"I wish, dear Lucille, thou couldst be persuaded to marry Justin; he loves thee well, and now that thou art yet young, and hast many years before thee, thou shouldst remember that when I die thou wilt be alone."
"Ah cease, dearest mother, I never can marry now, and as for love—once taught in the bitter school in which I have learned the knowledge of myself—I cannot be deceived again."
"My Lucille, you do not know yourself; never was woman loved, if Justin does not love you; and never did lover feel with more real warmth how worthily he loved."
And this was true; and not of Justin alone, for Lucille's modest virtues, her kindly temper, and a certain undulating and feminine grace, which accompanied all her movements, had secured her as many conquests as if she had been beautiful. She had rejected all offers of marriage with a shudder; without even the throb of a flattered vanity. One memory, sadder, was also dearer to her than all things; and something sacred in its recollections made her deem it even a crime to think of effacing the past by a new affection.
"I believe," continued Madame Le Tisseur, angrily, "that thou still thinkest fondly of him from whom only in the world thou couldst have experienced ingratitude."
"Nay mother," said Lucille, with a blush and a slight sigh, "Eugene is married to another."
While thus conversing, they heard a gentle and timid knock at the door—the latch was lifted. "This" said the rough voice of a commissaire of the town—"this, monsieur, is the house of Madame Le Tisseur, and—voila mademoiselle!" A tall figure, with a shade over his eyes, and wrapped in a long military cloak, stood in the room. A thrill shot across Lucille's heart. He stretched out his arms; "Lucille," said that melancholy voice, which had made the music of her first youth—"where art thou, Lucille; alas! she does not recognize St. Amand."
Thus was it, indeed. By a singular fatality, the burning suns and the sharp dust of the plains of Egypt had smitten the young soldier, in the flush of his career, with a second—and this time, with an irremediable—blindness! He had returned to France to find his hearth lonely; Julie was no more—a sudden fever had cut her off in the midst of youth; and he had sought his way to Lucille's house, to see if one hope yet remained to him in the world!
And when, days afterward, humbly and sadly he re-urged a former suit, did Lucille shut her heart to its prayer? Did her pride remember its wound—did she revert to his desertion—did she say to the whisper of her yearning love—"thou hast been before forsaken?" That voice and those darkened eyes pleaded to her with a pathos not to be resisted; "I am once more necessary to him," was all her thought—"if I reject him, who will tend him?" In that thought was the motive of her conduct; in that thought gushed back upon her soul all the springs of checked, but unconquered, unconquerable love! In that thought she stood beside him at the altar, and pledged, with a yet holier devotion than she might have felt of yore, the vow of her imperishable truth.
And Lucille found, in the future, a reward which the common world could never comprehend. With his blindness returned all the feelings she had first awakened in St. Amand's solitary heart; again he yearned for her step—again he missed even a moment's absence from his side—again her voice chased the shadow from his brow—and in her presence was a sense of shelter and of sunshine. He no longer sighed for the blessing he had lost; he reconciled himself to fate, and entered into that serenity of mood which mostly characterizes the blind. Perhaps, after we have seen the actual world, and experienced its hollow pleasures, we can resign ourselves the better to its exclusion; and as the cloister which repels the ardor of our hope is sweet to our remembrance, so the darkness loses its terror when experience has wearied us with the glare and travail of the day. It was something, too, as they advanced in life, to feel the chains that bound him to Lucille strengthening daily, and to cherish in his overflowing heart the sweetness of increasing gratitude; it was something that he could not see years wrinkle that open brow, or dim the tenderness of that touching smile; it was something that to him she was beyond the reach of time, and preserved to the verge of a grave (which received them both within a few days of each other,) in all the bloom of her unwithering affection—in all the freshness of a heart that never could grow old!