Charlottes Inheritance | Page 9

race there were to
be none.
He put Boileau into his pocket. That glimpse of a suffering human
mind, which had been unconsciously revealed to him, possessed an
interest more absorbing than the grandest flight of poet and satirist. As
he passed for the fifth time, he looked at the mournful lady still more
searchingly, and this time the sad eyes were lifted, and met his pitying
looks. The beautiful lips moved, and murmured something in tones so
tremulous as to be quite unintelligible.
The student took off his hat, and approached the lady, deferential as
knight-errant of old awaiting the behest of his liege mistress.
"In what can I have the happiness to be agreeable to you, madame?"
"You are very good, monsieur," murmured the lady in very decent
French, but with an accent unmistakably foreign--English, as Gustave
opined. "I--I--am quite a stranger in Paris, and--and--I have heard there
are numerous lodging-houses in this quarter--where one may obtain a
lodging--cheaply. I have asked several nursemaids, and other women,
in the gardens this morning; but they seem very stupid, and can tell me
nothing; and I do not care to ask at the hotel where I am staying."
Gustave pondered. Yes, there were many lodgings, he informed the
lady. And then he thought of Madame Magnotte. Was it not his duty to
secure this stray lodger for that worthy woman, if possible?

"If madame has no objection to a boarding-house--" he began.
Madame shook her head. "A boarding-house would suit me just as
well," she said; "but it must not be expensive. I cannot afford to pay
much."
"I know of a boarding-house very near this place, where madame might
find a comfortable home on very reasonable terms. It is, in point of fact,
the house in which I myself reside," added Gustave, with some
timidity.
"If you will kindly direct me to the house--" said the lady, looking
straight before her with sad unseeing eyes, and evidently supremely
indifferent as to the residence or non-residence of M. Lenoble in the
habitation referred to.
"Nay, madame, if you will permit me to conduct you there. It is but a
walk of five minutes."
The stranger accepted the courtesy with a gentle indifference that was
not ingratitude, but rather incapacity for any feeling except that one
great sorrow which seemed to absorb her mind.
Gustave wondered what calamity could thus overwhelm one so young
and beautiful.
The lady was quite silent during the little walk from the gardens to the
Rue Grande-Mademoiselle, and Gustave observed her attentively as he
walked by her side. She was evidently not more than four-and-twenty
years of age, and she was certainly the prettiest woman he had ever
seen. It was a fair delicate English beauty, a little worn and faded, as if
by care, but idealized and sublimated in the process. At her brightest
this stranger must have been strikingly beautiful; in her sorrow she was
touchingly lovely. It was what Gustave's countrymen call a _beauté
navrante_.
Gustave watched her, and wondered about her. The dress she wore was
sufficiently elegant, but had lost the gloss of newness. Her shawl,

which she carried as gracefully as a Frenchwoman, was darned.
Gustave perceived the neat careful stitches, and divined the poverty of
the wearer. That she should be poor was no subject for surprise; but
that she, so sorrowful, so lonely, should seek a home in a strange city,
was an enigma not easy to solve.
To Madame Magnotte Gustave introduced the stranger. She gave just
one look round the dreary saloon; but to Gustave's fancy that one look
seemed eloquent. "Ah me!" it said; "is this the fairest home I am to find
upon this inhospitable earth?"
"She does not seem to belong to this world," the young man thought, as
he went back to the garden where he had found his fair stranger, having
been very coolly dismissed by Madame Magnotte after his introduction
had been made.
And then M. Lenoble, being of a romantic turn of mind, remembered
how a lady had been found by a student sitting on the lowest steps of
the guillotine, desolate and helpless, at night; and how the student had
taken her home and sheltered her, and had straightway fallen
desperately in love with her, to discover, with unutterable horror, that
her head had been severed from her fair shoulders by the cruel knife
twelve hours before, and that her melancholy loveliness was altogether
phantasmal and delusive.
Was this English stranger whom Gustave had found in the gardens of
the Luxembourg twin sister to that ghostly lady of the familiar legend?
Her despair and her beauty seemed to him greater than earthly sorrow
or earthly beauty; and he was half inclined to wonder whether she
could be of the same