Part 7

At sight of this generous enemy, this faithful friend, how could he restrain the grateful impulse to fling himself into his arms! Wharton was alone; no one was near to report the momentary recognition!

"Duke Wharton!" cried he.

Wharton looked up, and, for an instant, around; his face lightened with the flash of joyful surprise, and opening his arms, Louis did indeed throw himself into them.

"Oh, this hug!" cried the Duke, as he strained him to his bounding heart; "it is the resurrection of confidence in man. You are true, and it matters not who is false." "True! for ever true!" cried Louis, grasping the hand of his friend with unutterable feelings. In proportion to his conviction, that love would henceforth be denied him, his sensibilities pointed all to friendship; and poured into that sacred flame the collected blaze.

"I needed these honest throbs to tell me so!" replied Wharton, "but the world has _reported and slandered_ Louis de Montemar, as I once prophesied."

"Oh, Wharton, how much is on my soul, that you have so generously endured for me and mine! Again and again, I have turned from you, when that soul followed you. I fled from you in the palace; but you know that my residence at Vienna was then to be concealed. I treated your clinging friendship with harshness, and yet you pardoned me; you risqued your safety, to preserve myself and the Sieur Ignatius from danger. And when wine had unselfed my noble father, you received his passionate insults with forbearance and forgiveness! Wharton, had I a thousand hearts, they should be yours, for this unconquered friendship."

"And had I as many, dear de Montemar, to transfer into your breast, they would be insufficient to repay the life you saved to me, in that of Maria of Bavaria."

The Duke then hastily recapitulated the Electress's account of the transaction, and her increased gratitude for his having maintained it so profound a secret. Louis listened with pleasure, and dwelt with delight on the interesting Princess and her son. Wharton smiled at his animation: and, with all his former sparkling archness, softly repeated,--

"Dum tu, Lydia, Telephi Cervicem roseam, & cerea Telephi Laudas Brachia, væ meum Fervens difficili bile tumet jecur."

Louis smiled also; but it was accompanied by a mantling cheek. The praises of women might now have passed unnoticed, from their familiarity; and, in general, it would have been so, but he respected the Electress, and admiration from her recalled the blush of modest consciousness. The Duke intimated a possibility of contriving a meeting between her, Louis, and himself, at her villa on Mount Calenberg.

"I have much to say to you, de Montemar," added he, "much of importance. That rare voice of thine has conjured a devil out of Philip Wharton; and now you must have the arcana of his heart."

Louis looked on him, and grasped his hand; "and could you, indeed, doubt me?"

"I will tell you more anon," replied Wharton; "come to-morrow night, at ten o'clock, to Mount Calenberg. There will be no danger in such a place, but much mystery, and, added he, with gaiety,---

"As veiled charms are fairest, So stolen joys are dearest."

Before Louis could answer in the negative, he heard voices in the adjoining garden. The friends were standing close to the wall; but on these sounds they moved away; and a key presently turned in the door.

"You come?" cried Wharton, as his hand gave the pressure of farewell.

"Impossible," returned Louis.

Wharton stood for a moment.

"You must," cried he, "since she will dare it! But there can be no discovery."

"I dare not, for my life and honour."

"For your father's life and honour, you must dare every thing! _Osez_ is my badge, and you will be wise to make it yours."

Wharton uttered this with a peculiar force of voice, and aweful expression in his countenance. Louis was thunderstruck: and yet, how could his father be involved in Wharton's demand? He was in Spain, and no longer in danger from his former enemies! "My father's honour forbids my compliance," replied he; "I dare not go to the Electress's villa; I dare not meet, even you, by design."

The garden door at that moment opened, and a bevy of persons issued from it. Wharton dropped the hand of his friend. "Faithless, deluded de Montemar!" cried he; and breaking away, the friends mutually disappeared.

CHAP. IX.

The influence of Ripperda over the minds of the King and Queen of Spain had reached its acmé. Isabella's enthusiasm for the new minister was more like passion than patronage; and Philip's deference to him possessed all the fanatic zeal of the devotee who worships the object he has beatified. The King believed he had converted Ripperda to the Catholic faith, and he exulted in the reclaimed heretic as a future saint.

The minister's eye kept steady to one point; to raise the country he governed, to the utmost pinnacle of earthly grandeur. But his manner of conducting his projects, and demeaning himself after their accomplishment, had suffered a rapid and extraordinary change since he returned from Vienna. During his voyage from Genoa to Barcelona he was attacked by a delirious fever, in consequence of the wound he had received in his rencontre with the banditti of the Appenines. It seemed to have jarred his nerves and affected his temper; or rather to have taken off the curb which his self-control had hitherto kept on the motions of his passions; but this alteration did not appear at first. His habits of universal suavity prevailed for a time, until he launched so deeply into business, as to forget all minor considerations in its great results. He became not merely zealous, but impetuous in the prosecution of his objects; not merely determined on a point, but dogmatical in its assertion. He did not now persuade the Lords of the Council, by his always subduing eloquence; but he commanded from the consciousness of mental superiority, and the conviction of his power to execute all his designs. The pride of the Grandees was incensed, and the precipitation with which he urged forward all degrees of persons, rather offended than served them. There is a restiveness in human nature that resists compulsion, even to its own manifest advantage.

Ripperda saw no will but his own; he was sure of its great purpose, and, therefore, stopped not to solicit the good from others, he believed he could do more shortly himself. He went careering forward to his point, overturning and wounding; but as he speeded on, he left a train of enemies behind.

Even the King and Queen began to start from the patriotic despot they had raised. Enamoured of his vision of happiness for Spain, he snatched the prerogative too openly from their hands, and conceded privileges to the people, novel to the Spanish laws. He dared to oppose the extirpating power of the inquisition, by protecting certain Jewish merchants from its fangs; and this being represented to Philip, as a proof of his being a heretic in his heart, the monarch considered it unanswerable, and determined to watch him narrowly. His most active enemy with the Queen was Donna Laura; her nurse and confidant, an old Italian, totally abandoned to avarice. Being irritated by his late disdain of propitiating her as formerly, by successive magnificent presents; she sold her interest in another quarter, and studied day and night to destroy him in the favour of her mistress. She knew where Isabella was particularly vulnerable; her vanity as a woman; and the crafty dame had many stories to recount of Ripperda's early devotion to Elizabeth. She insinuated, that it was rather to be near her than to negociate for Spain, that he so willingly consented to go to Vienna in disguise; and she easily corroborated her assertion, by turning Isabella's attention to his gradually changing manner since his return. But Isabella did not require to be reminded of the cessation of his homage. Ripperda had lately omitted all those gallant attentions, which spoke the lover, who may only dare to devote his heart and his life to the pure object of his wishes, while she moves above him in unsullied light, like Cynthia in her distant heavens.

Without adulation of this kind, Isabella could not exist; and it never came so sweet from any lips as those of Ripperda; it never beamed with so graceful a homage from other eyes. It was her delight to mingle politics and chivalric devotion, in their long conferences. It was her triumph, in the crowded court, to see his eyes fixed alone on her; and to behold herself envied by her ladies as a woman, as much as she was respected by them as their Queen. But when the change took place; and, regardless of these useful arts, he became absorbed in his duties; then, Laura taught her to believe he thought only of Elizabeth.

His enemies in the cabinet were quick to perceive when their devices had taken effect on the King and Queen. Amongst the most formidable of these illustrious conspirators, was the hoary headed Marquis de Grimaldo, whose disgrace had preceded Ripperda's taking the supreme chair. The old Grandee held a strict watch over his successor's proceedings; and made it the business of his life to collect observations on his minutest actions, and to misrepresent, or aggravate them, to the ears of jealous Majesty. The Marquis de Castallor, who had lost the office of Secretary at War, when the new minister absorbed it in his ample grasp, joined with Grimaldo, heart and hand, to overthrow his Colossal power. To this end they spread a distorted epitome of his favourite views, amongst their retainers. These disseminated them to the people, with proper commentaries, in dark hints and distant observations. Ripperda was talked of as the son of a rebel; one who had been born in a heretic country, and educated in its faith; who had embraced the true church, merely from ambition; who was depriving the Grandees of their privileges; and devising plans to reduce the gentlemen of Spain to the rank of bourgeois and slaves, by turning them to bodily labour and mechanic trades, and abridging them of their evening siesta and morning revels under the shade of their groves.

While the fortress was undermining at home, they were not idle, who were preparing to storm it from abroad. France, saw with apprehension, His Catholic Majesty drawing such strict bonds with the house of Austria. The States General were alarmed at the treaty of commerce. England proclaimed a rough indignation at the demand for Gibraltar, which Austria had made in behalf of Spain. And, it being reported amongst the nations, that Ripperda's views were to compel by force, what he could not obtain by negociation, his overthrow was considered a common cause. The various silent armaments, which commenced on this resolution, were represented in appalling colours to Philip; and as the Court of Austria so slowly performed its part in the treaty, his apprehensions were more easily awakened. The insincerity and insult of this delay were doubled in effect by the private correspondence of De Patinos to his father, who spoke mysteriously of the determination of Charles's cabinet, from some hidden cause, not to perform any more of their engagements.

Louis, meanwhile, unconscious of the storm that was circling round his father's head in Spain, was stemming his way through the traversing movements of his enemies at the Austrian Court. He contended firmly for his political objects, but resigned himself with desperate despair, to the current which bore his private happiness to destruction. He had obeyed an intimation from the Empress, that Countess Altheim was arrived, and prepared to name the day and hour for their nuptials; and he went to her apartments to receive the abhorred appointment from herself. She met him with all her smiles; for the memento of the lowlines of her origin, presented to her in the domestic scene she had just left, stimulated her joy at the prospect of being elevated out of these humbling impressions, by the pomp of an illustrious marriage. She had just quitted the bed of death, had just closed the eyes of a respectable parent; and yet had vanity so steeled her soul to every feeling of filial nature, that, banishing all, as a thing with which she had no concern, she turned alone to views of splendid rivalry: and, when Louis appeared, exultation in the full Court of the Empress swam before her eyes with his entering form.

With unaffected rapture, she met his ceremonious salute, and softly whispered, as his cold cheek touched hers, that she knew the object of his visit. It was soon discussed. For Louis had hardly repeated in words, what his promise to Elizabeth extorted, before her ready favourite named the evening of the following day. He felt the paleness of his countenance spread to his heart; and, without pulsation in his veins, his lips parted in a vacant smile; and he suffered the glowing hand she had put into his, to remain unnoticed in his motionless grasp.

At this moment, the Empress entered; and Otteline prevented any involuntary exhibition of her resentment at the frozen demeanor of her lover, by rising hastily, and as hastily informing Her Majesty that she had obeyed her commands in naming her nuptials for the morrow. Elizabeth read the despair of his countenance, as he started from his seat at her approach; and, triumphing in her victory, she seemed in that hour to forget all her inexplicable coldness, and to be as gracious as ever. She embraced Otteline; and gave him her hand to kiss, with repeated expressions of future confidence in the husband of her friend.

The marriage was to be solemnised with unexampled magnificence in the chapel of the palace; and the equipage which was to convey the favourite to her husband's residence, was to be the gift of her patroness. Louis summoned himself as well as he could, to perform that with cheerfulness, which it was right to do at all; and, he conducted himself, during the remainder of the interview, with respect to his future bride, and extorted gratitude to her mistress.

The remainder of the day was passed in his official duties; but when evening came, he could not endure his own thoughts; the anticipations of to-morrow sickened and distracted him; and he rushed out, to fly himself, and the image of her who had blighted all his prospects.

He hurried to the _Hotel d'Ettrées_; but the scenes of careless gaiety he saw there, seemed only to chafe his mind. The sight of young men of his own years; some, with similar pursuits, moving on with honour; and others, worthlessly wasting their time; but all, free and untortured by bonds like his; barbed him to the quick: and he was hurrying from the splendid mockery, when in the outward saloon, which was almost solitary, he was met by the Countess Claudine. She accosted him with wonder at his early flight. In his eagerness to escape, he made some senseless excuse. Laughing, she put her fair hand upon his arm, and told him a little more civility to her, and a little less impatience towards his intended bride, would, at that moment, be more becoming, in the representative of the most gallant nation in Europe! Louis rallied himself to reply in her own way; and putting her arm through his, she drew him back into the rooms. In her brilliant discourse, so sparkling with wit, so exquisite in sentiment, she united all the varied powers of "_Bland Aspasia, and the Lesbian Maid_;" and Louis felt grateful for the lively interest with which she, evidently tried to amuse him, during the long protracted evening. But ere they parted, while she was walking with him down an illuminated and solitary avenue of orange-trees that led from the supper-room, she contrived to let him know that every body wondered at his having persuaded Countess Altheim to so indecorous a step, as to meet him at the nuptial altar before the ashes of her father had been consigned to the grave. Louis repelled this charge from himself; and declared his belief that Claudine had received wrong information respecting the death of Monsieur de Blaggay, as it had never been intimated to him. His fair companion shook her head, and while she turned her full bright eyes upon his face, she calmly said:

"Were you convinced of this fact, would you marry the woman who could commit so unfeeling a sacrilege on the memory of her parent?"

Louis could make only one answer, and he did it with downcast eyes. "These are questions, Madam, to which I can give no reply. At this moment, I consider Countess Altheim as having every claim on me; and her character is under my protection."

"Generous, de Montemar!" replied Claudine, "How have you been entangled in this engagement! I see your heart, and I urge no more. But forgive me, that I lament such a destiny for such a man? Had all men your honour----"

She interrupted herself with a convulsive sigh, and wringing, rather than pressing the hand she had unconsciously snatched, she parted from him. Louis disbelieved the story of Monsieur de Blaggay's death; but he was affected by the manner of his accomplished informer; and slowly withdrawing through the now almost deserted rooms, mused on the variety of human misery.

CHAP. X.

When that sun arose, which, he believed, was to set on him a completed wretch, he turned from its beams with a loathing sense of what his vain credulity and headlong passion had brought upon him; a joyless youth, an old age of desolation! How different from his home of Lindisfarne! But he could not bear the reflection, and with fevered impatience, he hurried through the business of the morning.

At three o'clock, just as he had shut himself into his study, to brood over his last hours of liberty; and to consecrate them to the unburthening of his full soul to his venerable uncle, in a letter, which, while he wrote, he thought it would be cruelty to send; a billet was brought him from the Empress: it contained these lines:

"A circumstance, which shall be explained hereafter, delays your nuptials. Otteline is gone for a few days to the Luxemburg to join my daughter. Tomorrow, at noon, be in the boudoir, and you will meet Elizabeth."

This was heaven's reprieve to Louis; suspension was life, and with almost hope of some unlooked-for escape, he repaired in the evening to the Chateau de Phaffenberg. His object in visiting that lonely habitation, was to consult papers that remained there, on a dispatch he was making up for Sweden.

While the gorgeous sun-set, by which he had extracted the memorandums, dissolved into a bloomy twilight; and the soft moon was rising in silvering glory over the hills, Louis felt the soothing aspect of nature; and gliding through the garden door, which stood half open, he stood for a moment viewing the scene before him.

"How beautiful is nature!" exclaimed he, "how unobtruse her loveliness, how guileless all her charms!"

He gently descended the steps of the terrace. All was still. Not a zephyr ruffled the leaf of a rose, and a soft breathing fragrance bathed his reposing senses. He walked on, and thought of the rapt liberty of the soul in the sweet serenities of beautiful solitude. No rebellious feeling of any kind then agitated his placid bosom; every passion was at rest,--his ambition slept in its thorny bed, and his remembrances of Otteline were quenched in the gentle dews of a resigned spirit. Such power has the divine hand of Nature on the son that loves her! and thus did he glide along, with the ethereal temper of his soul beaming in every feature, like the reflected face of heaven.

In this blessed calm, his meditations had ascended far above this sublunary world, when he observed a man spring off the battlements into the garden, from the very quarter where he had once clambered himself. A second glance, recognised the figure of Duke Wharton, who, immediately, hastened towards him. An exulting smile was on his countenance, as he hailed him in his approach.

"This is safer ground than the _Horti Adonidis_, I fixed for our conference!" cried he, "no envious demon would ever think of tracing Philip Wharton to so desolate a region as this!"

"I have found it a garden of peace," replied Louis, putting out his hand to Wharton with glad surprise; "and, were it not for fear of the consequence of this rash seeking me, I should call it the garden of happiness too!"

"De Montemar," cried his friend, "it does not become friendship like ours, to be always fearing consequences, and skulking past each other, as if our meetings had guilty errands. How different are you in this detested court of finesse, from the free-hearted, independent De Montemar, who won my soul on his unbondaged native mountains! Louis, where is that open eye, that open heart? that fearless, brave, uncuirassed bosom? All that you can gain in Vienna or at Madrid, is not worth one of those proofs of manhood!"

Louis turned on him a countenance, in which all that Wharton had conjured up in that noble soul, shone bright in the moon-light.

"If I have fear, it is to do wrong; and that is no change of my nature. If I shroud my heart, it is from them who cannot understand it; if I shroud my eye, it is from them who are not worthy to read my thoughts; and for my shut bosom, Wharton, would it gratify you, to hear it was unlocked to fools? You have the key of it, my friend! A triangle encases my heart," continued he, with one of his wonted smiles; "and you have one of its sides."

Wharton pressed his hand.

"Then Cæsar has quite forgiven Brutus?"

"What could I not forgive him?" replied Louis. All the trust of his partial and enthusiastic heart, spoke in those words; and he thought within himself,--"Oh, that I might give my whole life to filial love and friendship!" As the hopeless wish passed through his soul, the _iron entered_ with it, but did not pass away.

They walked together to a recess in the garden, where they sat down under the full radiance of the unclouded moon.

"De Montemar," said Wharton, "this hour is portentous. Hear me to an end; and you will then have an ample reply to your question, of why I so named your father, when you broke from me in the avenue."

Louis was ready to listen; and his friend unfolded to him a scene in the German court, which petrified him with astonishment, and made him indeed maintain a breathless silence during the recital. He displayed the insincere character of the Emperor, and explained his manoeuvres in delaying the fulfilment of the great articles of the treaty, and only executing the small, while he managed to draw every resignation from the Spanish side. He imparted to Louis the secret arrangement between Charles and the Prince of Lorraine; (though he withheld his own share in the transaction) and shewed that the Arch-duchess was never intended, by her father, to be the wife of Don Carlos. He also declared that the Emperor derided the investiture he had sent to the Spanish Prince, with the remark, when he signed it, that "swords would cut through parchments." But the worst information was to come. He knew that a plan was laid, to accomplish the political ruin of the Duke de Ripperda, and by that achievement at once obliterate every engagement that was made through him.

At this intimation Louis was all ear: For, during the varied disclosure, he could connect its details with circumstances which had embarrassed his diplomatic proceedings; and internal evidence stamped the veracity of every assertion of his friend.