Herbert, Henry William, 1807-1858 [1835], The brothers: a tale of the Fronde volume 1 (Harper & Brothers, New York) [word count] [eaf136v1].
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CHAPTER I. INTRODUCTION.
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“Myself—
Have stooped my neck under your injuries,
And sighed my English breath in foreign clouds,
Eating the bitter bread of banishment:
While you have fed upon my seignories,
Disparked my parks, and felled my forest woods;
From my own windows torn my household coat,
Rased out my impress, leaving me no sign,—
Save men's opinions and my living blood,—
To show the world I am a gentleman.”
King Richard II.
It has been a day of storm and darkness—the
morning dawned upon the mustering of the elements—
vast towering clouds rose mass upon
mass, stratum above stratum, till the whole horizon
was over-canopied. Then there was a stern
and breathless pause, as if the tempest-demon
were collecting his energies in silent resolution;
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anon its own internal weight appeared to rend the
vaporous shroud asunder, and the big rain poured
down in torrents. At moments, indeed, the sunbeams
have struggled through the driving rack,
and darted down their pensiles of soft light, showing
even more blithely golden than their wont,
from the very contrast of the surrounding gloom.
Still—noon arrived, and there was no cessation of
the strife. At that hour, the blue lightning was
splitting the tortured clouds in twain, and the
thunder roaring and crashing close above our
heads. The melancholy wailing of the winds
among the sculptured pinnacles and ivyed turrets
of our Elizabethan mansion—the sobbing and
creaking of the immemorial oak-trees, their huge
branches wrestling with the gale—the dashing and
pattering of the heavy rain—and, deeper and more
melancholy than all, the gradually increasing moan
of the distant river, have conspired all day long to
cast a gloom alike upon the face of nature and the
heart of man. Yet now evening has brought back
peace, and calm delicious sunshine.
I sit beside my open casement, and the fresh
odour of the drenched herbage rises refreshingly
to my senses—the west is clear and beautifully
blue—the broad sun sinking slowly below the
horizon, cloudless, indeed, but veiled in that soft
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haze, which enables me to gaze upon his glories
with undazzled delight. Towards the east the
heavy clouds are rolling away, their edges
touched so sweetly by the last rays of the declining
day-god that it is hardly possible to conceive
them—as they seemed a few short hours ago—
the harbingers of desolation and dismay. The
very rain-drops sparkle like diamonds on every
blade of grass, on every leaf of those old oaks,
which smile as tranquilly in the glow of this soft
evening as though they had never borne and shuddered
beneath the weight of the tempest—there is a
mute voice of rejoicing breathed up from all around
me—thousands of summer flies are on the wing—
the rooks are wheeling on their balanced pinions
high up in the breezeless air—the deer have come
forth from the tangled coverts wherein they
cowered during the tempest, and are grazing in
picturesque groups in all directions—the clustered
woodbines, twining over every coigne and buttress,
smell wooingly—it is an evening of fragrant loveliness.
Such has been the picture of my own career.
My youth and manhood have been spent in domestic
feuds and foreign warfare, in banishment,
hardship, bloodshed, sorrow—my declining years
are flowing away in peace, tranquillity, and
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happiness. I know not how it is, nor wherefore, but
my thoughts have been cast backward towards the
eventful past more strongly during this morning
than at any previous period in the course of many
years.
I have lived in a singular and most important
age; an age which will, I believe, hereafter
date as an era—which will be a precedent for
future centuries—the seed of a harvest that shall
be reaped hereafter. In almost every region
of the earth there have been strange commotions—
a new spirit seems to have gone forth
among the people—a thinking, questioning, resisting
spirit. I have seen a king—a mild and, in the
main, a well-intentioned king—dragged down from
the throne of his ancestors—haled, like the vilest
of criminals, to the ignominious scaffold, for the
mere upholding of that dignity, and asserting that
prerogative, which, a hundred years ago, a man
would have been considered frantic to have called
in question. I have seen the people triumph by
the mere force of popular opinion, and by the
steadiness of their united efforts, over the bravest,
the wealthiest, the most enlightened aristocracy of
the universe. I have seen liberty degenerate into
license; and despotism—as it has at some time
done in every age and every country—spring up,
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the very consequence of that same license. I
have seen a puissant people break all the bonds of
civil and political society, with the avowed intention
of shaking off an oppressive government. I
have seen them plunge into the maddest anarchy,
till, sickened and wearied out with the abuse of
that very freedom for which they had so greatly
done and suffered, they have themselves called
forth an iron despot from their own peculiar ranks—
have erected over themselves a power ten thousand
times more absolute—ten thousand times
more galling, than that which they had previously
cast down. I have seen a man—a man of the
people—of the despised and trampled people—set
himself upon a par with the mightiest potentates
of his age. I have seen a usurper raise my native
country to a situation, to a pre-eminence
among the nations of the world, such as she never
occupied before, no, not in the days of the greatest
of her legitimate sovereigns. I have seen his unassisted
wisdom defeat the deep diplomacy of the
most crafty statesmen; I have seen the navies of
Spain and Holland humbled before his all-victorious
banner. I have seen monarchs courting
the alliance of one who was, a few brief years before,
a by-word and a laughing-stock to our bold
cavaliers. All this have I seen, and more—all
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this have I seen in my own native England; and
though I strove against the elevation of that wondrous
being with the whole energies of my mind
and body; though I was an exile from the land of
my fathers during the plenitude of his power;
though I have subsequently seen the restoration of
the ancient dynasty, and with it have recovered
my patrimonial possessions—I faithfully confess
my own conviction that Cromwell was—ay! and
will be considered—the mightiest of usurpers, and
the most wise of conquerors. I believe that his
enlightened policy will be resumed hereafter; I
believe that the harvest he has sowed will be
reaped and garnered by our sons, and our sons'
sons; I believe that the spirit which he has set
afloat will go on increasing from hour to hour—
will go on working, whether for good or for evil I
know not, for centuries yet to come; I believe that
it will give brith to revolutions such as our fathers
have never dreamed of, such as ourselves have
never witnessed; I believe, even now, that convulsions
are at hand, greater in their result than those
in which it has been my lot to play no humble part,
and which shall themselves but pave the way for
greater that shall follow; I believe that the ages
of legitimacy have already passed from earth;
and when I look upon the madness, the baseness,
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the loathsome sensuality, the frantic ingratitude of
present rulers, I could almost rejoice in the belief—
did I not foresee the wreck of many a noble institution—
did I not foresee the fall of much that is
venerable, much that is in itself good—did I not foresee
that the march will be still onward—onward—
till reform shall have degenerated into revolution—
till the pruning away of excrescences shall have
led to the uprooting of the tree—till the mania for
freedom shall have become a mania for change—
and that of change for abolition. I look upon the
present peace, the present gleam of national repose
and welfare, but as a brief precarious truce, originating
from the mere necessity of taking breath.
We have already witnessed how the triumph of
the popular faction, and the establishment of a self-styled
republic in Britain, gave birth to the assertion
of equal rights, to popular excitement, and to
civil war in the neighbouring realm of France;
and though, for a time, the flame of popular spirit
hath in this country, as it were, burnt itself out,
and so perished for the lack of sustenance—while
on the other side of the Channel it hath been
extinguished by the still powerful hand of the
nobility—I yet believe that the suppression hath
been but for the moment; and that it will again
burst forth with a broad and all-pervading radiance.
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It is my firm conviction that the order of things
which has been, never will be again!—that the
events which in my youth were hourly taking
place as familiar things, not only never will take
place again, but, in the lapse of a single century,
will be either utterly forgotten, or, if recorded, be
looked upon as wild and extravagant, almost as
impossible fictions. It is this conviction which has
now determined me to revise some papers, on
which I stumbled accidentally, as it were, this
morning; relating to events which—while they
have been altogether the most important of my
own life—possess so much of what even now, in
the comparatively settled state of affairs throughout
the world, appears wild and marvellous, that
I cannot but feel certain, that to remote posterity
they will bear the semblance of things wholly out
of the course of society, and may, therefore, if
preserved, convey to them much information, and
some entertainment.
The events in my own life, to which I have
already alluded, are so intimately connected with
the history of France during the period at which
they occurred, and the account of them seems to
me to furnish so admirable a commentary on the
state of things as they then were, that I have determined,
before giving them to the public—which
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it is my intention to do precisely as the journal in
which they are imbodied was written at the time—
to preface them by a slight sketch of the situation
of that country in which alone they could have
happened. It will be of course borne in mind that
the triumph of free principles in England—although
it had ended in the elevation of a despot to the
throne—had, nevertheless, been in itself complete;
and although the powers that were in France had
looked on for the most part in apathy, or, perhaps,
in sympathy with the misfortunes of Charles, there
can be no manner of doubt but the people received
encouragement to make an effort for the establishment
of such a constitution as might preserve to
them the liberties to which they now for the first
time began to consider themselves entitled. The
weakness of the hands in which government was
vested; the debility of the aristocracy, which,
during the long reign of Louis XIII., had been
humbled to the very dust by the iron policy of
Richelieu; their want of union among themselves,
which prevented the possibility of their either
rallying in a mass to the defence of the throne, or
of their successfully resisting the attacks designed
against their own body; the youth and consequent
long minority of the king; the infatuation of the
queen-regent, Anne of Austria, for the feeble yet
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crafty successor of the stern Richelieu; the poverty
of the country; the exhaustion of the treasury,
through the constantly recurring expenses
of the Spanish War; the heavy taxes levied, now
on the office-holders, now on the people at large;
and, above all, the bitter hatred which was almost
universally entertained against Mazarin, operating
more than all the rest to divide and distract parties—
all conspired to render the moment in the highest
degree favourable to an attempt which would probably
have taken place long before, had it not been
that the preceding minister had been no less ready
to defend than willing to execute to the utmost his
despotic powers—that his talents were inferior
only to his ambition, and his ambition—when his
passions or his fears were once fairly excited—to
his cruelty.
The immediate cause of the popular outbreak,
which in our days received its denomination of the
Fronde—from the mimic warfare of children about
the streets, who would occasionally resist the
police sent to disperse them with slings and
stones—was the attempt to impose a tax upon all
the sovereign courts of judicature throughout the
realm, the Parliament alone excepted. These
bodies, composed of the most distinguished jurists of
the day, at once passed the celebrated Edict of
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Union; under which, all those who hated the cardinal,
whether from public disaffection or from
private pique, from self-interest or patriotic feelings,
banded themselves at once. After many
fruitless negotiations between the court and the
Parliament, which only served to render the intriguing
parties more desperately hostile to each
other, both parties took up arms nearly simultaneously:
a bourgeois guard was organized; the
streets of Paris were barricaded; the Archbishop
coadjutor of Paris De Retz raised a large force of
cavalry at his own private expense; and the armies
thus levied were intrusted at once to the command
of some score of exceedingly clever, but no less
profligate, nobles, who had, moreover, no feelings
in common with the mass of their party, save
hatred to Mazarin—a passion which was always
ready to give place to aught that might further
their own self-advancement. The Dukes of Elbeuf
and Beaufort, Monsieur de Bouillon, and the celebrated
Rochefoucault were on the instant openly
and actively engaged on the popular side; while
Turenne was more than suspected of an intention to
bring up the army—with which he had first foiled,
and then defeated, the brave De Merci on the Rhine—
to the aid of the Frondeurs. On the other side, the
Prince de Condé and the Duke of Orleans were
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appointed leaders; multitudes of the young and
profligate noblesse, who, during the administration
of Mazarin's predecessor, had been excluded from
all power of intriguing for or against the government,
rushed forward with all that mad levity
which constituted the national character of France.
To this it was that I attribute the success of the
court faction: the people, doubtful of their own
power—sufficient, by-the-way, to overturn a
stronger government than that of Mazarin—
united the nobles to their cause, who fought
for them, as they intrigued for themselves, vigorously
enough, till some new caprice, some fresh
amour, or some hope of advancement, caused them
to desert their party, and go over at once by scores
at a time to the opposite faction. This levity, this
utter want of principle, this vacillation of purpose
among the leaders—not one of whom, by-the-way,
is free from the charge of repeated acts of treachery
to his party—tended not only to weaken the popular
party, but finally to render the bourgeoisy,
with whom the spirit of rebellion in the first place
originated, so weary of a war by which they
speedily found that they were gaining nothing,
while they were suffering extremities, that they
finally suffered it to cease, as it were, by common
consent of all engaged. For aught I know, it is the
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only rebellion which ever extinguished itself, which
died of exhaustion, unsuppressed by its political
antagonists, and unpunished, when all was over,
by its political conquerors.
This tergiversation it is, also, that will hereafter
tend to render the annals of the Fronde a mass of
inextricable confusion; and which can hardly fail
to place obstacles of the greatest weight in the
way of future historians. There is no one prominent
character among the principal actors—Molè,
the president of the Parliament, alone excepted—
who did not repeatedly turn sides, as interest or
humour prompted him; and the slightest pretext
was held cause enough for defection from the
banners of either faction! The promise of favours
from a vain and capricious beauty; the
hope of a higher station—of the government of a
petty town, or of the command of a regiment;
the most trivial disgust at any others of his
party, were enough to overturn all scruples of
honour, consistency, or principle, even in the
bosoms of such men as Hocquincourt, Turenne,
and Condé. Historians, for the most part, err in
attributing great popular movements, great political
results, to individual leaders, overlooking entirely
the will and action of the great masses, on
which, in truth, the conduct and bias of the leaders
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must generally depend. In this strange rebellion
the people were in earnest—the leaders in sport:
the people were striving for liberty, from an ardent
thirst for freedom in the abstract, from a desire to
ameliorate their present condition, and to establish
government on sound and popular principles; the
leaders were striving, as I have said before, in very
levity of heart, from the mere desire of action and
momentary importance, or at best from the lust of
personal aggrandizement. To this, then, I ascribe
the fact that the people were overthrown; and to
this I am willing to assign, by anticipation, the failure
of all those who shall hereafter strive to reconcile
the strange confusion of this wild rebellion to
any of the ordinary standards of principles and
actions, causes and effects.
Since my restoration to my own country--from
which I was a weary exile for many a long year,
fighting, like my betters, for my own hand, and
perhaps also from a mistaken predilection for the
royalist party, which had been not a little strengthened
by the unfortunate termination of our English
civil wars, and by the mad abuses there consequent
upon the triumph of the populace--since
my restoration to my own country, I have heard
actual spectators of the commotions of the Fronde
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term it[1] “a rebellion unennobled by the spirit of
liberty;” and actually turn it into a jest, as a trivial
senseless uproar, excited by men of ambition and
women of light character, begun in levity, and
prosecuted to satiety. I, on the contrary, feel
certain that I can see in its blind and undigested
movements the working of a spirit which will
one day shake the world; which will place it beyond
the power of ministers or princes to sway
public opinion like a wind-waved reed; which is
even now working onward, in my own country,
towards a mighty revolution, provoked by the insanity
of the monarchs who, taking no lesson from
the fate of their fathers, are rushing headlong to
their own destruction; and which will one day,
unless I err more wildly than I can easily believe,
pervade the whole of Europe. But enough has
been said already to give a slight clew to the
reader of the following pages, by which he may
find his way through the mazes of this almost
forgotten period.
The ensuing chapters were written immediately
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after the occurrence of the events to which they
relate—many of them almost contemporaneously.
The only judgment I can form of the influence
they may exercise on the minds of others, is from
that which they possess on my own. From having
perused them this morning—distant as is their
date, and widely as I feel my own character to
have been changed in the interim—I have returned,
as it were, to the very days of my prime—
the actors are before my eyes—I can hear their
voices—I can read their countenances. It is for
this reason that I am unwilling to change a word,
even for the improvement of the style: much of
the language is even now becoming antiquated;
and, ere mysons shall be of age to read them, will
probably be obsolete. There is, nevertheless, a
life in its very roughness, which I am loath to
alter, fearing lest, by over-polishing the blade, I may
wear away a something of its sterling metal: as
it is, I commit it to the hands of posterity; only reminding
those who may perchance take it up to
kill a heavy hour, that the writer was one in his
day more ready with the sword than the pen, and
that to him the camp and the court-martial stood
in the lieu of schools or académe.
Moncton Hall, Feb. 23, A. D. 1683.
eaf136v1.n1[1] The date affixed to this preliminary chapter, and the internal
evidence, contained in the whole work, that the writer was deeply
engaged in the conflicts which he describes, go far to prove that
the great historian Hume, in falling into the same mode of expression,
must have plagiarised some older writer.
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CHAPTER II.
“His breast with wounds unnumbered riven,
His back to earth, his face to heaven,
Fall'n Hassan lies—his unclosed eye
Yet lowering on his enemy,
As if the hour that sealed his fate
Surviving left his quenchless hate;
And o'er him bends that foe, with brow
As dark as his that bled below.”
The Giaour.
The morning lacked a full hour of the time
when the cold sun of January should pour its faint
rays, as if in mockery, over the chilled and cheerless
world, which at that season of the year they
can neither fertilize nor beautify. A thick raw
mist was drawn like a curtain over the universal
face of nature; the skies looked blank and dismal;
there was not a cloud of darker hue, not a speck
of light, however pale, to relieve the solid wall of
dull gray fog, which limited the view to a dozen
feet around me. The air was piercingly cold,
though perfectly breezeless; and it froze so keenly
that the sharp ringing sound of my horse's feet on
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the hard soil might have been heard at a mile's distance;
while the moisture of the atmosphere hung
in wreaths of hoary rime, not only on my cloak
and charger's mane, but on my eyebrows, and on
the floating locks which, at the period I speak of,
were cultivated with peculiar care as the distinctive
marks of gentle blood. Indeed, so bitter
was the morning, and so dreary the prospect that
lay before me, that I almost blamed myself for
having quitted the cabin in which I had passed the
preceding night, although the motives for my
expedition were in the highest degree pressing and
important. What those motives were,—employed
as I now am in the relation of an event which,
bearing in no single point upon any portion of my
past time, produced effects the most striking on
my after-life,—I am not at present inclined to
relate; nor is it probable that my readers would
find much either of profit or of pleasure in the
perusal of occurrences so intimately connected
with facts, which have already become history, as
to baffle all attempts at unravelling them from the
skein in which their humble thread is blended.
Suffice it to say, I am an Englishman; by birth
noble, and by education, association, or prejudice
if you will, a cavalier. Yes!—with my eyes fully
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open to the danger and iniquity of those arbitrary
doctrines, whether of church or state, which had
filled the green homes of my native land with
misery and with blood,—perfectly conscious of the
inability of the king to be a governor of freeborn
men,—I had yet drawn my sword in every skirmish
from the first unfolding of the banners of rebellion
to the final triumph of the commonwealth on the
scaffold of Whitehall. An ardent adorer of freedom
in the abstract, I had lent all the energies of
my mind, all the powers of my arm, to establish
a tyranny which, at a later period of my life, I
should probably with equal zeal have striven to
overthrow. Dazzled by the influences of those
splendid associations, by that almost religious
veneration for ancient institutions, merely because
they are ancient, and by that false glare of nobility,
of accomplishment, and of chivalrous honour, which
served to conceal the injustice of the royal cause
behind a halo no less delusive than it was brilliant,
I had surrendered my mind to the romantic rather
than to the rational. The cry of patriotism was
no less alive in the mouths of one than of the other
party; and if liberty were the magic sound which
swelled the chorus of the victors, there were still
many among the vanquished to whom the shout
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of loyalty appeared to “become the mouth as
well.” Thus was it then with me; I had fared
hardly, fought hardly, and gained small reward
save hard blows. I had not, it is true, served
through the desperate fights of Naseby and Long
Marston without acquiring some reputation, which,
if it were not so bright as that of Capel, Rupert,
or Goring, was at the least sufficient to obtain for
me the appellation of an arch-malignant, and a fair
proportion of the enmity of that singular being
who, assuredly, at some future day, when the
clouds of party prejudice, of envy, and of detraction
shall have been dispersed, will be esteemed
the greatest man that ever raised himself to a
throne. Still, as the party to which I had attached
myself had sunk, as it would seem, for many a
year, it would, perhaps, have been better for
me to possess no character whatever for bravery
or talent, than to be notorious as one of
the most constant, if not of the most distinguished,
adherents of the fallen dynasty. When
all was over, and it was evident to men that the
star of Cromwell was in the ascendant, and that of
the Stuarts obscured, perhaps, for ever,—when my
master had expiated his crooked counsels with his
blood, and his son had preserved himself from a
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similar fate only by a rapid flight,—I found myself
so situated, that I had but the choice of dying to
no purpose for a lost cause, or of leaving the land
of my ancestors till times should prove more favourable.
To be brief, I made good my escape
to France; and ere long, in default of better occupation,
I found myself again in arms, under the
direction and patronage of no less a man than the
celebrated Mazarin, in whose service I was acting
when I encountered the adventures which it is
now my purpose to recite.
It was in vain that I endeavoured to banish my
recollection of the pinching cold, by indulging in
bright reveries of a glorious and happy future; it
was in vain that I strove to animate my flagging
spirits by anticipating the stirring scenes in which
I expected ere long to be engaged, or by picturing
to myself the manner in which it would become
me to act in this or that emergency; it was
in vain that I whistled or hummed some bacchanal
or martial tune;—the dulness of the time oppressed
me; my mind had assimilated itself, as it
were, to the colouring of surrounding objects, and
I felt as miserable as though I were about to ascend
that scaffold, which had terminated the carrer
of so many of my brave companions. Yet it could
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not be the weather only that had cast so deep a
gloom over a spirit naturally buoyant and excitable;—
many a day had I mounted guard in back
and breast-piece, when the frost was so keen that
it would have been scarcely less painful to grasp
the barrel of my musketoon with ungloved hand
than to touch a bar fresh glowing from the furnace;—
many a day had I ridden from dawn to
dusk in soaking rain, and after grooming my jaded
horse, though chill and famished, jested and laughed
as merrily as the most jovial ruffler of a court.
But now it seemed as if there were a vast black
shadow covering, as with a mighty wing, the
whole horizon of my mind. I felt as though I
were abandoned by the world, surrendered to sure
destruction, devoted, doomed,—yet, at the same
time, I had no care, no anxiety, no excitement. I,
who in times of peril have felt the fiery blood
dancing through my veins with the eagerness, the
rapture of the strife,—I, the enthusiastic, reckless
soldier, should have entered the fray, had a cause for
fray occurred, in dogged, sullen, calm desperation.
Thus had I ridden onward for some miles,
when the gradual brightening of the atmosphere,
not in any one quarter of the heavens, but all over
the firmament, gave token, not that the fog was
about to melt away, but that the hours of night
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were ended. My road lay over a vast unbroken
plain, without an ascent to scale, or a valley to
descend, for miles on miles; the highway stretched,
as it were, into interminable distance, bounded on
either side by rows of that to me most dismal and
monotonous of trees—the poplar. The misty state
of the morning cut off all view beyond these limits;
but it was evident that, had the eye been at liberty
to roam over the landscape, there would have been
little either of variety or beauty in the view. I
had already passed through several extensive tracts
of woodland, which bore, however, no resemblance
to the lovely woods of my own England, with their
bosky dells and open glades, their gnarled oaks and
silvery birches, gleaming out from the dark hollies
and waving fern; in these forests of France, all is
monotonous, tame, and regular. A long straight
vista, sweeping right onward through ranks of
trees, undistinguished by their individual magnitude,
and unbroken by dewy lawn or brooklet,—
an occasional carrèfour, or point of union to several
avenues, each as perfect in resemblance to the
other as Will Shakspeare's kings of Banquo, with
a broken cross or defaced guide-post in the centre,
presenting a picture of desolation and dreary sameness,
which I am at a loss for words to describe,
composed the eternal scene. I had ridden thus,
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as I have said, for miles; not a human being had
crossed my eyes, not a human dwelling had I
passed,—even the rude huts of the charcoal
burners, which are in general to be met with at
brief intervals in the taillis, which constitute the
greater proportion of the French woodlands, were
wanting. Nay, more, not a deer or rabbit had
hurried athwart my path, not a chirrup had I
heard from bird or insect. It seemed as if I were
passing through a country buried in profound midnight
slumber; the constant clack of my charger's
hoofs on the frozen road, waking the echoes as we
passed along, had grown so wearisome to my ear,
that I should have welcomed a thunder-clap for
its variety.
Suddenly my horse pricked up his ears, and
though I could hear no sound, whinnied repeatedly,
and at length, quickening his pace, gave
vent to his impatience in long shrill neighings.
Once or twice, it is true, I fancied that an answering
neigh was borne to my ears from the remote
distance; but if it were so, the sounds were so faint
that they might have passed for an echo. Nevertheless,
though little confident in the truth of what
I had heard or imagined, I suffered Bayard to continue
the more rapid trot into which he had
struck at the time of his first uneasiness. After
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proceeding thus about a mile, the full ringing report
of a shot came down the road, and ere I
could strike my spurs into the horse's side, another
and another, followed, or rather accompanied, by
the most fearful screams I ever remember to have
heard. They were not thee ries of terror, nor
of pain, but of the most wild and horror-stricken
phrensy. Peal upon peal, volume upon volume,
they rang through my brain, till my blood positively
curdled in my veins, and I felt the cold
creeping over my head with a sensation as though
every hair were standing erect, “like quills upon
the fretful porcupine.” The terror which came
upon me—for terror it was—was not of the body,
but of the soul. Not a second, nor the hundredth
part of a second, did I pause;—my rapier loosened
in its scabbard, its hilt brought forward in readiness
for my grasp, a long pistol in my right hand,
and my reins gathered firmly in my left, I dashed
along the causeway at a pace which must in a few
minutes have brought me up to any thing not
winged; for out of hundreds that I have backed,
never did I bestride a beast to match in speed, or
blood, or bottom, with that brave horse.
Notwithstanding the rate, however, at which I
dashed along the forest road, such was the unusual
distance at which the sounds had reached my
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ear,—owing, doubtless, to the peculiar state of the
atmosphere, no less than to the almost unnatural
silence of the country,—that more minutes had
elapsed, than I had counted upon seconds, before I
reached the scene of the affray.
The spectacle that met my eyes—the mist
having yielded in a considerable degree to the increasing
power of the sunlight—was, perhaps,
even more singular than terrible, although its
horrors were sufficient to have struck a chill to
the heart of one less used than I had been to scenes
of rapine and of bloodshed.
A travelling-carriage, one of the huge and cumbrous
vehicles of the age, lay in the centre of the
carrèfour, evidently overset by the struggles of
the affrighted brutes, one of which was stretched
out motionless,—unless the fitful quivering of his
limbs, fast draining of their life-blood, might be
termed motion,—while the others kicked, flung,
and screamed in all the wild confusion of vice and
terror. A little way in the rear of the carriage
lay the driver, slain by the passage of a bullet,
which had shattered his head almost to atoms with
its ghastly wound. His death must have been instantaneous;
but had it not been so, the ponderous
wheels, both of which had passed over his body from
hip to shoulder severing it almost in sunder, would
-- 035 --
[figure description] Page 035.[end figure description]
have been sufficient to divorce the spirit from a
giant's trunk. The door of the carriage, forced
from within, stood open, and a dark-coloured fluid
trickling through the aperture, proved that even
more of horror had been wrought than met the
eye. It must not be supposed that all which I
have here endeavoured to portray, met my eyes
in the fearful excitement of that first moment.
My quick glance fell upon two men engaged in
mortal conflict. Many a time, before and since,
have I witnessed the strife of men in every different
aspect; on the tented field, “i' the imminent
deadly breach,” in single duel, or in confused
mêleé; but never—never did I see such deadly
hate glare from the eyes of human beings,—such
desperate contempt of life—such fierce determination
to kill,—as manifested themselves in every
look, in every motion, of those two combatants. I
had leisure enough to mark them well; for my
horse, having almost trampled on the body of the
slaughtered servant, swerved so wildly from the
carcass,—though he had borne me without a start
or stumble over scores, ay, hundreds, in many a
pitched field,—and strove so fiercely against the
spur and rein, as I endeavoured again to bring
him up, that wellnigh a minute had elapsed ere I
could reach the spot. They were both in the
-- 036 --
[figure description] Page 036.[end figure description]
prime of life,—strong, finely formed, and active;
and, even before I could distinguish their features,
I had been powerfully impressed by the striking
similarity of their forms and general appearance.
One seemed perhaps some six years older than
the other; but neither did his activity seem so far
impaired, or his strength increased, by the difference,
as to render him an unequal match for his
antagonist. At a glance I perceived that they
were gentlemen, and that too of no ordinary rank or
station; not by their dresses, indeed, for it seemed
that—whether for purposes of disguise, or for some
other motive—their habits were below, rather than
above, their situation in life; but by the contour
of their heads, the flowing and soft hair that floated
down their necks, the smallness of their hands, and
above all the general grace and dignity of person,
which are as certain tokens of nobility in man as
are the clean limbs, flashing eye, expanded nostril,
and full vein signs of blood in the—I had wellnigh
said—more noble animal which man so frequently
debases to be the minister of his crimes,
the instrument of his passions.
There they stood, hand to hand, and foot to foot,
glaring in each other's faces with an expression of
fiendish malignity,—stamping, lunging, springing
to and fro, their long bright rapiers flashing at
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every thrust—each, as it seemed, wholly indifferent
whether he lived or died himself, so he should slay
before he fell. Darting from my horse, I rushed
towards them blade in hand with the intent of
mastering their weapons; but such was the rapidity
and fury of their fencing, that, as I perceived
at once, there was more probability of interference
on my part accelerating than preventing
a fatal result. With two swordsmen nearly
equal, and such it was manifest were these, the
risk is so great of disconcerting the guard of one,
without materially deranging the thrust of the
other, that, after a moment's reflection, I judged it
wiser to attempt no interruption of their deadly
pastime, until weariness or want of breath should
render my object more easily attainable. Nor did
I much doubt but that this would briefly be the
case; for more perfect masters of the fence never
crossed blades than those whom I then, for the
first time, beheld. I stood beside them, with my
rapier ready at a glance's warning to interpose,
adjuring them from time to time to cease, if it
were only to explain the cause of their encounter;
but they heeded me no more than did the leafless
trunks which stood around them in the glittering
garb of winter. Indeed, I doubt whether either of
the two was conscious of my presence. Once I
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[figure description] Page 038.[end figure description]
looked around me, in search of some one from whom
to learn the meaning of this fearful sight; but, save
the murdered groom and a confused heap within
the vehicle, which scarcely showed the outlines of
a human form, not a creature was in sight. Burning,
as in truth I was, to explore the secrets of that
charnel-carriage, I could not tear myself away
from the wild interest of the strife before me;
the rather that, from a vague and undefinable
likeness in the features of that pair, so desperately
pitted together, I could not but fancy some dread
domestic tragedy to be in process. The younger,
indeed, of the combatants, was blue-eyed and fair
complexioned; while his floating love-locks might
have been easily mistaken for the golden ringlets
of a girl. The elder was swarthy-skinned, black-eyed,
and raven-haired; yet there was a resemblance
in the massive breadth of the foreheads, in
the curl of the lips, in the flash of the eyes, which
at one moment amounted to conviction of their
kindred blood, while at the next instant it seemed
but a vague and foolish fancy. The swords of
both were already dimmed with blood, but not
enough had flowed to impede their motions, or to
check their animosity. Their wounds had been
felt, but, as the spur by the mettled horse, to urge
them to renewed exertion. Their breathings came
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thick—they panted, almost sobbed—their lips
frothed with the violence of their struggles—their
thrusts were looser and more wild, their parries
less deliberate. The moment had arrived when I
might hope for success in parting them; my foot
was already between them—my blade had all but
crossed their rapiers,—when the younger, stumbling
in a furious lunge, received the weapon of
the other in the muscles of his shoulder; the point
came out behind his back; but ere his adversary
could disengage it to repeat the blow, he had
grasped it by the net-work of the guard, and running
up it, like a wounded boar, drove his own
sword hilt-deep into the bosom of his foe. Quick
as lightning I sprang back. I perceived it was
too late. I might have given an undue advantage
to the one; I could not rescue either. The dark-browed
combatant fell back without a word or
groan; but the blood flashing from his deep
wound, like water from a pump, as his convulsed
bosom rose and fell, and his eye, still fixed
upon the visage of his slayer in unquenched, unblenching
hatred, showed that the spirit was yet
alive within him. The other, who had staggered
back for an instant, and dropped his weapon in the
struggle, now tore the rapier from his own pierced
breast, and leaping forward, with a yell more like
-- 040 --
[figure description] Page 040.[end figure description]
the cry of a maimed tiger than the voice of a
human being, planted his foot upon the chest of his
foe, and gazed into his eyes as though he would
have perused his very soul.
“What, no remorse!” he cried; “no terror—no
despair! With your own weapon, cursed, murtherous
dog! With your own weapon!”—
The spasmodic action of his throat cut short his
words, but the point glanced downwards towards
the heart of the fallen man. An inch was not between
the weapon and its living sheath, when by a
desperate parry, I struck it up—the maniac rage of
the victor was turned at once on me, but little did I
reck his anger. I was too calm, and he too furious,
even had he been my equal in strength or
vigour. But the blood, which gushed from three
wide gashes, was beginning at length to tell; his
thrusts, though well directed, were feeble; and at
the third pass, binding his blade with mine, I sent
it, by a single motion of my wrist, twinkling like a
meteor through the haze. The shock, which disarmed
him, completed his exhaustion. He made
one effort more to dash his heel into the features
of his foeman, who lay, as he had fallen, with the
frown on his brow, the distorted smile on his lip,
and the deadly glare of his glazed eye fixed for
ever; but, slipping in the effort, he fell beside the
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dead, the blood from their wounds actually mingling
as they lay.
“Dead!” he muttered, “dead—Isabel, where art
thou?—Isabel!—beloved!”
His head sank down upon the gored breast of
him he had destroyed. I thought the life had left
him, but I was in error. With a wild cry he
sprang into the air.
“Brother,” he shrieked, “brother, we shall meet
in hell!”
He fell upon his victim, a dead man ere he struck
the ground. I have seen sights of horror a thousand
and a thousand times,—on the field, on the
scaffold, in fire, and on the sea,—but never did I
know the meaning of the word FEAR till then. I
shook like a weak infant, my sword dropped from
my hand, a humming was in my ears, my eyes
swam, my senses wandered! I stood gazing in
motionless awe upon the kindred corpses. Fearful
self-accusation rose up against me. I had witnessed—
I had permitted—I had, in not prohibiting,
abetted that most hideous and unnatural slaughter.
My brain reeled. I was on the point of falling.
A sudden stir behind me—a quick rustle as of
garments—a step—and the same wild shriek,
which had caught my attention while at a distance,
roused me from my stupor. I turned, and
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there,—her delicate feet slipping in the gore, that
had already frozen as it flowed from the veins of
that guilty, miserable pair—her long fair tresses
stained with blood, and her white garments dabbled
with the same fatal stains,—there stood the loveliest
female form—the loveliest even in that moment
of heart-rending agony and terror—my eyes
had ever dwelt upon.
“Dead!” she cried; “all dead! Merciful! merciful
Heaven! Spare, spare my senses!”
She started in my face with a vacant gaze for a
moment, shook her head mournfully, and with a
wild sound between laughter and a groan, would
have fallen to the earth, had I not caught her in my
arms. The fearful scenes which she had undergone
had been too much for her delicate intellects;
madness was hovering at the very portals of
her mind, when, by a blessed providence, that
timely swoon preserved her. One glance into
the empty carriage,—it contained the corpse of
a young girl! By her garb I judged her to be
the attendant of the lovely being pillowed insensibly
upon my heart,—killed, as it seemed, by
a random bullet; for who could have wantonly
shed the blood of one so insignificant, so harmless,
and so helpless? One glance towards the slaughtered
brothers, sleeping side by side as peaceably
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as though no angry passions, no unearthly hate
had ever cast its shadow over them!—and, with
my precious treasure in my arms, I was again
upon the back of my brave Bayard, riding for life,
for life, along the road which late had seemed so
dull and dreary, now converted into the channel
which I felt must guide me to the harbour of my
future happiness, or to the eternal shipwreck of
my hopes.
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CHAPTER III.
[figure description] Page 044.[end figure description]
“ `She is won! we are gone, over bank, bush, and scaur;
They'll have fleet steeds that follow,' quoth young Lochinvar.
There was mounting 'mong Græmes of the Netherby clan;
Fosters, Fenwicks, and Musgraves, they rode and they ran:
There was racing and chasing on Cannobie Lea,
But the lost bride of Netherby ne'er did they see.
So daring in love, and so dauntless in war,
Have ye e'er heard of gallant like young Lochinvar?”
Marmion.
So wildly had my imagination been excited by
the strange scenes I had beheld, so completely had
I acted under the impulses of sudden feeling, as
opposed to deliberate reflection, that many minutes
passed ere I recovered the full mastery of my
thoughts from the dreamy whirl into which they had
been plunged. A mile, or perhaps two, had already
vanished beneath the fiery speed to which almost
unconsciously I continued to goad my gallant
horse, yet no decided sense of my position had as
yet crossed my mind; I knew not why, or whither,
I was flying at so desperate a pace; I rode on,
like one drunk with wine, satisfied with the
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[figure description] Page 045.[end figure description]
present and careless of the future. The only feeling
which I remember to have entertained, was one of
tenderness for the pale creature in my arms; an
eagerness to protect her from the slightest harm,
to shield her tender frame from the concussions
which the high elastic bounds of the hot war-horse
could not fail to inflict on a being so exquisitely
delicate, and, according to every probability, so
tenderly nurtured. It was, perhaps, well for me,
at the time, that my mind was partially obscured;
it spared me, at least, worlds of anxiety and doubt;
and, by precipitating me headlong, as it were, into
action, caused me to act on the spur of the moment
with a decision, a readiness of heart and
hand, which I have ever found in my own case,
however it may be with others, more promptly
serviceable on sudden, and what might be deemed
startling, emergencies, than after hours of mature
deliberation. When called upon by the imminence
of present peril, I have ever found my thoughts to
suggest themselves with the speed of lightning;
or, rather, my actions have proceeded with a rapidity
that seemed independent of thought,—instinctive,
if you will. The danger has been
averted, and I have sat down, a thousand and a
thousand times, coolly to reflect whether my
utmost ingenuity could have suggested, had the
-- 046 --
[figure description] Page 046.[end figure description]
crisis been foreseen, any mode preferable to that
adopted on the instant; and invariably have I
found that the first impulse was correct. On the
other hand, when, aware of an approaching crisis,
I have matured plan after plan, I have determined
on one course of action, only to determine in the
next moment its utter inefficiency; and, when the
time of trial has arrived, it has found me, if not
absolutely hesitating or unprovided, less prompt at
least, and far less confident of victory. It is a
strange constitution of mind—yet in every minute
circumstance of my life have I been able to trace
its prevalence. When a boy, following the winged
game in my ancestral woods, the bird which sprang
from the brake, unmarshalled save by the whirring
of its own rapid motion, invariably fell before the
momentary precision of my instinctive aim; while
that which fluttered slowly up, from beneath the
nostrils of the sagacious dog that had betrayed its
lair, escaped unharmed from a weapon levelled in
the irresolution of anxiety. So, in after days,
when, in the stormy debates of the Lower House, I
lent my voice to defeat that which I have since
learned to regard as the better cause, I invariably
found, when I had passed days and nights in
study,—when I had arranged my thoughts, marshalled
my very words, and sharpened, as it were,
-- 047 --
[figure description] Page 047.[end figure description]
the sword of my spirit for the keen encounter,—
that the ideas so prepared deserted me, and the
periods, already rounded for the occasion, fell
unimpressively from a faltering tongue. On the
other hand, I have repeatedly arisen from my
seat unprepared, roused by sudden indignation to
confute some calumny, to level some pile of
sophistry to the earth; and never yet have words
been wanting to express the rapid flow of ideas,
which thronged, as it were, with the stormy speed
of a torrent from my excited brain.
I have dwelt, perhaps, too long on these peculiarities
of my own mental constitution; but it
seems to me that those who have thus far followed
the course of my narration, will not be wholly unwilling
to learn something of that character, which,
of course, materially influenced the events that
occurred in the progress of this wild adventure.
It is probable—probable, did I say?—it is certain,
that had I been of the cooler and more reflective
disposition, which is far more common to
men than that which I have endeavoured to portray
as my own, I should immediately have perceived
the difficulty, not to say the impossibility,
of bestowing to any advantage the unfortunate
girl, with whom I had so rashly, as some might
deem it, encumbered myself. Myself a soldier of
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[figure description] Page 048.[end figure description]
fortune, in a foreign land, unknown, nameless, and
fortuneless, travelling on a mission of military service
through a district utterly strange to me, and
in the performance of duties entirely incompatible
with delay, and which must remove me yet farther
from the spot whereon the present occurrences
were proceeding,—what should I, what could I,
what ought I to do with a tender and high-born
female? for such—from those distinctive marks of
natural aristocracy which I was fond to fancy I
could trace in the clear high brow, the silken
tresses, the full blue veins, the grace and symmetry
of her whole form—I at once conjectured her to
be. To protect her from immediate peril would
be, in itself, an arduous task; to bear her with me,
an impossibility; to procure for her a protector in
a district which I knew not, and in which I was
myself unknown, would have defied the ingenuity
of the most wily schemer; and to linger with her
myself, a crime, a breach of duty and of honour,
from which I should have shrunk with a dread
even greater than that of death.
It was, therefore, as I have already hinted, fortunate
both for me and for my hapless protégée,
that I was so completely bewildered by what I
had witnessed, and so completely absorbed in the
business of the moment—in guiding my noble
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[figure description] Page 049.[end figure description]
Bayard, and in supporting my precious burden
clear of the peaked bow of my steel-bound demipique—
that I had no time left for reflection. I
trust, indeed, and confidently believe, that under
no possible combination of circumstances could I
have soiled that character of a cavalier and man
of honour, which it has been the object of a life
to preserve untarnished, by the deliberate desertion,
in a situation so horrible, of an unprotected
female.
A mile, and perhaps two, as I have before mentioned,
had already been passed, without my
experiencing any direct sensation, except that of
immediate anxiety for my lovely charge. The
character of the country was unchanged; the
same wide tracts of stunted woodland overspreading
a barren and level soil, with the road stretching
interminably onwards in dull and solitary
sameness. Not a house—not a sign of man or
beast was to be discovered.
Suddenly I was recalled to myself. At the
descent of a gentle slope a sluggish brook crept
with an almost imperceptible current over a muddy
bottom across the unfrequented road, and, running
parallel to the course of the streamlet, a pathway
from the forest intersected the highway. I had
already checked my horse, and was scrutinizing,
-- 050 --
[figure description] Page 050.[end figure description]
with a practised eye, the nature of the narrow ford
which lay before me,—when; with a loud shout,
several men—some on foot, some mounted, but all
well-armed, and dressed in liveries similar to those
of the slaughtered servant I had observed beside
the carriage—rushed impetuously from the left-hand
pathway. Before I had become well aware
of their intent, the grasp of the foremost was on
my bridle-rein.
“'Tis he! Thank God! Forward, my comrades!”—
“Down with the murderer!”--
“No quarter to the ruffian!”—burst simultaneously
from the throats of my fierce assailants.
Fire-arms were levelled, swords were brandished,
and, for an instant, it seemed as if my advance
were cut off. It was but for an instant; ere a
second ruffian could come to the aid of his fellow,
my trusty pistol was discharged within three
inches of his ear. I felt by the slackening of the
rein, which a moment before had been as tight as
a bowstring, that the bullet had done its bidding.
Without casting a glance on the senseless clay,
which had fallen with a sullen splash into the
water, I hurled the now useless weapon full in the
face of another of the footmen, and, striking my
brave charger with the spur, lifted him hard and
-- 051 --
[figure description] Page 051.[end figure description]
steadily with the heavy curb. He reared almost
erect, plunged forward with a short curvet, dashing
his fore-feet into the muddy margin of the
stream, and, springing from thence with a mighty
effort, cleared the dangerous channel, and darted
away with a speed hardly inferior to that of the
hunted deer. Loud and sharp rang the volleyed
reports of a dozen pieces on our track; the bullets
whistled round us; a rustle as of heavy wings
above me, and my sight was darkened; while, at
the same instant, a swerve from his direct course,
and his quickened gallop, told me that my noble
animal was wounded; the tall plume, with which
the fashion of the day had decked my head, was
severed, and had fallen over my eyes. Hastily I
tore the shattered remnant from my hat; and,
eager to escape beyond the range of musketry,
rose in my stirrups and spurred fiercely onward.
In another moment, the clatter of hoofs behind me
told that I was pursued: for this I little cared; for
well I knew that not a private gentleman, from
Calais to the bright shores of the Mediterranean,
could match, with a chance of success, the pride
of his stables against the horse I backed. With a
grim smile, I turned my head to mark the progress
of the chase. A sharp, quick stroke across my
forehead,—the singing of the leaden missiles, and
-- 052 --
[figure description] Page 052.[end figure description]
a second volley! This time I had not myself escaped
unscathed. Large gouts of blood trickled
down to my beard from a long gash athwart my
brows—you may see the furrow of the scar to
this day—but the hurt was superficial; the third
part of an inch closer, and my career had been
cut short for ever. The object of my glance was
however gained; in the point of time, it was no
more, before the ball had grazed me, I had taken
in, as it were intuitively, all that was passing in
the rear. Three of the horsemen had already
crossed the stream, two mounted on the large and
cumbrous horses of Flanders,—which, since the
complete panoply of the men-at-arms had fallen
into disuse, were now considered fitter for draught
than for the saddle—from these, as they thundered
and already panted along the causeway, it was
evident there was but little to be feared; but the
third, a cavalier of some pretension in his dress,
backed an Andalusian jennet of no mean points or
common speed, and he, to my astonishment, was
hard upon my heels. Struggling through the miry
ford were several other riders, mounted, for the
most part, on the active, wiry horses of Brittany,
which, from experience, I well knew it might be
difficult to throw far behind in a chase, as this
seemed like to prove, of long continuance. I also
-- 053 --
[figure description] Page 053.[end figure description]
perceived, grouped on the other bank, the fellows
from whose musketry I had already suffered, and
from whom I doubted not but I should meet yet
further interruption. Another report! but this
time the direction must have been bad, or the distance—
though I should not have imagined it so—
too great, for not only none of their bullets took
effect, but I did not hear the well-known hurtling
of their passage through the air.
Nothing now remained but to shake off, as soon
as possible, the pursuit of the horsemen, without
running the risk of bringing my own flight to a
speedy conclusion, by blowing my overloaded
charger. Again I turned in my saddle, and gazed
steadily to the rear. The cavalier, who pressed
most closely on my traces, was scarcely three
lances' length from my croup; the others straggled
on, at various distances, spurring, shouting,
and swearing at their jaded brutes, and occasionally,
as they pulled up in despair, discharging
their pistols, more to the peril of their own comrades
than of him for whom their contents were
intended. The leading horseman held his naked
rapier in his hand as he bent over his courser's
neck, in the full confidence, as it seemed, of overtaking
his victims in a few bounds more or less of
his mettled beast. It was, perhaps, fortunate for
-- 054 --
[figure description] Page 054.[end figure description]
us, that he either carried no pistols in his holsters,
or had already discharged them; for, at the
close distance which separated us, had he halted
for a second, he could hardly have failed of disabling
me, or bringing down my horse. Husbanding
his powers, then, with the utmost care
that was consistent with haste holding him at the
same time well in hand—for I was fully conscious
that the slightest stumble must put us at once in
the power of our inveterate enemies—I kept my
brave bay at three-quarters speed. Hill and hollow
vanished before us; stunted woodland and
marshy glade glanced by us, as though they were
in motion; the wind had risen, and, as it blew
keen and cold over the bleak country in advance,
freshened the courage of the gallant creature,
shook abroad his long thin mane, already clogged
with sweat, and scattered the foam-flakes from his
nostrils like the commencement of a snow-storm,
while its chilly breath curdled the blood that had
flowed over my features in black and stiffened
lines. Our race had at this time lasted above an
hour; and, to my infinite annoyance, I began to
feel that my horse's gait, if not actually less fleet,
was far less springy than its wont. It might be
that the double burden which he was bearing had
begun to tell; the rather, as, during my journey
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through that wild and steril region, his provender
had not only been deficient in quantity but inferior
in quality; or it might be the blood, which
had flowed abundantly from a deep though
not dangerous wound in his quarters, had impaired
his strength. Though not as yet actually
failing, I began to be aware that a few miles farther
would exhaust his powers of flight. Our pursuers,
though scattered, still held their own. I began to
look anxiously about for some place of refuge, or
at least of temporary concealment; but, as fortune
would have it, even the scanty and imperfect
shelter that might have been afforded by the coppices
through which our route had lain so long,
was now beyond our reach. The forests were
already miles in our rear; the causeway, bordered
on either hand, as I have before described it, by
the eternal poplar, stretched, as straight as the
bird flies, over an arable country, now a vast expanse
of bare and frost-bound soil, limited, indeed,
on the distant horizon by a fringe of wood, but
without glen or dingle, cottage or castle, for miles
and miles, that could yield a chance of shelter.
Before us lay a long bleak ascent, the brow of
which, standing in dim relief against the uncertain
sky, bounded the prospect. At every stroke I felt
my courser's vigour leaving him; at every stroke,
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I too well knew, our foes were nearing us. The
clang of their hard gallop, those hateful echoes,
which for the last hour had been lost in the distance,
again reached my ears. I dared not—by
the immortal light of heaven I dared not—look
behind me. On—on—the brow of the hill was
wellnigh gained,—the sound of a convent-bell
came faintly up the wind,—hope, angelic hope,
swept in a flood of tenderness over my soul. I
felt a tear-drop—it might have been the chilly blast
that drew it from its locked recesses—upon my
cheek. My charge, my adored, though yet unconscious
charge, might still be rescued. I
breathed a prayer,—I strained my eyeballs almost
from their sockets, as my head rose above the
summit. The sounds came clearer, swelling on
the breeze, and with them, in the lull of the gale,
I could distinguish the harmony of choral voices,
and the deep diapason of the organ. Another
stride, and the holy habitation lay before me. At
the distance of a short half-league, its gray walls
and slated belfry glinted back the rays of the faint
January sunshine, which slept in duller tints
upon the wide meadows and clustering sycamores
that spread their peaceful shades around the house
of God.
The first glance was rapture—rapture such as
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perhaps I never felt before or since—the second
was despair. It was, as I have said, but a short
half-league; the road sloped smoothly down a
gentle hill, fair, broad, and easy as that which
churchmen tell us leads to the abyss of hell; and
scarcely could the horror of the wretched sinner,
trembling on the pinnacle from which he first discovers
the home to which his flowery path conducts
him, exceed the blighting chill which numbed
my very life-blood, when I beheld, at the foot of
that gentle hill—placed there to bar me from my
paradise—a broad and bridgeless river. Dark,
dull, and turbid, it flowed along through deep and
rugged banks; the best carbine mortal workman
ever wrought would have sped no certain death
across those sullen waters. A bridge, it seemed,
had lately spanned it; for to either bank the loosened
joists of the abutments yet partially adhered,
though, as the waters sapped their foundations, I
could see the white spray leap into air, and hear
the heavy roar, as one by one they toppled into
the current that had swept their frailer comrades
before them to the ocean. In despair, I checked
my horse; I stood still, rooted, as it were, to the
ground in horror; east and west I gazed over the
barren country for aid, but aid was none. I set
my teeth, loosened my rapier in its scabbard, and
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cocked my remaining pistol. Already I had half-wheeled
my charger round, determined to remain,
dead or alive, the master of the ground on which
I stood; but, at the very moment when I was on
the point of rushing to the fray, my eye fell on the
sweet pale features of her, who lay in my arms
as calmly and as still as though the grave had
already claimed her for its own. Strangely had
her state of insensibility been protracted, although,
in the wild excitement of my spirits, its length had
passed unnoticed. During the whole term of that
long and rapid flight, she had rested, senseless and
motionless, on my arm. Not a quiver of a limb,
not a flutter of her breath, had announced a return
of the suspended animation. Now, whether it
was that the sudden cessation of our fleet motion
had broken the trance, as the quick stopping of a
carriage will oftentimes arouse a sleeper, or whether
it was the result of a more evident interposition
of Providence, I know not; but those deeply-curtained
lids arose, and, ere they closed again,
displayed a pair of eyes which, though their bright
intelligence was partially obscured, spoke volumes,
as I fancied, of languid tenderness. A shudder
ran through her limbs, her lips parted, and unconsciously
she murmured, in tones of the most
silvery music,—
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“Oh save me—for the love of God—rescue the
wretched Isabel!”
That which has occupied minutes in the relation,
passed in the space of a single second. “If I
should fall,”—the thought flashed upon me like a
meteor—“what will be the fate of her? and if I
conquer, what will it profit us?” The tension of
my nerves relaxed; the feelings of the gladiator
passed; my triumphant pursuer had already raised
the shout of triumph, when I skirred away, as it
were, from his very clutches, and, scarcely certain
of my own ulterior purpose, dashed at the top of
my horse's speed, somewhat recruited even by
that momentary pause, down the brief descent.
A dozen bounds, as it appeared to my excited
fancy, brought us within a stone's throw of the
brink; and, if the river had seemed from a distance
dark and dangerous, a nearer approach
revealed a thousand terrors, which might well
have appalled a stouter heart than mine, had I not
been buoyed up by the unnatural phrensy—for
such I may almost call it—of the moment. Again
I faltered!—not for myself, but for the angel in my
arms. Hardly knowing whether she were capable
of comprehending my words, I whispered, in the
softest tones my agitation would permit—“Dare
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you,” I said, “dare you, sweet lady, at imminent
peril of your life, brave yon swollen stream? 'Tis
but a single chance of safety, a thousand of destruction!
Yet must we brave it, or they have
you. Command me; I am yours—yours to the
death!”
“I dare!” she spoke calmly, and without the
slightest tremour of voice or form; “I dare!—
better a thousand times to die! But you—”
I tarried not to mark her concluding words. I
saw at a glance that the banks of the wintry torrent
were lined by a broad margin of ice, although
the force of the stream had prevented its formation
elsewhere. This we must clear, or perish. I
loosed the buckle of my broad buff belt, passed it
around her slender waist, and secured it firmly to
my own. “Cling to my collar with your hands,”
I cried, in accents far more cheerful than the bodings
of my heart; “but, as you value life, leave
my arms free. God aid us, or we perish!”
Rowel-deep I plunged my spurs into the sides
of the brave beast that never failed his rider, and
nobly did he answer them; brave as a lion, with
extended nostril and unblenching eye, he charged
the river. The bank was sheer and broken, an
abrupt descent of full ten feet,—and well for us it
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was so. Without a pause, he leaped! Deep—
deep we plunged into the wheeling waters, that
closed above our heads; but as suddenly did we
rise to the surface, clear of the treacherous ice,
dripping and shivering, but as yet unharmed.
Before taking this fearful step, I had marked,
about a quarter of a mile below, a spot on the opposing
shore, at which the soil was gravelly and
shelving while the rippling of the waters at its
base denoted a hard and shallow bottom. Had I
been alone, my safety was now certain. Confident
of my own powers, and of the qualities of my
horse—whose action in the water was nearly as
familiar to me, if not so often proved, as were his
paces on the good greensward—I should have
cared but little for even a longer swim. It was
not, however, to be denied, that the season was
fearfully against us. Large blocks of floating ice,
which had probably destroyed the bridge, came
crashing down the tide, and it required all the skill
that I could command to steer my course among
them. And then the cold—the cutting, agonizing
cold—I felt my own case-hardened muscles shiver,
and my teeth jar in my head, with the excessive
chill; yet, Heaven is my witness, I thought not of
myself,—unless it were with scorn, that I should
flinch so much as even to feel the elements, which
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that heroic girl so nobly battled with, so manfully
overcame. Never, in all my long and turbulent
career, never have I witnessed human intrepidity
that could compare with the serene holy fortitude
with which she made her agony subservient to her
will. Her clear bright eye never wavered; her
cheek paled, indeed, but trembled not; she would
not even permit—so perfect was the mastery of
mind over matter—she would not even permit her
limbs to shiver, lest they should interfere with
my control over the swimming charger. After
running a dozen times, as I thought, upon certain
destruction, and a dozen times almost miraculously
escaping—for, encumbered by his unwonted burden,
and overdone by his previous exertion, Bayard
swam not with his accustomed vigour, but floundered
heavily, so that it needed all the exertions
my benumbed limbs could muster, to hinder him
from turning tail to the current, and floating head
foremost to perdition—we reached the landing-place.
The struggle was severe, but it was successful.
We landed—we were saved! My first
thought was of gratitude to my God, and my eyes
glanced upward to his holy heavens,—my second
was of my love. I looked on her—but she had
fainted. The peril she had endured and conquered!
The revulsion of ecstasy had prevailed. A short
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gallop placed us at the convent-gates; my course
of action had been decided ere I reached the portal,
and was followed up on the instant. Deception it
was; but if deception may ever be forgiven,
surely, surely the preservation of an angel, such
as she I had rescued, might palliate, might justify
the offence. I bore a parchment,—a military commission
from the dreaded cardinal who swayed
the destinies of France. It had been darkly
framed, that, in case of its falling into other hands
than those for which it was intended, it might neither
criminate the bearer nor profit the gainers.
Its object being to confer on me the chief command
of a large body of troops, at quarters in a section
of the country almost surrounded by open or secret
enemies, it ran simply thus:—
“On your allegiance, we charge ye, in all things,
to obey and pleasure the bearer.
Signed, “Mazarin.”
CHAPTER III.
What would be the final consequences of my
misapplication of this powerful missive I knew
not, and I recked yet less. But I did know that I
had passed the most disaffected districts, and that
here it would meet implicit obedience. Nor was
I mistaken. Had I been the sovereign himself, I
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could not have been greeted with more prompt
and affectionate loyalty. But for this I cared not.
I had learned from the porter, that for many
leagues there was not another bridge across the
turbulent Marne. I was assured by the chirurgeon
that Isabel, though feeble and exhausted, was
in perfect safety; and had a thousand hardships
borne me down—a thousand perils threatened—I
should have been—as I then was—supremely
happy.
-- 065 --
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CHAPTER IV.
“Why did she love him? Curious fool! be still—
Is human love the growth of human will?
To her he might be gentleness—the stern
Have deeper thoughts than your dull eyes discern;
And when they love, your smilers guess not how
Beats the strong heart, though less the lips avow.”
Lara.
The flight was over—the struggle was at an
end—the haven was gained; but with present
safety there came an almost intolerable dread of
future evil. A thousand doubts and fears, unthought
of amid the stormy occurrences of the last
few hours, crowded, like busy fiends, upon my
brain. I said that I was happy; and so in truth
I was,—exquisitely, supremely happy! Never,
in the whole course of my life, have I experienced
sensations so thrilling, and so nearly approaching
to the delirium of joy, as were those with which I
learned that there was hardly a possibility of recapture
to be apprehended; and that, after a brief
repose, my lovely charge would be so completely
-- 066 --
[figure description] Page 066.[end figure description]
restored as to render a renewal of exertions, if
such should be required, not only free from risk,
but easy of accomplishment. While the brother
who officiated as chirurgeon in the convent which
had afforded us shelter was yet speaking to me,
a full sense of my condition flashed, for the first
time, upon my mind. All had before been dreamy,
indistinct, and obscure; all was now definite and
terrible in its distinctness. That moment of lightning-thought
was to my spirit what the sulphureous
glare of the tempest is to the midnight
ocean,—revealing, to the unconscious mariner,
terrors of which he had not even dreamed, till
they were dragged from darkness into horrible
reality by that brief illumination. I saw at once
the pinnacle on which I was tottering, and the
abyss that yawned below; but the light which
showed the perils that environed me, showed no
path by which to escape them. So suddenly did
this consciousness of my embarrassment gleam
upon my senses, and so overpowering were the
feelings to which that consciousness gave birth,
that I broke off abruptly in my reply to the worthy
Benedictine, with symptoms of confusion so evident,
that they must have excited suspicion, had
they not, luckily for me, been attributed to the
effects of over-exertion alike of mind and body. I
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was aware that I turned deadly pale for an instant,
and then again I felt that every drop of blood in
my veins was rushing in torrents to my brow; my
eye was vacant, and my tongue faltered; my
mind was utterly unstrung. To the entreaties of
the good friar, that I would suffer myself to be
conducted to a cell wherein I might take a few
hours of refreshment after the fatigues and perils
I had undergone, I returned at first a brief refusal.
“Nay,” said the kind-hearted old man, “but you
are to blame, my son, for suffering the things of
this world to hold so tyrannous a dominion over
your spirit. To an active mind like yours, I well
know that inactivity is the worst of evils! Yet,
bethink you, further speed, how much soever you
may deem it necessary, is impossible. Your good
horse can do no further service till rest shall have
repaired his faculties; you, too, my son, are not
yourself. Your spirit, like a bow too tightly
strung, has lost its elasticity. Listen, then, to the
voice of reason: an hour or two of quiet will have
restored you to yourself; your charger is in the
hands of our lay-brothers, and shall be cared for.
Let me, I pray you, lead you to a chamber.”
Urged so warmly, and at the same time so reasonably,
I could not refuse; and, after a moment's
consideration, I was averse no longer. I was in
-- 068 --
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want of absolute quiet, not, indeed, to reinvigorate
my mind,—for had its energies been called for,
they would have answered, as it were, to a trumpet's
note,—but to collect my thoughts—to deliberate
on what I had done already—and, yet
more difficult, on what I was about to do hereafter.
In a few moments I was ushered into a
little turret-chamber, narrow indeed, and somewhat
scanty in its furniture, but neat and cheerful
in its aspect. Used apparently for the accommodation
of visiters, its window, unobscured by the
accustomed convent-grates, looked over the rich
meadows stretching away, with many a clump of
shadowy trees and many an orchard intervening,
to the wide river, which had lately seemed so
terrible an obstacle; though now, in truth, it was
the only barrier that saved us from our foes. A
bright log, glowing and sputtering on the hearth,
diffused a warmth rendered doubly grateful by
the rigour of the season and by the state of
my benumbed and dripping limbs; the pallet-bed
was decked with linen of unblemished whiteness,
and the board was spread with dainties, and with
a flask of burgundy, whose bouquet alone was sufficient
to prove that the brothers of St. Benedictaux-Layes
were not likely to impair the reputation
of monastic institutions, the world through,
-- 069 --
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for hospitality and sumptuous cheer. Promising
to summon me whenever the lady should be restored
sufficiently to endure the excitement of my
presence, the monk, declining my invitation to
pledge me in the vintage of his convent, departed,
and left me to my meditations. And, in good sooth,
they were sufficiently gloomy; nor, when I had
disposed my doublet and upper garments before
the cheerful hearth, and tasted a single goblet of
the old Auxerre, could I find any pleasure, or even
consolation, in the aspect of affairs.
I had fallen, as I was fully conscious, over head
and ears in love with an errant damsel, whom I
had found, like a Bevis or an Ascapart, in a
forest,—and of whose name, history, and lineage
I was profoundly ignorant. This, in itself sufficiently
embarrassing, would not have been perhaps
wholly untinged with the ridiculous, had
there not been sundry most grave realities mixed
up with the romance, which rendered it no laughing
matter. First and foremost, I was myself
no loving character—little used to the society of
ladies,—for the fierce civil wars which had convulsed
my own country from my boyhood upward,
and, still more than actual warfare, the
party-hatred, the heart-burnings, and political suspicions
of the times, had greatly circumscribed all
-- 070 --
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social intercourse,—I had ever scoffed at the idea
of pure, poetical, all-engrossing passion. And if
the caprice of the moment, or the fashion of the
day, had at times induced me to play the part of
inamorato, I had never found the cruelty of any
fair one to be severely oppressive, or the continuance
of any passion to endure much longer than
to the next change of the modes.
Such, however, I too surely felt, was not the
case now. I was fairly caught—passionately in
love with an unknown girl, to whom, indeed, I
had rendered such services as might be deemed a
furtherance of my suit; but who, for aught I knew
to the contrary, might have been the mistress or
the wife of either cavalier whom I had seen perish
fighting, as I judged, for the possession of—perhaps
a second Helen. It was in vain that I repelled
such thoughts. For the moment, indeed,
they were overmastered and fled; but they fled
only to return, bringing with them too deeper and
far more weighty considerations; though to my
excited feelings they then seemed as things of
little moment, compared to the one engrossing subject
of my thoughts. I was yet many leagues distant
from the detachment I had been despatched
to command. Even were it at hand, I had a
hundred urgent duties to perform—wild feats of
-- 071 --
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irregular and partisan warfare, the least of which
was the cutting my way with three or four regiments
of cavalry through a wide and hostile district,
forcing the lines of the Frondeurs, and
bringing in my command to join the Duke of
Orleans and the Prince of Condé, who were
then beleaguering the generals of the parliament
within the walls of the capital. I had already,
in one important point, violated the spirit, if not
the letter, of my instructions, in displaying the
mandate of the cardinal before arriving at my
destination. Nor was this all; I had, it was evident,
caused much disturbance in the country by
my late adventure; for, from my turret-window,
as I paced and repaced the floor, in the agitation
of my thoughts, I could perceive the country people
gathering around the banks which had been
the theatre of my fearful exploit, wondering, as it
would seem, and speculating on the motives which
could have prompted any man, not frantic, to so
desperate a measure. This excitement, even if it
should not lead to my capture or forcible detention
at present, must, of necessity, prove highly
unfavourable to my intention of conducting a
heavy division of horse with any secrecy by the
same route; and would, in all probability, if not
defeat, at least delay the execution of this project,
and give rise to a progress won by hard fighting,
-- 072 --
[figure description] Page 072.[end figure description]
and at the sword's point, as it were, instead of a
succession of rapid and forced marches. All this
to a man of the cardinal's rigid and stern severity
would be matter of high offence, and might, perhaps,
be deemed worthy of a procession to the
Place de Grêve. This reflection, while it added
nothing to my comfort, was to be utterly cast
aside for the present; highly as I might regard,
in other circumstances, military obligations and
the approbation of a superior, in a case like the
present, where honour and humanity pointed the
one path, while discipline called to the other, I
felt that I could not pause; no, not for an instant.
Inwardly I swore that, be the shame or the peril
what it might, before I stirred a foot on my mission
I would place Isabel in perfect safety; learn,
if it might be so, the state of her affections;
plight her a soldier's troth; perform the duties
that lay before me; and return to cast my trophies
and redeem my pledges at her feet. An
hour or two had already elapsed in these meditations,
and I began to wax impatient at the delay
of the friar. My blood was in a perfect fever; I
sat down,—I rose, but to seat myself again; I
kicked the blazing log in nervous excitement, till
the toe of my ponderous jack-boot was wellnigh
red hot; I hurled myself on the low pallet; I
strode the floor with still increasing vehemence.
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Suddenly, as I passed the window, I caught a
glimpse of a female figure standing at a corresponding
opening in a second turret, which projected,
like that wherein I stood, beyond the level
of the wall. My first impulse was to turn away; as
I imagined, from the position, and from a something
monastical in the shape of her garments, which
had caught my attention even in that momentary
glance, that the figure I had seen was one of the
sisters of the establishment,—for I had already
learned that there was a female institution with its
abbess annexed to and adjoining the Benedictine
monastery. My second was to turn and gaze
again,—for reflection instantly suggested that none
of the sisterhood could be thus free from restraint,
and in a part of the building evidently under the
control of the other sex. I checked my impetuous
strides, returned gently to the lattice,—it was
Isabel! Her forehead was bound by the simple
yet not ungraceful head-gear of a Benedictine
nun, but with a single long tress of fair hair that
had escaped from its unwonted confinement, wantoning
down her long and swan-like neck; which
was but partially obscured by the veil and flowing
garments in which she was enveloped, until such
time as her own dress could be dried and purified
from the stains of clay and human gore contracted
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during the affray and subsequent flight. Her eyes
were directed towards the window from which I
had just turned away, and there was something like
an expression of impatience in those soft and beautiful
orbs that had evidently followed my departing
figure. A deep carnation glow rushed over her
brow and cheeks as my eye met hers; nay, her
neck, and the brief glimpse of a snowy bosom that
was afforded by the envious veil, were flushed
with the same delicate hue: she dropped her eyes
to the ground, and her long, long lashes were pencilled
in beautiful relief against the bright complexion
of her lovely features. Slowly she raised
them again to mine; and, as if she had conquered
the momentary confusion that had overpowered
her, smiled sweetly, and, waving her hand, moved
gracefully from the embrasure. My heart, that had
throbbed so wildly while she was before me in all the
radiance of loveliness and feminine delicacy, stood
still. It was as though a cloud had fallen on my
mental vision; all had been bright and sun-like,—
all was now obscure; still, as I sank slowly into
my seat, my thoughts were not so wild, nor my
hopes so desperate, as they had been before my
passing glance at her, whose slightest wish would
have been a command more weighty than the
proudest monarch's mandate. I felt that she had
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blushed—that she had blushed for me! Was I
then loved? “Away!” I muttered to myself—
“away! It is not possible!” But it would not
away! Fixed, fixed as the earth's centre that
question sat upon my heart. A step sounded
through the corridor; I leaped to my feet—
paused not to note the features of him whom I
addressed—for what to me were persons in that
hour of strange anxiety?—requested him to lead
me to the lady Isabel; and, ere I knew my purpose,
found myself alone in the parlour of the convent—
alone,—but with one other!
With a smile of ineffable sweetness, yet faint
withal and melancholy, she arose to greet me—
she had been weeping; and the smile, like that of
an April sun, gleamed through fast-falling tear-drops.
Her hand extended in all the lovely confidence
of young, enthusiastic, fearless purity—she
sprang towards me. “How,” she said, in tones
that melted into my very soul like spiritual music,
“oh! how can I thank you sufficiently, my noble,—
noble rescuer!”
The light touch of her fingers shot, as it were,
a stream of lava through my frame. I had not
power to close my hand on that which she so
frankly offered. With embarrassed mien and faltering
accents, I murmured something—I know not
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what—of hopes, of happiness, and of the slightness
of my services. Words—empty words—the meaning
of which I could hardly be said to comprehend,
even while I uttered them. None can know—
none dream—save those of stern and passionless
natures, and they but rarely—with what fierce
and flame-like dominion love seizes—subdues—
and becomes the very essence of a soul like mine.
Stamp characters upon the soft and sunny sands,
and the first tide effaces them; engrave them in
the cold and unimpressive flint, and they endure
for ever! She looked into my eyes, as I replied,
with a singular and almost painful expression of
disappointment; and, as she spoke again, her
words came forth hurriedly, and with a feverish
impetuosity wildly different from the sweet calmness
of her former tones.
“You are offended; you regret that you have
saved me; you deem me cold, ungrateful, heartless!
You have rescued me from misery,—
deeper, a thousand times deeper than death!
From agony—pollution—heart-break—shame;—
from all that is most loathsome! most appalling!
All this you have done, and you reject my thanks—
you spurn my gratitude! Oh! no, no, no!
Miserable I am,—most miserable—wellnigh mad
with misery; but not—not thankless!”
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“Dearest lady!” I interrupted her the instant
her vehemence permitted; “dearest lady, think
not so hardly of one whose greatest bliss would be
the thought that he had served you; and, more
than all, think not so humbly of yourself as to deem
that aught of human mould could look on the emotion,
or listen to the thanks, of such as you, without
deeming himself the most supremely blest of men!
My object in this intrusion is to learn whether in
aught my feeble efforts can avail you; to implore
you to command me; to trust in me,—to use me!
And if there be naught in which I can assist you,
to pray that you will favour me with your name;
that I may store it in my heart of hearts—that
I may look back to it from the storms of sin and
strife, as to a bright and blessed guardian—that I
may write, amid the record of my wild and wilful
deeds, one act of virtue—which may balance all the
evil—in the service I have done to you. Thrice
happy, if, when afar, I may not be forgotten—if
sometimes,” and here I believe the firmness I had
assumed deserted me, and my voice was hoarse
and husky, “if sometimes you will permit the name
of Harry Mornington to mingle with your prayers!
Tell me, then, ere we part—”
“Part!” she said, “part!”—in one of those
clear low whispers which pierce the ear more
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keenly than the trumpet-notes of passion. “And
do you too forsake me? Have you but saved
me that I may be dragged again—oh God!”—A
shudder of almost convulsive violence ran through
her frame at the recurrence of what seemed some
half-maddening thought: but ere I could have
counted ten, she had o'ermastered it; she wiped
away a single tear with that long sunny ringlet,
and moved yet closer to my side; cold, indeed,
and colourless, but firm and unmoved as the
sculptured marble.
“You know me not,” she said slowly, and
weighing her words, as it were, with desperate
calmness—“you know me not; nor do I wish you
should: but I know this—that you have rescued
me from horrors of which I dare not even think.
Leave not, then, I beseech you, leave not your
work unfinished! As you are a man—a gentleman—
a soldier—by the soul of the mother who
bore you—of the father who taught you to be
brave, and generous, and good,—I do conjure you.
Swear that you will grant to me one last request—
swear it—before we part for ever!”
“There needs not, sweet lady,” I replied, in
tones not untinctured by her own vehemence,
“there needs not an oath to bind me to your service.
Speak, and were life, liberty, honour itself
at stake, to the very letter you should be obeyed.”
-- 079 --
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“Draw then your sword, and strike me to the
heart! Better to die by the hand of a friend than
to live deserted and dishonoured!”
“Now, by the living light of heaven,” I cried,
moved beyond all self-control, “I am no slave to
Mazarin, that I should tear my heart-strings to
fulfil his bidding. Here will I tarry. He can but
take my life, and that is worthless! Lady—I
leave you not—while head can plan, heart feel, or
hand perform. While you have friends to be
righted, or foes to be put down, hence will I depart
living never! Command me; I am your
soldier; yours to the death,—yours only!”
“I accept your pledge!—most willingly, most
gratefully do I accept your proffered aid. I am
an orphan,” she continued, speaking more calmly,
and as if reassured by my promise of protection,
“a hapless, helpless orphan. If the gifts of fortune
have been lavished upon me, they have been lavished
but to render me more wretched. Death and
misery have dogged my footsteps from my very
cradle. Those who should have been my dearest
friends have been my direst foes. All whom I
have loved have perished; all whom I have
trusted have betrayed, have persecuted, and—had
it not been for you—would have destroyed me!
On your protection do I cast myself; to your
-- 080 --
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honour, to your courage, do I confide my all.—
But wherefore tarry here, if duty calls you elsewhere?
Fly from these hateful scenes; to the
world's end will I follow you, confidently believing
that he who once has saved will never
harm an orphan's sole possession,—her yet unblemished
honour!”
At a single glance I read her character. I
saw she was no common woman, to flaunt in the
sunshine of prosperity, and shrink, like the withered
flower, in the time of trouble. On the instant
I resolved to open to her my whole soul. I
am not one to crouch before a lady's feet,—to
play the sighing, sentimental lover. Gently I led
her to a seat; I told her of my exile from my native
land; of my present duties; of my all-engrossing
passion; of my hopes, my doubts, my
fears, and my embarrassment. Rapidly I spoke,
and fluently. Mastering the passion that was
boiling in my blood, I made no wild protestations,
poured forth no boyish rhapsodies; but calmly
and deliberately, as though I were speaking of
another, I showed her the nakedness of my heart;
I told her how lightly I had thought of love; how I
had striven against its first approaches; how deeply
convinced I was of the truth, the singleness, the
fervour of my unselfish, ignorant affection.
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Several times, while I was speaking, she had attempted
to interrupt me; but as often, seeing my
determination to speak to an end, she had desisted.
I understood her purpose; but I saw, by the deep
blush that crimsoned her countenance, by the
quick heaving of her bosom, and the suffusion of
her downcast eye, that if my suit should be rejected,
her heart would have no share in the rejection.
In conclusion, I entreated her to suffer
me to procure for her a temporary abode in our
present place of refuge, where she might dwell, as
it were in sanctuary, till I could fulfil my present
mission, return at the head of my troops, and conduct
her openly, and in the face of man and
Heaven, to St. Germains, where I again conjured
her to become my bride.
When I had fully concluded, she raised her clear
blue eye confidently to meet my gaze; there was
no tremulousness, no flutter, no affectation of distress
or sentiment,—all was purity and unsuspecting
innocence.
“You know not what you ask,” she said, deeply
moved, but completely conquering her emotion;
“you know not what you ask,—nor of whom.
Noble, generous-hearted man, think you that I could
brook, that I could stoop, even for mine own sake,
to practise on devotion such as yours? Never—
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never! There is a mystery, a deep and fearful
mystery, around me; and think you that I would
cast a shadow, even for an instant, on the name
and fortunes of my preserver? There is a cloud
of misery, and guilt, and madness upon our fated
house; and I, the wretched, guiltless sacrifice,
shall I drag down another glorious victim to the
abyss from which he fain would rescue me? Let
me but follow you—your slave—your sister—
what you will—let me but follow you, till I can
find some quiet grave wherein to lay my aching
head. I cannot—dare not tell you all; but of this
be certain,—ere you could reach your place of
destination, they would drag me from these walls,
as they have dragged me from many a more sure
asylum!”
“Ha!” I replied, “is it so? Then is there but
one course left; I fear not—doubt not—seek not
to know your mystery; say but that you love me,—
that you will be mine—and I can save you.
Thus, and thus only! Become my bride this night.
Start not—this night, I say. The prior hath the
power to protect you, give to me but the right
to compel, if needs be, his protection. Speak but
the word, one hour will make you mine, the next
shall find me in the saddle; and ere a third sun
set a thousand trusty swords shall guard my
-- 083 --
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bride. Refuse me—and, though I cannot save, I
still can die for you!”
Twenty times, as I pleaded my cause with all
the earnest vehemence of a resolved and honest
heart, did the shadows sink darkly down upon her
speaking brow; and as often did they vanish thence
in gleams of transient hope. Twenty times did her
lips unclose as if to speak; and as often did her
words die on her tongue in low and faltering murmurs.
I arose slowly to my feet as I concluded,
and stretched my open arms towards her, as to
the arbitress of my doom.
With a quick cry, she rushed into my embrace,
wound her arms convulsively about my neck—
“Harry!” she murmured, “you have prevailed;
you take me to your heart in doubt, in darkness,
and in mystery; but never, never shall you rue
this day. Many a fairer, many a nobler bride
might you have won; but never one more fond,
more faithful, nor—thanks be to thee, adored
Harry, to thee and ONE besides—more pure than
Isabel de Coucy.”
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CHAPTER V.
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“Fri. So smile the heavens upon this holy act,
That after-hours with sorrow chide us not!
Rom. Amen, Amen! But, come what sorrow can,
It cannot countervail the exchange of joy
That one short minute gives me in her sight.”
Romeo and Juliet.
With a heart filled almost to bursting, I hurried
forth to seek the superior of the convent; and
never, perhaps, did I feel a mightier conflict of
principles and impulses, of doubts and hopes, than
in the agitating moments which preceded that
strange wedding. Anticipating the unwillingness
of the worthy Benedictine to give his sanction to the
solemn union of two persons to whose characters
so much of mystery and suspicion must naturally
attach, and that too under circumstances which
might call down upon himself the resentment of powerful
enemies, and possibly bring upon his community
the more deeply-dreaded censure of their
common superior, I had tasked my spirit to the
utmost to find some plausible solution of the
-- 085 --
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difficulties of my situation, some satisfactory reasons
for a marriage so clandestine, so sudden, and,
above all, so authorized as that which it was my
object now to solemnize. And, strange to say, the
very search for a justification of my conduct to
the understanding of another, tended to render me
dissatisfied, and doubtful of myself. Is it possible,
I thought, or rather is it not probable, that I have
been the slave of impulse, the toy of sudden passion—
that I have surrendered my discretion to my
feelings, that I have suffered my soul to be lapped
in Elysium by the mere beauty and fascinations
of an artful woman, and that I shall awake from
my dream of paradise to find myself the inmate of
a moral Tartarus? And yet her refusal to become
my bride suggested my passion, or, as I
now am fain to believe, my better genius—her
manifest reluctance to owe that to compassion, or
to the intensity of sudden feeling, which she might
have accepted freely, if offered under different circumstances.
And might not this be the result of
artifice—deep-laid and hitherto successful artifice?
I felt that I had acted rashly—madly, if you will.
I doubted the wisdom, I wellnigh trembled at the
risk, of the step I had already taken; yet—so
strangely are our minds made up of opposite and
counteracting principles—I had not, for a single
-- 086 --
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instant, the slightest wish, the most remote idea, of
withdrawing my foot from the verge, how perilous
soever I might deem it, whereon it had been
planted by my own unbiased will. There were,
in my inmost soul, two concurring sensations,
which would probably have urged me onward in
the teeth of obstacles even greater than those
which seemed to bar my progress. The first was
one of those wild fancies, those superstitions, if
you will, which have been common in all times
and countries to intellects more powerful than my
own—to minds, indeed, of the highest order; one
of those creeds—not of the head, but of the heart;
one of those beliefs which, for ever disowned by
reason, for ever keep their place in our bosoms,
and exert an influence, not the less potent that it
is unconfessed, over our actions,—it was the conviction
of my own good-fortune. Yes!—wild, absurd
as such an idea may appear—my own inborn
good-fortune! The partisan of a fallen cause—
the soldier of a conquered army—the adherent of
a dethroned and a slaughtered monarch—an exile
from the land of my birth—the last outcast scion
of an attainted title—landless, friendless, and
alone, I still believed in my own good-fortune;
not, perhaps, as relating to connected consequences,
not to a series of events, but confidently
-- 087 --
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as pertaining to single isolated accidents. A thousand
times, during my stormy and eventful career,
had I rushed headlong, as it would seem,
upon destruction; and the very madness of the
proceeding had as often worked out its ultimate
success. To the metaphysician and philosopher
be it to analyze the belief, and to search out its
secret causes. They would, perhaps, tell you that
my mind had, in truth, by some unconscious operation,
balanced the chances and calculated the bearings
of every successive step; till that which in
every instance appeared the result of fortuitous
combinations was, in reality, the consequence of
plans matured, as it were, instinctively, and forgotten,
though still operating, during the whirl of
action and excitement. Be it to them, I say, to
reason, to qualify,—and, if they can, to explain. I
am a soldier, and I know not, and care yet less,
whether my thoughts be comprehensible or no.
The belief which I then held, which I still hold,
was, that, rush into whatever dilemma I might, my
own good-luck would bear me out, not scathless
only, but victorious. This, then, was the first and
leading principle which hurried me onward in
despite of my own judgment; the second, scarcely,
perhaps, less influential than that which I have
just described, was a conviction of the purity, the
-- 088 --
[figure description] Page 088.[end figure description]
faith, the excellence of Isabel. It was my cavilling
and suspicious mind alone that doubted; my
heart was confident, and on that confidence I
acted; after-events will tell if wisely,—or, at
least, if fortunately.
Pondering thus—doubting, and debating with
myself—I strode along the gloomy cloisters; till I
found myself already in the presence of him I
sought, before I had determined what should be
my arguments, or what my inducements to the
holy man to minister to my wishes. I had not
hitherto seen the father, to whom my application
was to be made. Hospitality had been furnished,
as a matter of course, and without inquiry;
though I subsequently discovered that
every circumstance of my coming had been made
known to him, who was to be the arbiter of my present
destinies. On the first glance at the person to
whom I was about to prefer my request, I was
resolved. I saw before me a tall, pale, and emaciated
man—not surely past the prime of the intellectual
man—but worn, as it struck me at once,
rather by the workings of a spirit too subtile and
energetic for its clay companion, than by ascetic
self-inflictions. His cowl had fallen back from his
nobly-formed head; and as he sat facing the narrow
casement, the last faint rays of the wintry
-- 089 --
[figure description] Page 089.[end figure description]
sunshine streamed down upon his high brow, and
almost superhuman features. His temples, perfectly
bald and unwrinkled, were not disfigured
by the formal tonsure, though a beard of the most
intense blackness flowed in long and silky waves
far down his bosom. There was a something of
severity in the general expression, but a bland and
beautiful smile played upon the chiselled lips;
while his soft dark eyes looked out from their deep
sockets with a mingled brilliancy and benignity,
that rendered his countenance altogether the most
remarkable that I had ever witnessed. He looked
the imbodiment of a spirit; as I gazed upon his
lustrous eyes, and wonderfully intellectual features,
I forgot that I was looking on a mortal like
myself. There was a purity, a truth, a beauty in
that face, that seemed to indicate the absence of
every earthly passion, accompanied by a divine
sympathy for the very feelings which he had himself
been permitted to eradicate or subdue, when
existing in the breasts of others. I felt as though
he had already perused my inmost soul, as though
he knew my object, my aims, my motives. I
could no more have attempted to deceive or to
diplomatize with such a man than I could have
lied before the throne of the Eternal. So complete
was the fascination of this strange being
-- 090 --
[figure description] Page 090.[end figure description]
upon my senses, that I almost started when, in a
voice that fitly harmonized with the frame from
which it was breathed, deep, melodious, and passionless,
he inquired the purport of my visit. At
once, and without hesitation, I told him all,—the
duel in the forest—the rescue—the pursuit—the
mystery. I probed my own heart, and told him of
my fears, my doubts, my determination. I told him
distinctly, and without disguise, who and whence
I was; showed him the missive of Mazarin, and
explained its real object; and concluded by entreating
him to perform a deed of the utmost benevolence
in uniting me to Isabel.
As I began to speak, he listened to me calmly,
and with attention, though, as it struck me, with a
slightly incredulous expression. As I proceeded,
that expression vanished into one of intense scrutiny
and interest; and as I spoke of my affection for
Isabel, of my deep passionate conviction of her
purity, and of my certainty that the only chance of
rescuing her lay in our instant union, that benignant
smile irradiated his whole countenance, and I
thought I saw a big tear roll down his pale cheek;
but, as I paused an instant from my narrative to
mark his features, he observed my glance, and
drawing his cowl forward, shadowed himself completely
from my further scrutiny. When I had
-- 091 --
[figure description] Page 091.[end figure description]
done speaking, he remained silent for some moments,
as if buried in the deepest reflection, ere he
replied:—
“The truth is in your words, my son, and well
for you it is so. Had you swerved from the
straight path but for the breadth of a single hair,
I could not, and I would not, have served you.
Well have you acted thus far, and nobly. That in
your further views you are actuated by high and
honourable motives, I well believe, though it
might, perhaps, be rash to term them wise ones.
It is singular that you should have thus been led
to apply yourself to me; for I—and I, perhaps,
alone of all men—can, and will assist you. You
have, it seems, yourself well weighed the risks you
run in wedding this young person; and are yet willing,
if I understand you rightly, to run these risks,
not for your own advancement, but for her preservation.
Is it not so?”
I signified my assent.
“It is a mighty sacrifice,” he muttered to himself,
and then repeated it again aloud—“it is a
mighty sacrifice, my son, and many an ecclesiastic
would deem it his bounden duty to prevent it.
But I—I love the sacrifice of self to honour—I
love the buoyant, ardent, and unselfish aspirations
of youth; enough—I will believe, will hope
-- 092 --
[figure description] Page 092.[end figure description]
your prospects of felicity less doubtful than they
would appear. Something, too, I can gather from
your narrative, of whom and what the lady is,
and what the oppression from which you would
preserve her—you know it not?”
“Father, I know it not!”
“It is wonderful—” he again spoke aside; and
ere he again addressed me, I saw his fingers pass
over his beads, and his lips move in silent prayer.
“Then from me you should know it not, even
had I the power to explain! Yet, thus much will I
tell you; and if, knowing this, you choose to persevere—
I will—I will unite you. If it be as well
I am assured it is,—this Isabel de Coucy is the
child of misery—may be the child of shame and
guilt. A dark and fearful mystery dwells over
her; one which, if it were divulged, would make
her an object of aversion and of dread to all
who heed the world's opinion more than their
own souls' judgment. Misery there is—misery of
her own; guilt—I say not of her own—but of all
those whose name she bears—misery, and guilt,
and shame, such as may never be cleared up; and
which, if not cleared up, must make her shunned
of men. If, knowing thus much, you dread, as it
well may be, the contempt or censure of the world,
forget that you have ever seen, and leave her—to
-- 093 --
[figure description] Page 093.[end figure description]
the protection of Him who, if innocent, never will
desert her. But if, knowing this, you dare abide
by the dictates of your own conscience, or of your
own heart,—and be sure, ere you decide, you
know which it be that prompts you,—meet me an
hour hence in the chapel, and I will further your
desires. Peril it will bring upon me, and, it may
be, destruction; but I see my path of duty,—and”—
he looked upward—“fiat voluntas tua!”
“Father,” I replied, “I had resolved upon my
line of action before I sought your presence. I
am no more a man to blench from what I deem
the path of honour, for the scorn of men, than you
to shrink from the road of Christian virtue, though
it should lead to martyrdom! Say but that you
will make her mine, that you will keep her from violence
till my return, and you shall have the prayers
of one who, though his trade be violence and blood,
hath not forgotten in his prime the lessons of his
childhood, and whose sins have been the sins of
weakness—not of wilfulness!”
“That I will make her yours, my son, I have
already promised; that I will protect her to the
utmost of my power, you are now assured! How
far I may be enabled to guard her, as your wife, I
know not; as a maiden, she would be ravished
hence before to-morrow's dawn. We are but
-- 094 --
[figure description] Page 094.[end figure description]
men—and we can but endeavour. There is One
above who may accomplish or annul, and to Him
we will submit ourselves in confidence, and in the
fear that yet is love!”
The hour passed away like a dream. I had acquainted
Isabel with my success, and at her own
request had left her alone with her sorrows and
her hopes. The hour passed away like a dream,
and I was still pacing the floor of my turret-chamber,
when a brother summoned me with the information
that his superior awaited me in the chapel.
I entered the apartment of my chosen one. I
found her prostrate on her knees, with lifted hands
and streaming eyes, and my name trembling on
her lips, mingled with the awful titles of Him to
whom she, for the last time, offered up the aspirations
of her virgin heart!
“Come,” I whispered, “come, my beloved,—
the holy father waits us. Banish your tears, sweet
Isabel; henceforth you shall shed none,—or shed
but tears of happiness!”
“O Harry,” she murmured; “dearest Harry,
there is a cloud of dread and doubt around me, and
I more than half repent the promise you wrung
from me. You take me to your arms, to your
heart—your glorious and confiding heart. And
what have I to give you in return,—a broken
-- 095 --
[figure description] Page 095.[end figure description]
spirit, a frail body, a creature rejected and despised
of the world,—a thing whose very name
will be a reproach to you! O Harry! Harry!
spare me; release me from my fatal vows. If
you knew all, you would release me—release me,
did I say?—would spurn me!”
“Isabel,” I interrupted her calmly and gravely—
“Isabel de Coucy—if you repent your promise on
your own account, you are at liberty; if not, do
me, at least, the justice to believe that I am a man
of truth and honour. If you cannot believe this,
better, better it were, indeed, for me and you to
perish where we stand, than to go forward in this
matter. I have in you all confidence—all faith.
In you I repose my honour as freely and as fully
as I trust one day to repose my soul in my Creator's
mercy. You have told me that you are innocent
of wrong; and had you told me otherwise, I
had deemed you still innocent of all—but slander
on yourself. Did I not believe you pure, and taintless,
and single-hearted, sooner would I take to
my arms deformity, ay, death herself, than you
with all your charms, were they to last for ever!
If you believe me—if you believe that I shall love
you ever as I love you now—that I should but
cherish you more fervently, esteem you more
thoroughly, if you were rejected, scorned, and
-- 096 --
[figure description] Page 096.[end figure description]
hated of the world—here is my heart and hand.
If you cannot believe this—we will part, even at
the altar's foot! It is for you to determine.
Speak, Isabel! speak for me as for yourself! and
bethink you that an error now is an error that
must endure for ever—that love, devoid of confidence,
is but a summer's flower; and that the
union of a man and wife must brave the wintry
storm as freely as it hails the summer sunshine!”
Without another word, without an instant's hesitation,
she grasped my proffered hand, pressed it
to her heart, to her lips. “No! no!” she cried,
“no, Harry! not for a moment have I doubted
aught but my own unworthiness—” Before she
could conclude her sentence, I folded her in
my arms, parted the sunny tresses from her fair
brow to press on it one chaste and passionless kiss,
drew her hand under my arm, and led her towards
the chapel. Conducted by the monk, we
threaded the long corridors within the pile; thence
through a low-browed arch we gained the outer
cloisters,—dark, damp, and cheerless. I felt the
frame of my companion shiver as we passed along
the gloomy cavernous range, and I knew intuitively
the thoughts that were working in her guileless
heart. In moments such as these, the strongest
heart is prone to superstitious terrors; the
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most skeptical look for omens in the merest occurrences
of chance, and pin their faith, as it were,
upon a falling leaf or fading flower. I was about
to speak cheerfully, when our conductor unlatched
a door leading into an inner garden, beyond which
lay the chapel, with its tall pointed windows glancing
in the moonlight. The contrast between the
gloom within and the heavenly brilliancy without
was not required to impress the mind with the
beauty of the scene. The quiet garden, with its
clustering evergreens, its imbowered walks, and its
dark foliage, gemmed with the night-dew, and sleeping
in the placid moonshine—the crystal pool in the
centre, with its tall fountain shooting upward
towards the clear blue sky, its summit bathed in
silvery light, and a thousand prismatic colours
playing on its dancing rain-drops, while its base
lay steeped in shadow—the light clustered columns
and pointed arches rich with the florid traceries
of the later Norman style—the rustle of the
gentle west wind among the shrubs—for the night
was as calm and spring-like as the morning had been
wintry and severe—combined to form one of the
most lovely pictures of tranquillity and happiness I
had ever witnessed. Isabel raised her liquid eyes
to mine, sparkling through their tears; and I felt
that I but echoed the words which they were
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uttering, as I whispered, “Such has been our course,
sweet Isabel—through gloom and sorrow; and so
to end—in light, and peace, and bliss!”
We entered the chapel, and the same tranquillity
was there. A single lamp, by the high
altar, streamed over the magnificent painting that
adorned the sacred spot, glanced upon the massive
chalices and candlesticks of gold that stood
around the shrine; and showed, nobler than all
those works of art and beauty, the high pale form
of the Benedictine prior. Beyond the circle of
light that emanated from the single lamp, the long
nave lay in mellowed gloom, save where the pure
moonlight streamed through the open doorway in
its natural hues, or slept upon the marble floor in
variegated tints, derived from the stained glass of
the lancet-shaped windows. The banners, which
decorated the walls, hung silent and unshaken,
and here and there some monument of whiter
marble, or the panoply which hung in monumental
mockery over the bones of some knight of other
days, touched by a stray beam, stood out from
the shadows in ghostly relief. There was no
chanted mass, no pealing of the organ, or streaming
of high anthems down the aisle; no plumed
spectators, no gay and congratulating friends, no
smiling bridemaids, no clamorous crowd without,
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to hail the happy couple; no witnesses to that most
important ceremony in the life of man, but two of
the eldest brethren of the order and the superior,
who performed the solemn rite. No witness, did
I say? There was a witness felt, if not seen, by two,
at least, of that small company—the One Eternal
Witness of every human thought as well as deed;
the One who hears and registers, not only every
vow, but every word that falls from the thoughtless
lip; and who never, perhaps, registered the
union of two hearts more single and devoted than
those which were joined in that solitary chapel on
that eventful night.
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CHAPTER VI.
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“The health this night must be my bed,
The bracken curtain for my head,
My lullaby the warder's tread;
Far, far from love and thee, Mary!
To-morrow eve, more stilly laid,
My couch may be my bloody plaid,
My vesper song thy wail, sweet maid!
It will not waken me, Mary!”
Lady of the Lake.
The echoes of the convent clock were still ringing
through the vaulted cloisters of the ancient
building, when the flash of torches, and the impatient
neigh and stamp of my charger in the courtyard,
announced too surely that the hour appointed
for my departure had arrived. At ten o'clock I
had resolved, however hard the effort, to tear myself
away; and, while in the newness of my feelings
I imagined that it lacked at least an hour of
the time, the night had worn onwards; and the
hateful bells had noted the lapse of minutes, which
to me and my young bride had passed unnumbered
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and unregarded, though never to be forgotten. To
one who has gone through the regular gradations
of acquaintance, intimacy, affection, love, and
wedlock,—who has known, perhaps, for years,
and courted for months, her who is to be the partner
of his weal and wo through time at least, if
not eternity,—there may, there must be rapture
indescribable in the hours of intercourse, for the
first time, free and unrestrained,—in the interchange
of thoughts which could not well be interchanged
before,—in the mutual remembrances of
the first dawning of that passion which now is
every thing,—and, above all, in the sense, the security,
of possession. But, perfectly as I can comprehend
the intense delight of such sensations, I,
at the same time, feel, that being entirely different
in their nature, they must also be vastly inferior in
their degree, to those which I experienced during
this first stolen interview of my wedded life. I
had, in the brief space of a single day, gone
through all those successive stages which, in the
ordinary lives of men, occupy the course of many
months thus combined into a single epoch: I had
passed at once from utter insensibility to the opposite
extreme of passion; I had become enamoured
of a few strong points of character, which, as I
fain to believe, no less clearly proved the
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existence of other excellences yet unseen, than do the
towering spires that loom above the ill-defined and
hazy outlines of a great city denote the position of
a hundred happy homes, which will emerge from
their obscurity as we draw near. I had set my
all upon a single cast. If my presentiment of
character were true, I had won that, in comparison
of which all other treasures might indeed be
counted dross; if I had erred, the happiness of a
life must atone for the error. It was not therefore
merely the gloating rapture of a lover blessed
by a fruition of all his hopes, but the keen and
thrilling scrutiny of a miser, weighing the ducats
for which he has exchanged his precious wares,—
the agonizing doubt of a magician, lest the pleasure
or the power for which he has trafficked his
immortal soul be found wanting in the balance.
It was not only the actual bliss that prompted me
to hang upon the silvery voice, to gaze on my own
features reflected in the clear blue eyes—those
mirrors of the ingenuous mind; not merely the
sense that she was irrevocably and eternally my
own—but the far loftier happiness of hearing in
every tone, of reading in every glance, the intelligence,
the brilliancy, the power, the sterling metal
of a soul now linked to mine by bonds of more
endurance than the adamant of old. So
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oppressively painful was the idea of tearing myself away
from converse fit for the ears of angels,—of leaving
a bride, and such a bride, in the very hour of
marriage,—of leaving her never perhaps to return—
for my route lay through danger, such as at
another moment I should probably have courted
for its own sake alone—that the glance of anger
and vexation which I cast towards the casement
was not wholly unmingled with hesitation. I was
more than half-inclined to stay—to dare, to defy,
to endure all things, save the risk of losing her.
One look towards Isabel—her liquid eye was
fixed, dwelling with an unutterable expression of
solicitude, upon my features. “Never!” I muttered,
“never!” And rising hastily, I made two
strides towards the door, determined to countermand
my steed; but, ere I could make a third, the
soft pressure of her hand upon my shoulder, and
her yet softer voice, recalled me. So thoroughly
congenial were our spirits, so perfectly attuned
our hearts, that she had already learned to read
even a motion or a look.
“No, Harry!” she said; “dearest Harry, no!
Think you not that it is as hard to me, this cruel
parting? Yet, though it were to anticipate the
joys of heaven, I would not you should tarry.
Too much have you done, too much have you
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risked already, and for me! It is honour that now
calls—your honour, Harry; and can you think
so meanly of her whom you have intrusted with
your all, as that she would set that in jeopardy,
and for the vile price of present pleasure? Go!—
go where duty and your honour call you. Go!
and may all good angels guard you!”
To an appeal like this there could be no reply.
To be reminded of my duty by a girl,—to be urged
to the sacrifice of all—of present bliss, perhaps of
future happiness—rather than to the loss of honour!
If I had loved her before, I adored her now! She
was, she was the very being I had conceived her
from the beginning,—fair, and fond, and feminine,
yet fraught with a spirit that could writhe up
against the pressure of evil, and show itself in all
the majesty of heroism—heroism not framed on
the brute impulses of active courage, but on the
rarer and far more noble principles of patient, fearless,
and unmoved endurance. I caught her—
strained her to my bosom—“Had all men such a
counsellor, earth would have to boast a thousand
heroes where now she numbers ten. Heaven—
Heaven itself hath given thee to me, Isabel, to be
my guardian genius, my good angel; to repress
each ill desire, to confirm each nobler purpose;
and Heaven will preserve to me its gift. Farewell
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—farewell, beloved one. What though my body
leave thee—my soul remains behind. For the first,
for the last time, fare thee well—my own—my
only Isabel!”
Many a bitter pang, many a chilling separation
had I endured. I had parted from a father, a
murdered corpse beneath a blazing roof-tree; from
a noble brother, gored by the roundhead pikes and
trampled beneath the hoofs of his own charging
squadrons, which he still cheered on to glory; from
a mother—the mother who had soothed my froward
infancy, and taught me to bear up against
the oppression of manhood's wo—perishing, slowly
and miserably, by that worst of human ailments,
a broken heart; from a country, for which I had
lost all but life, and for which I would have lost
that also, and how gladly! From all these had I
been severally rent asunder; and, at each several
parting, though I bore it as a man should bear, I
had felt as though the very strings of my existence
were strained to breaking! But now—and I shame
not to write it—tears, hot tears stood in my burning
eyes, and my throat swelled till it had wellnigh
choked me.
It was over! I pulled the hat upon my brows,
strode slowly, and without daring to look back,
through the echoing cloisters. Again and again I
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charged the prior, as he valued the approval or
dreaded the rebukes of his own conscience, to protect
the bride whom he himself had tied to me, in that
most hallowed bond which death alone may sever.
I paused not for his reply; his benedicite was
uttered, perhaps for the first time, to regardless
ears. I cast myself into the saddle, struck the
spurs deep into the charger's side, as if distrustful
of my own resolution, and dashed at once into
that fierce and rapid motion by which, despite the
ancient adage, men fancy they can outstrip the
pursuit of care.
All night long I journeyed onward; not, indeed,
at the furious pace which must have soon exhausted
both horse and rider, but at the steady measured
trot, which, though to the eye it seem a laggard's
gait, accomplishes a distant course with the greatest
speed and certainty. For a brief space, my
feelings were, I know not how, benumbed by the
shock of parting; then, gradually, as this insensibility
wore away, my spirits were depressed,
beyond all that my experience had ever felt of
despair: I dreamed—for my state of mind was
more similar to sleep than waking—a thousand
fearful things, among which, perhaps, eternal separation
was the least tremendous. After a time,
however, the free and somewhat chilly currents of
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the night air, the inspiriting sensation of quick motion,
and the increasing necessity for care and
vigilance, overpowered such gloomy fantasies. I
fixed my thoughts steadfastly upon the work before
me, and I soon perceived, that, when they did
revert to all which I had left, their train became
less gloomy, and tended, with an easy and gradual
transition, to confidence and hope. Before the
night had passed away, and while the stars were
still shining in the wintry sky, I found myself
humming the burden of some lively song, and
guiding my horse, if not with the thoughtless
buoyancy of former times, with cheerfulness at
least, and even gayety of heart.
The east grew pale, the morning broke brightly,
and, like a harbinger of happy tidings, the great
sun heaved his rim above the horizon, shooting his
slant rays over field and forest, which glittered, in
their frosty garb, as if they had been sprinkled
with diamonds. It was a season and a scene to
cheer the most despondent, and to wake reflection
in the most worldly mind. At this instant, however—
although their influence was not without its
effect in still further dispelling the gloom which
had a little while before so completely veiled my
mental horizon—I was called upon to give my
attention to things of a more important, if less
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exalted, nature, than mere reflection on the beauties
of nature, or the mercies of its Great Architect.
I had already completed twelve leagues of my route,
and, although my own mind was too deeply interested
to permit my feeling sensibly the wants of
the body, I was not one to neglect the necessities
of the faithful brute that bore me, and that lately
had acquired so heavy a claim on my gratitude.
A small hamlet, lying at a short distance from the
main road, imbosomed in a wide tract of woodland,
afforded me, in its snug hostelry, all the appliances
of simple comfort, with the additional
advantage of that secrecy which was so all-important
to the success of my mission. At this
place, wherein I rested till the sun was fast declining,
I gained, for the first time, certain information
of the troops I was hastening to command. They
lay in garrison, I was told, at the town of Pont à
Mousson, about ten leagues distant, consisting of
three full regiments of well-appointed cavalry.
With these good tidings, however, there were
mingled rumours of a nature far less agreeable.
The troops, it was whispered, were in a state of
ill-discipline approaching to the very verge of
license, unchecked by the officers, who were, for
the most part, gay youths, fitter for the salons of the
metropolis than for the austerities of a winter's
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campaign. Nor was this all: disaffection, it seems,
had been creeping darkly, but not therefore the
less certainly, among the population of this remote
district; and the party of the Fronde had gained
many partisans, though not yet avowed, among
the surrounding peasantry—nay, it was even
hinted that secret levies were now in progress,
and that the position of the troops might, ere long,
be critical enough. Such was the intelligence
which I easily elicited from the garrulity of mine
host; and which availed, yet more than the alteration
of my state of mind, to render me alert and
self-possessed. The shadows were already cast
in lengthened lines from every object that intercepted
the light of the setting sun, when I departed
from my resting-place; and it was not long before
my path lay through the total obscurity of a moonless
wintry night. I did not, however, as before,
pass all the hours of darkness on the road, but
paused, when two-thirds of the distance were accomplished,
to prepare myself for the first interview
with my new followers. Nor, in truth, did
I feel by any means over-confident of the result.
The character I had lately heard of the men and
officers whom I was about to meet, and the rude
and weather-beaten state of my own person and
accoutrements, would, I apprehended, be too little
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in unison to harmonize on a very brief acquaintance;
while I felt, at the same time, that the ordeal,
to which we should in all probability be exposed
together, was one that would require the
utmost energy and vigour in the commander, and
the most implicit obedience and unity of action in
the subordinates.
Of myself I have hitherto said little; but a
brief sketch of the person with whose inmost
thoughts he is becoming acquainted, may aid the
reader to form a better judgment of the position
into which I was now thrown. I was, at this
eventful period of my fortunes, somewhat past my
thirtieth year, although—from long exposure to
war and weather, and from having been cast very
early upon the world under circumstances such
as form the character and ripen the mind—I looked
several years older. Not unusually tall, or bulky,
in my person, I was both strongly and actively
framed; and constant exercise and hardship had
indurated my muscles to a degree that would have
rendered me more than a match for many a heavier
antagonist than myself. My features were
irregular; not so much so, however, as to amount
to ugliness, much less to vulgarity. My eye,
though sunken, or, to speak more properly, deepset,
was quick and clear; and my brow—now
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surrounded by a black fillet—broad and fully developed.
My lip was shaded by a thick mustache,
and, as I have elsewhere observed, I wore my hair
in the long flowing curls at this time peculiar to
the cavaliers. If, in addition to these, I mention,
that the lower part of my face was bronzed to
almost Indian redness, while my forehead retained
its natural fairness,—that my arms, though not so
long as to appear unsightly, or deformed, were of
unusual reach,—and that, from long practice, my
motions were easier, and my general appearance
far more graceful, on horseback than when on foot,—
no description can be more accurate. On my
departure from St. Germains, my dress had been
carefully selected, for other qualities than richness
or display; properties which, however admirable in
the court, would have been of no small disadvantage
under existing circumstances. A strong, but
plain, buff coat, with none of the rich silken loops
or fringes of Flanders lace with which it was then
the mode to deck the sternest habiliments of war;
a gorget and cuirass of steel, which, although
highly polished, and of the choicest metal, were
neither chased nor inlaid with gold or silver;
heavy jack-boots, extending far above the knee,
and equipped with a pair of massive spurs;
gauntlets of buff, protected on the outside by iron
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scales; and a slouched hat, provided with jointed
cheek-pieces, and an inner lining of the same material,—
such were the accoutrements of a well-appointed
trooper, and with such, for the support
of that character, I had furnished myself. Plain,
however, and unadorned as they had appeared,
when I sallied, some three weeks before, from my
head-quarters, they were then at least in the highest
state of order; which was more than could be
said of them when I halted for the night at Beaumont.
The leather of my doublet was sorely
chafed, and splashed with specimens of every different
soil through which my road had lain; the steel
of my breastplate was curiously ingrained with
rust of every hue, from the deep black of a fortnight's
growth to the red stain of yesterday; my
boots, guiltless of the brush, were gray and mildewed;
while my castor, that Corinthian capital
of a gentleman's architecture, had been shorn of
its feather, and knocked into every various shape
of which a Spanish beaver is susceptible. It was
in vain that, during my last halt, I stuck a new
feather of the loyal colours into my weather-beaten
hat, and flung a bright scarf of the same die across
my shoulders: I could not cheat even myself into
the belief that I bore the slightest resemblance to
a chef d'escadron—for such was the rank I bore—
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in the service of the most Christian king. The
result was—as, indeed, it mostly is—that all my
labour and anxiety were utterly thrown away;
accident providing me with a far better introduction
than the most martinet-like appearance, or
the most ample letters of credence, could have
afforded.
It was on the second morning after my parting
from Isabel, that I rode through the humble suburbs
of Beaumont, into the open country which
lies between that place and Pont à Mousson, now
but a few miles distant. I had already journeyed,
it might be for an hour, through a rich and fertile
country—when a distant shout riveted my attention.
It was not the deep and regular hurrah of
charging troops, nor yet was it such as could be
raised in any of the ordinary chances of rural
labour or pastime, but a hoarse savage roar, as of
an angry multitude. Immediately afterward I
heard, though very remote, the blast of trumpets,
and the booming of a kettle-drum. I paused, and,
listening in breathless eagerness, fancied I could
distinguish the heavy onward tramp of charging
troops. My suspicions were confirmed by the
roll of a volley of musketry, and the varied sounds
of a battle-field, distinctly audible in every lull,
but again lost in every freshening of the breeze.
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Loosening my weapon in its scabbard, I rode hastily
forward, and, on clearing the brow of a small
eminence, perceived below me the scene of the
disturbance. A small body of cavalry, not apparently
exceeding a single regiment, with royal
colours displayed and music sounding, was on the
point of charging for the second time, as it would
seem,—since the ground was strewed with dead,
and chargers were running masterless,—a large
concourse—for it merited no other name—of men,
whose motley costumes and irregular array betokened
any thing rather than soldiers. These rustics
were, however, posted with considerable skill,
their front being protected by a ditch, and their
right wing covered by a marshy wood, while their
extreme left occupied a churchyard abutting on
the high-road, and surrounded by a lofty wall.
The insurgents were destitute of cavalry, and, as
far as I could see, entirely unprovided with fire-arms.
I had scarcely time to observe the relative
position of the hostile parties, before the trumpets
of the horse again sounded a charge, and they
rushed headlong against the centre of the line,
through ground which I now discovered, by the
hampered movements of their chargers, to be little
better than a morass. On arriving at the verge of
the trench, which they did, not with the regular
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front of a well-ordered regiment, but in a broken
and scattered mass, the cuirassiers poured in a
heavy volley from their petronels,[2] throwing their
adversaries into some confusion; but, on their
attempting to improve this slight advantage, and
cross the ditch at a deep and miry ford, the peasants
broke down upon them with pike and sword,
while entangled in the broken ground; mingled
with the horsemen, meeting them resolutely, hand
to hand; and finally beat them off in total disarray,
spearing many, both officers and privates, ere
they could gain the firm ground; on reaching which
they were with some difficulty rallied, while the
victorious countrymen retired slowly and sullenly
to their main host.
Such was the crisis at which it was my fortune
to fall in with the outposts of my command. They
were collected, when I came up to them, on a
small knoll, or rocky hillock, on the very edge of
the marsh, and were engaged in loud and wordy
argument concerning the propriety of another attack
upon the Frondeurs; which counsel was
strenuously advocated by some, while others as
violently demanded that they should wait the
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arrival of a reinforcement, which had been already
summoned from Pont à Mousson. To all the
evils arising from want of discipline and insubordination
I had been well inured during the miserable
civil wars which had, during so long a period,
rent the bosom of my own fair island; but never,
in all my experience of camps, had I beheld so wild
and tumultuous a council as that which now met
my eyes. So completely were they engrossed in
their stormy debate, that I actually rode up to
within ten paces of the party unchallenged, and
might probably have mingled with them unnoticed;
but such was not my present intention. I
called out, therefore, in a clear loud voice, demanding
to be conducted instantly to their commanding
officer. Strange and scrutinizing glances
were cast upon my dress and accoutrements as I
approached, but my request was unhesitatingly
complied with, and, in another moment, I was
presented to a very young officer, in a splendid
uniform, with a burnished casque and corslet,
whose bloody brow, and arm suspended in a scarf,
proved his gallantry as clearly as did his ruffled
mien and angry exclamations his inability to command.
“If, sir,” I said, so loudly that all might hear
my words,—“if, sir, as I presume, you be the
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commander of the garrison of Pont à Mousson, I have
the honour to present to you a mandate from his
highness Cardinal Mazarin, requiring your immediate
march, with all the forces at your disposal,
upon the capital, whither I am authorized to conduct
you. At the same time, that you may not
remain ignorant of him who now addresses you, I
shall—although it be not absolutely called for—display
to you my commission, from the same hand,
as major-general and chef d'escadron, during the
pleasure of our glorious monarch Louis le Grand.”
As I concluded my harangue with a well-known
claptrap, which, as I had fully expected, called
forth a loud shout of approbation from the licentious
troopers, I perceived that the missives were
considered satisfactory, and that the officer was
slightly embarrassed. Determined, therefore, to
anticipate his inquiries—“And now, sir,” I cried,
“why do I find you here, with so small a command,
and—I regret to say it—in so great disarray
before a peasant foe? Why, too, this evil
discipline? Fy! sir, fy!—let your subalterns get
the men into array at once—this matter must be
amended. St. George! but ye resemble more a
band of robbers than the gallant cavaliers I trust I
soon shall prove ye! Methinks I heard ye speak
of reinforcements—send out videttes to
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reconnoitre their advance—push forward a picket of
cavalry in front, to mark the motions of that
canaille, with whom, God aid us, I will soon take
order! And now, sir—I await your answer!”
Briefly, yet not without manifest embarrassment,
the Comte de Charmi—for such, he informed
me, was his title—explained that he had been detached
by the officer in command, with orders to
disperse a body of malecontents assembled in the
marshes of Beaumont; that on his arrival he had
found the enemy vastly his superior in numbers,
and had immediately despatched an aide for reinforcements;
but that, unwilling to dishonour the
corps by a palpable retreat, he had made two
efforts to dislodge them, and had been repulsed
in either attack with considerable loss. Scarcely
had he finished his report, before the vidette returned
with the intelligence that no reinforcements
were in sight, although he had galloped to a height
which commanded the whole line of route up to
the very walls, and that consequently none were
shortly to be expected. I perceived at once my
opportunity—it would not do to retreat before the
Frondeurs, or our march to Paris could never be
accomplished—it would not do to risk my own
character, either for courage or decision. The
greatest hold a leader can possess over his troops
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is in their estimate of his abilities; and I saw at
once that I could gain the confidence of mine. On
even ground the enemy must prove mere chaff before
the mettled horses and perfect arms of our
cavalry. Their position was their only safety—
my practised eye had already found its key, and
I was resolved myself to carry it by a coup de
main!
“Accompany me to the front, Monsieur de
Charml;” and, turning my horse's head, I rode
slowly along the line. If there was much to
blame, there was yet more to admire, in the detachment.
The men were for the most part active
hardy-looking youths, admirably mounted and
equipped—discipline alone was wanting—and discipline,
I well knew, beneath the eye of a strict and
intelligent officer is soon acquired. “Gentlemen,”
I cried, in high but courteous tones—“it is the
pleasure of your king that I should lead you. I
have found you in retreat—but I never retreat, by
St. George, never! We must beat these fellows,
and that too on the instant! Monsieur de Charmi,
call volunteers to the front—I have need of two
score men for desperate service, and—I myself
shall lead them!”
The young officer rode forward, and addressed
a few spirited and well-chosen words to the
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soldiers, who were already on fire to retrieve their
reputation, and then fell back a pistol-shot from the
front; the bugles flourished, and, to my utter astonishment,
the whole corps rode out three paces,
like a single man. Highly delighted, I dashed the
rowels into Bayard's flanks, and wheeled, hat in
hand, to the front of their files at a gallop.
“Gentlemen, and gallant comrades,” I cried,
checking my horse from the top of his career so
suddenly that he stood at once still as a lifeless
sculpture—“words cannot tell how deeply I appreciate
your confidence—nor is your confidence misplaced!
Often and again, I trust, I shall experience
the courage and prompt devotion of all!—at
present I have but need of forty—and where all
are brave, a leader can have no choice—let every
tenth man leave the ranks!”
The movement was executed; I dismounted,
and passed on foot from man to man, examining,
with my own hand and eye, the state of their arms
and the condition of their steeds, and, this done,
gave the word to mount.
“My object, Monsieur de Charmi,” I continued,
“is to carry, sword in hand, you churchyard, which
forms the point d'appui of their left wing. This
will I execute myself. You, with the main body,
will advance in column upon their centre, slowly,
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and keeping your men well together. When you
shall reach the dike, let your first and second
troops deploy, covering your passage with the fire
of their petronels, till you shall hear my bugle.
Then charge! Cut your way to the rear! Wheel
to the right, and you shall find me near you. Be
steady, and success is certain! Forward, and let
your shout be—Glory!”
Without another word, I rode to the head of
my volunteers, and, putting them in motion, proceeded
along the highway, while De Charmi was
moving on a parallel line across the marshy meadows
to my left; the force of the enemy lying, as
I have before described it, at right angles to the
public road. As I advanced I lost sight of De
Charmi's division, behind some clumps of timber-trees
which lined the causeway; and, I confess, I
was not a little anxious during the interval; for I
shrewdly doubted the prudence of the leader, and
the steadiness of his command. At this moment
the sharp report of a petronel rang from the left,
and was followed by the continuous rattle of a well-sustained
fire. “On! on!” I shouted, and at a
rapid pace we reached the angle of the churchyard,
protected by walls of solid masonry at least four feet
in height. The trees became thinner, and then
broke off entirely. I caught a glimpse of the
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affair in the meadows. De Charmi's leading troops
were spread out to the right and left of his main
body, keeping up a beautiful and most destructive
volley upon the enemy's centre, while files after files
were passing the trench under the cover of the
cross fire, and taking up their position with all the
steadiness of veterans. “Forward!” and we
dashed on, till the head of my little column was
parallel with the extreme rear of the enemy's lines—
“Halt, Gentlemen of France!—Left face!”—
and on the instant our heads were turned against
his flank. The churchyard had been occupied by
those of the peasantry who were the least perfect
in their equipments, and who were destitute of musketry.
They were already wavering at the mere
sight of our front. Still the mode of attack to which
I had determined to resort was perilous in the extreme.
It was to leap my whole detachment, boot
and thigh, into the enclosure! With the well-trained
hunters of my native island would it have
been a matter of everyday occurrence; but with
the comparatively ill-trained horses and unpractised
riders of France it was a desperate risk.
Before giving the word to charge, I cast one
last glance to the centre. De Charmi's corps had
passed the ford, but, strange to say, his fire was
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slackening, and the enemy was bearing down on
him in overwhelming force.
In ten words, I explained my object to my men;
a loud shout was the reply. The bugler was
already handling his instrument. I took my post
three horses' lengths in front. I looked to my
troopers—every face was grim and resolute, every
sword levelled to the charge; with tightened rein
and ready spur, they waited for the signal.—
“Charge!”—the bugle flourished, and I dashed my
good horse fearlessly against the wall. Steadily,
with a long and swinging leap, he cleared the obstacle.
I pulled upon the curb; he reared erect,
and, ere his fore-feet touched the earth, was motionless.
Towards the craven foe I never turned
an eye—a thought; my whole soul was in the
attack. With the rush of a whirlwind they came
on; as if it were with a single motion they rose;
they swept over the high masonry; they landed
safely in the area; a single bullet might have
grazed the bosom of every rider, so beautifully even
was their advance! Unity of spirit had effected,
in a single instant, that which it is the pride of the
disciplinarian to bring about in the course of years.
Not a horse stumbled; not a rider swerved in his
seat.—“Halt! Ho!”—they were a line of statues.—
“Charge again! charge!”—but the victory
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was bloodless. Not a single second had they
paused; sauve qui peut was the word, before a
single trooper stood beside me. Ten minutes
more, and we had joined De Charmi—the peasant
foe scattered, cut down, broken, dispersed, without
a hope of rallying. An hour before, I had been a
stranger, doubtful of my reception, and the men
whom I commanded a mere armed mob. Now I
was adored; exalted to the skies; a leader, like
Bayard, sans peur et sans reprôche; and the meanest
trooper of the regiment confident in his own
prowess and in his general's skill. It was indeed
a victory in its results.
Ere the sun set, we were in Pont à Mousson.
Rumour had played her part. I was the idol of
my division. The regiment I had seen in action
was a fair sample of the whole; well-armed, well-mounted,
fearless, and full of that belief in their
own valour which renders men invincible. All
this was well; and, above all, we were to march
TO-MORROW.
eaf136v1.n2[2] The petronel was not a pistol, but a short heavy musketoon,
often with a match, or wheel-lock, and used much as the carabine
of modern cavalry.
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CHAPTER VII.
“Sab. Herding with the other females,
Like frightened antelopes.
Sar. No: like the dam
Of the young lion, femininely raging—
And femininely meaneth furiously,
Because all passions in excess are female—
Against the hunter flying with her cub,
She urged on with her voice and gesture, and
Her floating hair and flashing eyes, the soldiers
In the pursuit.”
Sardanapalus.
The morning was as dark as midnight; the
moon had set two hours before, and not a star
was twinkling in the firmament, when our bugles
sounded the reveillé. Yet, unaccustomed as they
were to early risings or forced marches, so perfect
was the influence I had gained over the spirits
both of men and officers, during the occurrences of
the preceding day, that they mustered on that
torch-light parade, not only without complaint or
murmur, but with alacrity and glee. It was with
a degree of pleasurable excitement which I
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cannot well describe, that I listened to their reckless
exclamations, mingled with the clash of spur and
scabbard, as they fell into their ranks beneath my
casement; and as I descended the creaking stairs
of the rude hostelry, I felt that I was no longer a
homeless, helpless fugitive, but a leader well prepared
to do battle—if that battle were for a
crown.
A more brilliant spectacle has rarely met my
eyes than that which presented itself as I passed
through the low doorway, and stood upon the village-green:
the skies black as a funeral canopy
above—the massive architectural front of the
Gothic abbey on the right, its salient angles splendidly
touched by the red light of the torches; and,
in the foreground of the picture, three thousand
gallant horsemen marshalled in one long line—
their casques and corslets throwing back the glare
of the flambeaux borne by their orderlies—the
subalterns wheeling rapidly through their files, the
restless chargers stamping and tossing their proud
heads, and the banners waving in the night-wind.
Scarcely, however, had my foot pressed the
threshold, ere the scene was altered. As I first beheld
them, all save a dozen figures were motionless
as steel-clad statues; not a sound was heard
but the occasional clash of armour, or the kick and
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scream of some vicious steed: but when I stood
before my followers, not, as on the previous evening,
in the rough garb of a mere mercenary trooper,
but wearing, in addition to a bright helmet and
breastplate, the full uniform of the corps—furnished
for the occasion by the officer next in command—
a shout, that might have been heard at a
mile's distance, broke the silence—again and again
it pealed—louder and louder yet, till the affrighted
martins, fluttering down from their nests on the
minster-towers, circled, with startled wing and
short shrill cry, above our heads in the lurid torch-light.
Words cannot depict the sensations of that moment—
independent of all the gratified feelings of
the man, all the military pride of the soldier, a load
of care was lifted from my heart by the sincere
expression of that clamour. Till I had heard “all
hearts and tongues uniting in that cry,” I had been
plunged in a sea of doubts, almost of fears. I had,
it is true, introduced myself, and successfully, to
troops bearing a character of the wildest license;
I had found them, in the main, orderly and well
affectioned, and had gained, in an incredibly short
period, their good opinion at least, if not their love.
But I had yet a harder task before me. Whether my
credentials would have been deemed satisfactory,
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had they not been backed by a fortunate display of
the bearer's prowess, was far from being a settled
point; and—although it had become evident to
me, in the course of the preceding evening, that
the men were willing, and perhaps eager, to follow
a leader who was likely to afford them a fair
chance of gaining both repute and plunder in the
regular routine of duty—I was, till that moment,
doubtful how far they might be trusted in a matter
of such delicacy as the escort and protection of a
lady, whose presence might, moreover, impose a
check upon the celerity of their movements and
the license of their manners. But with that honest
shout my hesitation vanished. Tell me not of the
expression of countenance, of the flash of the eye,
or the wreathing of the lip: the stoic can freeze
their living language into icy indifference—the
man of the world can mould them into the semblance
of a smile—but let me hear the voice—the
human voice—I care not whether in the familiar
sounds of my childhood, or in the unknown accents
of a foreign tongue—and I can read the feelings
which give birth and being to those tones, as
clearly as though they were written in the pages
of a book. In the softest whisper or the deepest
roar, I can detect—I have a hundred times detected—
the lurking devil; but in that shout,
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although I listened as the criminal listens for the
footsteps which may bear to him his reprieve, I
could not catch a single note but of unanimous
and heartfelt greeting.
In a brief speech, pointed, and eloquent of
thought, if not of words, I tendered them my
thanks—spoke cheerily of success, and confidently
of danger—hinted that I might, perchance, have
occasion ere long to prove that loyalty which
they so freely proffered—leaped on my good
charger, wheeled the long line into column—gave
the word to quench the torches, and to march—
and in an instant all was gloom and silence, except
the heavy onward tramp of the squadrons,
and the lights of the town, which soon vanished
behind us as we rode briskly forward.
Before the morning dawned, we had already
passed the scene of the preceding day's engagement;
and as we filed along the causeway, I could
hear the stifled merriment and whispered conversation
of the soldiers, recounting to their comrades
the various incidents of that brief conflict. It was
evident that they were all in the highest spirits,
full of emulation between themselves, and of
ardour against the foe—the men who had already
fleshed their swords, eager to maintain their place
in my opinion, and those whom fortune had not
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yet favoured, burning to achieve an equal reputation.
At noon we halted to refresh our horses, and to
dine the men, in the hamlet at which I had paused
during my upward march; and great was the surprise
of mine host at recognising, in the leader of
a gallant squadron, the weather-beaten and neglected
trooper whom, two short days before, he
had treated with scant courtesy. Here it was that
an event occurred which, although in itself of little
moment, had the effect of bringing down my spirits
from the pitch to which they had towered, and of
rendering me miserably anxious during the remainder
of our march. On going out, after a brief
repast, into the inn-yard, for the purpose of inspecting
the horses of the troopers, and seeing with my
own eyes that no means were left untried for
maintaining their condition, I was struck by observing
a fresh horse-track, which certainly had
not been there when we filed an hour before through
the arched gateway. I know not why it was,
but at the instant of my discovering that some one
had left the inn since our arrival, a deep presentiment
of coming evil crossed my mind. I actually
shuddered at the idea which, with the rapidity
and nearly the force of lightning, flashed upon my
soul.
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“Sergeant le Vasseur,” I cried, to a fine young
orderly busily employed in rubbing dry the fet-locks
of a vicious charger—“Sergeant le Vasseur,
has any one gone hence on horseback since the
troops marched in, or whence this hoof-track?”
Two or three voices were raised at once in
reply, that a servitor, apparently of a noble family,
who had been in the hostelry when we entered,
had immediately proceeded to the stables, saddled
a fine and highly-blooded jennet, with marks of
extreme haste, and ridden away on a hard gallop.
“Ha!” I exclaimed, more deeply annoyed than
I was willing to admit; “ha!—but it matters not!
Let the men get to horse—we have yet a long
day's march before us, and the sun has already
passed the meridian. To horse—sound trumpets!”
and, for a space, all was confusion, noise,
and bustle.
During the tumult, I returned to the hostelry,
and, calling for a measure of the best, took the
opportunity of inquiring concerning the stranger.
What I learned was far from quieting my apprehensions.
It was, to the best of his recollection,
the landlord said, on the afternoon of the day which
I had passed beneath his roof, that the servant had
arrived. He had questioned him closely concerning
the travellers who had passed that way lately;
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and I could easily judge from the speaker's manner,
that he had acquired all the information concerning
me which could be derived from the limited knowledge
and unlimited garrulity of mine host. Here
he had remained, living of the best, and paying with
lavish liberality, until our approach had scared him
from his roost. When, in addition to this, I learned
that his liveries were tawny, guarded with blue
lace, my fears wanted no further confirmation:
that I had been tracked was evident; and I was
painfully apprehensive that some deadly evil was
meditated, in the only quarter where evil would be
intolerable. Still there was no remedy; I was
pressing on as quickly as was consistent with certainty,
and a few hours must bring about a solution
of my terrors.
“Monsieur de Charmi,” I cried to my second in
command—“it was my original purpose to have
halted for the night at Bar le Duc, but we
must on to St. Dizier, though we trespass on
the hours of darkness. Our route is noted, and
I have fearful reason to press forward. Think
you the horses of the third regiment can hold out?
they are somewhat jaded even now.”
“I doubt it not, sir; they are well-blooded and
in good condition, though somewhat under-sized;
but should the worst occur, Colonel le Chaumont's
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regiment is fresh, and, if you deem it good, can
march with ease to St. Dizier, and accomplish the
distance in two hours less time than the division;”—
he paused for a moment; but, seeing that I offered
no reply, continued, though not without some hesitation—
“and if a single regiment might serve your
turn to-night, I dare be sworn to join you with
the rest ere daybreak.”
“It shall be so, sir,” I replied, eagerly grasping
at the idea—“see Chaumont's regiment equipped
at once, and in their lightest marching order: let
St. Agreve's regiment bring their baggage up to-morrow;
and, hark ye, sir—I trust all to your
prudence, and a heavy trust it is.—On no account
delay. There must be no fighting that can by any
means—by any means I say, sir—be avoided. If
you must fight, tarry not for pursuit or victory—
cut your way through whatever shall oppose your
advance, though it be ten times your force. Join
me, if possible, to-night; but I leave it to your discretion
to halt, if so it must be, at Bar le Duc, or
even at Villotte; but, at the latest, I shall look for
you before to-morrow's noon! Farewell, sir, fare
ye well; be prudent, and be fortunate!”
And, clapping spurs to Bayard, I led the freshest
regiment of my division, at a pace which I should
hardly have ventured to adopt, had I not been
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fully aware that night was fast approaching. It
was nearly four o'clock in the afternoon when we
reached Bar le Duc; but my horses were so fresh,
that, after a brief halt, I hurried on towards St.
Dizier, about three miles to the right of which lay
the convent of St. Benedict aux Layes.
In this manner we continued to advance, as fast
as prudence and the state of the roads would permit;
still, however, the shades of evening were
closing fast around us, as we entered the woody
country which lies on all sides of the little village
of Saudrupt, on the river Saulx. The road, for
the most part, ran between high banks of reddish
sand, clothed on either hand with a stunted undergrowth
of ash and hazel, mingled with a few still
verdant hollies, and with dark patches of the
prickly furze; it was, in parts, overflowed with
water, which by the rigour of the season had been
converted into broad sheets of ice. Wherever
these occurred, I had continually observed the
horse-track which had caused me so much uneasiness,
deeply dinted into the smooth surface. The
horse had been shod with a bar-shoe on the near
foot before, so that I had not the least difficulty in
distinguishing the prints from those of the country
garrons which had occasionally crossed or followed
the highway. We were just entering one
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of the deepest of those sandy gorges which I have
described, when the report of a musket rang, with
its oft-repeated echoes, through the woodland;
and after a moment's pause, the horse of the
vidette who had preceded us galloped madly
back upon our main body, with the rein dangling
loose from his head, and the carcass of the unfortunate
trooper, who had bestridden him a few
seconds before in all the pride of vigorous manhood,
dragged by the stirrup, and leaving a long
trace of gore upon the frozen road. My resolution
was taken on the instant. Shrewdly suspecting an
ambuscade, and perfectly convinced of the importance
of forcing the obstacle, I dismounted three
or four files, spreading them out as skirmishers on
either flank, to clear the woods by the fire of their
petronels. I then put myself at the head of my best
troop; and pressed steadily forward, keeping my
front, however, a few paces in the rear of the
skirmishers, who performed their duty with intelligence
and activity, darting from tree to tree as
they advanced, and beating every covert that
could conceal a lurking foeman. In a few moments
the flash of the right-hand flanker's petronel,
sending its bright stream of flame through the increasing
darkness of the coppice, announced that
the enemy was discovered. A more beautiful
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effect I never witnessed than the brilliant running
fire that ensued: but little time had I at that moment
to think of sights or sounds; for, the object
of their advance having been effected, the skirmishers
were already retiring to their horses,
while the troopers whom they had dislodged,
dashing into the open path, and discharging their
pistols at the head of our column, fled furiously
along the road. At a glance I recognised the
liveries of the hindmost rider, and the figure of the
Andalusian jennet—on the instant I comprehended
the object of the attack. The small number of the
assailants proved at once that no check upon the
column could have been intended—murder—my
murder was contemplated. The villain had observed,
on the entrance of our squadrons into the
courtyard of the inn, that I had ridden foremost.
His aim had been unerring, although the gloom of
the evening had prevented his discovering the features,
or even the accoutrements, of his victim
with sufficient accuracy.
My blood in my veins, as I whirled my
good rapier from its sheath, and, dashing the spurs
into my charger's flank, charged with a fierce
shout full on the retreating ruffians. Ere I had
overtaken the little group, which I did, as it appeared
to me, in a dozen bounds, the servant,
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whose capture was my principal inducement to
pursue, had outstripped the whole of his party.
The first man I reached, seeing that he had no
hope of safety in flight, attempted to wheel his
horse and face me; but the attempt was his destruction.
I was too close to his haunches when
he commenced the manœuvre, and, before he could
complete it, I was upon him. In full career, the
broad chest of Bayard struck the flank of his charger,
as he turned; over he went, and over, regaining
his feet only to be cut down by the troopers who
followed me, while I, unmoved by the slight shock,
held onward. One other, as I passed him standing
in my stirrups, I struck full on the head-piece with
my rapier's point; and the heavy clang of his
armour, as he fell, alone told me the consequences
of the blow. Scattering to the right and left, as I
drove through them, the rest avoided me, to perish
by the weapons of my men; for, unwilling to
waste time upon the mere accomplices, I spurred
hard upon the traces of the principal. Fiercely,
however, as I rode, I soon perceived that I gained
nothing on the fugitive; and that there was no
option but to suffer him to escape, or to desert my
troops with scarcely a possibility of again effecting
a junction. I was therefore compelled to pull up,
and to gaze upon the wretch, to secure whose
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capture I would have sacrificed willingly the sum of
all my earthly goods, carrying off the news of his
frustrated effort, and of my approach, to those who,
I too well knew, would profit by the intelligence.
Words cannot express the misery I endured, as
I was compelled to creep along at the slow pace
of the troops; while my mind, darting over the
well-remembered road, had already arrived at the
place of my destination. Miles appeared to my
excited fancy leagues, minutes dragged along like
hours: the attempt to describe the images of evil
that crossed the horizon of my excited mind would
be a mere absurdity; words cannot describe them.
By my honour, I shook in my steel-bound saddle
at every shadow that fell across my path; I started
at every howl of the wolves from the near forest;
I grasped my ready weapon a hundred times at
the sight of some gray pollard-tree, decked with
the glitter of the rising moonbeams, and converted,
to my heated fancy, into the guise of an
armed foeman. At length we reached the brow
of the last hill, from which the land slopes, in a
gradual and park-like sweep, down to the banks of
the Marne. About midway of the declivity stood
a small hamlet, bosomed in its orchards, and at its
foot the well-known convent of St. Benedict aux
Layes. The moon had risen brilliantly, the
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firmament was cloudless, and every object lay for miles
bathed in a radiance as pervading as the glare of
daylight, though far less gorgeous in its hues.
The population of the district, quiet and happy
rustics, had long since sunk upon their careless
pillows. Not a light glanced from the windows,
as we passed the cabins on the outskirts of the
village; not a sound was heard throughout the
wide expanse of country that lay before us, buried,
as it were, in dreamless slumbers, save the long
howl of a mastiff swelling upon the gale, as he
bayed the queen of night, or the wailing cry of the
night-owl from his ivyed tower. So calm was
the scene beneath my eyes, so free from every
sound or sight of danger, and so nearly had I
reached the haven of all my hopes, that I had
already begun to deem my previous terrors the
mere wanderings of an excited fancy. We reached
the little green before the village inn, and, in ten
words, I gave the orders for the night to the officer
next in command. The convent was but a bare
mile distant. Outposts were to be detailed upon
our flanks and rear, a picket to be pushed forward
to the river's brink, and connected, by a chain of
sentries, to the convent, and thence to the corps de
garde. Subalterns were selected for the various
duties of the night; the freshest men and horses
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were drafted for service; and then, accompanied
by the files which were to guard our front, I bade a
cheery adieu to my bold lieutenant, and cantered
on my way with a heart almost at ease.
So completely had I recovered from the temporary
depression of spirits into which I had been
thrown, that I was occupied as I rode along, not
merely in looking forward to the delight of clasping
in my arms the form of her whom I as yet
could hardly call my own, but in building up gay
edifices in the dark futurity,—edifices soon to fade
into sorrow and desolation. I did not, however,
in the exhilaration of the moment, forget to apply
the means necessary to the maintenance of my
happiness. At regular intervals I posted my sentries,
exercising to the utmost the military fore-sight
which, acquired by long and hard experience,
had at length become almost intuitive. On
the crest of every hillock, in the slack of every
valley, did I dispose one of my trusty followers;
so that eye might answer to eye, and voice to
voice, along the entire chain. The last guard I
left at the fork of the road leading from the highway,
through two deep meadows, to the conventgate.
The non-commissioned officer and dozen
men who had been detailed to perform the duty of
videttes saluted, and rode forward. All was at
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last accomplished. I stood within a stone's throw
of my bride; friends were around me on every
side, watchful, well-armed, and trusty; the silence
of security and peace brooded upon those holy
walls. I breathed a heartfelt prayer of gratitude
to the Giver of all good; dismounted from the
noble beast, which had in truth suffered all and
won all for his master, flung his rein to the orderly
who had accompanied me, and strode with light
steps and a happy spirit towards the temporary
dwelling of my Isabel. I could hear, as I pursued
my way, the receding clatter of the hoofs, and the
successive challenges of sentry after sentry, as
my servant hurried to rejoin his comrades; and
so still was the night, that the guargling of the river
sounded distinct and near. It was already long
past midnight; and the lamp which burned before
the patron saint above the gateway was already
waning in its socket: just as I raised my hand to
strike the wicket, it leaped brightly upwards, fluttered
for a moment, flashed up again yet higher
than before, and expired. Was it an omen? My
heart, at least, acknowledged it as such; and the
hot streams that had been hurrying thither in the
fierce eagerness of expectation, ebbed coldly. I
shrunk back, dismayed, I knew not wherefore! It
was—by heaven! I believe it, firmly, faithfully, as
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I believe the Gospel—that sudden chill was ominous!
Ere I had rallied from the momentary
start, a voice, a shrieking voice—that I had heard
once, only once before, and never can forget—
rang, like the blast of the eternal trumpet which
all must hear and answer, in my trembling ears.
I sprang backward from the untouched gate, firm
and collected; for not from that direction came
the fatal clamour. Again—again—from the rear
of the building—again it pealed, clearer and nearer
than before; harrowing up my nerves, and driving
my blood, now boiling with tenfold heat,
through every vein and artery. “Harry!” it
cried, “Harry! Save—save me—now or never!”
A wall was on either side, some five feet high, but
ivy-grown and time-worn. With a single effort
of hand, foot, and eye, I reached the summit of
the right-hand boundary; for that way was the
voice. There was a ditch below me—a wide,
yawning ditch. I saw it not—heeded it not—for,
scarce thirty yards distant, I beheld a ladder
propped against a turret window; at its foot there
was a busy, silent group; and half-way from its
summit, two armed figures—their corslets glittered
in the rays of light that streamed from out the open
casement—bearing with forcible yet careful grasp
a struggling, shrieking female.
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Tottering, as I stood on that frail summit, I discharged
my pistol, aimlessly, as I thought—for my
object was but the recall of my soldiers; yet—
as I saw even in that instant of dread anxiety—
it took effect. At one bound I cleared the
trench, alighted firmly on my feet, and, sword in
hand, rushed to the rescue. My signal had
reached wakeful ears: I heard shout answering to
shout along the line; and then the gallop of the
nearest picket came thickly up the tremulous
wind. “Isabel!” I shouted, “Isabel! fear nothing—
it is I!” I was within a spear's length of the spot
whereon she stood, struggling in the sacrilegious
grasp of the same cavelier who had so closely
pressed our flight three days before. My muscles
were braced, my weapon raised for the death-blow,
when a bright glare was shot into my very eyes.
I felt two sharp quick strokes, on my sword-arm
and my left side; a deadly sickness—a swimming
of the brain—and all was darkness. Faintly, and
as it were in a dream, I heard a cry, a struggle,
and a shot—no more! I had no note of time. I
half-unclosed my eyes; I turned them upward,
and, bestriding me, I saw—her blue eyes flashing,
her lip curling, and her nostril dilated—that tall
fair girl. Her light brown hair—the fillets which
had restrained it rent asunder—streamed on the
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night-wind. Erect she stood and fearless, as a
Judith or a Jael, braving the armed oppressor.
In her hand, her delicate white hand, a pistol—
my own pistol—shone to the clear moonshine. I
gazed upon her, wonderingly, in my delirium, and
I knew her not—yet it was SHE. For a moment
the dark figures shrunk from before her, cowed
like base and carrion vultures in the presence of
a royal eagle. There was a rush, a shouting, and
a tumult; yet my eyes were fixed, fascinated, as
it were, upon that form of superhuman beauty.
Another flash—and my eyes closed, my brain
reeled, sicker and more dizzy than before. I strove
to rise, fell, and—to all knowledge of myself or
consciousness of things around me—was dead for
many days.
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CHAPTER VIII.
“Adam. Master, go on; and I will follow thee
To the last gasp, with truth and loyalty.
From seventeen years till now almost fourscore
Here lived I, but now live here no more.
At seventeen years many their fortunes seek;
But at fourscore it is too late a week:
Yet fortune cannot recompense me better,
Than to die well, and not my master's debtor.”
As You Like It.
It was long before I again awoke to any distinct
consciousness of my situation, or even of my
personal identity. Senseless, indeed, I was not—
if by that word is meant the utter oblivion of all
external things, the total absence of thought, even
in its most dreamy form, the entire suspension of
every mental faculty, such as we occasionally
experience in that deep and unrefreshing slumber
which follows extreme exertion and consequent
lassitude both of mind and body.
Widely different from this was the state in
which I lay, as I have been since informed, for the
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space of seven days and as many nights. During
this time I was tormented by an unskilful chirurgeon,
who nevertheless succeeded in extracting
two bullets which had lodged in different parts of
my frame—was transported from St. Benedict
aux Layes to St. Germains, a distance of many
leagues, over rough and perilous roads, in such
rude vehicles as could be pressed into service—
was nearly captured in several instances by Guerilla
bands of the Frondeurs—and was at length,
after much danger and actual suffering, deposited
in my own quiet lodgings, at the pretty town
which was at that period the abode of the court.
During the whole of this time, although entirely
incapable of recognising individuals, or even of
comprehending what had befallen me, I was keenly
sensible of pain,and,even worse than pain—if such
a seeming paradox can be understood—of my own
insensibility. There was a dizzy swimming consciousness
in my mind, a knowledge that all was
not right with me, and a constant struggle, as it
were, to arouse myself from the unnatural stupor
which I could perceive to have fallen upon me.
At times I would catch a glance of unforgotten
faces, and hear the sounds of familiar voices—at
times the words would reach my understanding,
and I could discover myself to be the subject of
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discourse; but ere I could concentrate my thoughts,
or fix the floating fancies, the impressions themselves
would pass away. At times it seemed as
though I were communing with persons whom,
even in my mental aberration, I knew to be no
longer dwellers on earth; yet, whenever I would
endeavour to reflect, to argue my senses into reason,
or to deduce effects from causes, all became
at once a whirling chaos, a deep unfathomable
void. Then would events which had occurred
long years before mingle in strange and horrible
confusion with the scenes and deeds of yesterday:—
yet was there a method in my madness—a connecting
link between each terrible delusion—a
continuous thread in every delirious dream. Now
I was fighting hand to hand in that last charge on
the red field of Marston, when Cromwell's iron-sides
retrieved the half-lost fight—now was I
gazing on the slaughtered body of my father, out-stretched,
as when I saw it last, upon his own extinguished
hearth, the thin gray hairs clotted with
blood, and the sword, faithless in his utmost need,
shivered in his lifeless grasp—now I was struggling
in the eddies of the wintry Marne, the sullen waters
gurgling above my head; yet still in every scene
one form was present, one countenance for ever
stamped upon my soul—now pale as death, with
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eyelids closed, and with dishevelled hair, as when I
bore her in my arms on the morning of our eventful
meeting—now smiling sadly through her tears—
now radiant with the happiness of hope—now cold,
distorted, sprinkled with gouts of blood! Rather,
a thousand times rather, would I brave the most
abhorred realities, than again pass through that
fearful twilight of the mind, that dark struggle between
reason and madness, those “doubts more
dreadful than despair.” Fever and delirium were
at work with my enfeebled body and shattered
spirit; while, through all, and over all, the consciousness
of real misery, remembered when its
cause was all forgotten—waking or sleeping, night
or day—hag-rode my senses, a companion as inseparable
as the dark avengers of Orestes.
Never shall I forget the morning on which the
clouds were rolled away from my eyes—on which
reason began to dawn faintly at first, but with a
gradual and increasing light—on which I became
aware, first of the visible objects around me, then
of my own existence, of my own desolation.
The earliest sensations of the change were exquisite:
a freedom from pain—a calm voluptuous
languor—an absence of all excitement—a perception
of sweet sounds, and of the blessed daylight.
It was, I believe, a casual strain of music beneath
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my windows, the chance melody of some wandering
Switzer, an exile, like myself, from his far
father-land, that aroused me from the lethargic
sleep in which I had been plunged. I unclosed
my eyes, aimlessly and unconscious of myself; and
the mild radiance of the early morning fell, tempered
by a veil of sea-green silk that had been
drawn across the casements, full upon their dazzled
balls. I shrunk back and closed them for an instant,
dizzied and drunk with the excess of light,
although in truth it was hardly more than a summer's
evening twilight that found its way into that
shaded chamber; cautiously I opened them again,
and, avoiding the quarter from which the unusual
brightness had before annoyed me, suffered them
to wander carelessly around the well-known room.
They had not, however, roved far or for a long
time over their little circle, before they rested upon
objects which, had they been presented to me at a
time when I had less reason to doubt the accuracy
of my senses, would have tempted me to question
their reality at the least, if not my own sanity.
It was, indeed, my own humble home—my
limbs were stretched on the same lowly couch—
the same carved rafters were above my head—
around me the same well-remembered hangings of
Cordovan leather, quaintly embossed and gilded—
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the same narrow casements, with their diamond
panes and heavy freestone transoms—the same
grotesquely sculptured arch of oak yawning above
the ample hearth. There hung my Milan corslet,
an honorary gift of the unhappy Charles!—there
my plumed morion and trusty petronel!—there the
good sword which I had wielded to no purpose
against the iron veterans of the Parliament, never
to be unsheathed again, or wielded in a less noble
cause!—there stood the brass-bound chest, which
had conveyed the relics of my shipwrecked fortunes
from the land of my fathers—above it the
tattered standard I had rescued in the last skirmish
of the cavaliers from a stern fanatic, who
lost his trophy and his life together!—and there,
upon the oaken trivet, with its crimson velvet
binding and its clasps of massive silver—there lay
my mother's Bible! Dreamily, and as yet but
half-awakened, I surveyed these familiar objects
with that indefinite sense of pleasure which attaches
to the humblest abode we have hallowed
with the name of home; when suddenly a brighter
gleam shot through an opening of the ill-adjusted
curtain, and fell in a line of rich lustre on the opposite
wall; my eye, as it became accustomed to the
increase of light, followed the moving beam. It
rested on a picture—a bright, glorious, almost
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breathing portrait—it was the portrait of my
mother. Oh, what a charm there dwells about
that holiest of names—a mother! The pale and
somewhat melancholy face, the dark and liquid
eye, the braided hair, the faded flowers in the hand,—
it was the same dear picture which I had compared
a thousand times with the still more dear
original, rendered, as it were, immortal by the rich
pencil and unfading colours of Antonio Vandyke.
Before I had found time to wonder at its being
there, fresh cause for wonderment flashed on me;
for, below the picture, there lay extended on the
oaken floor a superb English bloodhound—of enormous
size and muscle, jet-black, except a tawny
spot on either side his brow, and a broad patch
of the same hue upon his chest; his head was
couched between his lion-like paws, which themselves
were half-concealed by the long sweeping
ears that marked his breed. Faint as I was and
feeble, I recognised the noble brute at once—old
Hector, the choicest leader of my father's staghounds.
I made an effort to arise, still doubtful
whether the objects before me were not the coinage
of my distempered fancy; but hardly had I
set my foot on the uncarpeted floor, before a
strange sense of sickness seized me—my head
grew dizzy—my eyes swam round, and were
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obscured. I had misjudged my own powers, and
the weakness still remaining upon me, after the
fever which had given it birth had departed,
conquered both mind and body—I had fainted.
I did not, however, on this occasion continue
senseless for any length of time; the last sound
which caught my ears, ere my mind was utterly
bewildered, was a slight rustle, as of a person
rising, from a more distant corner of the chamber,
to which my attention had not as yet been called;
and although my subsequent dizziness prevented
me from discovering the figure of him who had
caused the noise, I did not on that account the
less profit by his exertions in my behalf.
It was but a moment ere I became sensible of a
grateful coolness on my brow, and of a strong aromatic
perfume; then I felt the pressure of a hand,
which, though hard in its texture, yet moved tenderly
over me, trembling as it were with the exertions
it made to be more delicate and gentle than
nature had intended, as it chafed my hands and
bathed my burning temples. Just as I was becoming
fully master of myself, though my eyes
were still closed, a long low whine rose upon my
ear, accompanied by the peculiar sound of a dog's
tail striking the floor as it is wagged heavily to
and fro in some strong emotion of the animal. At
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once I raised my head, and saw—although I could
not for a while believe my senses—the face of
one whom I had long considered as numbered
with the dead—whom I had seen borne out of his
saddle and trodden down, as I imagined, beneath
the hoofs of a routed army—an old and faithful,
though an humble friend—my father's foster-brother,
and my own most trusty follower—old Martin
Lydford! Years have now passed away since
that hour of recognition—years have passed away
since I laid his bones beneath the very yew-tree
which he himself had designated—in the remote
and rural churchyard of his English birthplace;
yet never have I ceased to bear the old man's
countenance engraved on the very tablets of my
heart, as when it met my bewildered gaze on that
unforgotten morning. He was an aged man even
then, though many years younger than his patrician
foster-brother: his hair and heavy eyebrows,
as well as the thick short mustache upon
his upper-lip, were white as the driven snow;
though his strong decided features were still richly
coloured with the hale and healthful tints that
might have well beseemed a man some dozen
years his junior. Pleasure and anxiety were
struggling for the mastery in his lineaments; but
when he perceived that I had recognised him, the
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more powerful emotion conquered; the firm muscles
about his mouth worked convulsively. I could
see his bare neck swell and choke, as it were, with
the violence of his struggles to repress the exhibition
of feelings which his habitual self-restraint
had taught him to hold womanish and trifling: but
it would not do; the big tears gushed thick and
scalding from his aged eyelids, he threw his arms
about my neck, and as his gray head sunk upon
my shoulder, he lifted up his voice—to use the
simple and affecting words of Holy Writ—he lifted
up his voice, and wept!
“My master,” he sobbed out at length, “my
dear, dear master—have I then found you once
again? Never—oh never will I quit you more!
Promise me—promise your old faithful follower,
that he shall never quit you. Old I am, indeed,
and wellnigh worthless; yet well, I wot, can love
and prompt devotion supply the place of strength—
ay, and of youth itself. Let me but be about your
person, and I will bear your banner in the field,
where greener limbs and hotter hearts would flinch
from charging. Never did vassal follow lord as I
will follow thee; never did woman wait upon her
lover's eye as I will wait on thine, my master and
my son!”
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Weak as I was from the effects of my long confinement,
the old man's vehemence, and the violent
excitement it produced on my shattered nerves,
were almost overpowering. I sunk back upon my
pillow exhausted for the moment, but with a calm
and painless exhaustion.
“Fool, fool that I am!” he cried, “I have slain
him with my madness.”
“Fear not, Good Martin—fear not,” I faltered
forth—“I shall be well anon—'tis nothing.”
But the sudden revulsion had been, in truth, too
much for me, and, despite the utmost attentions of
the old man, I again relapsed into insensibility;
nor did I awaken from it till the blood was flowing
freely from a vein which had been opened in my
unwounded arm. As I was gradually returning
to my senses, I saw, through my half-closed eyelids,
a tall figure standing beside my pallet, supporting
in one hand my arm, while with the other
he replaced the lancet he had just been using in a
small case at his belt. His features were strange
to me, but, by his dress and accountrements, exhibiting
a ludicrous blending of the mediciner and martialist—
the boots, cuirass, and long rapier dangling
from his thigh belonging as clearly to the latter, as
did the dark uncurled periwig, broad linen band,
and chirurgical apparatus to the former, character
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—I knew him at once for the surgeon of the regiment.
Around him were collected a group of
noble-looking men, all clad in the half-armour of
the day, and wearing the scarfs of white and gold
which had been assumed by the court-faction, in
opposition to the blue colours of the Frondeurs.
In several of these I recognised familiar faces; but
it was with absolute astonishment that I discovered
in the principal personage no less a character than
our general-in-chief—the gallant Prince of Condé.
“Good, good!” were the first words I heard
uttered by the strange figure at my side—“he revives;
the danger is past, and in another week,
your highness, we will set this gallant in the
saddle.”
“Pray God you may—pray God you may,” replied
the prince, “for we are short of men and
officers already; and if this news be true, that
Turenne has declared against us—and if he march
to aid these cursed Frondeurs, as they say he will,
with twenty thousand Switzers from the Rhine—
ay, or with half the number—we shall be hardly
set to hold our own. Besides, De Charmi tells us
wonders of this Mornington—a pupil of hot-headed
Rupert, and better than his tutor in a charge.
Tête gris, we have no such overstock of leaders
that we can spare a good one; but, silence!—he
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awakes! How fare you, sir?” he continued, perceiving
that I looked about me; “how fare you
now? We thank you for your gallantry, young
sir, and shall rejoice to see you once again at the
head of those brave fellows you have brought up
to us so happily.”
“I hear your highness's words,” I answered,
“but hardly catch their meaning. Am I then at
St. Germains—and are the troops come up? Methinks
I led them not—I pray your pardon—but
I am somewhat forgetful!”
“You are, sir, at St. Germains—for which we
thank your valour and your skill. What you had
so successfully begun, De Charmi as successfully
accomplished—your division is attached to our
command. You must recover quickly—once more
on foot, and we shall find you work enough to warm
you! And now, sir, we shall leave you—Monsieur
le Médecin here frowns on us even now for trespassing
so long on his dominion. To horse, fair
sirs, to horse—and let us see if Noirmoutier will
drive us, as he boasts to have done yesterday.
Allons! to horse!”
And with his glittering cortège the gay prince
passed onward, equally prepared to fight or to intrigue,
in that strange spirit of levity which was
no less the characteristic of these civil wars of
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France than stern fanaticism had been that of the
more sanguinary struggles in my native land.
The surgeon lingered behind for a moment to
whisper some directions to old Martin, who, with
affectionate pertinacity, had constituted himself at
once my squire of the body and sick-nurse—poured
some dark-coloured fluid into a goblet of tisanne
which stood beside my pillow—pressed my hand
with an assurance that I should be a new man on
the morrow, and left the chamber. I could hear
the scabbard of his rapier rattling on every step as
he descended, and the clatter of his horse's hoofs
as he galloped away to join the general and his
mercurial train, probably with the avowed intention
of balancing the cure of one wounded man by
putting a dozen others hors de combat. After they
had all departed, my head at once became more
clear—my memory of events returned in nearly
its accustomed power, and with my memory an
all-engrossing desire to learn my fate—the fate of
Isabel.
“Martin,” I whispered, in a low hoarse note,
“come hither! I know that they have charged
you to keep me in ignorance and in quiet; but
I—I charge you, by the love you bear me—as you
would wish to see brighter and better days in company
with me—I charge you, tell me all! How
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came I hither?—how long since?—where is the
Lady Isabel?”
“God be merciful to him!” I heard the old man
mutter to himself; “the fit is on him again; the
fever has settled on his brain.”
I saw at once that he knew nothing of what had
passed—I saw at once that Isabel was lost to me.
Yet, sudden as was the shock, I was calm—I was
determined to be calm—I was determined to live—
to recover speedily, that speedily I might devote
myself to the rescue of her for whom alone I cared
to live at all.
“You think me mad,” I continued, after a moment's
pause, and in more composed and natural
tones; “but it is not so. Listen to my words attentively,
and fulfil my bidding! Nay,” I cried,
with a raised voice, as I saw him about to interrupt
me with some trite caution—“nay, I will
speak! I have been ill!—I know it—desperately
ill, and wellnigh frantic!—but now my pulse is
steady, my head cool, my senses perfect. I see
my mother's picture, which you, I know not how,
must have brought hither—I see old Hector, who
has likewise followed you; lastly, I see and know
yourself, whom I have long thought dead—my
oldest, my truest, and my only friend! Judge
now if I be mad, or fever-stricken. You know
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that I am neither. Then choose whether to obey my
bidding, and to be, what I have ever deemed you,
my second father, or to give up the man whom you
have followed from his childhood upward—to betray
me, at my utmost need, to utter misery—
hopeless despair!”
“Say not—oh, say not,” he cried, “such heart-rending
words! Obey? I will obey you to the
death! To your death and mine own I will obey
you—doubt me not, only doubt me not, and I will
obey you ever—ever!”
“Then hear me—I am wedded—wedded, though
none know it but the priests who made us one—
and He from whom naught can be hidden. I was
compelled to leave her, while I went on this accursed
mission—I returned—I found them tearing
her from the asylum to which she was committed.
I fell, pierced with these fatal wounds—I know no
more! Whether she be lost to me for ever—immured
from my love in that dark prison-house,
from which no mortal arm can win her; or
severed from me by the violence of ruffians, from
whose power my own good blade may rescue her—
I know not—but I will know—though all the leeches—
all the monarchs upon earth forbid it! I must
know, and shortly; or madness will relieve my
misery! Speak out, old man, and truly: hast thou
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heard aught, or canst conjecture aught of this? I
charge thee speak!”
“Nothing—be Heaven my witness—nothing!”
“Thou knowest De Charmi—him who, I doubt
not, bore me hither—hath he said naught—nor
hinted?—what, nothing?—Go, then, and speedily—
tell him that I would speak with him this night—
this very night—let him not say thee nay!—tell
him, an he refuse, that he shall pay the penalty of
his refusal, on the same hour that Harry Mornington
shall leave the bed of sickness! And, hark thee—
seek out the subaltern who was about my person
on that accursed night—do this—speedily do this,
and secretly—so wilt thou perform more to further
my well-being than all the leeches in the universe.
Away!—but hold—give me to drink—I will
lie down and try to sleep—so shall my mind be
keener and my body stronger, when they have
room for action!”
He handed the goblet to my grasp—and, with
the thirst of lingering fever and of strong excitement,
I drained it to the very dregs. It must
have contained some powerful and soothing opiate;
for scarcely had I removed it from my lips, before
a strange voluptuous dizziness seemed to steep all
my senses in forgetfulness. First I lost my sorrows
and my fierce anxiety; then I sunk into a
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sweet dreamy state of happiness—a rich confusion
of luxurious thoughts and blissful fantasies—my
ears were filled, as it seemed, even to intoxication,
with angelic harmonies; my nostrils with super-human
perfumes; my vision was bathed in a flood
of lustrous but undazzling radiance: one by one
these delicious sensations seemed to glide away
from me, yet left no void behind—all vanished,
and I was buried, for the first time in many days,
in the deep repose of unconscious and oblivious
slumber.
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CHAPTER IX.
[figure description] Page 163.[end figure description]
“In this trust,
I bear, I strive, I bow not to the dust;
That I may bring thee back no faded form,
No bosom chilled and blighted by the storm;
But all my youth's first treasures when we meet,
Making past sorrows, by communion, sweet.”
Records of Woman.
So powerful had been the soporific contained in
the beverage I had quaffed so eagerly, that, far
from being able to receive and interrogate the persons
I had summoned to attend my bedside on the
same evening, I did not awake from my heavy repose
till the sun of the succeeding day was high
in the heavens. The promise of the chirurgeon
had, moreover, been fully borne out by the improvement
I already experienced; for scarcely
had I raised my head from the pillow, before I
was sensible that the fever had entirely departed.
My pulse was cool and regular; the burning heat
of my limbs had been replaced by a healthful moisture;
and, above all, that fearful dizziness of the
brain which had come upon me on the preceding
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day, after every exertion, whether of mind or
body, how much soever I struggled against it,
had yielded to the unruffled calm which has ever
been the character of my mental habit, when undisturbed
by powerful excitement.
I was not now, as when I had awakened from
my stupor on the past morning, entirely alone;
for one of the first objects which caught my eye
was a tall casque of highly-burnished steel, with a
nodding plume, standing upon the oaken table; an
embroidered glove and sheathed sword lay beside
it. The next instant showed me that they
belonged to the Count de Charmi, who was sitting
by the hearth, playing with the long ears of my
bloodhound, as he waited till my protracted slumbers
should draw to an end.
The slight rustle I caused in changing my
position had already attracted his attention; and
his eyes were turned upon my countenance with
an expression of sincere pleasure, such as I could
hardly expect to see manifested by one who had
so lately been a stranger.
“By my faith!” he cried, “I am right glad to see
you look thus cheerily again, De Mornington!
You will be yet in the saddle time enough to share
the honours of this most ennobling war.” And the
young man laughed with an air of reckless
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contempt, as though the very idea that citizens and
burghers should presume to wield the weapons of
a soldier were in itself absurd. “How fare you
now?” he continued; “your wounds are healing,
as old Martin tells us, and your eye, this morning,
looks almost as brightly as its wont; yet is your
brow grave—your countenance downcast. Your
good old servant told me, too, last night, that you
would speak with me on matters of great import.
Say, is there aught in which I can assist you? If
it be so, I do beseech you to command me. I am
not—I assure you, sir, I am not one to proffer
services to every new acquaintance, nor to make
vaunts which I intend not to perform; but you, I
know not how it is, have won our hearts. Nor is
there in our ranks a common trooper but would
support your honour with his life. Contrary to
my allegiance or my good fame I know you never
will require me to act; and bating these, there is
nothing that man can do but I will do it.”
“There is no need,” I replied, more cheerfully
than I had spoken before, for sympathy is ever a
sure key to the affections—“there is no need of
such a pledge, Monsieur de Charmi; nor am I
about to ask aught at your hands, save some slight
information concerning subjects the nearest to my
heart. I do beseech you to deal with me plainly
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and freely in this matter, as you would yourself
be dealt with by another. And, firstly, saw you
aught of a lady, or heard you aught from the
soldiers, on the night when I received my wounds
at St. Benedict aux Layes?”
“You forget, sir, I imagine,” was the prompt
reply, “that I was left in command of the rear-guard
on that unlucky evening, and halted, according
to orders, at Bar le Duc. When I arrived
the next forenoon, I found you senseless in the
hostelry, under the hands of the leech; and the regiment
which had marched with you, in arms to
avenge your injury on all and sundry. But to reply
directly to your query, I have seen nothing of any
lady, nor, I fear me much, have the troops heard
any thing concerning her. I have, however,
brought with me the orderly who accompanied
you to the convent; he, perhaps, may give you
some satisfaction.”
“By all means let him enter,” I replied; “at the
worst, it will relieve me of a fierce and gnawing
anxiety: but I foresee already that all is lost.”
He quitted the chamber for an instant; and, before
I should have deemed it possible, returned
with a young non-commissioned officer, whom I at
once recollected for him to whose hand I had flung
Bayard's rein at the convent-gate, some ten
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minutes before my accident. I addressed him at once
by name, well aware that nothing is more flattering
to an inferior than to be remembered by one
placed far above him; thanked him for the ready
aid he had afforded me, as I had since learned; and
desired him to recite briefly all that had occurred,
from the moment of my leaving him at the
avenue to the period of De Charmi's arrival with
the remainder of the troops. I had, it is true, little
expectation of discovering any thing satisfactory;
it was already nearly certain that the villains had
succeeded in their purpose: yet I listened as he
spoke; I weighed his words, and watched his
features with the keenest scrutiny—to the double
intent of detecting him, should he attempt the
slightest equivocation, and of learning more surely
from his manner than from his language his own
impressions on the subject.
“I had,” he said, “ridden off very sharply on
leaving you, being somewhat weary, and anxious
to rejoin my comrades. I had already passed the
brow of the little hillock whereon you had posted the
third sentinel, and was descending with more caution
into the deep woody glen beyond it, when methought
I heard a cry, as if of a female. I paused,
and, listening attentively, distinctly caught the
sounds again; for the night was, as you will
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recollect, unusually calm and silent. I turned my horse's
head at once, with the intention of returning to
ascertain the cause, as I more than suspected that
it might arise from some license of our men; but I
had barely time to draw the reins, before a shout—
your shout I fancied it to be, monsieur—came
up the wind, followed by a pistol-shot. I did
not pause or hesitate for a moment; I fastened
your horse to a tree, and galloped fiercely back to
the convent, calling on every sentry, as I passed
his station, to follow; so that, by the time of my
reaching the turn of the road at which I had left
you, we were four armed men. Three minutes
could not have elapsed from the first alarm ere
we had reached the avenue; yet in that brief
space we had heard at least a dozen shots; some,
as we imagined, of petronel or musket, rather than
of a smaller caliber, accompanied by all the tumult
of a fierce and sudden fray. As we halted, to be
sure of our direction, the front of the convent was
all in shadow and in silence, but in the windows of
the northern wing lights were glancing to and fro,
and voices sounding in uproar. We easily cleared
the low wall, galloped furiously across the meadow,
and as we wheeled around a turret, beheld
several bodies—three they were in number, as we
found afterward, and yours, monsieur, one of the
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three—stretched motionless on the trampled and
bloody grass; while a superior body of horse was
galloping from the southward to meet us. Our
petronels were levelled on the moment, and I had
barely time to beat them up again, on recognising
in the new comers the picket which had
been detailed in front upon the river-bank. Two
or three of our men immediately dismounted,
while the rest—I led them myself—made a wide
sweep round the north-western side of the meadows,
quite down to the river, hoping to cut off the
perpetrators of the crime—but in vain! The night
had suddenly become cluded, and we could
discover nothing. Ere our return a heavy detachment
had been sent down from head-quarters,
under Captain Villeroy; you had been already
conveyed to the hamlet where the troops were
posted; and four files of men slept on their arms
before the convent, with orders to seek out the
traces which must have been left by the marauders,
as soon as there should be light enough to
distinguish a hoof-track. At my own request I was
allowed to remain with the scouting-party; and,
as soon as day began to dawn, we proceeded in
open files to survey the ground. It was not long
before we found the deeply-dinted tracks, running
directly westward, of six horses. One, I
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remember well, was smaller than the rest, and had a barshoe
on one foot before. After following them a
short distance, they entered a small open grove,
or rather a large clump of trees, in which, to our
surprise, we found two horses tied to the branches.
These I at once conjectured to have belonged
to the men who had fallen, and to have been led
thus far by their comrades, lest, running loose,
they should cause their discovery and capture.
From the grove, the traces of the four remaining
riders were plainly visible, running north-westerly
down to the river-bank, which they struck at a
point at least two miles beyond the limits of the
circuit made by us on the preceding night. I do
not, however, doubt but that we must have been
within a hundred yards of the party when they
were concealed among the trees, I mentioned—
so that, had there been light enough, we must have
taken them. We could plainly see that two boats
had been secured to the roots of the trees at this
spot; one of them a light sharp-keeled skiff, the
other, as we judged from the marks on the sand,
a large flat, for the conveyance of the horses.
They had evidently been short-handed, and fearful
of pursuit; for they had left a cloak, a petronel,
a glove, and some other trifles on the bank. Further
pursuit of course could not be made, as the river
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was unfordable; nor, had it been otherwise, should
I have ventured to advance without orders from
my superior. On our return to head-quarters, the
regiment was got under arms by Colonel le Chaumont;
and we were about to march, with the
intent of crossing the river, when Monsieur de
Charmi came up with the main body, and the
marching orders were at once countermanded.
This, sir, is all I know. Ihave, however, brought
with me the glove I told you of; it is, I think, a
lady's.”
And as he spoke, he handed to me a delicate
white glove of chamois leather, curiously wrought
with silver arabesques. I knew it at a glance
for Isabel's. The die was cast, and I could
have no further doubts; all were sunk in dark
and, as it would seem, irremediable despair.
Keenly and calmly as I had listened up to this
time to his least details, my strength of mind—my
coolness, whether assumed or real—at once deserted
me; I bowed my head between my hands,
too proud, even in my mortal misery, that the eyes
of man should witness that affliction which I had
not the power to control. I could not for a moment
hesitate to give my credence to the soldier's
tale; it was too connected in its details, too probable,
and, above all, too consistent with what I knew
to be truth. There was, moreover, no faltering of
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the voice, no embarrassment of eye or manner, as
he went straight-forward to the point, although I
was reading his every motion all the time, with a
fixed eagle glance that might have well confused a
speaker even conscious of his own veracity. Had
I been one prone to deceive myself with the lingering
flatteries of hope, I could not have done so in
this instance; but such was never the habit of my
mind. Once certain of any calamity, whether impending
or already fallen, I never strove, as some
men do, to disbelieve it; on the contrary, I nerved
my soul at once to avert, to remedy, or, at worst,
to bear it bravely.
The first thing that recalled me from my
gloomy meditations was a whisper of De Charmi
to the subaltern.
“You had better leave us now; Monsieur de
Mornington is as yet weak—both mind and body.
You had better leave us, but wait below for
orders.”
“Not so,” I broke in suddenly; “I would ask
him a few more questions—but no,” I again interrupted
myself, “it matters not: and you are
right, De Charmi. You, sir, shall leave us for the
present: but you shall not leave my mind, I promise
you; nor shall your gallantry and quickness fail
to procure for you speedy promotion—somewhat
in the hand the while.”
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The gratified orderly received the gratuity I
tendered him, and with a bright smile and deferential
salute quitted the chamber.
“All is over, De Charmi,” I continued—“as
bright a dream as ever gladdened the heart of man
has vanished from mine with his recital. Yet
would I learn from you what are our chances of
discovering the perpetrators of this infernal villany;
for I will not deny to you that I am interested
in their recapture, almost beyond the powers
of expression. Of this will I speak to you anon.
But satisfy me now. Saw you these horses of
which he told me? Saw you the corpses? For,
God be merciful, it is most marvellous! I slew
but one before I was myself stricken to the earth;
and it would seem that no one else had reached
the scene of action ere they left it. Were there no
marks upon the housings—naught in the liveries
of the troopers by which they might be traced?”
“We have the horses with us—two heavy
Norman blacks. They were accoutred in plain
demipiques and dark serge housings; there was no
crest or bearing on any portion of their trappings;
nor did the men wear liveries. They seemed
to me banditti, or, at best, countrymen recently
pressed into service. One wore, methinks, a
leathern cassock, the other a blue cloth jerkin, with
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a corslet and buff gauntlets; both had fallen by
pistol-shots. I fear there is no clew by which you
can discover the wretches, unless it be that you
have private cause for suspicion.”
“Cause enough,” I replied, “cause enough;
but little prospect of succeeding. One question
more, and I will explain to you this mystery, on
promise of strict silence. Had neither you nor
any of the officers an interview with the Benedictine
prior?”
“Doubtless we had. He showed more sorrow
at your accident than we could well comprehend;
for though the hurts were painful, and your convalescence—
owing to your high state of fever—
slow and tedious, we have never apprehended
danger. Yet did he seem most anxious. I remember
well one expression of that most singular
and noble-looking man—`Better it would have
been for him had he lost the best limb of his body
at another time, than to have been thus crippled
now!' The remark at the time struck me as
somewhat unusual, and I earnestly pressed him
for his meaning. Once I thought he was about to
tell me, but he checked himself; questioned me
of the duration of my friendship or acquaintance
with yourself; and, when he learned that it was
but of some two days' standing, broke off abruptly.
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We left with him your titles and address, and he
assured us he would write: to what intent, or
when, he said not. And now, De Mornington,
believe me, I entreat, to be as it were your second
self. I f I can assist you, I will do so; if not, it
is ever a relief to disburden your mind to one
who will not betray you. Something, I well suppose,
I have already gathered from the incoherent
ravings of your fever. You are married—is it not
so?—and lately?”
“To an angel, De Charmi; to an angel, whom
I never may see more. Never see more!”—I
broke forth, as if challenging the bold assertion of a
third person. “By Heaven I will see—will rescue
her—and that, too, shortly; or I will lose that
which is but dross—vile rubbish in the scale when
weighed against her recovery!” I then, as shortly
as the subject would allow, related to him my
encounter with the brothers in the wood; my
rescue of the lady; my flight, escape, and marriage.
“And now,” I said, “yourself have seen
the rest. Speak, have I acted in aught wrongly or
unworthily of the name I bear, or see you aught
that we may do to further her recovery?”
“By Heaven, Mornington!” he cried, in high
tones, which yet quivered with excitement—“by
Heaven, when I first heard your trumpet-voice, and
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marked your bearing in the saddle, I knew you
for a cavalier, despite your rude disguise. When
I beheld your prompt celerity of eye, and hand,
and mandate in the field, I knew you for a general
of God's own making; but now—now—and truly do
I thank you for the knowledge—I know you for the
best and noblest gentleman your own brave country
hath to boast of. You had my good-will from
the first; lately you have possessed my sympathy
and friendship; but now you hold my veneration
and my heart. Lead on, whither or when you
will; unquestioning, undoubting, I will follow you.
Follow you, were it possible, even to disgrace.”
“Calm yourself, my friend, calm yourself,” I
replied, grasping his proffered hand; “I were
base, indeed, to doubt you, and unthankful. But
there needs not this. Naught have I done in this unhappy
matter, but what the commonest gentleman
must at once have executed; but now, what can I
do? what must be our plan of operations? I ask not,
wholly, that I would learn myself, not being overwont
to seek advice from any save my own heart—
but that I would gladly learn how our ideas
jump.”
“If it were peace,” he replied, shortly enough—
“if it were not for this cursed Fronde, which after
all is the most frivolous rebellion the world ever
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witnessed, it were easy enough. But now, Turenne,
they say, is moving from the Rhine, and
probably hath ere this overrun the districts
about Bar le Duc and St. Dizier with his Swiss
rabble; besides, there is hot fighting here; no
chance of obtaining leave of absence—”
“No chance!” I almost shouted—“no chance,
say you? I will have leave of absence ere a month
be flown, or I will at once resign my sword and my
commission!”
“To achieve your wife's deliverance by a brief
sojourn in the dungeons of Marcoussi; or, if we
take Paris, as I think we shall, perchance in the
Bastile. No, no, sir—that plan is naught. You
must win Condé's friendship—another week will
see you in the saddle. You will of course acquire
renown in every skirmish; yours is the only cavalry
we have—and you its sole commander. We
have work enough here daily—win Condé's friendship—
and when these silly jars are ended, I doubt
not we shall win her back as lightly as you lost
her: and, hear me, sir, say naught to Mazarin
about this marriage. If she be noble and an
heiress—as I hold it probable she will prove to be—
you have committed high offence in wedding her
without the monarch's signature—you will lose at
least the lands.
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“Perish the trash!” I exclaimed; “what should
I do with lands?—But you mean well, and, I believe,
judge rightly. Nothing will I do rashly—but,
hark! what mean those trumpets?”
He listened for a moment—“I deemed not it
had been so late,” he said, looking towards the
window; “yet is the sun fast verging towards the
west. It is the evening parade, and I must leave
you. Adieu!” he continued, pressing my hand
warmly—“adieu, my friend; I shall be with you
early on the morrow; keep a good heart—adieu!”
And the gay young officer left the room evidently
under strong excitement. Yet such is the buoyancy
of the national constitution, that he had not descended
five of the creaking steps ere I could hear
the burthen of some merry air which he was humming
to himself, and which, as he reached the
outer door, broke into a snatch of song.
Scarcely had the sounds of his departure died
into stillness, ere I was again disturbed by a heavy
step without, immediately followed by a short quick
stroke upon the door; I had to raise my voice a
second time before the new-comer entered,—it was
the orderly officer of the day, bearing in his hand a
large packet, addressed “à Mons. Harry Mornington,
chef d'escardron, et commandant des chevaux
légers.” It had been delivered to the soldier on duty
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at the gates, on the preceding evening, by a muffled
horseman, who had ridden off at a gallop the moment
after he had disburdened himself of the despatch,
regardless of the threatening summons of the
sentries, and even of a shot or two which were
sent after him, though without effect.
The direction of the cover was in bold and
somewhat dashing manuscript; evidently the writing
of a man, and one not literary in his habits.
I gazed on it in mute curiosity, while the subaltern
was delivering some complimentary message from
the troopers, unwilling to open it in the presence
of a witness, yet to the last degree anxious to know
the contents. I thought the man would never have
finished his preamble; and then, when that was
ended, he had a long story to tell—illustrative of
his own attention and activity—of my good horse
Bayard, who, it seems, had been committed to his
keeping since my illness—and of a charger which
had been sent by the equerry of the king, as a
token of the royal approbation, to my somewhat
scanty stables. At last, with a profusion of hopes,
and fears, and wishes, he withdrew. I crawled out
of my pallet-bed—secured the door, by drawing
one and another massive bolt across it—severed the
band of floss silk which secured the packet with the
edge of my dagger—a weapon never far distant
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from my hand—tore off a blank wrapper—and
within it, to my almost terrified astonishment, beheld
a letter beautifully superscribed, in a small and
delicate female hand, with the one word “Harry.”
It was bound, not with flax or silk, but with a
long tress of lovely light-brown hair—I could have
sworn to the sunny gloss that played upon it amid
ten thousand—fastened in a slightly artificial knot
by a small drop of virgin wax; and on that wax
was stamped the impress of my own signet—
the ancient crest and heir-loom of my family—
with which, in default of a more fitting ring, I had
wedded my matchless Isabel. Besides the letter,
which I clutched with an eagerness hardly inferior
to that of the condemned felon snatching at his reprieve,
there was a large enclosure, endorsed on
the outside covering “Isabel—le bon temps viendra.”
This, however, for the moment, fell unnoticed
from my hand—for eye and heart alike were
riveted upon the smaller letter. With trembling
fingers I broke the wax, and read as follows:—
CHAPTER IX.
“Harry—my beloved Harry—
“They have prevailed, and we are torn asunder—
when, oh when to meet? They dragged me from
your bleeding body—they bound me on a horse—
they bore me—Oh God! Oh God!—that I should
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not dare to tell you whither!—No, my beloved, I dare
not—such is the sole condition on which the miserable
satisfaction of writing these few lines is granted.
They tell me that your wounds are slight—that you
will have regained your strength ere this shall reach
you; they tell me that you will again be in the
field of glory: but they tell me that I shall never
see you more—they tell me that death—your death,
Harry, shall follow on the slightest effort at my
rescue—and they tell me truly! You know not—
oh! may you never know—the boundless wickedness,
the wellnigh boundless power of my persecutor.
Never have I done aught, planned aught, for my
deliverance, but it has been revealed to him, and
blighted in the very bud, almost before I had conceived
it. And he—this fearful and malignant being—
he has sworn an oath, which I have never
heard him break, or bend from, that you shall not
have well put foot in stirrup to search out my prison,
ere the assassin's knife shall reach your heart! Oh,
my beloved, mine is a hard, a miserable duty—my
heart overflowing with deep unutterable love, I am
compelled to hide myself from him whom to see
were the very acme of imagined happiness. I am
compelled—I am compelled to pray you, as you
value—not life, for what noble spirit ever thinks of
life save as of a loan that must be one day repaid—
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but as you value all that is more dear than life—all
that ennobles it, and makes it holy—as you value
your ancestral name—your own untarnished fame—
ay! and—I will write it, though it chokeme—as
you value me, I do beseech you to forget—Oh never!
never! think not I meant to say forget me!—
but to forego me—to be patient—to bear, as I now
bear, in silence—and in hope! Were there a
chance—a possibility, however slight or desperate,
of your success—I would write, Gird yourself up
for the task like a warrior for the battle-field—and
follow me to the very ends of the earth; but now I
know that so to do could not in aught aid our hopes—
aid them, did I say!—aid!—them!it would sever
them for ever by the pitiless steel—it would bury
them in the darkness of an untimely tomb.
“You will blame me—I know that you will blame
and scorn my cautions, as vain and woman-fears—
that you will not comprehend my feelings—that you
will doubt—oh never doubt—your Isabel; but if it
must be so, blame—doubt—desert—despise me—
but oh, in this obey my bidding. Spies are about
your table and your bed—spies who note your every
action, hear perhaps your every word—spies as unscrupulous
as they are crafty. It is not that I fear
your safety in the open field—my brave and beautiful—
it is not that I doubt your prowess. No, God
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is my judge and witness—dearly as I regard your
safety—wildly as my heart might throb and tremble—
even now, in the open field, I would commit
my fortunes and your life to your own keeping; I
would send you forth, if it were a contest hand
to hand and sword to sword with mine oppressor,
I would send you forth—anxious, indeed, and
spirit-shaken—yet in all hope, all confidence, all
joy! But now no contest will be offered, no open
weapon brandished at your head: poison will
lurk around your cup—knives will be at your
throat when you the least expect them. Promise
me then—promise me, beloved Harry, that you will
make no vain and frantic effort; that you will not,
like the silly fly, entangle yourself yet deeper in the
maze by your own useless efforts—that you will not
madly dash away the single barrier that parts you
from destruction! Think—reflect one moment,
what it must cost a girl, an ardent and warmhearted
girl—ay, Harry, and a wife, a newly-wedded
wife, to write these maddening words! Reflect
on this, and will you not believe that I possess
some deep and certain cause for my dark warnings?
I do—I do! Certain is the fate to you—
certain the misery—the heart-break—and worse,
oh worse, a thousand times, the foul pollution—
which, you alive, they dare not heap upon me—from
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which the name of wife—the name, if not the hand,
of Mornington can yet protect me. All this will
follow if you stir but one pace's length to aid me.
“I know it has been said, `Who would win greatly
must venture greatly;' but so it is not now. Oh!
by the love that you bear me, by the friends whom
you have lost--nearer, perhaps, yet not more dear
than she who weeps as she addresses you”—and
the paper, blistered and soiled with the big drops,
spoke volumes for her truth—“by all your hopes
on earth or after the dark separation, I do conjure
you, be prudent and be patient; and, above all
things, neglect not nor scorn my caution.
“Think you that I have any deeper wish, any
more cherished feeling in the tabernacle of my
inmost heart, than the one desire to be yours—
wholly, inseparably, eternally yours? And think
you, that if action, enterprise, peril however
deadly, agonies however terrible, could bring us
once more together—think you that I would shun to
expose myself—think you that I would shrink from
exposing even you, my better and more valued self,
to the risk of these? But I will say no more.
Harry, you will grant my sad, my wretched boon;
you will—must grant it.
“And now will I tell you of myself. I am well
in the body—ay, and I force myself even to be
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cheerful. I suffer nothing but confinement, in a
situation not of itself devoid of charms—but, oh!
what matters it to the poor bird whose bleeding
bosom throbs against the bars, whether those bars
be gilded or of a meaner metal?—nothing but confinement
and absence from you,—not even the
presence of my persecutor. I said, I force myself
to be cheerful; and I am cheerful—cheerful
and happy in a high and holy hope, a certainty
that the motto of our family will be fulfilled—
`Merci, O merci Dieu—le bon temps viendra.'
It will come—oh, believe it, Harry, believe it as I
do, and pray for it, and be happy—the good time
will come, when we shall meet again, never, I
trust, to be grieved or parted more. The good
time will come, when you shall fold to your heart
your own unchanged, unchangeable. It is in this
hope that I am cheerful; in this hope, and in the
fixed resolve—if it be the will of Him that I
shall be restored in his good day to your affections,—
that I will be restored to them, not a pale, care-worn,
prison-broken wretch, but still rich in whatever
little I may have of youth or beauty; not a
timid, aguish, and disappointed spirit, sick with
the hope deferred, but a full and buoyant soul—
buoyant with love and rapture. In this hope I
tune my long-neglected harp; I sing the old
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homemelodies of my fresh girlhood; I pore over the
poets and the philosophers of your green island,
and I love them, not that they are rich and beautiful—
and how pathetic!—but that they derived their
being from that same spot of earth in which my
Harry first saw light,—but that they speak the
same heart-language, and breathe the same proud
sentiments of chivalric piety and love, which I
have heard him utter. I have found a little song,
a simple song—written, they say, by one, like me,
imprisoned, and afar from the object of her soul's
worship. Is it not sweet,—and is it not prophetic?
I will--I will believe it:—
` 'Tis past! I wake
A captive, and alone, and far from thee,
My love and friend! yet fostering for thy sake
A quenchless hope of happiness to be;
And feeling still my woman's spirit strong
In the deep faith, which lifts from earthly wrong
A heavenward glance. I know, I know our love
Shall yet call gentle angels from above,
By its undying fervour; and prevail,
Sending a breath, as of the spring's first gale,
Through hearts now cold; and, raising its bright face,
With a free gush of sunny tears erase
The characters of anguish; in this trust
I bear, I strive, I bow not to the dust;
That I may bring thee back no faded form,
No bosom chilled, and blighted by the storm,
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But all my youth's first treasurres when we meet,
Making past sorrow, by communion, sweet.'[3]
“And now, Harry, I must say farewell,--farewell,
my own, my all-beloved. I send you that
long ringlet you admired when first we met. I
have bathed it in many tears, and kissed it, and
envied it, Harry—envied the senseless, lifeless hair;
for well I know that it will be pressed to your lips,
and worn where I should be—worn in your bosom.
And now, may all the blessings that I can devise,
or pray for, fall upon you,—so shall you be rich
indeed! May the great glorious Comforter be
with you; may He take from your heart the bitterness,
from your soul the sting; may He fill your
thoughts with patience and with hope; and, oh!
above all, may he in his own good time—when we
are weighed and found not wholly wanting—may
he bring about the accomplishment of all our hopes
in one delicious meeting. Harry, farewell; Harry,
beloved Harry! farewell; and remember—
`Merci, O Merci Dieu—le bon temps viendra.'
“Ever, ever—for ever your own
“Isabel.”
eaf136v1.n3[3] Arabella Stuart to William Seymour. Preserved to our
days by Felicia Hemans.
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CHAPTER X.
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“Guilt is its own avenger! Ancient sin
Is but the parent to a younger crime,
That must be born, in fulness of its hour,
Itself to be prolific—and its seed
Is evermore the dark unholy fiend,
Insatiate of insolence and wrong—
The single fury with a thousand names—
Phrensy, or fate, or vengeful wrath divine.”
The Agamemnon.
It would be madness to attempt the portraiture
of my feelings, as I read the fatal intelligence contained
in that wild but powerful letter,—love—
admiration—impatience—anguish—I know not
which was strongest. At first I felt inclined to
rebel against the prohibition it contained; to doubt
the justice of her conclusions; to ascribe the whole—
as she herself had written it—to her woman-fears.
Then, again, when I thought of her, as I
had seen her the last time, fearlessly protecting
with the mortal weapon my own forfeit life;
when I considered the fearful accuracy with
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which my motions had thus far been tracked out—
the unrelenting and unscrupulous malice with
which my death had been meditated, and all but
executed; when I looked upon the frequency of
opportunities for the commission of this or any
other crime, in the present confusion of parties,
and in the distracted turbulence of the whole
realm, I began to feel that I had no right to
ascribe a weak and womanish vacillation to one
whom I had seen so nobly displaying qualities the
very reverse of these, under circumstances the
most trying! I began to feel that I was, indeed,
standing on a precipice's verge, and that my only
hope of safety or success did lie in caution.
At once, therefore, I resolved that I would not
for a moment be wanting to myself; that I would
not for a moment be wanting to her who had so
wonderfully manifested the depth of her devotion
to me, by the self-denying control with which she
had bound up her feelings, and compelled herself
to silence, when a word, a syllable might have
wrought deliverance or utter desolation! I saw,
as it were intuitively, that the only game which
could be crowned with good results was one of
deep, thoughtful, and well-executed artifice. I
saw that I must both deceive and divide, ere I
could hope to conquer. The first step to such a
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result must clearly be a thorough concealment of
my own thoughts, motives, character! I would
shake off all the semblance at least, if not all the
reality, of care! I would be foremost in the feast
as in the fray! I would no longer shun the deep
carousal—for, of a surety, there is truth in wine!
I would be all things with all men! I would wind
through thorns and flowers alike—carefully, noiselessly,
stealthily as the snake; that, like the snake,
I might, when certain of my distance and of my
prey, strike once and fatally!
As I revolved these things in my mind, a doubt—
a terrible doubt crossed me!—De Charmi! Had
I not rashly, like an idiot, given full confidence,
and on the merest impulse? “De Charmi”—I
repeated his name musingly—“can it be that he
is treacherous—base—leagued with the enemy?
Fool, fool!” I cried aloud, “henceforth will I speak
nothing; no, not even to myself. Henceforth will
I watch every motion of his eye, every quiver of
his lip, every light and every shadow that plays
upon his face; henceforth will I read his very
soul. If he be false—He that knows all things,
knows that I will stab him to his lying heart—at
the court of his king; in the arms of his mistress;
at the altar of his God!”
As I moved, vehemently, on the bed, in the
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violence of my excitement, I disarranged its draperies,
and something fell to the ground with a
slight but distinct sound—it was the larger packet;
which, in the warmth of the feelings conjured up
by what I had already seen, I had forgotten. It
was not an instant before I had dragged its contents
to daylight.
“It is but fitting,” thus ran the superscription—
“it is but fitting that Harry Mornington should
learn somewhat of her early fortunes whom he
has taken to his heart. Read these, my beloved,
and you will know that, if most miserable, I am
most innocent! You will see and judge, better
than from any words of mine, how desperate is
the hope of succour from violence or rashness.
Read these, and, oh! remember!—
`Merci, O merci Dièu—le bon temps viendra.'
Will it—will it indeed come? Heretofore has
my life been one long term of sorrow. A friendless,
homeless, persecuted orphan! Oh, that the
good time would indeed come, before my spirit
shall be broken, and my body worn away by the
very weariness of wo!”
“I said that my life had been one long term of
sorrow. I—I alone, have no sweet recollections,
no hallowed memories of old home-faces—of
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happy childish hours, when tears are but as April
showers, smiling even while they fall. I have none
such. My childhood is a blank, a starless night,
with here and there a dream! There is a vision
of a mother in my soul; of a soft, beautiful, but
ever melancholy mother—of one short summer
day of love and fearless confidence. Of one
whom I called father. I say wrongly; not of himself,
but of his eyes--deep, dark, unfathomably
tender. I can see those eyes looking down upon
my infant sports with a calm and chastened affection.
I can sometimes fancy that I see them, even
now, gazing down from the far firmament, when
the hush of night is heavy over the multitudinous
world. Yet are these but vague and, perchance,
false imaginings, scarcely more distinct than the
reflections on a midnight lake. They may be
real—they may be, and probably are, but the blind
yearnings of a fanciful and affectionate spirit pining
for sympathy and love, and finding none!
“At the furthest period to which I can recur
with certainty, I was the inmate of a noble castle—
a little wretched child; the orphan niece, as I was
told, of the dark lord of that demesne. But never
did I meet even the passing attention, the slight
affectionate notice, which the coldest heart must
lavish at moments on the sole remaining image of
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a departed sister. Never was I permitted to lisp
the name of uncle. I was abandoned to the
care of menials; and even by them was rebuked,
slighted, chidden, taunted!—ay, taunted with base
blood and infamy of origin. My heartless kinsman
had three sons; one but a few months my senior;
and him—I saw him daily; not as an equal, not as
a cousin, but as a lord. The others were absent
from their father's mansion—pages in some proud
family. I will not write a name; for my object
in writing at all is to deter you from pursuit, not
to afford a clew. When I was a girl, perhaps of
thirteen years, I was sent to a convent, not as a
novice, but to receive a finished education. Though
stinted in all things else, even to miserly closeness,
in this respect money was profusely lavished.
Embroidery, painting, music, languages, dancing—
every trivial grace was to be cultivated, every
accomplishment to be acquired. Yet, with all this,
the same insults pursued me—the same harsh coldness.
My superior frowned me into silence; my
teachers instructed me in chilling, heartless negligence;
my young companions shunned me, as a
creature under the ban of infamy. I have sometimes
imagined, since, that all this was done with
a view to breaking down my spirit, to rendering
me pliable, soulless, and passionless. If so, how
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strangely have they erred who so misjudged my
character. Tenderness—kindness—could have
moulded me to aught; oppression and severity,
and the strong sense of bitter wrong, of cruelty
unmerited, have made me what I am—resolute and
firm to resist—immoveable of purpose, unless my
heart be touched, and then all softness! I grew
up a child of poetry: the secret places of my mind
were my sole storehouses of bliss; and in them I
was happy—I created, I dreamed—I became a
solitary creature of impulses and imagination.
“Time fled—and I grew in years, and in
stature, and, they said, in beauty. My companions,
who had wronged me from the first, now
hated—for they envied me; and I, whose whole
soul was a desire for affection—who had but one
wish—to love some living being who should love
me in return—grew to maturity without a friend!
“They led me back to that old mansion—and
all were altered: I was courted, flattered, cringed
to in humble admiration. I was to be the heiress
of that wide demesne—of those rich woodlands, in
which I had run almost savage as a little child; of
those fair lawns, which I had from a distance witnessed
thronged with the noble and the gay; of
those superb galleries, which I had never been
allowed to enter. I was to be the bride of my
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uncle's first-born: a dispensation had been obtained
from the pope; and, as is usual in such
cases, my will had not been consulted.
“I was called to an interview with my dark
kinsman, and positively informed of the honour
that awaited me—which I as positively declined.
My uncle was furious. He reviled me as the
child of infamy—the child, almost, of incest—his
sister's daughter, born without the sanction of the
holy church—my father a wretch, a villain, a seducer
of his own kinswoman within the prohibited
degrees. At once, shortly and impetuously, I cast
the falsehood in his teeth! Harry—it must be—it
is a falsehood. No man, however base, however
grasping, could wish to bind a child of infamy
like this to his own son! I offered to take the
veil—to submit myself to an eternal dungeon; but
never—I swore--never would I call husband the
son of him who had slandered my parents, and
robbed their child of her good name! I was remanded
to my chamber, imprisoned, half starved,
scourged. Yes, Harry--by the holy heavens that
are above us!—I, a woman, a helpless woman, was
bound and beaten like a dog, by orders of my own
mother's brother. It was their pretext that I was
mad! I was intrusted to the charge of hags—of
fiends—fiends in the shape of women. Chance
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gave me to overhear a conversation—and the secret
of my fate is here. My mother was the
eldest of her family; and by a settlement—a deed
of entail so ancient that the Salique law of France
affects it not—the descent is vested in the female
line. She was sole heiress to all the titles, lands, and
privileges of an old and noble race. My mother
wedded young, and contrary to her father's and to
her brother's consent. Her father's was withheld
from mere caprice; her brother's, from foul unnatural
avarice—for, failing that one sister and her
race, the fair inheritance would fall to him. He
forged the lie; he brought false papers—perjured
witnesses to prove their consanguinity; he broke
his sister's heart—slaying her with the sword of
her own outraged feelings, of her own murdered
reputation. My father was seen no more.
Whether he fell beneath the murderer's knife;
whether he fled beyond the sea; whether he languishes
in eternal chains—none know. I was
dragged to my uncle's dwelling; there was no
security but in my death, or in my union with his
first-born.
“The brothers returned to their father's hall
well-nurtured, courtly, beautiful, and brave! And
me—wretch that I am—they both loved me. The
elder was dark-haired, dark-eyed—but why should
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I describe them? You have seen, you have witnessed—
you well know the horrible reality. He
was grave, but passionate, and full of devoted
sentiment and rich romance, even in his gravity:
he was a man whom any girl might worship! I
know not but I—with all my resolutions, all my
vows against it—might have been wrought upon
to yield him my affections; for he was gentle—
full of the melancholy vein of poetry I loved, yet
not without its brilliancy—attentive even to devotion!
Thanks be to the Eternal, the misery of
loving him was spared me; for I learned—no
matter how—I learned, in time to save me, that
another, a gentle being buried in a living grave,
could claim him for her own. I charged him with
it—face to face, eye to eye—I charged him with
his atrocious villany! And, by that holy strength
that dwells in innocence, he quailed before me!
His swarthy cheek reddened, and his features
writhed as if with agony—yet still he persevered.
The younger—I loathed him from the first, for he
had dared to whisper guilt to me—to tempt me—
me, whom he considered as the unwilling bride of
his own brother—to tempt me to illicit love.
“When first I saw them on the lawn, methought
two nobler or more gallant gentlemen ne'er walked
the world in company. Their tones were low and
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pleasant, their eyes looked mildly on each other.
With all their faults, they were as yet brothers—
brothers in heart, as in their birthright. A brief
month had elapsed, and they were deadliest foemen.
Heart-burnings, envyings, and secret malice
had blazed out into fierce, open, and uncompromising
hate: all knew it, and all knew the miserable
but most guiltless cause.
“Again and again I implored permission to retire
to a convent, to surrender all my earthly rights,
to go forth on the wide world an outcast and a
beggar! Again and again I was denied this meed
of mercy. Had I received the veil, the convent
would have claimed my fortunes as an appanage:
had I gone forth alone, however friendless, and
however humbled, I might yet marry; I might yet
be the mother of wretches like myself, who would
in turn be claimants of their mother's heirdom.
“At length I was told in human words—by
kindred lips I was told—`To one of these my sons
must you be wedded, or you must die.'—`Then
will I die,' was my unalterable answer; and, I
doubt not, ere long the poison or the oubliette
would have brought a close to my afflictions, had
not the guilt of those most abhorred, yet most
miserable, brethren precipitated a catastrophe,
fatal alike to us and to themselves.
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“One dark and silent midnight—the midnight of
that morning on which we for the first time met—
my solitary chamber was violently entered by the
emissaries of my elder lover—foul profanation of
the word!—my elder persecutor. That wretched
girl whose end—whose terrible, but surely not unmerited,
end—you witnessed, was the foremost.
Ere I was well awakened, I was blindfolded, bound,
gagged! With the silent expedition of guilt they
arrayed me—hurried me by private ways into a
coach—two persons entered with me, and we were
whirled away as fast as the speed of horses could
move the ponderous vehicle—whither I knew not.
“In an agony of horror and dismay I listened to
catch whatever word might fall from my companions,
whose identity I could well conjecture; but for
many miles they uttered not a syllable: only by the
thick breathing of one did I know him to be a man!
On—on we went—now over smooth and level roads,
now across country—over banks and ruts—sometimes
the branches sweeping the roof and panels—
and anon the wheels imbedded in the tenacious clay,
where, as I judged, we crossed the beds of streamlets
which had resisted the severe and biting frost.
The day was already breaking—as I could discover
even through the bandage, which pressed
tightly on my eyes—when we stopped for a few
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seconds: the weary horses which had conveyed
us thus far on our frightful journey were removed;
a fresh relay was at hand, and in a few instants we
set off again, and with redoubled fury. We had
not driven far at this fierce rate, before my hands
were unfettered—my eyes and lips unbandaged!
It was as I conjectured—it was the elder who
sat beside me, with a fierce smile of triumph on his
swarthy features—and she, the tool and minister of
his atrocities! I spoke not—I moved not—I looked
not to the right or left—a stupid, dull insensibility
had fallen on me.
“I could judge from the words of that guilty
pair, for they now spoke freely and without concealment,
that they deemed all danger of pursuit
to be over. A party of armed servants, commanded
by the third and youngest of the brethren,
had escorted our flight till we had taken our relays,
and then had left us. I could see that there was
now but one armed horseman riding beside the
window.
“Suddenly we stopped with a shock and heavy
jerk—one of the horses had fallen; and ere the motion
of his fall was ended, the loud report of fire-arms
announced the cause. From a pathway,
source ten yards in front, that light-haired youth
rushed forth; he hurled the musket he had just
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discharged full at the heads of the terrified horses,
which had made a motion to dash onward; they
fell to plunging, and in an instant the carriage was
overturned. He snatched a pistol from his belt
with either hand, discharged one at the outrider,
who instantly fled into the dense forest, and escaped;
then, as his brother dashed the door of the
carriage to atoms with his foot, and sprang out,
sword in hand, he levelled the second full at his
head, with a smile of devilish exultation—`Die,' he
shouted—`die, dog, in the moment of your triumph!
' The flash was so close that I involuntarily
closed my eyes; I heard a whistling sound rush
by me, and, with a succession of the wildest yells,
that miserable girl fell forward, and dragged me to
the bottom of the coach. She clasped me with
her convulsed arms—she tore my very garments
with her teeth—her hot blood streamed over me!
Oh Heaven! Heaven!—I know not how I held my
reason—yet I did hold it; and all the time I heard
the shivering clash of their swords, and the stamping
of their feet upon the frozen soil. I heard the
quick clang of a horse's hoof as you drew nigh—
and struggled violently to get loose, but I could not.
Though speechless, and convulsed, and evidently
in her last agony, she still held me with a gripe
of steel. Suddenly her grasp relaxed—she was
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stone dead. I extricated myself, tottered out of
the fatal carriage—beheld the kindred corpses, and
a stranger gazing on those corpses—a stranger now
no longer—I fainted—Harry, you only know the
rest!
“It was on the third night from your departure—
I had not yet retired to my couch, though it was
already two hours past midnight, for you had
promised me—and well I knew you would perform
that promise, cost you what it might—you had
promised to return on the third night. I sat by the
window, gazing out upon the moonlight scenery;
the air was beautifully calm and clear, and the
night wonderfully silent; I could hear the rushing
of the distant Marne in every lull of the light
breeze. Suddenly methought I heard a stealthy
footstep beneath the window—I listened—it was
not repeated. For a moment, I thought of flight,
or of calling for assistance, but an instant's reflection
reasoned me into security—fatal security!
At this moment the shrill note of a trumpet
came to my ear from a distance—I gazed steadily
to the road by which I knew you must return—
I saw your squadron reach the summit of the
hill—their steel caps glancing one by one as they
crossed the brow, and sinking into obscurity as they
entered the shadow of the orchards; I could even
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mark the heavy onward trampling of the march;
I missed them amid the low roofs of the hamlet;
I lost the sound of their advance!—my breath
came thick—my eyes were filled with tears—my
heart was too full for my bosom. I was then safe,
indeed safe!—I had scarcely nurtured such a hope;
I had felt throughout the day a deep oppression on
my spirits—an overshadowing presentiment of evil
had weighed me down—yet now all, all was forgotten!
I breathed a prayer of thankfulness to
Him that is above; I looked forth again upon the
night, and I saw a little company of horsemen
emerge from the village, and ride briskly down the
moonlit slope. Filled, almost to choking, with gratitude
and love, I flung the casement open, and
leaned out to mark your coming; I saw you reach
the avenue—I lost you as you entered it—I
leaned yet farther out—at that moment—that very
moment of intense pleasure—the tall frame-work
of a ladder rose suddenly between me and the light,
and, ere I could spring back into the apartment,
fell with a jarring sound against the sculptured
window-sill. Rapidly as I darted towards the
lamp, with the hope of extinguishing it, and so escaping
in the gloom—more rapidly had three ruffians
scaled the ladder; they seized me ere I could
reach the door, and—though I screamed and
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struggled with almost superhuman power—forced me
through the narrow aperture, and bore me down
the steps. One of the party was left watching the
door within, to prevent rescue from that way ere
his comrades could descend. I knew that aid was
close at hand—I shrieked your name, and, not to
my astonishment, you came; your shot struck down
one of the party—they were taken by surprise—
the ladder fell, leaving the ruffian within entrapped
in his own snare. I saw you rush forward—oh
God! I saw you fall—I saw that foul assassin rear
his coward blade to pierce you—then—all glory be
to Him who gave me power!—I snatched the pistol
that had dropped from your hand—I stood over
you—and he—dastardly no less than cruel—he
cowered before me. It was but a second ere they
tore me from my station, and the weapon was discharged
in vain; but that second was your safety,
for, on either hand, the clash of stirrups and the
shouts of your followers came loud and near. At
this critical moment, the wretch within called to
his master to rear up the ladder for his escape—he
was answered by a short and sullen oath. As he
saw them mount to fly, he fired—first his musket,
and then both his pistols—in the despair of vengeance,
at his own treacherous companions; the
ball from the last weapon grazed the face of my
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persecutor, who had bound me before him on his
horse; with a savage execration he turned in his
saddle, levelled his own carabine with deliberate
aim—called on his men to fire! I saw the miserable
victim plunge headlong from the window!—I
heard the soft, dull sound of his fall!—and the
whole party dashed away, bearing me with them,
at the top of their horses' speed. We paused for
a moment or two in a clump of trees, I know not
wherefore, for the night had become gloomy and
overcast—yet I heard the jingling of armour, and
the tread of managed chargers sweeping around our
hiding-place. I raised my voice to cry aloud for
succour; but in a moment, ere one tone had found
its way to the air of heaven, a scarf was forced
into my mouth, and folded over my head, close—
almost to suffocation.
My tale of wo is ended—I cannot, dare not
write another word. Seek me not, Harry—
seek me not now—I do beseech you, even if you
shrink not aghast from the idea of reclaiming
one who would be but a reproach to your good
name!—Of all things, seek me not where first
we met—that, that, indeed, were sure destruction!
I am not there—I am not in that horrible vicinity.
Would, oh would that I dared reveal to you
my dwelling-place!—would that I dared reveal to
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you the means by which you will receive this letter!
But I am bound—bound by a fearful oath,
never, by word or deed, by sign or letter, to reveal
or hint the place of my concealment—the names
of my tormentors. I swore it, Harry, with a bursting
heart and burning brain—I swore it by the
bones of my mother—by my love for you—by my
hopes of heaven hereafter—by the life of Him who
died that we might live! I swore it—and wherefore?—
that you might be safe, my beloved, from
the dagger or the bowl. They dare not break
their faith with me in this—I know they dare not—
but how, I may not tell you. Be you prudent
and cautious; seem to the world—seem—but oh,
let it be but seeming—seem to have forgotten, even
while you most remember, your own Isabel. Gird
yourself up with the armour of cautiousness and
craft—so, and so only, may we meet again! Oh
that I could see you, my beloved,—oh that I could
look upon your lordly brow, and hear your blessed
voice—oh that I could hold you in my arms, were
it but for one short hour, though death itself should
follow! Would, oh would we were together—together
even in the tomb—for the tomb knows no
further separation!”
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CHAPTER XI.
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“Bacchus, ever fair and young,
Drinking joys did first ordain;
Bacchus' blessings are a treasure,
Drinking is the soldier's pleasure.
Rich the treasure—
Sweet the pleasure—
Sweet is pleasure after pain.”
Alexander's Feast.
It was about a fortnight after the receipt of
these letters--a fortnight during which, although
nothing of import had occurred, I had completely
regained my strength, and had so far, at least, matured
my plans of future action as to be thoroughly
master of my mind and conduct—that I was summoned
late in the evening to a council of war at
the quarters of the commander-in-chief. I had on
the preceding day resumed the command of my
troops, who were quartered somewhat in advance
of our lines, in such places of shelter as could be
found between St. Germains and the bridge of
Charenton. They had been almost incessantly
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engaged since the formation of the blockade, being
the only corps of cavalry attached to the royal
army, in covering the advances of the infantry, in
patrolling the ground, and, above all, in cutting off
convoys of cattle and provision, to introduce
which to the beleaguered city was the continual
aim of the Frondeurs. The men were nevertheless
in high spirits, and were gradually acquiring a
very respectable degree of discipline; while the
horses, considering the harassing nature of the
service, were in good condition, and fit for action.
I had just returned from visiting the outposts, and
had in the afternoon repelled, in a brilliant charge,
a sally intended to cover the entrance of a considerable
number of wagons laden with stores of
all kinds, when the summons was delivered to me,
with a further injunction to make no long tarrying,
as the council was already assembled. I did not,
therefore, even dismount from my horse, much less
pause to make any alteration in my dress, but rode
directly to the quarters of the prince. It was
already quite dark, but there were collected about
the door a score or two of grooms and lackeys,
besides the sentinels on duty, with lanterns and
flambeaux, by the light of which they were leading
to and fro about a dozen chargers fully caparisoned
for war. Throwing my rein to one of
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these fellows, I entered at once the chamber
wherein the council was debating. It must be
observed that the court had quitted Paris at a
most inclement season, and at so short a notice
that not only the army, but the leaders, and even
the royal family itself, were in want of all the
common conveniences of life. The palace of St.
Germains was not half large enough to accommodate
those who had a claim to quarters in the royal
residence, in right of birth or station. Notwithstanding
this, however, the Prince of Condé was
undoubtedly one to whom, under any circumstances,
the best apartments must have been tendered;
but he was too old a soldier, and too good
a general, not to be aware that a leader, in order
to share the affections, must also share the hardships
of his soldiery. He had, in the present instance,
taken up his residence in an old rambling
métairie, which might have originally belonged to
some small proprietor, but which had long been
used only as the abode of the bailiff, who continued
to manage the demesnes. This rude dwelling had
been hastily and imperfectly put in order for the
reception of the prince and his suite. The large
kitchen had been converted into a hall of entrance;
the walls were hung with splendid arms, and rich
mantles of fur and velvet; in the corners stood
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several stands of regimental colours; and on a
slab against the wall lay, in splendid confusion,
plumed caps and glittering helmets, riding-cloaks,
spurs, and swords, as they had been laid aside by
the officers who composed the council. Several
esquires of the body, and gentlemen—some in civil
attire, but more in undress uniforms or armour—
lounged round the ample chimney, in which was
blazing a tremendous fire, rendered not a little
acceptable by the unwonted severity of the season.
Opposite to this glowing pile, and in the full
glare of its red light, two halberdiers of the Swiss
guard stalked to and fro, their bright head-pieces,
massive partisans, and long beards offering a
strange contrast to the superb freshness of the silk
and embroidery which adorned their habits. I
passed without hesitation or delay through this
apartment, receiving the whispered greetings of
several among the officers, and the silent salute of
the guards, into the inner chamber, which had been
originally the saloon of the building. A dozen
lights of common tallow were flaring and streaming
from candlesticks of massive silver; and a
covering of Genoa velvet had been spread over a
table of unpolished deal, supported by rough trivets.
Throughout the whole room a similar mixture
of regal display and abject poverty was
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visible. The floor, of plain red bricks, was partially
covered by a three-piled Persian carpet; the chairs,
of country manufacture, were decked with damask
cushions; and, to crown the whole, the mantling
wines of Auvergnât and Sillery, which stood upon
the board among maps of the adjacent country,
plans of fortifications, muster-rolls, commissariat
accounts, and unsigned commissions, were poured
from flasks of gold and silver into old-fashioned
Flemish glasses, or mugs of the vilest earthenware.
The debate, as it would seem—if there had
indeed been one—was at an end when I entered.
The prince was seated at the upper end of the
table, in close but apparently trivial conversation
with the dukes of Châtillon and Orleans, who were
placed on his right-hand and on his left. Below
these sat a dozen gentlemen holding commissions
in the royal army, among whom I at once discovered
the maréchals de Meilleraye, de Grammont,
and de Duplessis-Praslin, who had come together
from their various posts of Lagny, Corbeil, and
St. Cloud, for the purpose of deciding on the mode
of attack for the morrow.
“You come somewhat late, Monsieur de Mornington,”
cried the prince, gayly, as I entered;
“late, too, for our council as well as for our
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supper! Seat yourself, sir,” he continued—“room
there for our gallant comrade! We are told, sir,
that we are again indebted to your activity. Gentlemen
cavaliers, a health to Monsieur Mornington—
we are his debtors; if not for our suppers to-night,
at least for to-morrow's breakfast! Ma foi,
it would be cold comfort to break one's fast on
naught save gunpowder and pike-heads. Fill up—
fill up.”
The health was drunk by acclamation; and in
five minutes all was mirth and revelry. Amid the
clang of beakers and the fun, that soon waxed
furious, I made out, however, to learn that the
movement of the Parisian army, on the preceding
day—the Marquis de Chanleu having occupied the
hamlet and bridge of Charenton with a strong force
of infantry and a tolerably well-ordered park of
artillery—had determined the commander-in-chief
on carrying the post by storm on the next morning;
as it was, in itself, a station of great importance,
commanding the junction of the Seine and Marne.
The troops destined for the assault were Chatillon's
division of veterans, the best men in the
army; Condé himself intending to occupy the
heights of St. Mandé with a strong reserve, for
the purpose of intercepting any reinforcements
which might be sent out from Paris, or preventing
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any diversion which might be attempted on the
attacking party.
“You have heard, doubtless, sir,” cried Grammont,
turning suddenly to me, “that Rochefoucauld
has joined the Frondeurs?”
“Doubtless he has; but not, perhaps, the cause.
The couplet, I confess, might almost palliate the
treason,” cried Condé: “have you heard his last,
sir?—
`To gain one smile from Longueville's lovely eyes,
I war against my king—would war against the skies.'[4]
The game is worth the candle, I confess.”
“C'est selon,” laughed out De Grammont—“I
am rather for D'Hocquincourt. `Peronne to the
fairest of the fair!' Oh, Montbazon for me!”
“Nay, but they say there is a nameless beauty,—
brighter than all or any,” chimed in De Meilleraye—
“a captive beauty of young De Chateaufort.
He entered Paris some three days since
with five hundred musketeers, two hundred head
of cattle, and a devilish pretty girl in a close-curtained
litter!”
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“How!—What, saw you her, De Meilleraye?
What like was she?—Tête Dieu! why seized you
not the convoy?”
“De Chateaufort,” said I; “is it that I am myself
unknown, or is it permitted to be ignorant of
this De Chateaufort.”
“It is not permitted, sir,” replied De Grammont,
with infinite gravity, “to be ignorant of any man
who hath a pretty damsel in a close-curtained
litter—hey, De Meilleraye?”
“Nevertheless,” cried Condé, “I fear that, in
this instance, we must pardon the young man his
crime. Yes, sir, crime,” he continued, in a tone
of affected indignation, as he saw me stare—
“what, know you not that it has been decided, long
since, in our high Parliament of wits, `That a mistake
is worse than a crime?' But, crime or blunder,
I fear, gentlemen, that we must overlook it, as I
well believe we all are guilty in the same degree!
How say you, Grammont, Duplessis—who is De
Chateaufort?”
“He is, so please your highness,” answered
Grammont, so gravely that Condé looked for a
reply—“he is a young man, with five hundred
soldiers, two hundred swine. Is it not so, De
Meilleraye?—two hundred swine and one fair
lady?”
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“A truce to jesting,” began De Meilleraye—
“Treason, monseigneur, treason,” shouted the
other; “I do beseech you call a guard for the
maréchal: we shall next have him crying, `Peace
with the Frondeurs!' ”
“In the mean time let us drink—a health to
Chateaufort's fair lady!”
After a mighty pledge had been quaffed to this
most sapient toast, the maréchal, not a little vain
of his supposed discovery, recommenced, before
any of those present had recovered their breath,—
“Monsieur de Chateaufort is third son of the
Marquis de Penthiêvre. Though why he should
have sent his youngest with his regiment I cannot
conceive, when he has two sons who have seen
service.”
“Let them go hang,” cried Condé, growing
weary of the subject—“let them go hang, the marquis
and his sons, be they three or thirty! One
cup more, and to bed: we have work for to-morrow,
gentlemen, sharp work; pray God it be successful.
Monsieur de Mornington, you will have
your men under arms one hour before the daybreak;
occupy the heights of St. Mandé with your
three regiments, and hold them till we can bring
up our infantry. Hold them, despite the devil!
De Châtillon, no bed for you to-night; you must
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march at midnight—en avant—sweep all before
you, but do not charge till daybreak; and then we
shall be there, God willing, to cover or support
you! Fill up! fill up! and then good-night!”
Excusing myself from further potations on the
score of health, and of the necessity of seeing immediately
to the movements of the cavalry, I bowed
and withdrew. In the outer hall, most of the officers,
worn out by the continual and harassing service
on which they were employed, were sleeping,
some in their chairs, some wrapped in their mantles
on the floor; and the Swiss guards themselves
were nodding as they leaned upon their rested
halberds. Without the doors a watch-fire was
blazing, and in its ruddy light the horses of the
officers were picketed, while the grooms were
slumbering or carousing by their sides, mingled
with pedlers, courtesans, and countrymen, and all
the rabble whose presence was connived at, if not
permitted, in the quarters of the royal army. As
I drew near, which I did silently and unannounced,
I thought I caught the sound of my own name; it
was repeated, and, despite of the old adage, I
stood still.
“That is a gallant horse of his, that bay,” cried
the first speaker; “will he ride him to-morrow in
the field?”
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“I judge not,” replied a second voice—it was
that of the groom to whose charge I had committed
Bayard—“this charger has had hard work
to-day.”
“And hath he others, then? Methought he
owned but one, this English officer.”
“He had but one till his return from Pont à
Mousson, when his majesty's equery sent him
another, as a reward of honour. Ventre St. Gris!
A charger of ten thousand; white as the winter's
snow, with jet-black mane and tail.”
“And he will back the white to-morrow?”
“Saint Dieu! how should I know—or if I did,
what matters it?” returned the groom. “Drink
up your eau-de-vie; and let the horses look to
themselves.”
Finding that I should hear no further, and marvelling
somewhat with myself what these inquiries
could mean, I hurried up to the fire,—
“My horse, sirrah!” I exclaimed rather shortly,
as if ignorant of all that had passed, “my horse!
why dally you?”
It was not a moment before the animal was
brought to me; but in that moment's space I cast
my eye over the circle, which had for the most
part risen to their feet at my approach, to see if I
could not detect the inquirer. It was not long
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before I found him, or at least one whom I concluded
to be the same. He was a dark, sallow-complexioned
man, broad-shouldered and strong
made, though somewhat undersized. He wore a
suit of common blue homespun, with a thick
riding-coat of shaggy felt thrown loosely over it,
and a huge bonnet of uncut plush pulled forward
over his eyes. There was, indeed, little or nothing
peculiar about the man, unless it were a slightly
military bearing, which was but partially disguised
by what seemed to me an affected boorishness of
manner. Yet there was something about him
which excited my attention; a sort of undefinable
resemblance to some person I had seen before,
and that, too, at no very remote period. I looked
at him steadily, and he met my fixed gaze as
firmly, and with an air of utter unconsciousness.
I could not recall time or place, yet I felt certain
that I had caught his eye before; it was a feeling,
too, that gave me some disquiet, as though I had
some lurking cause of apprehension. Nothing,
however, was to be done. I mounted my horse
and rode slowly to my private quarters, pondering
as I went on the conversation I had heard that
evening. There was indeed much food for meditation:—
the mysterious lady; the youngest son of
three leading his father's vassals; and, above all,
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the unaccountable absence of the elder brethren!
To say the least of it, there was a strange coincidence;
and I was hard set, as I rode homeward,
to discover some mode of gaining, without appearing
to desire it, more certain information on
the subject. Still, notwithstanding all this, the
countenance of the stranger was uppermost in my
mind; and the more I considered it, the more singular
did the pertinacity of his inquiries appear.
I determined, at length, though perhaps I could not
easily have explained the cause of my determination,
that I would on no account ride White Majestic—
for so my grooms had named him—on the
morrow.
“Martin,” I cried, as I entered my little dwelling,
“we shall have work to do right early! Go
find the orderlies of my three regiments forthwith,
and let them come to me at once for orders; and,
hark you! bear Monsieur Mornington's good
wishes to Colonel St. Agrêve, and ask the loan of
his black charger for to-morrow. Bayard is overdone,
and it lists me not to ride Majestic. I
await not his reply to-night; but see that a horse—
be it the black or no—be fully harnessed for the
field three hours before the daybreak. You, Martin,
if you will, shall bear my private ensign; I
hold a warrant from the prince of your
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appointment, and here I have an order on the colonel of
the first regiment for a troop-horse and housings.
See that you be well accountred, and on foot before
the hour. Perform this speedily, and then get thee
to bed at once; 'tis late already.”
In half an hour's space I had despatched the
subalterns of every regiment with marching orders;
for half an hour more I mused till my head
grew dizzy with the fruitless toil; then threw myself
upon my lowly bed, and, over-fatigued alike in
body and in spirit, slept heavily, till I was aroused
by the wild flourish of our trumpets as they
sounded the reveillé.
END OF VOL. I.
eaf136v1.n4[4] These lines were actually written by the celebrated La Rochefoucauld
on the back of a portrait of the beautiful duchess:—
Pour captiver son cœur, pour plaire à ses beaux yeux,
J'ai fait la guerre aux rois, je l'aurais faite aux dieux.
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