Charlotte's Inheritance by Mary Elizabeth Braddon (best beach reads .txt) 📖

CONTENTS.

Book the First.

DE PROFUNDIS.

I. LENOBLE OF BEAUBOCAGE

II. IN THIS WIDE WORLD I STAND ALONE

III. PAST HOPE, AND IN DESPAIR

IV. A DECREE OF BANISHMENT


Book the Second.

DOWNHILL.

I. THE FATE OF SUSAN LENOBLE

II. FORGIVEN TOO LATE

III. GUSTAVE THE SECOND


Book the Third.

THE HORATIAD.

I. CHIEFLY RETROSPECTIVE

II. EPISTOLARY

III. TOO CLEVER FOR A CATSPAW

IV. CAPTAIN PAGET IS PATERNAL

V. THE CAPTAIN'S COADJUTOR


Book the Fourth.

GUSTAVE IN ENGLAND.

I. HALCYON DAYS

II. CAPTAIN PAGET AWAKENS TO A SENSE OF HIS DUTY

III. WHAT DO WE HERE, MY HEART AND I?

IV. SHARPER THAN A SERPENT'S TOOTH


Book the Fifth.

THE FIRST ACT OF MR. SHELDON'S DRAMA.

I. TAKEN BY STORM

II. FIRM AS A ROCK

III. AGAINST WIND AND TIDE

IV. DIANA ASKS FOR A HOLIDAY

V. ASSURANCE DOUBLY SURE


Book the Sixth.

DIANA IN NORMANDY.

I. AT CÔTENOIR


Book the Seventh.

A CLOUD OF FEAR.

I. THE BEGINNING OF SORROW

II. FADING

III. MRS. WOOLPER IS ANXIOUS

IV. VALENTINE'S SKELETON

V. AT HAROLD'S HILL

VI. DESPERATE MEASURES


Book the Eighth.

A FIGHT AGAINST TIME.

I. A DREAD REVELATION

II. PHOENICIANS ARE RISING

III. THE SORTES VIRGILIANAE


Book the Ninth.

THROUGH THE FURNACE.

I. SOMETHING TOO MUCH

II. DR. JEDD'S OPINION

III. NON DORMIT JUDAS

IV. COUNTING THE COST

V. THE BEGINNING OF THE END

VI. CONFUSION WORSE CONFOUNDED

VII. THERE IS A WORD WILL PRIAM TURN TO STONE


Book the Tenth.

HARBOUR, AFTER MANY SHIPWRECKS.

I. OUT OF THE DARK VALLEY

II. AFTER THE WEDDING

III. GREEK AGAINST GREEK

IV. ONLY A DREAM

V. BOHEMIAN INDEPENDENCE

VI. BEYOND THE VEIL

VII. BETTER THAN GOLD

VIII. LOST SIGHT OF

IX. ETEOCLES AND POLYNICES

X. "ACCORDING TO THEIR DEEDS."

CHARLOTTE'S INHERITANCE


Book the first.


DE PROFUNDIS.

CHAPTER I.


LENOBLE OF BEAUBOCAGE.

In the days when the Bourbon reigned over Gaul, before the "simple, sensuous, passionate" verse of Alfred de Musset had succeeded the _débonnaire_ Muse of Béranger in the affections of young France,--in days when the site of the Trocadero was a remote and undiscovered country, and the word "exposition" unknown in the Academic dictionary, and the Gallic Augustus destined to rebuild the city yet an exile,--a young law-student boarded, in common with other students, in a big dreary-looking house at the corner of the Rue Grande-Mademoiselle, abutting on the Place Lauzun, and within some ten minutes walk of the Luxembourg. It was a very dingy quarter, though noble gentlemen and lovely ladies had once occupied the great ghastly mansions, and disported themselves in the gruesome gardens. But the young students were in nowise oppressed by the ghastliness of their abode. They sang their Béranger, and they pledged each other in cheap Bordeaux, and clinked their glasses noisily in their boisterous good-fellowship, and ate the messes compounded for them in a darksome cupboard, known as the kitchen, by old Nanon the cook, purblind, stone-deaf, and all but imbecile, and popularly supposed to be the venerable mother of Madame Magnotte. The youngsters grumbled to each other about the messes when they were unusually mysterious; and it must be owned that there were _vol-au-vents_ and _fricandeaux_ consumed in that establishment which were awful and wonderful in their nature; but they ventured on no complaint to the mistress of the mansion. She was a grim and terrible personage. Her terms were low, and she treated her boarders _de haute en bas_. If they were not content with her viands, they might go and find more agreeable viands elsewhere.

Madame Magnotte was altogether mysterious and inscrutable. Some people said that she was a countess, and that the wealth and lands of her family had been confiscated by the committee of public unsafety in '93. Others declared that she had been a popular actress in a small theatre in the days of Napoleon. She was tall and thin--nay, of an exceptional leanness--and her complexion was of a more agreeable yellow than the butter that appeared on her hospitable board; but she had flashing black eyes, and a certain stateliness of gait and grandeur of manner that impressed those young Bohemians, her boarders, with a kind of awe. They talked of her as the "countess," and by that name she was known to all inmates of the mansion; but in all their dealings with her they treated her with unfailing respect.

One of the quietest among the young men who enjoyed the privileges of Madame Magnotte's abode was a certain Gustave Lenoble, a law-student, the only son of a very excellent couple who lived on their own estate, near an obscure village in Normandy. The estate was of the smallest; a dilapidated old house, known in the immediate neighbourhood as "the Château," and very dear to those who resided therein; a garden, in which everything seemed to have run to seed; and about forty acres of the poorest land in Normandy. These possessions constituted the patrimonial estate of Francois Lenoble, _propriétaire_, of Beaubocage, near Vevinordin, the department of Eure.

The people amongst whom the good man lived his simple life called him M. Lenoble de Beaubocage, but he did not insist upon this distinction; and on sending out his only son to begin the battle of life in the great world of Paris, he recommended the young man to call himself Lenoble, _tout court_.

The young man had never cherished any other design. He was of all creatures the least presuming or pretentious. The father was Legitimist to the very marrow; the son half Buonapartist, half republican. The father and son had quarrelled about these differences of opinion sometimes in a pleasantly disputatious manner; but no political disagreement could lesser the love between these two. Gustave loved his parents as only a Frenchman can venture to love his father and mother--with a devotion for the gentleman that bordered on enthusiasm, with a fond reverence for the lady that was the very essence of chivalry. There was a sister, who regarded her brother Gustave as the embodiment of all that is perfect in youthful mankind; and there were a couple of old house-servants, a very stupid clumsy lad in the stables, and half a dozen old mongrel dogs, born and bred on the premises, who seemed to share the young lady's opinions. There was not a little discussion upon the subject of Gustave Lenoble's future career; and it was not without difficulty that the father could be persuaded to approve the choice of a profession which the young man had made. The seigneur of Beaubocage cherished an exaggerated pride of race little suspected by those who saw his simple life, and were pleased by his kindly unaffected manners. The house of Lenoble, at some remote and almost mythical period of history, had distinguished itself in divers ways; and those bygone grandeurs, vague and shadowy in the minds of all others, seemed very real to Monsieur Lenoble. He assured his son that no Lenoble had ever been a lawyer. They had been always lords of the soil, living on their own lands, which had once stretched wide and far in that Norman province; a fact proved by certain maps in M. Lenoble's possession, the paper whereof was worn and yellow with age. They had stooped to no profession save that of arms. One seigneur of Beaubocage had fought under Bayard himself; another had fallen at Pavia, on that great day when all was lost _hormis l'honneur_; another had followed the white plume of the Bernais; another--but was there any need to tell of the glories of that house upon which Gustave was so eager to inflict the disgrace of a learned profession?

Thus argued the father; but the mother had spent her girlhood amidst the clamour of the Buonapartist campaigns, and the thought of war was very terrible to her. The memory of the retreat from Russia was not yet twenty years old. There were men alive to tell the story, to depict those days and nights of horror, that mighty march of death. It was she and her daughter Cydalise who had helped to persuade Gustave that he was born to distinguish himself in the law. They wanted him to study in Paris--the young man himself had a wild desire to enjoy the delights of that wondrous capital--and to return in a few years to set up for himself as _avocat_ at the town of Vevinord, some half-dozen leagues from the patrimonial estate. He was created to plead for the innocent, to denounce the guilty, to be grand and brave and fiery-hot with enthusiasm in defence of virtuous peasants charged unjustly with the stealing of sheep, or firing of corn-ricks. It never struck these simple souls that he might sometimes be called upon to defend the guilty, or to denounce the innocent.

It was all settled at last. Gustave was to go to Paris, and enter himself as a student of law. There were plenty of boarding-houses in the neighbourhood of the Ecole de Droit where a young man might find a home; and to one of these Gustave was recommended by a friend of his family. It was the Pension Magnotte to which they had sent him, the big dreary house, _entre cour et jardin_, which had once been so grand and noble. A printer now occupied the lower chambers, and a hand painted on the wall pointed to the _Pension Magnotte, au premier. Tirez le cordon, s.v.p._

Gustave was twenty-one years of age when he came to Paris; tall, stalwart, broad of shoulders and deep of chest, with a fair frank face, an auburn moustache, candid, kind blue eyes--a physiognomy rather Saxon than Celtic. He was a man who made friends quickly, and was soon at home among the students, roaring their favourite songs, and dancing their favourite dances at the dancing-places of that day, joining with a pleasant heartiness in all their innocent dissipations. For guilty dissipation the young provincial had no taste. Did he not carry the images of two kind and pure women about with him wherever he went, like two attendant angels ever protecting his steps; and could he leave them sorrowing on thresholds _they_ could not pass? Ah, no! He was loud and boisterous and wild of spirits in those early days, but incapable of meanness or vice.

"It is a brave heart," Madame Magnotte said of him, "though for the breaking of glasses a scourge--_un fléau_."

The ladies of the Pension Magnotte were for the most part of mature age and unattractive appearance--two or three lonely spinsters, eking out their pitiful little incomes as best they might, by the surreptitious sale of delicate embroideries, confectioned in their dismal leisure; and a fat elderly widow, popularly supposed to be enormously rich, but of miserly propensities. "It is the widow of Harpagon himself," Madame Magnotte told her gossips--an old woman with two furiously ugly daughters, who for the last