“I have little more to add,” resumed the general, after a long pause, and in a voice whose weakened accents evinced how fearfully the remembrance he called up affected him. “What remains, too, more immediately concerns myself than others. I am the last of my house. An ancient family, and one not undistinguished in the annals of France, hangs but on the feeble thread of a withered and broken old man's life, with whom it dies. My only brother fell in the Austrian campaign. I never had a sister. Uncles and cousins I have had in numbers; but death and exile have been rife these last twenty years, and, save myself, none bears the name of D'Auvergne.
“Yet once I nourished the hope of a family,—of a race who should hand down the ancient virtues of our house to after years. I thought of those gallant ancestors whose portraits graced the walls of the old château I was born in, and fancied myself leading my infant boy from picture to picture, as I pointed out the brave and the good who had been his forefathers. But this is a dream long since dispelled. I was then a youth, scarce older than yourself, rich, and with every prospect of happiness before me. I fell in love, and the object of my passion seemed one created to have made the very paradise I sought for. She was beautiful, beyond even the loveliest of a handsome Court; high-born and gifted. But her heart was bestowed on another,—one who, unlike myself, encouraged no daring thoughts, no ambitious longings, but who, wholly devoted to her he loved, sought in tranquil quiet the happiness such spirits can give each other. She told me herself frankly, as I speak now to you, that she could not be mine; and then placed my hand in her husband's. This was Marie de Rochefort, the mother of Mademoiselle de Meudon.
“The world's changes seem ever to bring about these strange vicissitudes by which our early deeds of good and evil are brought more forcibly to our memories, and we are made to think over the past by some accident of the present. After twenty years I came to live in that château where she whom I once loved had lived and died. I became the lord of that estate which her husband once possessed, and where in happiness they had dwelt together. I will not dwell upon the thoughts such associations ever give rise to; I dare not, old as I am, evoke them.”
He paused for some minutes, and then went on: “Two years ago I learned that Mademoiselle de Meudon was the daughter of my once loved Marie. From that hour I felt no longer childless. I watched over her,—without, however, attracting notice on her part,—and followed her everywhere. The very day I saw you first at the Polytechnique, I was beside her. From all I could learn and hear, her life bad been one of devoted attachment to her brother, and then to Madame Bonaparte. Her heart, it was said, was buried with him she once loved,—at least none since had ever won even the slightest acknowledgment from her bordering on encouragement.
“Satisfied that she was everything I could have wished my own daughter, and feeling that with youth the springs of affection rarely dry up, I conceived the idea of settling all my property on her, and entreating the Emperor to make me her guardian, with her own consent of course. He agreed: he went further; he repealed, so far as it concerned her, the law by which the daughters of Royalists cannot inherit, and made her eligible to succeed to property, and placed her hand at my disposal.
“Such was the state of matters when I wrote to you. Since that I have seen her, and spoken to her in confidence. She has consented to every portion of the arrangement, save that which involves her marrying; but some strange superstition being over her mind that her fate is to ruin all with whom it is linked, that her name carries an evil destiny with it, she refuses every offer of marriage, and will not yield to my solicitation.
“I thought,” said the general, as he leaned on his hand, and muttered half aloud, “that I had conceived a plan which must bring happiness with it. But, however, one part of my design is accomplished: she is my heir; the daughter of my own loved Marie is the child of my adoption, and for this I have reason to feel grateful. The cheerless feeling of a deathbed where not one mourns for the dying haunts me no longer, and I feel not as one deserted and alone. To-morrow I go to wish her adieu; and we are to be at the Tuileries by noon. The Emperor holds a levée, and our final orders will then be given.”
The old general rallied at the last few words he spoke, and pressing my hand affectionately, wished me goodnight, and withdrew; while I, with a mind confused and stunned, sat thinking over the melancholy story he had related, and sorrowing over the misfortunes of one whose lot in life had been far sadder than my own.