She wrote to Francine,
bidding her come immediately from London. The girl not replying, the
hopeful nephew was put upon her track. He went away. His letters from
England reported that Francine was no longer in that country, but was
probably come back to Belgium, "I know not in what suburb of Brussels
our very independent miss may this instant be hiding," he wrote.
About the same time, in the circle of French exiles at Brussels,
a young _romantique_ named Fortnoye was reported as weeping and
lavishing statues over the grave of an unknown infant in the
churchyard at Laaken. It was a delicious mystery. Kind meddlers
approached the sexton, who said that all he knew of the babe's mother
was that she was a beautiful lady from London. Kranich carried the
story dutifully to his aunt, adding his own ingenious surmise: "Can
Francine have become sufficiently Anglicised to contract secret
marriages with roving revolutionists, and scamper about the country
with ardent young Frenchmen in the style of Gretna Green?" In fact, it
was really from London that Mrs. Ashburleigh was proceeding, for the
purpose of taking care, in the Rhenish city where he was dying, of
her handsome, dissipated, worthless husband. Taken suddenly ill at
Brussels, she left her infant to the unequaled chill of a strange,
unknown cemetery, hastening thence with tears and despair to the
bedside where duty called her.
Has my reader forgotten the dim, tear-swollen story which I heard--not
at all improved in the telling--from my generous young friend
Grandstone--how an impulsive Frenchman had laid to rest, in flowers
and evergreens, the unnamed baby of a woman he had never seen? Jealous
as I was of Fortnoye, I never could think without tenderness of this
singular action.
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