Thaddeus of Warsaw Part 57

"Her lover!" interrupted Lord Harwold, turning on his heel.

"Her defender, sir!" repeated Thaddeus, with a tremendous frown; "and shame and sorrow will pursue that son who requires a stranger to supply his duty."

"Wretch!" cried the earl, forgetting his a.s.sumed loftiness, and advancing pa.s.sionately towards Thaddeus, with his stick held up; "how dare you address such language to an English n.o.bleman?"

"By the right of nature, which holds her laws over all mankind,"

returned Thaddeus, calmly looking on the raised stick. "When an English n.o.bleman forgets that he is a son, he deserves reproach from his meanest va.s.sal."

"You see, my lord," cried Harwold, sliding behind his father, "what we bring on ourselves by harboring these democratic foreigners! Sir,"

added he, addressing himself to Thaddeus, "your dangerous principles shall be communicated to Government. Such traitors ought to hanged."

Sobieski eyed the enraged little lord with contempt; and turning to the earl, who was again going to speak, he said, in an unaltered tone, "I cannot guess, Lord Tinemouth, what is the reason of this attack on me. I came hither by accident; I found the countess ill; and, from respect to her excellent qualities, I remained with her until her eyes were closed forever. She desired to see her daughter before she died,--what human heart could deny a mother such a request?--and Pembroke Somerset, her kinsman, undertook to bring Lady Albina to the Abbey.

"Pembroke Somerset!" echoed the earl. "A pretty guard for my daughter, truly! I have no doubt that he is just such a fellow as his father--just such a person as yourself! I am not to be imposed upon.

I know Lady Tinemouth to have been a disgrace to me, and you to be that German adventurer on whose account I sent her from London."

Shocked at this calumny on the memory of a woman whose fame from any other mouth came as unsullied as purity itself, Thaddeus gazed with horror at the furious countenance of the man whom he believed to be his father. His heart swelled; but not deigning to reply to a charge as unmanly as it was false, he calmly took out of his pocket two letters which the countess had dictated to her husband and her son.

Lord Harwold tore his open, cast his eyes over the first words, then crumpling it in his hand, threw it from him, exclaiming, "I am not to be frightened either by her arts or the falsehoods of the fellows with whom she dishonored her name."

Thaddeus, no longer master of himself, sprang towards his unnatural son, and seized his arm with an iron grasp. "Lord Harwold!" cried he, in a dreadful voice, "were it not that I have some mercy on you for that parent's sake, to whom, like a parricide, you are giving a second death by such murderous slander, I would resent her wrongs at the hazard of your worthless life!"

"My lord! my lord!" cried the trembling Harwold, quaking under the gripe of Thaddeus, and shrinking from the terrible brightness of his eye,--"my lord! my lord, rescue me!"

The earl, almost suffocated with rage, called out, "Ruffian! let go my son!" and again raising his arm, aimed a blow at the head of Thaddeus, who, wrenching the stick out of the foaming lord's hand, snapped it in two, and threw the pieces out of the open window.

Lord Harwold took this opportunity to ring the bell violently, on which summons two of his servants entered the room.

"Now, you low-born, insolent scoundrel," cried the disarmed earl, stamping with his feet, and pointing to the men who stood at the door; "you shall be turned by the neck and heels out of this house.

Richard, James, collar that fellow instantly."

Thaddeus only extended his arm to the men (who were looking confusedly on each other), and calmly said, "If either of you attempt to obey this command of your lord, you shall have cause to repent it."

The men retreated. The earl repeated his orders.

"Rascals! do as I command you, or instantly quit my service. I will teach you," added he, clenching his fist at the count, who stood resolutely and serenely before him, "I will teach you how to behave to a man of high birth."

The footmen were again deterred from approaching by a glance from the intimidating eyes of Thaddeus, who, turning with stern dignity to the storming earl, said, "You can teach me nothing about high birth that I do not already know. Could it be of any independent benefit to a man, then had I not received the taunts and insults which you have dared to cast upon me."

At that moment Dr. Cavendish, having heard a bustle, made his appearance. Amazed at the sight of two strangers, who from their enraged countenances and the proud elevation with which Thaddeus was standing between them, he rightly judged to be the earl and his son, he advanced towards his friend, intending to support him in the attack which he saw was menaced by the violent gestures of these visitors.

"Dr. Cavendish," said Thaddeus, speaking to him as he approached, "your name must be a pa.s.sport to the confidence of any man; I therefore shall gratify the husband of my ever lamented friend by quitting this house; but I delegate to you the office with which she entrusted me. I leave you in charge of her sacred remains, and of the jewels which you will find in her apartment. She desired that half of them might be given with her blessing, to her daughter, and the other half, with her pardon, to her son."

"Tell me. Dr. Cavendish," cried the earl, as Thaddeus was pa.s.sing him to leave the room, "who is that insolent fellow? By heaven, he shall smart for this!"

"Ay, that he shall," rejoined Lord Harwold, "if I have any interest with the Alien-office."

Dr. Cavendish was preparing to speak, when Thaddeus, turning round at this last threat of the viscount, said, "If I did not know myself to be above Lord Harwold's power, perhaps he might provoke me to treat him according to his deserts; but I abjure resentment, while I pity his delusions. For you, my lord," added he, addressing the earl with a less calm countenance, "there is an angel in heaven who pleads against the insults you have uninquiringly and unjustly heaped upon an innocent man!"

Thaddeus disappeared from the apartment while uttering the last word; hastening from the house and park, he stopped near the brow of the hill, at the porch of his lately peaceful little hotel. The landlady was a sister of John Jacobs, the faithful servant of his lamented friend, and who was then watching the door of the neglected chamber in which the sacred remains of his dear mistress lay, as he would have guarded her life, had the foes who had now destroyed it been still menacing its flickering flame. The worthy couple were also attached to that benevolent lady; and with sad looks, but respectful welcoming, they saw Mr. Constantine re-enter their humble home, and a.s.sured him of its retirement as long as he might wish to abide in the neighborhood of the Abbey. Any prospect of repose promised elysium to him; and with hara.s.sed and torn nerves he took possession of his apartment, which looked down the road that led from the old monastic structure to the town of Grantham. The rapidity of the recent events bewildered his senses, like the illusions of a dream.

He had seen his father, his sister, his brother; and most probably he had parted from them forever!--at least, he hoped he should never again be tortured with the sight of Lord Tinemouth or his son.

"How," thought he, whilst walking up and down his solitary parlor, "could the n.o.ble nature of my mother love such a man? and how could he have held so long an empire over the pure heart he has just now broken."

He could nowhere discern, in the bloated visage and rageful gestures of the earl, any of that beauty of countenance or grace of manners which had alike charmed Therese Sobieski and the tender Acleliza.

Like those hideous chasms which are dug deep in the land by the impetuous sweep of a torrent, the course of violent pa.s.sions leaves vast and irreparable traces on the features and in the soul. So it was with Lord Tinemouth.

"How legibly does vice or virtue," e.j.a.c.u.l.a.t.ed Thaddeus, "write itself on the human face! The earl's might once have been fine, but the lineaments of selfishness and sin have degraded every part of him.

Mysterious Providence! Can he be my father--can it be his blood that is now running in my veins? Can it be his blood that rises at this moment with detestation against him?"

Before the sun set, Sobieski was aroused from these painful soliloquies by still more painful feelings. He saw from his window a hea.r.s.e driving at full speed up the road that ascended to the Abbey, and presently return at a slower pace, followed by a single black coach.

"Inhuman men!" exclaimed he, while pursuing with his eyes the tips of the sable plumes as the meagre cavalcade of mourners wound down the hill; "could you not allow this poor corse a little rest? Must her persecution be extended to the grave? Must her cold relics be insulted, be hurried to the tomb without reverence--without decency?"

The filial heart that uttered this thought also of his own injured mother, and shrunk with horror at this climax of the earl's barbarity. Dr. Cavendish entered with a flushed countenance. He spoke indignantly of the act he still saw from the window, which he denounced as a sacrilege against the dead. "Not four-and-twenty hours since," cried he, "she expired! and she is hurried into the cold bosom of the earth, like a criminal, or a creature whose ashes a moment above ground might spread a pestilence. Oh, how can that sweet victim, Lady Albin, share such peccant blood?"

Thaddeus, whose soul had just writhed under a similar question with regard to himself, could little bear the repet.i.tion and interrupted the good physician by tenderly inquiring how she had borne that so abrupt removal of her mother's remains.

"With mute anguish," returned Dr. Cavendish, in a responding, calmer voice of pity; "and though I had warned her father that the shock of so suddenly tearing his daughter from such beloved relics might peril her own life, he continued obdarate; and putting her into his travelling chariot in a state of insensibility, along with her maid, in a few minutes afterwards I saw him set off in a hired post-chaise, accompanied by his detestable son, loaded with more than one curse, muttered by the honest rustics. Only servants followed in that mourning coach."

In the midst of this depressing conversation a courier arrived from Stamford to Dr. Cavendish, recalling him immediately to return thither, the invalid there having sustained an alarming relapse. The good doctor, sincerely reluctant to quit Thaddeus (whom he still knew by no other name than Constantine), ordered the dispatch-chaise to the hotel door. When it was announced, he shook hands with the now lonely survivor of his departed friend in this stranger land, requested that he might hear from him before he left that part of the country for London again, and bidding him many cordial adieus, continued to look out of the back window of the carriage, until the faint light of the moon and the receding glimmer of the village candles finally hid the little spot that yet contained this young and sadly-stricken exile from his lingering eyes.

CHAPTER XLIII.

THE OLD VILLAGE HOTEL.

For the first time during many nights, Thaddeus slept soundly; but his dreams were disturbed, and he awoke from them at an early hour, unrefreshed and in much fever.

The simple breakfast which his attentive host and hostess set before him was scarcely touched. Their nicely-dressed dinner met with the same fate. He was ill, and possessed neither appet.i.te nor spirits to eat. The good people being too civil to intrude upon him, he sat alone in his window from eight o'clock (at which hour he had arisen) until the cawing of the rooks, as they returned to the Abbey-woods, reminded him of the approach of evening. He was uneasy at the absence of Somerset, not so much on his own account, as on that of Sir Robert, whose increased danger might have occasioned this delay; however, he hoped otherwise. Longing earnestly for a temporary sanctuary under his friend's paternal roof, in the quiet of its peace and virtues, he trusted that the sympathy of Pembroke, the only confidant of his past sorrows, would tend to heal his recent wounds (though the nature of the most galling, he felt, must ever remain unrevealed even to him!) and so fit him, should it be required, to yet further brave the buffets of an adverse fate. Nor was Miss Beaufort forgotten. If ever one idea more than another sweetened the bitterness of his reflections, it was the remembrance of Mary Beaufort. Whenever her image rose before him--whether he were standing in the lonely clay with folded arms, in vacant gaze on the valley beneath, or when lying on his watchful pillow he opened his aching eyes to the morning light-still, as her angel figure presented itself to his mind, he did indeed sigh, but it was a sigh laden with balm; it did not tear his breast like those which had been wrung from him by the hard hand of calamity and insult. It was the soft breath of a hallowed love, which makes man dream of heaven, while he feels sinking to an early grave. Thaddeus felt it delightful to recollect how she had looked on him that day in Hyde Park, when she "bade him take care of his own life, while so devoted to that of his dying friend!" and how she "blessed him in his task," with a voice of tenderness so startlingly sacred to his soul in its accents, that in remembering her words now, when so near the moment of his again seeing and hearing her, his soul expanded towards her, agitated, indeed, but soothed and comforted.

"Sweet Mary!" murmured he, "I shall behold thee once more; I shall again revive under thy kind smile! Oh, it is happiness to know that I owe my liberty to thee, though I may not dare to tell thee so! Yet my swelling heart may cherish the clear consciousness, and, bereaved though I am of all I formerly loved, be indeed blessed while on earth with the heaven-bestowed privilege of loving thee, even in silence and forever! Alas! alas! a man without kindred or a country dare not even wish thee to be his!" A sigh from the depths of his soul closed this soliloquy.

The sight of Pembroke riding through the field towards the little inn, recalled the thoughts of Sobieski to that dear friend alone. He went out to meet him. Mr. Somerset saw him, and putting his horse to a brisk canter, was at his side in a few minutes. Thaddeus asked anxiously about the baronet's health. Pembroke answered with an incoherency devoid of all meaning. Thaddeus looked at him with surprise, but from increased anxiety forbore to repeat the question.

They walked towards the inn; still Pembroke did not appear to recover himself, and his evident absence of mind and the wild rambling of his eyes were so striking, that Thaddeus could have no doubt of some dreadful accident.

As soon as they had entered the little parlor, his friend cast himself into a chair, and throwing off his hat, wiped away the perspiration which, though a cold October evening, was streaming down his forehead. Thaddeus endured a suspense which was almost insupportable.

"What is the direful matter, dear Pembroke? Is any we honor, and love, ill unto death?" His pale face showed that he apprehended it, and he thought it might be Mary.

"No, no," returned Pembroke; "everybody is well, excepting myself and my father, who, I verily believe, has lost his senses; at any rate he will drive me mad."

The manner in which this reply was uttered astonished Thaddeus so much, that he could only gaze with wonder on the convulsed feature of his friend. Pembroke observed his amazement, and laying his hand on his arm, said, "My dear, dear Sobieski! what do I not owe to you?

Good Heaven! how humbled am I in your sight! But there is a Power above who knows how intimately you are woven with every artery of this heart."