CHAPTER XVI.
THE HAPPINESS OF MEETING.
Before the reader is made acquainted with the dénouement of the drama then passing in Nicholas's boat, we shall beg leave to retrace our steps.
Shortly after Fleur-de-Marie had quitted St. Lazare in company of Madame Séraphin, La Louve also left that prison. Thanks to the recommendations of Madame Armand and the governor, who were desirous of recompensing her for her kindness towards Mont Saint-Jean, the few remaining days the beloved of Martial had still to remain in confinement were remitted her. A complete change had come over this hitherto depraved, degraded, and intractable being. Forever brooding over the description of the peaceful, wild, and retired life, so beautifully depictured by Fleur-de-Marie, La Louve entertained the utmost horror and disgust of her past life. To bury herself with Martial in the deep shades of some vast forest, such was her waking and dreaming thought,—the one fixed idea of her existence, against which all her former evil inclinations had in vain struggled when, separating herself from La Goualeuse, whose growing influence she feared, this singular creature had retired to another part of St. Lazare.
To complete this sincere though rapid conversion, still more assured by the ineffectual resistance attempted by the perverse and froward habits of her companion, Fleur-de-Marie, following the dictates of her own natural good sense, had thus reasoned:
"La Louve, a violent and determined creature, is passionately fond of Martial. She would, then, hail with delight the means of quitting the disgraceful life she now, for the first time, views with shame and disgust, for the purpose of entirely devoting herself to the rude, unpolished man whose taste she so entirely partakes of, and who seeks to hide himself from the world, as much from inclination as from a desire of escaping from the universal reprobation in which his family is viewed."
Assisted by these small materials, gleaned during her conversation with La Louve, Fleur-de-Marie, in giving a right direction to the unbridled passion and restraining the daring hardihood of the reckless creature, had positively converted a lost, wretched being into an honest woman; for what could the most virtuous of her sex have desired more than to bestow her undivided affections on the man of her choice, to dwell with him in the silence and solitude of woods, where hard labour, privations and poverty, would all be cheerfully borne and shared for his dear sake, to whom her heart was given?
And such was the constant, ardent prayer of La Louve. Relying on the assistance which Fleur-de-Marie had assured her of in the name of an unknown benefactor, La Louve determined to make her praiseworthy proposal to her lover, not, indeed, without the keen and bitter apprehension of being rejected by him, for La Goualeuse, while she brought her to blush for her past life, awakened her to a just sense also of her position as regarded Martial.
Once at liberty, La Louve thought only of seeing "her man," as she called him. He took exclusive possession of her mind; she had heard nothing of him for several days. In the hopes of meeting with him in the Isle du Ravageur, and with the determination of waiting there until he came, should she fail to find him at first, she paid the driver of a cabriolet liberally to conduct her with all speed to the bridge of Asnières, which she crossed about a quarter of an hour before Madame Séraphin and Fleur-de-Marie (they having walked from the barrier) had reached the banks of the river near the lime-kilns. As Martial did not present himself to ferry La Louve across to the Isle du Ravageur, she applied to an old fisherman, named Father Férot, who lived close by the bridge.
It was about four o'clock in the day when a cabriolet stopped at the entrance of a small street in the village of Asnières. La Louve leaped from it at one bound, threw a five-franc piece to the driver, and proceeded with all haste to the dwelling of old Férot, the ferryman. La Louve, no longer dressed in her prison garb, wore a gown of dark green merino, a red imitation of cashmere shawl with large, flaming pattern, and a net cap trimmed with riband; her thick, curly hair was scarcely smoothed out, her impatient longing to see Martial having rendered an ordinary attention to her toilet quite impossible. Any other female would, after so long a separation, have exerted her very utmost to appear becomingly adorned at her first interview with her lover; but La Louve knew little and cared less for all these coquettish arts, which ill accorded with her excitable nature. Her first, her predominating desire was to see "her man" as quickly as possible, and this impetuous wish was caused, not alone by the fervour of a love which, in minds as wild and unregulated as hers, sometimes leads on to madness, but also from a yearning to pour into the ear of Martial the virtuous resolutions she had formed, and to reveal to him the bright vista of happiness opened to both by her conversation with Fleur-de-Marie.