It would be wonderful, were it not of daily occurrence, and to be observed by all who give attention to the characteristics of the human mind, how quickly confidence, even when shaken to its very foundations, and almost obliterated, springs up again, and recovers all its strength in the bosoms of the young of either sex.
Let but a few more years pass over the heart, and when once broken, if it be only by a slight suspicion, or a half unreal cause, it will scarce revive again in a lifetime; nor then, unless proofs the strongest and most unquestionable can be adduced to overpower the doubts which have well-nigh annihilated it.
In early life, however, before long contact with the world has blunted the susceptibilities, and hardened the sympathies of the soul, before the constant experience of the treachery, the coldness, the ingratitude of men has given birth to universal doubt and general distrust, the shadow vanishes as soon as the cloud which cast it is withdrawn, and the sufferer again believes, alas! too often, only to be again deceived.
Thus it was with St. Renan, who a few moments before had given up even the last hope, who had ceased, as he thought, to believe even in the possibility of faith or honor among men, of constancy, or purity, or truth, in women, no sooner saw his Melanie, whom he knew to be the wife of another, solitary and in tears, no sooner felt her inanimate form reclining on his bosom, than he was prepared to believe anything, rather than believe276 her false.
Indeed, her consternation at his appearance, her evident dismay, not unnatural in an age wherein skepticism and infidelity were marvellously mingled with credulity and superstition, her clear conviction that it was not himself in mortal blood and being, did go far to establish the fact, that she had been deceived either casually or—which was far more probable—by foul artifice, into the belief that her beloved and plighted husband was no longer with the living.
The very exclamation which she uttered last, ere she sunk senseless into his arms, uttered, as she imagined, in the presence of the immortal spirit of the injured dead, “I am true, Raoul—true to the last, my beloved!” rang in his ears with a power and a meaning which convinced him of her veracity.
“She could not lie!” he muttered to himself, “in the presence of the living dead! God be praised! she is true, and we shall yet be happy!”
How beautiful she looked, as she lay there, unconscious and insensible even of her own existence. If time and maturity had improved Raoul’s person, and added the strength and majesty of manhood to the grace and pliability of youth, infinitely more had it bestowed on the beauty of his betrothed. He had left her a beautiful girl just blooming out of girlhood, he found her a mature, full-blown woman, with all the flush and flower of complete feminine perfection, before one charm has become too luxuriant, or one drop of the youthful dew exhaled from the new expanded blossom.
She had shot up, indeed, to a height above the ordinary stature of women—straight, erect, and graceful as a young poplar, slender, yet full withal, exquisitely and voluptuously rounded, and with every sinuous line and swelling curve of her soft form full of the poetry and beauty of both repose and motion.
277 Her complexion was pale as alabaster; even her cheeks, except when some sudden tide of passion, or some strong emotion sent the impetuous blood coursing thither more wildly than its wont, were colorless, but there was nothing sallow or sickly, nothing of that which is ordinarily understood by the word pallid, in their clear, warm, transparent purity; nothing, in a word, of that lividness which the French, with more accuracy than we, distinguish from the healthful paleness which is so beautiful in southern women.
Her hair, profuse almost to redundance, was perfectly black, but of that warm and lustrous blackness which is probably the hue expressed by the ancient Greeks by the term hyacinthine, and which in certain lights has a purplish metallic gloss playing over it, like the varying reflections on the back of the raven. Her strongly defined, and nearly straight eyebrows, were dark as night, as were the long, silky lashes which were displayed in clear relief against the fair, smooth cheek, as the lids lay closed languidly over the bright blue eyes.
It was a minute or two before Melanie moved or gave any symptoms of recovering from her fainting fit, and during those minutes the lips of Raoul had been pressed so often and so warmly to those of the fair insensible, that had any spark of perception remained to her, the fond and lingering pressure could not have failed to call the “purple light of love,” to her ingenuous face.
At length a long, slow shiver ran through the form of the senseless girl, and thrilled, like the touch of the electric wire, every nerve in St. Renan’s body.
Then the soft rosy lips were unclosed, and forth rushed the ambrosial breath in a long, gentle sigh, and the beautiful bust heaved and undulated, like the bosom of the calm sea, when the first breathings of the coming storm steal over it, and wake, as if by sympathy, its deep pulsations.
278 He clasped her closer to his heart, half-fearful that when life and perfect consciousness should be restored to that exquisite frame, it would start from his embrace, if not in anger or alarm, at least as if from a forbidden and illicit pleasure.
Gradually a faint rosy hue, slight as the earliest blushes of the morning sky, crept over her white cheeks, and deepened into a rich passionate flush; and at the same moment the azure-tinctured lids were unclosed slowly, and the large, radiant, bright blue eyes beamed up into his own, half languid still, but gleaming through their dewy languor, with an expression which he must have been, indeed, blind to mistake for aught but the strongest of unchanged, unchangeable affection.
It was evident that she knew him now; that the momentary terror, arising rather, perhaps, from fear than from superstition, which had converted the young ardent soldier into a visitant from beyond those gloomy portals through which no visitant returns, had passed from her mind, and that she had already recognised, although she spoke not, her living lover.
And though she recognised him, she sought not to withdraw herself from the enclosure of his sheltering arms, but lay there on his bosom, with her head reclined on his shoulder, and her eyes drinking long draughts of love from his fascinated gaze, as if she were his own, and that her appropriate place of refuge.
“Oh! Raoul,” she exclaimed, at length, in a low, soft whisper, “is it, indeed, you—you, whom I have so long wept as dead—you, whom I was even now weeping as one lost to me for ever, when you are thus restored to me?”
“It is I, Melanie,” he answered mournfully, “it is I, alive, and in health; but better far had I been in truth dead, as they have told you, rather than thus a survivor of all happiness, of all hopes; spared only from the grave to know you false, and myself forgotten.”
“Oh, no, Raoul, not false!” she cried wildly, as she started from his arms, “oh, not forgotten! think you,” she added, blushing279 crimson, “that had I loved any but you, that had I not loved you with my whole heart and being, I had lain thus on your bosom, thus endured your caresses? Oh, no, no, never false! nor for one moment forgotten!
“But what avails it, if you do love no other—what profits it, if you do love me? Are you not—are you not, false girl—alas! that these lips should speak it—the wife of another—the promised mistress of the king?”
“I—I—Raoul!” she exclaimed, with such a blending of wonder and loathing in her face, such an expression of indignation on her tongue, that her lover perceived at once, that, whatever might be the infamy of her father, of her husband, of this climax of falsehood and self-degradation, she, at least, was guiltless.
“The mistress of the king! what king? what mean you? are you distraught?”
“Ha! you are ignorant, you are innocent of that, then. You are not yet indoctrinated into the noble uses for which your honorable lord intends you. It is the town’s talk, Melanie. How is it you, whom it most concerns, alone have not heard it?”
“Raoul,” she said, earnestly, imploringly, “I know not if there be any meaning in your words, except to punish me, to torture me, for what you deem my faithlessness, but if there be, I implore you, I conjure you, by your father’s noble name, by your mother’s honor, show me the worst; but listen to me first, for by the God that made us both, and now hears my words, I am not faithless.”
“Not faithless? Are you not the wife of another?”
“No!” she replied enthusiastically. “I am not. For I am yours, and while you live I can not wed another. Whom God hath joined man can not put asunder.”
280 “I fear me that plea will avail us little,” Raoul answered. “But say on, dearest Melanie, and believe that there is nothing you can ask which I will not give you gladly—even if it were my own life-blood. Say on, so shall we best arrive at the truth of this intricate and black affair.”
“Mark me, then, Raoul, for every word I shall speak is as true as the sun in heaven. It is near two years now since we heard that you had fallen in battle, and that your body had been carried off by the barbarians. Long, long I hoped and prayed, but prayers and hopes were alike in vain. I wrote to you often, as I promised, but no line from you has reached me since the day when you sailed for India, and that made me fear that the dread news was true. But at the last, to make assurance doubly sure, all my own letters were returned to me six months since, with their seals unbroken, and an endorsement from the authorities in India that the person addressed was not to be found. Then hope itself was over; and my father, who never from the first had doubted that you were no more—”
“Out on him! out on him! the heartless villain!” the young man interrupted her indignantly. “He knows, as well as I myself, that I am living; although it is no fault of his or his coadjutors that I am so. He knows not as yet, however, that I am here; but he shall know it ere long to his cost, my Melanie.”
“At least,” she answered in a faltering voice, “at least he swore to me that you were dead; and never having ceased to persecute me, since the day that fatal tidings reached us, to become the wife of La Rochederrien, now marquis de Ploermel, he now became doubly urgent—”
“And you Melanie! you yielded! I had thought you would have died sooner.”
“I had no choice but to yield, Raoul. Or at least but the choice of that old man’s hand, or an eternal dungeon. The lettres de cachet were signed, and you dead, and on the conditions281 I extorted from the marquis, I became in name, Raoul, only in name, by all my hopes of heaven, the wife of the man whom you pronounce, wherefore, I can not dream, the basest of mankind. Now tell me.”
“And did it never strike you as being wonderful and most unnatural that this Ploermel, who is neither absolutely a dotard nor an old woman, should accept your hand upon this condition?”
“I was too happy to succeed in extorting it to think much of that,” she answered.
“Extorted!” replied Raoul bitterly; “and how, I pray you, is this condition which you extorted ratified or made valid?”
“It is signed by himself, and witnessed by my own father, that, being I regard myself the wife of the dead, he shall ask no more of familiarity from me than if I were the bride of heaven!”
“The double villains!”
“But wherefore villains, Raoul?” exclaimed Melanie.
“I tell you, girl, it is a compact—a base, hellish compact—with the foul despot, the disgrace of kings, the opprobrium of France, who sits upon the throne, dishonoring it daily! A compact such as yet was never entered into by a father and a husband, even of the lowest of mankind! A compact to deliver you a spotless virgin-victim to the vile-hearted and luxurious tyrant. Curses! a thousand curses on his soul! and on my own soul! who have fought and bled for him, and all to meet with this, as my reward of service!”
“Great God! can these things be,” she exclaimed, almost fainting with horror and disgust. “Can these things indeed be? But speak, Raoul, speak; how can you know all this?”
“I tell you, Melanie, it is the talk, the very daily, hourly gossip of the streets, the alleys, nay, even the very kennels of Paris. Every one knows it—every one believes it, from the282 monarch in the Louvre to the lowest butcher of the Faubourg St. Antoine!
“And they believe it—of me, of me, they believe this infamy!”
“With this addition, if any addition were needed, that you are not a deceived victim, but a willing and proud participator in the shame.”
“I will—that is—” she corrected herself, speaking very rapidly and energetically—“I would die sooner. But there is no need now to die. You have come back to me, and all will yet go well with us!”
“It never can go well with us again,” St. Renan answered gloomily. “The king never yields his purpose, he is as tenacious in his hold as reckless in his promptitude to seize. And they are paid beforehand.”
“Paid!” exclaimed the girl, shuddering at the word. “What atrocity. How paid?”
“How, think you, did your good father earn his title and the rich governorship of Morlaix? What great deeds were rewarded to La Rochederrien by his marquisate, and this captaincy of musquetaires. You know not yet, young lady, what virtue there is now-a-days in being the accommodating father, or the convenient husband of a beauty!”
“You speak harshly, St. Renan, and bitterly.”
“And if I do, have I not cause enough for bitterness and harshness?” he replied almost angrily.
“Not against me, Raoul.”
“I am not bitter against you, Melanie. And yet—and yet—”
“And yet what, Raoul?”
“And yet had you resisted three days longer, we might have been saved—you might have been mine—”
283 “I am yours, Raoul de St. Renan. Yours, ever and for ever! No one’s but only yours.”
“You speak but madness—your vow—the sacrament!”
“To the winds with my vow—to the abyss with the fraudful sacrament!” she cried, almost fiercely. “By sin it was obtained and sanctioned—in sin let it perish. I say—I swear, Raoul, if you will take me, I am yours.”
“Mine? Mine?” cried the young man, half bewildered. “How mine, and when?”
“Thus,” she replied, casting herself upon his breast, and winding her arms around his neck, and kissing his lips passionately and often. “Thus, Raoul, thus, and now!”
He returned her embrace fondly once, but the next instant he removed her almost forcibly from his breast, and held her at arm’s length.
“No, no!” he exclaimed, “not thus, not thus! If at all, honestly, openly, holily, in the face of day! May my soul perish, ere cause come through me why you should ever blush to show your front aloft among the purest and the proudest. No, no, not thus, my own Melanie!”
The girl burst into a paroxysm of tears and sobbing, through which she hardly could contrive to make her interrupted and faltering words audible.
“If not now,” she said at length, “it will never be. For, hear me, Raoul, and pity me, to-morrow they are about to drag me to Paris.”
The lover mused for several moments very deeply, and then replied, “Listen to me, Melanie. If you are in earnest, if you are true, and can be firm, there may yet be happiness in store for us, and that very shortly.”
“Do you doubt me, Raoul?”
“I do not doubt you, Melanie. But ever as in my own wildest rapture, even to gain my own extremest bliss, I would not do aught that could possibly cast one shadow on your pure284 renown, so, mark me, would I not take you to my heart were there one spot, though it were but as a speck in the all-glorious sun, upon the brightness of your purity.”
“I believe you, Raoul. I feel, I know that my honor, that my purity is all in all to you.”
“I would die a thousand deaths,” he made answer, “ere even a false report should fall on it, to mar its virgin whiteness. Marvel not then that I ask as much of you.”
“Ask anything, St. Renan. It is granted.”
“In France we can hope for nothing. But there are other lands than France. We must fly; and thanks to these documents which you have wrung from them, and the proofs which I can easily obtain, this cursed marriage can be set aside, and then, in honor and in truth you can be mine, mine own Melanie.”
“God grant it so, Raoul.”
“It shall be so, beloved. Be you but firm, and it may be done right speedily. I will sell the estates of St. Renan—by a good chance, supposing me dead, the lord of Yrvilliac was in treaty for it with my uncle. That can be arranged forthwith. Conduct yourself according to your wont, cool and as distant as may be with this villain of Ploermel; avoid above all things to let your father see that you are buoyed by any hope, or moved by any passion. Treat the king with deliberate scorn, if he approach you over-boldly. Beware how you eat or drink in his company, for he is capable of all things, even of drugging you into insensibility, and here,” he added, taking a small poniard, of exquisite workmanship, with a gold hilt and scabbard, from his girdle, and giving it to her, “wear this at all times, and if he dare attempt violence, were he thrice a king, use it!”
“I will—I will—trust me, Raoul! I will use it, and that to his sorrow! My heart is strong, and my hand brave now—now285 that I know you to be living. Now that I have hope to nerve me, I will fear nothing, but dare all things.”
“Do so, do so, my beloved, and you shall have no cause to fear, for I will be ever near you. I will tarry here but one day; and ere you reach Paris, I will be there, be certain. Within ten days, I doubt not I can convert my acres into gold, and ship that gold across the narrow straits; and that done, the speed of horses, and a swift ship will soon have us safe in England; and if that land be not so fair, or so dear as our own France, at least there are no tyrants there, like this Louis; and there are laws, they say, which guard the meanest man as safely and as surely as the proudest noble.”
“A happy land, Raoul. I would we were there even now.”
“We will be there ere long, fear nothing. But tell me, whom have you near your person on whom we may rely. There must be some one through whom we may communicate in Paris. It may be that I shall require to see you.”
“Oh! you remember Rose, Raoul—little Rose Faverney, who has lived with me ever since she was a child—a pretty little black-eyed damsel.”
“Surely I do remember her. Is she with you yet? That will do admirably, then, if she be faithful, as I think she is; and unless I forget, what will serve us better yet, she loves my page Jules de Marlien. He has not forgotten her, I promise you.”
“Ah! Jules—we grow selfish, I believe, as we grow old, Raoul. I have not thought to ask after one of your people. So Jules remembers little Rose, and loves her yet; that will indeed, secure her, even had she been doubtful, which she is not. She is as true as steel—truer, I fear, than even I; for she reproached me bitterly four evenings since, and swore she would be buried alive, much more willingly imprisoned, than be married to the marquis de Ploermel, though she was only286 plighted to the vicomte Raoul’s page! Oh! we may trust in her with all certainty.”
“Send her, then, on the very same night that you reach Paris, so soon as it is dark, to my uncle’s house in the place de St. Louis. I think she knows it, and let her ask—not for me—but for Jules. Ere then I will know something definite of our future; and fear nothing, love, all shall go well with us. Love such as ours, with faith, and right, and honesty, and honor to support it, can not fail to win, blow what wind may. And now, sweet Melanie, the night is wearing onward, and I fear that they may miss you. Kiss me, then, once more, sweet girl, and farewell.”
“Not for the last, Raoul,” she cried, with a gay smile, casting herself once again into her lover’s arms, and meeting his lips with a long, rapturous kiss.
“Not by a thousand, and a thousand! But now, angel, farewell for a little space. I hate to bid you leave me, but I dare not ask you to stay; even now I tremble lest you should be missed and they should send to seek you. For were they but to suspect that I am here and have seen you, it would, at the best, double all our difficulties; fare you well, sweetest Melanie.”
“Fare you well,” she replied; “fare you well, my own best beloved Raoul,” and she put up the glittering dagger, as she spoke, into the bosom of her dress; but as she did so, she paused and said, “I wish this had not been your first gift to me, Raoul, for they say that such gifts are fatal, to love at least, if not to life.”
“Fear not! fear not!” answered the young man, laughing gayly, “our love is immortal. It may defy the best steel blade that was ever forged on Milan stithy to cut it asunder. Fare you—but, hush! who comes here; it is too late, yet fly—fly, Melanie!”
287 But she did not fly, for as he spoke, a tall, gayly-dressed cavalier burst through the coppice on the side next the chateau d’Argenson, exclaiming: “So, my fair cousin!—this is your faith to my good brother of Ploermel is it?”
But, before he spoke, she had whispered to Raoul, “It is the chevalier de Pontrein, de Ploermel’s half-brother. Alas! all is lost.”
“Not so! not so!” answered her lover, also in a whisper, “leave him to me, I will detain him. Fly, by the upper pathway and through the orchard to the chateau, and remember—you have not seen this dog. So much deceit is pardonable. Fly, I say, Melanie. Look not behind for your life, whatever you may hear, nor tarry. All rests now on your steadiness and courage.”
“Then all is safe,” she answered firmly and aloud, and without casting a glance toward the cavalier, who was now within ten paces of her side, or taking the smallest notice of his words, she kissed her hand to St. Renan, and bounded up the steep path, in the opposite direction, with so fleet a step as soon carried her beyond the sound of all that followed, though that was neither silent nor of small interest.
“Do you not hear me, madam. By Heaven! but you carry it off easily!” cried the young cavalier, setting off at speed, as if to follow her. “But you must run swifter than a roe if you look to ’scape me;” and with the words he attempted to rush past Raoul, of whom he affected, although he knew him well, to take no notice.
But in that intent he was quickly frustrated, for the young count grasped him by the collar as he endeavored to pass, with a grasp of iron, and said to him in an ironical tone of excessive courtesy.
“Sweet sir, I fear you have forgotten me, that you should give me the go-by thus, when it is so long a time since we have met, and we such dear friends, too.”
288 But the young man was in earnest, and very angry, and struggled to release himself from St. Renan’s grasp, until, having no strong reasons for forbearance, but many for the reverse, Raoul, too, lost his temper.
“By Heaven!” he exclaimed, “I believe that you do not know me, or you would not dare to suppose that I would suffer you to follow a lady who seeks not your presence or society.”
“Let me go, St. Renan!” returned the other fiercely, laying his hand on his dagger’s hilt. “Let me go, villain, or you shall rue it!”
“Villain!” Raoul repeated calmly, “villain! It is so you call me, hey?” and he did instantly release him, drawing his sword as he did so. “Draw, De Pontrien—that word has cost you your life!”
“Yes, villain!” repeated the other, “villain to your teeth! But you lie! it is your life that is forfeit—forfeit to my brother’s honor!”
“Ha! ha!” laughed Raoul, savagely. “Ha-ha-ha-ha! your brother’s honor! who the devil ever heard before of a pandar’s honor—even if he were Sir Pandarus to a king? Sa! sa! have at you!”
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