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

the other ladies after dinner.

"It must be very cold and cheerless for you in your bedroom," said Madame Magnotte; "why not spend your evening with us, in a pleasant and social manner?"

"You are very good, madame," murmured the Englishwoman, in the slow timid accents that had so plaintive a sound to Gustave's ear; "if you wish it, I will stay."

She seemed to submit rather from utter weakness and inability to refuse anything asked of her than from any hope of finding pleasure in the society of the Magnotte salon.

It was an evening in March--cold, blustrous, dreary. The east wind blew clouds of dust athwart the Rue Grande-Mademoiselle, and the few foot-passengers in that dull thoroughfare looked pinched and wretched. The old ladies gathered round the great black stove, and gossipped in the twilight; the music-mistress went to her feeble piano, and played, unasked, unheeded; for Gustave, who was wont to turn the leaves, or sit attentive by the piano, seemed this evening unconscious of the music. Madame Meynell sat in one of the windows, alone, half-hidden by the faded yellow damask curtains, looking out into the street.

Something--some impulse which he tried to resist, but could not--drew Gustave towards that lonely figure by the window. He went close up to the strange lady. This evening, as in the gardens of the Luxembourg, she seemed to him a living statue of despair. Now, as then, he felt an interest in her sorrow which he was powerless to combat. He had a vague idea that even this compassionate sympathy was in some manner an offence against Madelon Frehlter, the woman to whom he belonged, and yet he yielded to the fatal weakness.

"Yes, I belong to her," he said to himself; "I belong to Madelon Frehlter. She is neither pretty nor fascinating; but I have every reason to believe her very good, very amiable; and she is the only woman, except those of my own kindred, in whom I have any right to be interested."

He did not say this in so many words; but this was the shape which his thoughts assumed as he yielded to the tempter, and walked straight to the distant window by which Madame Meynell had seated herself.

She started slightly as he approached her, and then looked up and recognized him as her acquaintance of the Luxembourg.

"Good evening, monsieur," she said; "I have to thank you for having helped me to find a comfortable home."

Having said this in a low gentle voice, she looked out into the street once more with her mournful unseeing eyes. It was evident that she had no more to say to M. Lenoble.

The student, however, had no idea of leaving the window just yet, although he knew--yes, knew--that his presence there was a wrong done to Madelon Frehlter; but a wrong so small, so infinitesimal, that it was really not worth consideration.

"I am enchanted to think that I was of some slight service to you, madame," he said; "but I fear you will find this quarter of Paris very dull."

She did not take any notice of this remark until Gustave had repeated it, and then she spoke as if suddenly awakened from a trance.

"Dull?" she said. "No, I have not found it dull. I do not care for gaiety."

After this M. Lenoble felt that he could say no more. The lady relapsed into her waking trance. The dust-clouds in the silent street seemed more interesting to her than M. Lenoble of Beaubocage. He lingered a few minutes in the neighbourhood of her chair, thoughtfully observant of the delicate profile, the pale clear tints of a complexion that had lost its bloom but not its purity, the settled sadness of the perfect mouth, the dreamy pensiveness of the dark-grey eye, and then was fain to retire.

After this, the English widow lady spent many evenings in Madame Magnotte's salon. The old Frenchwoman gossipped and wondered about her; but the most speculative could fashion no story from a page so blank as this joyless existence. Even slander could scarcely assail a creature so unobtrusive as the English boarder. The elderly ladies shrugged their shoulders and pursed up their lips with solemn significance. There must needs be something--a secret, a mystery, sorrow, or wrong-doing--somewhere; but of Madame Meynell herself no one could suspect any harm.

Gustave Lenoble heard little of this gossip about the stranger, but she filled his thoughts nevertheless. The vision of her face came between him and his work; and when he thought of the future, and of the damsel who had been allotted to him for a wife, his thoughts were very bitter.

"Fate is like Laban," he said to himself; "a man works and does his duty for seven years, and then Fate gives him Leah instead of Rachel. No doubt Leah is a very good young woman; one has no complaint to make against her, except that she is not Rachel."

This was not a hopeful manner of looking at things for the destined master of Côtenoir. M. Lenoble's letters to the anxious folks at Beaubocage became, about this time, somewhat brief and unsatisfactory. He no longer gave ample details of his student-life--he no longer wrote in his accustomed good spirits. His letters seemed stiff and constrained.

"I am afraid he is studying too much," said the mother.

"I daresay the rascal is wasting his time in dissipation," suggested the father.


CHAPTER III.


"PAST HOPE, AND IN DESPAIR."

Two months had elapsed since the bleak spring morning on which Gustave Lenoble found the solitary lady under the leafless trees of the Luxembourg gardens. The inmates of the Pension Magnotte had grown accustomed to her presence, to her silence, her settled sadness, and troubled themselves no further respecting herself or her antecedents. The lapse of time had brought no improvement to her spirits; indeed, Gustave, who watched her closely, perceived that she had grown paler and thinner since that March morning when he met her in the public garden. Her life must have been painfully monotonous. She very rarely went out of doors, and on no occasion ventured beyond the gardens of the Luxembourg. No one visited her. She neither wrote nor received any letters. She was wont to make a pretence of reading as she sat in her retired corner of the salon; but Gustave had discovered that she gave little attention to her book. The open volume in her hand seemed no more than an excuse for brooding upon her sorrows.

If people, prompted by curiosity or by compassion, endeavoured to get into conversation with this lonely lady, the result was always the same. She would answer their questions in a low gentle voice, with a quiet politeness; but she never assisted them in the smallest degree to interchange thoughts with her. It seemed as if she sought neither friend nor sympathizer, or as if her case was so entirely hopeless as to admit of neither. She paid for her board and lodging weekly with a punctilious exactness, though weekly payments were not the rule of the house.

"My movements are uncertain," she said to Madame Magnotte. "I cannot tell how long I may be with you. It will therefore be better for me to pay you weekly."

She had been in the house two months, dining every day at the public table, spending all her evenings in the public saloon; and during that time her settled gloom had never been broken by any outburst of grief or passion. She might have been a creature of ice, a statue of despair modelled in snow by a Michael Angelo. But one night the ice melted, the statue of snow became in a moment a passionate, grief-stricken woman.

It was one bright evening late in May. Ah, how near at hand was the appointed date of those nuptials to which the household of Beaubocage looked forward with supreme happiness! The old ladies of the Pension Magnotte were for the most part out of doors. The long saloon was almost empty. There were only Gustave, Madame Magnotte, and the little music-mistress, who sat at her piano, with the western sunlight shining full upon her, rosy-hued and glorious, surrounding her with its soft radiance until she looked like a humble St. Cecilia.

Madame Meynell had seated herself close to the piano, and was listening to the music. Gustave hovered near, pretending to be occupied with a limp little sheet of news published that evening.

Mademoiselle Servin, the teacher of music, upon this occasion deserted her favourite masters. She seemed in a somewhat dreamy and sentimental humour, and played tender little melodies and simple plaintive airs, that were more agreeable to Gustave than those grand examples of the mathematics of counter-point which she so loved to interpret.

"You like this melody of Grétry's," said the music-mistress, as M. Lenoble seated himself close to the piano. "I do not think you care for classic sonatas--the great works of Gluck, or Bach, or Beethoven?"

"No," replied the young man frankly; "I do not care about anything I can't understand. I like music that goes to one's heart."

"And you, too, Madame Meynell, like simple melodies?" mademoiselle asked of that lady, who was not wont to come so near the little piano, or to pay so much attention to Mademoiselle Servin's performance.

"O yes," murmured the Englishwoman, "I like such music as that."

"And you, too, think that Beethoven never composed simple plaintive airs--for example," exclaimed the pianist, playing softly while she spoke. "You think he wrote only sonatas, quartettes, fugues, grand, operas, like _Fidelio_. Have you never heard this by your scientific Beethoven?"

Hereupon she played "Hope told a flattering tale," with much tenderness and delicacy. Her two hearers listened, mute and deeply moved. And then from that familiar melody she glided softly into another, most musical, most melancholy, which has been set to some of the sweetest verses that Thomas Moore ever composed:

"Those evening bells, those evening bells! How many a tale their music tells Of youth and home, and that sweet time When last I heard their soothing chime!"

All the world sang the verses of Ireland's divine bard in those days. The song was one which the Englishwoman had sung years ago in a happy home. What recollections, what associations, were evoked by that plaintive melody, who shall say? The words came back with the music to which they have been eternally wedded. The words, their mournful meaning, the faces of the friends amongst whom she had last sung them, the picture of the peaceful home whose walls had echoed the music,--all these things arose before her in a vision too painfully vivid; and the lonely boarder at the Pension Magnotte covered her face with her hands, and sobbed aloud.

The passion of tears lasted but a minute. Madame Meynell dried her eyes, and rose to leave the room.

"Do not question me," she said, perceiving that her two companions were about to offer her their sympathy. "I cannot tell you the memories that were conjured up by that music. It brought back a home I shall never see again, and the faces of the dead--worse than dead to me--and the happiness I have lost, and the hopes and dreams that once were mine. Oh, I pray God I may never hear that melody again."

There was a passion, a depth of feeling, in her tone quite new to Gustave Lenoble. He opened the door for her without a word, and she passed out of the salon quietly, like a ghost--the ghost of that bright young creature who had once borne her shape, and been