Even three years of gloom and sorrow, of that deep anguish which at the time the sufferer believes to be indelible and everlasting, lag on their weary, desolate course, and when they too are over-passed, and he looks back upon their transit, which seemed so painfully protracted, and, lo! all is changed, and their flight also is now but as an ended minute.
And yet what strange and sudden changes altering the affairs of men, changing the hearts of mortals, yea, revolutionizing their whole intellects, and over-turning their very natures—more than the devastating earthquake or the destroying lava transforms the face of the everlasting earth—have not been wrought, and again well nigh forgotten within that little period.
Three years had passed, I say, over the head of Raoul de Douarnez—the three most marked and memorable years in the life of every young man—and from the ingenuous and promising stripling, he had now become in all respects a man, and a bold and enterprising man, moreover, who had seen much and struggled much, and suffered somewhat—without which there is no gain of his wisdom here below—in his transit, even thus far, over the billows and among the reefs and quicksands of the world.
His father had kept his promise to that loved son in all things, nor had the Sieur d'Argenson failed of his plighted faith. The autumn of that year, the spring of which saw Kerguelen die in unutterable agony, saw Raoul de Douarnez the contracted and affianced husband of the lovely and beloved Melanie.
All that was wanted now to render them actually man and wife, to create between them that bond which, alone of mortal ties, man cannot sunder, was the ministration of the church's holiest rite, and that, in wise consideration of their tender years, was postponed until the termination of the third summer.
During the interval it was decided that Raoul, as was the custom of the world in those days, especially among the nobility, and most especially among the nobility of France, should bear arms in active service, and see something of the world abroad, before settling down into the easier duties of domestic life. The family of St. Renan, since the days of that ancestor who has been already mentioned as having sojourned in Pondicherry, had never ceased to maintain some relations with the East Indian possessions of France, and a relation of the house in no very remote degree was at this time military governor of the French East Indias, which were then, previous to the unexampled growth of the British empire in the East, important, flourishing, and full of future promise.
Thither, then, it was determined that Raoul should go in search of adventures, if not of fortune, in the spring following the signature of his marriage contract with the young demoiselle d'Argenson. And, consequently, after a winter passed in quiet domestic happiness on the noble estates, whereon the gentry of Britanny were wont to reside in almost patriarchal state—a winter, every day of which the young lovers spent in company, and at every eve of which they separated more in love than they were at meeting in the morning—Raoul set sail in a fine frigate, carrying several companies of the line, invested with the rank of ensign, and proud to bear the colors of his king, for the shores of the still half fabulous oriental world.
Three years had passed, and the boy had returned a man, the ensign had returned a colonel, so rapid was the promotion of the nobility of the sword in the French army, under the ancient regime; and—greatest change of all, ay, and saddest—the Viscount of Douarnez had returned Count de St. Renan. An infectious fever, ere he had been one year absent from the land of his birth, had cut off his noble father in the very pride and maturity of his intellectual manhood; nor had his mother lingered long behind him whom she had ever loved so fondly. A low, slow fever, caught from that beloved patient whom she had so affectionately nurtured, was as fatal to her, though not so suddenly, as it had proved to her good lord; and when their son returned to France full of honors achieved, and gay anticipations for the future, he found himself an orphan, the lord in lonely and unwilling state of the superb demesnes which had so long called his family their owners.
There never in the world was a kinder heart than that which beat in the breast of the young soldier, and never was a family more strictly bound together by all the kindly influences which breed love and confidence, and domestic happiness among all the members of it, than that of St. Renan. There had been nothing austere or rigid in the bringing up of the gallant boy; the father who had at one hour been the tutor and the monitor, was at the next the comrade and the playmate, and at all times the true and trusted friend, while the mother had been ever the idolized and adored protectress, and the confidante of all the innocent schemes and artless joys of boyhood.
Bitter, then, was the blow stricken to the very heart of the young soldier, when the first tidings which he received, on landing in his loved France, was the intelligence that those—all those, with but one exception—whom he most tenderly and truly loved, all those to whom he looked up with affectionate trust for advice and guidance, all those on whom he relied for support in his first trials of young manhood, were cold and silent in the all absorbing tomb.