Transcriber’s Notes

The cover image was produced by the transcriber and is placed in the public domain.
No table of contents existed in the original book. A simple table of contents was created by the transcriber.
Additional transcriber's notes at the end of the text.

THE
PASTOR'S FIRE-SIDE,
Vol. II.

Printed by A. Strahan,
New-Street-Square, London.

THE

PASTOR'S FIRE-SIDE,

A

NOVEL,

IN FOUR VOLUMES.
BY

MISS JANE PORTER,

AUTHOR OF THADDEUS OF WARSAW, SIDNEY'S APHORISMS, AND THE SCOTTISH CHIEFS.

I will confess the ambitious projects which I once had, are dead within me. After having seen the parts which fools play upon the great stage; a few books, and a few friends, are what I shall seek to finish my days with.

TWEDDELL.

VOL. II.

LONDON:
PRINTED FOR LONGMAN, HURST, REES, ORME, AND BROWN, PATERNOSTER-ROW.
1817.

CONTENTS.

[CHAP. I.] 1 [CHAP. II.] 25 [CHAP. III.] 53 [CHAP. IV.] 88 [CHAP. V.] 114 [CHAP. VI.] 145 [CHAP. VII.] 172 [CHAP. VIII.] 198 [CHAP. IX.] 229 [CHAP. X.] 269 [CHAP. XI.] 287 [CHAP. XII.] 311 [CHAP. XIII.] 345 [CHAP. XIV.] 367

THE
PASTOR'S FIRE-SIDE,
Vol. II.

CHAP. I.

Next morning's rayless sun found Louis passing from his hardly pressed pillow, to the prosecution of his appointed task for the day. Ignatius had laid before him new papers, of a totally different character from the former, and much more difficult to transcribe.

As he continued to write, he heard the furious beating of a snow-storm against the windows, which, in this apartment, were not only grated but too high in the wall to allow of outward view. The heat of a well-filled stove excluded the encreased cold of the season; and the fierceness of the elements made him the less regret the exercise he must relinquish, or lose all hope of reducing the immense piles before him.

The Sieur appeared at his former nocturnal hour, to receive what had been finished, and to leave other manuscripts to which he desired duplicates. Day after day Louis was kept close to his desk, and every night delivered to his unrelenting task-master the labour of the day.

At the expiration of a week, the Sieur told him he should not see him again till the first of the ensuing month; but that he had a correspondence to leave with him, which he must completely transcribe into a regular series, by the time of his return. Louis received his orders in respectful silence, and when he was again left to his solitary toil, he found that his voluminous task was in the Sclavonian and Turkish characters. Neither of these languages had been parts of his studies; so he pursued his monotonous employment each succeeding day, from morning until midnight, without the accession of one new idea, or a moment's leisure for retrospection on former acquirements.

The sun rose, and the sun set; the weather, foul or fair; gloomy in storm, or gay with the scintillation of exhilarating frost, all found Louis de Montemar close at his desk. The iron-bound windows had never opened to the air; and the charcoal fumes which warmed the apartment, having no egress, hung in narcotic vapours on the vaulted roof. A heavy languor fell on its lonely inhabitant, and grew on him from day to day, till it left him hardly any other consciousness of being, than the faculty of moving, his now habituated hand, perpetually over the infinite reams of paper which lay before him.

On the night of the 1st of February, according to his promise, Ignatius entered the prison-room of his unrelaxing secretary. The piles which were completed, at last extorted from his unbending loftiness, an exclamation of admiration at such faultless execution and indefatigable perseverance. Louis's face no longer lighted up, as it was wont, at the voice of praise; but he bowed, though in silence. Had Ignatius spared a glance from the laborious heap to its unrepining artificer, that face would have told the tale his tongue had not uttered. The bloomy crimson of his cheek had perished under the withering breath of stoved confinement; and his eyes, before so luminous in health, so bright in youthful enjoyment, were sunk in languor under his darkening brows. So thoroughly was the Sieur absorbed in the business of his visit, he might not have observed these changes, had he not accidentally come in contact with the hand of his pupil in taking one of the packets. He started, as the touch seemed to scorch him.

"How is this?" cried he, eyeing Louis from head to foot, "you are ill."

"Perhaps the confinement, Sir," returned he, "may discompose me a little. But custom will enure me to it, and meanwhile it is of no consequence."

"No," said Ignatius, "your diligence has been too severe; you must have air and exercise. To-morrow you shall try their efficacy. I will send a respectable servant of my own, to attend you over the city."

Louis thankfully embraced the proposal.

The morrow's sun rose brilliant, as on the first morning he had hailed its beams from his chamber at Vienna. Louis dismissed a breakfast, for which he had no appetite; and with a spring of joy, he could not have conceived it possible to have experienced by merely stepping forth into the open air, he followed Martini, (the promised attendant from the Sieur,) out of the great gates of the Chateau.

The man was an Italian, and possessed none of the taciturnity of his mysterious master. With the respect due to a superior, but the garrulous gaiety of his country, he freely remarked to his companion on every object of sight, as he conducted him along the hoar-frosted avenue to the extensive glacis before the fortified walls of Vienna. Martini led the way through the Leopoldstadt-gate. Louis followed, but paid no attention to street nor square, palace nor cathedral; he was all occupied by the reviving aspirations he drew at every breath from an atmosphere whose ethereal quality seemed to penetrate every pore, and by an enchanting inebriation to restore him at once to his wonted elasticity of spirits.

Martini conducted him through the finest squares of the city, and along the most magnificent part of the suburbs towards the frozen Danube. It was now the hour of high gala. The noise and bustle of a countless multitude, passing and re-passing in a thousand different directions, soon summoned the concentrated senses of Louis to regard outward objects. The beams of the sun played over the landscape; hues of light blue, intermingled with bloomy purple deepening into shade, checquered the hills on the horizon. A waving line of shining snow marked the heights of Calemberg, and a sky of the purest azure canopied the scene. At the distance of his windows from the river, he could only view a various and interminable mass of human beings moving on its surface; but now he could distinguish the peculiar dress and aspect of each individual of all the nations assembled on that universal theatre. Turks, Tartars, Greeks, Muscovites, Swedes, and Italians, English and French, all appeared as if travelling to some vast senate of mankind; or rather, so gay were their habits, so gorgeous their equipages, it might be taken for a pageantry in fairy-land.

Delighted to see the attention of his charge at last arouzed, Martini allowed him, for some time, to gaze around in pleased amazement; then, resuming his office of Cicerone with augmented eloquence, he particularized the objects most worthy observation, and explained them with the accuracy of an itinerary. The Asiatic structure, raising its gilded domes over the cedars of the island, and which Louis had noticed from his window, Martini informed him was the Favorita; the favorite palace of the imperial family. It was now their temporary residence; and in that direction he saw numerous carriages, of strange shapes and capricious magnificence, shoot along the ice. Fancy seemed to have exhausted all her varieties of form in the construction of these whimsical vehicles. Some were fashioned like triumphal cars, others like the fabled shells of marine deities, and many of shapes so fantastical and grotesque, that the incumbent seemed lying in the grasp of some sea or land monster. All were garnished with gilding, emblazoned arms, or gallant devices; while the master, wrapped in ermines, guided with silken reins the flying horses, who, caparisoned in glittering housings, flashed by the spectator like the steeds of the sun. In some of the gayest traineaux, formed like scallop-shells and bedded with fur, beautiful women were seen reclining, while gentlemen sat on the sledge behind, managing the horses, and conversing with the ladies.

Louis was particularly struck with the singular beauty of the animals which drew these carriages. They were evidently of the Arabian breed, slight of limb, and carrying their branching necks with the grace of an antelope. The peculiar airiness and freedom of their pace, suited well with the Eastern magnificence of their trappings. An equipage with four of these fine creatures had just engaged his attention, when he found himself hurried forward by a crowd of foot-passengers, rushing to meet a cavalcade which preceded the Empress. At the moment of general clamour, he thought he heard his own name suddenly ejaculated. He listened,—it was repeated, and in the voice of Duke Wharton. Louis's heart leaped to the sound. He turned towards it, and saw the Duke standing behind the car of one of the Arch-duchesses. Another gentleman shared his post of honour, and guided the reins, while the Duke's eyes met the eager recognition and out-stretched arms of his friend. The carriage shot swiftly onward, but Wharton also extended his arms to Louis, and, as he was snatched from his sight, pointed to the Favorita. Louis understood that it was there he must seek him; and thither he determined to go, when he should walk out the following day.

The sight of the Duke, not merely recalled the enthusiastic feeling with which he originally regarded him, but presented to Louis the image of England, and all that it contained dear to his habits and to his heart! Tears rushed into his eyes: they seemed to overflow his soul, as he clasped his hands and inwardly exclaimed, "England! beloved land of liberty and tenderness! renown may be sought in other countries, but happiness is to be found in thee!"

For the first time since his arrival at Vienna, did he allow his heart to speak even to himself, to acknowledge that he was unhappy! That he had exchanged the generous freedom of the home of his youth, for harsh imprisonment in a foreign land. That he had parted with relations, who loved and honoured him, to become dependent on a stranger, and bound to the toil of a slave!

"Is such to be the purpose of my life?" said he to himself, as, with eyes blinded by emotion, he turned from the gay scene; "is such to be the oblivion of all that I took so much pains to acquire? Such, the grave of talents, my too partial relations cherished with so many hopes? My boasting ambition! Where has it led me? Oh, Wharton, what will you see me now? Crushed in spirit, and bowed with servitude; cheated into vassalage; and chained to an employment, that any hireling might perform as honourably! For, what trust is confided in me? I copy an unknown character; from whom, and to whom, I am completely ignorant. No, it cannot be the will of my father, thus to degrade and sacrifice his son!"

With these thoughts goading his fevered nerves, un-noting the way he went, he hurried from the Danube. By accident he took the path to the Chateau, and his guide, marvelling at the fitful humours of the young secretary, followed in silence. With a pulse in every vein, and feelings exasperated at the present, from immediate comparison with the past, and yearning for the moment of throwing himself into the arms of Wharton; as if that one embrace would restore to him at once, his liberty, his country, and his friends; Louis did not recover his attention to visible objects, till he found himself again within the dreary walls of the Chateau. He locked himself into the room of his labour, and throwing himself on the floor, gave way to the regrets that overwhelmed him in restrainless floods of bitter tears. In Lindisfarne, he had wept in tenderness and in sorrow. He had known the pangs of parting, and given the tribute of his tears to the racking moment. But he had never felt completely unmanned until now.

Hour passed over hour; Gerard knocked at the door, to announce that his solitary meal was prepared, but he knocked unheeded. At last, the deepening glooms of evening enclosing him in darkness, reminded him the day was past, and that his demanded task of the morning was yet to begin. Aware that the man, whom he was required to revere as a guardian, but whom the pangs of recollection made him now abhor as a tyrant, would exact it from him at midnight; he started from the ground. At that moment of self-recall to labour, the yoke of bondage pressed with insupportable weight upon his soul.

"I will not endure it!" cried he, "why should I immure myself like a condemned wretch? Shut up in solitude, fastened to the duty of a machine; Without sound of human voice, but that of my hard task-master! Without breathing the free air of Heaven; unless accompanied with lackies! Is this a fate, chosen by the Baron de Ripperda for his son, his only son? It is mockery, and I will not endure it."

The fever in his blood exaggerated to his perturbed mind every mysterious circumstance in his situation. He might be now the unconscious instrument of treason, or the cheated agent of political treachery. His father's confidence might be abused by the impenetrable Ignatius, and he be ignorant, alike of his son's being at Vienna, and of the illiterate drudgery to which he was consigned.

All this seemed the strange effect of Louis having seen Duke Wharton. But much sprung from a distempered imagination, and disordered nerves; the consequence of loneliness, want of exercise, and long confinement in a deleterious atmosphere. However, the sudden appearance of Wharton was certainly the circumstance which at once awoke all his sensibilities to the perception of his changed state; of the liberty he had been persuaded to relinquish, of the liberty he might, perhaps, regain by the Duke's interference. The last idea was a vague one, but still it was visible; it had a shadowy existence between hope and despair, and Louis clasped at the delusive shade.

A prey to these confused imaginations, he could not command either the desire or the power to resume his labours. Leaning his throbbing head upon the table, he allowed the gloom of black night to surround him; without even the wish to dispel it, by going into the adjoining room for one of the candles which had been for so many hours burning to waste.

As the old clock of the mansion struck ten, he was aroused from his moody position by a gleam of light. He looked up, and saw the Sieur Ignatius standing before him, with a lamp in his hand.

Louis started, disordered, from his chair.

"What is the meaning of this?" asked the Sieur, in a kindly voice; "I fear you are seriously ill."

Louis, in attempting to speak, was agitated to suffocation. Ignatius fixed his eyes on his haggard countenance.

"Your zeal has over-wrought your strength. Health is as necessary as will, to the completion of your duty. In these respects you must learn to be an economical, as well as a generous servant to your country; for that is the only way to be an efficient one. I see you have been too ill to prepare this night's papers."

The unusual interest in his feelings, which this address intimated; and the perfect confidence in his will to perform, what he had not done, smote on the heart of Louis; and, embarrassed and miserable, he bowed in silence.

"Sit down," continued the Sieur, evidently struck with the changed appearance of his charge; "I was improvident not to calculate on the ardour of your character, and give you orders to make pauses in your work, and take daily exercise in the garden. I ought to have thought on the garden before; for your walk of to-day without the walls, has already been productive of vexation. You have been seen, and to my great embarrassment, recognised. Have you any idea by whom?"

"By the Duke of Wharton," returned Louis, with all the recollections of that moment flushing his cheek; "I saw him on the Danube."

"And you saluted him first?" demanded Ignatius.

"No;" answered Louis, "but I turned to a voice calling on my name through the crowd, and met the eyes of my friend."

"And he recognised you, and you him?"

"We did."

"Mischief upon mischief!" ejaculated the Sieur, starting from his chair, and striding across the room in extraordinary discomposure. He turned suddenly upon Louis.—"So thoroughly did I believe you incapable of conduct so inconsistent with your awful engagements, that I have absolutely contradicted the mutual recognition. On being told of it to night by the Emperor's confessor, and the inferences drawn from the fact; I empowered him to affirm that he knew from an authority he could not dispute, that Louis de Montemar was not in Vienna; and that whoever had occasioned the report, must have mistaken some other person for the son of the Baron de Ripperda. Think then, faithless boy, into what a dilemma your recognition of Duke Wharton has brought the friend of your father! Into what a danger you have precipitated the cause, in which that father has embarked his fortunes and his life!"

"Sir," said Louis, with the dignity of conscious probity answering a man who had so lately put his affirmation to a falsehood; "my office here is inconsistent with my awful engagements. I bound myself to the dedication of all my talents, all the energies of my mind and heart, to the service of my father's country, now become mine; and to be obedient to him, as its agent. But I find myself, and all these talents, few or many, which have been the labour of my life to cultivate, chained down to the one mechanical act of writing on this table, in a character unknown to me, and on subjects concerning which I am as ignorant as the messenger that carries them to and fro! I am not treated with the confidence of a son, but the suspicion of a slave; and I have my doubts that I am really so degraded by the commands of my father."

"This is new language Louis de Montemar! You have spoken with the Duke of Wharton. He knows all that you know: and he has put this complexion on the affair! well he knows how to sap and to overturn—and a fit agent for a father's ruin, he has found in the son of the Baron de Ripperda."

As the terrible Ignatius delivered this, he approached close to Louis, and seizing his arm, fixed on him his powerful eyes, as if to look into his soul.

"I can bear your scrutiny, Sir," said he, "were you to rip open my breast with the poniard your hand rests upon. It is not in me to betray any man. I have not spoken with Duke Wharton."

"And you must not," returned the Sieur, recovering his presence of mind, and dropping his hand from the dagger's hilt he had unconsciously grasped; "you must avoid, avoid even the chance of his seeing you again. You are ill, and you are moody. You require air and action; and you shall have them: but henceforth they must be found in the garden of the Chateau. Be obedient to this necessity; and I will forget the phrenzied language, which, if not Wharton, some demon must have conjured, to betray your reason and your duty."

"Sir," replied Louis, in great emotion; "I do not wish you to forget it. I wish you to answer me to all its points. I wish to know at once, whether I am a trusted servant, or an abused slave? Trust me, and that labour will be happiness—distinction!—which is now misery, and degradation insupportable!"

For some time the lofty Ignatius regarded his pupil's almost convulsed features with a steady perusal of their varying expressions.—At last, putting his hand on the shoulder of Louis, he said in a calm voice; "Compose yourself; and listen to me. Hear from my lips, truths that must be your future guide in the destiny you have chosen; but to combat with the evils of which, you come totally unprovided. You have educated yourself for the service of your country.—You are full of ardour to engage in it. But how? Not as she directs; but as yourself chuses. You would fight her battles in the field of blood; you would fill her cars of triumph! But you disdain to watch for her in secret, to labour in obscurity for her ultimate peace. This last, is virtue in her purest simplicity; and, therefore, your father awarded to the virgin honour of his son, the unblemished sacrifice."

Louis believed that he now, indeed, listened to truth. But why did he, who could impress it so powerfully, why did he utter so mean a denial of the fact, as to affirm that the son of Baron de Ripperda was not in Vienna?

The prompt intelligence of the Sieur's rapid glance, had seen the effect of this assertion on the mind of his pupil; and while he pursued his remarks on what had passed, he noticed the equivocation he had made, as a common style in diplomacy: "your being in the suburbs, and not in Vienna," said he, "afforded me the advantage of this ambiguity. Always hold in mind, that no advantage, however trivial, is contemptible to a negotiator. The smallest causes often produce the greatest effects. Alberoni's mysterious policy, which held Europe in awe for five years, was revealed and destroyed in one moment by the dropping of his courier's cloak-bag into a river!"

While Louis sighed to think, that subterfuge could ever be a duty, he was filled with ingenuous shame at the suspicions he had dared to proclaim; at the reproaches with which his impatient doubts, and personal feelings, had provoked him to insult the trusted friend of his father. The forbearance of the Sieur Ignatius, under this unexpected flood of impassioned violence, augmented the contrition of the disordered offender; and when he rose to withdraw, Louis could only say, "bear with me this night. I am incapable of speaking—almost of thinking—but bear with me! and to-morrow, you shall find that I have not listened in vain."

CHAP. II.

Next day found Louis in a state far from tranquillized. Thorough dissatisfaction with himself, had prevented his eyes closing during the night; and he arose in the morning, only to continue his self-accusations. He condemned the indulgence of feelings so inconsistent with his usual candour in dubious circumstances, and which had hurried him, not only into an unreasonable despair of his own situation, but, with the most dishonouring suspicions, to provoke the man, who, it was madness to doubt, was the confidential colleague of the Baron de Ripperda. And yet, while he vowed to himself, that no privation of air or action, no solitude and monotony of life, should ever excite him to a second murmur; while he panted for the moment in which he might repair, by a full apology to the Sieur, the indignity he had cast upon him; he could not warm the chill at his heart, when he recollected that the first amends Ignatius was likely to demand of him, would be to relinquish all hope of seeing the Duke of Wharton.

This conviction threw his still agitated mind into tumults. In the parting interview between him and Mr. Athelstone, that venerable man had taken off the absolute terms of his interdiction respecting the Duke. In the wide and busy world, his nephew and Wharton might meet again; and in circumstances that Louis could not bend to his promise of avoidance. On this ground, the Pastor now left him to his own discretion. "But, remember," added he, "it is to your discretion!"

Louis thought on this licence from his revered uncle, with the outstretching arms of his soul towards his beloved friend; and, he vainly pursued his laborious penmanship, to get rid of the attendant ideas. The well-known voice, calling on him through the crowd, haunted his ear. Again, and again, the form of his friend, leaning towards him from the car, rose before him. He threw down his pen, and rested his working brain upon his hand. He could not recollect how Wharton looked, for he had not seen how he looked; all that his glad eyes had taken in of that dear apparition, was, that it was him! That it was his resplendent countenance which shone on him from that gay eminence!

"And I must not see it again!" cried Louis, "all with whom I am connected, seem leagued at one time or other to exclude him from my society. But they never can shut him from my heart. His gracious selection of me, from a crowd, older and of more approved merit than myself; his own distinguished qualities and irrepressible confidence in my honour, have bound me to love him through a life that is condemned to fly him, as if he were my direst enemy."

Louis opened his writing-case to recreate his eyes with the sight of Wharton's letter, that he might hear him speak through that at least; but as soon as he touched it, and saw the superscription, whose characters again recalled the image of the writer, and with it the home in which he had first read the letter; he dropped it back into the case.

"I will not further un-nerve myself," cried he, "by pressing memory on my heart! I will not pervert hours of past happiness to the purposes of present wretchedness. I must remember that I am called to self-denial; and you, dear generous Wharton! fated to be my first, are to continue my repeated sacrifice."

Louis was found at noon by his punctual visitor, seated at his desk with his former diligence. A slight hectic coloured his cheek as he rose to receive him.—The Sieur smiled. Louis again saw the heaven open, which had beguiled him into confidence on his first arrival, and this smile was not so flitting as its predecessor. It dwelt on his features like a bending seraph lingering on its cloud.

"Louis," cried he, "I come to trust you."

Louis caught the hand which was extended to him, and pressed it to his lips.

"I come to trust you," said he, "but not as I see you expect; I come to call again upon your faith, to fulfil the whole of this affair, while you must yet remain ignorant of its particular purpose; to trust in your honour, that you will not further doubt the integrity of the man on whom your father has conferred confidence without reserve. His interests and mine are united, never to be separated in this world: we rise, or we fall together. You redden Louis! But I do not trifle with you. It is possible that accident, if not design, may betray a scheme of such important bearings; and I will not leave it in the power of malice to accuse the son of Baron de Ripperda of treachery, or of imprudence in such a case."

"My recent conduct," replied he, "gives you no reliance on my prudence; and you believe me unworthy of fuller confidence."

"No, Louis,—that I still hold you in ignorance, is a greater proof of my dependence on your fidelity, than if I bound your personal interests with your honour, by unfolding to you any part of the glorious plan on which you are employed. Your oath ties your conscience to the fulfilment of your duty, but I want your free-will. I want, what I thought I had. The open eye of faith in the virtue of your cause,—the forward hand of zealous devotedness in the execution. Give me your mind, Louis, and I shall no longer see that changing cheek and languid frame? Zeal is life."

"Again I pledge myself," returned he, "I will be all you require, only trust me!" Then with a sudden paleness displacing the flush of resolution, and with a forced smile, he added, "I know I must prove my sincerity by a victim; and I yield a dear one. I will not see the Duke of Wharton, till you or my father grant me that privilege."

"To see him," replied the Sieur, resuming his usual austerity, "it is probable you may one day have perfect liberty, but never to cultivate his friendship."

"How?—Wherefore?"

"He is the enemy of your father."

"O, No—I have reason to believe he would gladly make my father his friend."

The moment this had escaped him, Louis could have plucked his tongue out for having uttered so inconsiderate a speech; so much did he fear that Ignatius would immediately demand what was that reason. But for once, the sagacious politician lost an opportunity of acquiring information respecting the views of a rival. Absorbed in the haughty consciousness of his own pre-eminence, he did not put the dreaded question, but with a scornful motion of his lips, replied.—

"I doubt it not.—But Philip Wharton would purchase without gold. He may defraud, but he cannot bestow."

"I do not understand you, Sir?"

"Future events will speak plainly," returned the Sieur, "and meanwhile, I rely on your engagement to avoid him."

Louis smothered an indignant rising in his bosom, and without answering, bowed his head in ratification of his promise.

Ignatius turned to the table, and gathering up the manuscripts prepared for him, told his now silent companion, that he need not resume his labours till he had taken the air on the terrace. "But," added he, "you must not forget that for every day, until I direct otherwise, the garden is your utmost limits."

"I shall not wish to extend them," replied Louis, with a resigned but lofty bow, and the Sieur left the room.

With his expanding heart again closed by the repulsive demeanor of his governor, Louis saw him depart. A feeling of complete desolation spread over his soul. Without having found comfort in his presence, he felt a more dreary loneliness when he was gone, as the hope of winning at all on his unbending nature, seemed utterly at an end. He had tried it, by anticipating what he knew would be exacted, the resignation of his friend. But Ignatius had received the sacrifice, not merely without sensibility, but with the most unsparing remarks. The tender care with which all his good dispositions had been fostered by the secluded guardians of his youth, made him doubly feel how sterile is the communion of the world. Interest may bind man to man, and extort the convenience of virtue; but affection is not there, to nourish or to reward its growth.

"Misjudging Ignatius! he demands my mind, when he might have my heart! I would love him, but he will not let me. In vain I watched for another of those smiles; the first, I hailed on my arrival as an earnest of a gracious master! And the second, which greeted me to-day, as a pledge of forgiveness of my yesterday's impatience, how soon was it displaced by the hard aspect of despotic command! But I deserve it," exclaimed he, "did not my humiliation, at having so frantically rebelled, vanish as soon? I was even on the point of a second violence, had not some good angel stilled the tumult in my breast." Having walked his dismal apartment some time, continuing the same soliloquy, he threw himself into a chair to compose his mind, and to confirm it. He arraigned himself for the weakness of his present discontents, and summoned his best reason to the forming a steady resolution of pursuing his duty upon the principle of enduring as well as acting. He reviewed the past and the present with an impartial eye; and where he saw he failed, condemned himself with an inexorable judgement.

In this hour's communing with himself, he found how different is the real from the imaginary contest; how wise is speculation, how absurd practice; how easy profession, how difficult performance; and that of all conquests, that of reason over a refractory heart, is the hardest to acquire. After these humbling reflections, he walked forth a victor, though a wounded one, to cheer himself with the glories of the setting sun. Its reclining orb had never failed to recall the compact which his heart had made, when he beheld it for the last time on the verge of his native hills. But this evening, its mild religious light, gradually withdrawing into the clouds, as the golden disk sunk beneath the earth, reminded him so touchedly of the venerable saint whose emblem he had called it, that he could not forbear exclaiming,

"Yes, my revered uncle! Those pious hands shall not always be raised in vain. I trust, that henceforth I shall do my duty in a manner more befitting the character you fondly believed mine; but on which, recent experience has too repeatedly shewn me, how slight ought to have been my dependance. For your sake, dear instructor of my youth! I will do all, and be all, that is required of me. I will forget your graciousness, that, in this land of severity, I may act worthy of your hopes. They who led me away captive, require of me a song, and melody in my heaviness! and, for thine honour, gentlest of human beings, I will take my harp from the willows, and be as happy as this stubborn heart will let me."

For several succeeding weeks, Louis steadily obeyed the law he had enjoined himself. The exasperation of his mind gradually subsided; his awakened sensibilities sunk to repose; and he concentrated his thoughts as much as possible upon his unchanging toil. As he constantly passed part of every day in the open air, he found companions, and even social ones, in the birds he fed with the crumbs from his breakfast. Their grateful chirpings were cheerful; and as he paced the snows of the garden, his blood regained its vigour, and the elasticity of his spirits revived. Again his cheek wore the brightness of health; and his volant step, too often reminded him how narrow were his boundaries. His eye, however, was yet free to range; and its excursions were wide as the horizon. It sought the heights of Mount Calemberg, whose hoary summits mingled with the hazy west; or when the winter day put on a fairer garb, he contemplated their snowy peaks piercing the glittering sky, and cloathed in all its splendor. A little convent, like Paraclete's white walls and silver springs, stood in an umbrageous cleft of the mountain; whose icicled trees, and frozen stream, promise a luxuriant scene in verdant summer.

But Mount Calemberg, with all its beauties, was not as fair to him, as cloud-capt Cheviot, clad in her storms, and standing sublime amidst the roaring torrent, and the shouts of the hunters echoing from her hills. He sighed for the joyous chace, for the jocund hour of return. He thought the voices of his uncle's boon companions, would no more sound discordant in his ear; even for the cry of their dogs, and their own loud halloos, reverberating from the walls of the old hall of Bamborough, what would he now give?

"Churl that I was," cried he, "not to allow people to be happy, but in my own way! And fool too, to despise them for being happy, with the humbler talents bestowed on them by the God of nature!"

Louis blushed to feel, that we must suffer, to value all that is bestowed.

His wandering eye could not elude the attraction of another point. It often turned to the yet frozen Danube, and tried, by straining its powers, to discern amongst the variegated groups, any thing like the person of his interdicted friend; but he gazed in vain. The river was too distant to distinguish individuals; and all he saw, was a moving pageantry, which might interest, but could never satisfy him, as it was probable it contained Wharton, and it was impossible for him to see him, if it did.

Louis was constant in these walks, and the Sieur as regular in his evening visits. The one, always greeted his governor with cheerfulness; and the other, his pupil, with a stateliness, which shewed approbation, only by silence from reproof. But Louis was content, and the whole glided smoothly on.

The name of Wharton never occurred between them, to disturb the unruffled surface, but once; and that was occasioned by the Duke's parting letter to Louis, dropping out of his private portfolio, one evening when Ignatius asked if he could furnish him with a sheet of paper bearing the English water-mark. As the letter fell with the seal to the floor, the Sieur's observing eye recognised the hand-writing, and, though unused to the bending mood, he stooped to take it up.

"You have corresponded with Wharton!" cried he, holding the letter in his hand; "what, did he tell you, was his object in leaving England last autumn?" "Nothing, Sir;" replied Louis, stretching out his hand rather too eagerly to receive the letter; but Ignatius retained it. "That was the first, and the only letter, with which he ever honoured me."

"It is in answer then, to one from yourself?"

"No; I have never written to him. That was sent to me the night he quitted England, to go——he did not say whither; and so the correspondence ended."

"And, as certainly, he did not desire its continuance," replied the Sieur. He observed Louis start, and redden with an air of offended incredulity. "Else why," resumed he, "did he omit naming to you the place of his destination? But," added he, throwing the letter contemptuously on the table, "Wharton was always a creature of caprice, and you will not be the last ball his racket will strike out of his careing."

Stung with the sarcasm of this remark, mortified at being supposed liable to such trifling, and jealous for the sincerity of his friend, with flashing eyes Louis took up the letter, and held it silently in his hand. He stood a few minutes, struggling to subdue the resentment that was ready to burst from his lips. The Sieur appeared to have already forgotten the matter, and was calmly examining the manuscripts on the table. This apathy was more galling, than perhaps further remark. Louis pressed on his swelling heart the recollection of the vow he had made to himself, to bear all, as well as to do all, the will of this arrogant man; and turning towards his port-folio, he was replacing the letter in the case, when Ignatius looking up, said in a voice that was careless of being heard,

"It is pity, to see ingenuous youth treasure a counterfeit, for true metal."

"Your observation, Sir," said Louis, "does not touch the Duke of Wharton."

"But it might you, Louis;" coolly answered the Sieur, "for you hold a proof of his ephemeral attachments, in your hand."

Louis felt an instant impulse to disprove at once this contemptuous inference, by requesting Ignatius to read the Duke's letter; but the next moment he bethought him, whether there were ought in the contents his misjudged friend might wish not to be exposed to an enemy. For such, he could not but perceive the inveterate Ignatius was to Wharton. There was a mixture of malignant contempt, with evident apprehension of his influence somewhere, which marked the sentiment the Sieur entertained for him; but whether from personal dislike, or solely on account of the asserted hostility between him and Baron de Ripperda, Louis could not be sure; though he certainly saw hatred in his governor's deeply sunken eyes, whenever he spoke of the Duke.

To persist in silence, seemed to Louis to be sanctioning these calumnies on his friend, and to continue asserting without offering proof, he was aware would only redouble the scorn of his antagonist. Placed in a torturing dilemma, he stood recollecting whether the contents of the Duke's letter were such that he might safely shew; when the Sieur, rising from his seat, said in an exasperating tone of pity; "put up your relic, Louis! though I see you are properly ashamed of a credulity too natural to the vanity of youth."

"No, Sir;" returned he, opening the letter with a trembling hand; "I should detest myself, if I thought I had a spark within me of any thing so mean as vanity. But if I had, Duke Wharton is of too noble a nature to play upon credulity so worthless. That letter, Sir, if you will condescend to read it, will shew you that I am honoured with his friendship."

Ignatius had now wrought Louis to the point at which he aimed, but maintaining his air of indifference, he took the letter from the agitated hand of his pupil, without observation. Louis presented it with a proud look, and stood as proudly watching his countenance while he read it. The Sieur went over it twice; he then coldly returned it, with the remark, "it is beyond my skill to expound so curious a riddle, but as you are his friend, you doubtless have a key?"

All the self-confidence, which a moment before had dilated the indignant heart of Louis, fell in an instant. He did not anticipate this sort of observation on the letter, and alarmed at the impressions which must have given rise to it, he stood in speechless embarrassment.

"This piece of paper," continued Ignatius, "is mere nonsense to me; and proves nothing, of what you to wish prove, unless you can do it by explaining its meaning?"

Louis remained silent.

The Sieur proceeded:—"You ought not to have put such seeming foolery into my hands, unless you were prepared to be its commentary."

"Then return it to me, Sir," cried Louis, overwhelmed with confusion, "and forget that you have seen it."

"I never forget any thing that I have seen, and, I am not to be trifled with. You have called my attention to this letter; you have shewn it to me, as a proof of Duke Wharton's confidence in you: but I see only a farrago of words, which, you have now pledged yourself to put into reasonable meaning by your explanation."

Louis's consternation was so great, at so unlooked for a consequence of what he had done, that he could not recollect what he had said, or might have implied to the Sieur; and he continued to gaze on the ground, humbled to the dust. "Oh!" cried he, in the depths of his soul, "was I then under the immediate control of detested, mischievous vanity, at the very moment I disclaimed its presence in my heart! Wretch that I am, to have been betrayed by any motive, to open the faintest glimmering of light upon the secrets of my friend, to this inexorable man!"

The recollection of Wharton's words, I put my life into your hands! rose before his mental sight in characters of blood; and turning sick at heart, he supported a momentary failure of his limbs, by grasping the back of a chair. The sight of this agitation only stimulated the curiosity of Ignatius, or, whatever else it was that impelled him to persecute his unoffending charge to such a point of distress.—He resumed.

"You have gone too far, to be silent now, I can comprehend, that certain phrases in this enigmatical epistle, refer to former conferences with you. Brutus and Cassius are not usually masquing names in affairs of gallantry, therefore, the nature of your mutual confidence I can guess; and it is necessary for your own, as well as the Duke's honour, that you should tell me their object."

"Sir," said Louis, "I have already done too much for my own honour.—The Duke's can never be injured by any thing I can say or withhold. And, I will mention his name no more."

"Young man," said Ignatius, "you must not add obstinacy to rashness. You have allowed yourself to be made privy to the schemes of a man who is suspected by his country! Be aware, that to conceal treason, is to share it."

Louis did not speak.

The Sieur continued: "Besides, you are answerable to your country, and to your father, who has devoted you with himself, to her interests, to reveal to him, as to your confessor, every event of your life. Much more, then, a circumstance like this. For, on your father's intimate acquaintance with every political device which could possibly disturb Europe, depends his guiding to perfection the mighty machine he is now constructing to give peace to the world. Hence, the glory of your father, as well as your vow to Spain, commands you to bend all minor considerations to the great duty of your life; and to confide to him, through me, every confidence of a political nature which has passed between you and the Duke of Wharton."

"The glory of my father," replied Louis, "can never be augmented by his son's faithlessness. And could Spain require such a proof of my attachment to her, the law of God, which is the everlasting appeal from all human ordinances, would sanction me in abjuring my vow!"

"You grant that Wharton has engaged your faithfulness! A secret implied, is a secret revealed; and further withholding a full acknowledgement, is finesse with me, and irreverence to your father. The Duke left Vienna a few weeks ago, secretly, and I have reason to believe, you could guess whither he is gone?"

"Sir," answered Louis, "I neither say, nor do not say, that I have been honoured with any confidence whatever, by the Duke of Wharton; but I repeat, that neither to my father, nor to any man living, do I think it necessary to betray a trust in me. Therefore, as I cannot repeat discourses I have never heard, and will not repeat discourses confided to me; you cannot be surprized that I hold my peace. My inconsideration, to give it the mildest appellation, has gone far enough, in shewing Duke Wharton's letter, however indifferent its subject, without his permission."

The Sieur fixed his investigating eye upon the determined brow of his pupil.

"Louis de Montemar," cried he, "you have imprudence enough in your composition to ruin a state; and sufficient stubbornness of what you call Honour, to ensure your own destruction. If you do not mean to relax the one, you must learn to confirm your mind against the wild influence of the other. Act less from passion, and more from principle. Be wary of friend, as well as foe; and never speak from your heart, till your words have paused in your head, to take the judgment of your circumspection. Had you shewn this letter to one less interested in your welfare, than your father's friend, the suspicion its style would have awakened, might have wrought consequences ruinous to the Duke, and not much less full of evil to yourself. I shall now drop the subject for ever, because I see that you will not neglect its lesson."

With the gratitude of one escaped from a snare, into which he thought he had desperately, and therefore blameably rushed, Louis took the letter, which the Sieur presented to him. His ingenuous cheek flushed with displeasure at himself for having been beguiled, rather than at the subtle trier of his wariness; and respectfully, though silently, he bowed his head to his unanswerable monitor. Ignatius fell immediately into his usual abstracted mood, and soon after left the room.

CHAP. III.

Three days after this discussion, Louis had just seated himself at his morning task, when he heard a knock at the chamber door. This was an unusual circumstance, for Gerard never approached with such signal, but at the hours when his stroke was to announce the frugal repast in the adjoining apartment. The Sieur always entered with his own key; and this was a time of the day he never visited the Chateau. Louis thought it could be no summons to him, and that probably Gerard had accidentally occasioned the noise in passing. But in another minute, he heard a second knock, louder than the former. He then rose to see what it was, and to his surprise beheld Castanos; whom he had not seen, or heard of, since his departure with the dispatches for Spain.

Hoping to hear news of his father; and that his letter to Don Ferdinand had reached him in safety; Louis eagerly bade him welcome from Madrid. With a deepened gloom on his always sullen countenance, Castanos roughly interrupted him.—

"I am sent to tell you, Senor, that the Sieur Ignatius is at the point of death."

"Impossible!" cried Louis, "he was not here yesterday; but I saw him the evening before, in perfect health."

"Last night he was stabbed in the porch of the Jesuits' College," returned Castanos.

Louis's tongue clove to the roof of his mouth, as grasping the arm of his unfeeling informant, he seemed to demand, who had done it? For once in his life, the morose Spaniard suffered his half-closed eyes to look directly on the face of a fellow-creature. He was not insensible to the horror depicted on Louis, and in more humane accents replied—

"Villains way-laid him in the porch at the outer gate of the College, where he always quits his carriage. They closed on him: but he struggled, and drew his dagger. The business, however, was soon over; for the stroke of some heavy weapon felled him to the ground; and while he lay insensible, to make sure work, they stabbed him, and fled. But the drawn blood did a service not intended.—It recovered my lord Ignatius from his swoon; and he managed to stagger to the gate, and gain admittance. When I was sent for to his chamber, which was not till this morning, I found surgeons and a priest with him; and they declare his wounds dangerous."

"And am I not to see him?" cried Louis, forgetting his hard task-master, in the image of a fellow-creature dying by murder; that fellow-creature was his father's friend; and he repeated, "may I not go to him?"

"I came to bring you to him," replied Castanos.

Shocked as he was by the horrid recital, Louis felt an emotion of pleasure at this summons. To be to his severe, but he believed upright guardian, a more soothing attendant than was in the power, if indeed in the will of the rugged Spaniard, gave a generous satisfaction to his heart. Having carefully locked the chamber which contained the secret papers; that, whether the Sieur lived or died, his injunctions might be equally respected; Louis accompanied his old conductor to a carriage which awaited them in the court-yard.

While driving down the avenue, and crossing the esplanade into the city, both Louis and his companion were lost in thought. At last the former, hardly conscious of giving utterance to his meditations suddenly asked Castanos whether he had any idea of the motive of this horrid deed "Not robbery," replied the Spaniard; "they never stopped for plunder. They wanted his life. And, I believe, we may curse the jealousy of your father's political enemies for the motive. I brought my dispatches from Madrid yesterday morning; and yesterday night these daggers were at work."

"But how," returned Louis, "can the death of the Sieur Ignatius be of such moment to my father's enemies, that they should load their souls with this assassination, and leave my father alive?"

"Senor," said Castanos, "you know little of politicians. The agents of such rivals are always in danger. So you will do well to look to yourself."

"No man knows me in this capital."

"But some may know your employment; and that is the object of grudge.—Since the stilleto has reached our master, we know not how far it may be from ourselves."

Louis could not bid him not fear; for the assault on their employer proved that danger was connected with their situation; and being ignorant of what that situation really was, he could not foresee whence the danger might issue, nor how it might be repelled. He therefore made no reply; neither did he ask any more questions of a man, who, when he did break his sullen taciturnity, was ever more inclined to engloom an evil prospect, than to cheer it with a ray of hope.

The silence that ensued, was not interrupted till the carriage drew up before a colossal column, surmounted by a bronze statue of the Virgin Mary, and in front of which stretched the dark walls of the College. At the portico they alighted.

"Here," muttered Castanos, "is the place of blood; and its marks are yet on the stones."

As he said, Louis saw; for it might be tracked from the spot where he supposed the Sieur had fallen, to where he rose and made his way to the gate. Louis shuddered at such a proof of the most dreadful part of the Spaniard's tale, and hastened to follow him through the porch. He entered a large quadrangle, surrounded by cloisters. As they proceeded, Louis perceived several persons in dark monastic habits, walking to and fro under the colonades. When he approached, they eyed him with curiosity; and when two or three were together, they whispered as he passed. Castanos seemed vexed by this notice; but without remarking on it, hurried his companion towards a great door at the extremity of one of the cloisters. He struck it with his clenched hand, and it was instantly opened by a man, who Louis recognised to be Martini, the servant who had attended him in his only walk beyond the walls of the Chateau. He immediately enquired whether the Sieur had undergone any change since Castanos left him.

"No, Signor. The Superior of the College is with him now, but he is impatient for your arrival."

"Shew me to his apartment," cried Louis; and following with fleet steps the long strides of the Italian, the father of the Jesuits met him, as he passed into the presence of the wounded Ignatius.

The chamber was then left entirely to the invalid, and to the conference he had so strenuously desired to have with his secretary. Louis advanced into the room. Ignatius lay on a low couch, which, from its form and sombre appointments, looked more like a bier for the dead, than a bed of rest for the living. It stood in the center of an arched cove at the end of the apartment. Louis approached in speechless awe. As he drew near, he saw the body of the Sieur extended under the coverlid, in the position he should have expected had he been to find him in his shroud. His head lay flat on the pillow, and was so veiled in a black cowl, nothing could be discerned of his face, but his ashy lips and grizzled beard.

Ignatius knew the step that so cautiously drew near his bed, and feebly raising the arm, which his pupil now saw had lain enveloped in black upon the dark coverlid, he put out his hand to him. Louis clasped it gently in his, but forbore to speak. He felt himself pressed by the cold fingers of Ignatius; and there was an expression in the touch that said, he understood his sympathy. Louis bent his head to that not silent hand, and put it to his lips.

"Son of Ripperda," said the Sieur, in a low agitated voice; "thou hast a kindly heart!"

"The son of Ripperda," replied Louis, "could not feel otherwise towards the friend of his father. But I would devote myself to watch this couch, for the Sieur Ignatius's own sake." Again he felt his hand pressed by the wounded man; and the smile, which was once so beautiful, flitted over his shrouded countenance like a departing spirit. Louis turned icy cold. He had never seen any one on a death-bed; and that spectacle, which he believed was now before him, shivered him to the soul.

"Louis," said the Sieur, after a pause, "I have not summoned you hither, to wait upon the tedious hours of my recovery, but to perform my part in the place, where jealousy of my success has brought me to this. You must go to the Imperial palace; I am expected there in the course of an hour; for none there yet know of this assassination. You must see the Empress, and acquaint her with what has happened. With difficulty I have written these few hardly legible lines, to assure her she may trust you with any confidential paper or message to me; and she too well knows my writing, to doubt their authenticity. My surgeons say little to encourage hope, but tell Her Majesty, I feel a life in my heart, that her enemies and mine have not been able to reach!"

Ignatius spoke this at intervals, checked at each sentence by internal spasms from his most dangerous wound. But he shewed a vehemence at the close, which his pupil had never before witnessed in his tempered discourse. More than his usual caution seemed taken from his lips, and as Louis apprehended the approach of delirium, he felt the hand which still clasped his, flash at once into a scorching heat. The agitated speaker gasped for breath, but after a momentary pause he began again, and with rapid utterance went through a train of directions, to guide his pupil in his conference with the Empress. In the midst of the most energetic part of his discourse, his lip became convulsed, he suddenly stopped, and dropping the hand he held, seemed as if seized at once by the grasp of death. Louis sprang forward, to give air to the enveloped face, but the moment Ignatius felt the attempt to withdraw his cowl, he arrested the hand that touched it, and said in a stifled voice: "do not be alarmed, I am not dying, but in pain. The villains struck well through my side, but not quite home!—Go," continued he, "you will find Martini in the anti-chamber. He has my orders to attend you to the palace. You will then be conducted to the Altheim apartments; shew that card to the page at the door, (it is written by the Empress's own hand, to admit the possessor,) and he will immediately obey its command. In those apartments you will see the Imperial Elizabeth."

Louis had been under no inconsiderable degree of surprize during many parts of this discourse. Until now, he had supposed that the agency of Ignatius was directed to some of the Austrian ministers, whom his father probably wished to bring over to the present views of Spain. He could hardly have suspected that so much caution and peril could be connected with any negociation in which the sovereigns themselves were principles; and that they should be principles, was astonishing in itself. The Emperor's claims on the throne of Spain, and Philip's repugnance to the Austrian possession of the Netherlands, united with the pertinacious character of the two monarchs, and the usual turn of human passions, would have made Louis affirm, that no political adversaries could have been more naturally irreconcilable to amity between them, beyond occasional shews of peace.

However the Sieur Ignatius had borne a reverse testimony. His pupil could not doubt what he had said, and taking the credentials presented to him, he was rising to withdraw, when the wounded man impressively added; "remember, she alone knows that my secretary is Louis de Montemar. In the guard-room, you will hear yourself announced as the Chevalier de Phaffenberg."

Louis stood silent, without moving another pace to the door; "Oh!" thought he, "another deception! How can that be right, which requires so much wrong to support it!"

Not hearing his step, the Sieur guessed what was passing in his mind. "I understand your hesitation," cried he, "though I cannot look on you; the wound in my head, will not suffer my eyes to endure the light. But Louis, you must not cross me at such an hour as this, with your romantic prejudices. Should any want of caution discover you to the eye or ear of an enemy, the blow that has only half reached me, may be made sure; and the failure of our scheme at this crisis, would sink your father's fame in everlasting dishonour."

"O! Sir," returned Louis, "I cannot connect dishonour with a scheme of virtue, whatever may be its fortune! Is not my father labouring for the happiness of Spain? For the peace of the world? If I had no other repugnance, I cannot but shrink from giving up, even for an instant, such a name as his."

"Louis," resumed the Sieur, his voice and manner evidently raised by growing fever, "it is now in your power, and in yours alone, to keep that name your distinction, or to brand it as your disgrace. Schemes of policy have no character in the public mind, but according to their issue. If success attend this of the Baron de Ripperda, it will be sounded as a blessing to the nations; if it fail, obloquy will proclaim it a conspiracy worthy their curses. Concealment now, is present preservation, and victory hereafter. Remember, once for all, that diplomatic simulation is no falsehood. It is expected; and is no more a breach of honour, than an ambuscade in war. You are of the Chateau Phaffenberg, while you reside in it. And thus we provide for consciences of more sensibility than judgement. If there be sin, it is on my head and your father's! Be satisfied with this, and depart on your duty."

Louis placed his hand on his heart, as he replied, "my honour cannot be satisfied by a quibble; nor my conscience with the responsibility of another man. But it is possible I may overstrain the principles I hope to live and die in; and therefore I obey."

As he left the room without further observation from the Sieur, the virtuous pupil of the pious minister of Lindisfarne, folded his hands together, and inwardly exclaimed; "these are labyrinths I never expected to tread! and may the God I would not offend, be the guide of my lips and of my actions!"

When he entered the anti-chamber, Castanos was sitting on a low bench sulkily smoking a cegar, and Martini stood near him, discoursing in a suppressed voice, but with vehement gesticulation. On hearing the steps of Louis, the latter turned and caught up his hat.

"I am at your command Signor;" and without waiting for the order, he led the way through the cloisters to the porch where the carriage stood. Louis stepped in; and he followed, with the familiarity of a man who felt his consequence in having been trusted with a confidence of no mean bearing.

They drove on; and by the looks which Martini occasionally threw towards him, Louis easily perceived his eagerness to be encouraged to speak. Martini was as anxious to be always an orator, as Castanos to maintain the character of a mute. But in the present case, Louis was too much possessed with what he had just seen, and what he might soon have to do, to be in any humour to gratify the conversational desires of his conductor. In proportion as his frank countenance was inviting to conversation, when he had no inclination to repel it; a dignified reserve, which few persons would dare disturb, occupied every feature when he wished to be left to his own thoughts. There was nothing severe in the look, but it had the air of one accustomed to deference; and though Martini would rather have met the social smile which Louis wore on the Danube, he saw every thing to respect, but nothing to fear, in the tacit command of his countenance.

Attentive to the Sieur's minutest injunctions, when Louis followed his guide from the carriage into the palace, he folded his pelisse round him, and drawing the fur of his winter-cap down upon his face, walked on with little more than his eyes visible. On being saluted by the officer in the guard-chamber, Martini announced Louis as the Chevalier de Phaffenberg, who required to be conducted to the Altheim apartments. A person was called to shew him the way, and as he turned to follow his guide, Martini said aloud, "Chevalier, I await you in this chamber."

The man led him up the imperial staircase to a superb rotunda, whose pillared arcades branched in all directions into long galleries of equal magnificence. Through several of these, they took their way, and in some of them, a few persons were seen passing lightly and silently along, as if in the discharge of their respective services towards the numerous august inhabitants. Louis thought of the palace of Thebes; and as the smirking lips, but troubled brows, of these people met his eye, he could not but think how base and how miserable is the coveted bread of dependance.

He approached another of the many folding-doors which had led him from gallery to gallery; and on opening this, his guide told the page within to conduct the Chevalier de Phaffenberg to the Altheim apartment. "By what authority?" asked the page.

The person from the guard-room had turned away on his return; but Louis, without speaking, presented the passport from the Empress. The youth bowed profoundly, and ushered him through a highly ornamented vestibule, into first one, and then into another saloon still more splendid. In the second, the page made another obeisance, and left him. The Sieur had instructed him, merely to shew the imperial signature, and not to ask for any body, but patiently to await, in this her private boudoir, the arrival of the Empress. He had therefore leisure to look around him, had his mind been sufficiently free from solicitude to derive amusement from the endless varieties of art and nature which decorated the place. In one part, an apparently interminable conservatory, blooming with all the flowers of summer, wafted its fragrance towards him. In another, opened a deep alcove of entire mirror, which doubled the mimic garden; and in an opposite direction, a stretch of canopied arches discovered chamber after chamber, till the most capricious fancy might be sated with the gay variety.

Louis's eye hardly glanced along them, for he fell almost immediately into an awful meditation on the scene he had just left, on the probable death of the mysterious Ignatius; and, in the event of such a catastrophe, what might be the consequence to his father. Would the loss of so efficient an agent compel him to abandon his views? or would he come to Vienna, and finish in person what his murdered friend had so well begun? At the close of these melancholy cogitations, nothing but gloomy images presented themselves; the dark-cowled priests flitting around the bed of the dying Ignatius, and the dismal voice of Castanos, presaging a similar fate to the Baron himself! In the midst of these thoughts, he was startled by a sound in the adjoining chamber. He looked towards it, and saw a lady, splendidly attired, approaching him. Unused to courts, he hesitated whether he should go forward, or await her advance; but as she drew near, the amazing beauty he beheld, decided for him, and struck him motionless.

He had heard that the Empress was beautiful and young; but of any thing like this bloom of youth, this splendour of beauty, he had no expectation. It was more like the dream of the poet, than any mortal mixture of earth's mould! He stood as one lost to recollection. The lady did not seem less surprised, though certainly with less amazement. On her first approach to him, when he took his cap from his head, and his disengaged pelisse, falling back, discovered his youthful figure, she retreated a step; but the next moment advancing, with a smile of peculiar complacency, she observed, that "there must be some mistake, for she came to meet a totally different person."

Louis tried to recover himself from the admiration her beauty had excited, to the ceremonial due to her rank, and bowing with disordered grace, he replied, "that he was sent by the person he believed Her Majesty expected to meet in that chamber; and that he came a messenger of distressing tidings. To say, that the Sieur Ignatius had been attacked by ruffians, and was then lying in extremity at the Jesuits' College."

The lady interrupted him; "Sir," said she, with an eager blush, "you have done me the honour to mistake me for the Empress, whom I am so happy as to serve; and being distinguished by my imperial mistress's confidence, I came hither to request the Sieur Ignatius (whose attendance she had required at this hour) to excuse her absence for a few minutes. She is with the Emperor, and, when I deliver your message, will expect you to await her commands."

With these words, the lady curtseyed and withdrew.

Louis gazed on the track through which she had disappeared. A vision of some heavenly creature seemed to have passed before his eyes, to give him assurance of what really did exist in the angelic world! The apparition, the voice, had been seen and heard, and all was again solitude and silence! Was it possible, he asked himself, that any thing mortal could be so perfectly beautiful? that any thing earthly should be too bright to look upon? Lost in the amazement of his senses, he thought only of her; he had forgotten the majesty he came to visit, and almost the disastrous tale that was his errand, when steps again sounded in the adjoining apartment. He sprang towards the canopied arch; the curtains were draperied back by two golden caryates, and his eager eyes shot beyond; but another form appeared! another lady! of beauty too; but blinded by excess of light, all other objects seemed dark and indistinct before him.

She was less magnificently arrayed than her fair messenger, but approached with so striking an air of dignity, that Louis could not hesitate believing this must be the Empress. Respectfully meeting her advancing steps, he bent his knee to her, as he presented the letter from the Sieur. At the moment of her approach, his bewildered faculties suddenly recollected that such was the attitude Ignatius told him, he must assume in delivering his credentials.

The Empress stood still, and looked steadfastly on him for several moments. Then taking the letter from his hand, in a voice of tender commiseration, she bade him rise.

"The lady I sent hither, has informed me of your melancholy embassy," continued she, in the same gracious tone; "but I trust he is not wounded past hope?"

"Not past his own," replied Louis, as he rose from his knee; "but the surgeons are less sanguine."

With a troubled countenance, the Empress opened the letter and read it hastily. She looked from its contents to its bearer; and fixing her sweet but penetrating eyes anxiously on his face, said in a doubting voice, "you are young, very young, for the trust I am called upon to confide to you!" Still she looked on him, and still she spoke; evidently without consciousness, uttering the remarks her observing mind was passing upon his appearance. "A youth like you, must be too fond of pleasure, to be a secure confidant! Too accessible—to much in the power of circumstances. And at such a crisis too! But he tells me, I may trust you as his son!"

Again she looked full at him. Louis's whole soul was fixed on that look, and arouzed by its occasion. That the rigid Ignatius had given such testimony of him, at such a moment, did not more surprise, than determine him to perish, rather than dishonour it. He did not venture to speak, but the expression of his eloquent countenance was more than a thousand vows to Elizabeth.

She sighed deeply, and sitting down by a table, leaned her head upon her hand. Louis remained standing where she had left him, regarding her with respectful interest. At last she looked up, and waved her hand to him to approach her.

"My heart is heavy," said she, "with the tidings you have brought me. For, should my counsellor in all this, be indeed taken from me, how incalculable are the difficulties into which I shall be plunged! Nothing but full and complete success in the end, can excuse me to my family and to the world, for the perils I incur in the progress." Louis was silent.—Elizabeth resumed.

"You know to what I allude!"

"I know nothing," replied he, "but what the Sieur Ignatius has told me; and that is, a general intimation of his possessing Your Majesty's confidence: and that jealousy of so high distinction, he suspects to be the cause of his present state."

The Empress took two or three turns up and down the room. She was harrassed, and undecided, and often turned, to look again and again upon the youthful secretary. She suddenly stopped.

"Did Ignatius tell you, who I know you to be?"

"He did.—That I am the son of the Baron de Ripperda."

As he made this simple reply, the pride he had in being the son of such a father, seemed to encircle his brow with the before veiled diadem of all his princely ancestors. "And where is your father?" asked the Empress.

"At Madrid. And I cannot doubt that at such a moment, he would be eager to hasten to the feet of the Empress Elizabeth; the generous truster in his friend!"

The Empress shook her head—"Alas! Alas!" cried she; and again she walked from Louis with a hurrying pace. For some time she continued murmuring to herself, in a voice so low that he could not distinguish what she said; but at last drawing near him, she again threw herself into a chair, and spoke aloud. "You call me the generous truster in his friend! I will be that to his son too. There is an honesty in your countenance; an enthusiasm in your manner, so unlike a courtier, that, I cannot but believe you trust-worthy! and, when he says it," added she, pressing the Sieur's letter in her hand; "it is conviction.—Hearken then to me." Louis drew near.—And the Empress, in a low but steady voice, imparted to him certain subjects of national dispute between the empires of Germany and of Spain; and personal rivalries between their respective sovereigns; which she and the Baron de Ripperda, through the secret agency of Ignatius, were labouring to reconcile. She intimated that her Imperial husband retained so much of his ancient enmity to Philip; and the Austrian ministers were so jealous of yielding advantage to the Spanish cabinet; she was obliged to move towards her end with the strictest caution. Besides, she had some collateral objects in view, which, if obtained, would not only establish a cordial friendship between the two countries; but so balance the power of the continent; that war, for this generation at least, could hardly find a plea for disturbing the tranquillity of Europe.

"Some of these plans," added she, "are more than suspected by my enemies, and the enemies of my children; and since they have engaged a certain wily English Duke in their interest, an hour does not pass over my head without dread of the whole scheme being blown into the air. Like an evil spirit, he can transport himself when and wherever he pleases; and while he is invisible, work a train of mischief that is felt through many nations. It was only yesterday that he returned from one of his secret flights; from Paris, I suspect——" She suddenly paused; and putting her hand to her head, appeared to muse for a few minutes.

Louis's blood chilled at this mention of an English Duke. From what Ignatius had said to him on the same subject, he was compelled to think that the Empress could mean no other than Wharton. And, how strange it was, that every person who had named that Duke to him with censure, had all concurred in giving him some epithet of duplicity. Elizabeth looked up, with an abrupt demand of her auditor, whether he thought the assassination traceable to Duke Wharton? adding, that she did not know a source whence it was more likely to spring.

"Madam," returned Louis, "I should as soon suspect it from my own hand."

She gazed on him, astonished.

"Yes!" repeated he, in a determined voice; "though it is possible that Duke Wharton may be hostile to Your Majesty's politics; and even be the personal enemy of the Sieur Ignatius; yet I know him too well, not to stake my head on his abhorrence of a crime like this."

The Empress did not withdraw her penetrating eye from his face.

"I now remember," said she, "that it was he who spread the report at the Favorita, that the Baron de Ripperda's son was at Vienna. He met you on the Danube. But Ignatius assured me, you had never seen him since!" "I never have.—And I never will, while he is an object of suspicion to Your Majesty, and to my father's friend. But I must again aver, as I would at the judgment-day, that Duke Wharton is incapable of assassination."

"He shall be the better for your vindication," returned the Empress. And then entering into a detailed communication, of what her new confidant was to impart to Ignatius relative to the most open part of their scheme; she gave him a letter, which she wrote, and sealed in his presence, to acquaint the Sieur with the recent progress of their more secret views. When she put it into the hand of Louis, she said with much emotion, "the last courier from Madrid, wrought so favourably on the Emperor, that I was even now conversing with him in the highest spirits, when I was called to hear this danger of my noble coadjutor!—Should I lose him at this moment, their daggers had better have reached me! Louis de Montemar, guard his life, as you would your own. You know not the value of the charge."

Louis received her command to be in these apartments the next day, at the same hour, to give her tidings of the Sieur. She then presented her hand to him to kiss, in sign of her favour to himself. He touched it on his bent knee; and as she turned to withdraw, she told him a page should attend him to the guard-room; but he must take such cognizance of the passages, as henceforth to find his way in the palace alone. Again she proceeded to the door, and again she turned round, and said with agitated solemnity; "should any fatal change occur, come to me to-night.—We will discourse together for the last time; and all that I have said in this conference, you must regard as a dream—to be forgotten!"

Louis silently bowed his head, and Her Majesty passed on. So crowded were his thoughts with the events of the last six hours, he hardly noted the time, though he did the situation of the ground, as the promised attendant brought him to the guard-chamber.—Martini sprang to meet him; and, a moment after, he had left the mansion of royal splendors and luxury, to seek the cloisters of world-forswearing men! All without, was darkness and assumed humiliation; but within, dwelt the rulers of kings, the universal dictators, the all-compelling Jesuits! Louis now entered, to visit one of the most extraordinary personages that ever came within their walls; one, to whom the vast machinery was all unfolded, by which these mighty workmen moved and controuled the world.

CHAP. IV.

The information which Louis brought to the suffering Ignatius, did not fail to heal the worst wound his enemies had inflicted; suspicion, that their machinations had reached the mind of the Emperor. When the surgeons visited their patient in the evening, they gave a more favourable report on his symptoms with regard to fever, which was the threatening danger of the morning. The manner of his passing the night, they thought would be decisive for hope or fear, and Louis entreated permission to attend his couch until day.

The Sieur peremptorily put his negative on this proposal. But Louis was steady in not being denied watching by the side of Castanos in the anti-room. Martini, with a surgeon and a priest, remained all night in the cell of Ignatius; and that he slept most part of the time, Louis was satisfied; as, with his strictest attention, he could hardly hear a movement within.

Castanos, and his anxious companion, kept true vigils. The act was the same, though the motives were as different as the two men. In one of the dreary pauses of the night, when the intensity of Louis's meditations, on the various objects which bore upon the event of the present hour, had wearied his unrested spirit; he observed Castanos shake the exhausted embers from his pipe; and desirous of asking some questions respecting the fate of his packet to Don Ferdinand, he thought he could not have a better opportunity, and while the old Spaniard was twisting out his tobacco, he addressed him in a low voice.

"Senor Castanos," said he, "you were so kind as to deliver a packet from me to Don Ferdinand d'Osorio, into the hands of my father?"

"No," returned he, "your father was not at Madrid."

"Then, what became of my packet?"

"It was sent with the dispatches, to where he ordered them."

"Then I may assure myself of its safety?—and that my father was well?"

Castanos had resumed his pipe, and made no answer. After the second volume of renewed smoke had wreathed away from his sullen features, Louis addressed him again.

"But of course you saw my father, before you left Spain? Under the present anxious circumstances, it would particularly cheer me to know that he is well."

Castanos drew in, and puffed forth another cloud; then indolently sliding his words out of the unoccupied corner of his mouth, he sulkily replied, "Senor, the less, in the present circumstances, you talk of your father; the better for the object of your anxiety, and for yourself!—Walls have ears."

With this apothegm, he resumed his smoking with redoubled energy, and Louis submitted to the silence imposed.

A few hours more, and the dawn brought a more communicative comforter from the inner chamber. Martini issued forth with smiling lips, to announce that his master's symptoms were those to please the doctors, for that he had just awoke with little remaining fever. The priest and surgeon soon after appeared, bearing the same testimony; and the latter communicated the Sieur's commands, for the Chevalier de Phaffenberg to attend him immediately.

Though Louis shrunk from answering to the name, yet he hastened to obey. Again Ignatius took his hand, but it was no longer with the icy tremor of expiring life, nor the burning clasp of raging fever; there was languor, but not death, in the pressure; and with heart-felt joy Louis congratulated him on the certain hope of his recovery.

"It is well," replied the Sieur, "and we shall not be ungrateful for it, where thanksgiving is due. But we must now proceed to business. They tell me, my wounds are too deep, to give prospect of my quitting this couch for many days. Our affairs will not brook that time. Your duty at the Chateau, and mine at the palace, must continue to be discharged, and you must perform them both."

Louis's assent was as prompt as the delight with which he embraced active service. And if the idea of the bright form he had seen only for an instant, did flash across his mind with a hope of beholding it again; the passing thought was too transient to materially alloy the pure zeal with which he pressed forward to his new duty.

The Sieur then told him to return to the Chateau for certain of the completed papers, and to bring them without delay, for his further orders. As the carriage was now directed to be always in readiness for the Chevalier de Phaffenberg, Louis found no tardiness in transporting himself back to the Chateau, and thence to the College again.

On his return, he found the surgeons in the invalid chamber, remonstrating with their patient against seeing his secretary again for that day. But Ignatius was inflexible, and to prevent encreasing the evil by further opposition, they withdrew. Louis obeyed the beckon of his governor to the side of his bed, and there he received his instructions respecting the papers he had brought. He disposed them into several packets, and putting them into as many small leather-bags, sealed them, and addressed them according to his orders.

At a particular hour, he was conducted by Martini to a dungeon-like cell, in a distant and obscure quarter of the College, where the Italian introduced him to a grey-headed brother of the order, who had been entrusted by Ignatius with this part of the business. His office was to receive, and to bring in succession, the messengers of the correspondence which Louis held in his hand. The venerable Jesuit told him, that several were then in waiting, but in separate cells; for no one was to know of the other, and each were conducted out by different passages.

Louis remained three hours in his gloomy hall of audience, before he had seen every body he ought to see, and had delivered to them all the packets of which they were to be the bearers to some of the most distant nations in Europe. He gave no further account of the Sieur's absence, to these foreigners, than that he was suddenly indisposed. An idea of his danger might have had ruinous effects on the purposes of this various correspondence.

As the time drew near for his attendance on the Empress, Louis returned to Ignatius, to receive his further commands. This interview was brief, but pregnant with matter; and included instructions for a conversation with another personage, to whom the Imperial Elizabeth would see the necessity of introducing their young negociator.

Louis had now no reason to complain of want of trust, in those who commanded his services. The Empress was so impatient to hear his report, that he found her awaiting him; and his communications were so satisfactory, that she at once dismissed her worst fears for the Sieur, and entered into a circumstantial discussion of his message, comparing its expectations with what had passed between the Emperor and herself on the last overtures brought by Castanos. She was not the direct agent to her husband in these affairs; for His Majesty had not the most distant suspicion of her interference with any of the ostensible negociators; therefore, all that she appeared to do, was by apparently accidental remarks; but they were so managed, as very often to decide a fluctuating question. He had never admitted the Sieur Ignatius to a personal audience; who, he however, respected as a Jesuit of talents, employed by the Spanish sovereigns to compromise secretly with Sinzendorff; the Imperial chancellor. The Emperor usually talked with the Empress on all that passed between him and Sinzendorff: and she made ample use of her influence in suggestion, and persuasion towards the leading objects of the Spanish propositions. Besides the brilliancy of her ostensible motive, to see her husband be the second Cæsar to close the gates of Janus on mankind! she had two private views, in gratifying the demands of Spain: to obtain the guarantee of so leading a power to the pragmatic sanction, which would establish her own descendants, male or female, on the throne of Germany; and to complete the cession of Philip from the cause of James Stuart, by which her near kinsman, George of Brunswick, would be more firmly seated on that of Great Britain.

An active enemy to the first of these projects was then residing at Vienna, in the person of the widowed Electress of Bavaria. Being the daughter of the late Emperor Joseph, (who died without a son,) she believed, if the female line were to inherit, that she and her posterity had every way more right to the succession than any daughter of the present Emperor, who was the younger brother of his predecessor, her father. To avert these claims, the present Emperor, Charles the Sixth, devised the act of settlement, (called the pragmatic sanction,) on his own female posterity, in default of male issue; and to this, he was moving every wile of policy, to obtain the guarantee of the great European states. Fonder of artifice, than of plain dealing, Charles made promises he never intended to perform; though he hoped by their means to purchase the acquiescence of his brother monarchs. Spain had been once attempted in this way; but Philip's resentments against his former rival were not to be appeased. He joined France in thwarting all the Emperor's plans. And as he not only withheld his assent to the proposed act for the Austrian succession, but was actively hostile to that of the new King of England, the Empress concluded that he had extended his animosity to her, and was altogether jealous of the further aggrandizement of the House of Brunswick. But when the Baron de Ripperda, (whose brilliant wit, and diplomatic magnificence at her father's court, had been the first object of her youthful admiration,) when he quitted Holland for Spain, and gained the confidential ear of its king; then the Spanish cabinet seemed to turn a colder aspect towards the setting star of the Stuarts; and the hopes of the Empress settled on the newly-rising minister of Spain.

The same policy which united the friends of the pragmatic sanction with those of the reigning king of England, brought the supporters of the Bavarian pretensions into joint interest with all the adversaries of the house of Brunswick, and consequently into strict friendship with the intended restorers of the line of James. To keep the negociation between the sovereigns of Spain and the Empress, from the cognizance of these two latter parties, now so determinately united, was indispensible to its ultimate success; for the Emperor was too jealous of a prince, who had once gained over him a great advantage; and too personally attached to ancient Austrian prejudices, not to be very accessible to the diplomatic subtilities of the adverse faction, should they have timely notice to make the attack.

The Empress expressed herself to this effect; but there were still some secret measures between herself and Ignatius, which she did not think expedient to notice to their young confidant; and when she had explained all that she deemed necessary for the present, she told him he must go to the apartments of Count Sinzendorff, where that minister was now expecting him. She drew from her finger a ring that the Count knew, and which, on being presented by Louis, would be sufficient assurance that he was visited by the right person.

"But recollect," said she, "the chancellor is ignorant that you are of more consequence than the mere secretary of the Sieur Ignatius. I told him your name is Phaffenberg; and take care you do not give him, or any one else, reason to suspect you have any other."

Louis bowed; and her air of cautionary command, dilating into a smile, she added, "to-morrow, and every day, attend me here at the same hour, until perfect recovery restore your guardian to the full performance of his own duty."

The Empress's description of the situation of the chancellor's apartments in the palace, was too accurate for her ambassador to mistake his way; and, without impediment he found himself ushered into the presence of Count Sinzendorff. He recognized the ring, which the young secretary respectfully put into his hand, and without preface or circumlocution, entered at once upon the assassination of Ignatius, and the consequences to be drawn from the attempt. To detect the perpetrators was impossible, as the necessity for concealment in all that related to the negociation of the Sieur, extended to his person; and to make a stir in search of the ruffians, would only direct the eyes of their employers, where to dare a second attack.

The chancellor then opened the communications he wished to be conveyed to Ignatius. They principally consisted of certain demands, besides that for the pragmatic sanction, which His Imperial Majesty persisted in making on the King of Spain, before he would propound to his ministers, what he styled, the very high requisitions from the Spanish side. The chancellor followed this up, with remarks on his own difficulty in preparing the minds of some of the most stubborn of these ministers, whom he could hardly bring to apprehend even the possibility of such measures being ever proposed to them.

From the plain and well-digested discourse of Count Sinzendorff, Louis derived a clear idea of the scheme in negociation; which, if brought fully into effect, did indeed promise universal benefit. In the constrained confidence of the Sieur, there was always so much mystery; and in the hurried communications of the Empress, so much confusion; that, until now, he could only see as afar off, a mass of anticipated events whose misty obscurity rendered some mostrous and most indistinct. But now he comprehended, not only the magnificence of the mutual greatness of Austria and of Spain; but the foundations of prosperity and peace for Europe, so long threatened with the interminable miseries of hereditary wars. His soul, devoted to noble contemplations, was roused to all its wonted ardour by these views; and, vibrating to the tone of his father's declared motive, which the chancellor had incidentally quoted; he made some remarks on the proposed measures, that did not less astonish than please that consummate statesman.

Count Sinzendorff saw that it was no hireling secretary Ignatius had dispatched to him. The air and language of Louis were too elevated to belong to a man born in dependance; and the chancellor read in the intelligence of his eye, and the peculiar attention of his countenance, as he respectfully listened to what was said, that he was still unapprenticed to the mechanism of politics. He felt the soul of patriotism, but he was not yet aware of the machinery, which, in this world of artifice must be its body! A few general sentiments of political virtue, uttered by the Count, elicited its purest principles from the lips of Louis. His own glowing words had given the tone he thought he had taken from the chancellor, who, in fact, only admired the enthusiasm he reflected, and pitied what he admired. "It is first love, amiable youth!" thought he, "which must give place to a more worldly bride!"

That this singularly noble young man, both in appearance and manner, should have been introduced to him by the Empress and the Jesuit Ignatius, as a common secretary, and by the name of Phaffenberg; (a family, whose folly and extravagance had long ago sent it into obscurity!) did not so surprise Sinzendorff, as it confirmed his suspicion, that he saw the son of some great man in this interesting novice; and his shrewd guesses did not lead him far from the mark. He smiled inwardly, at the useless deception which the Empress thought to put upon his penetration; and determined to allow her to believe he was as blind as she wished. Before he and the object of his doubts separated, it was fixed, that every night, at an hour before midnight, the latter should attend in the Chancellor's apartments, to be the medium of communication between him, Ignatius, and the Empress.

When Louis returned from his long and double embassy, all he had to impart was listened to without interruption. For when he began his recital, the Sieur apprised him, that in transactions of this nature, it was so necessary to recapitulate every word that passed; and as nearly as possible, describe the manner of saying it, that he would not confuse his recollection by a single interrupting remark. When Louis finished speaking, all his guardian said, was—"It is well." and then bade him return to the Chateau for the remainder of the night.

He had a task to perform there before he slept; and similar ones would henceforth lengthen his visits to a late hour every evening, as long as his double duty lasted. He was to register all that was said in his presence, by the Empress and the Chancellor. And he was to make duplicates of this diary, into the cypher he had been so long accustomed to copy; and to understand which, the Sieur now gave him a key. Every night he was to return to the Chateau, and every morning make his appearance at the College.

The two following days passed in the same round of duties; but there was a difference in the third, which made it remarkable to Louis, and gave a new character to those which succeeded it. He again beheld the beautiful friend of Elizabeth.

Not having seen her since her first transit across his then cheerless sky, the starry brightness of that glance only occurred to him afterwards, like the fading image of a delightful dream. Absorbed in the great interests which now occupied him, he was thinking of nothing less than her, when, on entering the boudoir to await the Empress, he was surprised to see her accustomed chair filled by another lady; and a lovely girl sitting by her, busily employed on the table. He started, and the lady, hastily throwing back a lace veil, which shaded her face as she bent over her companion, discovered to him the beautiful creature he hardly expected to see again. She apologized for having permitted her own, and the Arch-Duchess's occupations, to make her forget the hour in which these rooms ought to be left to his use; and, taking the Princess's arm, had even passed into the next chamber, before he could recollect himself so much as to feel that he stood like an idiot, without having uttered a word of the commonest civility, in answer to her graceful address. He then flew after her; and spoke, he knew not what, in explanation of his remissness; all the while walking by her side in a strange disorder of feelings, till reaching a small door in almost the farthest apartment, she turned round, and with a dignified bend of her neck and a dimpled smile, granted him her pardon, and disappeared with her fair charge.

Louis paused a moment, looking at the closed door through which she had passed; and then returned to the boudoir, with his senses all in a maze. His heart, which had never beat before at the sight of womankind, throbbed in his breast almost audibly. Such an eye, as its soft lustre fell upon him, he had never met before; he felt its rays in his heart. And then, so finely composed a figure! Such matchless grace in her shape and snowy arms, as she led the young princess along. And the golden tresses which mingled with the white veil upon her neck, made him think of the peerless Helen, whose divine beauties compelled the admiration of the very empire she destroyed.

Full of these imaginations, the more he thought, the farther did his mind wander from the business which brought him there:—and, when the Empress did make her appearance, it was with difficulty that he recalled his senses to the subject of the interview. In one of her pauses, she noticed his abstraction. She remarked it to him. A bright crimson flashed over his face. She repeated her enquiries. Louis was astonished at his own emotion; but without seeking other excuse, though with deepening colour, he said, he feared he had behaved rudely to a lady who had just left that apartment: but he was surprised, at meeting any but Her Majesty; and he had not yet recovered from his confusion.

Elizabeth bade him describe the lady. To do that, he felt was impossible; though, on the demand, his ready heart repeated its pulsations; and looking down, he merely answered, "she was with the Arch-duchess." The Empress smiled. She now knew whom he had seen; and by his disorder, had no difficulty in guessing the cause of his abstraction.

"The lady," returned she, "is the Countess Altheim; to whose care these apartments are consigned, as my first lady of the key. She is also the governess of my eldest daughter, whom you saw; and whom I wish her to model after her own graces!"

Louis unconsciously sighed, as he bowed to this information; and Elizabeth, thinking she understood his meaning, with a smile still more gracious than the former, added—"she is a widow, though so young:—and has hitherto loved me too well, to be persuaded from my service by any one of the numerous solicitors for her hand."

Louis felt another impertinent sigh rising to his lips, but he smothered it with a gentle effort; saying inwardly—"What is all this to me!" and made no answer to the Empress, but a second bow. She immediately passed to the subject of his audience.

In returning to the College, he would not suffer himself to dwell a moment on the image of the beautiful Countess. But he was not permitted to keep his wise resolve of dismissing it altogether from his thoughts; for the bright original found occasions of repeating the impression day after day.

She sometimes awaited him with preparatory messages from the Empress. At other times he surprised her and the young Princess at their studies. But at none of these meetings could she be prevailed on to linger a moment. When she had to deliver a message, she hastened away as soon as it was uttered. And when he broke on her accidentally, the instant he had caught a glimpse of her white arms moving over the lute, or had heard the trill of her exquisite voice warbling through the rooms, she would rise in disorder, and hurry from his ardent entreaties in so sweet a confusion, that it was sure to fix her idea in his mind till their next rencounter.

Louis felt the truth of the observation, that "The secret to interest, is to excite curiosity, and never satisfy it." He was ever asking himself, why the charming Countess, the worshipped of so many hearts, should be so timid to him? Or rather, why she should thus fly, as if with aversion, one whose heart was so well prepared to admire the graces of a mind, which, the Empress had assured him were equal to those of her matchless person. He had never seen any thing so beautiful as that person! And in so fair a temple, he could not doubt, as fair a spirit must dwell. He longed to converse with it; to understand all its loveliness; and to feel his heart sympathise, as it was wont to do in holy Lindisfarne, with all the pure intelligence of woman's mind. It was not of love he thought; for though he respected the sentiment, hitherto he had never felt its touch; and, as he had devoted his admiration to all that would take him out of himself, he had always regarded the winning of a female heart, as but a secondary object in the aims of his life. "Ah, never," has he often said, "would I give my noon of manhood to a myrtle shade! Woman's love was given to be the helpmate of man, but his folly makes her the tyrant!" In this case, as in others, Louis was yet to learn.—How wise is speculation, how absurd is practice!

CHAP. V.

The Countess was indeed accomplished; and most accomplished in the art of charming. The noble Cornelia, and the tender Alice, knew nothing of her science; and of what spirit it was, the heart of their cousin had yet to prove.

On the day of his first appearance at the palace, she had only to behold his singularly fine person, to think him the handsomest young man who had ever entered there. But the fair Altheim was not particularly attracted by the charms which most pleased in herself; and she would never have sought a second glance of the graceful secretary, had she not accidentally attended to a discourse between her imperial mistress and the chancellor, wherein the latter, (being piqued by a quotation from Ripperda, which the Empress made, to confute one of his political arguments;) rather sarcastically gave hints that he suspected the wounded Jesuit had got something more illustrious in his diplomatic novice, than he chose to acknowledge. Elizabeth affected to see nothing peculiarly distinguishing in the manners of the secretary; but when the chancellor had withdrawn, she let some ambiguous expressions escape her, in the triumph of having baffled his penetration. These intimations were not lost on the Countess. And on the day following that in which she and the Arch-Duchess had retreated from Louis in such haste, the Empress could not forbear telling her in what an amazement of admiration she had surprized him; adding, "He is a conquest worth more than a haughty beauty's smile!"

Elizabeth smiled as she said this, but remarked no further. It was enough for her fair confidant; who, if her soul possessed any passion, did not scruple to own it was ambition. To gratify this, she had given her blooming beauties, at the age of seventeen, to the superannuated Count Altheim; a man of high family and great riches, but who had long survived every faculty, but that of dotage on any pretty face that would endure the incense of an habitual idolater of youth and beauty. At that early age, she had been sent for by the Empress, who loved her, from her having been the only daughter of the respectable woman who had been her nurse; and in consequence of which the pretty Otteline had been brought up as the favourite play-thing of the Princess; but the gracious Elizabeth soon regarded her with the tenderness of a sister; and on the death of the venerable mother, embraced the opportunity to have the companion of her youth brought to Vienna. Otteline de Blaggay was many years younger than her Imperial mistress, and far transcended that beautiful Princess in every personal grace. But as the prejudice in favour of high birth is so great in Austria, that a mis-alliance is considered as indelible a disgrace, as a moral dishonour; none of all the illustrious courtiers who contemplated, and sighed for the possession of the lovely Otteline, ever thought of making her the sharer of his rank. A thousand gay adventurers pressed forward, to gratify their passion for beauty, and to excite an interest in their behalf with the Empress, by making her favourite their wife. But Otteline knew herself to be despised, though worshipped. And as rank was all she wanted, to set her in every respect above the women who envied her charms, and therefore looked with double contempt on her untitled name, she resolved to marry for rank, and for nothing else. Within a few months after her arrival, the old Count Altheim became infatuated with her beauty; and, intoxicated by her smiles, dared every obloquy to raise her to the station her lofty spirit seemed so calculated to dignify. The Empress felt the situation of her favourite, and, having joyfully pronounced her consent; the no less delighted Otteline gave her hand to the Count in a splendid espousal, at which, not merely her patroness, but all the Imperial family were present.

While the fond husband lived, his young Countess was the brightest, the loveliest, the proudest of the court. Elizabeth exulted in the homage the haughty Austrians were at length obliged to pay her eléve and country-woman; and to render it more complete, she determined that an application to the Countess should be the only avenue to her Imperial favours. But the Count died; and according to the law at Vienna, that on the death of her husband, the wife loses whatever rank she may have acquired by her marriage; the Countess Altheim, though a richly endowed widow, found herself at once thrown back into all her former insignificance. This reverse was doubly galling, since she had been on the heights of consideration; and had trod that elevated path with a step not much less imperial than that of the Empress herself. To be contemned now, was mortification almost to madness. But the beautiful mourner had lived too long in courts, to permit her rivals to perceive the complete victory events had given them over her. Affecting a wish for retirement after the death of so adoring a husband, she lived secluded for a time; loftily leaving that world, she was aware, would have scornfully excluded her: and when the assumption of inconsolable grief was no longer feasible, Elizabeth appointed her to the high office of presiding governess over the Arch-Duchess Maria-Theresa. This afforded her a dignified plea for still abstaining from the assemblies of the court; though in private parties she sometimes permitted herself to be seen. Yet this was a rare indulgence;—that the novelty of her unequalled charms, whenever she did appear, might continue to give her successive triumphs over the envy of her proud rivals;—and the effect was ever what she expected. She was then twenty-six, and though in the meridian of her beauty, she foresaw that the time approached when she must resign this, her sole sceptre of power, to some younger hand. What then should she be? She could not endure to dwell upon the answer; and again turned her views to some elevating alliance. To think of another Austrian connection, would have been waste of time, and a hopeless speculation. She must direct her attention to some of the numerous noblemen from foreign countries, who visited Vienna. This plan was hardly determined on, before the arrival of the Marquis Santa Cruz gave the wished-for victim to her ambition in the person of his son Don Ferdinand d'Osorio.—Young, handsome, susceptible, and of high rank! It was an opportunity not to be neglected; and a few interviews with him at the petits soupés of the Baroness Hermanstadt, put to flight every remembrance of the dove-eyed beauties he had so lately sighed for in the groves of Italy. Lost in the blaze of her attractions, he soon lived only in her presence; and drew from her a confession, that she awaited his father's consent alone to become his bride. But she was a Protestant, and she was of ignoble birth; two disqualifications, which the Marquis's bigotry of faith and of ancestry could not be brought to excuse. In anguish and hope, Ferdinand flew to the feet of his adored Otteline, and implored her to give him her hand, in spite of his inexorable father.—She knew the degrading consequence of such a compliance. She saw the point to which the passions of Ferdinand were hurrying his reason; and to throw it at once on that dreadful extremity; and by that phrenzy of despair alarm the Marquis, and compel him to save the senses of his son, by consenting to the marriage; to do this, she exasperated the agonies of her lover's mind, by appearing to regard the proposal for a clandestine union, as an insult from himself. When she allowed herself to be convinced of the contrary, still her indignation continued, though directed to a different object; and she declared, that her wounded honour could never be appeased, nor would she consent to see Don Ferdinand again, till he should bring her the Marquis's only adequate apology for the disgrace he had presumed to attach to her alliance.

Ferdinand departed from her, almost insane; and in that condition threw himself upon the mercy of his father. But the good Catholic, and Spanish Grandee, was not to be moved. And the frantic lover, being denied admittance at the door of his proud mistress, he flew to unburthen his distracted soul to their mutual friend, the Baroness Hermanstadt.

The narrative that follows is of more common, than agreeable detail. The Baroness was one of those women who are a blot on their own sex, and a blight to all of the other on whom they fix their rapacious eyes. Abandoned to ostentatious expence, no means were rejected, by which she could gratify the vanity her own fortune could not supply; and while her friend looked abroad for an ennobling alliance, to give her rank, she laid snares for dishonourable engagements, to furnish her with gold. Her iniquitous proceedings had hitherto been so warily managed between herself and her dupes, that no one else suspected her of error.—She was generally received in the first circles of Vienna, and hence had a wider field from which to select her victims. The thoughtless expenditure of the son of Santa Cruz, had for some time tempted her rapacity; and the opportunity presented itself of making it all her own. She was an elegant woman, and an animated companion; and soon made the distracted Ferdinand forget the pretended disdain of managing ambition, in the delusions of practised art and soothing flattery. Intoxicated with what he believed her generous oblivion of herself, in voluntarily sacrificing every duty to her newly-avowed passion for him; he was-only awakened from his trance of vice, by the information that her husband, a rough Hungarian General, was returning from his post on the Turkish frontiers. She would gladly have exchanged this poor and rugged hero, for the soft prodigal, she had bereft of his better reason; and she made the proposal to him:—To fly with him, before the Baron could arrive; and that henceforth their fates should be one. As she clung round him, making the insiduous proffer, a gleam from his long banished reason seemed to visit him from on high; he shrunk with horror from an everlasting engagement with such a woman. Though the slave of her allurements, she was not the mistress of his soul, and he dared to deny her. Then all her assumed persuasiveness was cast aside. She insisted on flight, with a vehemence that turned her passionate love to threatening fury; and closed with holding a pistol to her head, to extort his assent, or to end her existence. He wrested the weapon from her hand; and oppressed with his own bitter consciousness, left her in a storm of frantic upbraidings, to the care of her confidential maid.

From this disgraceful connection, it was, that the Marquis Santa Cruz had borne away his son. As soon as the extraordinary disorder of Ferdinand, and consequent enquiries, had made the Marquis aware of these circumstances, he saw the necessity of hurrying him away from the machinations of a wicked woman, too well practised in the ruin of the youthful mind; and too ready to make the credulous Ferdinand a lasting prey.

Meanwhile, the disappointed Countess Altheim, foiled by her perfidious friend and versatile lover, broke with the one, and really disdained the other. And though she never condescended to enquire about either, after the double desertion was known to her beyond a doubt; yet she was not insensible to some feeling of gratified revenge, when she heard that Ferdinand had abandoned her rival, and left the country.

The Marquis hastened with his remorseful son, to Holland and to England. But the pangs of his repentance had not struck at the root of his crime. He mourned the act of guilt, not the empassioned nature which impelled it. He cursed the hour in which he had ever met with the Baroness Hermanstadt; but he did not condemn the headlong impetuosity with which he yielded to every impulse of self-gratification. The only son of his parents, and heir to immense revenues in both hemispheres, he had been indulged in every wish, till he believed he had no duty in life but to enjoy all its blameless pleasures. But when personal gratification is the principle of existence, the boundary between innocence and transgression is often invisible. Ferdinand had more than once trembled on it. He had now overleaped it.—And though racked with self-abhorrence at what he had done; and hoping, by deeds of penance to repass it; yet he fostered in his heart the passions which had betrayed him: and even found a new temptation for their excesses, in the land of his penitential pilgrimage. By a strange coincidence of fate, while he was sowing tares in the happy fields of Lindisfarne, Countess Altheim was preparing a similar attempt on the peace of its darling Louis.

The beautiful Otteline was as widely different from the character of her false friend, as unsunned snow from the molten lava of Vesuvius. She sought for nothing in her union with Ferdinand, but the rank he would bestow on her. His riches and his love were alike indifferent to her. And when she turned her eyes on the handsome secretary of Ignatius, she had no other idea in her meditated attack on his heart, but what aimed at sharing a birthright, which the Empress had assured her, would exceed her proudest wishes. Notwithstanding her incapability of loving, and indeed of feeling any emotion but those connected with her ambition and its disappointments; she was so keen an observer, and so fine an actress, that he must have had an Ithuriel eye, who could have distinguished the counterfeit from the real, in her pretensions.

Having made her first advances on Louis, by a retreating manœuvre, she perceived that her personal charms had made their intended impression; and that she had only to produce the graces of her conversation, to complete the conquest. On subjects of general taste, she was mistress; and in every department of human knowledge that belongs to worldly wisdom, she was perfectly informed. If sympathy did not give her anticipation of her lover's thoughts, self-interest endowed her with tact to glide into his opinions; and she did this so adroitly, as to make her echo appear the leading voice:—Her accomplishments were likewise brought into play; and the Empress did not disdain to partake the management. Once or twice, she detained the Arch-dutchess and her governess in the room, to call forth some natural or acquired charm in the beautiful instructress; and when the blushing Countess withdrew, Her Majesty usually made some observation on the inimitable perfections of her character, and the engaging modesty by which they were so constantly veiled.

In one of these interviews, when Louis was gazing with his soul in his eyes after the departing steps of the too exquisite Otteline, the Empress, with a peculiar smile, ejaculated,—"She has lately become enamoured of politics.—And should she negociate for herself, adieu my right in her possession!"

Louis felt himself turn pale, but he did not reply.—Though his Imperial Inquisitor thought his looks were sufficiently expressive, she was determined to carry away a direct avowal; and with a little archness, she added, "But you, perhaps, doubt her powers?"

He coloured as he replied: "I believe the Countess Altheim may command just what she pleases." "Indeed!" cried the Empress, "then you must not be my minister. If she negociate against me, I see where my interest would be."

Elizabeth smiled again, and with an expression that Louis could not resolve into any positive meaning;—but it was unpleasant to him, and gave him an impression of being played upon. A confused recollection of the Sieur's exordium against the power of beauty, suddenly occurred to him; and with rather a more offended air than is often ventured to an Empress, he said; "believing that the Countess Altheim would always please to command what is right, I did not suppose her influence could ever be actuated against the interests of Your Majesty."

The soft colour on Elizabeth's cheek, mounted to a proud crimson. The words were compliment, but the manner reproof. She regarded the audacious speaker with a look of astonishment. His eyes were now directed to the ground. She felt she had been reproved; and by a youth! a boy! The son of a man, who, if her confidant and coadjutor, she was also his! and, from circumstances, so much more in her power, than she in his; that, at any moment she could ground his chariot in the quicksands; and give him a fall as deep, as that which had sunk for ever the fortunes of his predecessor, the great Alberoni!—And yet the son of this man, so perilously placed, so dependant on her will, durst presume to be offended with an innocent freedom she had condescended to take with his feelings!—He had dared to imply to her, that she had trifled with him beneath her dignity; and still he stood before her with a mien of more true respect, than any she was accustomed to meet from the most obsequious of her vassals!

With a haughty swelling at her heart, the Imperial Elizabeth ran through the first of these suggestions, but as she contemplated the countenance of the speaker, so noble, so modest; she found a more ingenuous sentiment arise. She had then, for the first time in her life, beheld the unveiled face of simple truth! the situation was strange to her; but there was a charm even in the novelty: and again smiling, but with an air in which all the distance of her rank was conveyed, she graciously said, "there was something besides compliment in that speech of your's, de Montemar; but I forgive you." She stretched out her hand to him, in sign of full pardon; and as he respectfully touched it with his lip, she added, "you would make a better counsellor than a courtier; but if you mean to be a statesman, you must unite both."

He bowed as she turned away; and said to himself, "then I must mean to be, what I never can be. If the world is not to be governed without the moral degradation of its governors, my ambition to be a ruler must follow Orlando's wits to the moon!"

Gracious as the Empress looked and spoke, he yet saw that he had been on the verge of giving her mortal offence. His Pastor-uncle had often told him, the atmosphere of courts was cold, in proportion to their elevation: it was as withering to every honest demonstration of the heart, as the icy peaks of the glaziers, to the verdure which would flourish in the vallies! Louis did not then quite believe the representation; but he now remembered the lesson, and sighed to find it true.

Musing on the causes and consequences of so unnatural a state of moral existence, he passed hastily through the galleries. The day was unusually warm for the season, and the heat of the stoves made the unventilated air so oppressive, that absorbed in thought, he unconsciously complied with his bodily feeling; and, with his cap still in his hand, he allowed his pelisse to fall open from his figure, as he hastened down the passages. As he turned into an obscure lobby, by which he avoided the public guard-room, he passed the bottom of a flight of steps. Two persons were coming out of a door at the top. He did not observe the circumstance, so profound was his reverie, till he heard the voice of Wharton exclaiming, "'tis he, by Heaven!"

Without a moment's hesitation, Louis sprang forward; but not to meet his friend. He disappeared from the passage, at the very instant he heard the Duke throw himself over the rails of the stair, and call in louder accents, "De Montemar! De Montemar! Stop, for God's sake! It is Wharton who calls you!"

But Louis continued to fly, and Wharton to pursue, till the former abruptly turning through a small postern into the street, darted into his carriage; which always awaited him at this obscure entrance. It was just wheeling into the mob of attending equipages, when he beheld the Duke issue from the gate, and stand gazing around in search of his faithless friend!

"Faithless, I am not, dear, insulted Wharton!" cried Louis, aloud, though unheard by him he apostrophised. "But you have seen me desert you! Fly you, in spite of the sacred adjuration with which you would have recalled me! Oh, what do you now think of ungrateful de Montemar?"

At that moment he saw the Duke strike his forehead, as in the vexation of disappointment; and in the next, the turn of the carriage snatched him from his sight.

Louis now began to arraign his own carelessness, in having erred so unpardonably against warning, as to permit any abstraction of mind to divert him from the indispensible concealment of his person. Angry with himself, and vexed to the soul that his negligent reverie had so immediately incurred the evil most deprecated by Ignatius, the wormwood in his heart for a moment distilled over every other object, and with a bitterness unusual to him, he exclaimed, "Why did I forget that a man sworn to politics, has immolated body and mind? Neither love nor friendship, nor the reasoning faculty, are for him. She is his deity, and must command all his thoughts! Had I properly recollected this detested creed, coiled like Satan in his serpent-train, I might have passed through the dust, unnoticed by the erect eyes of Duke Wharton!"

Perhaps, the consciousness that his own nature had caught some of this abhorrent system of disguise, excited temper, as well as regret, in this moody exclamation! His soul was naturally brave and frank; but the mysterious language of the Sieur had touched him with a kind of superstitious dread on certain points; and he now shrunk from mentioning this rencontre to any one. He knew it would fill Ignatius with alarm for their secret; and in the present state of his slowly-closing wounds, all agitation was dangerous. To name it to the Empress, might not only re-awaken her suspicions of the Duke, but excite her to precautions hostile to his safety. Louis thought, and re-thought over these circumstances; and, as his perturbed feelings subsided, and gave him clearer judgment, he fully determined on silence. He flattered himself that no ill could proceed from this concealment; and while he resolved to be more circumspect in future, he believed that Wharton was incapable of any act which could implicate his friend, and might be justly feared. He did not hope that the Duke could suppose that either now, or on the Danube, he had mistaken any other person for him. He might have been persuaded to say the mistake was probable; but Louis could not believe the possibility of his having ever thought so. For, could any one make him think he had not seen Wharton on the Danube; that he had not heard his voice calling on him through the passages of the palace?

"Oh, no," cried he, "there is an identity which never can deceive the heart! You know that it was Louis de Montemar you saw, that it was Louis de Montemar who fled you! But a day will come, I trust, when you may know all; or at least, when you shall see cause to grant to me, that I could not do otherwise: and that one essential in true friendship, is sometimes to confide, even against the evidence of our own senses."

With that romantic faith, Louis had confided in the purity of Wharton's attachment; and he believed that Wharton would not be less generous to him. But Louis was enthusiastic, and judged men with that deference to oral wisdom, which hangs on the precept of virtue, as if it were virtue's self. He was yet practically ignorant, that a man's taste for moral excellence might be as exquisite as that which modelled the life of Addison; and his conduct be as foreign from his theory, as that which debased the genius of Richard Savage. Hence, Louis formed his opinion of his fellow-creatures, rather from the sentiments he heard them utter, than from the actions he was told they performed. He could not be mistaken in the one; misrepresentation, or misapprehension of motives, might pervert the other; and thus he more often made a good sentiment the commentary on a dubious action, than tried the principles of the sentimentalist, by the rectitude of his conduct. Indeed, he was not thus liberal, merely from never having supposed the absurdity of men admiring a principle they are determined never to adopt; but from an ingenuous pleader in his own breast, whose still small voice continually whispered to him, "Why should I conceive the worst of others, when my own conduct so often falls short of my best intentions! nay, frequently turns so blindly aside, that I wonder to find myself in the midst of errors, when I most intended to do the perfect right! But the heart's weakness, the impatience of the will, the frowardness of the temper! how can I feel these within me, and not judge with charity of appearances in others?"

"And you, dear Wharton," cried he, "are now called on to judge me charitably. To believe any thing of me, but that I could treat you thus, from the dictates of my own will."

How Wharton did judge of the conduct of Louis de Montemar, after events were to prove. Louis was right in believing him sure of his friend's identity, both on the Danube and in the palace gallery. But in the first instance, as he saw him no more, he supposed that some cause must have hurried him from Vienna; and he did not think it worth while to press the matter on those who denied it. But now, that he had not only seen him again, but seen him fly his sight and his voice! Here indeed, Wharton could hardly credit his senses. And he was still standing in the porch, gazing after the various passing carriages, when the companion he had broken from in his pursuit, rejoined him.