Page:Braddon--The Trail of the Serpent.djvu/264

260 philosophical reflections for a more convenient season, there will be some chance of our coming to an understanding. One of these twin sons still lives."

"Now, really, that is the old ground again. We are not getting on"

"Still lives, I say. Whatever he is, Monsieur de Cevennes—whatever his chequered life may have been, the guilt and the misery of that life rest alike on your head."

The Marquis gives the head alluded to an almost imperceptible jerk, as if he threw this moral burden off, and looks relieved by the proceeding. "Don't be melodramatic," he remarks, mildly, "this is not the Porte-St.-Martin, and there are no citizens in the gallery to applaud."

"That guilt and that misery, I say, rest upon your head. When you married the woman whom you abandoned to starvation and despair, you loved her, I suppose?"

"I dare say I did; I have no doubt I told her so, poor little thing!"

"And a few months after your marriage you wearied of her, as you would have done of any other plaything."

"As I should have done of any other plaything. Poor dear child, she was dreadfully wearisome. Her relations too. Heaven and earth, what relations! They were looked upon in the light of human beings at Slopperton: but they were wise to keep out of Paris, for they'd have been most decidedly put into the Jardin des Plantes; and, really," said the Marquis, thoughtfully, "behind bars, and aggravated by fallacious offers of buns from small children, they would have been rather amusing."

"You were quite content that this unhappy girl should share your poverty, Monsieur le Marquis; but in the hour of your good fortune"

"I left her. Decidedly. Look you, Monsieur de Marolles, when I married that young person, whom you insist on dragging out of her grave—poor girl, she is dead, no doubt, by this time—in this remarkably melodramatic manner, I was a young man, without a penny in the world, and with very slight expectations of ever becoming possessed of one. I am figurative, of course. I believe men of my temperament and complexion are not very subject to that popular epidemic, called love. But as much as it was in my power to love any one, I loved this little factory girl. I used to meet her going backwards and forwards to her work, as I went backwards and forwards to mine; and we became acquainted. She was gentle, innocent, pretty. I was very young, and, I need scarcely say, extremely stupid; and I married her. We had not been married six months before that dreadful Corsican person took it into his head to abdicate, and I was summoned back to France, to make my appearance