"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."