Charlotte's Inheritance. M. E. Braddon

London in a high fever. Ill, faint, and helpless, the great city seemed to her unspeakably dismal—most stony of all stony-hearted mothers to this wretched orphan. She could go no farther than the darksome city inn where the coach from Southampton brought her. She had come viâ Havre. Here she sank prostrate, and had barely sufficient strength to write an incoherent letter to her sister, Mrs. Halliday, of Newhall Farm, near Huxter's Cross, Yorkshire.

      The sister came as fast as the fastest coach on the great northern road could carry her. There was infinite joy in that honest sisterly heart over this one sinner's repentance. Fourteen years had gone by since the young city-bred beauty had fled with that falsest of men, and most hardened of profligates, Montague Kingdon; and tidings from Susan were unlooked for and thrilling as a message from the grave.

      Alas for the adverse fate of Susan Meynell! The false step of her youth had set her for ever wrong upon life's highway. When kind Mrs. Halliday came, Gustave Lenoble's wife was past her help; wandering in her mind; a girl again, but newly run away from her peaceful home; and with no thought save of remorse for her misdeeds.

      The seven years of her married life seemed to have faded out of her mind. She raved of Montague Kingdon's baseness, of her own folly, her vain regret, her yearning for pardon; but of the dying husband in the garret at Rouen she uttered no word. And so, with her weary head upon her sister's breast, she passed away, her story untold, no wedding-ring on her wasted finger to bear witness that she died an honest man's wife; no letters or papers in her poor little trunk to throw light on the fourteen years in which she had been a castaway.

      Mrs. Halliday stayed in London to see the wanderer laid in the quiet city churchyard where her family rested, and where for her was chosen an obscure corner in which she might repose forgotten and unknown.

      But not quite nameless. Mrs. Halliday could not leave the grave unmarked by any record of the sister she had loved. The stone above the grave of Gustave's wife bore her maiden name, and the comforting familiar text about the one sinner who repenteth.

CHAPTER II.

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      FORGIVEN TOO LATE.

      For a week of long days and longer nights there was no step sounded on the stair, no opening or shutting of a door in the old dilapidated house where he lay languishing on the brink of an open grave, that did not move Gustave Lenoble with a sudden emotion of hope. But the footsteps came and went, the doors were opened and shut again and again, and the traveller so waited, so hoped for did not return.

      The boy—the brave bright son, who seemed to inherit all that was noblest and best in his father's nature—pined for his mother. The man endured a martyrdom worse than the agony of Damiens, the slow tortures of La Barre. What had befallen her? That she could desert him or his child was a possibility that never shaped itself in his mind. That drop of poison was happily wanting in his cup; and the bitterness of death was sweet compared to the scorpion-sting of such a supposition.

      She did not return. Calamity in some shape had overtaken her—calamity dire as death; for, with life and reason, she could not have failed to send some token, some tidings, to those she loved. The sick man waited a week after the day on which he had begun to expect her return. At the end of that time he rose, with death in his face, and went out to look for her—to look for her in Rouen; for her whom the instinct of his heart told him was far away from that city—as far as death from life. He went to the Cour de Messageries, and loitered and waited amidst the bustle of arriving and departing diligences, with a half-imbecile hope that she would alight from one of them. The travellers came and went, pushing and hustling him in their selfish haste. When night came he went back to his garret. All was quiet. The boy slept with the children of his good neighbour, and was comforted by the warmth of that strange hearth.

      Gustave lit his candle, a last remaining morsel.

      "You will last my time, friend," he said, with a wan smile.

      He seated himself at the little table, pushed aside the medicine-bottles, searched for a stray sheet of letter-paper, and then began to write.

      He wrote to his mother, telling her that death was at hand, and that the time had come in which she must succour her son's orphan child. With this he enclosed a letter to his father—that letter of which he had spoken to his wife, and which had been written in the early days of his illness. This packet he directed to Madame Lenoble, at Beaubocage. There was no longer need for secrecy.

      "When those letters are delivered I shall be past blame, and past forgiveness," he thought.

      In the morning he was dead.

      The neighbours posted the letter. The neighbours comforted and protected the child for two days; and then there came a lady, very sad, very quiet, who wept bitterly in the stillness of that attic chamber where Gustave Lenoble lay; and who afterwards, with a gentle calmness of manner that was very sweet to see, made all necessary arrangements for a humble, but not a mean or ignominious, funeral.

      "He was my brother," she said to the good friends of the neighbouring garret. "We did our best to help him, my mother and I; but we little thought how bitterly he wanted help. The brave heart would not suffer us to know that."

      And then she thanked them with much tenderness for their charity to the dead man; and with these good people she went on foot through the narrow streets of the city to see her brother laid in his grave.

      Until this was done the mournful lady, who was not yet thirty years of age, and of a placid nun-like beauty, abandoned herself to no transport of love for her orphan nephew; but when that last office of affection had been performed, she took the little one on her knees, and folded him to her breast, and gave him her heart, as she had given it long ago to his father; for this gentle unselfish creature was one who must needs have some shrine at which to offer her daily sacrifice of self. Already she was beginning to think how the orphan was to be cared for and the widow also, for whose return she looked daily.

      For the return of Susan Lenoble Cydalise waited at Rouen several days after the funeral. She had, happily, an old school-fellow comfortably established in the city; and in the house of this old friend she found a home. No one but her mother and this friend, whom she could trust, knew of the business that had brought her from Beaubocage. In seven years the father had never uttered his only son's name; in all the seven years that name had never been spoken in his hearing.

      When three weeks had gone by since the departure of Susan for England, all hope of her return was abandoned by Mademoiselle Lenoble and the neighbours who had known the absent woman.

      "She had the stamp of death on her face when she went away," said the labourer's wife, "as surely as it was on him that she left. I told her she had no strength for the journey; but she would go: there was no moving her from that. She had rich friends là-bas, who might help her husband. It was for that she went. That thought seemed to give her a kind of fever, and the strength of fever."

      "And there has come no letter—nothing?"

      "Nothing, mademoiselle."

      On this Cydalise determined to return to Beaubocage. She could not well leave the child longer on the hands of these friendly people, even by paying for his maintenance, which she insisted on doing, though they would fain have shared their humble pot-à-feu and coarse loaf with him unrecompensed. She determined on a desperate step. She would take her brother's orphan child back with her, and leave the rest to Providence—to the chance of some sudden awakening of natural affection in a heart that had long languished in a kind of torpor that was almost death.

      The little fellow pined sadly for those dear familiar faces, those tender soothing voices, that had vanished so suddenly from his life. But the voice of his aunt was very sweet and tender, and had a tone that recalled the father who was gone. With this kind aunt he left Rouen in the lumbering old vehicle that plied daily betwixt that city and Vevinord.

      "Thou