no one had ever seen him shed a tear for the son he had put away from his home—and, as it had seemed, from his heart. Not by one sigh, not by one mournful utterance of the familiar name, had he betrayed the depth of that wound which he had endured, silently, obstinately, in all these years.
They suffered him to bemoan his dead son unhindered by stereotyped consolations. The two women stood by, and pitied him in silence. The little boy stared wonderingly, and at last crept up to the sorrow-stricken father. "Why do you cry, poor old man?" he asked. "You have not lost your papa and mamma, as I have lost mine, have you? I want to stay with you and be your little boy, please. She told me to say that," he added, pointing to Cydalise.—"And I have said it right, haven't I?" he asked of the same lady.—"I think I shall love you, because you are like my papa, only older and uglier," the little one concluded, with angelic candour.
The seigneur of Beaubocage dried his tears with an effort. Beaubocage—Côtenoir. Ah, me! what empty sounds those two once magic names seemed to him now that his son's life had been sacrificed to so paltry an ambition, so sordid a passion, so vile and grovelling a desire! He took the boy on his knee, and kissed him tenderly. His thoughts bridged over a chasm of five-and-twenty years as his lips pressed that fair young brow; and it was his own son—the son whom he had disowned—whose soft hair was mingling itself now with the grey bristles on his rugged chin.
"My child," he murmured softly, "the fear is that I shall love thee too well, and be to thee as much too weakly indulgent as I was wickedly stern to thy father. Anything is easier to humanity than justice."
This was said to himself rather than to the boy.
"Tell me thy name, little one," he asked presently, after a few moments' pensive meditation.
"I have two names, monsieur."
"Thou must call me grandfather. And the two names?"
"François Gustave."
"I shall call thee Gustave."
"But papa always called me François, and mamma said it was the name of a cruel man; but papa said he loved the name—"
"Ah, no more, little one!" cried the lord of Beaubocage suddenly; "thou knowest not with what dagger-thrusts thou dost pierce this poor old heart."
The little Gustave grew and flourished. Such love was lavished on him as rarely falls to the lot of children, though the spring of many lives may be rich in love's pure white blossom. The existence of this child seemed all happiness. He brought hope, and a sense of atonement, and all sweet things, to the quiet family at Beaubocage; and as he grew from childhood to boyhood, from boyhood to manhood, it seemed to that household as if the first Gustave of their love had never been taken from them. That Orphic fable of Zagreus repeats itself in many households. For the one bright creature lost another is given; and then comes a time when it is almost difficult to separate the image of the missing one from the dear substitute who so nearly fills his place.
François Lenoble and his wife enjoyed a green old age, and the affection of their grandson made the cup of life sweet for them to the very dregs. There are, happily, some natures which indulgence cannot injure; some luxuriant flowers which attain strength as well as beauty under the influence of these tropical heats of affection. Gustave the second possessed all the noble qualities of Gustave the first. Frank, generous, brave, constant, affectionate, light-hearted, he shone on the failing eyes of his kindred radiant as a young Apollo, brave as a mortal Hercules.
Those things which the ignorant heart has at some time so passionately desired are apt to be granted when the desire has grown somewhat cold and dead. Thus it was with the ambition of François Lenoble. He lived to see the lands of Côtenoir and Beaubocage united in the person of his grandson, who married Clarice, the only surviving child of M. and Madame de Nérague. Two sons and a daughter had been born at Côtenoir; but the sons withered and faded in early boyhood, and even the daughter, though considered a flourishing plant in that poor garden of weakling blossoms, was but a fragile creature.
The old people at Beaubocage survived the seigneur and châtelaine of Côtenoir by some years, and survived also the fiery lieutenant, who fell in Algeria without having attained his captaincy, or added any military renown to the good old name of de Nérague in his own magnificent person.
François saw his grandson established at Côtenoir before he died. He expired with his hand in that of Gustave, whom, in the half-consciousness of that last hour, he mistook for the son he had disowned.
"What door was that that shut?" he asked, in an eager whisper. "Who said I turned my son out of doors—my only son? It's false! I couldn't have done it! Hark! there's the door shutting again! It sounds like the door of a tomb."
After this he dozed a little, and woke with a smile on his face.
"I have been dreaming of thy father, Gustave," he said calmly. "I thought that I saw him with a light shining in his face, and that he kissed and forgave me."
This was the end. The faithful wife was not slow to follow her husband to the grave, and there was now only a placid maiden lady at Beaubocage, Mademoiselle Cydalise Lenoble, whom everyone within ten leagues of Vevinord knew and loved,—a lay abbess, a Sister of Mercy in all save the robes; a tender creature, who lived only to do good.
Ten years passed, and M. Lenoble of Côtenoir was a widower with two fair young daughters at a convent school on the outskirts of Vevinord, and a boisterous son at an academy in Rouen. Gustave had never followed any profession; the lands of Beaubocage secured him a competence, so prudently had the small estate been managed by the kindred who adored him. His marriage had given him fortune. He had no need of trade or profession. His life was laid out for him like a prim Dutch flower-garden. He was to live at Côtenoir, and look after his estate, and smoke his pipe, as Baron Frehlter had done, and be a good husband to his wife, a kind father to his children. This latter part of his duty came natural to M. Lenoble. It was not in him to be otherwise than kind to women and children. His invalid wife praised him as a model of marital perfection. It was Gustave who wheeled her sofa from one room to another, Gustave who prepared her medicines, Gustave whose careful hands adjusted curtains andportières. The poor woman lived and died believing herself the happiest of wives. She mistook kindness for love.
M. Lenoble bore his wife's demise with Christian calmness. He was sorry that the fragile creature should have been taken so early from the pleasant home that was hers by right, but of passionate grief, or dreary sense of irreparable loss, there was none in that manly heart. There were times when the widower reproached himself for this want of feeling; but in very truth Madame Lenoble,jeune, had lived and died a nonentity. Her departure left no empty place; even her children scarcely missed her. The father was all-in-all.
Gustave had married at twenty years of age. He was twenty-nine when his wife died. His eldest daughter, Clarice, eight; his second, Madelon, seven; the boy, a spoilt young dog of five, not yet despatched to the great school at Rouen.
But in '65 Mademoiselle Clarice was fifteen years of age, and a very charming performer on the pianoforte, as the good nuns at the Convent of the Sacred Heart, at Vevinord, told the father. Mademoiselle Madelon was looking forward to her fourteenth anniversary, and she, too, was a very pretty pianist, and altogether a young prodigy of learning and goodness, as the nuns told the master of Côtenoir. The demoiselles of Côtenoir stood high in the estimation of pupils and mistress; they were a kind of noblesse; and the simple-minded superioress spoke of these young persons with some pride when she described her establishment to a stranger. It was a very comfortable little colony, a small world enclosed by high walls. The good mothers who taught and cherished the children were for the greater part ladies of superior and even exalted station; and there was a gentleness, a tenderness, in their care for these young lambs not always to be insured by the payment of an annual stipend. It must be confessed that the young lambs were apt to be troublesome, and required a good deal of watching. To the eye of the philosopher that convent school would have afforded scope for curious study; for it is singular to discover what exceptional vices the youthful mind can develop from its inner consciousness, in homes as pure as this. There were black sheep even in the convent of the Sacré Coeur, damsels marked with a sign that meant "dangerous."
Happily for Gustave Lenoble, his daughters were amongst the brightest and the purest of those girl-graduates. They gave him no trouble, except when they asked him for a home.
"It seems so dull and dreary at Côtenoir, papa," they said, "though you are always so kind. It doesn't seem like home. Beaubocage is more home-like. At Côtenoir, when you are out, there is no one to talk to; and we have no little parties, no excursions into the country, none of those pleasures which the other girls tell us they have during the holidays."
This was the gist of the lamentations of Mademoiselles Clarice and Madelon; and the father knew not how to supply the mysterious something which was wanting to make Côtenoir a pleasant home. The girls could complain of no restraint, or pine for no indulgence, since their father was always prompt to gratify every whim. But there was some element of happiness wanting, nevertheless; and M. Lenoble perceived that it was so. The life at Côtenoir was desultory, straggling; an existence of perpetual dawdling; a life of shreds and patches, half-formed resolutions, projects begun and broken off in the middle. The good genius, the household angel, order, was wanting in that mansion. There was waste, dirt, destruction of all kinds, in the rambling old château; old servants, too weak or too lazy to work; old tradesmen, presuming on old-established habits of imposition, unquestioned so long as to have become a right—for the feudal system of fine and forfeiture has only changed hands. The power still flourishes, only it is the villein who takes tithe of his lord.
The servants at Côtenoir had gone their own ways with but little interference since the death of Madame de Nérague, which occurred two years before that of her daughter, Clarice Lenoble. Poor invalid Clarice had been quite unable to superintend her household; and since her death Mademoiselle Cydalise had been too feeble of health to assume any authority in her nephew's establishment, even if the household of Côtenoir would have submitted to interference from Beaubocage, which in all likelihood they would not.
Thus it happened that things had taken their own course at the château, and the course had been somewhat erratic. There is nothing so costly as muddle, and Gustave Lenoble had of late begun to perceive that he had the maximum of expense with the minimum of comfort. Meanwhile the kind old aunt at Beaubocage gave her nieces much valuable advice against the time when they should be old enough to assume the management of their father's house. The sweet unselfish lady of Beaubocage had indeed undergone hard experience in the acquirement of the domestic art. Heaven and her own memory alone recorded those scrapings and pinchings and nice calculations of morsels by which she had contrived to save a few pounds for her outcast brother. Such sordid economics show but poorly on earth; but it is probable that in the mass of documentary evidence which goes before the Great Judge, Mademoiselle Lenoble's account-book will be placed on the right side.