Our Novelettes.

Lake Wakatip Mail, Issue 1586, 22 April 1887, Page 4

Our Novelettes.

LORLOTTE AND THE CAPITAINE.

Chapter ll.—(Continued).

It was not all to nature, either in the fields of Montmoronci or of young humanity, that these bewitching efforts were due. If Lorlotte had known it, there was a foolish fond little face which had once bloomed as fair as Lorlotte's —the remembrance of which, unsought by M. Hyaciuthe, unacknowledged even to himself, blended with his Mayday pleasure, and lent a wild pathos to his random talk and to the expression of his groat eyes as they dwelt on Lorlotte. Strange mortal that Frenchman who can extract pungent sweetness from his own follies and their individual punishment, and can indulge a Bohen iun generosity in the fidelity whieh in a small measure redeems his errors and shields his victims! If M. Hyacinthe had known it, Lorlotte was pufllng out and pluming herself as a little bird plumes itself for a grand flight. " I am no longer behind the English girls," she was snying to herself. " 1 have got a disinterested ndorer, and oh 1 such a splendid young lover of my own, far beyond Miss Jimma Herbert's sons-lieutenant, and Miss Clara Brown's curate. I have scorned my ancient admirer as they scorned the old general and the great merchant who lived to buy tfcem with their rank and their bags of gold. But my capitaine has only a little rank and no money, and I am a poor girl myself, and this is France—not England. Madame saw it all, and still did not interfere much; too wise a woman to waste her artillery or to bring it into disrepute by failure. Sho did not so much as rebuke her Louis. "He does not comprehend," sho decidod magnanimously, "and there is no use in trying to make him, for it is not in the boy." With large even-handed justice she dealt the blame to herself principally. " I ought to have apprehended all the chances of a fete and not have risked them. M. Hyacinthe is a gay young bachelor, a uaurien, and Lcrlotte. —ouf! all girls are babies or hypocrites. They have been exposed to each other, they shall be exposed no moro until after the marriage, and then the capitaine can see to it. For the rest, my poor dear crpitaino, who has been slighted and made a fool of, is long-sutlering and modest when he does not happen to have his rages. 1 must not let him got into one of the rages, and ho will make allowance foracouple of silly young people in the woods, where, it is true, a silly old woman took them. It is an age since I read St Pierre's Paul et J'irjinie, and bah! I believe there is something immoral in trees and water."

Having mentally originated this atrocious sentiment, madame set herself to pay much flattering attention to the capitaino, in order to dissipate the glumness and the spasmodic restlessness which were becoming ominously visible in the worthy officer ; at the same time she kept a sharp eye on her two troublesome young people, and did cot permit them to stray a couple of yards fiom her till she had them again safe in the oblivion of the crowd at the station.

But madame, sagacious and not to be surprised and put out as she was, did open her eyes when 11. Hyncintlie in the course of their little journey to Paris, with deliberate assurance and desperate earnestness asked permission to visit at the entresol above the shop in the Rue des Magasins. Ho accompanied his request by so pointed a reference to Mdlle. Lorlotte's then favouring it with her presence, and to his vehement desire for the honour and the delight of a prosecution of their acquaintance thus auspiciously begun, with the countenance of her friends, that, however hasty and ill-timed, it was from a Frenchman, little short of a proposal of roarruigo to Lorlotte. And that heroine, whether from being so much in request, whether from believing that her rash little heart had been won in a tlash to hang on madame's answer, blushed and trembled in her corner of the cariiage, and waited breath* lessly for the sovereign decree of open or closed doors.

It was quite on the cards that madame might have civilly or haughtily declined M. liyacinthe's overture. She might have said plainly s.ud, or hinted with high-flown but quite comprehensible ambiguity, that the ground had already been walked over, and that, besides, M. Uyacinthe was too fust ia his approach. lie ought to have been provided with credentials from his relaitons expressing their approval, and informing her wnat they intended to do with their son, or nephew, or even their favourite prologt, with statements of his present funds and future prospects, with sure pledges that he was ready to relinquish his bachelor habits, reform, and bo a Heady family man, befere he crossed her doorstep with an eye to her kinswoman—the ci-devant teacher Lorlotte.

Ah! but madame was wise, and she was only baftled, not beaten, as the last would have confessed her to be. She said to herself, " If 31. Uyacinthe has fallen so madly in love with Lorlotte, like Abelard and Hcioise, in one day, as to shoot himself, or propose for her hand on the spot, no prohibition of mine would restrain a clever, imprudent, extravagant j oung fellow, and the child, with her loose English notions, migbt be decoyed and dragged to ruin. I consent and I receive him, and have the two players under my fore finger, and see their cards, as I like to do when I mean to win the game. And I explain everything and keep the peace w;th the capitaine ; he is not English, but he is a modern Bayard, ' tans pev.r et satu reproche.' I tell him so, and that it is neither honest nor honourable not to give the girl a choice; that he, a bravo soldier, cannot object to an antagonist. It would be no compliment to Lorlotte if there were none. And I shall take care that there is a fair field for both. But I cannot divine it. I have always heard that M Uyacinthe was poor; I have always understood that he had brains. If Lorlotte had been her cousin Agatl.c, with thousands in place of hundreds of t francs for her dowry, to sweep away his debts and to pay a premium for a business or a journal to him, the whole afl'air would have been clear; but as it is, I declare I shall have to borrow spectacles to see to the end of the affair." It is sufficient to write that madame did as she did, and within three days the whole quarter of the Duponts—all the houses and their occupants, from the comparative aristocrats on the ground floors to the mechanics aud workmen in the garrets—were ready to explode with the strange story of the mad romantic attachment of M. Hyacinthe Masset, in contention with the persevering ardour and noble neutrality of the capitaine. M. liyacinthe's folly excited the greatest sen* sat ion. True, he was to a certain extent a stranger among them, having come up, like other students, from the provinces, an utter stranger, to his lodging in his quarter two years before; and he might, for all that the little world knew, be a prince in disguise, who could aford to make a love marriage with a Cinderella of a pretty, all but penniless teacher from Boulogne. But disinterested love matrimonial, even felt by princes in disguise, was a marvel in that Burguig, sparkling, calculating, lowminded, kindly Parisian life.

Chapter lll.—m. hyacinthe a traitor. Lorlotte wns in the seventh heaven: the adored her young handsome literary Bohemian lover —adored him with the silly, ignorant hankering after forbidden fruit —all tlo more for what t>he could fancy hnd been his Bobemaini*m; adored him most of all for the pacrifico whieh she was persuaded ho wbs willing to make for her sako. It was a girl's first love in oil is hair-brained enthusiasm and fanaticism. Lorlotte viewed M. Hyacinthe's somewhat haggard and sallow young face as the fare, not merely of an Adonis and an 4pollo, but of a hero—a saint to be, one day, in fpito of his license and hardly veiled infidelity. She prized his languors, his distrait fits, —even his slight but not uncandid revelations of perversity, cynicism, and tyranny, which madame wns careful to point out to her and compare with another lover's unreserved homage, gentleness, generous concessions, and lavish silent compliments. Lorlotte was so entranced, so besotted, so beside herself, that it was a wonder that she did not suspect she was in a raging fever, a delirious dream, and dread the awakening that she could credit that such bliss could last in a world of care. In the meantime, M. Hyacinthe did what he c >uld to detain the delusion by h : 9 unmistakable suit, his handsome face and his tongue winning in its very caprico and tragic airs. And, alis ! the poor capitaino did what he could to enable the enemy to scale the fortress, not only by being unable in his old-fashioned tactics to do more than bristle up beside his lady-love, grim like a ghastly opposing bastion in her fsco, and botnbarb her like a performer at the carnival with a shower of flowers, so costly and exotic in their specimens as to dip him deep in his next instalment of pay, and the incessant fall of which grew monotonous and weurisome to a girl who loved flowers after all twenty times less than the moustache griso loved them. Ho allowed M. Hyacinthe —moro in mischief than in maliee —to put him into one of his towering passions by vilifying the Zouaves and impugning the tactics of the great emperor. The capitaine was provoked to splutter and sac re, stamp up and down in his boots, rattle his sword, and and wax purple in the faoe. So great was the uproar that madame stood up, large, rawboned and threatening, and looked as if she would have seized the poker had her stove furnished her with such a weapon ; M. Dupont sprang nimbly behind a cupboarddoor, M. Hyacinthe desisted from drawing his fingers through his hair, and looked not gay, or melancholy, or defiant, as he was apt to do, but astounded. As for Lorlotte, she uttered a g&i-ping cry of terror lest the c.ipitaine should draw cold eteel on Hyacinthe, and then fall down, convulsed and foaming, in a fit at his feet. But the capitaine only stormed out of the company, and returned neit day, selfcondemned and shamed, with the ashes of penitence not the less thick on his grizzled head that he held it bolt upright in his military collar. Madame was not conquered. She was not come to the last of her resources. She acquainted herself with some particulars in M. Hyacinthe's student's life, and taking advantage of her afternoon's snatch of womanly retirement and needlework in her saloon tcte a-tite with Lorlotte, conveyed the gossip to the girl listening with greedy ears, and not foreseeing the consequences. M. Hyacinthe had lodged for years in a house which had a grenier occupied by a young couturicre. She was a good girl, but she was on orphan, and, although her parents had been alive, she belonged to a class which bad not etiquette (Madame made this explanation speaking de hwt en las with perfect sincerity.) M. Hyacinthe made the acquaintance of his fellow-lodger—the young couturicre-, he became on friandly terms with her ; he showed her pttits sains ; he escorted her 011 fete dnys to public places—such as Montmoronci. There had even been a report that he was going to throw up all his prospects and marry her. But 41. Hyacinthe had not been so far loct to himself or to his friends. Ho had a tend all that; he had taken another lodging j he was going to marry in his own rank ot' life ; still he had not given up the girl.

" \ou slander liim to mo, mndame, you will believe in him! What do such words signify ?" exclaimed Lorlotte, in a grand, vaguo triumph of faith.

"To see is to believe with the greatest infidel; is it not so, Lorlotte P I work no miracle, but I can convince you. Ho has not parted from the grisette to this day. That young man has a heart somewhere," declared tnndaine,—forced to do so by clear, impartial instinct, —"though not for you. No, I cannot tell what he means by paying his addrei-ses to you; I am lost there,"continued madame, frankly, staring into vucancy, and shaking her yellow rose in a state of pros ration at being puzzled. " All the same he goes to see his grisette in her lodgings near St. Denis, lie takes her out for a turn on the nearest boulevHrd, when he is gone from us or before he comes to us, when he is certain that we are out of the way. lie will be there within this hour, since N6tre Dame has struck five. If you like, I'll give up the shop to the slupman and woman, and I'll make believe to stay at home to receive and entertain the capitaine. Ah, there is a valiant and true heart for you, naughty girl; without a thought so much as a save as a sister, since he quitted his mother's side. But are you bravo and honest, Lorlotte? You doubt my information; you will come with me, and see and believe t"

" I will come to prove that the words which you have repeated are false, madame. You ought to be undeceived; you are too true a woman, you have been too good to me,"— with a quick, quivering, girlish sob in the middle of her fiery heroics,—" to act as a spy and scandal monger." Madarao did not even stay to shrug her shoulders, but went promptly to procure shawls and bonnets,—plain shrouding shawls and bonnets, such as were worn in general by poorer tradeswomen out mi errands, —with a thick ml for Lorlotte, and took the t'irl on her arm, but neither drooping nor clutching at her support, to the boulevard.

There, at the gayest liour of gay spring Paric, —when the world is out on evening airingsand diversions,—when the »ir is balmy, not with cigars alone, but full of the bitter sweetness, the lusciousness, and the langour of the scrnt of sheaves of Inte wallflower, hyacinths, narcitsuses, contesting the field of the air, with the fresher, more delicate, and honeyed fragrance of early blushing roses on budding rose-trees, and blossoming over boxes of light green feathery mignonette,—at the season when the brilliant buulevarda form the most brilliant mosaic of gorgeous shops and tender green leaves, among the well-pleased loungers and animated domino players, madame and Lorlotte passed. With a great start, as if her heart had given a mighty throb, from Lorlette,—and even a little thrill from the calm, philanthropic heart of madame, the two watchers descried the couple whom they tought a few yards before them on the quieter bide of the way, beside the railings. These two were strolling apart, and engrossed as if thoy were the only pair in the thronged world. The tall figure of the man was bending down to the woman, whose little band-box he was carrying openly, almost ostentatiously, and he was occasionally touching her shoulder with his disengaged band familiarly and eveningly. The woman was walking don

to him for protection from the carriages which drove close by, and from other assailants, and was reaching up to him to hear and answer his continued speech. There was no mistaking M. Hyacinthe's step, air, profile; and the woman with him was in a grisette's working dress, with her cap, neckerchief, and apron, clean, but not smart; she had a face which might have been I retty when it was round and dimpled, but which had no more attraction now than the pitiful interest of the contrast between its youthfulness and its thinness. It was no older a face yet than Lorlotte's; and its eyes still retained the aJch habit ef continually lifting up or letting fall their glances, though it remained no more than a mechanical trick of the eyelids, red and swollen.

After the first terrible throb of Lorlotte's heart, which mndame both saw and felt, and which frightened her a little, lest the girl become ill, have to be carried into a shop, and cause an ef eland re, Lorlotte turned of her own accord and walked home so fast that madame had difficulty in keeping up with her. When they reached the shop in the Run des Magasins, Lorlotte took no notice of M. Dupont, who was in the confidence of madame, and had prepared an extravagant pantomime of sympathy. She made no inquiry after the capitaine, but proceeded straight to her little bed-room, locked herself in, and remained deaf and dumb to all invitations to join the family at supper, and ail requests to see whether she was ailing, or what comfort of chocolate or coffe with milk she could receive under the circumstances.

It was childish behaviour, and madame left the offending child to herself, notwithstanding monsieur's horrified insinuations that Lorlotte might have a chafing dish and charcoal in her private possession, or that she might steal out in the course of the evening, before the doors were locked, and have recourse to the Seine. Think of the little man's utter discomfiture and strange misery if he should be called upon to go to the Morgue and identify the drowned draggled body of the wayward little cousin, instead of filling the office of young father in giving her away to a husband old enough to be her father —the trusty capitaine. But for that matter, all who liked to go with " the steps of the fox," and listen outeide Lorlotte's chamber-door, could assure themselves quietly of the baselessness of the charcoal and the Seine visions by the muflled sounds of the impulsive sobs and simple wails with which the Gallic Bature of the girl asserted itself. Madame considered that she had admin istered to Lorlotte bitter medicine, which could not be swallowed without a grimace, but which would begin very soon—next morning, perhaps—to work its cure. Madame was once more mistaken. In the marryof Lorlotte she had to endure not one alone, but a series of surpriaes and checks. Lorlotte came down to the second breakfast with shining eyes and flaming cheeks, and announced to madame, as soon as monsieur had strutted out on his daily round of enjoyments, that M. Hyacinthe was the victim of a wicked conspiracy—that she, Lorlotte, was sure of it. He wast he prey of an intriguante, a monster of iniquity, seeking to lure him to his destruction. Of course she, Lorlotte, would no more give him up than she would surrender without a thought of saving him, a friend who was slipping within the bars of the cage to encounter the claws and the teeth of the fiercest tigress in the Jardin des Plantes, or who was crossing a threshold to meet the scorching air and crushing beams of a house on fire.

Madame had a little qualm that Lorlotte's flights were getting beyoud parallel, except in the cells in Bicdtre; but she bethought herself of the unlucky English association and mania, and condescended to remonstrate. " M, Hyacinthe is not a little boy j he is five-and-twenty, and has seen the world." " Some men are never spoilt by worldly wisdom, are always guileless enough to be deceived, especially by a womau. Madame has heard his beautiful sentiments." Madame slightly raised her straight, thick eyebrows, and sniffed with her powerful nose. «' Yes, heard and forgotten. Ido not give a sniff of eau*de-cologne for beautiful sentiments ; they are like the essence of tte flowers, here this moment, gone the Hext—except muek, and that is not made of fbwers, but of rats' tails and of the debris of great fishes; and it is vulgar, bourgeoise, I suppose, like plain virtues and menaget. But, Lorlotte, one ought not to be unjust and cruel, even to a hated rival, a poor unhappy, young girl. Did I not tell you that M. Hyacinthe's Mimie is a good girl? that he has had the the thought of marrying her? There has never been a vthisper against her, except for letting him follow her. Mimie is younger than M. Hyacinthe, ma fui! as young as you. It is she who is misled, by the bold, clever, scoffing, sentimentalizing young man, according to all the laws of reason and nature. Besides, it iscertan, and you are a fool if you cannot see it, that he would have no difficulty, in parting from her if she had not been good as well as faithful to him; he would not be torn in two and tortured as you see he is, no, nor so grossly imprudent, if they had not loved each other truly, and if he had found any hole, however small, in her conduct, out of wh'ce he could have cast in a heap his old regard, kindness, and cougtancy." "It is not true," persisted Lorlotte, half sullenly, half passionately. " There is some great mistake. Why does he come to me if it is so ? He can make no horrible, s rdid manage de convenance with me, as you would have me make with your stupid,| raging man, —your kirsman, the capitaine. M. Hyacinthe loves me—poor, obscure, ignorant, silly girl that I am j and he is miue, a moi t my beautiful, gifted, noble young lover. Drdinary minds cannot understand him, but I can understand him. I stand by him, he has not trusted me in vuin."

"Truly, mademoiselle, you had better be sure whom you tiust," commented madame, with a sneer. " I pass over that you Bra disobedient, insolent, and ungrateful—l say nothing of it j but I remind you, though M. Hyacinthe h*s a>ked permission to visit here while Jyou are with us, he does not advance in hi* suit. Ma foi, t ere may be double treachery." The warning only drove Lorlotte wild.

" You insult me, madame j you insult both him and me. I believe that you too are in a conspiracy Against us j but I will not gire him up for anything you have told me, nor for the little that I h ive seen. He cannot care for that Mitnie—that girl of the people —as he cares for me. What could she ever be to him ? What could she do for him P I tell you that he would not care for her at all if he knew how I love him."

" Lorlotte, you are a mad, wicked girl," madame continued, here eyes looming large and grim as she pronounced the sentence, "to talk o£ loving a man who is not your husband, not even your Jianci. You are not worthy of my cousin the capitaine, and I shall have nothing more to do with you to get disgraced by you. If you do not repent and submit to your superiors like a modest girl, I send you back in eight little days, my outrageous mademoiselle, to Boulogne, to your school dormitories and your litres de version. I refuse on principle ever to see your kitten's face again.

(ft 1* MUIIMMi),