Lippincotts Magazine, January 1875 | Page 6

her
escapade to England had never pleased him, and her return from her
godmother's home wore to him the air of a repudiation. At her father's
house, however, she was discovered by Fortnoye, who had never heard
the ingenious Kranich's theory of his own private wedding with
Francine, and who thought to find in her the veiled unknown of the
cemetery. He saw for the first time, in the flowery home at Noisy, that
fresh ingenuous beauty, a little over-cast with disappointment. His
generous nature was touched; and, with his talent for administration
and planning, he conceived the idea of establishing Francine in the
pretty bird's nest at Carlsruhe, distant alike from the strongholds of her
calumniators, Belgium and France.

Fortnoye now had an object in life. "There is a very young person in
the cemetery of Laaken who is much in need of a chaperone," he said.
The frank proofs of his own relations with this churchyard would not
only do credit to his own reputation, but would gratify the best friends
of Mademoiselle Joliet and at least one other lady. To attain these
proofs he had to step over the coiling, writhing bodies of a whole nest
of rumors. When he seized by the throat the especial slander that he
himself was the husband of the babe's mother, he found written on its
crest the signature of John Kranich. He sought the aunt. This lady gave
him several interviews, the Lutheran prayer-book for ever in her hand.
"Why does the dear girl not come to me?" she would say, weeping, but
she refused to hear a word against her precious nephew, the
personification of bluff frankness. As if to make crushing him
impossible, young Kranich had now withdrawn to America, leaving his
reputation in that best possible protection, the chivalry that is extended
toward the absent. Fortnoye was baffled. "I will ask the baby at its
tomb for its mother's and father's name," he cried. In the pretty God's
Acre he found a fresh harvest of flowers and a new statue over the
well-known grave. It was a pretty miniature of Thorwaldsen's Psyche,
on which the proud copyist had inscribed his name. A respectful
correspondence with Mrs. Ashburleigh, to whom he was guided by the
sculptor, and who was now taking the waters at Wildbad, soon put the
whole tangled story to rights. Fortnoye had the happiness of conducting
Francine, by this time his affianced wife, to the good Frau Kranich,
who, convinced that she had wrongly judged her, threw her arms
ardently around her recovered jewel, letting the eternal little book fly
from her hand like a projectile.
[Illustration: THE FUTURE OF FFARINA.]
"But the most singular part of the story," concluded Father Joliet, "is
the letter which Fortnoye, after two or three quarrels, forced out of
young Kranich when the latter had returned to Europe, full of triumph
and debts, to take possession of his aunt for the rest of his life. Here it
is," added the good man, opening a pocket-book. "The hand-writing is
drunken, but the sense is clear as Seltzer-water. The scholars tell me
_in vino veritas est_, but it appears to me that truth really comes out in
the repentance and headache that follow."
[Illustration: HOHENFELS' FAILURE.]

"MY DEAR AUNT" (ran the letter which Charles had seen forced from
the alligator after his unlucky game of dominoes): "You have known
me as the soul of candor. It is this happy quality which compels me to
state (for I am something of a Rousseau) that if I ever playfully accused
your pretty pet Francine of being a flirt, I knew nothing about it. The
best proof is that she absolutely refused to join her expectations with
mine, though I am something of an Adonis. If you believed that she and
the wine-peddler had made a match, I pity your credulity and ignorance
of human nature. I am certain that neither the peddler nor myself would
touch the enterprise until you had shown exactly what you would
(pecuniarily) do. For my part, I have acted throughout on the most
exact and advanced scientific principles. Intending to modify the
spirit-trade in America, and especially to introduce the exclusive
agency of the Farina essences, I found that the sinew particularly
needed for this leap was capital. Desiring to absorb your bounties
toward Francine, I at first proposed matrimony. This offer was made
without any enmity toward the girl, as my next move was without
affection, though it seems to be resulting to her benefit. I became her
accuser as coolly as I had been her lover. Passion has nothing to do
with the combinations of strategic genius: I am something of a
Washington. My theory of her clandestine marriage was one of the
most masterly fictions of the