"To the lamp-post with the aristocrats!—to the lamp-post with Desmarais!"
The clamors seemed to come so pat upon the words of Charlotte, that Madam Desmarais, stricken with affright, threw herself on her knees in an attitude of prayer, clasped her hands, and stammered out an appeal to God.
"To the lamp-post with Desmarais! Death to the traitor!" shrieked Lehiron's band once more, and passed on its way. The cries of "Death!" faded away in the distance as Lehiron's troop followed in the wake of the conquerors of the Bastille. It was the pack of jackals following the lions.
Desmarais gradually recovered from the state of rigid fright in which he was plunged, and cried out to Charlotte in a voice trembling with repressed rage:
"Unnatural daughter! Parricide! Did you hear the cries of death hurled at your father by those cannibals of Paris, who carry in triumph the head of Flesselles? These men, who perhaps quite soon will have made your father undergo the same torture, are the friends, the brothers of John Lebrenn. Your lover is, like them, an assassin. Horror upon all this revolted plebs!"
CHAPTER XII.
REUNITED FROM THE BASTILLE.
While advocate Desmarais was whelming his daughter with reproaches on the score of her love for John Lebrenn, the latter was at his mother's knee in their modest lodgings on the fourth floor of the old house in St. Honoré Street. In the larger of the two rooms composing the family's apartments, were to be seen two beds. One had never been occupied for years, since the day Ronan Lebrenn disappeared without a soul knowing what had become of him. The room also contained a sort of little bookshelf garnished with books printed with his own hand, a portable workbench at which John in the evenings finished up pieces belonging to his ironsmith's trade, tools, some little furniture, and a buffet of walnut-wood in which reposed the relics and legends of the family.
Madam, or Mother, Lebrenn, as she was called in the neighborhood, was nearly sixty years of age. Domestic griefs, rather than years, had enfeebled and ruined her health. Her venerable countenance was of an extreme pallor, and sadly sunken. The poor woman held in her hands the head of her son, kneeling before her. The aged mother stroked it several times, saying in a voice thrilled with emotion:
"Dear boy, you have come back to me at last. I can now reassure myself on the state of your wound. Helas! how great was my anguish during all the time of that frightful combat. The little note you sent me after the taking of the Bastille indeed calmed a little my terrors for you, but without stilling them completely. I feared lest, out of tenderness, you sought to deceive me as to the gravity of your hurt. Now I am coming to myself from my fears, and yet I still must hold you in my arms. Dear and only child whom God has left to a poor widow—how sweet it is for a mother to embrace her son!"
"Come, good mother, I see your spirit is still troubled by the pangs of this morning. But are you quite sure you are a widow? Am I truly your only child?"