Part 49 (1/2)
”As for you, my daughter--as for you, my son-in-law--I shall denounce your execrable complot to my friends of the mad-men's party, to Hebert, to James Roux the disfrocked priest, to Varlet. Get you hence--I drive you from my house.” Then seizing his wife by the arm, Desmarais added, ”But not you. You stay!”
”You will please to allow my mother full control over her own actions, Citizen Desmarais,” said Lebrenn calmly, and mastering his indignation.
”Unhand her!”
”Get out of here, scoundrel!” retorted the attorney, still holding his wife by the wrist. ”Get out of here, at once!”
”For the last time, Citizen Desmarais,” quoth John Lebrenn. ”Allow Madam Desmarais to follow her daughter, as is her desire. My patience is at an end, and I can not much longer tolerate the brutality I see here.”
”Would you have the boldness to raise your hand against me, wretch!”
replied the advocate, foaming with rage, and roughly wrenching his wife's arm. ”Malediction on you both.”
”Aye, I shall succor your wife from your wretched treatment,” John answered; and seizing the lawyer's wrist with his iron hand as if in a vise, he forced the attorney to release his almost fainting spouse. She, on her part, made all haste to leave the now intolerable presence of her husband, and, supported by Charlotte, disappeared into the next room.
As John left the parlor to rejoin his bride and his second mother, advocate Desmarais, hiding his face in his hands, sank into an arm-chair, crying:
”Abandoned by wife, abandoned by daughter! Henceforth I am condemned to live alone!”
CHAPTER XXI.
A LOVE FROM THE GRAVE.
His marriage with Charlotte achieved, John Lebrenn, his sister, his wife and Madam Desmarais took up their abode in the modest dwelling on Anjou Street. Here also was Lebrenn's smithy, now for two months transformed into an armorer's shop, for he had received an order for guns for the volunteers, and, with his companions, set about the work with a will.
On the evening of May the 30th, in the year of his marriage, Lebrenn was looking over the newspapers while he rested from the heavy labors of the day, when his wife, sad and engrossed, came to him, saying to herself:
”No--painful though the confidence be, my last talk with the poor child, and my tender attachment for Victoria, will not permit me to postpone it--” Then, aloud to her husband, she began:
”I have for long hesitated, my friend, over the communication I am about to make to you. But the interest I feel in Victoria compels me to-day to speak. Closer knowledge of your sister's character has shown me, my friend, that you do not over-state when you say that, despite the youthful degradation she perforce underwent, her heart has remained pure. And yet I very wrongly harbored an evil thought against her. Now I have the proof of my mistake. I attributed to jealousy the change we noticed coming over her. I thought to myself that Victoria, used to concentrate upon you all her tenderness, to share your life, might feel toward me that sort of sisterly jealousy which the best and bravest of sisters feel in spite of themselves toward the wife of an idolized brother. I blush for my error, my friend, but still it was pardonable.
Do you recall that shortly after our wedding we began to remark in your sister a growing sadness and taciturnity? Did she not seem by turns happy and saddened at our intimacy? Has she not appeared almost continuously under the empire of some secret brooding?”
”True; for long I have noticed in Victoria a sort of capricious changefulness of spirit which contrasted strongly with her ordinary equability. Thus, after having taken upon herself the task of evening lessons for our three apprentice boys and little Oliver, the orphan lad whom we took in, who, in spite of his eighteen years, knows no more than the younger boys, my sister suddenly declared she was going to stop the lessons and leave Paris; and without a word of explanation, at that.”
”You remember, John, how bitter were her farewells at leaving us?”
”Happily, at the end of barely a week, Victoria returned, and--strange contradiction--insisted upon resuming her functions as school mistress.”
”But her sadness, her sighs, the decline of her health proved only too well the persistence of her secret anguish. I said to myself, 'The courageous woman is fighting with all her might against her sisterly jealousy. In vain she tried to flee. Drawn again to us by her tenderness for John, she prefers to live with us and suffer.' But no, my friend, I was in error. I am now positive of it.”
”To what cause, then, do you attribute Victoria's deep dejection and chagrin?”
”I shall surprise you, my friend, in revealing the burden--it is love!”
Mute with astonishment, John looked at his wife at first without answering her. Then, sadly smiling, and shaking his head incredulously, he said:
”Charlotte, you mistake. Victoria has had but one love in her life. He whom she loved to distraction is dead. She will be faithful to that flame to the tomb.”
”You related to me the sad story of Victoria and Maurice, the young sergeant in the French Guards, killed by his disgraceful punishment.
But, recall to mind that two or three days after our marriage, when you presented Oliver and the three apprentices, whom she wished to teach to read, to her, she suddenly shuddered, and cried as in great bewilderment--'Good G.o.d! Is it a vision, or is it a specter? 'Tis he, 'tis Maurice I see again!'”