On arriving in New York, Madame de Fleury had taken up her residence for a few days at the Fifth Avenue Hotel, and, as though she feared to lose sight of Mademoiselle Melanie, requested her to do the same. A severe indisposition, which caused the latter to seek feminine aid, threw her in communication with the housekeeper of the hotel and her young assistant. Mademoiselle Melanie quickly became interested in the sweet, pale, patient face hovering about her bed, and did not fail to note the air of refinement which seemed at variance with her position. In less than four and twenty hours the young French couturière had learned the history of the young American housekeeper, and resolved, if she prospered in America, to remove this lovely girl from her present perilous position to one less exposed.
Six months later Ruth received a letter from Washington making her an offer to become one of the assistants of Mademoiselle Melanie, and gratefully accepted the proposal. Mademoiselle Melanie found her young employée's health too delicate for an exhausting apprenticeship to the needle, and employed Ruth in copying and coloring sketches of costumes which the accomplished couturière herself designed. As she became more and more conversant with the noble character of her protegée the spontaneous attachment she had conceived for her grew stronger, and Ruth Thornton became her constant companion.
CHAPTER XVIII.
MAURICE.
On their arrival in America Ronald took Maurice to his southern home, where he was received with a cordial hospitality that strengthened and confirmed the tie of brotherhood between the young men.
We will not attempt to portray the meeting between Ronald and his parents,—a meeting so full of joy that its throbs quickened into the pulse of pain, as though clay-compassed hearts were hardly large enough to endure the ecstasy of such a reunion. Nor will we dwell upon the proud elation with which Ronald's first ambitious attempt in art was contemplated by his parents. Their praises might simply have testified that love appreciates; the hand that wrought might have sanctified even a feeble work to their sight; but colder judgments pronounced Ronald's initiatory achievement a pledge of power, and all the more decisive because the execution of the youthful hand obviously had not kept pace with the strong conception of the fervid brain.
We pass on to the effect produced upon Maurice by his sojourn in Ronald's transatlantic home.
Many a pang did the youthful Frenchman endure as he noted the thorough and genial understanding which seemed to exist between the southern youth and his father. Maurice was amazed by Mr. Walton's unfailing recognition that his son was a responsible being; by the confidence he reposed in him; by the unequivocal manner in which he placed him upon a footing of equality, even while guiding him by his counsels,—counsels offered as the results of a larger experience, yet never so compulsorily urged as to check his son's freedom of decision. Maurice, marked, too, the earnest interest with which Mr. Walton entered into all Ronald's projects, albeit some of them appeared too wild and high-reaching to be easy of accomplishment; beheld how readily the paternal hand was stretched out to soften the ordeals through which the neophyte must inevitably pass, and was moved by the touching frankness with which the noble-minded parent repeatedly congratulated himself that he had not permitted his own predilections to force Ronald into a field of action repugnant to his tastes.
When Maurice instinctively compared this liberal, high-toned father's mode of influencing his son with the tyrannous control of the haughty count, and contrasted Ronald's untrammeled position with his own state of dependent nonentity, he felt that unstruggling submission to the cruel decree which doomed him to waste those fresh, strong, aspiring years of his life in hopeless idleness was a weakness rather than a virtue.