M. Mauleon was somewhat surprised by Raoul's visit the next morning. He
had no great liking for a kinsman whose politely distant reserve towards
him, in contrast to poor Euguerrand's genial heartiness, had much wounded
his sensitive self-respect; nor could he comprehend the religious
scruples which forbade Raoul to take a soldier's share in the battle-
field, though in seeking there to save the lives of others so fearlessly
hazarding his own life.
"Pardon," said Raoul, with his sweet mournful smile, "the unseasonable
hour at which I disturb you. But your duties on the ramparts and mine in
the hospital begin early, and I have promised the Abbe Vertpre to
communicate a message of a nature which perhaps you may deem pressing."
He proceeded at once to repeat what the Abbe had communicated to him the
night before relative to the illness and the request of the nun.
"Louise Duval!" exclaimed the Vicomte, "discovered at last, and a
religieuse! Ah! I now understand why she never sought me out when I
reappeared at Paris. Tidings of that sort do not penetrate the walls of
a convent. I am greatly obliged to you, M. de Vandemar, for the trouble
you have so kindly taken. This poor nun is related to me, and I will at
once obey the summons. But this convent des ------- I am ashamed to say
I know not where it is. A long way off, I suppose?"
"Allow me to be your guide," said Raoul; "I should take it as a favour to
be allowed to see a little more of a man whom my lost brother held in
such esteem."
Victor was touched by this conciliatory speech, and in a few minutes more
the two men were on their way to the convent on the other side of the
Seine.
Victor commenced the conversation by a warm and heartfelt tribute to
Euguerrand's character and memory. "I never," he said, "knew a nature
more rich in the most endearing qualities of youth; so gentle, so high-
spirited, rendering every virtue more attractive, and redeeming such few
faults or foibles as youth so situated and so tempted cannot wholly
escape, with an urbanity not conventional, not artificial, but reflected
from the frankness of a genial temper and the tenderness of a generous
heart. Be comforted for his loss, my kinsman. A brave death was the
proper crown of that beautiful life."
Raoul made no answer, but pressed gratefully the arm now linked within
his own. The companions walked on in silence; Victor's mind settling on
the visit he was about to make to the niece so long mysteriously lost,
and now so unexpectedly found. Louise had inspired him with a certain
interest from her beauty and force of character, but never with any warm
affection. He felt relieved to find that her life had found its close in
the sanctuary of the convent. He had never divested himself of a certain
fear, inspired by Louvier's statement that she might live to bring
scandal and disgrace on the name he had with so much difficulty, and
after so lengthened an anguish, partially cleared in his own person.
Raoul left De Mauleon at the gate of the convent, and took his way
towards the hospitals where he visited, and the poor whom he relieved.
Victor was conducted silently into the convent _parloir_; and, after
waiting there several minutes, the door opened, and the _Superieure_
entered. As she advanced towards him, with stately step and solemn
visage, De Mauleon recoiled, and uttered a half-suppressed exclamation
that partook both of amaze and awe. Could it be possible? Was this
majestic woman, with the grave impassible aspect, once the ardent girl
whose tender letters he had cherished through stormy years, and only
burned on the night before the most perilous of his battle-fields? This
the one, the sole one, whom in his younger dreams he had seen as his
destined wife? It was so--it was. Doubt vanished when he heard her
voice; and yet how different every tone, every accent, from those of the
low, soft, thrilling music that had breathed in the voice of old!
"M. de Mauleon," said the Superieure, calmly, "I grieve to sadden you by
very mournful intelligence. Yesterday evening, when the Abbe undertook
to convey to you the request of our Sister Ursula, although she was
beyond mortal hope of recovery--as otherwise you will conceive that I
could not have relaxed the rules of this house so as to sanction your
visit--there was no apprehension of immediate danger. It was believed
that her sufferings would be prolonged for some days. I saw her late
last night before retiring to my cell, and she seemed even stronger than
she had been for the last week. A sister remained at watch in her cell.
Towards morning she fell into apparently quiet sleep, and in that sleep
she passed away." The Superieure here crossed herself, and murmured
pious words in Latin. "Dead! my poor niece!" said Victor, feelingly,
roused from his stun at the first sight of the Superieure by her measured
tones, and the melancholy information she so composedly conveyed to him.
"I cannot, then, even learn why she so wished to see me once more,--or
what she might have requested at my hands!"
"Pardon, M. le Vicomte. Such sorrowful consolation I have resolved to
afford you, not without scruples of conscience, but not without sanction
of the excellent Abbe Vertpre, whom I summoned early this morning to
decide my duties in the sacred office I hold. As soon as Sister Ursula
heard of your return to Paris, she obtained my permission to address to
you a letter, subjected, when finished, to my perusal and sanction. She
felt that she had much on her mind which her feeble state might forbid
her to make known to you in conversation with 'sufficient fulness; and as
she could only have seen you in presence of one of the sisters she
imagined that there would also be less restraint in a written
communication. In fine, her request was that, when you called, I might
first place this letter in your hands, and allow you time to read it,
before being admitted to her presence; when a few words conveying your
promise to attend to the wishes with which you would then be acquainted,
would suffice for an interview in her exhausted condition. Do I make
myself understood?"
"Certainly, Madame,--and the letter?"
"She had concluded last evening; and when I took leave of her later in
the night, she placed it in my hands for approval. M. le Vicomte, it
pains me to say that there is much in the tone of that letter which I
grieve for and condemn. And it was my intention to point this out to our
sister at morning, and tell her that passages must be altered before I
could give to you the letter. Her sudden decease deprived me of this
opportunity. I could not, of course, alter or erase a line--a word. My
only option was to suppress the letter altogether, or give it you intact.
The Abbe thinks that, on the whole, my duty does not forbid the dictate
of my own impulse--my own feelings; and I now place this letter in your
hands."
De Mauleon took a packet, unsealed, from the thin white fingers of the
Superieure; and as he bent to receive it, lifted towards her eyes
eloquent with sorrowful, humble pathos, in which it was impossible for
the heart of a woman who had loved not to see a reference to the past
which the lips did not dare to utter.
A faint, scarce-perceptible blush stole over the marble cheek of the nun.
But, with an exquisite delicacy, in which survived the woman while
reigned the nun, she replied to the appeal.
"M. Victor de Mauleon, before, having thus met, we part for ever, permit
a poor _religieuse_ to say with what joy--a joy rendered happier because
it was tearful--I have learned through the Abbe Vertpre that the honour
which, as between man and man, no one who had once known you could ever
doubt, you have lived to vindicate from calumny."
"Ah; you have heard that--at last, at last!"
"I repeat--of the honour thus deferred, I never doubted." The Superieure
hurried on. "Greater joy it has been to me to hear from the same
venerable source that, while found bravest among the defenders of your
country, you are clear from all alliance with the assailants of your God.
Continue so, continue so, Victor de Mauleon,"
She retreated to the door, and then turned towards him with a look in
which all the marble had melted away, adding, with words more formally
nunlike, yet unmistakably womanlike, than those which had gone before,
"That to the last you may be true to God, is a prayer never by me
omitted."
She spoke, and vanished.
In a kind of dim and dreamlike bewilderment, Victor de Mauleon found
himself without the walls of the convent. Mechanically, as a man does
when the routine of his life is presented to him, from the first Minister
of State to the poor clown at a suburban theatre, doomed to appear at
their posts, to prose on a Beer Bill, or grin through a horse-collar,
though their hearts are bleeding at every pore with some household or
secret affliction,--mechanically De Mauldon went his way towards the
ramparts, at a section of which he daily drilled his raw recruits.
Proverbial for his severity towards those who offended, for the
cordiality of his praise of those who pleased his soldierly judgment,
no change of his demeanour was visible that morning, save that he might
be somewhat milder to the one, somewhat less hearty to the other. This
routine duty done, he passed slowly towards a more deserted because a
more exposed part of the defences, and seated himself on the frozen sward
alone. The cannon thundered around him. He heard unconsciously: from
time to time an _obus_ hissed and splintered close at his feet;--he saw
with abstracted eye. His soul was with the past; and, brooding over all
that in the past lay buried there, came over him a conviction of the
vanity of the human earth-bounded objects for which we burn or freeze,
far more absolute than had grown out of the worldly cynicism connected
with his worldly ambition. The sight of that face, associated with the
one pure romance of his reckless youth, the face of one so estranged, so
serenely aloft from all memories of youth, of romance, of passion, smote
him in the midst of the new hopes of the new career, as the look on the
skull of the woman he had so loved and so mourned, when disburied from
her grave, smote the brilliant noble who became the stern reformer of La
Trappe. And while thus gloomily meditating, the letter of the poor
Louise Duval was forgotten. She whose existence had so troubled, and
crossed, and partly marred the lives of others,--she, scarcely dead, and
already forgotten by her nearest kin. Well--had she not forgotten, put
wholly out of her mind, all that was due to those much nearer to her than
is an uncle to a niece?
The short, bitter, sunless day was advancing towards its decline before
Victor roused himself with a quick impatient start from his reverie, and
took forth the letter from the dead nun.
It began with expressions of gratitude, of joy at the thought that she
should see him again before she died, thank him for his past kindness,
and receive, she trusted, his assurance that he would attend to her last
remorseful injunctions. I pass over much that followed in the
explanation of events in her life sufficiently known to the reader. She
stated, as the strongest reason why she had refused the hand of Louvier,
her knowledge that she should in due time become a mother--a fact
concealed from Victor, secure that he would then urge her not to annul
her informal marriage, but rather insist on the ceremonies that would
render it valid. She touched briefly on her confidential intimacy with
Madame Marigny, the exchange of name and papers, her confinement in the
neighbourhood of Aix, the child left to the care of the nurse, the
journey to Munich to find the false Louise Duval was no more. The
documents obtained through the agency of her easy-tempered kinsman, the
late Marquis de Rochebriant, and her subsequent domestication in the
house of the von Rudesheims,--all this it is needless to do more here
than briefly recapitulate. The letter then went on: "While thus kindly
treated by the family with whom nominally a governess, I was on the terms
of a friend with Signor Ludovico Cicogna, an Italian of noble birth. He
was the only man I ever cared for. I loved him with frail human passion.
I could not tell him, my true history. I could not tell him that I had a
child; such intelligence would have made him renounce me at once. He had
a daughter, still but an infant, by a former marriage, then brought up in
France. He wished to take her to his house, and his second wife to
supply the place of her mother. What was I to do with the child I had
left near Aix? While doubtful and distracted, I read an advertisement in
the journals to the effect that a French lady, then staying in Coblentz,
wished to adopt a female child not exceeding the age of six: the child to
be wholly resigned to her by the parents, she undertaking to rear and
provide for it as her own. I resolved to go to Coblentz at once. I did
so. I saw this lady. She seemed in affluent circumstances, yet young,
but a confirmed invalid, confined the greater part of the day to her sofa
by some malady of the spine. She told me very frankly her story. She
had been a professional dancer on the stage, had married respectably,
quitted the stage, become a widow, and shortly afterwards been seized
with the complaint that would probably for life keep her a secluded
prisoner in her room. Thus afflicted, and without tie, interest, or
object in the world, she conceived the idea of adopting a child that she
might bring up to tend and cherish her as a daughter. In this, the
imperative condition was that the child should never be sought by the
parents. She was pleased by my manner and appearance: she did not wish
her adopted daughter to be the child of peasants. She asked me for no
references,--made no inquiries. She said cordially that she wished for
no knowledge that, through any indiscretion of her own, communicated to
the child might lead her to seek the discovery of her real parents. In
fine, I left Coblentz on the understanding that I was to bring the
infant, and if it pleased Madame Surville, the agreement was concluded.
"I then repaired to Aix. I saw the child. Alas! unnatural mother that
I was, the sight only more vividly brought before me the sense of my own
perilous position. Yet the child was lovely! a likeness of myself, but
lovelier far, for it was a pure, innocent, gentle loveliness. And they
told her to call me 'Maman.' Oh, did I not relent when I heard that
name? No; it jarred on my ear as a word of reproach and shame. In
walking with the infant towards the railway station, imagine my dismay
when suddenly I met the man who had been taught to believe me dead. I
soon discovered that his dismay was equal to my own,--that I had nothing
to fear from his desire to claim me. It did occur to me for a moment to
resign his child to him. But when he shrank reluctantly from a half
suggestion to that effect, my pride was wounded, my conscience absolved.
And, after all, it might be unsafe to my future to leave with him any
motive for tracing me. I left him hastily. I have never seen nor heard
of him more. I took the child to Coblentz. Madame Surville was charmed
with its prettiness and prattle,--charmed still more when I rebuked the
poor infant for calling me 'Maman,' and said, 'Thy real mother is here.'
Freed from my trouble, I returned to the kind German roof I had quitted,
and shortly after became the wife of Ludovico Cicogna.
"My punishment soon began. His was a light, fickle, pleasure-hunting
nature. He soon grew weary of me. My very love made me unamiable to
him. I became irritable, jealous, exacting. His daughter, who now came
to live with us, was another subject of discord. I knew that he loved
her better than me. I became a harsh step-mother; and Ludovico's
reproaches, vehemently made, nursed all my angriest passions. But a son
of this new marriage was born to myself. My pretty Luigi! how my heart
became wrapt up in him! Nursing him, I forgot resentment against his
father. Well, poor Cicogna fell ill and died. I mourned him sincerely;
but my boy was left. Poverty then fell on me,--poverty extreme.
Cicogna's sole income was derived from a post in the Austrian dominion in
Italy, and ceased with it. He received a small pension in compensation;
that died with him.
"At this time, an Englishman, with whom Ludovico had made acquaintance in
Venice, and who visited often at our house in Verona, offered me his
hand. He had taken an extraordinary liking to Isaura, Cicogna's daughter
by his first marriage. But I think his proposal was dictated partly by
compassion for me, and more by affection for her. For the sake of my boy
Luigi I married him. He was a good man, of retired learned habits with
which I had no sympathy. His companionship overwhelmed me with ennui.
But I bore it patiently for Luigi's sake. God saw that my heart was as
much as ever estranged from Him, and He took away my all on earth--my
boy. Then in my desolation I turned to our Holy Church for comfort. I
found a friend in the priest, my confessor. I was startled to learn from
him how guilty I had been--was still. Pushing to an extreme the
doctrines of the Church, he would not allow that my first marriage,
though null by law, was void in the eyes of Heaven. Was not the death of
the child I so cherished a penalty due to my sin towards the child I had
abandoned?
"These thoughts pressed on me night and day. With the consent and
approval of the good priest, I determined to quit the roof of M. Selby,
and to devote myself to the discovery of my forsaken Julie.
"I had a painful interview with M. Selby. I announced my intention to
separate from him. I alleged as a reason my conscientious repugnance to
live with a professed heretic--an enemy to our Holy Church. When M.
Selby found that he could not shake my resolution, he lent himself to it
with the forbearance and generosity which he had always exhibited. On
our marriage he had settled on me five thousand pounds, to be absolutely
mine in the event of his death. He now proposed to concede to me the
interest on that capital during his life, and he undertook the charge of
my step-daughter Isaura, and secured to her all the rest he had to leave;
such landed property as he possessed in England passing to a distant
relative.
"So we parted, not with hostility--tears were shed on both sides. I set
out for Coblentz. Madame Surville had long since quitted that town,
devoting some years to the round of various mineral spas in vain hope of
cure. Not without some difficulty I traced her to her last residence in
the neighbourhood of Paris, but she was then no more--her death
accelerated by the shock occasioned by the loss of her whole fortune,
which she had been induced to place in one of the numerous fraudulent
companies by which so many have been ruined. Julie, who was with her at
the time of her death, had disappeared shortly after it--none could tell
me whither; but from such hints as I could gather, the poor child, thus
left destitute, had been betrayed into sinful courses.
"Probably I might yet by searching inquiry have found her out; you will
say it was my duty at least to institute such inquiry. No doubt; I now
remorsefully feel that it was. I did not think so at the time. The
Italian priest had given me a few letters of introduction to French
ladies with whom, when they had sojourned at Florence, he had made
acquaintance. These ladies were very strict devotees, formal observers
of those decorums by which devotion proclaims itself to the world. They
had received me not only with kindness but with marked respect. They
chose to exalt into the noblest self-sacrifice the act of my leaving M.
Selby's house. Exaggerating the simple cause assigned to it in the
priest's letter, they represented me as quitting a luxurious home and an
idolising husband rather than continue intimate intercourse with the
enemy of my religion. This new sort of flattery intoxicated me with its
fumes. I recoiled from the thought of shattering the pedestal to which I
had found myself elevated. What if I should discover my daughter in one
from the touch of whose robe these holy women would recoil as from the
rags of a leper! No; it would be impossible for me to own her--
impossible for me to give her the shelter of my roof. Nay, if discovered
to hold any commune with such an outcast, no explanation, no excuse short
of the actual truth, would avail with these austere judges of human
error. And the actual truth would be yet deeper disgrace. I reasoned
away my conscience. If I looked for example in the circles in which I
had obtained reverential place, I could find no instance in which a girl
who had fallen from virtue was not repudiated by her nearest relatives.
Nay, when I thought of my own mother, had not her father refused to see
her, to acknowledge her child, from no other offence than that of a
misalliance which wounded the family pride? That pride, alas! was in my
blood--my sole inheritance from the family I sprang from.
"Thus it went on, till I had grave symptoms of a disease which rendered
the duration of my life uncertain. My conscience awoke and tortured me.
I resolved to take the veil. Vanity and pride again! My resolution was
applauded by those whose opinion had so swayed my mind and my conduct.
Before I retired into the convent from which I write, I made legal
provision as to the bulk of the fortune which, by the death of M. Selby,
has become absolutely at my disposal. One thousand pounds amply sufficed
for dotation to the convent: the other four thousand pounds are given in
trust to the eminent notary, M. Nadaud, Rue -------. On applying to him,
you will find that the sum, with the accumulated interest, is bequeathed
to you,--a tribute of gratitude for the assistance you afforded me in the
time of your own need, and the kindness with which you acknowledged our
relationship and commiserated my misfortunes.
"But oh, my uncle, find out--a man can do so with a facility not accorded
to a woman--what has become of this poor Julie, and devote what you may
deem right and just of the sum thus bequeathed to place her above want
and temptation. In doing so, I know you will respect my name: I would
not have it dishonour you, indeed.
"I have been employed in writing this long letter since the day I heard
you were in Paris. It has exhausted the feeble remnants of my strength.
It will be given to you before the interview I at once dread and long
for, and in that interview you will not rebuke me. Will you, my kind
uncle? No, you will only soothe and pity!
"Would that I were worthy to pray for others, that I might add, 'May the
Saints have you in their keeping and lead you to faith in the Holy
Church, which has power to absolve from sins those who repent as I do.'"
The letter dropped from Victor's hand. He took it up, smoothed it
mechanically, and with a dim, abstracted, be wildered, pitiful wonder.
Well might the _Superieure_ have hesitated to allow confessions,
betraying a mind so little regulated by genuine religious faith, to pass
into other hands. Evidently it was the paramount duty of rescuing from
want or from sin the writer's forsaken child, that had overborne all
other considerations in the mind of the Woman and the Priest she
consulted.
Throughout that letter, what a strange perversion of understanding! what
a half-unconscious confusion of wrong and right!--the duty marked out so
obvious and so neglected; even the religious sentiment awakened by the
conscience so dividing itself from the moral instinct! the dread of being
thought less religious by obscure comparative strangers stronger than the
moral obligation to discover and reclaim the child for whose errors, if
she had erred, the mother who so selfishly forsook her was alone
responsible! even at the last, at the approach of death, the love for a
name she had never made a self-sacrifice to preserve unstained; and that
concluding exhortation,--that reliance on a repentance in which there was
so qualified a reparation!
More would Victor de Mauldon have wondered had he known those points of
similarity in character, and in the nature of their final bequests,
between Louise Duval and the husband she had deserted. By one of those
singular coincidences which, if this work be judged by the ordinary rules
presented to the ordinary novel-reader, a critic would not unjustly
impute to defective invention in the author, the provision for this
child, deprived of its natural parents during their lives, is left to the
discretion and honour of trustees, accompanied on the part of the
consecrated Louise and "the blameless King," with the injunction of
respect to their worldly reputations--two parents so opposite in
condition, in creed, in disposition, yet assimilating in that point of
individual character in which it touches the wide vague circle of human
opinion. For this, indeed, the excuses of Richard King are strong,
inasmuch as the secrecy he sought was for the sake, not of his own
memory, but that of her whom the world knew only as his honoured wife.
The conduct of Louise admits no such excuse; she dies as she had lived;
an Egotist. But, whatever the motives of the parents, what is the fate
of the deserted child? What revenge does the worldly opinion, which the
parents would escape for themselves, inflict on the innocent infant to
whom the bulk of their worldly possessions is to be clandestinely
conveyed? Would all the gold of Ophir be compensation enough for her?
Slowly De Mauleon roused himself, and turned from the solitary place
where he had been seated to a more crowded part of the ramparts. He
passed a group of young _Moblots_, with flowers wreathed round their gun-
barrels. "If," said one of them gaily, "Paris wants bread, it never
wants flowers." His companions laughed merrily, and burst out into a
scurrile song in ridicule of St. Trochu. Just then an _obus_ fell a few
yards before the group. The sound only for a moment drowned the song,
but the splinters struck a man in a coarse, ragged dress, who had stopped
to listen to the singers. At his sharp cry, two men hastened to his
side: one was Victor de Mauleon; the other was a surgeon, who quitted
another group of idlers--National Guards--attracted by the shriek that
summoned his professional aid. The poor man was terribly wounded. The
surgeon, glancing at De Mauleon, shrugged his shoulders, and muttered,
"Past help!" The sufferer turned his haggard eyes on the Vicomte, and
gasped out, "M. de Mauleon?"
"That is my name," answered Victor, surprised, and not immediately
recognising the sufferer.
"Hist, Jean Lebeau!--look at me: you recollect me now,--Mart le Roux,
_concierge_ to the Secret Council. Ay, I found out who you were long ago
--followed you home from the last meeting you broke up. But I did not
betray you, or you would have been murdered long since. Beware of
the old set--beware of--of--" Here his voice broke off into shrill
exclamations of pain. Curbing his last agonies with a powerful effort,
he faltered forth, "You owe me a service--see to the little one at home
--she is starving." The death-_rale_ came on; in a few moments he was no
more.
Victor gave orders for the removal of the corpse, and hurried away. The
surgeon, who had changed countenance when he overheard the name in which
the dying man had addressed De Mauleon, gazed silently after De Mauleon's
retreating form, and then, also quitting the dead, rejoined the group he
had quitted. Some of those who composed it acquired evil renown later in
the war of the Communists, and came to disastrous ends: among that number
the Pole Loubinsky and other members of the Secret Council. The Italian
Raselli was there too, but, subtler than his French confreres, he divined
the fate of the Communists, and glided from it--safe now in his native
land, destined there, no doubt, to the funereal honours and lasting
renown which Italy bestows on the dust of her sons who have advocated
assassination out of love for the human race.
Amid this group, too, was a National Guard, strayed from his proper post,
and stretched on the frozen ground; and, early though the hour, in the
profound sleep of intoxication.
"So," said Loubinsky, "you have found your errand in vain, Citizen le
Noy; another victim to the imbecility of our generals."
"And partly one of us," replied the Medecin des Pauvres. "You remember
poor le Roux, who kept the old baraque where the Council of Ten used to
meet? Yonder he lies."
"Don't talk of the Council of Ten. What fools and dupes we were made by
that _vieux gredin_, Jean Lebeau! How I wish I could meet him again!"
Gaspard le Noy smiled sarcastically. "So much the worse for you, if you
did. A muscular and a ruthless fellow is that Jean Lebeau!" Therewith
he turned to the drunken sleeper and woke him up with a shake and a kick.
"Armand--Armand Monnier, I say, rise, rub your eyes. What if you are
called to your post? What if you are shamed as a deserter and a coward?"
Armand turned, rose with an effort from the recumbent to the sitting
posture, and stared dizzily in the face of the _Medecin des Pauvres_.
"I was dreaming that I had caught by the throat," said Armand, wildly,
"the aristo who shot my brother; and lo, there were two men, Victor de
Mauleon and Jean Lebeau."
"Ah! there is something in dreams," said the surgeon. "Once in a
thousand times a dream comes true."