Lippincotts Magazine, January 1875 | Page 5

been hunting
down a chimaera, a hydra with a dozen heads: each head shows me by
turn the portrait of Fortnoye, or Francine, or yourself, or Kranich, or
Mrs. Ashburleigh. Ever since Noisy I have been meandering through
the folds of a mystery. My head is turning with it. If you want to save
me from distraction, sit down in this chair and answer me a long
catechism, without saying a word but in reply to my questions."
[Illustration: FRAU KRANICH.]
"I am sure I talk as plain as a professor. Look! You frightened me at
first with your doubts and your impossibilities. You have only to make
Kranich's aunt agree with Francine's guardian, and at the same time

forgive Francine's husband for having assumed the undertaker's bill for
Madame Ashburleigh's baby."
"Yes, yes, my dear Joliet, you are clearer than Euclid." And I
administered a category of questions. Joliet, with his fatherly joy
bursting out of him in the longest of parentheses, kept quiet in his
refulgent shoes and answered as well as he could.
[Illustration: "TO MY ARMS."]
Francine, he protested, had never been a flirt (I have met no Frenchmen
who were ignorant of that one English word, to which they give a new
value by pronouncing it in a very orotund manner, as _flort_). When
she came to be ten or twelve, Frau Kranich--until then a well-preserved
lioness with an appetite for society--ceased to give her dolls and
promised to give her an education. At the same time, the banker's
widow left Paris, and repaired with her charge to Brussels, where the
little girl received some good half-Jesuitical, half-English schooling, of
the kind suggested in the Brontë novels. Her diploma attained, Francine
begged to accompany her English teacher back to London: she wished
to become a _meess_, she said, and be competent to teach like a new
Hypatia. She had hardly bidden her kind protectress adieu when Frau
Kranich's nephew arrived at Brussels, exceedingly dissatisfied with his
American business in the bar-rooms of the grand duke of Mississippi.
A sordid jealousy of Mademoiselle Joliet's claims upon his aunt took
possession of this prudent spirit. He took up a watch-post at a
university town on the Rhine. He began to whisper vague
exaggerations of her coquetries and liveliness, which the Protestant
circle that revolved about Madame Kranich did not fail to bear in to her.
This lady admired her nephew, sure that his want of manners was the
sign of a noble frankness. She wrote to Francine, bidding her come
immediately from London. The girl not replying, the hopeful nephew
was put upon her track. He went away. His letters from England
reported that Francine was no longer in that country, but was probably
come back to Belgium, "I know not in what suburb of Brussels our very
independent miss may this instant be hiding," he wrote.
About the same time, in the circle of French exiles at Brussels, a young
romantique named Fortnoye was reported as weeping and lavishing
statues over the grave of an unknown infant in the churchyard at
Laaken. It was a delicious mystery. Kind meddlers approached the

sexton, who said that all he knew of the babe's mother was that she was
a beautiful lady from London. Kranich carried the story dutifully to his
aunt, adding his own ingenious surmise: "Can Francine have become
sufficiently Anglicised to contract secret marriages with roving
revolutionists, and scamper about the country with ardent young
Frenchmen in the style of Gretna Green?" In fact, it was really from
London that Mrs. Ashburleigh was proceeding, for the purpose of
taking care, in the Rhenish city where he was dying, of her handsome,
dissipated, worthless husband. Taken suddenly ill at Brussels, she left
her infant to the unequaled chill of a strange, unknown cemetery,
hastening thence with tears and despair to the bedside where duty
called her.
Has my reader forgotten the dim, tear-swollen story which I heard--not
at all improved in the telling--from my generous young friend
Grandstone--how an impulsive Frenchman had laid to rest, in flowers
and evergreens, the unnamed baby of a woman he had never seen?
Jealous as I was of Fortnoye, I never could think without tenderness of
this singular action. To make the tomb of this helpless Innocence the
young man braved the curiosity of his comrades--despised the rumor,
the obloquy, and, hardest of all, the jests. Well has the wise dramatist
decided that Ophelia must needs be laid in Yorick's bed!
Poor Francine, gay, frivolous, innocently vain of her little travesty of
English behavior, found her accomplishments and graces received by
her guardian's circle with incomprehensible coldness. Hurt and
humiliated, she asked to pay a visit to her father. The honest rustic
received her with a miserable confusion of doubt and severity, for