The young man stood firm against all their arguments, he was unmoved by all their pleading. It was only when his anxious kindred had given up the battle for lost that Gustave wavered. Their mute despair moved him more than the most persuasive eloquence; and the end was submission. He left Beaubocage the plighted lover of that woman who, of all others, he would have been the last to choose for his wife. It had all been settled very pleasantly—the dowry, the union of the two estates, the two names. For six months Gustave was to enjoy his freedom to finish his studies; and then he was to return to Normandy for his marriage.
"I have heard very good accounts of you from Paris," said the Baron. "You are not like some young men, wild, mad-brained. One can confide in your honour, your steadiness."
The good folks of Beaubocage were in ecstacies. They congratulated Gustave—they congratulated each other. A match so brilliant would be the redemption of the family. The young man at last began to fancy himself the favoured of the gods. What if Madelon seemed a little dull—a little wanting in that vivacity which is so pleasing to frivolous minds? she was doubtless so much the more profound, so much the more virtuous. If she was not bright and varied and beautiful as some limpid fountain dancing in summer sunlight, she was perhaps changeless and steady as a rock; and who would not rather have the security of a rock than the summer-day beauty of a fountain?
Before Gustave departed from his paternal home he had persuaded himself that he was a very lucky fellow; and he had paid Mademoiselle Frehlter some pretty little stereotyped compliments, and had listened with sublime patience to her pretty little stereotyped songs. He left the young lady profoundly impressed by his merits; he left his own household supremely happy; and he carried away with him a heart in which Madelon Frehlter's image had no place.
CHAPTER II.
IN THIS WIDE WORLD I STAND ALONE.
Gustave went back to his old life, and was not much disturbed by the grandeur of his destiny as future seigneur of Côtenoir and Beaubocage. It sometimes occurred to him that he had a weight upon his mind; and, on consideration, he found that the weight was Madelon Frehlter. But he continued to carry that burden very lightly, and his easy-going student life went on, unbroken by thoughts of the future. He sent polite messages to the demoiselle Frehlter in his letters to Cydalise; and he received from Cydalise much information, more graphic than interesting, upon the subject of the family at Côtenoir; and so his days went on with pleasant monotony. This was the brief summer of his youth; but, alas, how near at hand was the dark and dismal winter that was to freeze this honest joyous heart! That heart, so compassionate for all suffering, so especially tender for all womankind, was to be attacked upon its weaker side.
It was Gustave Lenoble's habit to cross the gardens of the Luxembourg every morning, on his way from the Rue Grande-Mademoiselle to the Ecole de Droit. Sometimes, when he was earlier than usual, he carried a book with him, and paced one of the more obscure alleys, reading for an odd half-hour before he went to the daily mill-grinding in the big building beyond those quiet gardens.
Walking with his book one morning—it was a volume of Boileau, which the student knew by heart, and the pages whereof did not altogether absorb his attention—he passed and repassed a bench on which a lady sat, pensive and solitary, tracing shapeless figures on the ground with the point of her parasol. He glanced at her somewhat carelessly the first time of passing, more curiously on the second occasion, and the third time with considerable attention. Something in her attitude—helplessness, hopelessness, nay indeed, despair itself, all expressed in the drooping head, the listless hand tracing those idle characters on the gravel—enlisted the sympathies of Gustave Lenoble. He had pitied her even before his gaze had penetrated the cavernous depths of the capacious bonnet of those days; but one glimpse of the pale plaintive face inspired him with compassion unspeakable. Never had he seen despair more painfully depicted on the human countenance—a despair that sought no sympathy, a sorrow that separated the sufferer from the outer world. Never had he seen a face so beautiful, even in despair. He could have fancied it the face of Andromache, when all that made her world had been reft from her; or of Antigone, when the dread fiat had gone forth—that funeral rites or sepulture for the last accursed scion of an accursed race there were to be none.
He put Boileau into his pocket. That glimpse of a suffering human mind, which had been unconsciously revealed to him, possessed an interest more absorbing than the grandest flight of poet and satirist. As he passed for the fifth time, he looked at the mournful lady still more searchingly, and this time the sad eyes were lifted, and met his pitying looks. The beautiful lips moved, and murmured something in tones so tremulous as to be quite unintelligible.