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

suppose, in every man's life; and the angel of his life comes in that appointed hour. Mine came when I saw you. I have spoken to your father, and have his warm approval. He was all encouragement, and hinted that I might be assured of your love. Had he sufficient justification for that half-promise, Diane?"

"He had none," Miss Paget answered gravely, "none except his own wishes. You have made me hear more than I wished to hear, M. Lenoble, for the treasure you offer me is one that I cannot accept. With all my heart I thank you for the love you tell me of. Even if it is, as I can but think it, a passing fancy, I thank you, nevertheless. It is sweet to win the love of a good man. I pray you to believe that with all my heart and mind I honour your generous nature, your noble sympathy with the weak and friendless. If you can give me your friendship, you shall find how I can value a good man's regard, but I cannot accept your love."

"Why not?" asked Gustave, aghast.

"Because I cannot give you measure for measure, and I will not give you less."

"But in time, Diane, in time?"

"Time cannot show me your character in a nobler light than that in which I see it now. You do not lack the power to win a woman's heart, but I have no heart to give. If you will be my friend, time will increase my affection for you--but time cannot restore the dead."

"Which means that your heart is dead, Diane?"

"Yes," she answered, with unutterable sadness.

"You love some one younger, happier than I?"

"No, M. Lenoble, no one."

"But you have loved? Yes!--a scoundrel, perhaps; a villain, who--"

A spasm of pain contracted his face as he looked at the girl's drooping head; her face, in that dim light, he could not see.

"Tell me this, Diane," he said presently, in an altered voice; "there is no barrier between us--no irrevocable obstacle that must part us for ever? There is no one who can claim you by any right--" He paused; and then added, in a lower voice, "by any wrong?"

"No one," answered Miss Paget, lifting her head, and looking her lover full in the face. Even in that uncertain light he could see the proud steady gaze that seemed the fittest answer of all doubts.

"Thank God!" he whispered. "Ah, how could I fear, even for one moment, that you could be anything but what you seem--the purest among the pure? Why, then, do you reject me? You do not love me, but you ask my friendship; you offer me your friendship, even your affection. Ah, believe me, if those are but real, time will ripen them into love. Your heart is dead. Ah, why should that young heart be dead? It is not dead, Diane; it needs but the fire of true love to warm it into life again. Why should you reject me, since you tell me that you love me; unless you love another? What should divide us?"

"Shadows and memories," Diana replied mournfully,--"vague and foolish; wicked, perhaps; but they come between you and me, M. Lenoble. And since I cannot give you a whole heart, I will give you nothing."

"You have loved some one, some one who did not value your love? Tell me the truth, Diane; you owe me at least as much as that."

"I do owe you the truth. Yes; I have been very foolish. For two or three years of my life there was a person who was our daily companion. He travelled with us--with my father and me; and we saw many changes and troubles together. For a long time he was like my brother; and I doubt if many brothers are as kind to their sisters as he was to me. In his heart that feeling never changed. He was always equally kind, equally careless. Once I deluded myself with the fancy that in his looks and tones, and even in his words, there was some deeper feeling than this careless brotherly kindness; but it was no more than a delusion. My eyes were opened rudely enough. I saw his heart bestowed elsewhere. Do not think that I am so weak, or so wicked, as to abandon myself to despair because I have been awakened from my foolish dream. I can look the realities of life in the face, M. Lenoble; and I have taught myself to wish all good things for the dear girl who has won the heart that I once thought was mine. The person I am speaking of can boast no superior graces of mind or person. He is only a very commonplace young man, with a certain amount of talent, a disposition inclined to good rather than to evil. But he was the companion of my girlhood; and in losing him it seems to me as if I had lost a part of my youth itself."

To Diana's mind this seemed the end of the discussion. She expected M. Lenoble to bow his head to the inevitable, to utter a friendly farewell, and depart for his Norman home, convinced, if not satisfied. But the light-hearted, easy-tempered Gustave was not a lover of the despairing order, nor an easily answered suppliant.

"And that is all!" he exclaimed, in the cheeriest tone. "A companion of your girlhood, for whom you had a girl's romantic fancy! And the memory of this unspeakable idiot--great Heaven! but how idiotic must this wretch have been, to be loved by you, and not even to know it!--the memory of this last of the last is to come between you and me, and divide us for ever? The phantom of this miserable, who could be loved by an angel without knowing it, is to lift its phantasmal hand and thrust me aside--me, Gustave Lenoble, a man, and not an idiot? Ah, thus we blow him to the uttermost end of the world!" cried M. Lenoble, blowing an imaginary rival from the tips of his fingers. "Thus we dismiss him to the Arctic regions, the torrid zone--to the Caucasus, where await vultures to gnaw his liver--wherever earth is most remote and uncomfortable--he and the bread-and-butter miss whom he prefers to my Diane!"

This manner of taking things was quite unexpected by Diana. It was much more pleasant than gloomy despair or sullen resentment; but it was, at the same time, much more difficult to deal with.

"He is gone!" cried Gustave presently; "he is on the topmost heights of Caucasus, and the vultures are sharpening their beaks! And now, tell me, Diane--you will be my wife, will you not? You will be a mother to my children? You will transform the old chateau of Côtenoir into a pleasant home? You will cease to live amongst strangers? You will come to those who will love and cherish you as their own, their dearest and best and brightest? You will give your poor old father a corner by your fireside? He is old and needs a home for his last years. For his sake, Diane, for mine, for my children, let your answer be yes! Ah, not so fast!" he cried, as she was about to speak. "Why are you so quick to pronounce your fatal judgment? Think how much depends on your reply--your father's happiness, my children's, mine!"

"It is of yours only I must think," Miss Paget answered earnestly. "You fancy it is so easy for me to say no. Believe me, it would be much easier to say yes. When you speak of my father's declining years, I, who know his weary life so well, would be hard of heart indeed if I were not tempted by the haven you offer. Every word that you say gives me some new proof of your goodness, your generosity. But I will not wrong you because you are generous. I shall always be your grateful friend, but you must seek elsewhere for a wife, M. Lenoble. You will have little difficulty in finding one worthier than I."

"I will seek nowhere else for a wife; I will have no wife but you. I have had a wife of other people's choosing; I will choose one for myself this time. Let us be friends, Diane, since your decision is as irrevocable as the laws of Draco. You are stone, you are adamant; but no matter, we can be friends. Your father will be disappointed. But what then? He is no doubt accustomed to disappointments. My daughters--for them it is a profound affliction to be motherless, but they must support it. Côtenoir must go to wreck and ruin a little longer--a few more rats behind the panelling, a few more moths in the tapestry, that is all. My children say, 'Papa, our home is not comfortable; all is upside-down;' and I reply. 'But what will you, my children? A home without a wife is always upside down.' And then I take them between my arms, in weeping. It is a poignant picture to rend the heart. But what does it matter, Miss Paget? What is that verse of your grand Will?--

Blow, blow, thou wintry wind; And let go weep the stricken land, While harts ungalled go play.

Perhaps I have mixed him up somehow; but the meaning is clear."

A hollow-sounding and somewhat awful cough heralded the approach of Captain Paget, who entered the room at this juncture. If the Captain had prolonged his first airing, after six weeks' confinement to the house, until this late period of the afternoon, he would have committed an imprudence which might have cost him dearly. Happily, he had done nothing of the kind, but had re-entered the house unobserved, while Diana and Gustave were conversing close to the window, having preferred to leave his fly at the end of the street, rather than to incur the hazard of interrupting a critical tête-à-tête. The interval that had elapsed since his return had been spent by the Captain in his own bedchamber, and in the immediate neighbourhood of the folding-doors between that apartment and the parlour. What he had heard had been by no means satisfactory to him; and if a look could annihilate, Miss Paget might have perished beneath the Parthian glance which her father shot at her as he came towards the window, with a stereotyped smile upon his lips and unspeakable anger in his heart.

He had heard just enough of the conversation to know that Gustave had been rejected--Gustave, with Côtenoir and a handsome independence in the present, and the late John Haygarth's fortune in the future. Rejected by a penniless young woman, who at any moment might find herself without a roof to shelter her from the winds of heaven! Was ever folly, madness, wickedness supreme as this?

Horatio trembled with rage as he took his daughter's hand. She had the insolence to extend her hand for the customary salutation. The Captain's greeting was a grip that made her wince.

"Good-night, Miss Paget," said Gustave gravely, but with by no means the despondent tone of a hopeless lover; "I--well, I shall see you again, perhaps, before I go to Normandy. I doubt if I shall go to-morrow. I have my own reasons for staying--unreasonable reasons, perhaps, but I shall stay."

All this was said in a tone too low to reach Captain Paget's ear.

"Are you going to leave us, Lenoble?" he asked in a quavering voice. "You will not stop and let Di give you a cup of tea as usual?"

"Not to-night, Captain. Good-bye."

He wrung the old man's hand and departed. Captain Paget dropped heavily into