Mademoiselle Dumarques had thriven in a quiet steady-going way. She had not risen to be a court milliner. She did not give fashions to Europe, America, and the colonies, or employ the genius of rising draughtsmen to design her costumes. She was of the bourgeoisie, and lived by the bourgeoisie. Her abode was a second floor in one of the quiet respectable streets in that half-deserted quarter of Paris which lies on the unfashionable side of the Seine; an eminently gloomy street which seemed to lead to nowhere, but was nevertheless the abode of two or three important business firms. Here Mademoiselle Dumarques confectioned gowns and bonnets, caps and mantles, on reasonable terms, and in strict accordance with the fashions of last year.
Lucius ascended a dingy staircase, odorous with that all-pervading smell of stewed vegetables which is prone to distinguish French staircases—an odour which in some manner counterbalances the advantages of that more savoury cuisine, so often vaunted by the admirers of French institutions to the discredit of British cooks. A long way up the dingy staircase Lucius discovered a dingy door, on which, by the doubtful light, he was just able to make out the name of ‘Mademoiselle Dumarques, Robes et Chapeaux.’ He rang a shrill bell, which summons produced a shrill young person in a rusty-black silk gown, who admitted him with a somewhat dubious air, as if questioning his ability to order a gown or a bonnet. The saloon into which he was ushered had a tawdry faded look. A few flyblown pink tissue-paper models of dresses, life size, denoted the profession of its occupant. A marble-topped commode was surmounted by a bonnet, whose virgin beauties were veiled by yellow gauze. The room was clean and tidily kept, but was spoiled by that cheap finery which is so often found in a third-rate French apartment. A clock which did not go; a pair of lacquered candelabra, green with age, yet modern enough to be commonplace; a sofa of the first empire, originally white and gold, but tarnished and blackened by the passage of time; chairs, velvet-covered, brass-nailed, and clumsy; carpet threadbare; curtains of a gaudy imitation tapestry.
Mademoiselle Dumarques emerged from an inner chamber with a mouthful of pins, which she disposed of in the band of her dress as she came. She was tall, thin, and sallow, might once have been passably good-looking, but was in every respect unlike the portrait of Félicie.
‘I come, madame,’ said Lucius, after the politest possible reception from the lady, who insisted that he should take the trouble to seat himself in one of the uncomfortably square arm-chairs, whose angles were designed in defiance of the first principles of human anatomy—‘I come to speak to you of a subject which I cannot doubt is very near to your heart. I come to speak of the dead.’
Mademoiselle Dumarques looked at him wonderingly, but said nothing.
‘I come to you on an important matter connected with your sister, Mademoiselle Félicie, afterwards Mrs. Glenlyne.’
He made a bold plunge; for, after all, the name might not have been Glenlyne; and even if it were, Mademoiselle Dumarques might have known nothing about it. But the name elicited no expression of surprise from Mademoiselle Dumarques. She shook her head pensively, sighed, wiped away a tear from her sharp black eyes, and then asked,
‘What can you have to say to me about my sister, Madame Glenlyne?’
The name was evidently right.
‘I come to you to speak of her only child, Lucille; who has been brought up in ignorance of her parents, and whom it is my wish to restore to her rightful position in society.’
‘Her rightful position!’ cried Julie Dumarques, with a scornful look in her hard pinched face; ‘her rightful position in society, as a milliner’s niece! You are vastly mistaken, sir, if you suppose that it is in my power to assist my niece. I find it a hard struggle to support myself by the labour of my hands.’
‘So,’ thought Lucius, ‘Mademoiselle Julie inherits her father’s miserly nature. She has a house in Rouen which must bring her in seventy to a hundred pounds a year, and she has a fairly prosperous business, but repudiates the claims of her niece. Hard world, in which blood is no thicker than water. Thank Heaven, my Lucille needs nothing from her kindred.’
‘I am happy to tell you, madame,’ he said after a little pause, ‘that Miss Glenlyne asks and requires no assistance from you or any other relative.’
‘I am very glad to hear that,’ answered Mademoiselle Julie. ‘Of course I should be pleased to hear of the poor child’s welfare, though I have never seen her face, and though her mother treated me in no very sisterly spirit, keeping from me the secret of her marriage, while she confided it to my sister Hortense. True that I was here at the time of her return to Rouen, and too busy to go yonder to see her. The tidings of her death took me by surprise. I had no idea of her danger, or I should naturally have gone to see her. But as for Félicie’s marriage or the birth of her child, I knew nothing of either event till after the death of my sister Hortense, when I found some letters and a kind of journal, kept by poor Félicie, among her papers.’
‘Will you let me see that journal and those letters?’ asked Lucius eagerly.
‘I should hardly be justified in showing them to a stranger.’
‘Perhaps not; but although a stranger to you, mademoiselle, I have a strong claim upon your kindness in this matter.’
‘Are you a lawyer?’
‘No. I have no mercenary interest in this matter. Your niece, Lucille Glenlyne, is my promised wife.’
He produced the double miniature and the packet of letters.
‘These,’ he said, ‘will show you that I do not come to you unacquainted with the secrets of your sister’s life. My desire is to restore Lucille to her father, if he still lives; or, in the event of his death, to win for her at least a father’s name.’
‘And a father’s fortune!’ exclaimed Mademoiselle Julie hastily; ‘my niece ought not to be deprived of her just rights. This Mr. Glenlyne was likely to inherit a large fortune. I gathered that from his letters to my sister.’
‘Yet in all these years you have made no attempt to seek out your niece, or to assist her in establishing her rights,’ said Lucius, with some reproach in his tone.
‘In the first place, I had no clue that would assist such a search,’ answered Julie Dumarques, ‘and in the second place, I had no money to spend on lawyers. I had still another reason—namely, my horror of crossing the sea. But with you the case is different—as my niece’s affianced husband, you would profit by any good fortune that may befall her.’
‘Believe me, that contingency is very far from my thoughts. I want to do my duty to Lucille; but a life of poverty has no terror for me if it be but shared with her.’
‘The young are apt to take that romantic view of life,’ said Mademoiselle Dumarques, with a philosophic air; ‘but their ideas are generally modified in after years. A decent competence is the only solace of age;’ and here she sighed, as if that decent competence were not yet achieved.
‘Will you let me see those letters, mademoiselle?’ asked Lucius, coming straight to the point. ‘I have shown you my credentials; those letters in your sister’s hand must prove to you that I have some interest in this case, even should you be inclined to doubt my own word.’
Mademoiselle shrugged her shoulders, in polite disavowal of any such mistrust.
‘I have no objection to your looking over the letters, in my presence,’ she said; ‘and I hope, if by my assistance my niece obtains a fortune, she will not forget her poor aunt Julie.’
‘I doubt not, mademoiselle, that the niece will show more consideration for the aunt than the aunt has hitherto shown for the niece.’
Mademoiselle Dumarques sighed plaintively. ‘What was I to do, monsieur, with narrow means, and an insurmountable terror of crossing the sea?’
‘The transit from Calais to Dover is no doubt appalling,’ said Lucius.
Mademoiselle Dumarques took him into her den; or the laboratory in which she concocted those costumes which were to ravish the Parc Monceau or the Champs Elysées on a Sunday afternoon. It was a small and stifling apartment behind the saloon in which mademoiselle received her customers—a box of a room ten feet by nine, smelling of coffee, garlic, and a suspicion of cognac, and crowded with breadths of stuff and silk, lining, pincushions, yard measures, paper patterns, and all the appliances of the mantuamaker’s art. Here the shrill-voiced young apprentice stitched steadily with a little clicking noise, while Mademoiselle Dumarques opened a brass-inlaid desk, and produced therefrom a small packet of papers.
Lucius seated himself at a little table by the single window, and opened this packet.
There were about a dozen letters, some of them love-letters, written to a person of humbler station than the writer. Vague at first, and expressing only a young man’s passion for a lovely and attractive girl; then plainly and distinctly proposing marriage ‘since my Félicie is inexorable on this point,’ said the writer, ‘but our marriage must be kept a secret for years to come. You must tell my aunt that you are summoned home by your father, and leave abruptly, not giving her or my uncle time for any inquiries. You can let a servant accompany you to the station, taking your luggage with you, and you can leave by the eight-o’clock train for Newhaven before that servant’s eyes. At Croydon I will meet you, get your luggage out of the van, and bring you back to London in time for our marriage to take place at the church in Piccadilly by half-past eleven that morning. We are both residents in the parish, so there will be no difficulty about the license, only to avoid all questioning I shall have to describe you as an Englishwoman, and of age. I have heard of a cottage near Sidmouth, in Devonshire, which I think will suit us delightfully for our home; an out-of-the-way quiet nook, from which I can run up to London when absolutely necessary. My uncle is anxious that I should take my degree, as you know. So I may have to spend some months of the next two years at Oxford; but even that necessity needn’t part us, as I can get a place somewhere on the river, at Nuneham, for instance, for you. Reading for honours will be a good excuse for continued and close retirement, and will, I think, completely satisfy the dear old uncle—whom, even apart from all considerations about the future, I would not for worlds offend. Would that he could see things with my eyes, dearest; but you know I did once sound him as to a marriage with one in all things my superior except in worldly position, and he met me with a severity that appalled me. Good as he is in many ways, he is full of prejudice, and believes the Glenlynes are a little more exalted than the Guelphs or the Ghibelines. So we must fain wait, not impatiently but resignedly, till inevitable death cuts the knot of our difficulties. Heaven is my witness that if evil wishes could injure, no wicked desire of mine should hasten my uncle’s end by an hour; but he is past sixty, and has aged a good deal lately, so it is not in nature that his life can long stand between us and the avowal of our union.’
This was the last of the lover’s letters; the next Lucius found in the little packet was from the husband, written some years later—written when Félicie had returned to Rouen.
This letter was despondent, nay, almost despairing, or rather, expressive of that impatience which men call despair.
The writer, who in all these letters signed himself in full, Henry Glenlyne, had failed to get his degree; had been, in his own words, ignominiously plucked; but that was an event of two years ago, to which he referred, retrospectively, as a cause of discontent in his uncle.
‘The fact is, I’ve disappointed him, Félicie, and a very little more would induce him to throw me over altogether, and leave his estate to the Worcestershire Glenlyne Spaldings—my natural enemies, who have courted him assiduously for the last thirty years. The sons are Cambridge men, models of propriety; senior wranglers, prizemen, and heaven knows what else, and of course have done their best to undermine me. Yet I know the dear old man loves me better than the whole lot of them—to be at once vulgar and emphatic—and that unless I did something to outrage his pet prejudice, he would never dream of altering his will, charm they never so wisely. But to declare our marriage at such a time as this would be simple madness, and is not to be thought of. You must keep up your spirits, my dearest girl. If I can bring the little one over to Rouen, I’ll do it; but I have a shrewd notion that my uncle has spies about him, and that my movements are rather closely watched, no doubt in the interests of the Glenlyne Spaldings; your expectant legatees have generally their paid creature in the testator’s household; so it would be difficult for me to bring her myself, and it is just the last favour I could ask of Sivewright, as he profits by the charge of her. It would be like asking him to surrender the goose that lays golden eggs; and remember, whatever the man may be, he has done us good service; for had he not passed himself off as your husband when my uncle swooped down upon us that dreadful day at Sidmouth, the whole secret would have been out, and I beggared for life. I had a peep at the little pet the other day; she is growing fast, and growing prettier every day, and seems happy. Strange to say, she is passionately fond of Ferdinand, who, I suppose, spoils her, and she looked at me with the most entire indifference. I felt the sting of this strangeness. But in the days to come I will win her love back again, or it shall go hard with me.’
Then came a still later letter.
‘My Darling,—I am inexpressibly grieved to hear of your weak health. I shall come over again directly I can get away from my uncle, and will, at any risk, bring Lucille with me. At this present writing it is absolutely impossible for me to get away. My uncle is breaking fast, and I much fear the G. Spaldings are gaining ground. The senior wrangler is going to make a great marriage; in fact, the very match which my uncle tried to force upon me. This is a blow—for the old man is warmly attached to the young lady in question, and even thinks, entirely without reason, that I have treated her badly. However, I must trust to his long-standing affection for me to vanquish the artifices of my rivals. I hardly think that he could bring himself to disinherit me after so long allowing me to consider myself his heir. Keep up your spirits, my dear Félicie; the end cannot be far off, and rich or poor, believe in the continued devotion of your faithfully attached husband,
‘HENRY GLENLYNE.
‘The Albany.’
This was the letter of a man of the world, but hardly the letter of a bad man. The writer of that letter would scarcely repudiate the claim of an only daughter, did he still live to acknowledge her.
The journal, written in a russia-leather covered diary, consisted of only disjointed snatches, all dated at Rouen, in the last year of the writer’s life, and all full of a sadness bordering on despair—not the man’s impatience of vexation and trouble, but the deep and settled sorrow of a patient unselfish woman. Many of the lines were merely the ejaculations of a troubled spirit, brief snatches of prayer, supplications to the Mother of Christ to protect the motherless child; utterances of a broken heart, penitential acknowledgments of an act of deceit, prayers for forgiveness of a wrong done to a kind mistress.
One entry was evidently written after the receipt of the last letter. It was at the end of the journal, and the hand that inscribed the lines had been weak and tremulous.
‘He cannot come to me, yet there is no unkindness in his refusal. He promises to come soon, to bring the darling whose tender form these arms yearn to embrace, whose fair young head may never more recline on this bosom. O, happy days at Sidmouth, how they come back to me in sweet delusive dreams! I see the garden above the blue smiling sea. I hold my little girl in my arms, or lead her by her soft little hand as she toddles in and out among the old crooked apple-trees in the orchard. Henry has promised to come in a little while; but Death comes faster, Death knows no delays. I did not wish to alarm my husband. I would not let Hortense write, for she would have told him the bitter truth. Yet, I sometimes ask myself sadly, would that truth seem bitter to him? Might not my death bring him a welcome release? I know that he has loved me. I can but remember that we spent four happy years together in beautiful England; but when I think of the difficulties that surround him, the ruin which threatens him, can I doubt that my death will be a relief to him? It will grieve that kind heart, but it will put an end to his troubles. God grant that when I am gone he may have courage to acknowledge his child! The fear that he may shrink from that sacred duty racks my heart. Blessed Mother, intercede for my orphan child!’
Then came disjointed passages—passages that were little more than prayer. Here and there, mingled with pious hopes, with spiritual aspirations, came the cry of human despair.
‘Death comes faster than my husband. My Henry, I shall see thee no more. Ah, if thou lovest me, my beloved, why dost thou not hasten? It is hard to die without one pitying look from those dear eyes, one tender word from that loved voice. Hast thou forgotten thy Félicie, whom thou didst pursue so ardently five years ago? I wait for thee now, dear one; but the end is near. The hope of seeing thee once again fades fast. Wilt thou have quite forgotten me ere we meet in heaven? A long life lies before thee; thou wilt form new ties, and give to another the love that was once Félicie’s. In that far land where we may meet hereafter thou wilt look on me with unrecognising eyes. O, to see thee once more on earth—to feel thy hand clasping mine as life ebbs away!’
Lucius closed the little book with a sigh. Alas, how many a woman’s life ends thus, with a broken heart! Happy those finer natures whose fragile clay survives not the shattered lamp of the soul! There are some fashioned of a duller stuff, in whom the mere habit of life survives all that gave life its charm.
This was all that letters or journal could tell the investigator. But Lucius told himself that the rest would be easy to discover. He had name, date, locality. The name, too, was not a common name; Burke’s Landed Gentry or County Families would doubtless help him to identify that Henry Glenlyne who married Félicie Dumarques at the church in Piccadilly. These letters had done much; for they had assured him of Lucille’s legitimacy. This made all clear before him; he need no longer fear to pluck the curtain from the mystery of the past, lest he should reveal a story of dishonour.
He took some brief notes from Mr. Glenlyne’s letter, and thanked Mademoiselle Dumarques for her politeness, promising that if the niece should profit by the use of these documents, the aunt should be amply requited for any assistance they afforded; and then he took a courteous leave of the dressmaker and her apprentice, the monotonous click of whose needle had not ceased during his visit.
It was four o’clock in the afternoon when Lucius left Mademoiselle Dumarques. He had thought of getting back to Dieppe in time for that evening’s boat, so as to arrive in London by the following morning—he had taken a return ticket by this longer but cheaper route. He found, however, that the strain upon his attention during the last forty-eight hours, the night journey by Newhaven and Dieppe, combined with many an anxious day and night in the past, had completely worn him out.
‘I must have another night’s rest before I travel, or I shall go off my head,’ he said to himself. ‘I am beginning to feel that confused sense of time and place which is the forerunner of mental disturbance. No; it would be of some importance to me to save a day, but I won’t run the risk of knocking myself up. I’ll go back to Dieppe by the next train, and sleep there to-night.’
