Charlotte's Inheritance, Mary Elizabeth Braddon [dar e dil novel online reading .TXT] 📗

All his life! He looked forward and shuddered. What a dreary life it must needs be! Côtenoir, Beaubocage, Madelon, the law; to plead, to read papers, to study dry as dust books. He shrank appalled from the contemplation of that dreary desert of existence--a life without her.

She had been writing letters--doubtless letters to her friends to announce her return. Her departure must be very near at hand.

Gustave refused to go out that evening. His fellow-students were bent on a night's pleasure at a dancing-garden then in vogue, where there would be twinkling lamps and merry music under the May moon. The lamp-lit parterres, the joyous waltzes, had no attractions for Gustave Lenoble. He haunted the dull salon, dim and dreary in the twilight; for Madame Magnotte was chary of lamps and candles, and prolonged to its utmost limits the pensive interval between day and night. He walked softly up and down the room, unheeded by the ladies clustered in a group by one of the windows. Restless and unhappy, he could neither go nor stay. She was not coming down to the salon this evening. He had clung to the faint hope that she might appear; but the faint hope died away in his breast as the night deepened. What purpose could be served by his remaining in that dismal room? He was no nearer her than he would have been in the remotest wilds of Central America. He would go out--not to the odious dancing-garden, but to the cool dark streets, where the night wind might blow this fever from his brain.

He left the room suddenly, and hurried downstairs. At the bottom of the staircase he almost stumbled against a woman, who turned and looked at him in the light of a little oil-lamp that hung over the door of the portress's lodge.

It was the Englishwoman, deadly pale, and with a wild look in her face that Gustave had never seen there before. She gave him no sign of recognition, but passed out of the courtyard, and walked rapidly away. That unusual look in her face, the strangeness of the fact that she should be leaving the house at this hour, inspired him with a vague terror, and he followed her, not stealthily, without a thought that he was doing any wrong by such an act--rather, indeed, with the conviction that he had a right so to follow her.

She walked very quickly--at a more rapid pace than Gustave would have supposed possible for so fragile a creature. She chose the lonelier streets, and Gustave had no difficulty in following her; she never looked back, but went straight on her course, without pause or slackening of her pace, as if with a settled purpose.

"Where can she be going?" Gustave asked himself; and an answer, vague, hideous, terrible, suggested itself to his mind. The idea that occurred to him was one that would scarcely have occurred to an Englishman under the same circumstances, but to a Frenchman it was a very familiar idea.

It was dark now--the darkness that reigns between early sunset and late moonrise. As the lonely woman went farther along the dreary streets parallel with the quay, the dreadful suspicion grew stronger in Gustave's mind. From that instant he had but one thought; in that moment he put away from him for ever all sense of obligation to Madelon Frehlter; he shook off father, mother, sister, old associations, home ties, ambition, fortune--he lived alone for this woman, and the purpose of his life was to save her from despair and death.

They emerged upon the quay at last. The long stretch of pavement was deserted. Ah, now she looked back--she looked on every side with wild unseeing eyes--and now there could be little doubt as to the purpose that brought her here. She crossed the road, and went upon the bridge, Gustave following close; in the next minute she was standing on the stone bench, a tremulous, fluttering figure, with arms stretched towards the water; in a breath she was clasped to Gustave's breast, clasped by arms that meant to hold her for ever.

The shock of that surprise utterly unnerved the wretched creature. She shivered violently, and struggled to free herself from those strong arms.

"Let me go!" she cried in English. "Let me go!" And then, finding herself powerless, she turned and looked at her captor. "M. Lenoble! O, why do you persecute me? Why do you follow me?"

"Because I want to save you."

"To save me! To snatch me back when I was going to find rest--an end for my weary life! O yes, I know that it is a sinful end; but my life has been all sin."

"Your life all sin! Foolish one, I will never believe that."

"It is true," she cried, with passionate self-reproach. "The sin of selfishness, and pride, and disobedience. There is no fate too hard for me--but, O, my fate is very hard! Why did you keep me from that river? You do not know how miserable my life is--you do not know. I paid my last penny to Madame Magnotte this morning. I have no money to take me back to England, even if I dared go there--and I dare not. I have prayed for courage, for strength to go back, but my prayers have not been heard; and there is nothing for me but to die. What would be the sin of my throwing myself into that river! I must die; I shall die of starvation in the streets."

"No, no," cried Gustave passionately; "do you think I have dragged you back from death to give you to loneliness and despair? My dear one, you are mine--mine by right of this night. These arms that have kept you from death shall shelter you,--ah, let them shelter you! These hands shall work for you. My love, my love! you cannot tell how dear you are to me. If there must be want or trouble for either of us, it shall come to me first."

He had placed her on the stone bench, bewildered and unresisting, and had seated himself by her side. The fragile figure, shivering still, even in the mild atmosphere of the spring night, was sustained by his encircling arm. He felt that she was his, irrevocably and entirely--given to him by the Providence which would have seemed to have abandoned her, but for the love it had implanted for her in this one faithful heart. His tone had all the pleading tenderness of a lover's, but it had something more--an authority, a sense of possession.

"Providence sent me here to save you," he said, with that gentle yet authoritative tone; "I am your providence, am I not, dearest? Fate made me love you--fondly, hopelessly, as I thought. Yesterday you seemed as far away from me as those pale stars, shining up yonder--as incomprehensible as that faint silvery mist above the rising moon--and to-night you are my own."

He knew not what ties might be broken by this act. He had indeed a vague consciousness that the step which he was now taking would cause a lifelong breach between himself and his father. But the time had gone by in which he could count the cost.

"Let me go back, M. Lenoble," the Englishwoman said presently. The faintness of terror was passing away, and she spoke almost calmly. "Let me go back to the house. It is you that have saved me from a dreadful sin. I promise you that I will not again think of committing that deadly sin. I will wait for the end to come. Let me go, my kind friend. Ah, no, no; do not detain me! Forget that you have ever known me."

"That is not in my power. I will take you back to the Pension Magnotte directly; but you must first promise to be my wife."

"Your wife! O, no, no, no! That is impossible."

"Because you do not love me," said Gustave, with mournful gravity.

"Because I am not worthy of you."

Humiliation and self-reproach unspeakable were conveyed in those few words.

"You are worth all the stars to me. If I had them in my hands, those lamps shining up there, I would throw them away, to hold you," said the student passionately. "You cannot understand my love, perhaps. I seem a stranger to you, and all I say sounds wild and foolish. My love, it is true as the heaven above us--true as life or death--death that was so near you just now. I have loved you ever since that bleak March morning on which I saw you sitting under the leafless trees yonder. You held me from that moment. I was subjugated--possessed--yours at once and for ever. I would not confess even to myself that my heart had resigned itself to you; but I know now that it was so from the first. Is there any hope that you will ever pay me back one tithe of my love?"

"You love me," the Englishwoman repeated slowly, as if the words were almost beyond her comprehension,--"you love _me_, a creature so lost, so friendless! Ah, but you do not know my wretched story!"

"I do not ask to know it. I only ask one question--will you be my wife?"

"You must be mad to offer your name, your honour to me."

"Yes, I am mad--madly in love. And I am waiting for your answer. You will be my wife? My angel, you will say yes! It is not much that I offer you--a life of uncertainty, perhaps even of poverty; but a fond and constant heart, and a head and hands that will work for you while God gives them strength. It is better than the river."

All that was thoughtless and hopeful in his disposition was expressed in these words. The woman to whom he pleaded was weakened by sorrow, and the devotion of this brave true heart brought her strength, comfort, almost hope.

"Will you be my friend?" she said gently. "Your words seem to bring me back to life. I wanted to die because I was so wretched, so lonely. I have friends in England--friends who were once all that is dear and kind; but I dare not go to them. I think a cruel look from one of those friends would kill me with a pain more bitter than any other death could give. And I have no right to hope for kind looks from them. Yours are the only words of friendship I have heard for a long time."

"And you will give me the right to work for you--to protect you? You will be my wife?"

"I would rather be your servant," she answered, with sad humility. "What right have I to accept so great a sacrifice? What folly can be so foolish as your love for me--if it is indeed love, and not a wild fancy of to-night!"

"It is a fancy that will last my life."

"Ah, you do not know how such fancies change."

"I know nothing except that mine is changeless. Come, my love, it is growing late and cold. Let me take you home. The portress will wonder. You must slip past her quietly with your veil down. Did you give old Margot your key when you came down stairs to-night?"

"No, it is in my pocket. I was not thinking--I--"

She stopped with a sudden shudder. Gustave understood that shudder; he also shuddered. She had left her room that night possessed by the suicide's madness; she had left it to come straight to death. Happily his strong arm had come between her and that cruel grave by which