“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 friends là-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 humble pot-à-feu and 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.
“That is 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.”
CHAPTER III.
GUSTAVE THE SECOND.
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 and portières. 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 g
oodness, 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.
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