Charlotte's Inheritance Part 8

"Francois Gustave."

"I shall call thee Gustave."

"But papa always called me Francois, and mamma said it was the name of a cruel man; but papa said he loved the name--"

"Ah, no more, little one!" cried the lord of Beaubocage suddenly; "thou knowest not with what dagger-thrusts thou dost pierce this poor old heart."

CHAPTER III.

GUSTAVE THE SECOND.

The little Gustave grew and flourished. Such love was lavished on him as rarely falls to the lot of children, though the spring of many lives may be rich in love's pure white blossom. The existence of this child seemed all happiness. He brought hope, and a sense of atonement, and all sweet things, to the quiet family at Beaubocage; and as he grew from childhood to boyhood, from boyhood to manhood, it seemed to that household as if the first Gustave of their love had never been taken from them. That Orphic fable of Zagreus repeats itself in many households. For the one bright creature lost another is given; and then comes a time when it is almost difficult to separate the image of the missing one from the dear subst.i.tute who so nearly fills his place.

Francois Len.o.ble and his wife enjoyed a green old age, and the affection of their grandson made the cup of life sweet for them to the very dregs.

There are, happily, some natures which indulgence cannot injure; some luxuriant flowers which attain strength as well as beauty under the influence of these tropical heats of affection. Gustave the second possessed all the n.o.ble qualities of Gustave the first. Frank, generous, brave, constant, affectionate, light-hearted, he shone on the failing eyes of his kindred radiant as a young Apollo, brave as a mortal Hercules.

Those things which the ignorant heart has at some time so pa.s.sionately desired are apt to be granted when the desire has grown somewhat cold and dead. Thus it was with the ambition of Francois Len.o.ble. He lived to see the lands of Cotenoir and Beaubocage united in the person of his grandson, who married Clarice, the only surviving child of M. and Madame de Nerague. Two sons and a daughter had been born at Cotenoir; but the sons withered and faded in early boyhood, and even the daughter, though considered a flouris.h.i.+ng plant in that poor garden of weakling blossoms, was but a fragile creature.

The old people at Beaubocage survived the seigneur and chatelaine of Cotenoir by some years, and survived also the fiery lieutenant, who fell in Algeria without having attained his captaincy, or added any military renown to the good old name of de Nerague in his own magnificent person.

Francois saw his grandson established at Cotenoir before he died. He expired with his hand in that of Gustave, whom, in the half-consciousness of that last hour, he mistook for the son he had disowned.

"What door was that that shut?" he asked, in an eager whisper. "Who said I turned my son out of doors--my only son? It's false! I couldn't have done it! Hark! there's the door shutting again! It sounds like the door of a tomb."

After this he dozed a little, and woke with a smile on his face.

"I have been dreaming of thy father, Gustave," he said calmly. "I thought that I saw him with a light s.h.i.+ning in his face, and that he kissed and forgave me."

This was the end. The faithful wife was not slow to follow her husband to the grave, and there was now only a placid maiden lady at Beaubocage, Mademoiselle Cydalise Len.o.ble, whom everyone within ten leagues of Vevinord knew and loved,--a lay abbess, a Sister of Mercy in all save the robes; a tender creature, who lived only to do good.

Ten years pa.s.sed, and M. Len.o.ble of Cotenoir was a widower with two fair young daughters at a convent school on the outskirts of Vevinord, and a boisterous son at an academy in Rouen. Gustave had never followed any profession; the lands of Beaubocage secured him a competence, so prudently had the small estate been managed by the kindred who adored him. His marriage had given him fortune. He had no need of trade or profession. His life was laid out for him like a prim Dutch flower-garden. He was to live at Cotenoir, and look after his estate, and smoke his pipe, as Baron Frehlter had done, and be a good husband to his wife, a kind father to his children. This latter part of his duty came natural to M. Len.o.ble. It was not in him to be otherwise than kind to women and children. His invalid wife praised him as a model of marital perfection. It was Gustave who wheeled her sofa from one room to another, Gustave who prepared her medicines, Gustave whose careful hands adjusted curtains and _portieres_. The poor woman lived and died believing herself the happiest of wives. She mistook kindness for love.

M. Len.o.ble bore his wife's demise with Christian calmness. He was sorry that the fragile creature should have been taken so early from the pleasant home that was hers by right, but of pa.s.sionate grief, or dreary sense of irreparable loss, there was none in that manly heart. There were times when the widower reproached himself for this want of feeling; but in very truth Madame Len.o.ble, _jeune_, had lived and died a nonent.i.ty.

Her departure left no empty place; even her children scarcely missed her.

The father was all-in-all.

Gustave had married at twenty years of age. He was twenty-nine when his wife died. His eldest daughter, Clarice, eight; his second, Madelon, seven; the boy, a spoilt young dog of five, not yet despatched to the great school at Rouen.

But in '65 Mademoiselle Clarice was fifteen years of age, and a very charming performer on the pianoforte, as the good nuns at the Convent of the Sacred Heart, at Vevinord, told the father. Mademoiselle Madelon was looking forward to her fourteenth anniversary, and she, too, was a very pretty pianist, and altogether a young prodigy of learning and goodness, as the nuns told the master of Cotenoir. The demoiselles of Cotenoir stood high in the estimation of pupils and mistress; they were a kind of n.o.blesse; and the simple-minded superioress spoke of these young persons with some pride when she described her establishment to a stranger. It was a very comfortable little colony, a small world enclosed by high walls. The good mothers who taught and cherished the children were for the greater part ladies of superior and even exalted station; and there was a gentleness, a tenderness, in their care for these young lambs not always to be insured by the payment of an annual stipend. It must be confessed that the young lambs were apt to be troublesome, and required a good deal of watching. To the eye of the philosopher that convent school would have afforded scope for curious study; for it is singular to discover what exceptional vices the youthful mind can develop from its inner consciousness, in homes as pure as this. There were black sheep even in the convent of the Sacre Coeur, damsels marked with a sign that meant "dangerous."

Happily for Gustave Len.o.ble, his daughters were amongst the brightest and the purest of those girl-graduates. They gave him no trouble, except when they asked him for a home.

"It seems so dull and dreary at Cotenoir, papa," they said, "though you are always so kind. It doesn't seem like home. Beaubocage is more home-like. At Cotenoir, when you are out, there is no one to talk to; and we have no little parties, no excursions into the country, none of those pleasures which the other girls tell us they have during the holidays."

This was the gist of the lamentations of Mademoiselles Clarice and Madelon; and the father knew not how to supply the mysterious something which was wanting to make Cotenoir a pleasant home. The girls could complain of no restraint, or pine for no indulgence, since their father was always prompt to gratify every whim. But there was some element of happiness wanting, nevertheless; and M. Len.o.ble perceived that it was so.

The life at Cotenoir was desultory, straggling; an existence of perpetual dawdling; a life of shreds and patches, half-formed resolutions, projects begun and broken off in the middle. The good genius, the household angel, order, was wanting in that mansion. There was waste, dirt, destruction of all kinds, in the rambling old chateau; old servants, too weak or too lazy to work; old tradesmen, presuming on old-established habits of imposition, unquestioned so long as to have become a right--for the feudal system of fine and forfeiture has only changed hands. The power still flourishes, only it is the villein who takes t.i.the of his lord.

The servants at Cotenoir had gone their own ways with but little interference since the death of Madame de Nerague, which occurred two years before that of her daughter, Clarice Len.o.ble. Poor invalid Clarice had been quite unable to superintend her household; and since her death Mademoiselle Cydalise had been too feeble of health to a.s.sume any authority in her nephew's establishment, even if the household of Cotenoir would have submitted to interference from Beaubocage, which in all likelihood they would not.

Thus it happened that things had taken their own course at the chateau, and the course had been somewhat erratic. There is nothing so costly as muddle, and Gustave Len.o.ble had of late begun to perceive that he had the maximum of expense with the minimum of comfort. Meanwhile the kind old aunt at Beaubocage gave her nieces much valuable advice against the time when they should be old enough to a.s.sume the management of their father's house. The sweet unselfish lady of Beaubocage had indeed undergone hard experience in the acquirement of the domestic art. Heaven and her own memory alone recorded those sc.r.a.pings and pinchings and nice calculations of morsels by which she had contrived to save a few pounds for her outcast brother. Such sordid economics show but poorly on earth; but it is probable that in the ma.s.s of doc.u.mentary evidence which goes before the Great Judge, Mademoiselle Len.o.ble's account-book will be placed on the right side.

Book the Third.

THE HORATIAD.

CHAPTER I.

CHIEFLY RETROSPECTIVE.

Captain Paget went his way to Rouen in a placid but not an exulting mood, after parting with his young friend Valentine Hawkehurst at the London Bridge terminus of the Brighton line. He was setting out upon an adventure wild and impracticable as the quest of Jason and his Argonauts; and this gallant captain was a carpet-knight, sufficiently adventurous and audacious in the diplomatic crusades of society, but in nowise eager to hazard his life on tented field and in thick press of war. If the Fates had allowed the accomplished Horatio to choose his own destiny, he would have elected to live in the immediate neighbourhood of St. James's Street, from the first day to the last of the London season, and to dine artistically and discreetly at one of those older and more exclusive clubs dear and familiar to him from the bright years of his youth. He was by nature a _flaneur_, a gossip, a lover of expensive luxuries and frivolous pleasures. He was not only incapable of a high thought himself, but was an unbeliever in the possibility of high thoughts or n.o.ble principles in the world he lived in. He measured the universe by that narrow sc.r.a.p of tape which was the span of his own littleness. To him Caesar was an imperial brigand, Cicero a hypocritical agitator. To him all great warriors were greedy time-servers like John Churchill; all statesmen plausible placemen; all reformers self-seeking pretenders. Nor did Captain Paget wish that it should be otherwise. In his ideal republic, unselfishness and earnestness would have rendered a man rather a nuisance than otherwise. With the vices of his fellow-men the diplomatic Horatio was fully competent to deal; but some of his most subtle combinations on the chess-board of life would have been checkmated by an unexpected encounter with intractable virtue.

The necessity of living was the paramount consideration to which this gentleman had given his mind from the time when he found himself a popular subaltern in a crack regiment, admired for his easy manners and good looks, respected by meaner men for his good blood, and rich in everything except that vulgar dross without which the life of West-end London is so hollow a delusion, so bitter a comedy of mean s.h.i.+fts and lying devices.

That freebooter of civilization, the man who lives by his wits, is subject to strange fluctuations from prosperity to adversity. He is the miner or gold-digger of civilized life; and as there are times when his pickaxe strikes suddenly on a rich lode, so there are dreary intervals in which his spade turns up nothing but valueless clay, and the end of each day's work leaves him with no better evidence of his wasted labour than the aching limbs which he drags at nightfall to his dismal shanty.

For some months Captain Paget had found Philip Sheldon a very useful acquaintance. The stockbroker had been the secret inaugurator of two or three joint-stock companies, though figuring to the outer world only as director; and in the getting-up of these companies Horatio had been a useful instrument, and had received liberal payment for his labours.

Unhappily, so serene an occupation as promoting cannot go on for ever; or rather, cannot remain for ever in the same hands. The human mind is naturally imitative, and the plagiarisms of commerce are infinitely more audacious than the small larcenies of literature. The joint-stock company market became day by day more crowded. No sooner did Philip Sheldon float the Non-destructive Laundry Company, the admirable organization of which would offer a guarantee against the use of chloride of lime and other destructive agencies in the wash-tub, than a rival power launched a colourable imitation thereof, in the Union-is-Strength Domestic Lavatory Company, with a professor of chemistry specially retained as inspector of wash-tubs. Thus it was that, after the profitable ripening of three such schemes, Mr. Sheldon deemed it advisable to retire from the field, and await a fitter time for the further exercise of his commercial genius.

Captain Paget's relations with the stockbroker did not, however, terminate with the cessation of his labours as secretary, jack-of-all-trades, and promoter. Having found him, so far, clever, and to all appearance trustworthy--and this was an important point, for no man so much needs honourable service as a rogue--Philip Sheldon determined upon confiding to Horatio the conduct of a more delicate business than anything purely commercial. After that discovery of the telegraphic message sent by his brother George to Valentine Hawkehurst, and the further discovery of the advertis.e.m.e.nt relating to the unclaimed wealth of the lately deceased John Haygarth, Mr. Sheldon lost no time in organizing his plans for his own aggrandizement at the expense of his brother.

"George refused to let me in for a share of chances when I showed myself willing to help him," thought Philip. "He may discover by-and-by that I have contrived to let myself into his secrets; and that he might have played a better game by consenting to a partners.h.i.+p."

A life devoted to his own interests, and a consistent habit of selfishness, had rendered Mr. Sheldon, of the Lawn, Bayswater, and Stags Court, City, very quick of apprehension in all matters connected, immediately or remotely, with the making of money. The broken sentences of the telegram betrayed by the blotting-pad told him a great deal. They told him that there was a certain Goodge, in the town of Ullerton, who possessed letters so valuable to George Sheldon, as to be bought by his agent Valentine Hawkehurst. Letters for which Sheldon was willing to give money must needs be of considerable importance, since money was a very scarce commodity with that hunter of unconscious heirs-at-law. Again, a transaction which required the use of so expensive a medium as the electric telegraph rather than the penny post, might be fairly supposed a transaction of some moment. The letters in question might relate to some other estate than that of John Haygarth, for it was quite possible that the schemer of Gray's Inn had other irons in the fire. But this was a question of no moment to Philip Sheldon.

If the letters--or the information contained therein--were likely to be useful to George, they might be useful to him. If George found it worth his while to employ an agent at Ullerton, why should not he (Philip) have his agent in the same town? The pecuniary risk, which might be a serious affair to George, was child's play for Philip, who had always plenty of money, or, at any rate, the command of money. The whole business of heir-at-law hunting seemed to the stockbroker a very vague and shadowy piece of work, as compared to the kind of speculation that was familiar to him; but he knew that men had made money in such a manner, and any business by which money could be made, was interesting to him. Beyond this, the notion of cutting the ground from under his brother's feet had a certain attraction for him. George's manner to him had been somewhat offensive to him on more than one occasion since--well, since Tom Halliday's death. Mr. Sheldon had borne that offensiveness in mind, with the determination to "take it out of" his brother on the earliest opportunity.

It seemed as if the opportunity had arrived, and Philip was not one of those men who wait s.h.i.+vering on the sh.o.r.e when Fortune's tide is at the flood. Mr. Sheldon launched his bark upon the rising waters, and within two hours of his discovery in the telegraph-office was closeted with Horatio Paget in the little parlour in Omega Street, making arrangements for the Captain's journey to Ullerton.

That Horatio was the right man for the work he wanted done, Mr. Sheldon had been quick to perceive.

"He knows Hawkehurst, and will be able to reckon up any manoeuvres of his better than a stranger; and is, I think, altogether as deep an old gentleman as one could hope to meet with, barring _the_ traditional gentleman who did odd jobs for Dr. Faustus," the stockbroker said to himself, as his hansom sped along Park Lane on its way to Chelsea. The eagerness with which Captain Paget took up the idea of this business was very agreeable to his patron.

"This is an affair in which success hinges on time," said Mr. Sheldon; "so, if you mean to go in for the business, you must start for Ullerton by the two o'clock express. You'll have just time to throw your razors and a clean s.h.i.+rt into a carpet-bag while I talk to you. I've got a cab outside, and a good one, that will take you to Euston Square in half an hour."

The Captain showed himself prompt in action. His bedchamber was a small apartment at the back of the parlour, and here he packed his bag while conversing with his employer.

"If you get upon the ground in time, you may obtain a look at the letters before they are handed over to Hawkehurst, or you may outbid him for them," said Mr. Sheldon; "but remember, whatever you do must be so done as to keep Hawkehurst and George completely in the dark as to our proceedings. If once they find out we are on their track, our chances will be gone, for they have got the information and we haven't; and it's only by following close in their footsteps we can hope to do anything."