"Thou canst call me Cydalise for a while, my little one," she said to him; for she did not wish the child to proclaim the relationship between them yet awhile.
Ah, what bitter tears the two women shed over the soft fair curls of that little head, when they had the boy all to themselves in the turret chamber at Beaubocage, on whose white walls the eyes of Cydalise had opened almost every morning of her pure eventless life!
"Why dost thou cry so, madame?" the child asked of his grandmother, as she held him in her arms, kissing and weeping over him; "and what have they done with my father—and mamma too? She went away one day, but she told me that she would come back, so quickly, ah, so quickly! and the days passed, and they shut papa in his room, and would not let me go to him; and mamma did not come, though I asked the Blessed Virgin to send her back to me."
"Dear child, thy father and mother are in a brighter place than this hard world, where they had so much sorrow," Madame Lenoble answered, gently.
"Yes, they were often sorry," murmured the boy thoughtfully. "It was because of money; but then, when there was no money, mamma cried and kissed me, and kissed papa, and the good papa kissed us both, and somehow it always ended in happiness."
François Lenoble was, happily, absent on this day of tribulation. The women took their fill of sorrow, but it was sorrow mingled with a strange bitter sweetness that was almost joy. The seigneur of Beaubocage had gone to dine, as he still often did, with his old friend Baron Frehlter; for the breach of faith which had caused a lifelong disunion of father and son had not divided the two proprietors. Nay, indeed the Baron had been generous enough to plead the cause of the castaway.
"A man cannot dispose at will of his affections, my friend," he urged; "and it was more generous in your son to break faith with my daughter before marriage than after."
Mademoiselle Frehlter had not broken her heart on account of her lover's falsehood. She had been sufficiently indignant on the occasion, and had been more impatient of her mother's pet priest and pet poodle during the brief period in which she wore the willow. She had recovered her good humour, however, on being wooed by a young subaltern in a cavalry regiment stationed at Vevinord, the offshoot of a grander house than that of Lenoble, and whose good looks and good lineage had ultimately prevailed with the Baron. That gentleman had by no means too good an opinion of the son-in-law thus forced upon him; but peace was the highest good (with unlimited tobacco) to which his Germanic soul aspired; and for the sake of peace in the present he was content to hazard his daughter's happiness in the future.
"That is very brilliant," he said of M. Paul de Nérague, the young lieutenant of light cavalry; "but it is not solid, like Gustave. Your son is honest, candid—a brave heart. It is for that I would have given him Madelon. But it is Providence which disposes of us, as our good father St. Velours tells us often; and one must be content. Young Nérague pleases my daughter, and I must swallow him, though for me he smells too strong of the barracks: ça flaire la caserne, mon ami."
That odour of the barracks which distinguished the sub-lieutenant Paul de Nérague became more odious after his marriage with the virtuous Madelon, when he was established—niché, as he himself called it—in very comfortable, though somewhat gruesome, apartments at Côtenoir. His riotous deportment, his hospitable disposition (as displayed in the frequent entertainment of his brothers-in-arms at the expense of his father-in-law), his Don Juan-like demeanour in relation to the housemaids and kitchen-wenches of the château—innocent enough in the main, but on that account so much the more audacious—struck terror to the hearts of Madame Frehlter and her daughter; and the elder lady was much gratified by that thirst for foreign territory which carried the greater part of the French army and the regiment of the vivacious Paul to the distant wilds of Algeria.