The virtuous Madelon was too stolid to weep for her husband. But even her stolidity was not proof against the fiery influence of jealousy, and, waking and sleeping, her visions were of veiled damsels of Orient assailing the too inflammable heart of Lieutenant de Nérague.
The young officer was yet absent at that period in which Cydalise returned from Rouen with her brother's child.
The little boy was sleeping peacefully in a cot beside his aunt's bed (it had been his father's cot thirty years ago) when François Lenoble returned from Côtenoir that night.
It was not till the next day that he saw the child. He had been making his usual morning's round in the gardens and orchards, when he came into the salon, and saw the little boy seated near his grandmother's chair, playing with some dominoes. Something—perhaps the likeness to his dead son—the boy's black clothes, for Cydalise had contrived to dress him in decent mourning—struck suddenly on the old man's heart. "Who is that boy?" he asked, with a strange earnestness.
"Your son Gustave's only child," answered his wife gently,—"his orphan child."
François Lenoble looked at her, and from her to the boy; tried to speak, but could not; beckoned the child, and then dropped heavily into a chair and sobbed aloud. Until this moment no one had ever seen him shed a tear for the son he had put away from his home—and, as it had seemed, from his heart. Not by one sigh, not by one mournful utterance of the familiar name, had he betrayed the depth of that wound which he had endured, silently, obstinately, in all these years.
They suffered him to bemoan his dead son unhindered by stereotyped consolations. The two women stood by, and pitied him in silence. The little boy stared wonderingly, and at last crept up to the sorrow-stricken father. "Why do you cry, poor old man?" he asked. "You have not lost your papa and mamma, as I have lost mine, have you? I want to stay with you and be your little boy, please. She told me to say that," he added, pointing to Cydalise.—"And I have said it right, haven't I?" he asked of the same lady.—"I think I shall love you, because you are like my papa, only older and uglier," the little one concluded, with angelic candour.
The seigneur of Beaubocage dried his tears with an effort. Beaubocage—Côtenoir. Ah, me! what empty sounds those two once magic names seemed to him now that his son's life had been sacrificed to so paltry an ambition, so sordid a passion, so vile and grovelling a desire! He took the boy on his knee, and kissed him tenderly. His thoughts bridged over a chasm of five-and-twenty years as his lips pressed that fair young brow; and it was his own son—the son whom he had disowned—whose soft hair was mingling itself now with the grey bristles on his rugged chin.
"My child," he murmured softly, "the fear is that I shall love thee too well, and be to thee as much too weakly indulgent as I was wickedly stern to thy father. Anything is easier to humanity than justice."
This was said to himself rather than to the boy.