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There was a death-blow that must descend upon him, cruel, inevitable. Let it come when it would. Every day when he came home to dinner, M. Lenoble expected to behold a vacant place by the side of his hostess; every day he was pleasantly disappointed. The pale hopeless face was still to be seen, ghost-like, at that noisy board.
This request set him wondering whether she were poor, and how poor. But she had evidently no more to say to him; she had again become impenetrable. He would fain have stayed, though honour and conscience were clamorous in their demands for his departure. Happily for honour and conscience, the lady was silent as death, impervious as marble; so M. Lenoble presently bowed and departed.
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.
She secretly reserved to herself the right to tell Charlotte anything she pleased. From that dear adopted sister she would hide nothing. "If M. Lenoble should repeat his offer, and I should accept it, I will tell her all," she thought. "It will make that dear girl happy to know that there is some one who loves me, besides herself."
There must needs be something a secret, a mystery, sorrow, or wrong-doing somewhere; but of Madame Meynell herself no one could suspect any harm. Gustave Lenoble heard little of this gossip about the stranger, but she filled his thoughts nevertheless.
M. Lenoble blew the little difficulty away from his finger-tips, and then wafted a kiss from the same finger-tips to his absent beloved. "And this noble heart warned me against her own father!" M. Lenoble said to himself, as he walked towards the hotel at Blackfriars where he had taken up his abode, quite unconscious that the foot of Blackfriars Bridge was not the centre of West End London.
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.
Friend Francois pricked up his ears, and in his old eyes flickered a feeble light. Cotenoir and Beaubocage united in the person of his son Gustave! Lenoble of Beaubocage and Cotenoir Lenoble of Cotenoir and Beaubocage! So splendid a vision had never shone before his eyes in all the dreams that he had dreamed about the only son of whom he was so proud.
To this resolution Mr. Hawkehurst adhered with a gentle firmness. "Thou art chivalrous like Don Quixote," said Gustave Lenoble; "but it shall be as thou wouldest. Touch there." He offered his hand, which the other grasped with all heartiness. "I will be godfather to thy little first one, and I will settle on him ten thousand pounds before he cuts his first tooth," said Gustave decisively.
The phantom of this miserable, who could be loved by an angel without knowing it, is to lift its phantasmal hand and thrust me aside me, Gustave Lenoble, a man, and not an idiot? Ah, thus we blow him to the uttermost end of the world!" cried M. Lenoble, blowing an imaginary rival from the tips of his fingers.
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