University of Virginia Library

LEGENDS
OF
FEUDAL DAYS.

THE FALSE LADYE.

1. CHAPTER I.

There were merriment and music in the Chateau des Tournelles
— at that time the abode of France's royalty! — music
and merriment, even from the break of day! That was a singular
age, an age of great transitions. The splendid spirit-stirring
soul of chivalry was alive yet among the nations —
yet! although fast declining, and destined soon to meet its
death-blow in the spear-thrust that hurled the noble Henry,
last victim of its wondrous system, at once from saddle and
from throne! In every art, in every usage, new science had
effected even then mighty changes; yet it was the OLD WORLD
STILL! Gunpowder, and the use of musketry and ordnance,
had introduced new topics; yet still knights spurred their
barbed chargers to the shock, still rode in complete steel
— and tilts and tournaments still mustered all the knightly
and the noble; and banquets at high noon, and balls in the
broad daylight, assembled to the board or to the dance, the
young, the beautiful, and happy.

There were merriment and music in the court, the hall, the
staircase, the saloons of state! All that France held of beautiful,
and bright, and brave, and wise, and noble, were gathered

to the presence of their king. And there were many there,
well-known and honored in those olden days; well-known and
honored ever after. The first, in person as in place, was the
great king! the proud, and chivalrous, and princely! becoming
his high station at all times and in every place; wearing his
state right gracefully and freely — the second Henry! — and at
his side young Francis, the king-dauphin; with her, the cynosure
of every heart, the star of that fair company — Scotland's
unrivalled Mary hanging upon his manly arm, and gazing up
with those soft, dovelike eyes, fraught with unutterable soul,
into her husband's face — into her husband's spirit. Brissac
was there, and Joyeuse, and Nevers; and Jarnac, the renowned
for skill in fence, and Vielleville; and the cardinal Lorraine,
and all the glorious Guises and Montmorenci, soon to be famous
as the slayer of his king, and every peer of France, and every
peerless lady.

Loud peeled the exulting symphonies; loud sang the chosen
minstrelsey — and as the gorgeous sunbeams rushed in a flood
of tinted lustre through the rich many-colored panes of the tall
windows, glancing on soft voluptuous forms and eyes that
might outdazzle their own radiance, arrayed in all the pomp
and pride of that magnificent and stately period — a more resplendent
scene could scarcely be imagined. That was a day
of rich and graceful costumes, when men and warriors thought
it no shame to be adorned in silks and velvets, with chains of
goldsmith's work about their necks, and jewels in their ears,
and on their hatbands, buttons, and buckles, and swordhilts;
and if such were the sumptuous attire of the sterner and more
solid sex, what must have been the ornature of the court ladies,
under the gentle sway of such a being as Diane de Poictiers,
the lovely mistress of the monarch, and arbitress of the soft
follies of the court?

The palace halls were decked with every fanciful variety,

some in the pomp of blazoned tapestries, with banners rustling
from the cornices above the jocund dancers, some filled with
fresh green branches, wrought into silver arbors, sweet garlands
perfuming the air, and the light half excluded or tempered
into a mild and emerald radiance by the dense foliage of the
rare exotics. Pages and ushers tripped it to and fro, clad in
the royal liveries, embroidered with the cognizance of Henry,
the fuigist salamander, bearing the choicest wines, the rarest
cates, in every interval of the surrounding dance. It would be
tedious to dwell longer on the scene; to multiply more instances
of the strange mixture, which might be witnessed everywhere,
of artificial luxury with semibarbarous rudeness — to
specify the graces of the company, the beauty of the demoiselles
and dames, the stately bearing of the warrior nobles, as
they swept back and forth in the quaint mazes of some antiquated
measure, were a task to be undertaken only by some
old chronicler, with style as curious and as quaint as the manners
he portrays in living colors. Enough for us to catch a
fleeting glimpse of the grand pageantry! to sketch with a
dashy pencil the groups which he would designate with absolute
and accurate minuteness!

But there was one among that gay assemblage, who must
not be passed over with so slight a regard, since she attracted
on that festive day, as much of wondering admiration for her
unequalled beauties as she excited sympathy, and fear, in after-days,
for her sad fortunes — but there was now no cloud upon
her radiant beauty, no dimness prophetic of approaching tears
in her large laughing eyes, no touch of melancholy thought
upon one glorious feature — Marguerite de Vaudreuil, the heiress
of a ducal fortune, the heiress of charms so surpassing, that
rank and fortune were forgotten by all who gazed upon her pure,
high brow, her dazzling glances, her seductive smile, the perfect
symmetry of her whole shape and person! Her hair, of

the darkest auburn shade, fell in a thousand ringlets, glittering
out like threads of virgin gold when a stray sunbeam touched
them, fell down her snowy neck over the shapely shoulders
and so much of a soft, heaving bosom — veined by unnumbered
azure channels, wherein the pure blood coursed so joyously —
as was displayed by the falling laces which decked her velvet
boddice. Her eyes, so quick and dazzling was their light,
almost defied description, possessing at one time the depth and
brilliance of the black, melting into the softer languor of the
blue — yet they were of the latter hue, and suited truly to the
whole style and character of her voluptuous beauty. Her form,
as has been noticed, was symmetry itself; and every movement,
every step, was fraught with natural and unstudied
grace. In sooth, she seemed almost too beautiful for mere
mortality — and so thought many a one who gazed upon her,
half drunk with that divine delirium which steeps the souls of
men who dwell too steadfastly upon such wondrous charms,
as she bounded through the labyrinth of the dance, lighter and
springier than the world-famed gazelle, or rested from the exciting
toil in panting abandonment upon some cushioned settle!
and many inquired of themselves, could it be possible that an
exterior so divine should be the tenement of a harsh, worldly
spirit — that a demeanor and an air so frank, so cordial, and
so warm, should be but the deceptive veil that hid a selfish,
cold, bad heart. Ay, many asked themselves that question on
that day, but not one answered his own question candidly or
truly — no! not one man! — for in her presence he had been
more or less than mortal, who could pronounce his sentence
unmoved by the attractions of her outward seeming.

For Marguerite de Vaudreuil had been but three short months
before affianced as the bride of the young Baron de La-Hirè
— the bravest and best of Henry's youthful nobles. It had
been a love-treaty — no matter of shrewd bartering of hearts —

no cold and worldly convenance — but the outpouring, as it
seemed, of two young spirits, each warm and worthy of the
other! — and men had envied him, and ladies had held her
more fortunate in her high conquest, than in her rank, her
riches, or her beauties; and the world had forgotten to calumniate,
or to sneer, in admiration of the young glorious pair, that
seemed so fitly mated. Three little months had passed — three
more, and they had been made one! — but in the interval
Charles de La-Hirè, obedient to his king's behest, had buckled
on his sword, and led the followers of his house to the Italian
wars. With him, scarcely less brave, and, as some thought,
yet handsomer than he, forth rode upon his first campaign, Armand
de Laguy, his own orphaned cousin, bred like a brother
on his father's hearth; and, as Charles well believed, a brother
in affection. Three little months had passed, and, in a temporary
truce, Armand de Laguy had returned alone, leading the
relics of his cousin's force, and laden with the doleful tidings
of that cousin's fall upon the field of honor. None else had
seen him die, none else had pierced so deeply into the hostile
ranks; but Armand had rushed madly on to save his noble
kinsman, and failing in the desperate attempt, had borne off his
reward in many a perilous wound. Another month, and it was
whispered far and near, that Marguerite had dried her tears
already; and that Armand de Laguy had, by his cousin's death,
succeeded, not to lands and to lordships only, but to the winning
of that dead cousin's bride. It had been whispered far
and near, and now the whisper was proved true. For on this
festive day young Armand, still pale from the effects of his exhausting
wounds, and languid from loss of blood, appeared
in public for the first time, not in the sable weeds of decent and
accustomed wo, but in the gayest garb of a successful bridegroom
— his pourpoint of rose-colored velvet strewn thickly
with seed-pearl and broideries of silver, his hose of rich white
silk, all slashed and lined with cloth of silver, his injured arm
suspended in a rare scarf of the lady's colors, and, above all,
the air of quiet confident success with which he offered, and
that lovely girl received, his intimate attentions, showed that
for once, at least, the tongue of rumor had told truth.

Therefore men gazed in wonder — and marvelled as they
gazed, and half condemned! — yet they who had been loudest
in their censure when the first whisper reached their ears of
so disloyal love, of so bold-fronted an inconstancy, now found
themselves devising many an excuse within their secret hearts
for this sad lapse of one so exquisitely fair. Henry himself
had frowned, when Armand de Laguy led forth the fair betrothed,
radiant in festive garb and decked with joyous smiles
— but the stern brow of the offended prince had smoothed itself
into a softer aspect, and the rebuff which he had determined —
but a second's space before — to give to the untimely lovers,
was frittered down into a jest before it left the lips of the repentant
speaker.

The day was well-nigh spent — the evening banquet had
been spread, and had been honored duly — and now the lamps
were lit in hall, and corridor, and bower; and merrier waxed
the mirth, and faster wheeled the dance. The company were
scattered to and fro, some wandering in the royal gardens,
which overspread at that day most of the Isle de Paris; some
played with cards or dice; some drank and revelled in the
halls; some danced unwearied in the grand saloons; some
whispered love in ladies' ears in dark sequestered bowers —
and of these last were Marguerite and Armand — a long alcove
of thick green boughs, with orange-trees between, flowering in
marble vases, and myrtles, and a thousand odorous trees, mingling
their perfumed shadows, led to a lonely bower, and there
alone, in the dim starlight — alone indeed! for they might now
be deemed as one, sat the two lovers. One fair hand of the

frail lady was clasped in the bold suitor's right, while his left
arm, unconscious of its wound, was twined about her slender
waist; her head reclined upon his shoulder, with all its rich
redundancy of ringlets floating about his neck and bosom, and
her eyes, languid and suffused, fondly turned up to meet his
passionate glances. “And can it be,” he said, in the thick
broken tones that tell of vehement passion, “and can it be that
you indeed love Armand? I fear, I fear, sweet beauty, that I,
like Charles, should be forgotten, were I, like Charles, removed;
for him thou didst love dearly, while on me never didst
thou waste thought or word.”

“Him — never, Armand, never! — by the bright stars above
us — by the great gods that hear us — I never — never did love
Charles de La-Hirè — never did love man, save thee, my noble
Armand. False girlish vanity and pique led me to toy with
him at first; now to my sorrow I confess it — and when thou
didst look coldly upon me, and seemedst to woo dark Adeline de
Courcy, a woman's vengeance stirred up my very soul, and
therefore to punish thee, whom only did I love, I well nigh
yielded up myself to torture by wedding one whom I esteemed
indeed and honored, but never thought of for one moment with
affection; wilt thou believe me, Armand?”

“Sweet angel, Marguerite!”' and he clasped her to his hot,
heaving breast, and her white arms were flung about his neck,
and their lips met in a long fiery kiss.

Just in that point of time — in that soft melting moment — a
heavy hand was laid quietly on Armand's shoulder — he started,
as the fiend sprang up, revealed before the temper of Ithuriel's
angel weapon — he started like a guilty thing from that forbidden
kiss.

A tall form stood beside him, shrouded from head to heel in
a dark riding-cloak of the Italian fashion; but there was no hat
on the stately head, nor any covering to the cold stern impassive

features. The high broad forehead as pale as sculptured
marble, with the dark chestnut curls falling off parted evenly
upon the crown — the full, fixed, steady eye, which he could
no more meet than he could gaze unscathed on the meridian
sun, the noble features, sharpened by want and suffering and
wo — were all! all those of his good cousin.

For a moment's space the three stood there in silence —
Charles de La-Hirè reaping rich vengeance from the unconquerable
consternation of the traitor! Armand de Laguy bent
almost to the earth with shame and conscious terror! and Marguerite
half dead with fear, and scarcely certain if indeed he
who stood before her were the man in his living presence,
whom she had vowed to love for ever; or if it were but the
visioned form of an indignant friend returned from the dark
grave to thunderstrike the false disturbers of his eternal rest.

“I am in time” — he said at length, in accents slow and unfaltering
as his whole air was cold and tranquil — in time to
break off this monstrous union! — Thy perjuries have been in
vain, weak man; thy lies are open to the day. He whom thou
didst betray to the Italian's dungeon — to the Italian's dagger
— as thou didst then believe and hope — stands bodily before
thee.”

A long heart-piercing shriek burst from the lips of Marguerite,
as the dread import of his speech fell on her sharpened
fears — the man whom she had loved — first loved! — for all
her previous words were false and fickle — stood at her side in
all his power and glory — and she affianced to a liar, a base
traitor — a foul murderer in his heart! — a scorn and byword
to her own sex — an object of contempt and hatred to every
noble spirit!

But at that instant Armand de Laguy's pride awoke — for he
was proud, and brave, and daring! — and he gave back the lie,
and hurled defiance in his accuser's teeth.

“Death to thy soul!” he cried; “'tis thou that liest, Charles!
Did I not see thee stretched on the bloody plain? did I not
sink beside thee, hewed down and trampled under foot, in striving
to preserve thee? And when my vassals found me, wert
thou not beside me — with thy face scarred, indeed, and mangled
beyond recognition — but with the surcoat and the arms
upon the lifeless corpse, and the sword in the cold hand? 'T is
thou that liest, man! — 't is thou that, for some base end, didst
conceal thy life, and now wouldst charge thy felonies on me;
but 't will not do, fair cousin! The king shall judge between
us! Come, lady” — and he would have taken her by the
hand, but she sprang back as though a viper would have stung
her.

“Back, traitor!” she exclaimed, in tones of the deepest loathing;
“I hate thee — spit on thee — defy thee! Base have I
been myself, and frail, and fickle; but, as I live, Charles de
La-Hirè — but as I live now, and will die right shortly — I
knew not of this villany! I did believe thee dead, as that false
murtherer swore — and — God be good to me! — I did betray
thee dead; and now have lost thee living! But for thee, Armand
de Laguy — dog! traitor! villain! knave! — dare not to
look upon me any more; dare not address me with one accent
of thy serpent-tongue! for Marguerite de Vaudreuil, fallen although
she be, and lost for ever, is not so all abandoned as,
knowing thee for what thou art, to bear with thee one second
longer — no! not though that second could redeem all the past,
and wipe out all the sin —”

“Fine words, fine words, fair mistress! but on with me thou
shalt!” — and he stretched out his arm to seize her, when, with
a perfect majesty, Charles de La-Hirè stepped in and grasped
him by the wrist, and held him for a moment there, gazing into
his eye as though he would have read his soul; then threw
him off with a force that made him stagger back ten paces before

he could regain his footing. Then, then, with all the fury
of the fiend depicted on his working lineaments, Armand unsheathed
his rapier and made a full longe, bounding forward as
he did so, right at his cousin's heart; but he was foiled again
— for with a single, and, as it seemed, slight motion of the
sheathed broadsword which he held under his cloak, Charles
de La-Hirè struck up the weapon, and sent it whirling through
the air to twenty paces' distance.

Just then there came a shout, “The king! the king!” — and,
with the words, a glare of many torches, and with his courtiers
and his guard about him, the monarch stood forth in offended
majesty.

“Ha! what means this insolent broil? What men be these
who dare draw swords within the palace precincts?”

“My sword is sheathed, sire,” answered De La-Hirè, kneeling
before the king, and laying the good weapon at his feet —
“nor has been ever drawn, save at your highness' bidding,
against your highness' foes. But I beseech you, sire, as you
love honesty and honor, and hate deceit and treason, grant me
your royal license to prove Armand de Laguy recreant, base,
traitorous, a liar, and a felon, and a murtherer, hand to hand, in
the presence of the ladies of your court, according to the law
of arms and honor!”

“Something of this we have heard already,” replied the king,
“Baron de La-Hirè. But say out, now: of what accuse you
Armand de Laguy? Show but good cause, and thy request is
granted; for I have not forgot your good deeds in my cause
against our rebel Savoyards and our Italian foemen. Of what
accuse you Armand de Laguy?”

“That he betrayed me, wounded, into the hands of the duke
of Parma; that he dealt with Italian bravos to compass my
assassination; that by foul lies and treacherous devices he has
trained from me my affianced bride; and last, not least, deprived

her of fair name and honor. This will I prove upon his body,
so help me God and my good sword!”

“Stand forth and answer to his charge, De Laguy — speak
out! what sayest thou?”

“I say,” answered Armand, boldly — “I say that he lies!
that he did feign his own death, for some evil ends, and did deceive
me, who would have died to succor him; that I, believing
him dead, have won from him the love of this fair lady, I admit
— but I assert that I did win it fairly, and of good right; and,
for the rest, I say he lies doubly when he asserts that she has
lost fair name or honor! This is my answer, sire; and I beseech
you grant his prayer, and let us prove our words, as gentlemen
of France, and soldiers, forthwith, by singular battle!”

“Amen!” replied the king. “The third day hence, at noon,
in the tiltyard, before our court, we do adjudge the combat —
and this fair lady be the prize of the victor! —”

“No, sire!” interposed Charles de La-Hirè, again kneeling;
but before he had the time to add a second word, Marguerite
de Vaudreuil, who had stood all the while with her hands
clasped, and her eyes riveted upon the ground, sprang forth
with a great cry.

“No! no! for God's sake! no! no! sire — great king —
good gentleman — brave knight! doom me not to a fate so
dreadful. Charles de La-Hirè is all that man can be of good,
or great, or noble; but I betrayed him, whom I deemed dead,
and he can never trust me living! Moreover, if he would take
me to his arms, base as I am and most false-hearted, he should
not; for God forbid that my dishonor should blight his noble
fame. As for the slave De Laguy — the traitor and low liar —
doom me, great monarch, to the convent or the block, but curse
me not with such contamination! for, by the heavens I swear,
and by the God that rules them, that I will die by my own
hand before I wed that serpent!”

“Be it so, fair one,” answered the king, very coldly, “be it
so; we permit thy choice — a convent or the victor's bridal bed
shall be thy doom, at thine own option! Meanwhile, your
swords, sirs: until the hour of battle ye are both under our arrest.
Jarnac, be thou godfather to Charles de La-Hirè; Nevers,
do thou like office for De Laguy.”

“By God, not I, sire!” answered the proud duke. “I hold
this man's offence so rank, his guilt so palpable, that, on my
conscience, I think your royal hangman were his best god-father!”

“Nevertheless, De Nevers, it shall be as I say! This bold
protest of thine is all-sufficient for thine honor; and it is but a
form! No words, duke! it must be as I have said! Joyeuse,
escort this lady to thy duchess; pray her accept of her as the
king's guest, until this matter be decided. The third day hence
at noon, on foot, with sword and dagger, with no arms of defence
or vantage; the principals to fight alone, until one die or
yield — and so God shield the right!”

2. CHAPTER II.

It was a clear, bright day in the early autumn, when the
royal tiltyard, on the Isle de Paris, was prepared for a deadly
conflict. The tilt-yard was a regular, oblong space, enclosed
with stout, squared palisades, and galleries for the accommodation
of spectators, immediately in the vicinity of the royal residence
of the Tournelles, a splendid Gothic structure, adorned
with all the rare and fanciful devices of that rich style of architecture.
At a short distance thence rose the tall, gray towers
of Nôtre Dame, the bells of which were tolling minutely the
dirge for a passing soul.

From one of the windows of the palace a gallery had been

constructed, hung with rich crimson tapestry, leading to a long
range of seats, cushioned and decked with arras, and guarded
by a strong party of gentlemen in the royal livery, with partisans
in their hands, and sword and dagger at the belt. At
either end of the list was a tent pitched: that at the right of
the royal gallery a plain marquee of canvass, of small size,
which had apparently seen much service, and been used in
real warfare. The curtain which formed the door of this was
lowered, so that no part of the interior could be seen from without;
but a parti-colored pennon was pitched into the ground
beside it, and a shield suspended from the palisades, emblazoned
with bearings, which all men knew to be those of Charles
Baron de La-Hirè, a renowned soldier in the late Italian wars,
and the challenger in the present conflict. The pavilion at the
left, or lower end, was of a widely-different kind — of the very
largest sort then in use, completely framed of crimson cloth,
lined with white silk, festooned and fringed with gold, and all
the curtains looped up to display a range of massive tables, covered
with snow-white damask, and loaded with two hundred
covers of pure silver! Vases of flowers and flasks of crystal
were intermixed upon the board with tankards, flagons, and
cups and urns of gold, embossed and jewelled; and behind every
seat a page was placed, clad in the colors of the counts de
Laguy. A silken curtain concealed the entrance of an inner
tent, wherein the count awaited the signal that should call him
to the lists.

Strange and indecent as such an accompaniment would be
deemed now-a-days to a solemn, mortal conflict, it was then
deemed neither singular nor monstrous; and in this gay pavilion
Armand de Laguy, the challenged in the coming duel, had
summoned all the nobles of the court to feast with him, after he
should have slain — so confident was he of victory — his cousin
and accuser, Charles Baron de La-Hirè.

The entrances of the tiltyard were guarded by a detachment
of the king's sergeants, sheathed cap-à-pie in steel, with shouldered
arquebuses and matches ready lighted. The lists were
strewn with sawdust, and hung completely with black serge,
save where the royal gallery afforded a strange contrast by its
rich decorations to the ghastly draperies of the battle-ground.
One other object only remains to be noticed: it was a huge
block of black oak, dinted in many places as if by the edge of
a sharp weapon, and stained with plashes of dark gore. Beside
this frightful emblem stood a tall, muscular, gray-headed man,
dressed in a leathern frock and apron, stained like the block
with many a gout of blood, bare-headed and bare-armed, leaning
upon a huge two-handed axe, with a blade of three feet in
breadth. A little way aloof from these was placed a chair,
wherein a monk was seated — a very aged man, with a bald
head and beard as white as snow — telling his beads in silence
until his ministry should be required.

The space around the lists and all the seats were crowded
well-nigh to suffocation by thousands of anxious and attentive
spectators; and many an eye was turned to watch the royal
seats, which were yet vacant, but which it was well known
would be occupied before the trumpet should sound for the onset.
The sun was now nearly at the meridian, and the expectation
of the crowd was at its height, when the passing-bell
ceased ringing, and was immediately succeeded by the accustomed
peal, announcing the hour of high noon. Within a moment
or two, a bustle was observed among the gentlemen-pensioners;
then a page or two entered the royal seats, and, after
looking about them for a moment, again retired. Another pause
of profound expectation, and then a long, loud blast of trumpets
followed from the interior of the royal residence; nearer it rang
and nearer, till the loud symphonies filled every ear and thrilled
to the core of every heart: and then the king — the dignified

and noble Henry — entered with all his glittering court, princes,
and dukes, and peers, and ladies of high birth and matchless
beauty, and took their seats amid the thundering acclamations
of the people, to witness the dread scene that was about to
follow, of wounds, and blood, and butchery!

All were arrayed in the most gorgeous splendor — all except
one, a girl of charms unrivalled (although she seemed plunged
in the deepest agony of grief) by the seductive beauties of the
gayest. Her bright, redundant auburn hair was all dishevelled;
her long, dark eyelashes were pencilled in distinct relief against
the marble pallor of her colorless cheeks; her rich and rounded
form was veiled, but not concealed, by a dress of the coarsest
serge, black as the robes of night, and thereby contrasting more
the exquisite fairness of her complexion. On her all eyes
were fixed — some with disgust, some with contempt, others
with pity, sympathy, and even admiration. That girl was Marguerite
de Vaudreuil — betrothed to either combatant; the betrayed
herself, and the betrayer; rejected by the man whose
memory, when she believed him dead, she had herself deserted;
rejecting, in her turn, and absolutely loathing him whose
falsehood had betrayed her into the commission of a yet deeper
treason — Marguerite de Vaudreuil, lately the admired of all
beholders, now the prize of two kindred swordsmen, without
an option save that between the bed of a man she hated and
the lifelong seclusion of the convent.

The king was seated; the trumpets flourished once again,
and at the signal the curtain was withdrawn from the tent-door
of the challenger, and Charles de La-Hirè stepped calmly out
on the arena, followed by his god-father, De Jarnac, bearing
two double-edged swords of great length and weight, and two
broad-bladed poniards. Charles de La-Hirè was very pale
and sallow, as if from ill health or from long confinement, but
his step was firm and elastic, and his air perfectly unmoved

and tranquil. A slight flush rose to his pale cheek as he was
greeted by an enthusiastic cheer from the people, to whom his
fame in the wars of Italy had much endeared him; but the
flush was transient, and in a moment he was as pale and cold
as before the shout which hailed his entrance. He was clad
very plainly in a dark, morone-colored pourpoint, with vest,
trunk-hose, and nether socks of black-silk netting, displaying to
admiration the outlines of his lithe and sinewy frame. De Jarnac,
his godfather, on the contrary, was very foppishly attired
with an abundance of fluttering tags, and ruffles of rich lace,
and feathers in his velvet cap.

These two had scarcely stood a moment in the lists, before,
from the opposite pavilion, De Laguy and the duke de Nevers
issued, the latter bearing, like De Jarnac, a pair of swords and
daggers. It was observed, however, that the weapons of De
Laguy were narrow, three-cornered rapier-blades and Italian
stilettoes; and it was well understood that on the choice of the
weapons depended much the result of the encounter — De Laguy
being renowned above any gentleman in the French court
for his skill in the science of defence, as practised by the Italian
masters; while his antagonist was known to excel in
strength and skill in the management of all downright soldierly
weapons, in coolness, in decision, presence of mind, and calm,
self-sustained valor, rather than in sleight and dexterity. Armand
de Laguy was dressed sumptuously — in the same garb,
indeed, which he had worn at the festival whereon the strife
arose which now was on the point of being terminated, and for
ever!

A few moments were spent in deliberation between the god-fathers
of the combatants, and then it was proclaimed by De
Jarnac that “the wind and sun having been equally divided
between the two swordsmen, their places were assigned, and
that it remained only to decide upon the choice of the weapons:

that the choice should be regulated by a throw of the dice, and
that with the weapons so chosen they should fight until one or
other should be hors de combat; but that in case that either
weapon should be bent or broken, the seconds should cry,
`Hold!' and recourse be had to the other swords; the use of
the poniard to be optional, as it was to be used only for parrying,
and not for striking; that either combatant striking a blow
or thrusting after the utterance of the word `hold,' or using the
dagger to inflict a wound, should be dragged to the block and
die the death of a felon!”

This proclamation made, dice were produced, and De Nevers
winning the throw for Armand, the rapiers and stilettoes which
he had selected were produced, examined carefully, and measured,
and delivered to the kindred foemen.

It was a stern and fearful sight; for there was no bravery
nor show in their attire, nor aught chivalrous in the way of
battle. They had thrown off their coats and hats, and remained
in their shirt-sleeves and under-garments only, with napkins
bound about their brows, and their eyes fixed each on the other's
with intense and terrible malignity.

The signal was now given, and the blades were crossed,
and on the instant it was seen how fearful was the advantage
which De Laguy had gained by the choice of weapons; for it
was with the utmost difficulty that Charles de La-Hirè avoided
the incessant longes of his enemy, who, springing to and fro,
stamping, and writhing his body in every direction, never ceased
for a moment with every trick of feint, and pass, and flourish,
to thrust at limb, face, and body, easily parrying himself with
the poniard, which he held in his left hand, the less skilful
assaults of his enemy. Within five minutes the blood had been
drawn in as many different places, though the wounds were
but superficial, from the sword-arm, the face, and thigh of De
La-Hirè, while he had not as yet pricked ever so lightly his

formidable enemy. His quick eye, however, and firm, active
hand, stood him in stead, and he contrived in every instance to
turn the thrusts of Armand so far at least aside as to render
them innocuous to life. As his blood, however, ebbed away,
and as he knew that he must soon become weak from the loss
of it, De Jarnac evidently grew uneasy, and many bets were
offered that Armand would kill him without receiving so much
as a scratch himself.

And now Charles saw his peril, and determined on a fresh
line of action. Flinging away his dagger, he altered his position
rapidly, so as to bring his left hand toward De Laguy, and
made a motion with it as if to grasp his sword-hilt. He was
immediately rewarded by a longe, which drove clear through
his left arm close to the elbow-joint, but just above it. De Jarnac
turned on the instant deadly pale, for he thought all was
over; but he erred widely, for De La-Hirè had calculated well
his action and his time, and that which threatened to destroy
him proved, as he meant it, his salvation: for as quick as light,
when he felt the wound, he dropped his own rapier, and grasping
Armand's guard with his right hand, he snapped the blade
short off in his own mangled flesh, and bounded five feet backward,
with the broken fragment still sticking in his arm.

“Hold!” shouted each godfather on the instant; and at the
same time De La-Hirè exclaimed, “Give us the other swords,
give us the other swords, De Jarnac!”

The exchange was made in a moment: the stilettoes and the
broken weapons were gathered up, and the heavy horse-swords
given to the combatants, who again faced each other with equal
resolution, though now with altered fortunes. “Now, De La-Hirè,”
exclaimed De Jarnac, as he put the well-poised blade
into his friend's hand, “you managed that right gallantly and
well: now fight the quick fight, ere you shall faint from pain
and bleeding!”

And it was instantly apparent that such was indeed his intention.
His eye lightened, and he looked like an eagle about
to pounce upon his foe, as he drew up his form to its utmost
height, and whirled the long new blade about his head as
though it had been but a feather. Far less sublime and striking
was the attitude and swordmanship of De Laguy, though
he too fought gallantly and well. But at the fifth pass, feinting
at his head, Charles fetched a long and sweeping blow at his
right leg, and, striking him below the ham, divided all the tendons
with the back of the double-edged blade; then, springing
in before he fell, plunged his sword into his body, that the hilt
knocked heavily at his breast-bone, and the point came out
glittering between his shoulders! The blood flashed out from
the deep wound, from nose, and ears, and mouth, as he fell
prostrate; and Charles stood over him, leaning on his avenging
weapon, and gazing sadly into his stiffening features. “Fetch
him a priest,” exclaimed De Nevers, “for by my halydom he
will not live ten minutes!”

“If he live five,” cried the king, rising from his seat, “if he
live five, he will live long enough to die upon the block; for
he lies there a felon and convicted traitor, and by my soul he
shall die a felon's doom! But bring him a priest quickly.”

The old monk ran across the lists, and raised the head of the
dying man, and held the crucifix aloft before his glazing eyes,
and called upon him to repent and to confess, as he would have
salvation.

Faint and half-choked with blood, he faltered forth the words
— “I do — I do confess guilty — oh! doubly guilty! — Pardon,
O God! — Charles! Marguerite!” — and as the words died
on his quivering lips, he sank down, fainting with the excess
of agony.

“Ho, there! — guards, headsman!” shouted Henry; “off
with him — off with the villain to the block, before he die an

honorable death by the sword of as good a knight as ever fought
for glory!”

“Then De La-Hirè knelt down beside the dying man, and
took his hand in his own and raised it tenderly, while a faint
gleam of consciousness kindled the pallid features — “May God
as freely pardon thee as I do, O my cousin!” Then turning to
the king —

“You have admitted, sire, that I have served you faithfully
and well. Never yet have I sought reward at your
hand: let this now be my guerdon. Much have I suffered:
even thus let me not feel that my king has increased my sufferings
by consigning one of my blood to the headsman's blow.
Pardon him, sire, as I do, who have the most cause of offence;
pardon him, gracious king, as we will hope that a King higher
yet shall pardon him and us, who be all sinners in the sight of
his all-seeing eye!”

“Be it so,” answered Henry; “it never shall be said of me
that a French king refused his bravest soldier's first claim upon
his justice! Bear him to his pavilion.”

And they did bear him to his pavilion, decked as it was for
revelry and feasting; and they laid him there, ghastly, and
gashed, and gory, upon the festive board, and his blood streamed
among the choice wines, and the scent of death chilled the rich
fragrance of the flowers! An hour, and he was dead who had
invited others to triumph over his cousin's slaughter; an hour,
and the court-lackeys shamefully spoiled and plundered the
repast which had been spread for nobles!

“And now,” continued Henry, taking the hand of Marguerite,
“here is the victor's prize! Wilt have him, Marguerite? —
'fore Heaven, but he has won thee nobly! Wilt have her, De
La-Hirè? — methinks her tears and beauty may yet atone for
fickleness produced by treasons such as his who now shall
never more betray, nor lie, nor sin, for ever! —”

“Sire,” replied De La-Hirè, very firmly, “I pardon her; I
love her yet! — but I wed not dishonor!”

“He is right,” said the pale girl, “he is right, ever right and
noble; for what have such as I to do with wedlock? Fare thee
well, Charles — dear, honored Charles! The mists of this
world are clearing away from mine eyes, and I see now that I
loved thee best — thee only! Fare thee well, noble one! forget
the wretch who has so deeply wronged thee — forget me,
and be happy. For me, I shall right soon be free!”

“Not so, not so,” replied King Henry, misunderstanding her
meaning; “not so, for I have sworn it, and though I may pity
thee, I may not be forsworn. To-morrow thou must to a convent,
there to abide for ever!”

“And that will not be long,” answered the girl, a gleam of
her old pride and impetuosity lighting up her fair features.

“By Heaven, I say for ever!” cried Henry, stamping his
foot on the ground angrily.

“And I reply, not long!”

3. CHAPTER III.

A cold and dark northeaster, had swept together a host of
straggling vapors and thin lowering clouds over the French
metropolis — the course of the Seine might be traced easily
among the grotesque roofs and Gothic towers which at that day
adorned its banks, by the gray ghostly mist which seethed up
from its sluggish waters — a small fine rain was falling noiselessly,
and almost imperceptibly, by its own weight as it were,
from the surcharged and watery atmosphere — the air was
keenly cold and piercing, although the seasons had not crept
far as yet beyond the confines of the summer. The trees, for

there were many in the streets of Paris, and still more in the
fauxbourgs and gardens of the haute noblesse, were thickly
covered with white rime, as were the manes and frontlets of
the horses, the clothes, and hair, and eyebrows of the human
beings who ventured forth in spite of the inclement weather.
A sadder and more gloomy scene can scarcely be conceived
than is presented by the streets of a large city in such a time
as that I have attempted to describe. But this peculier sadness
was, on the day of which I write, augmented and exaggerated
by the continual tolling of the great bell of St. Germains Auxerrois,
replying to the iron din which arose from the gray towers
of Nôtre Dame. From an early hour of the day the people
had been congregating in the streets and about the bridges leading
to the precincts of the royal palace, the Chateau des Tournelles,
which then stood — long since obliterated almost from
the memory of men — upon the Isle de Paris, the greater part
of which was covered then with the courts, and terraces, and
gardens of that princely pile.

Strong bodies of the household troops were posted here and
there about the avenues and gates of the royal demesne, and
several large detachments of the archers of the prevôt's guard
— still called so from the arms which they had long since
ceased to carry — might be seen everywhere on duty. Yet
there were no symptoms of an émeute among the populace, nor
any signs of angry feeling or excitement in the features of the
loitering crowd, which was increasing every moment as the
day waxed toward noon. Some feeling certainly there was —
some dark and earnest interest, as might be judged from the
knit brows, clinched hands, and anxious whispers which everywhere
attended the exchange of thought throughout the concourse
— but it was by no means of an alarming or an angry
character. Grief, wonder, expectation, and a sort of half-doubtful
pity, as far as might be gathered from the words of the

passing speakers, were the more prominent ingredients of the
common feeling, which had called out so large a portion of the
city's population on a day so unsuited to any spectacle of interest.
For several hours this mob, increasing as it has been
described from hour to hour, varied but little in its character,
save that as the day wore it became more and more respectable
in the appearance of its members. At first it had been
composed almost without exception of artisans and shop-boys,
and mechanics of the lowest order, with not a few of the cheats,
bravoes, pickpockets, and similar ruffians, who then as now
formed a fraternity of no mean size in the Parisian world. As
the morning advanced, however, many of the burghers of the
city, and respectable craftsmen, might be seen among the
crowd; and a little later many of the secondary gentry and
petite noblesse, with well-dressed women and even children,
all showing the same symptoms of sad yet eager expectation.
Now, when it lacked but a few minutes of noon, long trains of
courtiers with their retinues and armed attendants, many a head
of a renowned and ancient house, many a warrior famous for
valor and for conduct might be seen threading the mazes of the
crowded thoroughfares toward the royal palace.

A double ceremony of singular and solemn nature was soon
to be enacted there — the interment of a noble soldier, slain
lately in an unjust quarrel, and the investiture of an unwilling
woman with the robes of a holy sisterhood preparatory to her
lifelong interment in that sepulchre of the living body — sepulchre
of the pining soul — the convent cloisters. Armand de
Laguy! — Marguerite de Vaudreuil!

Many circumstances had united in this matter to call forth
much excitement, much grave interest in the minds of all who
had heard tell of it! — the singular and wild romance of the
story, the furious and cruel combat which had resulted from it
— and last not least, the violent, and, as it was generally considered,

unnatural resentment of the king toward the guilty victim
who survived the ruin she had wrought.

The story was, in truth, then, but little understood. A thousand
rumors were abroad, and of course no one accurately true;
yet in each there was a share of truth, and the amount of the
whole was perhaps less wide of the mark than is usual in matters
of the kind. And thus they ran: Marguerite de Vaudreuil
had been betrothed to the youngest of France's famous warriors,
Charles de La-Hirè, who after a time fell — as it was related
by his young friend and kinsman Armand de Laguy — covered
with wounds and honor. The body had been found outstretched
beneath the survivor, who, himself desperately hurt, had alone
witnessed and in vain endeavored to prevent his cousin's slaughter.
The face of Charles de La-Hirè, as all men deemed the
corpse to be, was mangled and defaced so frightfully as to render
recognition by the features utterly hopeless; yet, from the
emblazoned surcoat which it bore, the well-known armor on
the limbs, the signet-ring upon the finger, and the accustomed
sword clinched in the dead right hand, none doubted the identity
of the body, or questioned the truth of Armand's story.

Armand de Laguy, succeeding by his cousin's death to all
his lands and lordships, returned to the metropolis, and mixed
in the gayeties of that gay period, when all the court of France
was revelling in the celebration of the union of the dauphin
with the lovely Mary Stuart, in after-days the hapless queen
of Scotland.

He wore no decent and accustomed garb of mourning. He
suffered no interval, however brief — due to decorum at least,
if not to kindly feeling — to elapse, before it was announced
that Marguerite de Vaudreuil, the dead man's late betrothed,
was instantly to wed his living cousin! Her wondrous beauty,
her all-seductive manners, her extreme youth, had in vain pleaded
against the general censure of the court — the world. Men

had frowned on her for a while, and women sneered and slandered;
but after a little while, as the novelty of the story wore
away, the indignation against her inconstancy ceased, and she
was once again installed the leader of the court's unwedded
beauties.

Suddenly, on the very eve of her intended nuptials, Charles
de La-Hirè returned! — ransomed, as it turned out, by Brissac,
from the Italian dungeons of the prince of Parma, and making
fearful charges of treason and intended murder against Armand
de Laguy. The king had commanded that the truth should be
proved by a solemn combat; had sworn to execute upon the
felon's block whichever of the two should yield or confess
falsehood; had sworn that the inconstant Marguerite — who,
on the return of De La-Hirè, had returned instantly to her former
feelings, asserting her perfect confidence in the truth of
Charles, the treachery of Armand — should either wed the victor,
or live and die the inmate of the most rigorous convent in
his realm.

The battle had been fought yesterday! Armand de Laguy
fell, mortally wounded by his wronged cousin's hand, and with
his latest breath declared his treasons, and implored pardon
from his king, his kinsman, and his God — happy to perish by
a brave man's sword, not by a headman's axe. And Marguerite,
the victor's prize — rejected by the man she had betrayed
— herself refusing, even if he were willing, to wed with him
whom she could but dishonor — had now no option save death
or the detested cloister.

And now men pitied — women wept — all frowned, and wondered,
and kept silence. That a young, vain, capricious beauty
— the pet and spoiled child from her very cradle of a gay and
luxurious court, worshipped for her charms like a second Aphrodite,
intoxicated with the love of admiration — that such a

one should be inconstant, fickle — should swerve from her fealty
to the dead — a questionable fealty always — and be won to a
rash second love by the falsehood and treasons of a man young,
and brave, and handsome — falsehood which had deceived wise
men — that such should be the course of events, men said, was
neither strange nor monstrous! It was a fault, a lapse, of
which she had been guilty — which might indeed make her
future faith suspected, which would surely justify Charles de
La-Hirè in casting back her proffered hand — but which at the
worst was venial, and deserving no such doom as the soul-chilling
cloister.

She had, they said, in no respect participated in the guilt or
shared the treacheries of Armand. On the contrary, she, the
victim of his fraud, had been the first to denounce, to spit at, to
defy him.

Moreover, it was understood that, although De La-Hirè had
refused her hand, several of equal and even higher birth than
he had offered to redeem her from the cloister by taking her to
wife of their free choice. Jarnac had claimed the beauty, and
it was whispered that the duke de Nevers had sued to Henry
vainly for the fair hand of the unwilling novice.

But the king was relentless. “Either the wife of De La-Hirè,
or the bride of God in the cloister!” was his unvarying
reply. No further answer would he give — no disclosure of
his motives would he make, even to his wisest councillors.
Some, indeed, augured that the good monarch's anger was but
feigned, and that, deeming her sufficiently punished already,
he was desirous still of forcing her to be the bride of him to
whom she had been destined, and whom she still, despite her
brief inconstancy, unquestionably worshipped in her heart; for
all men still supposed that at the last Charles would forgive
the hapless girl, and so relieve her from the living tomb that
even now seemed yawning to enclose her. But others — and

they were those who understood the best mood of France's
second Henry — vowed that the wrath was real; and felt that,
though no man could fathom the cause of his stern ire, he never
would forgive the guilty girl, whose frailty, as he swore, had
caused such strife and bloodshed.

But now it was high noon; and forth filed from the palace-gates
a long and glittering train — Henry and all his court, with
all the rank and beauty of the realm, knights, nobles, peers and
princes, damsels and dames — the pride of France and Europe.
But at the monarch's right walked one, clad in no gay attire —
pale, languid, wounded, and warworn — Charles de La-Hirè,
the victor. A sad, deep gloom o'ercast his large dark eye, and
threw a shadow over his massy forehead. His lip had forgot
to smile, his glance to lighten; yet was there no remorse, no
doubt, no wavering in his calm, noble features — only fixed, settled
sorrow. His long and waving hair of the darkest chestnut,
evenly parted on his crown, fell down on either cheek, and
flowed over the broad, plain collar of his shirt, which, decked
with no embroidery-lace, was folded back over the cape of a
plain black pourpoint, made of fine cloth indeed, but neither
laced nor passemented, nor even slashed with velvet; a broad
scarf of black taffeta supported his weapon — a heavy, double-edged,
straight broadsword — and served at the same time to
support his left arm, the sleeve of which hung open, tied in
with points of riband; his trunk-hose and nether stocks of plain
black silk, black velvet shoes, and a slouched hat, with neither
feather nor cockade, completed the suit of melancholy mourning
which he wore.

In the midst of the train was a yet sadder sight — Marguerite
de Vaudreuil, robed in the snow-white vestments of a novice,
with all her glorious ringlets flowing in loose redundance
over her shoulders and her bosom, soon to be cut close by the
fatal scissors — pale as the monumental stone, and only not as

rigid. A hard-featured, gray-headed monk supported her on
either hand; and a long train of priests swept after, with crucifix,
and rosary, and censer.

Scarcely had this strange procession issued from the great
gates of Les Tournelles — the death-bells tolling still from every
tower and steeple — before another train, gloomier yet and
sadder, filed out from the gate of the royal tiltyard, at the farther
end of which stood a superb pavilion. Sixteen black
Benedictine monks led the array, chanting the mournful Miserere.
Next behind these (strange contrast!) strode on the
grim, gaunt form, clad in his blood-stained tabard, and bearing
full displayed his broad, two-handed axe — fell emblem of his
odious calling — the public executioner of Paris. Immediately
in the rear of this dark functionary, not borne by his bold captains,
nor followed by his gallant vassals with arms reversed
and signs of martial sorrow, but ignominiously supported by
the grim-visaged ministers of the law, came on the bier of
Armand, the last count de Laguy.

Stretched in a coffin of the rudest material and construction,
with his pale visage bare, displaying still in its distorted lines
and sharpened features the agonies of mind and body which
had preceded his untimely dissolution, the bad but haughty
noble was borne to his long home in the graveyard of Nôtre
Dame. His sword, broken in twain, was laid across his breast,
his spurs had been hacked from his heels by the base cleaver
of the scullion, and his reversed escutcheon was hung above
his head.

Narrowly saved by his wronged kinsman's intercession from
dying by the headman's weapon ere yet his mortal wounds
should have let out his spirit, he was yet destined to the shame
of a dishonored sepulchre. Such was the king's decree —
alas! inexorable.

The funeral-train proceeded; the king and his court followed.

They reached the graveyard, hard beneath those
superb gray towers! — they reached the grave, in a remote and
gloomy corner, where, in unconsecrated earth, reposed the executed
felon. The priests attended not the corpse beyond the
precincts of that unholy spot; their solemn chant died mournfully
away; no rites were done, no prayers were said above
the senseless clay, but in silence was it lowered into the ready
pit — silence disturbed only by the deep, hollow sound of the
clods that fell fast and heavy on the breast of the guilty noble!
For many a day a headstone might be seen — not raised by the
kind hands of sorrowing friends, nor watered by the tears of
kinsmen, but planted there to tell of his disgraceful doom —
amid the nameless graves of the self-slain, and the recorded
resting-places of well-known thieves and felons. It was of
dark-gray freestone, and it bore these brief words — brief words,
but in that situation speaking the voice of volumes:—

Three forms stood by the grave — stood till the last clod had
been heaped upon its kindred clay, and the dark headstone
planted: Henry the king; and Charles the baron de La-Hirè;
and Marguerite de Vaudreuil.

And as the last clod was flattened down upon the dead —
after the stone was fixed — De La-Hirè crossed the grave to
the despairing girl, where she had stood gazing with a fixed,
rayless eye on the sad ceremony, and took her by the hand,
and spoke so loud that all might hear his words, while Henry
looked on calmly, but not without an air of wondering excitement:—

“Not that I did not love thee,” he said, “Marguerite! Not
that I did not pardon thee thy brief inconstancy, caused as it
was by evil arts of which we will say nothing now — since he

who plotted them hath suffered even above his merits, and is,
we trust, now pardoned! Not for these causes, nor for any of
them, have I declined thine hand thus far; but that the king
commanded, judging it in his wisdom best for both of us. Now
Armand is gone hence; and let all doubt and sorrow go hence
with him! Let all your tears, all my suspicions, be buried in
his grave for ever! I take your hand, dear Marguerite — I
take you as mine honored and loved bride — I claim you mine
for ever!”

Thus far the girl had listened to him, not blushingly, nor
with a melting eye, nor with any sign of renewed hope or rekindled
happiness in her pale features — but with cold, resolute
attention. But now she put away his hand very steadily, and
spoke with a firm, unfaltering voice.

“Be not so weak!” she said; “be not so weak, Charles de
La-Hirè — nor fancy me so vain! The weight and wisdom of
years have passed above my head since yester morning: then
was I a vain, thoughtless girl; now am I a stern, wise woman!
That I have sinned, is very true — that I have betrayed thee,
wronged thee! It may be, had you spoke pardon yesterday —
it might have been all well! It may be it had been dishonor
in you to take me to your arms; but if to do so had been dishonor
yesterday, by what is it made honor now? No! no!
Charles de La-Hirè — no! no! I had refused thee yesterday,
hadst thou been willing to redeem me, by self-sacrifice, then,
from the convent-walls; I had refused thee then, with love
warming my heart toward thee — in all honor! Force me not
to reject thee now with scorn and hatred. Nor dare to think
that Marguerite de Vaudreuil will owe to man's compassion
what she owes not to love! Peace, Charles de La-Hirè! — I
say, peace! my last words to thee have been spoken, and never
will I hear more from thee! And now, Sir King, hear thou —
may God judge between thee and me, as thou hast judged!

If I was frail and fickle, nature and God made woman weak
and credulous — but made man not wise, to deceive and ruin
her. If I sinned deeply against this baron de La-Hirè, I sinned
not knowingly, nor of premeditation! If I sinned deeply, more
deeply was I sinned against — more deeply was I left to suffer
— even hadst thou heaped no more brands upon the burning!
If to bear hopeless love — to pine with unavailing sorrow — to
repent with continual remorse — to writhe with trampled pride!
— if these things be to suffer, then, Sir King, had I enough suffered
without thy just interposition!” As she spoke, a bitter
sneer curled her lip for a moment; but as she saw Henry
again about to speak, a wilder and higher expression flashed
over all her features: her form appeared to distend, her bosom
heaved, her eye glared, her ringlets seemed to stiffen, as if instinct
with life.

“Nay!” she cried, in a voice clear as the strain of a
silver trumpet — “nay, thou shalt hear me out! And thou
didst swear yesterday I should live in a cloister-cell for ever!
and I replied to thy words then, `Not long!' I have thought
better now; and now I answer, `Never!' Lo here! lo here!
ye who have marked the doom of Armand — mark now the
doom of Marguerite! Ye who have judged the treason, mark
the doom of the traitress!”

And with the words, before any one could interfere, even
had they suspected her intentions, she raised her right hand
on high — and all then saw the quick twinkle of a weapon —
and struck herself, as it seemed, a quick, slight blow immediately
under the left bosom! It seemed a quick, slight blow!
but it had been so accurately studied — so steadily aimed and
fatally — that the keen blade, scarcely three inches long and
very slender, of the best of Milan steel, with nearly a third of
the hilt, was driven home into her very heart. She spoke no
syllable again, nor uttered any cry! — nor did a single spasm

contract her pallid features, a single convulsion distort her
shapely limbs; but she leaped forward, and fell upon her face,
quite dead, at the king's feet!”

Henry smiled not again for many a day thereafter. Charles
de La-Hirè died very old, a Carthusian monk of the strictest
order, having mourned sixty years and prayed in silence for
the sorrows and the sins of that most hapless being.

THE VASSAL'S WIFE.

1. CHAPTER I.

The early sun was shining on as beautiful a morning of the
merry month of May as ever lover dreamed or poet sang, over
a gentle pastoral scene in the sunny land of France. It was a
little winding dale between soft, sloping hills, covered with the
tenderest spring verdure, and dotted with small brakes and
thickets of hawthorn and sweet-brier; the former all powdered
over, as if by a snowstorm, with their sweet, white blossoms,
and the others exhaling their aromatic perfume from every dewspangled
bud and leaflet.

To the right hand the narrow dale widened gradually as it
took its way — worn, doubtless, in past days by the waters of
the noisy brooklet which flowed along its bottom over a bed of
many-colored pebbles, among thickets of willow, alder, and
hazel — toward a broad and beautiful valley, through which
flowed the majestic volume of a great, navigable river. To the
left it decreased in width, and ascended rapidly between steep
banks to the spring-head of the rivulet, a clear, cold well, covered
by a canopy of Gothic architecture rudely chiselled in red
sandstone.

Above this the gorge of the ravine — for into such the dell

here degenerated — was thickly overshadowed by a grove of
old tufted oak-trees, which might well have rung to the brazen
trumpets of the Roman legions, and echoed the wild war-whoops
of the barbarous Gauls in the days of the first Cæsar. Sheltered
and half-concealed by these, there stood a very small, old-fashioned
chapel, in the earliest and rudest style of Norman
architecture, exhibiting the short, massive, clustered columns
and round-headed arches of that antique style. It had never
spire or tower; but on the summit of the steep, peaked roof
there was a little crypt or vaulted canopy, supported by four
columns, and containing a bell proportioned to the dimensions
of the humble village-chapel.

The larger valley presented all the usual beauties of rural
landscape scenery at that remote and unscientific day, when
lands were principally laid down in pasture, and husbandry
consisted mainly in the tending of flocks and herds. There
were wide expanses of common ground, dotted here and there
with few arable fields now green as the pastures with their
young crops of wheat and rye; there were woodlands bright in
their new greenery, and apple-orchards, glowing with their fragrant
blossoms. There were scattered farmhouses among the
orchards; and an irregular hamlet scattered along a yellow road
in the foreground, among shadowy elm-trees, all festooned with
vines; and far off, on the farthest slope on the verge of the
horizon, the towers and pinnacles of a tall, castellated building
towered above the grand and solemn woods, which probably
composed the chase of some feudal seigneur.

The little dale which I have described was traversed by two
separate ways: one, a regular road, so far as any roads of the
fourteenth century could be called regular, and adapted for
horses and such rude vehicles as the age and the country required;
the other, a narrow, winding foot-path, following the
bends of the rivulet, which the other crossed by a picturesque

wooden bridge, at about five hundred yards below the well-head
and the chapel.

At the moment when my tale commences, the doors of the
chapel were thrown wide open, and the little bell was tinkling
with a merry chime that harmonized well with the gay aspect
of nature — the music of the rejoicing birds which were filling
the air with their glee, and the lively ripple of the stream fretting
over its pebbly bed.

As if summoned by the joyous cadence of the bells, a numerous
party was now seen coming up the foot-path by the edge
of the rivulet, apparently from the hamlet in the larger valley,
wending their way toward the chapel. It needed but a glance
to discover the occasion. It was a bridal-procession, headed
by the gray-haired village priest in full canonicals, and some
of the elders of the village.

Behind these, lightly tripped six young girls, dressed in white,
with crowns of May-flowers on their heads, and garlands of the
same woven like scarfs across their bosoms. They were all
singularly pretty, having been chosen probably for their beauty
from among their playmates: they had all the rich, dark hair,
flowing in loose ringlets down their backs; the fine, expressive,
dark eyes; the peach-like bloom on the sunny cheeks, and the
ripe, red lips, which constitute the peculiar beauty which is
almost characteristic of the south of France. Each of these
fair young beings carried on her arm a light wicker basket,
filled with the bright field-flowers of that sunny land and season
— the purple violet, the rich jonquil, and pale narcissus,
the many-colored crocuses from the mead, the primrose from
the hedgerow-bank, the lily of the valley from the cool, shadowy
grove — and strewed them, as they passed along, before
the footsteps of the bride; chanting, as they did so, in the quaint
old Gascon tongue, the bridal strain:—

After these, followed by her bridemaids, the bride stepped
daintily and demurely along, the acknowledged beauty of the
village, happy, and bright, and innocent — the young bride Marguerite.

Her hair was of the very deepest shade of brown — so dark,
that at first thought you would have deemed it black; but when
you looked again, you discovered, by the absence of the cold,
metallic gloss upon its wavy surface, and by the rich, warm
hue with which it glowed under the sunlight, what was its
true color. Her forehead was not very high, but broad and
beautifully formed, and as smooth as ivory; while her arched
eyebrows showed as black as night, and as soft and smooth as
though they had been stripes of sable Genoa velvet. Her
nose, if not absolutely faultless — for it had the slight upward
turn which was so charming in Roxabara — added an arch and
sprightly expression to features which were otherwise passive
and voluptuous rather than mirthful; but her eyes, her eyes
were wonderful — like to no eyes on earth that have ever met
my gaze, save thine, incomparable —, which still shine
upon my soul, though long unseen, and far away, never, never
to be forgotten! — not star-like, but like wells of living, loving,
languid lustrousness — brown of the deepest shade, filled with
a humid, rapturous tenderness, yet brighter than the brightest,
but with a soft, voluptuous, luminous brightness; not flashing,
not sparkling, but penetrating and imbuing the beholder with
love at once and magic light. They were fringed, too, with
lashes so long and dark, that, when her lids were lowered,
they showed like fringes of raven-hued silk against the delicate
blush of her round cheek. Her mouth, though perhaps rather
wide, was exquisitely shaped, with the arched upper lip and

full, pouting lower lip, of the color of the ripe clove-carnation,
that woos the kiss so irresistibly; with teeth as bright as
mother-of-pearl, and a breath sighing forth sweeter than Indian
summer.

Such was the face of Marguerite, the bride of that May
morning; nor was her form inferior to it. Modelled in the
fullest and roundest mould that is consistent with symmetry
and grace, her figure was the very perfection, the beau-ideal of
voluptuous, full-blown, yet youthful womanhood. The broad,
falling shoulders; the fully-developed, glowing bust, swelling
into twin hills of panting snow; the round, shapely arms, bare
to the shoulder; the graceful and elastic waist; the rich curve
of the arched hips, and the wavy outlines of her lower limbs,
suggesting, by the rustling folds of her draperies as she walked
the dewy greensward like a queen, the beauty of their unseen
symmetry: these, combined with the exquisite features, the
singular expression uniting, what would appear to be incongruous
and contradictory, much roguish archness, something that
was almost sensual in the wreathed smile, and yet withal the
most perfect modesty and innocence, rendered Marguerite, the
May-bride of Castel de Roche d'or, one of the loveliest, if not
the very loveliest creature that ever walked to church with her
affianced lover in that fair land of France.

She wore, like her bridesmaids — who, all pretty girls, were
utterly eclipsed by her radiant beauty — a May-wreath on her
head, and a large bouquet of fresh violets on the bosom of her
low-cut white dress, which was looped up at one side with
bunches of narcissus and violets, to show an under-skirt of pale
peach-colored silk, the tints of which showed faintly through
the thin draperies of her tunic; but, unlike them, she wore a
long gauze veil, intertwined with silver threads, floating down
among her luxuriant tresses, below her shapely waist.

Never was there seen in that region a lovelier, a purer, or a

happier bride. Immediately behind the bridesmaids, supported
in his turn by an equal number of tall, sinewy, well-formed
youths, dressed in their best attire, half-agricultural, half-martial,
as feudal vassals of their lord, bound to man-service in the
field, came on the stalwart bridegroom. He was a tall, athletic,
well-made man of twenty-nine or thirty years, erect as a quarter-staff,
yet showing in every motion an elastic pliability and
grace, which, although in reality the mere result of nature, appeared
to be the consequence either of innate gentility or of
long usance to the habits of the upper classes.

His complexion was that of the south — rich, sunny olive,
without a tinge of color in the clear, dark cheek; his hair black
as the raven's wing, and his eyes of that wild, fiery shade of
black which perhaps indicates a taint of Moorish blood. His
features were very regular, and very calm in their regularity,
though there was nothing pensive nor anything very grave in
their expression. It was the calmness of latent passions, not
the calmness of controlling principles — the stillness which precedes
the thunderburst, not the stillness of the subsident and
overmastered storm: for the firmly-compressed lips, the square
outlines of the hard, massive jaw, the immense muscular development
of the neck, and the deeply-indented frown between
the eyebrows, intersecting a furrow crossing the forehead from
brow to brow, would have indicated at once to the physiognomist
that Maurice Champrèst was a man of the fiercest and
most fiery energy and passions, concealed but not controlled —
existing perhaps unsuspected, but utterly unchecked by any
principle — and certain to start into a blaze at the first spark
that should enkindle them.

His dress was the usual attire of a man in his station at the
period, though of finer materials than was ordinary, consisting
of a dark forest-green gambison, or short tunic of fine cloth,
not very different in form from the blouse of the modern Frenchman,

gathered about his waist by a broad belt of black leather,
fastened in front by a brazen buckle, and supporting on one side
a heavy, buckhorn-hilted wood-knife, and on the other a large
pouch or purse of black cordovan, bound with silver; his hose
were of the same color with the tunic, fitting close to the shapely
thigh, and above these he wore long boots of russet-tawny
leather. His black hair fell in two heavy clubs or masses over
each ear, nearly to the collar of his doublet, from beneath the
cover of a small cap of black velvet, set jauntily on one side,
and adorned with a single white-cock's feather.

His appearance on the whole, though he was very far inferior
in regard of personal beauty to the exquisite creature whom he
was so soon to call his wife, was manly and imposing; while
the character of his dress and equipments, as well as the decorations
of Marguerite and her attendant maidens, showed at once
that they were all of a quality and station to the serfs employed
in the cultivation of the lands of the great seigneurs, and indeed
to that of the ordinary armed vassals and feudal tenants of
the day.

In truth, Maurice Champrèst was not only the richest farmer,
but the highest military vassal under the fief of Raoul de Canillac,
the marquis of Roche d'or, his ancestor having been banner-bearer
to the first lord of the name, and his people having
held and cultivated the same farm for many a century, bound
only to homage and free man-service in the field under the
banner of his lord, to which in war he was held to bring five
spearsmen and as many archers in full bodynge, as it was then
technically termed, and effeyre-of-war. He was, in short, though
not noble, nor what could be exactly termed a gentleman, of the
very highest of feudal territorial vassals, not far removed from
the class which were in England designated as franklins, although
with fewer privileges and smaller real freedom, France
having always been more rigidly feudal than the neighboring

island, owing to the absence of the large admixture of Saxon
blood and Saxon liberty, the latter of which soon began to preponderate
in the white-rocked isle of ocean. His beautiful
bride Marguerite, though not his equal in birth — for her grandfather
and grandmother, nay, her father himself, in his early
youth, had been serfs — was a free-born and a gently-nurtured
woman; the old people having been manumitted and presented
with a few acres of land, in consequence of the gallantry with
which he had rescued the then seigneur of Roche d'or, when
unhorsed and at the mercy of the German communes at the
bloody battle of Bovines, stricken between Philip the August
and his rebellious barons.

This event had taken place years before the birth of Marguerite,
and in fact when her father was a mere stripling; and,
as her mother was a woman of free lineage, neither serf nor
villeyn, she was, of course, beyond the reach of cavil. Nay,
more than this, the unusual courage of the old man on that
dreadful day, and the consideration always manifested toward
him by the then marquis and his immediate successor, had won
for him a far higher standing than was usually accorded to
manumitted serfs by the class next above them. Her family,
moreover, in both the last generations, had prospered in worldly
wealth, for the old serf was shrewd and wary, had hoarded
money, and increased the extent of his rural demesne, till Marguerite,
who was an only daughter, was not only a beauty but
an heiress; and probably, with the exception of her husband,
would be, on the death of her parents, the richest person in the
hamlet. She had received, moreover, advantages at that period
very unusual indeed; for having, when a mere child, attracted
the attention of the late marchioness de Canillac by her grace,
her beauty, and the artless naïveté of her manners, she had been
selected to attend, rather as a companion than a servant, on
Mademoiselle de Roche d'or, a girl a few years her senior.

The young lady had become much attached to Marguerite,
and on being sent to a convent in the principal town of the department
for her education, as was usual, had obtained permission
that Marguerite might attend her still; so that the young
peasant had enjoyed all the advantages of mental culture granted
to the high-born damsel; had profited by them to the utmost;
and had parted from her orphaned mistress only when, after
the death of her parents, she was removed with her brother,
the present marquis, to the guardianship of their next relative,
the prince of Auvergne. In the meantime, while the marquis
and his sister had breathed the atmosphere of courts and large cities,
far away from their native province, Marguerite had returned
to the humble home of her parents which she had filled with
happiness by the light of her loving eyes, and the harmonies of
her soft, low voice; had expanded from the bud into the full-blown
flower, admired and beloved of all; had burst from the frail
and graceful girl into the exquisite and complete woman; and,
having long been loved of Maurice Champrèst, and bestowed
upon him all the tenderness and truth of her maiden affections,
was now about to surrender her hand also to him unto whom
she had been during the whole of the last year affianced.

And now, with pipe and tabor, with the old, time-honored
bridal-chorus, with flowers scattered along the way, and garlands
swinging from the hedgerows by which she was to pass,
and decorating the rude pillars and stern arches of the old
Gothic church in which she was to wed, with all the village in
her train, carolling and rejoicing at so suitable, so sweet a bridal,
Marguerite, the bride of May, was led to the ceremony that
should of the twain make one for ever and for ever, of which
the word of God himself declared that whom he hath united
no man shall put asunder.

Merrily, with louder strains and blither minstrelsey, they
wound up the little dell among the oaks, paused for a moment

at the rustic fount to cross their brows with its holy waters,
and entered the low portals of the village-chapel. The bells
ceased tinkling; the brief ceremnny was performed by the old
priest who had baptized them both; the hand of the down-eyed,
blushing bride, still sparkling and smiling amid her happy, soft
confusion, was placed in the ardent grasp of Maurice, and she
was now her own no longer, but a wedded wife.

She was wept over, blessed, caressed, and kissed, by half
the company, and many a fervent prayer was breathed for the
happiness, the complete and perfect bliss of Marguerite, the
bride of May — alas for human hopes and the vain prayers of
mortals! — and then, while the bells struck up a livelier, louder
chiming, and the bride-maidens trolled the chorus forth more
cheerily —

with many a manly voice swelling more lustily the nuptial cadence,
they passed the little green descending to the horse-road,
Marguerite clinging now to his supporting arm and looking
tenderly up into his with eyes suffused with happy tears
and cheeks radiant with dimpled smiles and rosy blushes.

But at the moment when the bridal-train was wheeling down
toward the road, and had now nearly reached the point of its
intersection with the foot-path, the loud and noisy trampling of
many horses, and the jingling clash of the harness of armed
riders, was distinctly heard above the swelling chorus of the
hymenean, above the chiming of the wedding-bells; and within
a few seconds, two or three horsemen crossed the brow of the
eastern hill, at a gentle trot, and were followed by a company
of some fifty men-at-arms, under the guidance of an old officer,
whose beard and hair, as white as snow, fell down over his

gorget from beneath the small, black-velvet cap, which alone
covered his head, for his helmet hung at his saddle-bow. The
troopers were all armed point-device, in perfect steel, with long,
pennoned lances in their hands, two-handed broadswords slung
across their shoulders from the left to the right, and battle-axe
and mace depending on this side or that from the pommels of
their steel-plated saddles. Their horses, too — strong, powerful
brutes of the Norman stock, crossed with some lighter strain
of higher blood — were barded, as it was termed, with chamfronts
and neck-plates, poitrels on the breast, and the bards
proper covering the loins and croup; and all were arrayed under
a broad, square banner, blazoned, as if every eye of the
bridal-party could at once distinguish, with the bearings of the
lords of Castel de Roche d'or.

No sooner had they discovered this, than they halted, and
formed a line along the edge of the road, anxious to testify
their respect to their young lord — who now, recently of age,
was returning, after years of absence, from the chateau of his
guardian — and eager to observe the passage of the cavalcade.

The persons who led the approaching band were three in
number, two of whom rode a few horse-lengths in advance of
the third, and were evidently of rank superior to the rest; while
something seemed to indicate, though it was indefinite, and not
very obvious how far it did so, that even between these two
there subsisted no perfect equality.

He to the left was the elder by many years; a finely-formed
and not ill-favored man, of some forty-five or fifty years; magnificently
apparelled in a suit of rich half-armor, with russet-leather
boots meeting the taslets or thigh-pieces at the knee;
accoutred with heavy gilded spurs, and wearing on his head a
crimson-velvet mortier, adorned by a massive gold chain, and
a lofty plume of white feathers.

And he it was, who, although in his outward show he was

the more splendid — though he bestrode his steed with an air
of pride so manifest, that you might have fancied he bestrode
the universe — though he addressed all his inferiors with intolerable
haughtiness, and appeared to look upon all his equals as
inferiors — yet, by his demeanor toward the youth who reined
his Arab courser by his side, and by his almost servile watching
of his every motion, and lowering his voice at his every
word, appeared to be oppressed in his presence by a sense of
the utmost unworthiness, and scarcely to hold himself entitled
to have an opinion of his own until sanctioned by that of the
young marquis de Roche d'or.

The features of this man were certainly well-favored rather
than the reverse — for the brow, the eyes, the outlines, were all
good; and yet the expressions they assumed, as he was moved
by varying passions, were so odious and detestable, that on a
nearer view, a close observer would probably have styled him
hideous, and avoided his advances. Pride, of the haughtiest
and most intolerant form, would at one time writhe his lip and
deform his every lineament; at another, it would yield to the
basest, the most abject servility. Cruelty alone sat fixed and
permanent in the thick, massive, animal jaw, the low and somewhat
receding forehead, and the oblique glances of the cold,
clear, gray eye; but sensuality, and sneering sarcasm, and utter
want of veneration or belief for anything high or holy, had left
their hateful traces in the lines about his mouth and nostrils:
nor were these odious, ineradicable signs of an atrocious character
redeemed by the evident presence of high intellect and
pervading talents, for that intellect was of a shrewd, keen, cunning
caste, and was in no wise akin to anything of an imaginative,
a noble, or a virtuous type.

Such was the appearance, such the aspect, of a man renowned
in his day far and wide through France, but renowned for evil
only. Such was Canillac le fou — a soubriquet which he had

won throughout his province, for the insane, frantic, and unnatural
vice and crime which had marked his whole career from
boyhood. Canillac the madman! — and with good reason did
the vassals of the old house of Roche d'or shrink upon themselves,
and draw instinctively one toward the other, like wildfowl
when they see the shadow of the soaring falcon, with a
foreboding of peril near at hand, when they beheld this fierce,
voluptuous, pitiless monster — whose favorite boast it was that
he had never spared a woman in his passion, nor a man in his
hatred — riding at the bridle-rein of their young lord, as his
chosen friend and companion, and probably as the arbiter of his
pleasures, instigator of his vices!

And of a truth they had good cause to shrink and tremble,
an' had they but then known that which was even now impending,
to curse the very hour in which he or they were born
— he to inflict, they to endure the last, worst outrages of feudal
tyranny and wrong!

But they as yet knew nothing, nor, save instinctively, foreboded
anything; but he, with his keen, furtive, ever-roving
glances, noted (what none less sly, suspicious, and acute, would
have suspected) the secret and intuitive horror with which the
peasantry of Castel de Roche d'or regarded him, and vowed at
once within his secret soul that they should have good cause to
curse him, and that speedily.

His comrade, the young marquis, was, to the outward eye, a
very different personage. Having barely reached his twenty-first
year, he was as graceful and finely-framed a youth as ever
sat a charger. His face, too, was very fine and regular, with
the large, liquid, dark eyes, and deep, clear, olive tint, which
are so common in the south of France. His hair was black as
the raven's wing, with the same purplish, metallic lustre gleaming
over its glossy surface, and fell in long, wavy, uncurled
masses over the collar of the quilted gambison of rose-colored

silk, which he wore under a shirt of flexible chain-mail, polished
so brilliantly, that it flashed and sparkled in the morning sunbeams
like a network of diamonds.

The ordinary expression of his countenance was grave, calm,
and melancholy; yet it was impassive and cold, rather than
thoughtful and imaginative, while there was an occasional flashing
light in the sleepy eye, and a gleam of almost fierce intelligence
in all the features, and a strange, animal curl of the
pale lips, which seemed to tell that there lurked beneath that
cold exterior a volcano of fierce and fiery passions, ready at any
instant to leap into life, and consume whosoever should oppose
his will.

The keen observer of humanity would have pronounced him
one cold, rather than collected; selfish at once, and careless of
the rights and happiness of others; sluggish, perhaps, and difficult
to arouse, but, once aroused, impetuous, and of indomitable
will — truly a fearful combination!

When the company had arrived within thirty or forty paces
of the bridal-party, the villagers threw up their caps into the
air, and raised a loud and joyous exclamation — “Vive Canillac!
vive Canillac! Vive le beau marquis de Roche d'or!” —
and, for the moment, the boy's face lighted up with a gleam of
warm and honest feeling — gratification at the welcome of his
people, and something of real sympathy with their condition.

But just as he had determined to ride forward and return
their kindly greeting with words of cheer and promise of protection,
the young and fiery Arab on which he was mounted,
terrified by the shoutings, and the caps tossed into the air,
reared bolt upright, made a prodigious bound forward, and then,
wheeling round, yerked out his heels violently, and dashed
away with such fury, that before the young rider, who sat as
firmly in his saddle as though he had been a portion of the animal,
could arrest him, they were almost among the men-at-arms.

The whole passed in a minute; but that minute was of fearful
import to many there assembled, many both innocent and
guilty. Even in the point of time when the wild horse was
plunging forward to the bridal-party, the young lord's eye, undiverted
by the sense of his own keen peril, had fallen upon
the lovely face and exquisite symmetry of the fair bride, who,
moved by a timid apprehension for the safety of the handsome
cavalier, leaned forward a little way in front of her young companions,
with clasped hands and cheeks blanched somewhat by
sympathetic fear and pity.

The blood rushed in a torrent to his cheek, and remained
settled there in a red, hectic spot; a fierce, unnatural light
gleamed from his glassy eye, and his lip curled with an odious
smile. A volume of fierce passions rushed over his soul, overpowering
in an instant all his better characteristics. He was
determined, in that instant, by that one glance, to possess her,
reckless what misery and madness he might cause — reckless
of all things, human or Divine!

And, whether the disembodied fiend, who, we are taught to
believe, is ever ready at such moments of temptation to urge
the incipient sinner on to deeper crime and ruin, did spur his
wicked will or not — there was a human, sneering, tempting
fiend, who, as he rode beside him, read his inmost soul in every
look and gesture, and spared nothing of allurement to excite
him onward on that fell road of evil passions which should
insure his subjugation to his own sins and their readiest minister.

“Ha! what is this?” exclaimed the young man, almost angrily,
as he pulled up his violent horse, at length, beside the
aged seneschal; “what is this, Michael Rubempré — or who
am I, that my villeyns and serfs wed at their will, without my
consent, or consideration of my droits and dues?”

“So please you, beau seigneur, these be no serfs,” replied

the old man, bowing low, “but vassals of the highest class, in
this your lordship of Roche d'or — free vassals, beau sire, of
the highest class. Your consent was applied for duly, and
granted, in all form, by me, as, in your absence, by letters of
instruction, your representative and agent. The dues were all
paid, and a large present above them, as a donation to mademoiselle,
your sister, on whom the young bride attended, when
she dwelt in the house of the Ursulines, in Clermont.”

Darker and darker grew the brow of the young lord, as he
listened; for he could not fail to perceive the obstacles which
were opposed to the atrocious wrong he meditated. Yet he
listened sullenly to the end.

“Ha!” he replied, moodily, “no droits, only dues, and those
satisfied! The worse for them, by heaven and hell, and all
who dwell therein!”

He paused a moment, with his hands clinched, and the veins
upon his brow swollen into thick, azure cords, by the rush of
the hot blood; and then resumed, in a low, hissing tone, widely
different from his usually slow and modulated voice:—

“Who be they, Michael Rubempré? I would give half my
lands, they could be proved serfs. Can not this be done, Michael?”

“Impossible, beau sire!” replied the old man, firmly, though
there was much of anxiety, and even of alarm, in his eye; “utterly
impossible. The forefathers of Maurice Champrèst came
into the lands of Roche d'or with the first Canillac, and he
holds the same farm still, under the first grant, by tenure of
man-service, only on the field of battle. He is your lordship's
greatest vassal, and brings five spears and as many crossbows
to the banner of Roche d'or, serving himself on horseback.”

“Ha! curses on it! curses on it! And she — who is she!
By heaven, she is the loveliest creature I ever looked upon!
Who is she! ha!”

“Her grandfather, beau sire, then a serf — permitted, through
the exigency of the times, to bear arms in the field — saved the
life of your lordship's grandsire, by taking in his breast the
pike-thrust intended for his lord. For this good deed, he was
manumitted, with his wife and son, who is now a free vassal
and a large tenant of Roche d'or, bringing six crossbows to your
banner. Marguerite was selected by the marquise to wait on
Mademoiselle de Canillac de Roche d'or, and was educated
with her, almost as a friend. She is the best girl, too, in all
the village.”

“Ha! so much the worse! Curses on it — twenty thousand
curses!”

And he had turned his horse's head again, to ride on his way,
apparently convinced that for this time, at least, his wicked will
must be balked of its fulfilment; but at this moment, the voice
of the tempter, Canillac the madman — mad in his crimes alone,
for his wily and diverse intellect was clear as that of Catiline,
whom he in some sort resembled — addressed him, calm, yet
cutting and sarcastic:—

“What is it that has moved you so much, beau cousin? Methinks
your people's greeting should enliven, not depress you.”

“Tush!” the young man replied, almost savagely; “tush!
You are no fool, Canillac!”

“Not much, I think; though they do call me Canillac le fou!
But what then, what then, beau cousin?”

“Did you not see her? did you not see her, Canillac? As
I hope to live before God, she is the loveliest piece of woman's
flesh I ever looked upon! I would give — I would give half
my lands, half my life, that I had droits seignorial over her;
but I have dues, dues only, and they are satisfied. She is free
— a free woman of her own right, and can not be mine.”

“Were I you, cousin, and I so desired her as you do, she
should be mine, ere nightfall!”

“How so? how so?” asked the young man, sharply. “Did
I not tell you she is free — free — that I have no droits over her,
and do you tell me I can make her mine?”

“What if she be? She is but a peasant-wench — one of the
mere canaille. I would regard her squalling no more than a
kitten's mewing; nay, rather I would glory in it, for I am sick
to death of your complaisant beauties. Besides, she is not free,
if she was born while her father was a serf, unless she was
named in the deed of manumission.”

“But she must have been born years afterward. Look at
her, man: she could not have been born in my grandfather's
time.”

“Deny that she is free. Have her up with us to the castle,
now. Hold her there as a hostage, till she be proven free. If
you be not aweary of her, ere the week is ended, I will find
twenty men who shall swear she was born in the days of Sir
Noah in the ark, if it be needful.” And he laughed scornfully.

“By Heaven, I will not weary of her in a week of years!
But it is well advised. I will essay it.”

“Essay nothing: do it! Promise to hold her in all honor.
Promises cost no man anything, nor oaths either, for that matter,
which is fortunate; for, by mine honor, she is fitter to be a
prince's paramour than a Jacque's wife. So forward!”

And, with the word, they galloped forward, and pausing exactly
in front of the bride, who stood between her husband and
the priest — shrinking with modesty and terror from the ardent
and licentious gaze which he riveted on her glowing charms —
he began to rate the latter for daring to wed a serf-girl to a free
vassal without his lord's consent, and the former for presuming
to defraud his siegneur of his droits.

In vain the good curate explained and expostulated; in vain
twenty oaths were proffered by contemporaries of the girl's
grandsire, that she was free; in vain the husband tendered

security, and offered rich donations; in vain the village-maidens
grovelled before the young lord's charger's hoofs, and clasped
his knees in an agony of fruitless supplication! The wrong
was predetermined; the wronger was a strong man, armed; and
how should humble innocence prevail against the might which
makes the right, where violence is masterful, and law its abject
servitor?

To make a sad tale short, Raoul de Canillac announced his
determination to carry her up to the castle presently, and hold
her there in trust, until such time as a “court-baron” could be
held to decide on the question of her manumission. He plighted
his knightly word, however, his honor, as a peer of France,
that she should be treated with all tenderness, as one who had
waited on his sister; and returned to her husband, in all honor,
should she be pronounced free: but this on the condition only
that she should render herself freely up and gently, and go
without resistance or complaint. To this he added, that, as an
act of grace and favor, and to prove that he would deal with
them in all faithfulness of honor, he would himself hold court
at high noon to-morrow, at which he cited all his vassals to appear,
and enjoined it on the priest, the parents, and the bridegroom,
then and there to produce the testimonials of her birth
or manumission; or, failing that, to remain for ever mute.
Lovely as ever, if not lovelier, paler than the white lily, and
like it drooping when its fair head is surcharged with dewdrops,
and deluged with soft, silent tears, the miserable Marguerite
sank on her husband's breast in one last, long embrace.

Fire flashed from the dark eyes of Raoul de Canillac, and
the blood literally boiled in his veins, as he saw that lovely form
clasped close by arms other than his own — those lips polluted,
as he termed it, by the kiss of a peasant!

“Enough of this!” he cried. “Set her upon the palfrey —
the gray palfrey we brought down for my sister. You, Amelot

de l'Aigle, guide it,” he continued, “but keep her in the middle
of the lances.”

But the wretched girl had fainted; and they were forced to
place her on a cloak, doubled upon the bows of the demipique,
in front of the page, to whose waist she was bound by a silken
scarf, to prevent her falling to the ground. The tears stood in
the eyes of the good old senechal; and the faces of many of
the men-at-arms, who were all of the same class with the bridegroom,
and many of them his comrades and friends, were dark
and sullen. None, however, dared to remonstrate, much less
to resist the authoritative mandate of the feudal tyrant.

No words, however, can express the scene which ensued as
the cavalcade swept onward at a rapid pace, leaving behind
them agony, and desolation, and despair, where all, before their
coming, had been happiness, and innocent, quiet bliss, and hopeful
peace! The stifled wailing of the girls, the silent agony
of the hopeless bridegroom, the deep, scarcely-smothered execrations
of the men — it was a scene as terrible and heart-rending
as that which preceded it had been delightful and cheering
to the soul.

At length the priest, raising his arms toward heaven, cried in
a low and plaintive voice —

“My children, let us pray; let us pray to the most high God,
that he will keep our sweet sister Marguerite in innocence and
honor, and give her back to us in happiness and peace. Let
us pray!”

And every voice responded of all who heard his words; every
voice, save one, responded, “Let us pray!” and every knee
was bent as they bowed them in a sorrowing circle around
their monitor and friend — every knee, save that of Maurice
Champrèst; but he stood erect, and pulled his hat over his
brows, and folded his arms across his chest, and exclaimed, as
the ravishers of his sweet wife wound through the dale into the

larger valley: “Earth has no justice, Heaven no pity! Man
has no honor, God no vengeance!”

But on rode the tyrants, onward — careless of the ruin they
had wrought, ruthless toward the innocence they had determined
to destroy; confident in the puissance of their prowess,
and almost defying the thunders of Heaven, which were even
then rolling and muttering far away among the volcanic peaks
of the Mont d'or. Were these the omens of a coming storm?

They reached the esplanade before the castle-gates, and Marguerite
was still unconscious. Happy had she nevermore regained
her consciousness! But as the horses' hoofs thundered
over the echoing drawbridge, the clang roused her from her
swoon. She raised herself up, drew her hand across her brow,
as if to clear away some imaginary mist obscuring her mental
vision, and gazed wildly and hurriedly around her on the strange
objects which met her eyes, as if she had not as yet realized
to herself her condition, nor altogether knew her destination.
As she was carried, however, through the dim, resounding vault
of the barbacan, and heard the grating clang of the portcullis
when it thundered down behind her, a sense of her lost condition
flashed upon her soul, and a voice seemed to whisper in
her ear those words of horrible import which Danté, in after-days,
inscribed upon the gates of hell: “On entering here,
leave every hope behind!”

Still she shrieked not, nor wept, nor craved or sympathy or
pity; for too well did she know that the hearts of those to
whom she should appeal were harder, colder than their own
iron breastplates; her only confidence was in her own strenuous
virtue, her only hope in Him who alone can save.

She was lifted from the horse, not only with some show of
gentleness, but even of respect, without receiving word or sign
of intelligence from the young lord of Roche d'or, who strode
away, accompanied by his ill-counsellor, Canillac the madman,

toward the banqueting-room, wherein the noontide meal was
prepared already, and where the flower of the knights and nobles
of the province were assembled to welcome the new-comer.
Then she was conducted by the page through several long,
winding passages, to a sort of withdrawing-room, in which she
found several female-servants of the higher class, to the care of
one of whom she was consigned, with a few words of whispered
orders, by her conductor, who bowed low and retired. The
girls looked at her for a moment or two earnestly, inquiringly —
eying her gay bridal-dress, so ill-suited to the mode of her arrival,
with an air between suspicion and sympathy — until, at
length, one of them seemed to recognise her, and exclaimed:
“Mon Dieu! mon Dieu! if it be not the fair Marguerite!”

And then, as pity seemed to prevail over all other feelings,
they crowded round her kindly and respectfully; and after a
few kindly-intended but little-meaning words, one of them offered
to conduct her to her appointed chamber, promising to
bring her refreshments shortly, and saying that doubtless she
would prefer to take some repose, and be alone.

Through dark, circuitous passages, vaulted with solid stone,
and ribbed as though they had been hewn out of the living rock,
and up interminable winding stairs, she led her, until her brain
whirled round and round, and her senses were almost bewildered.
At length they reached the topmost story of the huge,
square tower, and, opening a low, arched door, the hapless
bride was ushered into a room so sumptuously furnished as
Marguerite had never seen or dreamed of; and then, with a
deep reverence, and a half-compassionate air, the attendant
maiden left her, a prisoner; for she heard the lock turned from
without, and her heart fell at the sound.

The sun, which had turned already toward the westward, was
pouring a rich stream of light through the oriel window, over
the tapestried walls and floor; over the velvet bed in a deep

alcove; over the soft arm-chairs, and central table covered with
a splendid carpet, and strewn with illuminated books, and rich,
sculptured cups and vases. But it was on none of these that
the eyes of Marguerite dwelt meaningly; for, as they wandered
over these, half-marvelling amid her terrors at their beauty, she
discerned an oaken prie-Dieu, in a small niche beside the window,
with a missal on its embroidered cushion, and a crucifix
with the sacrificed Redeemer looking down from it on the repentant
sinner.

In an instant, she was on her knees before the image of her
God, pouring forth the whole of her innocent and spotless soul,
in the holiest of supplications. She prayed for aid from on
high to preserve her unstained virtue; she prayed for strength
from on high to resist temptation; she prayed for pardon from
on high for her sins and errors past, for grace that she might
err no more in future; she prayed that He, who alone could
pity human suffering — for that he had suffered as no man suffereth
— would touch the hearts of her ruthless persecutors,
through his Virgin Mother; she prayed that he would console
her sorrowing parents, and him whom she scarcely dared think
of, so terrible she knew must be his anguish; lastly, she prayed
for pardon to her persecutor, and that, if she were doomed that
night to perish, her soul might be received to grace, through
the intercession of the saints, and her, the ever-blessed, the
Virgin Mother Mary!

Her prayer, if in form it were erroneous, in spirit was sincere
and fervent; and, as sincere and fervent prayers will ever, surely
must hers have found a hearing at the throne of mercy, for she
arose from her knees confirmed, if not consoled, and strengthened
in her virtuous principles, and calm by the very strength
of her resolves.

Then, opening the oriel window, she stepped out into the
little balcony, or bartizan, which projected out beyond the face

of the wall — perhaps in the hope of finding some means of
escape; but, alas! if such a hope had flattered her, it was delusive;
for there was no egress from it, nor any method of descending;
and it impended far over the broad, deep moat, a
hundred feet or more above its dark, clear waters — which, she
remembered to have heard men say, were fifty feet in depth to
the bottom of their rock-hewn channel. Long, long she gazed
over the lovely sunlit valley of her birth, which all lay mapped
out in the glorious glow before her eyes; the happy home among
the limes, beneath which she was born; the happier home of
promise, into which she had hoped that day to be led by him
whom she loved the best; the little chapel in the dell, among
the oaks, in which she had plighted, that very morn, her faith
for ever, until death, and death alone, should dissolve the bonds.

“And death alone,” she exclaimed, as the thoughts swelled
upon her soul, “and death alone shall dissolve them! But I
must not look upon these things — I must not think of him — or
my spirit will sink into utter weakness!” Then she paused,
and, leaning over the low breastwork of the bartizan, looked
down with a steady eye into the abyss, and crossing herself
as she rose — “May God assoil my soul, if I be driven to do
this thing, as do it of a surety I will, if otherwise I may not
save my honor!”

Then she returned into the chamber, leaving both lattices of
the oriel open; and seated herself calmly near the window,
with her eyes fixed on the effigy of her dying God, expecting
that which should ensue, in trembling and shuddering of the
spirit, it is true, yet in earnest resignation and fixed purpose.

Ere long, a step approached the door, but it was light and
gentle; and, when the lock was turned, it was the girl who had
led her thither, bearing wine and refreshments on a silver salver:
but, though the attendant pressed her kindly to take comfort
and to eat, that she might be strengthened, she refused all

consolation, and only drank a deep draught of the cold spring-water,
to quench the feverish thrist which parched her very
vitals. Seeing at once that the prisoner would not be consoled,
nor enter into any conversation, the maiden bade her “Goodnight,
and God speed her!” and added that she believed she
would not be disturbed that night, for the gentles were revelling
furiously in the great hall: and the feast, she believed,
would efface all thought of her.

“God grant that it may be so,” she replied, fervently; “for
if I live scatheless until to-morrow morn, I am free and happy!
No court on earth can dare decide against the testimony we
shall show to-morrow.”

But, in His wisdom — we, blind wretches, can not discern,
may not conjecture wherefore — HE did not grant it.

The sunlight faded from the sky, as the great orb went down;
and the stars came out, one by one; and then the moon arose,
nigh to the full, and filled the skies with glory, and the maiden
May-bride's heart with increasing hope on earth, and gratitude
toward Heaven. But little did she dream that he, she had that
morning wedded, lay, even now, at the verge of the moat,
watching her oriel window, with agony and desperation at his
heart; yet so it was. When she stepped on the bartizan, he
had been observing the castle with an angry and jealous eye
from the skirts of the nearest woodland; and, though it was
nearly a mile distant, the lover's glance of instinct had at once
detected the loved and lovely figure. As the shades of evening
closed, and night fell thick before the moon arose, he had crept
up, pace by pace, till he had reached the brink of the moat, unseen
of the warders on the keep and the flanking walls; and
now he lay couched in the rank grass, almost within reach of
his beloved, able to hear every sound — should sound come
forth — from her gentle lips, yet powerless to succor, impotent
to save!

It was now nigh midnight, and Marguerite had begun to
frame to herself a hope that she was indeed forgotten; when
suddenly the sound of feet, coming up the winding stair, aroused
her. The sounds were of the feet of two men: the one, heavy
and uncertain, as of a person who had drunk too deeply; the
other light and agile.

She rose to her feet, with her heart throbbing as though it
would have burst her boddice. “The time of my trial hath
come! My God, my God, now aid, or, if need be, forgive thy
servant!”

The door flew open, and at the sight hope fled her bosom, if
any hope had so long dwelt within it.

Flushed with wine — inebriate, almost — with his doublet
unbraced, and his points unfastened — with a glowing cheek, a
sparkling eye, and an unsteady gait, Raoul de Canillac stood
before her — the page Amelot bearing a waxen torch before
him, which he placed in a candelabrum near the bed, and that
done, retiring.

As the door closed, the young lord moved toward her, while
she stood gazing at him like a deer at bay, with a sad, liquid
eye, and the tears rolling down her cheeks, yet motionless and
dauntless.

“Dry thy tears, sweet one,” he exclaimed, “or rather weep
on, till I kiss them from thy cheeks, and replace them by smiles
of rapture. Girl, I adore thee. Be but mine, and I will change
thine every bunch of silly-flowers for gems worth an earl's ransom;
better to be—”

“Seigneur Raoul de Canillac,” she interrupted him, in tones
so calm, that he was compelled to pause and listen — “marquis
of Roche d'or, knight of the Holy Ghost, as you are prince and
noble, as you are peer of France and belted knight, hear me,
and spare me! By the soul of your mother, who was chaste
wife to your lordly father! by the honor of your sister, who is

spotless demoiselle! spare me, who am at once chaste wife
and spotless maiden! Conquer me you may, perchance, by
brute force; win me, by words, you never can! Nor would I
yield to thee one favor, were death itself the alternative!”

“Brute force, then, be it!” he replied, though, half-awed by
her manner, he advanced no farther; “for, conquer thee I will,
if I may not win thee, though my mother's soul stood palpable
between us, and my sister's honor were trampled underneath
my feet, as I spring on to seize thee!”

“False knight, your plighted honor! bad lord, your promised
faith!” she cried, so loud and clear, that her every accent reached
the ear and tore the heart of Maurice Champrèst below.

“Honor!” he shouted, sneeringly; “to the wild winds with
honor! Faith! who kept faith with a woman ever?”

And he dashed at her with a bound so sudden and unexpected,
that he cleared the space between them, and had his arms
around her, in an instant.

She thought that she was lost, and uttered one wild shriek,
so long, so shivering, so thrilling, that not one ear that heard it
but felt as if a lance had pierced it. But virtue gave her strength,
as vice and excess had robbed him of it; and, with a perfect
majesty, she thrust him from her, that he staggered and fell
headlong.

One spring, and she had cleared the oriel window; another,
and she stood upon the dizzy brink. “My God, forgive mine
enemy! Jesus, receive my soul!”

She veiled her head with her bridal-veil, and, with her white
arms clasped above it, stooped herself, and plunged headlong!

For one second, there was seen by every eye, within eye-shot,
a long, white gleam, glancing downward through the
misty moonlight —

For one second, there was heard by every ear, within earshot,
a dreadful, hurtling sound —

And then a sudden plash, and the waters of the moat flashed
upward in the serene moonlight, and closed over the head of
chaste, unspotted Marguerite!

But another plunge followed instantly; and, within one second,
she was drawn forth and clasped in her husband's arms,
shattered and stunned, and beyond all hope of life, yet still not
wholly dead.

A few long minutes passed — minutes as long as years —
and then, warmed into life by the pressure of that fond breast,
she revived; her dying eyes looked into his; she knew him —
she was blest! —

“Maurice — I am thine — in death, as in life — thine own,
thine own, pure Marguerite — kiss — kiss me! I am gone —
hus-husband!”

And she died, happy — died, may we not trust, forgiven! —

And he howled out a hideous curse against the castle, and
against its lord, and against all whom its guilty walls protected;
and then, bearing his dead bride in his arms, away through the
darkness of the night — away, with a speed mocking the fleet
pursuit of horses!

The sunrise of the morrow shone down upon the corpse of
Marguerite, clad in her bridal-veil and marriage-garments, dripping
and soiled with moisture, outstretched upon the very altar
before which the preceding dawn had seen her wedded.

But years elapsed ere Maurice Champrèst was seen again
in the hamlet of Castel de Roche d'or; and, when he was seen
there, it was a sorry sight to many a noble eye, and the very
stones cried “Wo!” when the Vassal's Wife was avenged on
her destroyer.

2. CHAPTER II.

They were dark and dismal days in the fair land of France.
Foreign invasion was triumphant, domestic insurrection was
rife.

The terrible and fatal field of Poictiers, the field of the Black
Prince, had stricken down at a single stroke the might of a
great, a glorious nation; her king a captive in a foreign dungeon;
one third of the best and bravest nobles dead on the
field of honor, or languishing in English fetters; a weak and
nerveless regent on her throne; and Charles, the bad king of
Navarre, the counsellor, the nearest to his ear.

Half of the realm at least was held directly under English
sway, with garrisons of English archers in the towns, and the
red-cross banner of St. George floating above her vanquished
towers; and in the provinces, still nominally French, armies
of free companions sweeping the fields of their harvests far and
near, plundering the cottage, pillaging the castle, levying contributions
on open towns, storming by force strongholds — English,
Gascons, and Normans — led for the most part by men of
name and renown — bastards, in many cases, of great and noble
houses, such as the bourg de Maulion, and the bourg de Keranlouet,
and a hundred others of scarcely inferior fame — had
subjected the country scarcely less effectually than it had been
done elsewhere by open, honorable warfare.

To this appalling state of things a fresh horror was now
added, where horror was least needed — and that the most tremendous
of all horrors, a servile insurrection — the sudden, and
spontaneous, and victorious outbreak of ignorant, down-trodden,
vicious, cruel, frenzied, and brutal slaves!

The nobles themselves — who, had they been combined, and
acted promptly and in unison, could have crushed the life out
of the insurrection in a week — divided into hostile parties, dispirited
by the wonderful successes of the victorious English,
intimidated and crest-fallen — held themselves aloof the one
from the other; and, attempting to defend their isolated fortresses
singly, without either concert or system, allowed themselves
to be surprised in detail, and butchered upon their own hearthstones,
by the infuriated serfs.

All horrors, all atrocities that can be conceived, were perpetrated
by the victors, maddened by long years of servitude and
suffering, by deprivation of all the rights and decencies which
belong of nature to every living man, and by the enforcement
of droits so infamous and unnatural, that it is only wonderful
how men should have so long endured them! Not the least
galling of these was that feudal right which permitted the seigneur
to compel the virgin bride on her wedding-day to his own
bed, and then return her dishonored to the arms of her impassive
husband — a right which not merely existed in abeyance,
or, as in latter days, was compounded by a fine, but which was
an every-day occurrence, a usage of the land — to enforce which
was no more considered cruel or tyrannical than to collect rents,
or tithes, or any other feudal dues — and which was not finally
abolished until the reign of Louis XIV., when it was at length
suppressed in those memorable assizes, known as the grands
jours d' Auvergne, when many of the noblest of the land died
by the hands of the common executioner for tyranny and persecution.

When, therefore, crimes like these, and worse, were perpetrated
daily under the sanction and authority of feudal law;
when they had been endured for years — not, indeed, without
feelings of the direst bitterness and rage, but without loud complaint
or general resistance, by all the serfs and villeyns of the

land — what wonder was it that these miserable, trampled
wretches, scarcely human, save in form, from the squalid
wretchedness of their condition, and the studious care of their
oppressors to prevent their progress or improvement — what
wonder, I say, was it, that, seeing at length their opportunity,
when their lords were distracted by foreign conquests, by the
devastations of robber-bands, and by their own political dissensions
or social feuds, they should have sprung to arms everywhere
— their cry, “War to the castle, peace to the cottage!”
— seeking redress or revenge, and braving death willingly, as
less intolerable than the wrongs they had been so long enduring
in sullen desperation? What wonder was it, that, when
victorious, they, who never had been spared, should have shown
themselves unsparing; that they, whose hearths had been to
them no safeguards for any sanctity of domestic life, no asylums
for any age or sex, should have wreaked upon the dwellers of
the castles the wrongs which for ages had been the inheritance
of the inmates of the cottages; that they, whose wives and
daughters had never found protection from worse than brutish
violence in tender years, in innocence of unstained virtue, in
the weakness of imploring beauty, should have requited, on the
wives and daughters of their tyrants, pollution by pollution,
infamy, and death?

Such, such, alas! is human nature; and rare it is indeed that
suffering at the hands of man teaches man moderation to the
sufferers when it becomes his turn to suffer. Injustice hardens,
not melts, the heart; and we have it, from no less an authority
than the word of Him who can not lie, that “persecution maketh
wise men mad” — but, of a surety, the wretched serfs and Jacquerie
were far enough removed from wisdom, however they
might be deemed mad, nor were many of their actions very far
removed from madness. Knights crucified above the altars of
their own castle-chapels, while their wives were dishonored,

tortured, and slain, with all extremities of cruelty, before their
eyes; infants tossed upon pikes, or burnt alive, in the presence
of their frantic mothers; women compelled to eat the flesh of
their own husbands, roasted at their own kitchen-grates ere yet
life was extinct; the whole land filled with blood and ruin, and
the smoke of conflagration going up night and day to the indignant
and polluted heavens — these were the signs of those dark
and awful times, these were the first fruits of the conquered
liberty of the emancipated helots of the feudal system!

And when, nerved at length by the very extremity of peril,
the nobles took up arms to make common cause against the
common enemy, they found themselves isolated and hemmed in
on all sides, unable to draw together so as to make head against
the countless numbers of the enemy, which, like the waters of
an inundation, increased hourly, and waxed wider, deeper,
stronger, as it rolled onward. Large bodies could not be collected;
small bodies were cut off; till at length so completely
were the proud and warlike nobles of the most warlike land in
Europe cowed and disheartened by the triumph of their despised
and degraded slaves, that fifty men, armed cap-à-pie, and
mounted on their puissant destriers, who would, six months before,
have couched their lances confidently, and ridden scatheless
through thousands of the skinclad Jacquery — trampling
them at leisure under the hoofs of their barded horses, and, invulnerable
themselves, spearing them at their will from their
lofty demipiques — now felt their proud hearts tremble at the
mere blast of a peasant's horn, and fled ingloriously before an
equal number of undisciplined and half-armed serfs!

About the period, however, of which I write, several encounters
had taken place, especially in Touraine, in the Beauvoisis,
and the country about the Seine, between the chivalry and their
insurgent villeyns, in which the former had been worsted, not
so much by superior forces as by superior courage, discipline,

and skill. And it came to be rumored far and near that there
was one hand, and that the fiercest and most cruel of all — consisting
of above a thousand foot, spears, and crossbow-men, and
led by a powerful man-at-arms, before whose lance everything
was said to go down — at the head of nearly a hundred fully-equipped
lances, which was in no respect unequal to the best
arrays of the nobility with their feudal vassals.

What was at first mere rumor, soon came to be accredited —
soon came to be undoubted truth; for, emboldened by their successes
from attacking the parties of chivalry in detail, as they
fell upon them traversing the country in the vain hope of combinations,
this great band now began to sit down before strong
towns and fortified holds, to besiege them in due form of war,
and were in every instance successful.

Their numbers, too, increased with their success, for every
knight or man-at-arms who fell, or was taken prisoner, mounted
and armed a peasant; and it was singular to observe with what
skill and judgment the leader apportioned his best spoils to his
best men: so that, developing his resources slowly — never
admitting any man to enter his cavalry who had not approved
himself a soldier, who could not ride well, and charge a lance
fearlessly, nor enrolling any one among his footmen who was
not well armed with a corslet or shirt-of-mail, and steel cap or
sallet, with sword, dagger, and pike, or crossbow — he was soon
at the head of two thousand excellent foot, and above three
hundred lances, admirably mounted, who fought under his own
immediate orders.

Who he was, no one knew, or conjectured. It was reported
that his own men were unacquainted with his name, and that
his face, when the vizor of his helmet was raised, was covered
by a sable mask. How much of truth or falsehood there might
be in these vague rumors, no man seemed to know; but it is
certain that a mysterious and almost supernatural terror attached

to the “Black Rider,” as he was universally termed,
whenever he was spoken of — a terror which perhaps he took
a secret pleasure in augmenting, either from motives of policy
or of pride.

The strong suit of knight's armor which he wore, of the best
Milan steel, was black as night from the crest to the spur, without
relief of any kind, or device on the shield, or heraldric crest
on the burgonet. The plume which he wore on his casque was
similar to those affixed in modern days to hearses; and another,
its counterpart, towered between the ears of his charger, which
was a coal-black barb, without one white hair in its glossy hide,
barded with chamfront, poitrel, neck-plates, and bard proper,
all of black steel, with funeral-housings of black cloth.

Such was the man who alone of the leaders of the Jacquerie
seemed to make war on a system, acting according to the dictates
of the soundest judgment rather than, like the others, by
wantonness or whim; permitting no license, nor promiscuous
individual pillaging, but causing all plunder to be brought together
for the common weal — thus making war support war,
according to the prescribed plan of the greatest of modern conquerors
— and subsisting his men on the spoils of the powerful
and rich, without trespassing in any wise on the property of
the poor, whose favor it was his object to conciliate.

It came, too, to be understood, ere long, that his cruelty was
no less systematic than his plundering. No wanton barbarity,
no torturing, roast, crucifying, or the like, was ever perpetrated
by his band; and of himself, it was notorious that, except in
open warfare or in the heat of battle, he had never dealt a blow
against a man, or laid a rude hand on a woman, of the hated
caste of nobles. Still, neither man nor woman ever escaped
his rancorous and premeditated vengeance.

Every male noble, of whatever age — gray-haired, or full-grown
man, stripling, or child, or infant in the cradle — no

sooner was he taken than he was hanged on the next tree if in
the open field, or from the pinnacles of his own castle if within
stone walls.

Every female of noble birth — and to these, though he never
looked on them himself, nor was tempted by the charms of the
fairest — was delivered at once to the mercies of his men, subjected
to the last dishonor; and then, when life was intolerable
to them, and death welcome, they were drowned in the nearest
stream or lake, if in the open country, or cast from the battlements
into the moat, if captured within the precincts of a fortalice.

So rigidly did he adhere to this last mode of execution, often
carrying his victims along with the band for several days until
he could find a suitable place for drowning them, that it was
soon determined that he must have some secret motive, or strong
vow, binding him to this strange course — the rather that there
were many reasons for believing him to be a man naturally of a
feeling and generous temper, hardened by circumstances into
this vein of cold and adamantine cruelty.

Though he had never been known to relent, tears had been
known to fall fast through the bars of his avantaille, as he repulsed
the outstretched arms and rejected the passionate entreaties
of some lovely, innocent maiden, imploring death itself
as a boon, so she might save her honor.

At such times, it was affirmed — and they were of no unusual
occurrence — when he seemed on the point of relenting, he
needed only to clasp in his mailed fingers a long, heavy tress
of female hair — once of the loveliest shade of dark brown,
verging almost upon black, but now bleached by exposure to
the summer sun and the wintry storm — which he wore among
the black plumes of his casque, when he became on the instant
cold, iron, and impenetrable, as the proof-harness which he
wore; and the words would come from his lips slow, stern,

irrevocable, speaking the miserable creature's doom, so that
even she would plead no longer! —

“Away with her! away! For she, too, was beautiful, and
innocent, and good; and which of these availed her, that she
should not perish? Away with her, I say, and do your will
with her; but let me not look on her any more!”

Up to this time, the insurrection had been confined to the
northeast of France, and more especially to the Beauvoisis
and the regions adjacent to the capital, the armed commons of
which appeared ready to encourage and assist, if not openly to
join them; but, at the period when my tale commences, it began
to spread like a conflagration, and rapidly extended itself in all
directions.

Auvergne still continued, however, free from disturbance, and
the knights and nobles whose demesnes lay within that fair
province went about their ordinary avocations and amusements,
unmolested and unsuspicious of danger, without any more display
of military force than was usual in those dark and dangerous
times, and with no more than ordinary trains of feudal dependants
and retainers.

This, however, was now brought to a sudden and alarming
conclusion by the occurrence of an incident so terrible and hideous
in its character, that it struck a panic-terror into every heart
that heard tell of it, and that it still survives, though centuries
have elapsed, as clear and distinct as if it had but just occurred,
in the memories of the peasantry of Auvergne.

It was a beautiful morning in the latter part of June, when
the whole face of the country was overspread by a garb of the
richest summer greenery, when the skies were glowing with
perfect and cloudless azure, and when the atmosphere was perfumed
with the breath of flowers and vocal with the melody of
birds. It was a morning when all nature seemed to be at peace,
the bridal, as are old pock-words of the earth and sky — when

even the angry passions of man, the great destroyer, seem to
be at rest, and when it is difficult to believe in the existence
or commission of any violence or wrong.

It was on such a morning that a gay cavalcade of knights
and ladies issued from the gates of the castle of Roche d'or,
with a numerous train of half-armed retainers; with grooms,
and foresters, and falconers; with hounds, gazehounds, and
spaniels, fretting in their leashes; and goss-hawks, jer-falcons,
peregrines, and marlins, horded upon their wrists, or cast upon
frames suspended by thongs about the waists of the varlets who
carried them.

At the head of this gallant company rode a finely-formed man
of stately presence, and apparelled in the rich garments of a
person of distinction in an age when every station and rank of
life had its distinctive garb, and when the sumptuary laws were
enforced with much strictness, rendering it highly penal for one
class to assume the dress of the station next above it. Velvet,
and rich furs, and ostrich-plumes, rustled and waved in the
garb of this puissant noble, and many a gem of rare price flashed
from the hilts of his weapons, and even from the accoutrements
of his splendid Andalusian charger. On either hand of him
rode a lady, beautiful both of them, and young, but in styles of
beauty utterly dissimilar: for one was dark-browed and black-haired,
with the complexion of a clear-skinned brunette, suffused
with a rich, sunny color, and large, languid black eyes; while
the other had a skin as white as snow, with the slightest possible
tinge of rose on the soft, rounded cheeks — eyes of the
hues of the dewy violet — and long, streaming tresses of warm,
golden brown.

In the dark-haired lady it was easy to trace a resemblance,
of both outline and complexion, to the gentleman who rode between
them, and it would not have needed a very keen observer
to discover at a glance that they were brother and sister. And

such was the truth: for the personages were Raoul de Canillac,
the marquis of Roche d'or; Louise de Canillac, his lovely sister;
and Clemente, his late-wedded wife, formerly Clemente
Isaure de Saint Angely, who was the wonder of the country
for beauty, and its idol for her charity and goodness.

Next this lady, on the outer side, there rode one who was as
much and as deservedly detested by the neighborhood as she
was admired and beloved — a strange compound of all the foul
and hideous vices which can render humanity detestable, unredeemed
by one solitary virtue, if bravery be excepted, which
was a quality so general and necessary — being, in fact, almost
unavoidable, from the peculiar nature of chivalrous institutions
— that it must be regarded rather as a virtue of the age and
military caste of nobles, than of this or that individual. He had
earned himself a fearful reputation, and how well he had deserved
no one could doubt who looked upon his face, all scathed
and furrowed by the lines stamped on it by habitual indulgence
in every hateful vice, habitual surrender to every fiery passion.
A cousin of the marquis, and his nearest male relative, he had
done much to deprave and corrupt his mind; and though an
accomplished and gallant gentleman, honorable, and affable, and
companionable to his own caste, a fond husband, a kind brother,
and a warm friend, he had succeeded in rendering him as cruel
and unmerciful an oppressor of all beneath him as a feudal
seigneur in those days could be, if his power was equalled by
his will to do evil. He also was Canillac, the reproach and
disgrace of an old and noble name, and was known far and wide,
for his furious and frantic crimes — which seemed, so perfectly
unprovoked were they at times and devoid of meaning, to arise
from actual insanity — by the soubriquet of Canillac le fou, the
madman — a title of which, so shameless was he in his infamous
renown, he actually appeared to glory, singing it as a portion
of his name, or an honorable title of distinction.

On the other side, next to Louise de Roche d'or, rode a tall
and handsome youth, wearing the belt and spurs of knighthood,
and gazing at times into the face of the beautiful girl with
eyes full of deep, ardent affection, and speaking to her in those
low, earnest tones which denote so certainly the existence of
strong and pervading interest and affection. The knight, already
famous far beyond his years, for deeds of dauntless daring,
was Sir Louis de Montfauçon, a puissant baron of Auvergne,
whose bands marched with those of Castel de Roche d'or, and
the affianced husband of the young and fair Louise. Pages and
equerries, with the usual attendants, followed, and the courtyard
rang and re-echoed with the clang of hoofs, the neighing of
coursers, the deep baying of the bloodhounds, and the screams
of the frightened falcons.

They issued from the castle-gates; wound through the open
park, and the dense woodland chase beyond it; swept down a
steep descent into a broad and fertile valley, watered by a great,
clear river, which they crossed by a wooden bridge; traversed
the narrow, sandy street of the village of Castel de Roche d'or,
and, turning off short to the right, entered a little dell, through
which a bright, clear rivulet murmured over its pebbly bed, on
its way to join the larger river in the valley.

The lower part of this little dell was principally open pasturage,
dotted here and there with brakes and solitary bushes of
hawthorn; and along the margin of the rivulet there ran a fringe
of willow and alder thickets, but a little higher up it degenerated
into a mere gorge or ravine, thickly overshadowed by the
gnarled arms and dense, verduous umbrage of huge, immemorial
oaks, the outskirts and advanced guard, as it were, of a vast
oak-forest, which covered leagues on leagues of rough and
broken country, to which this dell formed the readiest means
of access.

Just in the jaws of this pass, overhung by the oaks, stood a

small, gray, rustic chapel, supported on four clustered columns,
with groined arches intersecting each other resting upon them,
a small, arched canopy containing a bell on the summit of its
steep, slated roof, and a low-browed door, with a round arch,
decorated with the wolf-toothed carvings of the earliest Norman
style. Immediately in front of the door, the little rivulet which
watered the dell burst out of the other in a strong, gushing
spring, which had been blessed by some saint of old, and, being
surmounted by a vaulted canopy, was held to be peculiarly holy
by the superstitious rustics of the region.

This lovely spot, however, peaceful as it showed, and calm in
its tranquil and sequestered security, had been the scene, some
two or three years before, of a fearful and cruel crime: had
witnessed the violent seizure of a sweet, innocent, and rarely
lovely bride, fresh from the marriage benediction, by this very
Raoul de Canillac; and the girl had escaped pollution only by
self-immolation.

It was a cursed deed — and cursed was the vengeance it
provoked!

Just as the company I have described wheeled into the lower
end of the little dell, conversing joyously together, and enjoying
the sweet influences of the season and the place, they were
saluted by the long, keen blast of a bugle, well and clearly winded,
in that peculiarly note known at that period as the mort,
being the call that announced the death of the game, whatever
it was, which might be the object of pursuit.

This call came from the oaks above the chapel, although no
performer was seen, nor was there any baying of hounds or
clamor of hunters, such as usually accompanies the termination
of a chase.

There was no privilege at that time more highly regarded by
the nobles than the rights of the chase, nor was there any crime
more jealously pursued and punished more vindictively than the

infraction of the forest-laws; so much so, indeed, that the death
of a stag or wild-boar by unlicensed hands was visited with a
far deeper meed of vengeance than the murder of a man!

It was with a face, therefore, inflamed by the fiercest ire, a
flashing eye, and a knitted brow, that Raoul de Canillac unsheathed
his sword, and spurred his horse into a gallop, calling
upon his men with a vehement and angry oath to follow him,
for there were of a surety villeyns in the wood slaughtering the
deer.

The ladies of the party checked their horses on the instant
in affright, while the men rushed forward in confusion, drawing
their weapons, and casting loose the hounds and hawks which
they had led or carried, in order to wield their arms with more
advantage; and between the shouts of the feudal retainers, the
deep baying of the released bloodhounds, and the wild screams
of the hawks, all that calm and peaceful solitude was transformed
on the instant into a scene of the wildest turmoil and
confusion. At this moment, just as the lord of Roche d'or
spurred his horse up the slight eminence toward the little
church, a man of great height and powerful frame stepped
slowly forward from among the oaks, clad in a full suit of
knightly armor, of plain, unornamented black steel, with no device
or bearing on his shield, and no crest on his casque, which
was overshadowed by an immense plume of black ostrich-feathers.
He had a two-handed sword slung across his shoulders,
and carried a ponderous battle-axe in his right hand.

Startled by this unexpected apparition, Raoul de Canillac
checked his horse suddenly, exclaiming: “Treason! fy! treason!
Ride, ladies, for your lives! — ride! ride!”

But this warning came too late: for, simultaneously with the
appearance of the leader, above five hundred crossbow-men and
lancers poured out from the wood on either flank, with their
weapons ready; and a body of fifty or sixty mounted men-at-arms

drew out from behind a spur of the hills at the entrance
of the gorge, and effectually cut off their retreat. Entirely surrounded,
escape was impossible, and resistance hopeless, so
great was the numerical superiority of the enemy, and so perfectly
were they armed and accoutred for offence and defence,
while the retainers of the lords had no defensive arms whatever,
nor any weapons except their swords and hunting-staves,
and a few bows and arbalasts.

The leader of the Jacquerie — for it needed not a second
glance to inform Raoul de Canillac into whose hands he had
fallen — waved his axe on high as a signal, and instantly a single
crossbow was discharged; and the bolt, striking the horse
of the seigneur full in the centre of the chest, he went down on
the instant: and before he could recover his feet, the marquis
was seized by a dozen stout hands, and bound securely hand
and foot with stout hempen cords.

On perceiving this, the elder nobleman, Canillac the madman,
with the desperate and reckless fury for which he was so
conspicuous, dashed forward, sword in hand, with his paternal
war-cry, followed by a dozen or two of the armed servitors, as
if to rescue his kinsman. Perhaps he perceived the hopelessness
of their condition, and preferred selling his life dearly to
surrendering only to be slaughtered in cold blood: and if such
was his notion, he was not all unwise.

Again the battle-axe was waved, and this time a close and
well-aimed volley followed, the bolts taking effect fatally on the
bodies of the old lord and several of his followers, three of
whom with their chief were slain outright, while several others
staggered back more or less severely wounded.

With this, all resistance ended, the men throwing down their
arms, and crying for quarter, which — as they were all, with
the exception of two pages and an esquire, men of low birth —
was granted, and they were discharged without further condition.

To those of gentle origin, however, no such clemency
was extended. The pages and esquire were stripped of their
costly garb, and immediately hanged up by the necks from the
oak-trees, together with the young knight affianced to Mademoiselle
Roche d'or, in spite of the entreaties and supplications
of his beautiful betrothed.

The ladies were then compelled to dismount, and their arms
being bound behind their backs, were tied with ropes to the
tails of their captors' horses; and, together with Raoul de Canillac,
whose feet were now released from their fetters, were
dragged in painful and disgraceful procession back to the gates
of the feudal fortalice from which they had so lately issued free
and happy!

On the first summons of the leader of the Jacques — seeing
their lord and the ladies captive, weak in numbers, dispirited,
and without a leader — the garrison immediately surrendered:
the portcullis was drawn up, the pontlevis lowered, and, with
their wretched prisoners, the fierce marauders entered the walls,
which, by their massive strength, might otherwise have long
defied them.

Meantime, not one word had been uttered by the leader of
the party, who indicated his demands to his men merely by the
wafture of his hand or the gesture of his head, which were
promptly understood and implicitly obeyed. In compliance
with a sign, the prisoners were now led after him into their
own magnificent abode, and carried through long, winding passages,
and up an almost interminable stairway, to an apartment
in the summit of a huge, square tower, overlooking the castlemoat,
from a battlemented balcony, at the height of above a
hundred feet. A dread foreboding shook the breast of Raoul
de Canillac, as he was brought into that chamber, the scene of
his outrageous cruelty to the lovely Marguerite in past years,
and now to be the scene of its as cruel retribution.

The black warrior raised the vizor of his helmet, and gazed
into the face of his former lord with the fixed, resolute, determined
scowl of Maurice Champrest, while the bad, bold oppressor
shook before his captor with a visible, convulsive air.

“Ay! tremble, murderer and tyrant — tremble!” thundered
the fierce avenger; “tremble! for thy time is at hand: and,
Marguerite — lovely and beloved Marguerite — right royally
shalt thou be now avenged! Away with these! away with
them! their doom is spoken!”

And a scene of more than fiendish cruelty and violence ensued.
Those innocent and lovely women, subjected to the last
dishonor before the eyes of the husband and brother — tortured
with merciless ingenuity when their violators were satiate of
their beauties — and then cast headlong from the bartizan into
the moat which had received the corpse of the Vassal's Wife!
Raoul de Canillac, scourged till the flesh was literally torn from
his bones, was plunged headlong after them!

Such was the Vassal's Vengeance! — and when he fell,
shortly afterward, before the walls of Meaux, by the lance of
the renowned Captal de Buch, his last words were: “I care
not — I care not to live longer. My task was ended, my race
won, when thou wert avenged, Marguerite — Marguerite!” and
he perished with her name on his tongue. His crimes were
great, but was not his temptation greater? Pray we, that we
be not tempted!

TRUE LOVE'S DEVOTION:
A TALE OF THE TIMES OF LOUIS QUINZE.

1. PART I.

There was a mighty stir in the streets of Paris, as Paris's
streets were in the olden time. A dense and eager mob had
taken possession, at an early hour of the day, of all the environs
of the Bastile, and lined the way which led thence to the Place
de Grève in solid and almost impenetrable masses.

People of all conditions were there, except the very highest;
but the great majority of the concourse was composed of the
low populace, and the smaller bourgeoisie. Multitudes of
women were there, too, from the girl of sixteen to the beldam
of sixty, nor had mothers been ashamed to bring their infants
in their arms into that loud and tumultuous assemblage.

Loud it was and tumultuous, as all great multitudes are, unless
they are convened by purposes too resolutely dark and
solemn to find any vent in noise. When that is the case, let
rulers beware, for peril is at hand — perhaps the beginning of
the end.

But this Parisian mob, although long before this period it
had learned the use of barricades, though noisy, turbulent, and
sometimes even violent in the demonstrations of its impatience,
was anything but angry or excited.

On the contrary, it seemed to be on the very tip-toe of pleasurable
expectation, and from the somewhat frequent allusions
to notre bon roi, which circulated among the better order of
spectators, it would appear that the government of the Fifteenth
Louis was for the moment in unusually good odor with the
good folks of the metropolis.

What was the spectacle to which they were looking forward
with so much glee — which had brought forth young delicate
girls, and tender mothers, into the streets at so early an hour —
which, as the day advanced toward ten o'clock of the morning,
was tempting forth laced cloaks, and rapiers, and plumed hats,
and here and there, in the cumbrous carriages of the day, the
proud and luxurious ladies of the gay metropolis?

One glance toward the centre of the Place de Grève was
sufficient to inform the dullest, for there uprose, black, grisly,
horrible, a tall stout pile of some thirty feet in height, with a
huge wheel affixed horizontally to the summit.

Around this hideous instrument of torture was raised a scaffold
hung with black cloth, and strewd with saw-dust, for the
convenience of the executioners, about three feet lower than
the wheel which surmounted it.

Around this frightful apparatus were drawn up two companies
of the French guard, forming a large hollow-square facing
outward, with muskets loaded, and bayonets fixed, as if they
apprehended an attempt at rescue, although from the demeanor
of the people, nothing appeared at that time to be further from
their thoughts than anything of the kind.

Above was the executioner-in-chief, with two grim, truculent-looking
assistants, making preparations for the fearful operation
they were about to perform, or leaning indolently on the instruments
of slaughter.

By and by, as the day wore onward, and the concourse kept
still increasing both in numbers and in the respectability of

those who composed it, something of irritation began to show
itself, mingled with the eagerness and expectation of the populace,
and from some murmurs, which ran from time to time
through their ranks, it would seem that they apprehended the
escape of their victim.

By this time the windows of all the houses which overlooked
the precincts of that fatal square on which so much of noble
blood has been shed through so many ages, were occupied by
persons of both sexes, all of the middle, and some even of the
upper classes, as eager to behold the frightful and disgusting
scene, which was about to ensue, as the mere rabble in the
open streets below.

The same thing was manifest along the whole line of the
thoroughfare by which the fatal procession would advance, with
this difference alone, that many of the houses in that quarter
belonging to the high nobility, and all with few exceptions
being the dwellings of opulent persons, the windows, instead
of being let like seats at the opera, to any who would pay the
price, were occupied by the inhabitants, coming and going
from their ordinary avocations to look out upon the noisy throng,
when any louder outbreak of voices called their attention to the
busy scene.

Among the latter, in a large and splendid mansion, not far
from the Porte St. Antoine, and commanding a direct view of
the Place de la Bastille, with its esplanade, drawbridge, and
principal entrance, a group was collected at one of the windows,
nearly overlooking the gate itself, which seemed to take
the liveliest interest in the proceedings of the day, although
that interest was entirely unmixed with anything like the brutal
expectation, and morbid love of horrible excitement which
characterized the temper of the multitude.

The most prominent persons of this group was a singularly
noble-looking man, fast verging to his fiftieth year, if he had

not yet attained it. His countenance, though resolute and firm,
with a clear, piercing eye, lighted up at times, for a moment,
by a quick, fiery flash, was calm, benevolent, and pensive in
its ordinary mood, rather than energetical or active. Yet it
was easy to perceive that the mind, which informed it, was of
the highest capacity both of intellect and imagination.

The figure and carriage of this gentleman would have sufficiently
indicated that, at some period of his life he had borne
arms and led the life of a camp — which, indeed, at that day
was only to say that he was a nobleman of France — but a long
scar on his right brow, a little way above the eye, losing itself
among the thick locks of his fine waving hair, and a small
round cicatrix in the centre of his cheek, showing where a
pistol ball had found entrance, proved that he had been where
blows were falling thickest, and that he had not spared his own
person in the melée.

His dress was very rich, according to the fashion of the day,
though perhaps a fastidious eye might have objected that it
partook somewhat of the past mode of the regency, which had
just been brought to a conclusion as my tale commences, by the
resignation of the witty and licentious Philip of Orleans.

If, however, this fine-looking gentleman was the most prominent,
he certainly was not the most interesting person of the
company, which consisted, besides himself, of an ecclesiastic
of high rank in the French church, a lady, now somewhat advanced
in years, but showing the remains of beauty which, in
its prime, must have been extraordinary, and of a boy in his
fifteenth or sixteenth year.

For notwithstanding the eminent distinction, and high intellect
of the elder nobleman, the dignity of the abbé, not unsupported
by all which men look for as the outward and visible
signs of that dignity, and the grace and beauty of the lady, it

was upon the boy alone that the eye of every spectator would
have dwelt, from the instant of its first discovering him.

He was tall of his age, and very finely made, of proportions
which gave promise of exceeding strength when he should arrive
at maturity, but strength uncoupled to anything of weight
or clumsiness. He was unusually free, even at this early
period, from that heavy and ungraceful redundance of flesh
which not unfrequently is the forerunner of athletic power in
boys just bursting into manhood; for he was already as conspicuous
for the thinness of his flanks, and the shapely hollow
of his back, as for the depth and roundness of his chest, the
breadth of his shoulders, and the symmetry of his limbs.

His head was well set on, and his whole bearing was that
of one who had learned ease, and grace, and freedom, combined
with dignity of carriage, in no school of practice and mannerism,
but from the example of those with whom he had been
brought up, and by familiar intercourse from his cradle upward
with the high-born and gently nurtured of the land.

His long rich chestnut hair fell down in natural masses undisfigured
as yet by the hideous art of the court hair-dresser,
on either side his fine broad forehead, and curled, untortured
by the crisping-irons, over the collar of his velvet jerkin. His
eyes were large and very clear, of the deepest shade of blue,
with dark lashes, yet full of strong, tranquil light. All his features
were regular and shapely, but it was not so much in the
beauty of their form, or in the harmony of their coloring, that
the attractiveness of his aspect consisted, as in the peculiarity
and power of his expression.

For a boy of his age, the pensiveness and composure of that
expression were indeed almost unnatural, and they combined
with a calm firmness and immobility of feature, which promised,
I know not what of resolution and tenacity of purpose.
It was not gravity, much less sternness, or sadness, that lent

so powerful an expression to that young face; nor was there a
single line which indicated coldness or hardness of heart, or
which would have led to a suspicion that he had been schooled
by those hard monitors, suffering and sorrow. No, it was pure
thoughtfulness, and that of the highest and most intellectual
order, which characterized the boy's expression.

Yet, though it was so thoughtful, there was nothing in the
aspect whence to forebode a want of the more masculine qualifications.
It was the thoughtfulness of a worker, not of a
dreamer — the thoughtfulness which prepares, not unfits a man
for action. If the powers portrayed in that boy's countenance
were not deceptive to the last degree, high qualities were within
and a high destiny before him.

But who, from the foreshowing and the bloom of sixteen
years, may augur of the finish and the fruit of the threescore-and-ten,
which are the sum of human toil and sorrow?

It was now nearly noon, when the outer drawbridge of the
Bastile was lowered, and its gate opened; and forth rode, two
abreast, a troop of the musquetaires or lifeguard, in the bright
steel casques and cuirases, with the musquetoons, from which
they derived their name, unslung and ready for action. As
they issued into the wider space beyond the bridge, the troopers
formed themselves rapidly into a sort of hollow column, the
front of which, some eight file deep, occupied the whole width
of the street, two files in close order composing each flank, and
leaving an open space in the centre completely surrounded by
the horsemen.

Into this space, without a moment's delay, there was driven
a low, black cart, or hurdle as it was technically called, of the
rudest construction, drawn by four powerful black horses — a
savage-faced official guiding them by the ropes which supplied
the place of reins. On this ill-omened vehicle there stood
three persons — the prisoner, and two of the armed wardens of

the Bastile — the former ironed very heavily, and the latter
bristling with offensive weapons.

Immediately in the rear of this car followed another troop of
the lifeguard, which closed up in the densest and most serried
order around and behind the victim of the law, so as to render
any attempt at rescue useless.

The person, to secure whose punishment so strong a military
force had been produced, and to witness whose execution so
vast a multitude was collected, was a tall, noble-looking man
of forty or forty-five years, dressed in a rich mourning-habit
of the day, but wearing neither hat nor mantle. His dark hair,
mixed at intervals with thin lines of silver, was cut short behind,
contrary to the usage of the times, and his neck was bare, the
collar of his superbly-laced shirt being folded broadly back over
the cape of his pourpoint.

His face was very pale, and his complexion being naturally
of the darkest, the hue of his flesh, from which all the healthful
blood had receded, was strangely livid and unnatural in its appearance.
Still it did not seem that it was fear which had
blanched his cheeks, and stolen all the color from his compressed
lip, for his eye was full of a fierce, scornful light, and
all his features were set and steady with an expression of the
calmest and most iron resolution.

As the fatal vehicle which bore him made its appearance on
the esplanade without the gates of the prison, a deep hum of
satisfaction ran through the assembled concourse, rising and
deepening gradually into a savage howl like that of a hungry
tiger.

Then, then blazed out the haughty spirit, the indomitable
pride of the French noble! Then shame, and fear, and death
itself, which he was looking even now full in the face, were
all forgotten, all absorbed, in his overwhelming scorn of the
people!

The blood rushed in a torrent to his brow, his eye seemed
to lighten forth actual fire, as he raised his right hand aloft —
loaded although it was with such a mass of iron as a Greek
athlete might have shunned to lift — and shook it at the clamorous
mob, with a glare of scorn and fury that showed how, had
he been at liberty, he would have dealt with the revilers of his
fallen state.

“Sacré canaille!” he hissed through his hard-set teeth —
“back to your gutters and your garbage; or follow, if you can,
in silence, and learn, if ye lack not courage to look on, how a
man should die!”

The reproof told: for, though at the contemptuous tone and
fell insult of the first words, the clamor of the rabble-rout waxed
wilder, there was so much true dignity in the last sentiment
he uttered, and the fate to which he was going was so hideous,
that a key was struck in the popular heart, and thenceforth the
tone of the spectators was changed altogether.

It was the exultation of the people over the downfall and disgrace
of a noble, that had found tongue in that savage conclamation;
it was the apprehension that his dignity, and the interest
of his great name, would win him pardon from the partial
justice of the king, that had rendered them pitiless and savage:
and now that their own cruel will was about to be gratified, as
they beheld how dauntlessly the proud lord went to a death of
torture, they were stricken with a sort of secret shame, and
followed the dread train in sullen silence.

As the black car rolled onward, the haughty criminal turned
his eyes upward — perchance from a sentiment of pride, which
rendered it painful to him to meet the gaze, whether pitiful or
triumphant, of the Parisian populace; and as he did so, it
chanced that his glance fell on the group which I have described
as assembled at the windows of a mansion which he
knew well, and in which, in happier days, he had passed gay

and pleasant hours. Every eye of that group, with but one
exception, was fixed upon himself, as he perceived on the instant;
the lady alone having turned her head away, as unable
to look upon one in such a strait, whom she had known under
circumstances so widely different. There was nothing, however,
in the gaze of all these earnest eyes that seemed to embarrass,
much less to offend, the prisoner. Deep interest, earnestness,
perhaps horror, was expressed by one and all; but
that horror was not, nor in anywise partook of, the abhorrence
which appeared to be the leading sentiment of the populace below.
As he encountered their gaze, therefore, he drew himself
up to his full height, and, laying his right hand upon his heart,
bowed low and gracefully to the windows at which his friends
of past days were assembled.

The boy turned his eye quickly toward his father, as if to
note what return he should make to that strange salutation. If
it were so, he did not remain in doubt a moment, for that nobleman
bowed low and solemnly to his brother-peer with a very
grave and sad aspect; and even the ecclesiastic inclined his
head courteously to the condemned criminal.

The boy perhaps marvelled, for a look of bewilderment
crossed his ingenuous features; but it passed away in an instant,
and, following the example of his seniors, he bent his
ingenuous brow and sunny locks before the unhappy man, who
never was again to interchange a salute with living mortal.

It would seem that the recipient of that last act of courtesy
was gratified beyond the expectation of those who offered it, for
a faint flush stole over his livid features, from which the momentary
glow of indignation had now entirely faded, and a
slight smile played upon his pallid lip, while a tear — the last
he should ever shed — twinkled for an instant on his dark
lashes. “True,” he muttered to himself approvingly; “the
nobles are true ever to their order!”

The eyes of the mob likewise had been attracted to the group
above, by what had passed, and at first it appeared as if they
had taken umbrage at the sympathy showed to the criminal by
his equals in rank; for there was manifested a little inclination
to break out again into a murmured shout, and some angry words
were bandied about, reflecting on the pride and party spirit of
the proud lords.

But the inclination was checked instantly, before it had time
to render itself audible, by a word which was circulated, no
one knew whence or by whom, through the crowded ranks —
“Hush! hush! it is the good lord of St. Renan!” And therewith
every voice was hushed — so fickle is the fancy of a crowd
— although it is very certain that four fifths of those present
knew not nor had ever heard the name of St. Renan, nor had
the slightest suspicion what claims he who bore it had on either
their respect or forbearance.

The death-train passed on its way, however, unmolested by
any further show of temper on the part of the crowd; and the
crowd itself, following the progress of the hurdle to the place
of execution, was soon out of sight of the windows occupied by
the family of the count de St. Renan.

“Alas! unhappy Kerguelen!” exclaimed the count, with a
deep and painful sigh, as the fearful procession was lost to sight
in the distance. “He knows not yet half the bitterness of that
which he has to undergo.”

The boy looked up into his father's face with an inquiring
glance, which he answered at once, still in the same subdued
and solemn voice which he had used from the first.

“By the arrangement of his hair and dress I can see that
he imagines he is to die as a nobleman, by the axe. May
Heaven support him when he sees the disgraceful wheel.”

“You seem to pity the wretch, Louis,” cried the lady, who
had not hitherto spoken, nor even looked toward the criminal

as he was passing by the windows — “and yet he was assuredly
a most atrocious criminal. A cool, deliberate, cold-blooded
poisoner! Out upon it! out upon it! The wheel is fifty times
too good for him!”

“He was all that you say, Marie,” replied her husband
gravely; “and yet I do pity him with all my heart, and grieve
for him. I knew him well, though we have not met for many
years, when we were both young, and there was no braver, nobler,
better man within the limits of fair France. I know, too,
how he loved that woman, how he trusted that man — and then
to be so betrayed! It seems to me but yesterday that he led
her to the altar, all tears of happiness, and soft maiden blushes.
Poor Kerguelon! he was sorely tried.”

“But still, my son, he was found wanting. Had he submitted
him as a Christian to the punishment the good God laid
upon him —”

“The world would have pronounced him a spiritless, dishonored
slave, father,” said the count, answering the ecclesiastic's
speech before it was yet finished, “and gentlemen would
have refused him the hand of fellowship.”

“Was he justified then, my father?” asked the boy eagerly,
who had been listening with eager attention to every word that
had yet been spoken. “Do you think, then, that he was in
the right; that he could not do otherwise than to slay her? I
can understand that he was bound to kill the man who had
basely wronged his honor — but a woman! — a woman whom
he had once loved too! — that seems to me most horrible; and
the mode, by a slow poison! living with her while it took
effect! eating at the same board with her! sleeping by her
side! that seems even more than horrible, it was cowardly!”

“God forbid, my son,” replied the elder nobleman, “that I
should say any man was justified who had murdered another
in cold blood; especially, as you have said, a woman, and by a

method so terrible as poison. I only mean exactly what I
said, that he was tried very fearfully, and that under such trial
the best and wisest of us here below can not say how he would
act himself. Moreover, it would seem, that mistaken as he
was perhaps in the course which he seems to have imagined
that honor demanded at his hands, he was more mistaken in
the mode which he took of accomplishing his scheme of vengeance.
It was made very evident upon his trial that he did
nothing, even to that wretched traitress, in rage or revenge,
but all as he thought in honor. He chose a drug which consumed
her by a mild and gradual decay, without suffering or
spasm; he gave her time for repentance, nay, it is clearly
proved that he convinced her of her sin, reconciled her to the
part he had taken in her death, and exchanged forgiveness with
her before she passed away. I do not think myself that to
commit a crime himself can clear one from dishonor cast upon
him by another's act, but at the same time I can not look upon
Kerguelen's guilt as of that brutal and felonious nature which
calls for such a punishment as this — to be broken alive on the
wheel, like a hired stabber — much less can I assent to the
stigma which is attached to him on all sides, while that base,
low-lived, treacherous, cogging miscreant, who fell too honorably
by his honorable sword, meets pity — God defend us from
such justice and sympathy! — and is entombed with tears and
honors, while the avenger is crushed, living, out of the very
shape of humanity by the hands of the common hangman.”

The churchman's lips moved for a moment, as if he were
about to speak in reply to the false doctrines which he heard
enunciated by that upright and honorable man, and good father,
but, ere he spoke, he reflected that those doctrines were held
at that time, throughout Christian Europe, unquestioned, and
confirmed by prejudice and pride beyond all the power of argument
or of religion to set them aside, or invalidate them.

The law of chivalry, sterner and more inflexible than that Mosaic
code requiring an eye for an eye, and a tooth for a tooth,
which demanded a human life as the sacrifice for every rash
word, for every wrongful action, was the law paramount of
every civilized land in that day, and in France perhaps most
of all lands, as standing foremost in what was then deemed
civilization. And the abbé well knew that discussion of this
point would only tend to bring out the opinions of the count
de St. Renan, in favor of the sanguinary code of honor, more
decidedly, and consequently to confirm the mind of the young
man more effectually in what he believed himself to be a fatal
error.

The young man, who was evidently very deeply interested
in the matter of the conversation, had devoured every word of
his father, as if he had been listening to the oracles of a God;
and, when he ceased, after a pause of some seconds, during
which he was pondering very deeply on that which he had
heard, he raised his intelligent face and said in an earnest
voice —

“I see, my father, all that you have alleged in palliation of
the count's crime, and I fully understand you — though I still
think it the most terrible thing I ever have heard tell of. But
I do not perfectly comprehend wherefore you ransack our language
of all the deepest terms of contempt which to heap upon
the head of the chevalier de la Rochederrien? He was the
count's sworn friend, she was the count's wedded wife; they
both were forsworn and false, and both betrayed him. But in
what was the chevalier's fault the greater or the viler?”

Those were strange days, in which such a subject could
have been discussed between two wise and virtuous parents
and a son, whom it was their chiefest aim in life to bring up to
be a good and honorable man — that son, too, barely more than
a boy in years and understanding. But the morality of those

times was coarser and harder, and, if there was no more real
vice, there was far less superficial delicacy in the manners of
society, and the relations between men and women, than there
is now-a-days.

Perhaps the course lies midway; for certainly if there was
much coarseness then, there is much cant and much squeamishness
now, which could be excellently well dispensed with.

Beside this, boys were brought into the great world much
earlier at that period, and were made men of at an age when
they would have been learning Greek and Latin, had their
birth been postponed by a single century.

Then, at fifteen, they held commissions, and carried colors
in the battle's front, and were initiated into all the license of
the court, the camp, and the forum.

So it came that the discussion of a subject such as that
which I have described, was very naturally introduced even
between parents and a beloved and only son by the circumstances
of the day. Morals, as regards the matrimonial contract,
and the intercourse between the sexes, have at all times been
lower and far less rigid among the French, than in nations of
northern origin; and never at any period of the world was the
morality of any country, in this respect, at so low an ebb as
was France under the reign of the Fifteenth Louis.

The count de St. Renan replied, therefore, to his son with
as little restraint as if he had been his equal in age, and equally
acquainted with the customs and vices of the world, although
intrigue and crime were the topics of which he had to treat.

“It is quite true, Raoul,” replied the count, “that so far as
the unhappy lord of Kerguelen was concerned, the guilt of the
chevalier de la Rochederrien was, as you say, no deeper, perhaps
less deep than that of the miserable lady. He was, indeed,
bound to Kerguelen by every tie of friendship and honor;
he had been aided by his purse, backed by his sword, nay, I

have heard and believe, that he owed his life to him. Yet for
all that he seduced his wife; and to make it worse, if worse it
could be, Kerguelen had married her from the strongest affection,
and till the chevalier brought misery, and dishonor, and
death upon them, there was no wedded couple in all France so
virtuous or so happy.”

“Indeed, sir!” replied Raoul, in tones of great emotion,
staring with his large, dark eyes as if some strange sight had
presented itself to him on a sudden.

“I know well, Raoul, and if you have not heard it yet, you
will soon do so, when you begin to mingle with men, that there
are those in society, those whom the world regards, moreover,
as honorable men, who affect to say that he who loves a woman,
whether lawfully or sinfully, is at once absolved from all
considerations except how he most easily may win — or in other
words — ruin her; and consequently such men would speak
slightly of the chevalier's conduct toward his friend, Kerguelen,
and affect to regard it as a matter of course, and a mere
affair of gallantry! But I trust you will remember this, my
son, that there is nothing gallant, nor can be, in lying, or deceit,
or treachery of any kind. And further, that to look with eyes
of passion on the wife of a friend, is in itself both a crime, and
an act of deliberate dishonor.”

“I should not have supposed, sir,” replied the boy, blushing
very deeply, partly it might be from the nature of the subject
under discussion, and partly from the strength of his emotions,
“that any cavalier could have regarded it otherwise. It seems
to me that to betray a friend's honor is a far blacker thing than
to betray his life — and surely no man with one pretension to
honor would attempt to justify that.”

“I am happy to see, Raoul, that you think so correctly on
this point. Hold to your creed, my dear boy, for there are
who shall try ere long to shake it. But be sure that it is the

creed of honor. But, although I think La Rochederrien disgraced
himself even in this, it was not for this only that I
termed him, as I deem him, the very vilest and most infamous
of mankind. For when he had led that poor lady into sin;
when she had surrendered herself up wholly to his honor;
when she had placed the greatest trust — although a guilty
trust, I admit — in his faith and integrity that one human being
can place in another, the base dog betrayed her. He boasted
of her weakness, of Kerguelen's dishonor, of his own infamy.”

“And did not they to whom he boasted of it,” exclaimed the
noble boy, his face flushing fiery red with excitement and indignation,
“spurn him at once from their presence, as a thing
unworthy and beyond the pale of law.”

“No, Raoul, they laughed at him, applauded his gallant success,
and jeered at the lord of Kerguelen.”

“Great heaven! and these were gentlemen!”

“They were called such, at least; gentlemen by name and
descent they were assuredly, but as surely not right gentlemen
at heart. Many of them, however, in cooler moments, spoke
of the traitor and the braggart with the contempt and disgust
he merited. Some friend of Kerguelen's heard what had
passed, and deemed it his duty to inform him. The most unhappy
husband called the seducer to the field, wounded him
mortally, and — to increase yet more his infamy — even in the
agony of death the slave confessed the whole, and craved forgiveness
like a dog. Confessed the woman's crime — you mark
me, Raoul! — had he died mute, or died even with a falsehood
in his mouth, as I think he was bound to do in such extremity,
affirming her innocence with his last breath, he had saved her,
and perhaps spared her wretched lord the misery of knowing
certainly the depth of his dishonor.”

The boy pondered for a moment or two without making any
answer; and although he was evidently not altogether satisfied,

probably would not have again spoken, had not his father, who
read what was passing in his mind, asked him what it was that
he desired to know further.

Raoul smiled at perceiving how completely his father understood
him, and then said at once, without pause or hesitation:—

“I understand you to say, sir, that you thought the wretched
man of whom we spoke was bound, under the extremity in
which he stood, to die with a falsehood in his mouth. Can a
gentleman ever be justified in saying the thing that is not?
Much more, can it be his bounden duty to do so?”

“Unquestionably, as a rule of general conduct, he can not.
Truth is the soul of honor; and without truth, honor can not
exist. But this is a most intricate and tangled question. It
never can arise without presupposing the commission of one
guilty act — one act which no good or truly moral man would
commit at all. It is, therefore, scarcely worth our while to
examine it. But I do say, on my deliberate and grave opinion,
that if a woman, previously innocent and pure, have sacrificed
her honor to a man, that man is bound to sacrifice everything —
his life without a question, and I think his truth also — in order
to preserve her character, so far as he can, unscathed. But
we will speak no more of this; it is an odious subject, and one
of which I trust you, Raoul, will never have the sad occasion
to consider.”

“Oh, never, father, never I!” cried the ingenuous boy; “I
must first lose my senses, and become a madman.”

“All men are madmen, Raoul,” said the churchman — who
stood in the relation of maternal uncle to the youth — “who
suffer their passions to have the mastery of them. You must
learn, therefore, to be their tyrant; for if you be not, be well
assured that that they will be yours — and merciless tyrants
they are to the wretches who become their subjects.”

“I will remember what you say, sir,” answered the boy,

“and, indeed, I am not like to forget it, for altogether this is
the saddest day I ever have passed; and this is the most horrible
and appalling story that I have ever heard told. It was
but just that the lord of Kerguelen should die, for he did a murder;
and since the law punishes that in a peasant, it must do
so likewise with a noble. But to break him upon the wheel!
— it is atrocious! I should have thought all the nobles of the
land would have applied to the king to spare him that horror.”

“Many of them did apply, Raoul; but the king, or his ministers
in his name, made answer that during the regency the
count Horn was broken on the wheel for murder, and therefore
that to behead the lord of Kerguelen for the same offence, would
be to admit that the count was wrongfully condemned.”

“Out on it! out on it! what sophistry! Count Horn murdered
a banker, like a common thief, for his gold; and this unhappy
lord hath done the deed for which he must suffer in a
mistaken sense of honor, and with all tenderness compatible
with such a deed. There is nothing similar or parallel in the
two cases; and if there were, what signifies it now to Count
Horn, whether he were condemned rightfully or not? Are these
men heathen, that they would offer a victim to the offended
manes of the dead? But is there no hope, my father, that his
sentence may be commuted?”

“None whatever. Let us trust, therefore, that he has died
penitent, and that his sufferings are already over; and let us
pray, ere we lay us down to sleep, that his sins may be forgiven
to him, and that his soul may have rest.”

“Amen!” replied the boy, solemnly, at the same moment
that the ecclesiastic repeated the same word — though he did
so, as it would seem, less from the heart, and more as a matter
of course.

Nothing further was said on that subject, and in truth the
conversation ceased altogether. A gloom was cast over the

spirits of all present, both by the imagination of the horrors
which were in progress at that very moment, and by the recollection
of the preceding enormities of which this was but the
consummation; but the young viscount Raoul was so completely
engrossed by the deep thoughts which that conversation had
awakened in his mind, that his father, who was a very close
observer, and correct judge of human nature, almost regretted
that he had spoken, and determined, if possible, to divert him
from the gloomy revery into which he had fallen.

“Viscount,” said he, after a silence which had endured now
for many minutes, “when did you last wait upon Mademoiselle
Melanie d' Argenson?”

Raoul's eyes brightened at the name, and again the bright
blush, which I noticed before, crossed his ingenuous features;
but this time it was pleasure, not embarrassment, which colored
his young face so vividly.

“I called yesterday, sir,” he answered, “but she was abroad
with the countess, her mother. In truth, I have not seen her
since Friday last.”

“Why, that is an age, Raoul! Are you not dying to see her
again by this time? At your age, I was far more gallant.”

“With your permission, sir, I will go now and make my
compliments to her.”

“Not only my permission, Raoul, but my advice to make
your best haste thither. If you go straightways, you will be
sure to find her at home, for the ladies are sure not to have
ventured abroad with all this uproar in the streets. Take Martin
the equerry with you, and three of the grooms. What will
you ride — the new Barb I bought for you last week! Yes!
as well him as any; and, hark you, boy, tell them to send
Martin to me first: I will speak to him while you are beautifying
yourself to please the beaux yeux of Mademoiselle Melanie.”

“I am not sure that you are doing wisely, Louis,” said the

lady — as her son left the saloon, her eye following him wistfully
— “in bringing Raoul up as you are doing.”

“Nor I, Marie,” replied her husband, gravely; “we poor,
blind mortals can not be sure of anything, least of all of anything
the ends of which are incalculably distant. But in what
particular do you doubt the wisdom of my method?”

“In talking to him as you do, as though he were a man already;
in opening his eyes so widely to the sins and vices of
the world; in discussing questions with him such as those you
spoke of with him but now. He is a mere boy, you will remember,
to hear tell of such things!”

“Boys hear of such things early enough, I assure you — far
earlier than you ladies would deem possible. For the rest, he
must hear of them one day; and I think it quite as well that
he should hear of them, since hear he must, with the comments
of an old man, and that old man his best friend, than find them
out by the teachings and judge of them according to the light
views of his young and excitable associates. He who is forewarned
is fore-weaponed. I was kept pure, as it is termed —
or, in other words, kept ignorant of myself and of the world I
was destined to live in — until one fine day I was cut loose
from the apron-strings of my lady-mother, and the tether of my
abbé-tutor, and launched head-foremost into that vortex of temptation
and iniquity, the world of Paris, like a ship without a
chart or a compass. A precious race I ran in consequence, for
a time; and if I had not been so fortunate as to meet you, Marie
— whose bright eyes brought me out, like a blessed beacon,
safe from that perilous ocean — I know not but I should have
suffered shipwreck, both in fortune, which is a trifle, and in
character, which is everything. No, no; if that is all in which
you doubt, your fears are causeless.”

“But that is not all. In this you may be right — I know
not; at all events, you are a fitter judge than I! But are you

wise in encouraging so very strongly his fancy for Melanie
d' Argenson?”

“I' faith, it is something more than a fancy, I think: the boy
loves her!”

“I see that, Louis, clearly; and you encourage it.”

“And wherefore should I not? She is a good girl — as good
as she is beautiful!”

“She is an angel!”

“And her mother, Marie, was your most intimate, your bosom
friend.”

“And now a saint in heaven!”

“Well, what more? She is as noble as a De Rohan or a
Montmorency; she is an heiress with superb estates adjoining
our own lands of St. Renan; she is, like our Raoul, an only
child; and what is the most of all, I think, although it is not
the mode in this dear France of ours to attach much weight to
that, it is no made-up match, no cradle-plighting between babes
— to be made good, perhaps, by the breaking of hearts — but a
genuine, natural, mutual affection between two young, sincere,
innocent, artless persons; and a splendid couple they will make.
What can you see to alarm you in that prospect?”

“Her father.”

“The sieur d' Argenson! Well, I confess, he is not a very
charming person; but we all have our own faults or weaknesses:
and, after all, it is not he whom Raoul is about to
marry.”

“I doubt his good faith, very sorely.”

“I should doubt it too, Marie, did I see any cause which
should lead him to break it. But the match is in all respects
more desirable for him than it is for us; for, though Mademoiselle
d' Argenson is noble, rich, and handsome, the viscount de
Douarnenez might be well justified in looking for a wife far
higher than the daughter of a simple sieur of Bretagne. Be

sides, although the children loved before any one spoke of it —
before any one saw it, indeed, save I — it was D' Argenson himself
who broke the subject. What, then, should induce him to
play false?”

“I do not know; yet I doubt — I fear him.”

“But that, Marie, is unworthy of your character — of your
mind.”

“Louis, she is too beautiful!”

“I do not think Raoul will find fault with her on that score.”

“Nor would one greater than Raoul.”

“Whom do you mean?” cried the count, now for the first
time startled.

“I have seen eyes fixed upon her in deadly admiration,
which never admire but they pollute the object of their admiration.”

“The king's, Marie?”

“The king's!”

“And then —?”

“And then I have heard it whispered that the baron de Beaulieu
has asked her hand of the sieur d' Argenson.”

“The baron de Beaulieu! and who the devil is the baron de
Beaulieu, that the sieur d' Argenson should doubt for the nine
hundredth part of a minute between him and the viscount de
Douarnenez for the husband of his daughter?”

“The baron de Beaulieu, count, is the very particular friend,
the right-hand man, and most private minister, of his most Christian
majesty King Louis XV.”

“Ha! is it possible? Do you mean that —”

“I mean even that — if, by that, you mean all that is most
infamous and loathsome on the part of Beaulieu, all that is most
licentious on the part of the king. I believe — nay, I am well-nigh
sure — that there is such a scheme of villany on foot
against that sweet, unhappy child; and therefore would I pause

ere I urged too far my child's love toward her, lest it prove
most unhappy and disastrous.”

“And do you think D'Argenson capable —” exclaimed her
husband —

“Of anything,” she answered, interrupting him, “of anything
that may serve his avarice or his ambition.”

“Ah! it may be so. I will look to it, Marie; I will look to
it narrowly. But I fear that, if it be as you fancy, it is too late
already; that our boy's heart is devoted to her entirely; that
any break now, in one word, would be a heart-break!”

“He loves her very dearly, beyond doubt,” replied the lady;
“and she deserves it all, and is, I think, very fond of him likewise.”

“And can you suppose for a moment that she will lend herself
to such a scheme of infamy?”

“Never! She would die sooner.”

“I do not apprehend, then, that there will be so much difficulty
as you seem to fear. This business which brought all
of us Bretons up to Paris, as claimants of justice for our province,
or courters of the king's grace, as they phrase it, is finished
happily; and there is nothing to detain any of us in this
great wilderness of stone and mortar any longer. D'Argenson
told me yesterday that he should set out homeward on Wednesday
next; and it is but hurrying our own preparations a little
to travel with them in one party. I will see him this evening,
and arrange it.”

“Have you ever spoken with him concerning the contract,
Louis?”

“Never, directly, or in the form of a solemn proposal. But
we have spoken oftentimes of the evident attachment of the
children, and he has ever expressed himself gratified, and
seemed to regard it as a matter of course. But hush! here
comes the boy: leave us a while, and I will speak with him.”

Almost before his words were ended the door was thrown
open, and young Raoul entered, splendidly dressed, with his
rapier at his side, and his plumed hat in his hand — as likely a
youth to win a fair maid's heart as ever wore the weapon of a
gentleman.

“Martin is absent, sir. He went out soon after breakfast,
they tell me, to look after a pair of fine English carriage-horses
for the countess my mother, and has not yet returned. I ordered
old Jean François to attend me, with the four other
grooms.”

“Very well, Raoul. But look you — your head is young,
and your blood hot. You will meet, it is very like, all this
canaille returning from the slaughter of poor Kerguelen. Now
mark me, boy, there must be no vaporing on your part, or interfering
with the populace; and even if they should, as very
probably they may, be insolent, and utter outcries and abuse
against the nobility, even bear with them. On no account
strike any person, nor let your servants do so, nor encroach
upon their order; unless, indeed, they should so far forget themselves
as to throw stones, or to strike the first blow.”

“And then, my father?”

“Oh, then, Raoul, you are at liberty to let your good sword
feel the fresh air, and to give your horse a taste of those fine
spurs you wear. But even in that case, I should advise you to
use your edge rather than your point. There is not much harm
done in wiping a saucy burgher across the face to mend his
manners, but to pink him through the body makes it an awkward
matter. And I need not tell you by no means to fire, unless
you should be so beset and maltreated that you can not
otherwise extricate yourself; yet you must have your pistols
loaded. In these times it is necessary always to be provided
against all things. I do not, however, tell you these things
now because you are likely to be attacked; but such events

are always possible, and one can not provide against such too
early.”

“I will observe what you say, my father. Have I your permission
now to depart?”

“Not yet, Raoul; I would speak with you first a few words.
This Mademoiselle Melanie is very pretty, is she not?”

“She is the most beautiful lady I have ever seen,” replied
the youth, not without some embarrassment.

“And as amiable and gentle as she is beautiful?”

“Oh, yes, indeed, sir. She is all gentleness and sweetness,
yet is full of mirth, too, and graceful merriment.”

“In one word, then, she seems to you a very sweet and
lovely creature.”

“Doubtless she does, my father.”

“And I beseech you tell me, viscount, in what light do you
appear in the eyes of this very admirable young lady?”

“Oh, sir!” replied the youth, now very much embarrassed,
and blushing actually from shame.

“Nay, Raoul, I did not ask the question lightly, I assure you,
or in the least degree as a jest. It becomes very important
that I should know on what terms you and this fair lady stand
together. You have been visiting her now almost daily, I think,
during these three months last past. Do you conceive that you
are very disagreeable to her?”

“Oh! I hope not, sir. It would grieve me much if I thought
so!”

“Well, I am to understand, then, that you think she is not
blind to your merits, sir?”

“I am not aware, my dear father, that I have any merits
which she should be called to observe.”

“Oh, yes, viscount! That is an excess of modesty which
touches a little, I am afraid, on hypocrisy. You are not altogether
without merits. You are young, not ill-looking, nobly

born, and will, in God's good time, be rich. Then you can ride
well, and dance gracefully, and are not generally ill-educated
or unpolished. It is quite as necessary, my dear son, that a
young man should not undervalue himself, as that he should
not think of his deserts too highly. Now, that you have some
merits, is certain — for the rest, I desire frankness of you just
now, and beg that you will speak out plainly. I think you love
this young girl: is it not so, Raoul?”

“I do love her sir, very dearly — with my whole heart and
spirit!”

“And do you feel sure that this is not a mere transient liking
— that it will last, Raoul?”

“So long as life lasts in my heart, so long will my love for
her last, my father!”

“And you would wish to marry her?”

“Beyond all things in this world, my dear father.”

“And do you think that, were her tastes and views on the
subject consulted, she would say likewise?”

“I hope she would, sir. But I have never asked her.”

“And her father — is he gracious when you meet him?”

“Most gracious, sir, and most kind; indeed, he distinguishes
me above all the other young gentlemen who visit there.”

“You would not, then, despair of obtaining his consent.”

“By no means, my father, if you would be so kind as to
ask it.”

“And you desire that I should do so?”

“You will make me the happiest man in all France, if you
will!”

“Then go your way, sir, and make the best you can of it
with the young lady. I will speak myself with the sieur d'Argenson
to-night; and I do not despair any more than you do,
Raoul. But look you, boy, you do not fancy, I hope, that you
are going to church with your lady-love to-morrow or the next

day! Two or three years hence, at the earliest, will be all in
very good time. You must serve a campaign or two first, in
order to show that you know how to use your sword.”

“In all things, my dear father, I shall endeavor to fulfil your
wishes, knowing them to be as kindly as they are wise and
prudent. I owe you gratitude for every hour since I was born,
but for none so much as for this, for indeed you are going to
make me the happiest of men.”

“Away with you then, Sir Happiness! Betake yourself on
the wings of love to your bright lady; and mind the advice of
your favorite, Horace, to pluck the pleasures of the passing
hour, mindful how short is the sum of mortal life!”

The young man embraced his father gayly, and left the room
with a quick step and a joyous heart; and the jingling of his
spurs, and the quick, merry clash of his scabbard on the marble
staircase, told how joyously he descended its steps.

A moment afterward his father heard the clear, sonorous
tones of his fine voice calling to his attendants, and yet a few
seconds later the lively clatter of his horse's hoofs on the resounding
pavement.

“Alas for the happy days of youth, which are so quickly
flown!” exclaimed the father, as he participated in the hopeful
and exulting mood of his noble boy; “and alas for the promise
of mortal happiness, which is so oft deceitful and a traitress!”
He paused for a few moments, and seemed to ponder, and then
added, with a confident and proud expression: “But I see not
why one should forebode aught but success and happiness to
this noble boy of mine. Thus far, everything has worked toward
the end as I would wish it. They have fallen in love naturally
and of their own accord, and D'Argenson, whether he
like it or not, can not help himself. He must needs accedet
proudly and joyfully, to my proposal; he knows his estates to
be in my power far too deeply to resist. Nay, more — though

he be somewhat selfish, and ambitious, and avaricious, I know
nothing of him that should justify me in believing that he would
sell his daughter's honor, even to a king, for wealth or title!
My good wife is all too doubtful and suspicious. — But, hark!
here comes the mob, returning from that unfortunate man's execution!
I wonder how he bore it?”

And with the words he moved toward the window, and,
throwing it open, stepped out upon the spacious balcony. Here
he learned speedily, from the conversation of the passing crowd,
that, although dreadfully shocked and startled by the first intimation
of the death he was to undergo, which he received from
the sight of the fatal wheel, the lord of Kerguelen had died as
becomes a proud, brave man, reconciled to the church, forgiving
his enemies, without a groan or a murmur, under the protracted
agonies of that most horrible of deaths, the breaking on
the wheel!

Meanwhile the day passed onward; and when evening came,
and the last and most social meal of the day was laid on the
domestic board, young Raoul had returned from his visit to the
lady of his love, full of high hopes and happy anticipations.
Afterward, according to his promise, the count de St. Renan
went forth and held debate until a late hour of the night with
the sieur d'Argenson. Raoul had not retired when he came
home, too restless in his youthful ardor even to think of sleep.
His father brought good tidings: the father of the lady had
consented, and on their arrival in Bretagne the marriage-contract
was to be signed in form.

That was to Raoul an eventful day; and never did he forget
it, or the teachings he drew from it. That day was his fate.

2. PART II.

The castle of St. Renan, like the dwellings of many of the
nobles of Bretagne and Gascony, was a superb old pile of solid
masonry towering above the huge cliffs which guard the whole
of that iron coast with its gigantic masses of rude masonry. So
close did it stand to the verge of these precipitous crags on its
seaward face, that whenever the wind from the westward blew
angrily and in earnest, the spray of the tremendous billows
which rolled in from the wide Atlantic, and burst in thunder at
the foot of those stern ramparts, was dashed so high by the
collision that it would often fall in salt, bitter rain, upon the esplanade
above, and dim the diamond-paned casements with its
cold mists.

For leagues on either side, as the spectator stood upon the
terrace above and gazed out on the expanse of the everlasting
ocean, nothing was to be seen but the salient angles or deep
recesses formed by the dark, gray cliffs, unrelieved by any
spot of verdure, or even by that line of silver sand at their
base, which often intervenes between the rocks of an iron
coast and the sea. Here, however, there was no such intermediate
step visible; the black face of the rocks sunk sheer
and abrupt into the water, which, by its dark-green hue, indicated
to the practised eye, that it was deep and scarcely fathomable
to the very shore.

In places, indeed, where huge caverns opening in front to
the vast ocean, which had probably hollowed them out of the
earth-fast rock in the course of succeeding ages, yawned in
the mimicry of Gothic arches, the entering tide would rush, as
it were, into the bowels of the land, roaring and groaning in

those strange subterranean dungeons like some strong prisoner,
Typhon, Enceladus, or Ephialtes, in his immortal agony. One
of these singular vaults opened right in the base of the rock on
the summit of which stood the castle of St. Renan, and into
this the billows rushed with rapidity so tumultuous and terrible
that the fishers of that stormy coast avowed that a vortex was
created in the bay by their influx or return seaward, which
could be perceived sensibly at a league's distance; and that to
be caught in it, unless the wind blew strong and steadily off
land, was sure destruction. However that might be, it is certain
that this great subterranean tunnel extended far beneath
the rocks into the interior of the land, for at the distance of
nearly two miles from the castle, directly eastward, in the bottom
of a dark, wooded glen, which runs for many miles nearly
parallel to the coast, there is a deep, rocky well, or natural
cavity, of a form nearly circular, which, when the tide is up,
is filled to overflowing with bitter sea-water, on which the bubbles
and foam-flakes show the obstacles against which it must
have striven in its landward journey. At low water, on the
contrary, “the Devil's Drinking-Cup,” for so it is named by
the superstitious peasantry of the neighborhood, presents nothing
to the eye but a deep, black abyss, which the countryfolks,
of course, assert to be bottomless. But, in truth, its depth is
immense, as can easily be perceived, if you cast a stone into it,
by the length of time during which it may be heard thundering
from side to side, until the reverberated roar of its descent appears
to die away, not because it has ceased, but because the
sound is too distant to be conveyed to human ears.

On this side of the castle everything differs as much as it is
possible to conceive from the view to the seaward, which is
grim and desolate as any ocean scenery the world over. Few
sails are ever seen on those dangerous coasts; all vessels
bound to the mouth of the Garonne, or southward to the shores

of Spain, giving as wide a berth as possible to its frightful reefs
and inaccessible crags, which to all their other terrors add that,
from the extraordinary prevalence of the west wind on that
part of the ocean, of being, during at least three parts of the
year, a lee shore.

Inland, however, instead of the bleak and barren surface of
the ever-stormy sea, indented into long rolling ridges and dark
tempestuous hollows, all was varied and smiling, and gratifying
to every sense given by nature for his good to man. Immediately
from the brink of the cliffs the land sloped downward
southwardly and to the eastward, so that it was bathed during
all the day, except a few late evening hours, in the fullest radiance
of the sunbeams. Over this immense sloping descent
the eye could range from the castle battlements for miles and
miles, until the rich green champaign was lost in the blue haze
of distance. And it was green and gay over the whole of that
vast expanse, here with the dense and unpruned foliage of immemorial
forests, well stocked with every species of game,
from the gaunt wolf and the tusky boar, to the fleet roebuck and
the timid hare; here with the trim and smiling verdure of rich
orchards, in which nestled around their old, gray shrines the
humble hamlets of the happy peasantry; and everywhere with
the long intersecting curves, and sinuous irregular lines of the
old hawthorn hedges, thick set with pollard trees and hedgerow
timber, which make the whole country, when viewed from
a height, resemble a continuous tract of intermingled glades
and coppices, and which have procured for an adjoining district
the well-known, and in after-days far celebrated name of the
Bocage.

Immediately around the castle, on the edge as it were of this
beautiful and almost boundless slope, there lay a large and
well-kept garden in the old French style, laid out in a succession
of terraces, bordered by balustrades of marble, adorned at

frequent intervals by urns and statues, and rendered accessible
each from the next below by flights of ornamented steps of regular
and easy elevation; pleached bowery walks, and high
clipped hedges of holly, yew, and hornbeam, were the usual
decorations of such a garden, and here they abounded to an
extent that would have gladdened the heart of an admirer of
the tastes and habits of the olden time. In addition to these,
however, there were a profusion of flowers of the choicest
kinds known or cultivated in those days — roses and lilies
without number, and honeysuckles, and the sweet-scented clematis,
climbing in bountiful luxuriance over the numberless
seats and bowers which everywhere tempted to repose.

Below this beautiful garden a wide expanse of smooth, green
turf, dotted here and there with majestic trees, and at rarer intervals
diversified with tall groves and verdant coppices, covered
the whole descent of the first hill to the dim wooded dell
which has been mentioned as containing the singular cavity
known throughout the country as the “Devil's Drinking-Cup.”
This dell, which was the limit of count de St. Renan's demesnes
in that direction, was divided from the park by a ragged
paling many feet in height, and of considerable strength,
framed of rough timber from the woods, the space within being
appropriated to a singular and choice breed of deer, imported
from the East by one of the former counts, who, being of an
adventurous and roving disposition, had sojoured for some
time in the French settlements of Hindostan. Beyond this
dell again, which was defended on the outer side by a strong
and lofty wall of brick, all overrun with luxuriant ivy, the
ground rose in a small rounded knoll, or hillock of small extent,
richly wooded, and crowned by the gray turrets and steep
flagged roof of the old château d'Argenson.

This building, however, was as much inferior in size and
stateliness to the grand feudal fortalice of St. Renan, as the little

round-topped hill on which it stood, so slightly elevated
above the face of the surrounding country as to detract nothing,
at least in appearance, from its general slope to the southeastward,
was lower than the great rock-bound ridge from which
it overlooked the territories, all of which had in distant times
obeyed the rules of its almost princely dwellers.

The sun of a lovely evening in the latter part of July had
already sunk so far down in the west that only one half of its
great golden disk was visible above the well-defined, dark outline
of the seaward-crags, which, relieved by the glowing radiance
of the whole western sky, stood out massive and solid
like a huge purple wall, and seemed so close at hand that the
spectator could almost persuade himself that he had but to
stretch out his arm, in order to touch the great barrier, which
was in truth several miles distant.

Over the crest, and through the gaps of this continuous line
of highland, the long level rays streamed down in the slope in
one vast flood of golden glory, which was checkered only by
the interminable length of shadows which were projected from
every single tree, or scattered clump, from every petty elevation
of the soil, down the soft glimmering declivity.

Three years had elapsed since the frightful fate of the unhappy
lord of Kerguelen, and the various incidents, which in
some sort took their origin from the nature of his crime and
its consequence, affecting in the highest degree the happiness
of the families of St. Renan and D'Argenson.

Three years had elapsed — three years! That is a little
space in the annals of the world, in the life of nations, nay, in
the narrow records of humanity. Three years of careless happiness,
three years of indolent and tranquil ease, unmarked by
any great event, pass over our heads unnoted, and, save in the
gray hairs which they scatter, leave no memorial of their transit,
more than the sunshine of a happy summer day. They
are, they are gone, they are forgotten.

Even three years of gloom and sorrow, of that deep anguish
which at the time the sufferer believes to be indelible and everlasting,
lag on their weary, desolate course, and when they too
are over-passed, and he looks back upon their transit, which
seemed so painfully protracted, and, lo! all is changed, and
their flight also is now but as an ended minute.

And yet, what strange and sudden changes altering the affairs
of men, changing the hearts of mortals, yea, revolutionizing
their whole intellects, and overturning their very natures —
more than the devastating earthquake or the destroying lava
transforms the face of the everlasting earth — have not been
wrought, and again well nigh forgotten within that little period.

Three years had passed, I say, over the head of Raoul de
Douarnenez — the three most marked and memorable years in
the life of every young man — and from the ingenuous and
promising stripling, he had now become in every respect a
man, and a bold and enterprising man, moreover, who had seen
much and struggled much, and suffered somewhat — without
which there is no gain of his wisdom here below — in his transit,
even thus far, over the billows and among the reefs and
quicksands of the world.

His father had kept his promise to that loved son in all
things, nor had the sieur d'Argenson failed of his plighted
faith. The autumn of that year, the spring of which saw Kerguelen
die in unutterable agony, saw Raoul de Douarnenez the
contracted and affianced husband of the lovely and beloved
Melanie.

All that was wanted now to render them actually man and
wife, to create between them that bond which, alone of mortal
ties, man can not sunder, was the ministration of the church's
holiest rite, and that, in wise consideration of their tender
years, was postponed until the termination of the third summer.

During the interval it was decided that Raoul, as was the

custom of the world in those days, especially among the nobility,
and most especially among the nobility of France, should
bear arms in active service, and see something of the world
abroad, before settling down into the easier duties of domestic
life. The family of St. Renan, since the days of that ancestor
who has been already mentioned as having sojourned in Pondicherry,
had never ceased to maintain some relations with
the East Indian possessions of France, and a relation of the
house in no very remote degree was at this time military governor
of the French East Indies, which were then, previous to
the unexampled growth of the British empire in the East, important,
flourishing, and full of future promise.

Thither, then, it was determined that Raoul should go in
search of adventures, if not of fortune, in the spring following
the signature of his marriage contract with the young demoiselle
d'Argenson. And, consequently, after a winter passed in
quiet domestic happiness on the noble estates, whereon the
gentry of Brittany were wont to reside in almost patriarchal
state — a winter, every day of which the young lovers spent in
company, and at every eve of which they separated more in
love than they were at meeting in the morning — Raoul set
sail in a fine frigate, carrying several companies of the line,
invested with the rank of ensign, and proud to bear the colors
of his king, for the shores of the still half-fabulous oriental
world.

Three years had passed, and the boy had returned a man,
the ensign had returned a colonel, so rapid was the promotion
of the nobility of the sword in the French army, under the ancient
regime; and — greatest change of all, ay, and saddest —
the viscount of Douarnenez had returned count de St. Renan.
An infectious fever, ere he had been one year absent from the
land of his birth, and had cut off his noble father in the very
pride and maturity of his intellectual manhood; nor had his

mother lingered long behind him whom she had ever loved so
fondly. A low, slow fever, caught from that beloved patient
whom she had so affectionately nurtured, was as fatal to her,
though not so suddenly, as it had proved to her good lord; and
when their son returned to France full of honors achieved, and
gay anticipations for the future, he found himself an orphan,
the lord in lonely and unwilling state of the superb demesnes
which had so long called his family their owners.

There never in the world was a kinder heart than that which
beat in the breast of the young soldier, and never was a family
more strictly bound together by all the kindly influences which
breed love and confidence, and domestic happiness among all
the members of it, than that of St Renan. There had been
nothing austere or rigid in the bringing up of the gallant boy;
the father, who had at one hour been the tutor and the monitor,
was at the next the comrade and the playmate, and at all
times the true and trusted friend, while the mother had been
ever the idolized and adored protectress, and the confidante of
all the innocent schemes and artless joys of boyhood.

Bitter, then, was the blow stricken to the very heart of the
young soldier, when the first tidings which he received, on
landing in his loved France, was the intelligence that those —
all those, with but one exception — whom he most tenderly
and truly loved, all those to whom he looked up with affectionate
trust for advice and guidance, all those on whom he relied
for support in his first trials of young manhood, were cold and
silent in the all-absorbing tomb.

To him there was no hot, feverish ambition prompting him
to grasp joyously the absolute command of his great heritage.
In his heart there was none of that fierce yet sordid avarice
which finds compensation for the loss of the scarce-lamented
dead in the severance of the dearest natural bonds, in the possession
of wealth, or the promise of power. Nor was this all,

for, in truth, so well had Raoul de Douarnenez been brought
up, and so completely had wisdom grown up with his growth,
that when, at the age of nineteen years, he found himself endowed
with the rank and revenues of one of the highest and
wealthiest peers of France, and in all but mere name his own
master — for the abbé de Chastellar, his mother's brother, who
had been appointed his guardian by his father's will, scarcely
attempted to exercise even a nominal jurisdiction over him —
he felt himself more than ever at a loss, deprived as he was,
when he most needed it, of his best natural counsellor; and
instead of rejoicing, was more than half inclined to lament over
the almost absolute self-control with which he found himself
invested.

Young hearts are naturally true themselves, and prone to
put trust in others; and it is rarely, except in a few dark and
morose and gloomy natures, which are exceptions to the rule
and standard of human nature, that man learns to be distrustful
and suspicious of his kind, even after experience of fickleness
and falsehood may have in some sort justified suspicions, until
his head has grown gray.

And this in an eminent degree was the case with Raoul de
St. Renan, for henceforth he must be called by the title which
his altered state had conferred upon him.

His natural disposition was as trustful and unsuspicious as
it was artless and ingenuous; and from his early youth all the
lessons which had been taught him by his parents tended to
preserve in him unblemished and unbroken that bright gem,
which once shattered never can be restored, confidence in the
truth, the probity, the goodness of mankind.

Some ruder schooling he had met in the course of his service
in the eastern world — he had already learned that men,
and — harder knowledge yet to gain — women also, can feign
friendship, ay, and love, where neither have the least root in

the heart, for purposes the vilest, ends the most sordid. He
had learned that bosom friends can be secret foes; that false
loves can betray; and yet he was not disenchanted with humanity,
he had not even dreamed of doubting, because he had
fallen among worldly-minded flatterers and fickle-hearted coquettes,
that absolute friendship and unchangeable love may
exist, even in this evil world, stainless and incorruptible among
all the changes and chances of this mortal life.

If he had been deceived, he had attributed the failure of his
hopes hitherto to the right cause — the fallacy of his own judgment,
and the error of his own choice; and the more he had
been disappointed the more firmly had he relied on what he
felt certain could not change, the affection of his parents, the
love of his betrothed bride.

On the very instant of his landing he found himself shipwrecked
in his first hope; and on his earliest interview with
his uncle, in Paris, he had the agony — the utter and appalling
agony to undergo — of hearing that in the only promise which
he had flattered himself was yet left to him, he was destined
in all probability to undergo a deeper, deadlier disappointment.

If Melanie d'Argenson had been a lovely girl, the good abbé
said, when she was budding out of childhood into youth, so utterly
had she outstripped all the promise of her girlhood, that
no words could describe, nor imagination suggest to itself the
charms of the mature yet youthful woman. There was no
other beauty named, when loveliness was the theme, throughout
all France, than that of the young betrothed of Raoul de Douarnenez.
And that which was so loudly and so widely bruited
abroad, could not fail to reach the ever open, ever greedy ears
of the vile and sensual tyrant who sat on the throne of France,
at that time heaping upon his people that load of suffering and
anguish which was in after-times to be avenged so bitterly and
bloodily upon the innocent heads of his unhappy descendants.

Louis had, moreover, heard years before, nay, looked upon
the nascent loveliness of Melanie d'Argenson, and, with that
cold-blooded voluptuary, to look on beauty was to lust after it,
to lust after it was to devote all the powers his despotism could
command to win it.

Hence as the abbé de Chastellar soon made his unfortunate
nephew and pupil comprehend, a settled determination had
arisen on the part of the odious despot to break off the marriage
of the lovely girl with the young soldier whom it was well
known that she fondly loved, and to have her the wife of one
who would be less tender of his honor, and less reluctant to
surrender, or less difficult to be deprived of a bride, too transcendently
beautiful to bless the arms of a subject, even if he
were the noblest of the noble.

All this was easily arranged, the base father of Melanie was
willing enough to sell his exquisite and virtuous child to the
splendid infamy of becoming a king's paramour, and the yet
baser chevalier de la Rochederrien was eager to make the
shameful negotiation easy, and to sanction it to the eyes
of the willingly hoodwinked world, by giving his name and
rank to a woman, who was to be his wife but in name, and
whose charms and virtue he had precontracted to make over to
another.

The infamous contract had been agreed upon by the principal
actors; nay, the wages of the iniquity had been paid in advance.
The sieur d'Argenson had grown into the comte of
the same, with the governorship of the town of Morlaix added,
by the revenues of which to support his new dignities; while
the chevalier de la Rochederrien had become no less a personage
than the marquis de Ploermel, with a captaincy in the
musquetaires, and Heaven knows what beside of honorary title
and highly-gilded sinecure, whereby to reconcile him to such
depth of sordid infamy as the meanest galley-slave could have

scarce undertaken as the price of exchange between his fetters
and his oars, and the great noble's splendor.

Such were the tidings which greeted Raoul on his return
from honorable service to his king — service for which he was
thus repaid; and, before he had even time to reflect on the consequences,
or to comprehend the anguish thus entailed upon
him, his eyes were opened instantly to comprehension of two
or three occurrences which previously he had been unable to
explain to himself, or even to guess at their meaning by any
exercise of ingenuity. The first of these was the singular
ignorance in which he had been kept of the death of his parents
by the government officials in the East, and the very evident
suppression of the letters which, as his uncle informed him,
had been despatched to summon him with all speed homeward.

The second was the pertinacity with which he had been
thrust forward, time after time, on the most desperate and deadly
duty — a pertinacity so striking, that, eager as the young soldier
was, and greedy of any chance of winning honor, it had
not failed to strike him that he was frequently ordered on duty
of a nature which, under ordinary circumstances, is performed
by volunteers.

Occurrences of this kind are soon remarked in armies, and
it had early become a current remark in the camp that to serve
in Raoul's company was a sure passport either to promotion or
to the other world. But to such an extent was this carried,
that when time after time that company had been decimated,
even the bravest of the brave experienced an involuntary sinking
of the heart when informed that they were transferred or
even promoted into those fatal ranks.

Nor was this all, for twice it had occurred, once when he
was a captain in command of a company, and again when he
had a whole regiment under his orders as its colonel, that his
superiors, after detaching him on duty so desperate that it

might almost be regarded as a forlorn hope, had entirely neglected
either to support or recall him, but had left him exposed
to almost inevitable destruction.

In the first instance, not a man whether officer or private of
his company had escaped, with the exception of himself. And
he was found, when all was supposed to be over, in the last
ditch of the redoubt which he had been ordered to defend to
the uttermost, after it had been retaken, with his colors wrapped
around his breast, still breathing a little, although so cruelly
wounded that his life was long despaired of, and was only saved
at last by the vigor and purity of an unblemished and unbroken
constitution. On the second occasion, he had been suffered
to contend alone for three entire days with but a single battalion
against a whole oriental army; but then, that which had
been intended to destroy him had won him deathless fame, for
by a degree of skill in handling his little force, which had by
no means been looked for in so young an officer, although his
courage and his conduct were both well known, he had succeeded
in giving a bloody repulse to the overwhelming masses
of the enemy, and when at length he was supported — doubtless
when support was deemed too late to avail him aught —
by a few hundred native horse and a few guns, he had converted
that check into a total and disastrous route.

So palpable was the case that although Raoul suspected
nothing of the reasons which had led to that disgraceful affair,
he had demanded an inquiry into the conduct of his superior;
and that unfortunate personage being clearly convicted of unmilitary
conduct, and having failed in the end which would have
justified the means in the eyes of the voluptuous tyrant, was
ruthlessly abandoned to his fate, and actually died on the scaffold
with a gag in his mouth, as did the gallant Lally a few
years afterward to prevent his revelation of the orders which
he had received and for obeying which he perished.

All this, though strange and even extraordinary, had failed
up to this moment to awaken any suspicion of undue or treasonable
agency in the mind of Raoul.

But now as his uncle spoke the scales fell from his eyes, and
he saw all the baseness, all the villany of the monarch and his
satellites, in its true light.

“Is it so? Is it, indeed, so?” he said mournfully. And it
really appeared that grief at detecting such a dereliction on the
part of his king, had a greater share in the feelings of the noble
youth than indignation or resentment. “Is it indeed so?” he
said; “and could neither my father's long and glorious services,
nor my poor conduct, avail aught to turn him from such infamy?
But tell me,” he continued, the blood now mounting fiery red to
his pale face, “tell me this, uncle, is she true to me? is she
pure and good? Forgive, me, Heaven, that I doubt her; but
in such a mass of infamy where may a man look for faith or
virtue? Is Melanie true to me, or is she, too, consenting to
this scheme of infamous and loathsome guilt?”

“She was true, my son, when I last saw her,” replied the
good clergyman; “and you may well believe that I spared no
argument to urge her to hold fast to her loyalty and faith, and
she vowed then, by all that was most dear and holy, that nothing
should induce her ever to become the wife of Rochederrien.
But they carried her off into the province, and have immured
her, I have heard men say, almost in a dungeon, in her father's
castle, for now above a twelvemonth. What has fallen out no
one as yet knows certainly; but it is whispered now that she
has yielded, and the court scandal goes that she has either
wedded him already, or is to do so now within a few days. It
is said that they are looked for ere the month is out in Paris.”

“Then I will to horse, uncle,” replied Raoul, “before this
night is two hours older for St. Renan.”

“Great Heaven! to what end, Raoul? For the sake of all

that is good — by your father's memory — I implore you, do
nothing rashly!”

“To know of my own knowledge if she be true or false,
uncle.”

“And what matters it, Raoul? My boy, my unhappy boy!
False or true, she is lost to you alike, for ever! You have
that against which to contend, which no human energy can
conquer.”

“I know not the thing which human energy can not conquer,
uncle! It is years now ago that my good father taught me this
— that there is no such word as cannot! I have proved it
before now, uncle-abbé: I may, should I find it worth the while,
prove it again, and that shortly. If so, let the guilty and the
traitors look to themselves — they were best, for they shall
need it!”

Such was the state of St. Renan's affections and his hopes
when he left the gay capital of France, within a few hours after
his arrival, and hurried down at the utmost speed of man
and horse into Bretagne, whither he made his way so rapidly,
that the first intimation his people received of his return from
the East was his presence at the gates of the castle.

Great, as may be imagined, was the real joy of the old, true-hearted
servitors of the house, at finding their lord thus unexpectedly
restored to them, at a time when they had in fact
almost abandoned every hope of seeing him again. The same
infernal policy which had thrust him so often, as it were, into
the very jaws of death — which had intercepted all the letters
sent to him from home, and taken, in one word, every step that
ingenuity could suggest to isolate him altogether in that distant
world — had taken measures as deep and iniquitous at home to
cause him to be regarded as one dead, and to obliterate all memory
of his existence.

Three different times reports so circumstantial, and accompanied

by such minute details of time and place, as to render it
almost impossible for men to doubt their authenticity, had been
circulated with regard to the death of the young soldier; and
as no tidings had been received of him from any more direct
source, the last news of his fall had been generally received as
true, no motive appearing why it should be discredited.

His appearance, therefore, at the castle of St. Renan, was
hailed as that of one who had been lost and was now found —
of one who had been dead, and lo! he was alive. The bancloche
of the old feudal pile rang forth its blithest and most
jovial notes of greeting; the banner, with the old armorial bearings
of St. Renan, was displayed upon the keep; and a few
light pieces of antique artillery — falcons, and culverins, and
demi-cannon, which had kept their places on the battlements
since the days of the leagues — sent forth their thunders far
and wide over the astonished country.

So generally, however, had the belief of Raoul's death been
circulated, and so absolute had been the credence given to the
rumor, that when those unwonted sounds of rejoicing were heard
to proceed from the long-silent walls of St. Renan, men never
suspected that the lost heir had returned to enjoy his own again,
but fancied that some new master had established his claim to
the succession, and was thus celebrating his investiture with
the rights of the counts of St. Renan.

Nor was this wonderful, for ocular proof was scarcely enough
to satisfy the oldest retainers of the family of the young lord's
identity; and indeed ocular proof was rendered in some sort
dubious by the great alteration which had taken place in the
appearance of the personage in question.

Between the handsome stripling of sixteen and the grown
man of twenty summers there is a greater difference than the
same lapse of time will produce at any other period of human
life. And this change had been rendered even greater than

usual by the burning climate to which Raoul had been exposed,
by the stout endurance of fatigues which had prematurely enlarged
and hardened his youthful frame, and above all by the
dark experience which had spread something of the thoughtful
cast of age over the smooth and gracious lineaments of boyhood.

When he left home, the viscount de Douarnenez was a slight,
slender, graceful stripling, with a fair, delicate complexion, a
profusion of light hair waving in soft curls over his shoulders,
a light, elastic step, and a frame which, though it showed the
promise already of strength to be attained with maturity, was
conspicuous as yet for ease, and agility, and pliability, rather
than for power or robustness.

On his return, he had lost, it is true, no jot of his gracefulness
or ease of demeanor, but he had shot up and expanded
into a tall, broad-shouldered, round-chested, thin-flanked man,
with a complexion burned to the darkest hue of which a European
skin is susceptible, and which perhaps required the aid
of the full, soft blue eye to prove it to be European — with a
glance as quick, as penetrating, and at the same time as calm
and steady, as that of the eagle when he gazes undazzled at the
noontide splendor.

His hair had been cut short to wear beneath the casque,
which was still carried by cavaliers, and had grown so much
darker, that this alteration alone would have gone far to defy
the recognition of his friends. He wore a thick, dark mustache
on his upper lip, and a large “royal,” which we should
now-a-days call an “imperial,” on his chin.

The whole aspect and expression of face, moreover, was altered,
even in a greater degree than his complexion or his person.
All the quick, sparkling play and mobility of feature, the
sharp flash of rapidly-succeeding sentiments and strong emotions,
expressed on the ingenuous face as soon as they were

conceived within the brain — all these had disappeared completely
— disappeared, never to return.

The grave composure of the thoughtful, self-possessed, experienced
soldier, sufficient in himself to meet every emergency,
every alternation of fortune, had succeeded the imaginative, impulsive
ardor of the impetuous, gallant boy.

There was a shadow, too, a heavy shadow of something more
than thought; for it was, in truth, deep, real, heartfelt melancholy,
which lent an added gloom to the cold fixity of eye and
lip — which had obliterated all the gay and gleeful flashes which
used, from moment to moment, to light up the countenance so
speaking and so frank in its disclosures.

Yet it would have been difficult to say whether Raoul de St.
Renan — grave, dark, and sorrowful, as he now showed — was
not both a handsomer and more attractive person than he had
been in his earlier days, as the gay and thoughtless viscount
de Douarnenez.

There was a depth of feeling as well as of thought now perceptible
in the pensive brow and calm eye; and if the ordinary
expression of those fine and placid lineaments was fixed and
cold, that coldness and rigidity vanished when his face was
lighted up by a smile, as quickly as the thin ice of an April
morning melts away before the first glitter of the joyous sunbeams.
Nor were these smiles rare or forced, though not now as
habitual as in those days of youth unalloyed by calamity, and
unsunned by passion, which, once departed, never can return
in this world!

The morning of the young lord's arrival passed gloomily
enough. It was the very height of summer, it is true, and the
sun was shining his brightest over field, and tree, and tower,
and everything appeared to partake of the delicious influence
of the charming weather, and to put on its blithest and most
radiant apparel.

Never perhaps had the fine grounds, with their soft, mossy,
sloping lawns, and tranquil, brimful waters, and shadowy groves
of oak and elm — great, immemorial trees — looked lovelier than
they did that day to greet their long-absent master.

But, inasmuch as nothing in this world is more delightful,
nothing more unmixed in its means of conveying pleasure, than
the return, after long wanderings in foreign climes, among vicissitudes,
and cares, and sorrows, to an unchanged and happy
home, where the same faces are assembled to smile on your
late return which wept at your departure — so nothing can
be imagined sadder or more depressing to the spirit than, so
returning, to find all things inanimate unchanged, or if changed,
more beautiful and brighter for the alteration, but all the living,
breathing, sentient creatures — the creatures whose memory
has cheered our darkest days of sorrow, whose love we desire
most to find unaltered — gone, never to return, swallowed by
the cold grave, deaf, silent, unresponsive to our fond affection!

Such was St. Renan's return to the house of his fathers.
Until a few short days before, he had pictured to himself his
father's moderate and manly pleasure, his mother's holy kiss
and chastened rapture at beholding once again, at clasping to
her happy bosom, the son, whom she sent forth a boy, returned
a man worthy the pride of the most ambitious parent.

All this Raoul de St. Renan had anticipated, and bitter, bitter
was the pang when he perceived all this gay and glad anticipation
thrown to the winds irreparably.

There was not a room in the old house, not a view from a
single window, not a tree in the noble park, not a winding curve
of a trout-stream glimmering through the coppices, but was in
some way connected with his tenderest and most sacred recollections
— but had a memory of pleasant hours attached to it —
but recalled the sound of the kindliest and dearest words,
couched in the sweetest tones — the sight of persons but to

think of whom made his heart thrill and quiver to its inmost
core.

And for hours he had wandered through the long, echoing
corridors, the stately and superb saloons, feeling their solitude
as if it had been actual presence weighing upon his soul, and
peopling every apartment with the phantoms of the loved and
lost.

Thus had the day lagged onward; and, as the sun stooped
toward the west, darker and sadder had become the young
man's fancies, and he felt as if his last hope were about to fade
out with the fading light of the declining day-god. So gloomy,
indeed, were his thoughts — so sadly had he become inured to
wo within the last few days — so certainly had the reply to every
question he had asked been the very bitterest and most
painful he could have met — that he had, in truth lacked the
courage to assure himself of that on which he could not deny
to himself that his last hope of happiness depended. He had
not ventured yet to ask even of his own most faithful servants
whether Melanie d'Argenson — who was, he well knew, living
scarcely three bow-shots distant from the spot where he stood
— was true to him — was a maiden or a wedded wife!

And the old servitors, well aware of the earnest love which
had existed between the young people, and of the contract
which had been entered into with the consent of all parties,
knew not how their young master now stood affected toward
the lady, and consequently feared to speak on the subject.

At length, when he had dined some hours, while he was sitting
with the old bailiff, who had been endeavoring to seduce
him into an examination of I know not what of rents and leases,
dues and droits, seignorial and manorial — while the bottles of
ruby-colored Bordeaux wine stood almost untouched before
them — the young man made an effort, and raising his head
suddenly after a long and thoughtful silence, asked his companion

whether the comte d'Argenson was at that time resident at
the château.

“Oh, yes, monseigneur,” the old man returned immediately,
“he has been here all the summer, and the château has been
full of gay company from Paris. Never such times have been
known in my days: hawking-parties one day, and hunting-matches
the next, and music and balls every night, and cavalcades
of bright ladies, and cavaliers all ostrich-plumes and cloth
of gold and tissue, that you would think our old woods here
were converted into fairy-land. The young lady Melanie was
wedded only three days since to the marquis de Ploermel; but
you will not know him by that name, I trow: he was the chevalier
only — the chevalier de la Rochederrien — when you were
here before.”

“Ah, they are wedded, then,” replied the youth, mastering
his passions by a terrible exertion, and speaking of what rent
his very heartstrings asunder, as if it had been a matter which
concerned him not so much even as a thought; “I heard it
was about to be so shortly, but knew not that it had yet taken
place.”

“Yes, monseigneur, three days since; and it is very strangely
thought of in the country, and very strange things are said
on all sides concerning it.”

“As what, Matthieu?”

“Why, the marquis is old enough to be her father, or some
say her grandfather, for that matter; and little Rosalie, her
fille-de-chambre, has been telling all the neighborhood that
Mademoiselle Melanie hated him with all her heart and soul,
and would far rather die than go to the altar as his bride.”

“Pshaw! is that all, good Matthieu?” answered the youth,
very bitterly — “is that all? Why, there is nothing strange in
that; that is an every-day event. A pretty lady changes her
mind, breaks her faith, and weds a man she hates and despises!

Well! that is perfectly in rule; that is precisely
what is done every day at court! If you could tell just the
converse of this tale — that a beautiful woman had kept her inclinations
unchanged, her faith unbroken, her honor pure and
bright — that she had rejected a rich man or a powerful man
because he was base or bad, and wedded a poor and honorable
one because she loved him — then, indeed, my good Matthieu,
you would be telling something that would make men open
their eyes wide enough, and marvel what should follow. Is
this all that you call strange?”

“You are jesting at me, monseigneur, for that I am country
bred,” replied the steward, staring at his youthful master with
big eyes of astonishment; “you can not mean that which you
say!”

“I do mean precisely what I say, my good friend; and I
never felt less like jesting in the whole course of my life. I
know that you good folk down here in the quiet country judge
of these things as you have spoken; but that is entirely on account
of your ignorance of court life, and what is now termed
nobility. What I tell you is strictly true: that falsehood, and
intrigue, and lying — that daily sales of honor — that adultery
and infamy of all kinds — are every-day occurrences in Paris;
and that the wonders of the time are truth and sincerity, and
keeping faith and honor! This, I doubt not, seems strange to
you, but it is true for all that.”

“At least, it is not our custom down here in Bretagne,” returned
the old man, “and that, I suppose, is the reason why it
appears to be so extraordinary to us here. But you will not
say, I think, monsieur le comte, that what else I shall tell you
is nothing strange or new.”

“What else will you tell me, Matthieu? Let us hear it, and
then I shall be better able to decide.”

“Why, they say, monseigneur, that she is no more the marquis

de Ploermel's wife than she is yours or mine, except in
name alone; and that he does not dare to kiss her hand, much
less her lips; and that they have separate apartments, and are,
as it were, strangers altogether; and that the reason of all this
is, that Ma'mselle Melanie is never to be his wife at all, but that
she is to go to Paris in a few days, and to become the king's
mistress! Will you tell me that this is not strange — and more
than strange, infamous — and dishonoring to the very name of
man and woman?”

“Even in this, were it true, there would be nothing, I am
grieved to say, very wondrous now-a-days — for there have
been several base and terrible examples of such things, I am
told, of late; for the rest, I must sympathize with you in your
disgust and horror of such doings, even if I prove myself
thereby a mere country hobereau, and no man of the world, or
of fashion. But you must not believe all these things to be
true which you hear from the country gossips,” he added, desirous
still of shielding Melanie, so long as her guilt should be
in the slightest possible degree doubtful, from the reproach
which seemed already to attach to her. “I hardly can believe
such things possible of so fair and modest a demoiselle as the
young lady of D'Argenson: nor is it easy to me to believe
that the count would consent to any arrangement so disgraceful,
or that the chevalier de la Rocheder — I beg his pardon, the
marquis de Ploermel, would marry a lady for such an infamous
object. I think, therefore, good Matthieu, that, although there
would not even in this be anything very wonderful, it is yet
neither probable nor true.”

“Oh, yes, it is true! I am well assured that it is true, monseigneur,”
replied the old man, shaking his head obstinately;
“I do not believe that there is much truth or honor in this lady
either, or she would not so easily have broken one contract, or
forgotten one lover!”

“Hush, hush, Matthieu!” cried Raoul, “you forget that we
were mere children at that time; such early troth plightings
are foolish ceremonials at the best; besides, do you not see that
you are condemning me also as well as the lady?”

“Oh, that is different — that is quite different!” replied the
old steward, “gentlemen may be permitted to take some little
liberties which with ladies are not allowable. But that a young
demoiselle should break her contract in such wise is disgraceful.

“Well, well, we will not argue it to-night, Matthieu,” said
the young soldier, rising and looking out of the great oriel window
over the sunshiny park; “I believe I will go and walk
out for an hour or two and refresh my recollections of old
times. It is a lovely afternoon as I ever beheld in France or
elsewhere.”

And with the word he took up his rapier which lay on a slab
near the table at which he had been sitting, and hung it to his
belt, and then throwing on his plumed hat carelessly, without
putting on his cloak, strolled leisurely out into the glorious
summer evening.

For a little while he loitered on the esplanade, gazing out
toward the sea, the ridgy waves of which were sparkling like
emeralds tipped with diamonds in the grand glow of the setting
sun. But ere long he turned thence with a sigh, called up
perhaps by some fancied similitude between that bright and
boundless ocean, desolate and unadorned even by a single passing
sail, and his own course of life so desert, friendless, and
uncompanioned.

Thence he strolled listlessly through the fine garden, inhaling
the rare odors of the roses, hundreds of which bloomed on
every side of him, there in low bushes, there in trim standards,
and not a few climbing over tall trellices and bowery alcoves
in one mass of living bloom. He saw the happy swallows

darting and wheeling to and fro through the pellucid azure, in
pursuit of their insect prey. He heard the rich mellow notes
of the blackbirds and thrushes, thousands and thousands of
which were warbling incessantly in the cool shadow of the
yew and holly hedges. But his diseased and unhappy spirit
took no delight in the animated sounds, or summer-teeming
sights of rejoicing nature. No, the very joy and merriment,
which seemed to pervade all nature, animate or inanimate
around him, while he himself had no present joys to elevate,
no future promises to cheer him, rendered him, if that were
possible, darker and gloomier, and more mournful.

The spirits of the departed seemed to hover about him, forbidding
him ever again to admit hope or joy as an inmate to
his desolate heart; and, wrapt in these dark phantasies, with
his brow bent, and his eyes downcast, he wandered from terrace
to terrace through the garden, until he reached its farthest
boundary, and then passed out into the park, through which he
strolled, almost unconscious whither, until he came to the great
deer-fence of the utmost glen, through a wicket of which, just
as the sun was setting, he entered into the shadowy woodland.

Then a whole flood of wild and whirling thoughts rushed
over his brain at once. He had strolled without a thought
into the very scene of his happy rambles with the beloved, the
faithless, the lost Melanie. Carried away by a rush of inexplicable
feelings, he walked swiftly onward through the dim
wildwood path toward the Devil's Drinking-Cup. He came in
sight of it — a woman sat by its brink, who started to her feet
at the sound of his approaching footsteps.

It was Melanie — alone — and if his eyes deceived him not,
weeping bitterly.

She gazed at him, at the first, with an earnest, half-alarmed,
half-inquiring glance, as if she did not recognise his face, and,

perhaps, apprehended rudeness, if not danger, from the approach
of a stranger.

Gradually, however, she seemed in part to recognise him.
The look of inquiry and alarm gave place to a fixed, glaring,
icy stare of unmixed dread and horror; and when he had now
come to within six or eight paces of her, still without speaking,
she cried, in a wild, low voice —

“Great God! great God! has he come up from the grave
to reproach me! I am true, Raoul; true to the last, my beloved!”

And with a long, shivering, low shriek, she staggered, and
would have fallen to the earth had he not caught her in his
arms.

But she had fainted in the excess of superstitious awe, and
perceived not that it was no phantom's hand, but a most stalwart
arm of human mould that clasped her to the heart of the
living Raoul de St. Renan.

3. PART III.

It would be wonderful, were it not of daily occurrence, and
to be observed by all who give attention to the characteristics
of the human mind, how quickly confidence, even when shaken
to its very foundations, and almost obliterated, springs up again,
and recovers all its strength in the bosoms of the young of
either sex.

Let but a few more years pass over the heart, and when
once broken, if it be only by a slight suspicion, or a half unreal
cause, it will scarce revive again in a lifetime; nor then, unless
proofs the strongest and most unquestionable can be adduced
to overpower the doubts which have well-night annihilated it.

In early life, however, before long contact with the world
has blunted the susceptibilities, and hardened the sympathies
of the soul, before the constant experience of the treachery,
the coldness, the ingratitude of men has given birth to universal
doubt and general distrust, the shadow vanishes as soon as the
cloud which cast it is withdrawn, and the sufferer again believes,
alas! too often, only to be again deceived.

Thus it was with St. Renan, who a few moments before had
given up even the last hope, who had ceased, as he thought, to
believe even in the possibility of faith or honor among men, of
constancy, or purity, or truth, in women, no sooner saw his Melanie,
whom he knew to be the wife of another, solitary and in
tears, no sooner felt her inanimate form reclining on his bosom,

than he was prepared to believe anything, rather than believe
her false.

Indeed, her consternation at his appearance, her evident dismay,
not unnatural in an age wherein skepticism and infidelity
were marvellously mingled with credulity and superstition, her
clear conviction that it was not himself in mortal blood and
being, did go far to establish the fact, that she had been deceived
either casually or — which was far more probable — by foul artifice,
into the belief that her beloved and plighted husband was
no longer with the living.

The very exclamation which she uttered last, ere she sunk
senseless into his arms, uttered, as she imagined, in the presence
of the immortal spirit of the injured dead, “I am true,
Raoul — true to the last, my beloved!” rang in his ears with a
power and a meaning which convinced him of her veracity.

“She could not lie!” he muttered to himself, “in the presence
of the living dead! God be praised! she is true, and we
shall yet be happy!”

How beautiful she looked, as she lay there, unconscious and
insensible even of her own existence. If time and maturity
had improved Raoul's person, and added the strength and majesty
of manhood to the grace and pliability of youth, infinitely
more had it bestowed on the beauty of his betrothed. He had
left her a beautiful girl just blooming out of girlhood, he found
her a mature, full-blown woman, with all the flush and flower
of complete feminine perfection, before one charm has become
too luxuriant, or one drop of the youthful dew exhaled from the
new expanded blossom.

She had shot up, indeed, to a height above the ordinary
stature of women — straight, erect, and graceful as a young
poplar, slender, yet full withal, exquisitely and voluptuously
rounded, and with every sinuous line and swelling curve of her
soft form full of the poetry and beauty of both repose and motion.

Her complexion was pale as alabaster; even her cheeks, except
when some sudden tide of passion, or some strong emotion
sent the impetuous blood coursing thither more wildly than its
wont, were colorless, but there was nothing sallow or sickly,
nothing of that which is ordinarily understood by the word pallid,
in their clear, warm, transparent purity; nothing, in a word,
of that lividness which the French, with more accuracy than
we, distinguish from the healthful paleness which is so beautiful
in southern women.

Her hair, profuse almost to redundance, was perfectly black,
but of that warm and lustrous blackness which is probably the
hue expressed by the ancient Greeks by the term hyacinthine,
and which in certain lights has a purplish metallic gloss playing
over it, like the varying reflections on the back of the raven.
Her strongly defined, and nearly straight eyebrows, were dark
as night, as were the long, silky lashes which were displayed
in clear relief against the fair, smooth cheek, as the lids lay
closed languidly over the bright blue eyes.

It was a minute or two before Melanie moved or gave any
symptoms of recovering from her fainting fit, and during those
minutes the lips of Raoul had been pressed so often and so
warmly to those of the fair insensible, that had any spark of
perception remained to her, the fond and lingering pressure
could not have failed to call the “purple light of love,” to her
ingenuous face.

At length a long, slow shiver ran through the form of the
senseless girl, and thrilled, like the touch of the electric wire,
every nerve in St. Renan's body.

Then the soft rosy lips were unclosed, and forth rushed the
ambrosial breath in a long, gentle sigh, and the beautiful bust
heaved and undulated, like the bosom of the calm sea, when
the first breathings of the coming storm steal over it, and wake,
as if by sympathy, its deep pulsations.

He clasped her closer to his heart, half-fearful that when
life and perfect consciousness should be restored to that exquisite
frame, it would start from his embrace, if not in anger
or alarm, at least as if from a forbidden and illicit pleasure.

Gradually a faint rosy hue, slight as the earliest blushes of
the morning sky, crept over her white cheeks, and deepened
into a rich passionate flush; and at the same moment the azuretinctured
lids were unclosed slowly, and the large, radiant,
bright blue eyes beamed up into his own, half languid still, but
gleaming through their dewy languor, with an expression which
he must have been, indeed, blind to mistake for aught but the
strongest of unchanged, unchangeable affection.

It was evident that she knew him now; that the momentary
terror, arising rather, perhaps, from fear than from superstition,
which had converted the young ardent soldier into a visitant
from beyond those gloomy portals through which no visitant
returns, had passed from her mind, and that she had already
recognised, although she spoke not, her living lover.

And though she recognised him, she sought not to withdraw
herself from the enclosure of his sheltering arms, but lay there
on his bosom, with her head reclined on his shoulder, and her
eyes drinking long draughts of love from his fascinated gaze,
as if she were his own, and that her appropriate place of refuge.

“Oh! Raoul,” she exclaimed, at length, in a low, soft whisper,
“is it, indeed, you — you, whom I have so long wept as
dead — you, whom I was even now weeping as one lost to me
for ever, when you are thus restored to me?”

“It is I, Melanie,” he answered mournfully, “it is I, alive,
and in health; but better far had I been in truth dead, as they
have told you, rather than thus a survivor of all happiness, of
all hopes; spared only from the grave to know you false, and
myself forgotten.”

“Oh, no, Raoul, not false!” she cried wildly, as she started

from his arms, “oh, not forgotten! think you,” she added, blushing
crimson, “that had I loved any but you, that had I not
loved you with my whole heart and being, I had lain thus on
your bosom, thus endured your caresses? Oh, no, no, never
false! nor for one moment forgotten?”

“But what avails it, if you do love no other — what profits it,
if you do love me? Are you not — are you not, false girl —
alas! that these lips should speak it — the wife of another —
the promised mistress of the king?”

“I — I — Raoul!” she exclaimed, with such a blending of
wonder and loathing in her face, such an expression of indignation
on her tongue, that her lover perceived at once, that,
whatever might be the infamy of her father, of her husband, of
this climax of falsehood and self-degradation, she, at least, was
guiltless.

“The mistress of the king! what king? what mean you?
are you distraught?”

“Ha! you are ignorant, you are innocent of that, then.
You are not yet indoctrinated into the noble uses for which
your honorable lord intends you. It is the town's talk, Melanie.
How is it you, whom it most concerns, alone have not
heard it?”

“Raoul,” she said, earnestly, imploringly, “I know not if
there be any meaning in your words, except to punish me, to
torture me, for what you deem my faithlessness, but if there be,
I implore you, I conjure you, by your father's noble name, by
your mother's honor, show me the worst; but listen to me first,
for by the God that made us both, and now hears my words, I
am not faithless.”

“Not faithless? Are you not the wife of another?”

“No!” she replied enthusiastically. “I am not. For I am
yours, and while you live I can not wed another. Whom God
hath joined man can not put asunder.”

“I fear me that plea will avail us little,” Raoul answered.
“But say on, dearest Melanie, and believe that there is nothing
you can ask which I will not give you gladly — even if it were
my own life-blood. Say on, so shall we best arrive at the
truth of this intricate and black affair.”

“Mark me, then, Raoul, for every word I shall speak is as
true as the sun in heaven. It is near two years now since we
heard that you had fallen in battle, and that your body had been
carried off by the barbarians. Long, long I hoped and prayed,
but prayers and hopes were alike in vain. I wrote to you
often, as I promised, but no line from you has reached me
since the day when you sailed for India, and that made me
fear that the dread news was true. But at the last, to make
assurance doubly sure, all my own letters were returned to me
six months since, with their seals unbroken, and an endorsement
from the authorities in India that the person addressed
was not to be found. Then hope itself was over; and my
father, who never from the first had doubted that you were no
more —”

“Out on him! out on him! the heartless villain!” the young
man interrupted her indignantly. “He knows, as well as I
myself, that I am living; although it is no fault of his or his coadjutors
that I am so. He knows not as yet, however, that I
am here; but he shall know it ere long to his cost, my Melanie.”

“At least,” she answered in a faltering voice, “at least he
swore to me that you were dead; and never having ceased to
persecute me, since the day that fatal tidings reached us, to become
the wife of La Rochederrien, now marquis de Ploermel,
he now became doubly urgent —”

“And you Melanie! you yielded! I had thought you would
have died sooner.”

“I had no choice but to yield, Raoul. Or at least but the
choice of that old man's hand, or an eternal dungeon. The

lettres de cachet were signed, and you dead, and on the conditions
I extorted from the marquis, I became in name, Raoul,
only in name, by all my hopes of heaven! the wife of the man
whom you pronounce, wherefore, I can not dream, the basest
of mankind. Now tell me.”

“And did it never strike you as being wonderful and most
unnatural that this Ploermel, who is neither absolutely a
dotard nor an old woman, should accept your hand upon this
condition?”

“I was too happy to succeed in extorting it to think much
of that,” she answered.

“Extorted!” replied Raoul bitterly; “and how, I pray you,
is this condition which you extorted ratified or made valid?”

“It is signed by himself, and witnessed by my own father,
that, being I regard myself the wife of the dead, he shall ask
no more of familiarity from me than if I were the bride of
heaven!”

“The double villains!”

“But wherefore villains, Raoul?” exclaimed Melanie.

“I tell you, girl, it is a compact — a base, hellish compact —
with the foul despot, the disgrace of kings, the opprobrium of
France, who sits upon the throne, dishonoring it daily! A compact
such as yet was never entered into by a father and a husband,
even of the lowest of mankind! A compact to deliver
you a spotless virgin-victim to the vile-hearted and luxurious
tyrant. Curses! a thousand curses on his soul! and on my
own soul! who have fought and bled for him, and all to meet
with this, as my reward of service!”

“Great God! can these things be,” she exclaimed, almost
fainting with horror and disgust. “Can these things indeed
be? But speak, Raoul, speak; how can you know all this?”

“I tell you, Melanie, it is the talk, the very daily, hourly
gossip of the streets, the alleys, nay, even the very kennels of

Paris. Every one knows it — every one believes it, from the
monarch in the Louvre to the lowest butcher of the Faubourg
St. Antoine!

“And they believe it — of me, of me, they believe this
infamy!”

“With this addition, if any addition were needed, that you
are not a deceived victim, but a willing and proud participator
in the shame.”

“I will — that is —” she corrected herself, speaking very
rapidly and energetically — “I would die sooner. But there
is no need now to die. You have come back to me, and all
will yet go well with us!”

“It never can go well with us again,” St. Renan answered
gloomily. “The king never yields his purpose, he is as tenacious
in his hold as reckless in his promptitude to seize. And
they are paid beforehand.”

“Paid!” exclaimed the girl, shuddering at the word. “What
atrocity. How paid?”

“How, think you, did your good father earn his title and the
rich governorship of Morlaix? What great deeds were rewarded
to La Rochederrien by his marquisate, and this captaincy of
musquetaires. You know not yet, young lady, what virtue
there is now-a-days in being the accommodating father, or the
convenient husband of a beauty!”

“You speak harshly, St. Renan, and bitterly.”

“And if I do, have I not cause enough for bitterness and
harshness?” he replied almost angrily.

“Not against me, Raoul.”

“I am not bitter against you, Melanie. And yet — and
yet —”

“And yet what, Raoul?”

“And yet had you resisted three days longer, we might have
been saved — you might have been mine —”

“I am yours, Raoul de St. Renan. Yours, ever and for ever!
No one's but only yours.”

“You speak but madness — your vow — the sacrament!”

“To the winds with my vow — to the abyss with the fraudful
sacrament!” she cried, almost fiercely. “By sin it was obtained
and sanctioned — in sin let it perish. I say — I swear,
Raoul, if you will take me, I am yours.”

“Mine? Mine?” cried the young man, half bewildered.
“How mine, and when?”

“Thus,” she replied, casting herself upon his breast, and
winding her arms around his neck, and kissing his lips passionately
and often. “Thus, Raoul, thus, and now!”

He returned her embrace fondly once, but the next instant
he removed her almost forcibly from his breast, and held her
at arm's length.

“No, no!” he exclaimed, “not thus, not thus! If at all,
honestly, openly, holily, in the face of day! May my soul
perish, ere cause come through me why you should ever blush
to show your front aloft among the purest and the proudest.
No, no, not thus, my own Melanie!”

The girl burst into a paroxysm of tears and sobbing, through
which she hardly could contrive to make her interrupted and
faltering words audible.

“If not now,” she said at length, “it will never be. For,
hear me, Raoul, and pity me, to-morrow they are about to drag
me to Paris.”

The lover mused for several moments very deeply, and then
replied, “Listen to me, Melanie. If you are in earnest, if you
are true, and can be firm, there may yet be happiness in store
for us, and that very shortly.”

“Do you doubt me, Raoul?”

“I do not doubt you, Melanie. But ever as in my own
wildest rapture, even to gain my own extremest bliss, I would

not do aught that could possibly cast one shadow on your pure
renown, so, mark me, would I not take you to my heart were
there one spot, though it were but as a speak in the all-glorious
sun, upon the brightness of your purity.”

“I believe you, Raoul. I feel, I know that my honor, that
my purity is all in all to you.”

“I would die a thousand deaths,” he made answer, “ere
even a false report should fall on it, to mar its virgin whiteness.
Marvel not then that I ask as much of you.”

“Ask anything, St. Renan. It is granted.”

“In France we can hope for nothing. But there are other
lands than France. We must fly; and thanks to these documents
which you have wrung from them, and the proofs which
I can easily obtain, this cursed marriage can be set aside, and
then, in honor and in truth you can be mine, mine own Melanie.”

“God grant it so, Raoul.”

“It shall be so, beloved. Be you but firm, and it may be
done right speedily. I will sell the estates of St. Renan — by
a good chance, supposing me dead, the lord of Yrvilliac was in
treaty for it with my uncle. That can be arranged forthwith.
Conduct yourself according to your wont, cool and as distant
as may be with this villain of Ploermel; avoid above all things
to let your father see that you are buoyed by any hope, or
moved by any passion. Treat the king with deliberate scorn,
if he approach you over-boldly. Beware how you eat or drink
in his company, for he is capable of all things, even of drugging
you into insensibility, and here,” he added, taking a small
poniard, of exquisite workmanship, with a gold hilt and scabbard,
from his girdle, and giving it to her, “wear this at all
times, and if he dare attempt violence, were he thrice a king,
use it!”

“I will — I will — trust me, Raoul! I will use it, and that to

his sorrow! My heart is strong, and my hand brave now —
now that I know you to be living. Now that I have hope to
nerve me, I will fear nothing, but dare all things.”

“Do so, do so, my beloved, and you shall have no cause to
fear, for I will be ever near you. I will tarry here but one
day; and ere you reach Paris, I will be there, be certain.
Within ten days, I doubt not I can convert my acres into gold,
and ship that gold across the narrow straits; and that done,
the speed of horses, and a swift ship will soon have us safe
in England; and if that land be not so fair, or so dear as our
own France, at least there are no tyrants there, like this Louis;
and there are laws, they say, which guard the meanest man as
safely and as surely as the proudest noble.”

“A happy land, Raoul. I would we were there even now.”

“We will be there ere long, fear nothing. But tell me,
whom have you near your person on whom we may rely.
There must be some one through whom we may communicate
in Paris. It may be that I shall require to see you.”

“Oh! you remember Rose, Raoul — little Rose Faverney,
who has lived with me ever since she was a child — a pretty
little black-eyed damsel.”

“Surely I do remember her. Is she with you yet? That
will do admirably, then, if she be faithful, as I think she is;
and unless I forget, what will serve us better yet, she loves my
page Jules de Marlien. He has not forgotten her, I promise
you.”

“Ah! Jules — we grow selfish, I believe, as we grow old,
Raoul. I have not thought to ask after one of your people.
So Jules remembers little Rose, and loves her yet; that will
indeed, secure her, even had she been doubtful, which she is
not. She is as true as steel — truer, I fear, than even I; for
she reproached me bitterly four evenings since, and swore she
would be buried alive, much more willingly imprisoned, than

be married to the marquis de Ploermel, though she was only
plighted to the vicomte Raoul's page! Oh! we may trust in
her with all certainty.”

“Send her, then, on the very same night that you reach
Paris, so soon as it is dark, to my uncle's house in the place
de St. Louis. I think she knows it, and let her ask — not for
me — but for Jules. Ere then I will know something definite
of our future; and fear nothing, love, all shall go well with us.
Love such as ours, with faith, and right, and honesty, and
honor to support it, can not fail to win, blow what wind may.
And now, sweet Melanie, the night is wearing onward, and I
fear that they may miss you. Kiss me, then, once more, sweet
girl, and farewell.”

“Not for the last, Raoul,” she cried, with a gay smile, casting
herself once again into her lover's arms, and meeting his
lips with a long, rapturous kiss.

“Not by a thousand, and a thousand! But now, angel, farewell
for a little space. I hate to bid you leave me, but I dare
not ask yon to stay; even now I tremble lest you should be
missed and they should send to seek you. For were they but
to suspect that I am here and have seen you, it would, at the
best, double all our difficulties; fare you well, sweetest Melanie.”

“Fare you well,” she replied; “fare you well, my own best
beloved Raoul,” and she put up the glittering dagger, as she
spoke, into the bosom of her dress; but as she did so, she
paused and said, “I wish this had not been your first gift to
me, Raoul, for they say that such gifts are fatal, to love at least,
if not to life.”

“Fear not! fear not!” answered the young man, laughing
gayly, “our love is immortal. It may defy the best steel blade
that was ever forged on Milan stithy to cut it asunder. Fare
you — but, hush! who comes here; it is too late, yet fly — fly,
Melanie!”

But she did not fly, for as he spoke, a tall, gayly-dressed
cavalier burst through the coppice on the side next the château
d'Argenson, exclaiming: “So, my fair cousin! — this is your
faith to my good brother of Ploermel is it?”

But, before he spoke, she had whispered to Raoul, “It is
the chevalier de Pontrein, de Ploermel's half-brother. Alas!
all is lost.”

“Not so! not so!” answered her lover, also in a whisper,
“leave him to me, I will detain him. Fly, by the upper pathway
and through the orchard to the château, and remember —
you have not seen this dog. So much deceit is pardonable.
Fly, I say, Melanie. Look not behind for your life, whatever
you may hear, nor tarry. All rests now on your steadiness and
courage.”

“Then all is safe,” she answered firmly and aloud, and without
casting a glance toward the cavalier, who was now within
ten paces of her side, or taking the smallest notice of his words,
she kissed her hand to St. Renan, and bounded up the steep
path, in the opposite direction, with so fleet a step as soon carried
her beyond the sound of all that followed, though that was
neither silent nor of small interest.

“Do you not hear me, madam. By Heaven! but you carry
it off easily!” cried the young cavalier, setting off at speed, as
if to follow her. “But you must run swifter than a roe if you
look to 'scape me;” and with the words he attempted to rush
past Raoul, of whom he affected, although he knew him well,
to take no notice.

But in that intent he was quickly frustrated, for the young
count grasped him by the collar as he endeavored to pass, with
a grasp of iron, and said to him in an ironical tone of excessive
courtesy.

“Sweet sir, I fear you have forgotten me, that you should
give me the go-by thus, when it is so long a time since we
have met, and we such dear friends, too.”

But the young man was in earnest, and very angry, and
struggled to release himself from St. Renan's grasp, until, having
no strong reasons for forbearance, but many for the reverse,
Raoul, too, lost his temper.

“By Heaven!” he exclaimed, “I believe that you do not
know me, or you would not dare to suppose that I would suffer
you to follow a lady who seeks not your presence or society.”

“Let me go, St. Renan!” returned the other fiercely, laying
his hand on his dagger's hilt. “Let me go, villain, or you
shall rue it!”

“Villain!” Raoul repeated calmly, “villain! It is so you
call me, hey?” and he did instantly release him, drawing his
sword as he did so. “Draw, De Pontrien — that word has
cost you your life!”

“Yes, villain!” repeated the other, “villain to your teeth!
But you lie! it is your life that is forfeit — forfeit to my brother's
honor!”

“Ha! ha!” laughed Raoul, savagely. “Ha-ha-ha-ha! your
brother's honor! who the devil ever heard before of a pandar's
honor — even if he were Sir Pandarus to a king? Sa! sa!
have at you!”

Their blades crossed instantly, and they fought fiercely, and
with something like equality for some ten minutes. The chevalier
de Pontrien was far more than an ordinary swordsman,
and he was in earnest, not angry, but savage and determined,
and full of bitter hatred, and a fixed resolution to punish the
familiarity of Raoul with his brother's wife. But that was a
thing easier proposed than executed; for St. Renan, who had
left France as a boy already a perfect master of fence, had
learned the practice of the blade against the swordsmen of the
East, the finest swordsmen of the world, and had added to
skill, science, and experience, the iron nerves, the deep breath,
and the unwearied strength of a veteran.

If he fought slowly, it was that he fought carefully — that he
meant the first wound to be the last. He was resolved that De
Pontrien never should return home again to divulge what he
had seen, and he had the coolness, the skill, and the power to
carry out his resolution.

At the end of ten minutes he attacked. Six times within as
many seconds he might have inflicted a severe, perhaps a
deadly wound on his antagonist; and he, too, perceived it, but
it would not have been surely mortal.

“Come, come!” cried De Pontrien, at last, growing impatient
and angry at the idea of being played with. “Come, sir,
you are my master, it seems; make an end of this.”

“Do not be in a hurry,” replied St. Renan, with a deadly
smile, “it will come soon enough. There! will that suit you?”

And with the word he made a treble feint and lounged home.
So true was the thrust that the point pierced the very cavity
of his heart. So strongly was it sent home that the hilt smote
heavily on his breast-bone. He did not speak or groan, but
drew one short, broken sigh, and fell dead on the instant.

“The fool!” muttered St. Renan. “Wherefore did he meddle
where he had no business? But what the devil shall I do
with him? He must not be found, or all will out — and that
were ruin.”

As he spoke, a distant clap of thunder was heard to the eastward,
and a few heavy drops of rain began to fall, while a
heavy mass of black thunder-clouds began to rise rapidly
against the wind.

“There will be a fierce storm in ten minutes, which will
soon wash out all this evidence,” he said, looking down at the
trampled and blood-stained greensward. “One hour hence,
and there will not be a sign of this, if I can but dispose of him.
Ha!” he added, as a quick thought struck him, “the Devil's
Drinking-Cup! Enough! it is done!”

Within a minute's space he had swathed the corpse tightly
in the cloak, which had fallen from the wretched man's shoulders
as the fray began, bound it about the waist by the scarf,
to which he attached firmly an immense block of stone, which
lay at the brink of the fearful well, which was now — for the
tide was up — brimful of white boiling surf, and holding his
breath atween resolution and abhorrence, hurled it into the abyss.

It sunk instantly, so well was the stone secured to it; and
the fate of the chevalier de Pontrien never was suspected, for
that fatal pool never gave up its dead, nor will until the judgment-day.

Meantime the flood-gates of heaven were opened, and a
mimic torrent, rushing down the dark glen, soon obliterated
every trace of that stern, short affray.

Calmly Raoul strode homeward, and untouched by any conscience,
for those were hard and ruthless times, and he had
undergone so much wrong at the hands of his victim's nearest
relatives, and dearest friends, that it was no great marvel if his
blood were heated, and his heart pitiless.

“I will have masses said for his soul in Paris,” he muttered
to himself; and therewith, thinking that he had more than discharged
all a Christian's duty, he dismissed all further thoughts
of the matter, and actually hummed a gay opera-tune as he
strode homeward through the pelting storm, thinking how soon
he should be blessed by the possession of his own Melanie.

No observation was made on his absence, by either the
steward or any of the servants, on his return, though he was
well-nigh drenched with rain, for they remembered his old
half-boyish, half-romantic habits, and it seemed natural to them
that on his first return, after so many years of wandering, to
scenes endeared to him by innumerable fond recollections, he
should wander forth alone to muse with his own soul in secret.

There was great joy, however, in the hearts of the old servitors

and tenants in consequence of his return, and on the following
morning, and still on the third day, that feeling of joy
and security continued to increase, for it soon got abroad that
the young lord's grief and gloominess of mood were wearing
hourly away, and that his lip, and his whole countenance, were
often lighted up with an expression which showed, as they
fondly augured, that days and years of happiness were yet in
store for him.

It was not long before the tidings reached him that the house
of D'Argenson was in great distress concerning the sudden and
unaccountable disappearance of the chevalier de Pontrien, who
had walked out, it was said, on the preceding afternoon, promising
to be back at supper-time, and who had not been heard
of since.

Raoul smiled grimly at the intimation, but said nothing, and
the narrator judging that St. Renan was not likely to take offence
at the imputations against the family of Ploermel, proceeded
to inform him, that in the opinion of the neighborhood
there was nothing very mysterious, after all, in the disappearance
of the chevalier, since he was known to be very heavily
in debt, and was threatened with deadly feud by the old Sieur
de Plouzurde, whose fair daughter he had deceived to her undoing.
Robinet the smuggler's boat, had been seen off the
Penmarcks when the moon was setting, and no one doubted
that the gay gallant was by this time off the coast of Spain.

To all this, though he affected to pay little heed to it, Raoul
inclined an eager and attentive ear, and as a reward for his
patient listening, was soon informed, furthermore, that the bridegroom
marquis and the beautiful bride, being satisfied, it was
supposed, of the chevalier's safety, had departed for Paris, their
journey having been postponed only in consequence of the
research for the missing gentleman, from the morning when it
should have taken place, to the afternoon of the same day.

For two days longer did Raoul tarry at St. Renan, apparently
as free from concern or care about the fair Melanie de Ploermel,
as if he had never heard her name. And on this point
alone, for all men knew that he once loved her, did his conduct
excite any observation, or call forth comment. His silence,
however, and external nonchalance were attributed at all hands
to a proper sense of pride and self-respect; and as the territorial
vassals of those days held themselves in some degree ennobled
or disgraced by the high bearing or recreancy of their
lords, it was very soon determined by the men of St. Renan
that it would have been very disgraceful and humiliating had
their lord, the lord of Duarnenez and St. Renan, condescended
to trouble his head about the little demoiselle d'Argenson.

Meanwhile our lover, whose head was in truth occupied
about no other thing than that very same little demoiselle, for
whom he was believed to feel a contempt so supreme, had thoroughly
investigated all his affairs, thereby acquiring from his
old steward the character of an admirable man of business, had
made himself perfectly master of the real value of his estates,
droits, dues, and all connected with the same, and had packed
up all his papers, and such of his valuables as were movable,
so as to be transported easily by means of pack-horses.

This done, leaving orders for a retinue of some twenty of
his best and most trusty servants to follow him as soon as the
train and relays of horses could be prepared, he set off with two
followers only to return riding post, as he had come from Paris.

He was three days behind the lady of his love at starting;
but the journey from the western extremity of Bretagne to
the metropolis is at all times a long and tedious undertaking;
and as the roads and means of conveyance were in those days,
he found it no difficult task to catch up with the carriages of
the marquis, and to pass them on the road long enough before
they reached Paris.

Indeed, though he had set out three days behind them, he
succeeded in anticipating their arrival by as many, and had
succeeded in transacting more than half the business on which
his heart was bent, before he received the promised visit from
the pretty Rose Faverney, who, prompted by her desire to renew
her intimacy with the handsome page, came punctual to
her appointment. He had not, of course, admitted the good
old churchman, his uncle, into all his secrets; he had not even
told him that he had seen the lady, much less what were his
hopes and views concerning her.

But he did tell him that he was so deeply mortified and
wounded by her desertion, that he had determined to sell his
estates, to leave France for ever, and to betake himself to the
new American colonies on the St. Lawrence.

There was not in the state of France in those days much to
admire, or much to induce wise men to exert their influence
over the young and noble, to induce them to linger in the neighborhood
of a court which was in itself a very sink of corruption.
It was with no great difficulty, therefore, that Raoul obtained
the concurrence of his uncle, who was naturally a friend
to gallant and adventurous daring. The estates of St. Renan,
the old castle and the home park, with a few hundred acres in
its immediate vicinity only excepted, were converted into gold
with almost unexampled rapidity.

A part of the gold was in its turn converted into a gallant
brigantine of some two hundred tons, which was despatched
at once along the coast of Douarnenez bay, there to take in a
crew of the hardy fishermen and smugglers of that stormy shore,
all men well known to Raoul de St. Renan, and well content
to follow their young lord to the world's end, should such be
his will.

Here, indeed, I have anticipated something the progress of
events, for hurry it as much as he could in those days, St.

Renan could not, of course, work miracles; and though the
brigantine was purchased, where she lay ready to sail, at
Calais, the instant the sale of St. Renan was determined, without
awaiting the completion of the transfer, or the payment of
the purchase-money, many days had elapsed before the news
could be sent from the capital to the coast, and the vessel despatched
to Brittany.

Everything was, however, determined; nay, everything was
in process of accomplishment before the arrival of the fair
lady and her nominal husband, so that at the first interview
with Rose, Raoul was enabled to lay all his plans before her,
and to promise that within a month at the farthest, everything
would be ready for their certain and safe evasion.

He did not fail, however, on that account to impress upon
the pretty maiden — who, as Jules was to accompany his lord,
though not a hint of whither had been breathed to any one,
was doubly devoted to the success of the scheme — that a
method must be arranged by which he could have daily interviews
with the lovely Melanie; and this she promised that she
would use all her powers to induce her mistress to permit, saying,
with a gay laugh, that her permission gained, all the rest
was easy.

The next day, the better to avoid suspicion, Raoul was presented
to the king, in full court, by his uncle, on the double
event of his return from India, and of his approaching departure
for the colony of Acadie, for which it was his present purpose
to sue for his majesty's consent and approbation.

The king was in great good humor, and nothing could have
been more flattering or more gracious than Raoul de St. Renan's
reception. Louis had heard that very morning of the fair
Melanie's arrival in the city, and nothing could have fallen out
more apropos than the intention of her quondam lover to depart

at this very juncture, and that, too, for an indefinite period, from
the land of his birth.

Rejoicing inwardly at his good fortune, and of course, ascribing
the conduct of the young man to pique and disappointment,
the king, while he loaded him with honors and attentions, did
not neglect to encourage him in his intention of departing on a
very early day, and even offered to facilitate his departure by
making some remissions in his behalf from the strict regulations
of the Douane.

All this was perfectly comprehensible to Raoul; but he was
far too wise to suffer any one, even his uncle, to perceive that
he understood it; and while he profited to the utmost by the
readiness which he found in high places to smooth away all
the difficulties from his path, he laughed in his sleeve as he
thought what would be the fury of the licentious and despotic
sovereign when he should discover that the very steps which
he had taken to remove a dangerous rival, had actually cast
the lady into that rival's arms.

Nor had this measure of Raoul's been less effectual in sparing
Melanie much grief and vexation, than it had proved in
facilitating his own schemes of escape; for on that very day,
within an hour after his reception of St. Renan, the king caused
information to be conveyed to the marquis de Ploermel that the
presentation of madame should be deferred until such time as the
vicomte de St. Renan should have set sail for Acadie, which
it was expected would take place within a month at the furthest.

That evening when Rose Faverney was admitted to the young
lord's presence, through the agency of the enamored Jules,
she brought him permission to visit her lady at midnight in her
own chamber; and she brought with her a plan, sketched by
Melanie's own hand, of the garden, through which, by the aid
of a master-key and a rope-ladder, he was to gain access to
her presence.

“My lady says, Monsieur Raoul,” added the merry girl, with
a light laugh, “that she admits you only on the faith that you
will keep the word which you plighted to her, when last you
met, and on the condition that I shall be present at all your
interviews with her.”

“Her honor were safe in my hands,” replied the young man,
“without that precaution. But I appreciate the motive, and
accept the condition.”

“You will remember, then, my lord — at midnight. There
will be one light burning in the window, when that is extinguished,
all will be safe, and you may enter fearless? Will
you remember?”

“Nothing but death will prevent me. Nor that, if the spirits
of the dead may visit what they love best on earth. So tell
her, Rose. Farewell!”

Four hours afterward St. Renan stood in the shadow of a
dense trellice in the garden, watching the moment when that
love-beacon should expire. The clock of St. Germain l' Auxerre
struck twelve, and on the instant all was darkness. Another
minute and the lofty wall was scaled, and Melanie was
in the arms of Raoul.

It was a strange, grim, gloomy, gothic chamber, full of queer
niches and recesses of old stone-work. The walls were hung
with gilded tapestries of Spanish leather, but were interrupted
in many places by the antique stone groinings of alcoves and
cupboards, one of which, close beside the mantlepiece, was
closed by a curiously carved door of heavy oak-work, itself
sunk above a foot within the embrasure of the wall.

Lighted as it was only by the flickering of the wood-fire on
the hearth, for the thickness of the walls, and the damp of the
old vaulted room, rendered a fire acceptable, even at midsummer,
that antique chamber appeared doubly grim and ghostly;
but little cared the young lovers for its dismal seeming; and

if they noticed it at all, it was but to jest at the contrast of its
appearance with the happy hours which they passed within it.

Happy, indeed, they were — almost too happy — though as
pure and guiltless as if they had been hours spent within a
nunnery of the strictest rule, and in the presence of a sainted
abbess.

Happy, indeed, they were; and, although brief, oft repeated.
For, henceforth, not a night passed but Raoul visited his Melanie,
and tarried there enjoying her sweet converse, and bearing
to her every day glad tidings of the process of his schemes,
and the certainty of their escape, until the approach of morning
warned him to make good his retreat ere envious eyes
should be abroad to make espials.

And ever the page, Jules, kept watch at the ladder-foot in
the garden: and the true maiden, Rose, who ever sate within
the chamber with the lovers during their stolen interviews,
guarded the door, with ears as keen as those of Cerberus.

A month had passed, and the last night had come, and all
was successful — all was ready. The brigantine lay manned
and armed, and at all points prepared for her brief voyage at
an instant's notice at Calais. Relays of horses were at each
post on the road. Raoul had taken formal leave of the delighted
monarch. His passport was signed — his treasures
were on board his good ship — his pistols were loaded — his
horses were harnessed for the journey.

For the last time he scaled the ladder — for the last time he
stood within the chamber.

Too happy! ay, they were too happy on that night, for all
was done, all was won; and nothing but the last step remained,
and that step so easy. The next morning Melanie was to go
forth, as if to early mass, with Rose and a single valet. The
valet was to be mastered and overthrown as if in a street broil,
the lady, with her damsel, was to step into a light caleche,

which should await her, with her lover mounted at its side, and
hie! for Calais — England — without the risk — the possibility
of failure.

That night he would not tarry. He told his happy tidings,
clasped her to his heart, bid her farewell till to-morrow, and in
another moment would have been safe — a step sounded close
to the door. Rose sprang to her feet, with her finger to her
lip, pointing with her left hand to the deep cupboard-door.

She was right — there was not time to reach the window —
at the same instant, as Melanie relighted the lamp, not to be
taken in mysterious and suspicious darkness, the one door
closed upon the lover just as the other opened to the husband.

But rapid and light as were the motions of Raoul, the treacherous
door by which he had passed into his concealment, trembled
still as Ploermel entered. And Rose's quick eye saw
that he marked it.

But if he saw it, he gave no taken, made no allusion to the
least doubt or suspicion; on the contrary, he spoke more gayly
and kindly than his wont. He apologized for his untimely intrusion,
saying that her father had come suddenly to speak with
them, concerning her presentation at court, which the king had
appointed for the next day, and wished, late as it was, to see
her in the saloon below.

Nothing doubting the truth of his statement, which Raoul's
intended departure rendered probable, Melanie started from her
chair, and telling Rose to wait, for she would be back in an
instant, hurried out of the room, and took her way toward the
great staircase.

The marquis ordered Rose to light her mistress, for the corridor
was dark; and as the girl went out to do so, a suppressed
shriek, and the faint sounds of a momentary scuffle followed, and
then all was still.

A hideous smile flitted across the face of De Ploermel, as he

cast himself heavily into an arm-chair, opposite the door of the
cupboard in which St. Renan was concealed, and taking up a
silver bell which stood on the table, rung it repeatedly and
loudly for a servant.

“Bring wine,” he said, as the man entered. “And, hark
you, the masons are at work in the great hall, and have left
their tools and materials for building. Let half a dozen of the
grooms come up hither, and bring with them brick and mortar.
I hate the sight of that cupboard, and before I sleep this night,
it shall be built up solid with a good wall of mason-work; and
so here's a health to the rats within it, and a long life to them!”
and he quaffed off the wine in flendish triumph.

He spoke so loud, and that intentionally that Raoul heard
every word that he uttered.

But if he hoped thereby to terrify the lover into discovering
himself, and so convicting his fair and innocent wife, the villain
was deceived. Raoul heard every word — knew his fate
— knew that one word, one motion would have saved him; but
that one word, one motion would have destroyed the fair fame
of his Melanie.

The memory of the death of that unhappy Lord of Kerguelen
came palpably upon his mind in that dread moment, and the
comments of his dead father.

“I, at least,” he muttered between his hard set teeth, “I at
least will not be evidence against her. I will die silent — fiel
hasta, la muerte!”

And when the brick and mortar were piled by the hands of
the unconscious grooms, and when the fatal trowels clanged
and jarred around him, he spake not — stirred not — gave no
sign.

Even the savage wretch, De Ploermel, unable to believe in
the existence of such chivalry, such honor, half doubted if he

were not deceived, and the cupboard were not untenanted by
the true victim.

Higher and higher rose the wall before the oaken door; and
by the exclusion of the light of the many torches by which the
men were working, the victim must have marked, inch by inch,
the progress of his living immurement. The page, Jules, had
climbed in silence to the window's ledge, and was looking in,
an unseen spectator, for he had heard all that passed from
without, and suspected his lord's presence within the fatal precinct.

But as he saw the wall rise higher — higher — as he saw
the last brick fastened in its place solid, immovable from within,
and that without strife or opposition, he doubted not but that
there was some concealed exit by which St. Renan had escaped,
and he descended hastily and hurried homeward.

Now came the lady's trial — the trial that shall prove to De
Ploermel whether his vengeance was complete. She was led
in with Rose, a prisoner. Lettres de cachet had been obtained,
when the treason of some wretched subordinate had revealed
the secret of her intended flight with Raoul; and the officers
had seized the wife by the connivance of the shameless husband.

“See!” he said, as she entered, “see, the fool suffered himself
to be walled up there in silence. There let him die in
agony. You, madam, may live as long as you please in the
Bastile, au secret.”

She saw that all was lost — her lover's sacrifice was made —
she could not save him! Should she, by a weak divulging of
the truth, render his grand devotion fruitless? Never!

Her pale cheek did not turn one shade the paler, but her
keen eye flashed living fire, and her beautiful lip writhed with
loathing and scorn irrepressible.

“It is thou who art the fool!” she said, “who hast made all

this coil, to wall up a poor cat in a cupboard, as it is thou who
art the base knave and shameless pandar, who has attempted
to do murther, and all to sell thine own wife to a corrupt and
loathsome tyrant!”

All stood aghast at her fierce words, uttered with all the eloquence
and vehemence of real passion, but none so much as
Rose, who had never beheld her other than the gentlest of the
gentle. Now she wore the expression, and spoke with the
tone of a young Pythoness, full of the fury of the god.

She sprang forward as she uttered the last words, extricating
herself from the slight hold of the astonished officers, and rushed
toward her cowed and craven husband.

“But in all things, mean wretch,” she continued, in tones of
fiery scorn, “in all things thou art frustrate — thy vengeance
is naught, thy vile ambition naught, thyself and thy king, fools,
knaves, and frustrate equally, and now,” she added snatching
the dagger which Raoul had given her from the scabbard, “now
die, infamous, accursed pandar!” and with the word she buried
the keen weapon at one quick and steady stroke to the very
hilt in his base and brutal heart.

Then, ere the corpse had fallen to the earth, or one hand of
all those that were stretched out to seize her had touched her
person, she smote herself mortally with the same reeking
weapon, and only crying out in a clear, high voice, “Bear witness,
Rose, bear witness to my honor! Bear witness all that
I die spotless!” fell down beside the body of her husband, and
expired without a struggle or a groan.

Awfully was she tried, and awfully she died. Rest to her
soul, if it be possible.

The caitiff marquis de Ploermel perished, as she had said
in all things frustrated; for though his vengeance was in very
deed complete, he believed that it had failed, and in his very
agony that failure was his latest and his worst regret.

On the morrow, when St. Renan returned not to his home,
the page gave the alarm, and the fatal wall was torn down, but
too late.

The gallant victim of love's honor was no more. Doomed
to a lingering death he had died speedily, though by no act of
his own. A blood vessel had burst within, through the violence
of his own emotions. Ignorant of the fate of his sweet
Melanie, he had died as he had lived, the very soul of honor;
and when they buried him, in the old chapel of his Breton castle,
beside his famous ancestors, none nobler lay around him;
and the brief epitaph they carved upon his stone was true, at
least, if it were short and simple, for it ran only thus —

Raoul de St. Renan.

Fiel hasta la Muerte.