The next day, after a sleepless night, Eugenie de Merville sent for the Vicomte de Vaudemont.
CHAPTER XIV.
“A silver river small
In sweet accents
Its music vents;
The warbling virginal
To which the merry birds do sing,
Timed with stops of gold the silver string.”
Sir Richard Fanshawe.
One evening, several weeks after the events just commemorated, a stranger, leading in his hand, a young child, entered the churchyard of H——. The sun had not long set, and the short twilight of deepening summer reigned in the tranquil skies; you might still hear from the trees above the graves the chirp of some joyous bird;—what cared he, the denizen of the skies, for the dead that slept below?—what did he value save the greenness and repose of the spot,—to him alike the garden or the grave! As the man and the child passed, the robin, scarcely scared by their tread from the long grass beside one of the mounds, looked at them with its bright, blithe eye. It was a famous plot for the robin—the old churchyard! That domestic bird—“the friend of man,” as it has been called by the poets—found a jolly supper among the worms!
The stranger, on reaching the middle of the sacred ground, paused and looked round him wistfully. He then approached, slowly and hesitatingly, an oblong tablet, on which were graven, in letters yet fresh and new, these words:—
TO THE
MEMORY OF ONE CALUMNIATED AND WRONGED
THIS BURIAL-STONE IS DEDICATED
BY HER SON.
Such, with the addition of the dates of birth and death, was the tablet which Philip Morton had directed to be placed over his mother’s bones; and around it was set a simple palisade, which defended it from the tread of the children, who sometimes, in defiance of the beadle, played over the dust of the former race.
“Thy son!” muttered the stranger, while the child stood quietly by his side, pleased by the trees, the grass, the song of the birds, and reeking not of grief or death,—“thy son!—but not thy favoured son—thy darling—thy youngest born; on what spot of earth do thine eyes look down on him? Surely in heaven thy love has preserved the one whom on earth thou didst most cherish, from the sufferings and the trials that have visited the less-favoured outcast. Oh, mother—mother!—it was not his crime—not Philip’s—that he did not fulfil to the last the trust bequeathed to him! Happier, perhaps, as it is! And, oh, if thy memory be graven as deeply in my brother’s heart as my own, how often will it warn and save him! That memory!—it has been to me the angel of my life! To thee—to thee, even in death, I owe it, if, though erring, I am not criminal,—if I have lived with the lepers, and am still undefiled!” His lips then were silent—not his heart!
After a few minutes thus consumed he turned to the child, and said, gently and in a tremulous voice, “Fanny, you have been taught to pray—you will live near this spot,—will you come sometimes here and pray that you may grow up good and innocent, and become a blessing to those who love you?”