The old woman, running up the stairs before him, opened the door of his room, and busied herself at the fire. “Gently, my good Marthe,” said he, “that log suffices. I have been extravagant to-day, and must pinch for it.”
“M. le Marquis jests,” said the old woman, laughing.
“No, Marthe; I am serious. I have sinned, but I shall reform. ‘Entre nous,’ my dear friend, Paris is very dear when one sets one’s foot out of doors: I must soon go back to Rochebriant.”
“When M. le Marquis goes back to Rochebriant he must take with him a Madame la Marquise,--some pretty angel with a suitable dot.”
“A dot suitable to the ruins of Rochebriant would not suffice to repair them, Marthe: give me my dressing-gown, and good-night.”
“‘Bon repos, M. le Marquis! beaux reves, et bel avenir.’”
“‘Bel avenir!’” murmured the young man, bitterly, leaning his cheek on his hand; “what fortune fairer than the present can be mine? yet inaction in youth is more keenly felt than in age. How lightly I should endure poverty if it brought poverty’s ennobling companion, Labour,--denied to me! Well, well; I must go back to the old rock: on this ocean there is no sail, not even an oar, for me.”
Alain de Rochebriant had not been reared to the expectation of poverty. The only son of a father whose estates were large beyond those of most nobles in modern France, his destined heritage seemed not unsuitable to his illustrious birth. Educated at a provincial academy, he had been removed at the age of sixteen to Rochebriant, and lived there simply and lonelily enough, but still in a sort of feudal state, with an aunt, an elder and unmarried sister to his father.
His father he never saw but twice after leaving college. That brilliant seigneur visited France but rarely, for very brief intervals, residing wholly abroad. To him went all the revenues of Rochebriant save what sufficed for the manage of his son and his sister. It was the cherished belief of these two loyal natures that the Marquis secretly devoted his fortune to the cause of the Bourbons; how, they knew not, though they often amused themselves by conjecturing: and, the young man, as he grew up, nursed the hope that he should soon hear that the descendant of Henri Quatre had crossed the frontier on a white charger and hoisted the old gonfalon with its ‘fleur-de-lis.’ Then, indeed, his own career would be opened, and the sword of the Kerouecs drawn from its sheath. Day after day he expected to hear of revolts, of which his noble father was doubtless the soul. But the Marquis, though a sincere Legitimist, was by no means an enthusiastic fanatic. He was simply a very proud, a very polished, a very luxurious, and, though not without the kindliness and generosity which were common attributes of the old French noblesse, a very selfish grand seigneur.