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Madame Linders had money, but not much, and she made it go further than did ever Frenchwoman before, which is saying a great deal.
He understood now M. Linders' reluctance to send her to his sister, and sympathised with it fully. Poor little Madelon, with her pretty, impulsive ways, her naïve ignorance, Madelon, so used to be petted and indulged, she to be shut up within those dull walls, with that horrible, harsh, unforgiving woman, to be taught, and drilled, and turned into a nun he hated to think of it!
M. Linders was of both Belgian and French extraction, his father having been a native of Liége, his mother a Parisian of good family, who, in a moment of misplaced sentiment, as she was wont in after years to sigh, had consented to marry a handsome young Belgian officer, and had expiated her folly by spending the greater part of her married life at Malines, where her husband was stationed, and at Liége, where his mother and sister resided.
"Then you are probably unaware of the character he bore," Thérèse Linders said, suddenly exchanging her air of cold constraint for a voice and manner expressive of the bitterest scorn; "he was a gambler by profession, a man of the most reckless and dissipated life; he plunged by choice into the lowest society he could find; he broke his mother's heart before he was one-and-twenty; he neglected, and all but deserted his wife; he ruined the lives of all who came in his way he was a man without principle or feeling, without affection for any living being."
It was not long before she was devoted to her father, and, her nurse dying when she was a little more than three years old, M. Linders resolved at once to carry out his idea, and, instead of placing her with any one else, take possession of her himself. He removed her accordingly from the country to Paris, engaged a bonne, and henceforth Madelon accompanied him wherever he went.
There was a moment's pause, whilst M. Linders shifted and sorted his cards, and then, "A vous, Monsieur," he cried, with a sort of fierce impatience; but at the same instant his hold relaxed, the cards tumbled all in a heap on the floor, his head fell back. Madelon screamed and started forward, upsetting the table and the candle; Legros sprang up.
The morning hours slipped away; there was nothing to be done while M. Linders remained in this state, and Madelon, by Horace's advice, took a book, and seated herself on a low stool by the window to read.
M. Linders did not become a reformed character for her sake: he had never had any particular principles, and Madelon's loving innocence, which aroused all his best emotions, had no power to stir in him any noble motives or high aspirations, which, if they existed at all, were buried too deep to be awakened by the touch of her small hand.
The house to which M. Linders was directed stood a little apart from the others, near the road-side, but separated from it by a strip of garden, planted with herbs and a patch of vines; and as he opened the gate, he came at once upon a pretty little picture of a child of two years, in a quaint, short-waisted, long-skirted pinafore, toddling about, playing at hide-and-seek among the tall poles and trailing tendrils, and kept within safe limits by a pair of leading-strings passed round the arm of a woman who sat in the shade of the doorway knitting.
And so it came to pass that when she had been married about six years, and four months after her third child was born, Madame Linders died, alone at a Paris hotel, with no one near her but the doctor, her baby's nurse, and the woman of the house.
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