The Forsaken Inn Part 29

This noon I took down the sign which has swung for twenty years over my front door. "Happy-Go-Lucky" is scarcely the name for an inn accursed by so many horrors.

FEBRUARY 3, 1792.

This week I have fulfilled the threat of years ago. I have had the oak parlor and its hideous adjunct torn from my house.

Now, perhaps, I can sleep.

MARCH 16.

News from Honora. The distant relative who succeeded to the estates and the t.i.tle of the Marquis de la Roche-Guyon has fallen a victim to the guillotine. Would this have been the fate of Honora's husband had he forsaken her and returned home? There is reason to believe it. At all events, she finds herself greatly comforted by this news for the sacrifice which her husband made to his love, and no longer regrets the exile to which he has been forced to submit for her sake. Wonderful, wonderful Providence! I view its workings with renewed awe every day.

SEPTEMBER 5, 1795.

I have been from home. I have been on a visit to New York. I have tasted of change, of brightness, of free and cheerful living, and I can settle down now in this old and fast-decaying inn with something else to think about than ruin and fearful retribution.

I have been visiting Madame De Fontaine. She wished me to come, I think, that I might see how amply her married life had fulfilled the promise of her courtship days. Though she and her n.o.ble husband live in peaceful retirement, and without many of the appurtenances of wealth, they find such resources of delight in each other's companionship that it would be hard for the most exacting witness of their mutual felicity to wish them any different fate, or to desire for them any wider field of social influence.

The marquis--I shall always call him thus--has found a friend in General Washington, and though he is never seen at the President's receptions, or mingles his voice in the councils of his adopted country, there are evidences constantly appearing of the confidence reposed in him by this great man, which cannot but add to the exile's contentment and satisfaction.

Honora has developed into a grand beauty. The melancholy which her unhappy memories have necessarily infused into her countenance have given depth to her expression, which was always sweet, and frequently touching. She looks like a queen, but like a queen who has known not only grief, but love. There is nothing of despair in her glance, rather a lofty hope, and when her affections are touched, or her enthusiasm roused, she smiles with such a heavenly brightness in her countenance, that I think there is no fairer woman in the world, as I am a.s.sured there is none worthier.

Her husband agrees with me in this opinion, and is so happy that she said to me one day:

"I sometimes wonder how my heart succeeds in holding the joy which Heaven has seen fit to grant me. In it I read the forgiveness of G.o.d for the unutterable sins of my parents; and though the shadows will come, and do come, whenever I think upon the past, or see a face which, like yours, recalls memories as bitter as ever overwhelmed an innocent girl in her first youth, I find that with every year of love and peaceful living the darkness grows less, as if, somewhere in the boundless heavens, the mercy of G.o.d was making itself felt in the heart of her who once called herself my mother."

And hearing her speak thus, I felt my own breast lose something of the oppression which had hitherto weighed it down. And as the days pa.s.sed, and I experienced more and more of the true peace that comes with perfect love and perfect trust, I found my tears turned to rejoicing and the story of my regrets into songs of hope.

And so I have come back comforted and at rest. If there are yet ghosts haunting the old inn, I do not see them, and though its walls are dismantled, its custom gone, and its renown a thing of the past, I can still sit on its gra.s.s-grown doorstep and roam through its fast-decaying corridors without discovering any blacker shadow following in my wake than that of my own figure, bent now with age, and only held upright by the firmness of the little cane with which I strive to give aid to my tottering and uncertain steps.

The grace of G.o.d has fallen at last upon the Happy-Go-Lucky Inn.

[Ill.u.s.tration]

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