Charlotte's Inheritance

by M. E. Braddon

They had nearly reached Sloane Square before Diana took courage to broach the subject so naturally repugnant to her. She had need to remember that the welfare of M. Lenoble and all belonging to him might be dependent on her fortitude.

"M. Lenoble," she began at last, "I am going to say something I shall find it most painful to utter, but which I feel it my duty to say to you. I can only ask you to receive it in a generous spirit."

"But, my dear Miss Paget, I pray you not to say anything that is disagreeable to you. Why should you give yourself pain?—why—"

"Because it is my duty to warn you of a danger which I know only too well, and of which you may be quite ignorant. You are my father's friend, M. Lenoble; and he has very few friends. I should be sorry if anything I were to say should rob him of your regard."

"Nothing that you say shall rob him of my friendship. But why should you persist thus to say anything that is painful? What can you tell me that I do not know, or that I cannot guess? Will you tell me that he is poor? But I know it. That he is a broken-down gentleman? And that also I know. What, then, would you tell me? That he has a daughter who is to him a treasure without price? Ah, mademoiselle, what must I be if I did not know that also?—I, who have contemplated that daughter so many times—ah, so many!—when she could not know with what sympathy my eyes watched her dutiful looks, with what profound emotion my heart interpreted her life of affectionate sacrifice."

There was a warmth, a tenderness in his tones which touched Diana's heart as it had not been touched of late. Suddenly, unexpectedly, the full meaning of those tender accents came home to her. The love that she had once dreamed of from the lips of another spoke to her to-night in the words of this stranger. The sympathy for which she had yearned long ago, in the days of her wanderings with Valentine, was given to her to-night without stint or measure. Unhappily it came too late; and it did not come from the only lips which, as it seemed to her to-night, could make sympathy precious or love divine. But to this lonely girl a good man's affection seemed a treasure for which she must needs be deeply grateful. It was something to discover that she could be loved.

"I too," she said to herself,—"I, of whose presence Valentine is scarcely conscious when he enters a room where Charlotte and I are together; I, whom he greets day after day with the same careless words, the same indifferent look; I, who might fade and waste day by day with some slow disease, until I sank into the grave, before he would be conscious of any change in my face,—is it possible that amongst the same race of beings there can be any creature so widely different from Valentine Hawkehurst as to love me?"

This was the bitter complaint of her heart as she compared the tenderness of this stranger with the indifference of the man to whom, for three long years of her girlhood, she had given every dream, every thought, every hope of her existence. She could not put him away from her heart all at once. The weak heart still fondly clung to the dear familiar image. But the more intensely she had felt the cold neglect of Valentine, the more grateful to her seemed the unsought affection of Gustave Lenoble.

"You know me as little as you know my father, M. Lenoble," she said, after a long pause, during which they had walked to the end of the long dull street, and were close to the square. "Let us go back a little way, please; I have much more to say. I wish you to be my father's friend always, but, if possible, without danger to yourself. My father is one of those sanguine people who are always ready to embark in some new enterprise, and who go on hoping and dreaming, after the failure of a dozen schemes. He has no money, that I know of, to lose himself, and that fact may make him, unconsciously, reckless of other people's money. I have heard him speak of business relations with you, M. Lenoble, and it is on that account I venture to speak so plainly. I do not want my poor father to delude you, as he has often deluded himself. If you have already permitted him to involve you in any speculation, I entreat you to try to withdraw from it—to lose a little money, if necessary, rather than to lose all. If you are not yet involved, let my warning save you from any hazard."

"My dear Miss Paget, I thank you a thousand times for your advice, your noble thoughtfulness for others. But no, there is no hazard. The business in which your father is occupied for me is not a speculation. It involves no risk beyond the expenditure of a few thousand francs, which, happily, I can afford to lose. I am not at liberty to tell you the nature of the business in question, because I have promised your father to keep that a secret. Dear young lady, you need have no fear for me. I am not a rash speculator. The first years of my life were passed in extreme poverty—the poverty that is near neighbour to starvation. That is a lesson one cannot forget. How shall I thank you for your concern for me?—so generous, so noble!"