Go down into the Vale of Belvoir; watch one of the duke's tenants handing a five-year old over the Smite, and say if the modern agriculturists might not boast with Tydides,

_"hemeis de pateron meg' ameinones euchometh' einai."_

They are getting so erudite, too, that I dare say they would quote it in the original.

When all was over, and they were returning to Kerton, Guy ranged up to his cousin's side. He looked rather embarra.s.sed and penitent--an expression which sat upon his stern, resolute face very strangely. But Isabel was radiant with happiness, and did not even sigh as she held out the forfeited ring. He put it back with a decided gesture of his hand, and, leaning over her, whispered something in her ear. I don't know how they arranged it; but Miss Raymond wore the turquoises at the next county ball--the ring, to her dying day.

CHAPTER X.

"Souvent femme varie; Bien fol est, qui s'y fie."

We sat by the firelight in the old library of Kerton Manor. The dreary January evening was closing in, with a sharp sleet lashing the windows and rattling on their diamond panes, but the gleams from the great burning logs lighted up the dark crimson cushions of Utrecht and the polished walnut panels so changefully and enticingly that no one had the heart to think of candles.

All the younger members of the party were a.s.sembled there, with Mrs.

Bellasys to play propriety. It was her mission to be chaperon in ordinary to her daughter and her daughter's friends, and she went through with it, admirable in her patient self-denial. May they be reckoned to her credit hereafter--those long hours, when she sat sleepy, weary, uncomplaining, with an aching head but a stereotyped smile.

Let us speak gently of these maternal martyrs, manoeuvring though they be. If they have erred, they have suffered. I knew once a lady with a lot of six, nubile, but not attractive, all with a decided bias toward Terpsich.o.r.e and Hymen. Fancy what she must have endured, with those plain young women round her, always clamoring for partners, temporary or permanent, like fledglings in a nest for food. Clever and unscrupulous as she was--they called her the "judicious Hooker"--she must have been conscious of her utter inability to satisfy them. She knew, too, that if, by any dispensation, one were removed, five daughters of the horse-leech would still remain, with ravenous appet.i.tes unappeased. Yet the poor old bird was cheerful, and sometimes, after supper, would chirp quite merrily. _Honneur au courage malheureux._ Let us stand aside in the cloak-room, and salute her as she pa.s.ses out with all the honors of war.

Mrs. Bellasys was a little woman, who always reminded me of a certain tropical monkey--name unknown. She wore her hair bushily on each side of her small face, just like the said intelligent animal, and had the same eager, rather frightened way of glancing out of her beady black eyes, accompanied by a quick turning of the head when addressed. She had her full share of troubles in her time, but she took them all contentedly--not to say complacently--as part of the day's work. Her husband was not a model of fidelity, nor, indeed, of any of the conjugal or cardinal virtues. He was a sort of Maelstrom, into which fair fortunes and names were sucked down, only emerging in unrecognizable fragments. His own would have gone too, doubtless; but he had been lucky at play for a long time--too constantly so, some said--and a pistol bullet cut him short before he had half spent his wife's money, so that she was left comfortably off, and her daughter was a fair average heiress. She had long ago abdicated the government in favor of Flora, who treated her well on the whole, _en bonne princesse_.

It is an invariable rule that, if there is a delicate subject which we determine beforehand to avoid, this particular one is sure imperceptibly to creep into the conversation.

Mr. Bruce was to arrive before dinner, an event which we guessed would not add materially to the comfort of two of our party (how silent those two were in their remote corner where the firelight never came), so of course we found ourselves talking of ill-a.s.sorted marriages.

"You count _mesalliances_ among such?" Guy asked, at length. "Yes, you are right; but I know a case where 'a man's being balked in his intention to degrade himself' ruined him for life. Ralph Mohun told me of it. It was a nine-days' wonder in Vienna soon after he joined the Imperial Cuira.s.siers. A Bohemian count flourished there then--a great favorite with every one, for he was frank and generous, like most boys well-born and of great possessions, who have only seen things in general on the sunny side. While down at his castle for the shooting, he fell in love with the daughter of one of his foresters. The man was a dull, brutal cur, and, when drunk, especially savage. His daughter was rarely beautiful; at all events, the count, a good judge, thought her peerless.

"He meant fairly by the girl from the first, and promised her marriage, actually intending to keep his word. Still there were arrangements to be made before he could introduce such a novel element into blood that for centuries had been pure as the _sangue azzura_. He went up to Vienna for that purpose, leaving his design a profound secret to all his dependents. If these thought about it at all, they probably believed their master's intentions to be--like d.i.c.k Harcourt's toward the Irish lady--'strictly dishonorable.'

"One night during his absence shrieks came from the cottage where the forester lived alone with his daughter. Those who heard them made haste; but it was a desolate spot, far from any other dwelling, and they came too late.

"They found the girl lying in her blood, not a feature of her pretty face recognizable. Near her were the b.u.t.t of a gun shivered, and her father senselessly drunk. He had evidently finished the bottle after beating her to death.

"Whether it was merely an outbreak of his stupid ferocity, or if she had exasperated him by her threats and taunts, for she was of a haughty spirit, poor child! and perhaps rather elevated by the thought of the coming coronet, will never be known. The murderer was in no state to make a confession, and he remained obstinately silent in prison till his lord's return."

"How very horrible!" Mrs. Bellasys cried out, shuddering; "was not the count very angry?"

"Well, he _was_ rather vexed," replied Guy, coolly. "They are high justiciaries on their own lands, those great Bohemian barons, and so he gave the forester a fair trial. It was soon over; the man denied nothing, only whining out, in excuse, that he thought his daughter was dishonored. The shadow of death was closing round him, and he was nearly mad with fear.

"The old steward saw a strange sort of smile twist his master's white, quivering lips when he heard this, but he never said a word. I imagine he thought to reveal his purpose now that it was crushed too great a sacrifice even to clear the dead girl's fair fame; perhaps, though, he could not trust his voice, for he did not announce the sentence in words, but wrote it down: his hand shook very much, and it never carried a full gla.s.s unspilled to his mouth again.

"The court broke up at midday, and the man went straight, unconfessed, to the place of his punishment. They tied him to the tree nearest his own door, and the count sat by while he howled his life out under the lash. He was hardly dead by sundown."

"It was revenge, not justice," Mrs. Bellasys said, more firmly than was her wont. I saw the quick, impatient movement of her daughter's little foot; she did not appreciate her mother's moralities.

The answer came in the deepest of Livingstone's deep, stern tones.

"He was no saint, but a man, and a very miserable one; he acted according to his light, and in his despair caught at the weapon that was nearest to his hand. After all, the blood of a base, brutal hound, take it in what fashion you will, is a poor compensation for one life cut short in agony, and another blasted utterly.

"Mohun knew the count's family. Some of them, maiden aunts I suppose, were devotees of the first order: these came in person, or sent their pet priests, to argue with him on his unchristian habits of sullen solitude. The men of his old set came too, to laugh him out of the horrors. Saint and sinner got the same answer--a shake of the head, a curse, a threat if he were not left alone, growled out between deep draughts of strong Moldavian wine. They went, and were wise; for his pistols lay always beside him--in case his servants offended him, or if he should take a sudden fancy to suicide--and the shaking finger could have pulled a trigger still.

"After a little he left Vienna, shut himself up in his castle, and would see no one.

"In England they would have tried at the '_de lunatico_' statute; but his next of kin left him in peace, biding their time as patiently as they could. They had not to wait long; in four years a good const.i.tution broke up, suddenly at last, and the count exchanged stupor for a sleep with his fathers, without benefit of clergy. Perhaps they would not have given him absolution, for he died certainly not in charity with all men."

"I don't know," Mrs. Bellasys objected, with a timid obstinacy; "I can not argue with you; but I am sure it was very wrong."

I struck in to the meek little woman's rescue.

"That's right, Mrs. Bellasys, don't let him put you down with the high hand; it's always his way when truth is against him; but I never knew him break down a stubborn fact yet."

Guy turned upon me directly.

"Frank, I have often remarked in you, with pain, quite a feminine propensity to theorize. Women _will_ do it. My dear Mrs. Bellasys, don't look so dreadfully like an accusing angel about to bring me to book; you know I am a hopeless heretic. They get up a sort of _Memoria Technica_ in early youth, and it clings to them all their life through. If they go astray, they never cease proclaiming aloud that 'they know it's very wrong;' though eminently unpractical, they think it due to themselves to pet certain abstract truths (circ.u.mstances don't affect them in the least), like that priestess of Cotytto, who said to the magistrate, through her tears, 'I may have been unfortunate, but I've always been respectable!' Sometimes principle gets the pull over pa.s.sion, but, in such a case, regrets come as often afterward as remorse does in the reverse. I was reading a French story the other day--" He checked himself with a laugh. "Bah! I am in the prosaic vein, it seems, anecdoting like the old knave of clubs."

"Will you go on?" Flora said, leaning over toward him, her eyes glittering in the firelight.

The thrill in her voice--strangely contagious it was--told how much she was interested. I do not wonder at it. There was only one man on earth for whom she had ever really cared--he sat beside her then--and, I believe, what attracted her most in him was the daring disregard of opinions, conventionalities, and more sacred things yet, which carried him on straight to the accomplishment of his thought or purpose. In those days, if either were an obstacle, he flinched no more before a great moral law than at a big fence.

"Well," Guy went on, "it is the simple history of Fernande, an _ange dechue_ of the Quartier Breda. She had formed a connection with a man who suited her perfectly in every way, and they went on in happy immorality, till she found out that Maurice had a wife somewhere, a very charming person, who loved him dearly; perhaps she thought that the possession of two such affections by one man was _de luxe_; at all events, she cut him at once, refusing consistently to see him again.

Maurice, after trying all other means to move her in vain, resorted to the expedient of a brain fever. When his wife and mother saw him very near his end, they sent for Fernande as a last resource. They ought to have preferred death to dishonor, of course; but, my dear Mrs. Bellasys, they were not strong-minded. What would you have? There are women and women.

"She came and nursed him faithfully; when he got better, though still very weak, she took advantage of his unprotected position to inflict on him the longest lectures, replete with good sense and good feeling, as to his conjugal duties, proprieties, and so forth. He gave in at last, on the principle of 'any thing for a quiet life,' and promised to behave himself like a decent head of a family. When the balance of power was thoroughly re-established, she left him, first entreating him, when he found himself really in love with his wife, and happy, to write and tell her so. This was to be her reward, you know. The others went to Italy, Fernande to a place she had in Brittany, where she put herself on a strict _regime_ of penitence, attending matins regularly, and doing as much good in her neighborhood as Lady Bountiful, or--my mother. In about a twelvemonth the letter came; Maurice was devoted to his wife, and great on the point of domestic felicity. Then Fernande went into her oratory and prayed. What do you think was the substance of her prayer?"

"That she might go mad or die," was the quick answer: it came from Flora Bellasys.

"How good of you," Guy said, "to let me finish that long story, when you knew it by heart."

I think no ear but his and mine caught the whisper--"I never read or heard of it till now."

He bent his head in a.s.sent, as if the intelligence did not surprise him much, and then spoke suddenly,

"Charley, will you make an observation? You have been displaying that incontestable talent of yours for silence long enough."

Very seldom was Forrester taken by surprise, but this time his reply was not ready. There was an embarra.s.sing pause, broken by a _Deus ex machina_,--the butler announcing that Mr. Bruce had arrived, and was in the drawing-room.

CHAPTER XI.

"And now thou knowest thy father's will, All that thy s.e.x hath need to know: 'Twas mine to teach obedience still-- The way to love thy lord may show."

From that dark distant corner I heard a sigh, ending in a nervous catching of the breath, and then a muttered word unpleasantly like an oath, as Forrester sprang to his feet.