“You are innocent?” she cried, looking up at him with eyes full of tenderness and curiosity. “You have shielded some one?”
M. de Charruel shook his head. “I am not innocent,” he said. “I am no martyr, mademoiselle—not, at least, in the sense you are good enough to imply. I was fortunate to get transportation for life, doubly fortunate to obtain this modified liberty after only three years. You may, however, congratulate yourself that your friend is a model prisoner; his little farm has been well reported on by the Chef de l’Administration Pénitentiaire; it compares favourably with Leclair’s, the vitriol-thrower of Rue d’Enfer, and his early potatoes are said to rival those of Palitzi the famous poisoner.”
His companion shuddered.
“Pardon me,” he continued. “God knows, I have no desire to be merry; my heart is heavy enough, in all conscience.”
“You will tell me everything,” she said softly.
He walked along in silence for several minutes, moody and preoccupied, staring on the ground before him.
“I suppose I ought to begin with my father and mother, in the old-fashioned way,” he said at last, with a sudden smile. “There are conventionalities even for convicts! My father (if we are to go so far back) was the Comte de Charruel, one of the old noblesse; my mother an American lady from whom I got the little English I possess, as well as a disposition most rash, nervous, and impulsive. There were two of us children—my sister Berthe and myself, she the younger by six years. My father died when I reached twenty years, just as I entered the Eighty-sixth Hussars as a sub-lieutenant. Had he survived I might perhaps have been saved many miseries and unhappinesses; on the other hand, he, the soul of honour, might have been standing here in my place, condemned as I have been to a lifelong exile.
“I was a good officer. Titled, rich, and well born, there was accorded me the friendship of the aristocratic side of the regiment; a good comrade, and free from stupid pride, I stood well with those who had risen from the ranks and the humbler spheres of society. Many a time I was the only officer at home in either camp, and popular in both. When I look back upon my army life, so gay, so animated, so filled with small successes and commendations from my superiors, I wish that I had been fated to die in what was the very zenith of my happiness and prosperity.
“My mother, except for a short time each year at our hôtel in Paris, lived in our old château in Nemours, entertaining, in an unobtrusive fashion, many of the greatest people in France; for the entrée of few houses was more eagerly sought than our own. Though we were not so well born as some, nor so rich as many, my mother contrived to be always in request, and to make her salon the centre of all the gaiety and wit of France.
“From her earliest infancy my sister Berthe was counted one of the company at the château, and while I was at the lycée and afterwards at St. Cyr, she was leading the life of a great lady at Nemours. Marshals of France were her cavaliers; famous poets and musicians played with her dolls and shared her confidences; men and women distinguished in a thousand ways paid court to her childish beauty. Beauty, perhaps, I ought not to say, for her charm lay most in the extraordinary liveliness and intrepidity of her character, which captivated every beholder. Indeed, she ought to have been the man of the family, I the girl—so diverse were our tastes and aspirations, our whole outlook on life.