"So," said the old man, thoughtfully, "advocate Desmarais owes his election to your efforts, to your exertions?"
"He owes it to his merit, to his value. I only suggested Monsieur Desmarais to those of our fellow citizens who had confidence in me, and all acclaimed him."
"In short, you powerfully aided in his election. I am no longer astonished that he treats you as a friend, an equal. But it is a far cry, my son, from words to acts. I doubt the sincerity of this lawyer"s affection."
"That doubt would never enter your thoughts, good father, if you knew the excellent man. If you had heard him inveigh, as I have, against the distinctions of birth and fortune--"
"Perhaps he had in mind only the privileges of the n.o.bility," observed Victoria, who until then had remained grave and silent. "The prejudices of the Third Estate are tenacious."
"I should add, dearest sister, that he idolizes his daughter so, that to see her happy, he would sacrifice all the prejudices of his cla.s.s--even if he were still under their influence, which I can not believe. I am well a.s.sured of that."
"And his daughter is an angel," added Madam Lebrenn. "I have seen and can appreciate her."
"The excellence of our son"s choice is not doubted," replied the old man, half convinced. "And, after all, it may be that Monsieur Desmarais does belong to that portion of the bourgeoisie which sees in the proletariat, disinherited for so many centuries, a brother to be guided and helped along the path of emanc.i.p.ation. If such is the case, my son, your marriage with Mademoiselle Desmarais may be consummated, and become the joy of my old age."
"Brother," asked Victoria, "has Mademoiselle Desmarais informed her family of this projected union?"
"At our last meeting, she a.s.sured me that she would soon broach the subject to her mother, and inform her that she had pledged me her faith, as I have mine to her. But I can not yet tell you whether the confidence has been made."
"Does Mademoiselle Desmarais seem to have any doubts as to the consent of her relatives?"
"Among those relatives there is an uncle, Hubert, a rich banker, who without doubt will oppose the project. This moneyed bourgeois entertains for the working cla.s.s the most supreme contempt. But the violence of his opinions has brought about a rupture between him and Monsieur Desmarais.
As to the latter and his wife, Mademoiselle Charlotte has no doubt of their consent, by reason of the affection and esteem they have always evinced for me."
"Brother," continued Victoria after a moment"s reflection, "I counsel you, make your demand for the hand of Mademoiselle Charlotte this very day. I base my advice on urgent grounds. If Monsieur Desmarais really sees in you a friend, an equal, if his devotion to the people and the revolution is sincere, the glory you have won at the taking of the Bastille can not but plead in your favor; his consent will be given immediately. On the contrary, if his protestations of love for the people have been but a mask of hypocrisy, it is better to know at once how to regard him; in that case, he will repulse you, or will evade giving you a direct answer. It is not merely a question of your love, brother, but of our cause--of a grave responsibility that weighs upon you. Your friends placed their faith in you when you asked their votes for Monsieur Desmarais; you owe it to them, now that the occasion presents itself, to make a decisive test, and a.s.sure yourself whether the convictions expressed by Monsieur Desmarais are sincere. If he refuses you the hand of his daughter, it shows that he is with us from the lips only, not from the heart. In that case, it will be proven that advocate Desmarais is a hypocrite and a traitor! Would not then your duty, your honor, brother, demand that you unmask the double-dealer?"
"Nothing more just than what Victoria has said," declared the old man.
"You should, my son, go this very day and lay your suit before Monsieur Desmarais."
John thought for an instant, and answered: "You are right, father. My line of conduct is mapped out for me. I go at once to Monsieur Desmarais"s, and formally present my request for the hand of Charlotte."
"Brother," interposed Victoria, suppressing a sigh, "have you informed Monsieur Desmarais fully on our father"s disappearance? He should know all that relates to that mournful event."
"Monsieur Desmarais knows that immediately upon the publication of a hand-bill by father, he disappeared, and that we believed him dead or shut up in some state prison. He even knows the contents of the pamphlet which father wrote, and often has he shed tears in my presence when speaking of the disgrace of which you were a victim at the hands of Louis XV."
A bitter smile contracted Victoria"s lips, and she replied, "My father hid the truth in what he wrote, in order to stigmatize the first crime, and he threw a veil over the consequences of my dishonor. Have you raised the veil which covered my life? Did you speak of the series of a.s.saults of which I was the victim?"
"Sister," answered John Lebrenn, "out of respect for our family, I did not inform Monsieur Desmarais of the consequences of that first royal dishonor. I merely told him that you had been s.n.a.t.c.hed from us, the same as my father, and that we knew not what had become of you. My confidences did not extend beyond that."
"Your reserve was wise and prudent, dear brother. Continue to guard my secret from Monsieur Desmarais and his daughter. For them, as for all who know you, I must remain as dead."
"Let it be as you desire, sister. But the dissimulation weighs on my heart like an act of cowardice."
"The dissimulation is necessary to-day, brother, but it will not last forever. When you shall have a deeper knowledge of the character of your wife; after some years of marriage and motherhood shall have ripened her judgment, then, and only then, you may make to her a complete confidence of my past. Until then, I must remain dead to her, as to all--except you three and one other of our relatives, the Prince of Gerolstein, my initiator into the Voyants. Dead I shall be to the world, but living to you and to Franz of Gerolstein."
"This Franz of Gerolstein," asked Victoria"s father, "is he not one of the princes of that sovereign house of Germany founded of old by the descendants of our ancestor Gaelo the Pirate?"
"Yes, father; the heir to a reigning prince was to-day one of the most fearless attackers of the Bastille."
At this moment a knock was heard at the door.
"Enter," cried John, and to the astonished eyes of the Lebrenn family appeared Franz of Gerolstein. In the Prince, whom Victoria had just named, John recognized one of his fellow-combatants of the day.
"Franz, here is my brother, of whom I have often spoken to you," said Victoria, taking John"s hand and pressing it into that of the Prince.
"You are relatives--now be friends. You are both worthy, one of the other. Both march in the same path."
"My dear John--for so it is that friends and relatives of the same age should greet," answered Franz with cordial familiarity, affectionately closing in his own hand that of the young artisan, "I know through your sister all the good that can be thought of you. That will tell you how glad I am to meet you."
"I also, my dear Franz, am happy to find in you a relative and a friend," John made answer, no less affectionately than the Prince.
"Chance has made you of the sovereign race, yet you fight for the freedom of the people."
"My dear John, I am, like you, a son of Joel, the brenn of the tribe of Karnak. More than once, across the ages, the republican ardor of the old Gallic blood has roused itself in my plebeian race--although, by an uncouth stroke of destiny, it has been m.u.f.fled under a sovereignship and a grand-ducal crown."
"Aye, we are indeed of the same blood--your words, your acts prove it,"
said the blind father. "Your hand--let me also press your hand, my brave young man."
Franz stepped toward Monsieur Lebrenn. "I am deeply sensible of these marks of fatherly good-will," he said. "They console me for the rigors of my own father, who has banished me from his presence and forbade me from his states."
"What can have been the cause of such severity!" rejoined the old man in surprise. "What is your crime?"
"My crime?" replied Franz, with a slight smile. "My crime consists in attaching scant weight to our sovereignty. I tried more than once to bring my father to more just, more modest appreciation of our origin.
"Did not our family," I said to him, "come into its power through the audacity of an adventurer? May the earth lie light on our ancestor Gaelo! But he was the companion and pupil of old Rolf, a frightful bandit, who, each spring, came to ravage the banks of the Loire and the Seine." My father"s answer was that all the crowned heads of the world, big or little, were sprung from no less savage a beginning. To which I retorted that there would come the day when the people, enlightened as to the origin of their pretended masters, would tire of being the exploitable property, the forced laborers, the chattels of a few royal families whose founders were fit for the galleys or the gibbet; and that I feared for kings, princes, emperors and Popes lest, by some terrible reversal of things here below, the people, driven to the limit of endurance, should treat them as their august founders deserved, and the most of them to this very day deserve to be treated."
"In good sooth," said John Lebrenn, laughing, "that language was surely severe for a Prince to hold--and to monarchs!"
"So, my dear John, my father grew furious at my language. In fine, I concluded by urging him to set a great example to the other princes of the Germanic Confederation, by laying aside his grand-duchy. "Lay aside," I said to him, "a power stained with crime in its very origin, and lead the people of your states and the other German princ.i.p.alities to unite in a republic like the cantons of the Swiss, or the provinces of the Netherlands. The Poles, the Hungarians, the Moldavians, the Wallachians, enslaved by Prussia, by Russia and by Austria, but trained to republicanism by their old elective customs, will soon be attracted by the example and the cry of liberty! Then the three last powerful despotisms of Europe--Prussia, Austria, and Russia--will find themselves hemmed in, threatened by free peoples, and we shall soon have an end of these last lairs of royalty!""
"That was preparing for the future!" the old man exclaimed. "The United States of Europe! The Universal Republic!"
"But my father preferred to hang to his throne," continued Franz. "Then convinced of the futility of my appeals, and holding the duty of a citizen in precedence over that of a son, I pa.s.sed from word to action.
With all my power and by every means at my disposal I propagated in Germany, its cradle, the society of the Illuminati; my father banished me."
"Your account of yourself, Monsieur Gerolstein, deepens still more the esteem in which I needs must hold you," nodded the old man.
"These words of regard are doubly precious, Monsieur Lebrenn. They shall add their bonds to those of the relationship already existent between us. It is in the name of those very bonds that I am about to reveal to you one of the motives of my visit--a cordial offer of my services. It is a blood-relation, it is a friend who speaks, Monsieur Lebrenn; do not then, I beg of you, yield to a susceptibility in itself honorable, but perhaps exaggerated. You were a printer. For long your labor provided for the wants of your family. But now you have lost your sight in prison; you are feeble. Madam Lebrenn is old. What are to be your resources against the material needs of existence?"
"My health, thanks to G.o.d, is not so weakened that I can no longer work," replied Madam Lebrenn brightly. "The presence of my husband will double my strength."
"And I, mother," added John, "am I not here by you? Rea.s.sure yourself, Franz, my father and mother shall want for nothing. We are, nevertheless, deeply sensible of your offer. We thank you, but we decline, firmly."
"John, allow me to interrupt you," began the Prince. "I know from your sister what an industrious and skilful workman you are. But, please you, let us look at the situation together. Have you been able to go to your shop for the last four days? Considering the great events close at hand, of which the taking of the Bastille is but the precursor and sign, can you count on the full disposition of your time? The struggle once engaged between the nation and the royal power, will it not continue impetuous, implacable? Is it at a season when the liberty of the people trembles in the balance that you ought to abandon the field of battle?
And still your family must live, and it can only live by your daily labor."
"Often have I said," exclaimed Victoria, "that the people has never had the time to complete the revolutions it began! or else, if they were accomplished promptly, decisively and overwhelmingly, the time has always been lacking to defend the conquest, to maintain it, consolidate it, and fructify it. The people"s enemies, on the other hand, gentlemen of leisure, free from care, kings, priests, n.o.bles or tax-farmers, have awaited, under cover, the certain hour to ravish from the people the benefits of its short-lived conquest."
"Alas, it is but too true," a.s.sented her father. "The time has always been lacking--the time and the money."
"Such is the fatal verity!" continued Gerolstein. "Would that verity could convince the people that if they can, which is rarely the case, make some little savings from their meager pay, it is not at the tavern they should spend them. For those savings of the worker should, when the day arrives, insure to him a portion of the necessary leisure to emanc.i.p.ate himself. And if he has been able to put aside nothing, he is in error to yield to an exaggerated scruple of delicacy and repulse the aid fraternally offered to him by his friends in order that he may be a.s.sured one of the means to clinch his victory."