“The combat will, then, be a close one,” muttered D'Esmonde. “Grounsell has done this, and it shall cost them dearly. Mark me, Michel—all that the rack and the thumb-screw were to our ancestors, the system of a modern trial realizes in our day. There never was a torture, the invention of man's cruelty, as terrible as cross-examination! I care not that this Dalton should have been as innocent as you are of this crime,—it matters little if his guiltlessness appear from the very outset. Give me but two days of searching inquiry into his life, his habits, and his ways. Let me follow him to his fireside, in his poverty, and lay bare all the little straits and contrivances by which he eked out existence, and maintained a fair exterior. Let me show them to the world, as I can show them, with penury within, and pretension without These disclosures cannot be suppressed as irrelevant,—they are the alleged motives of the crime. The family that sacrifices a child to a hateful alliance——that sells to Austrian bondage the blood of an only son—and consigns to menial labor a maimed and sickly girl, might well have gone a step further in crime.”
“D'Esmonde! D'Esmonde!” cried the other, as he pressed him down into a seat, and took his hand between his own, “these are not words of calm reason, but the outpourings of passion.” The Abbé made no answer, but his chest heaved and fell, and his breath came with a rushing sound, while his eyes glared like the orbs of a wild animal.
“You are right, Michel,” said he at last, with a faint sigh. “This was a paroxysm of that hate which, stronger than all my reason, has actuated me through life. Again and again have I told you that towards these Daltons I bear a kind of instinctive aversion. These antipathies are not to be combated,—there are brave men who will shudder if they see a spider. I have seen a courageous spirit quail before a worm. These are not caprices, to be laughed at,—they are indications full of pregnant meaning, could we but read them aright. How my temples throb!—my head seems splitting. Now leave me, Michel, for a while, and I will try to take some rest.”
CHAPTER XXXV. A TALK OVER BYGONES
It was with a burst of joy that Lady Hester heard the Daltons had arrived. In the wearisome monotony of her daily life, anything to do, anywhere to go, any one to see, would have been esteemed boons of great price; what delight, then, was it to meet those with whom she could converse of “bygone times” and other lands!—“that dear Kate,” whom she really liked as well as it was in her nature to love anything, from whom she now anticipated so much of that gossip, technically called “news,” and into whose confiding heart she longed to pour out her own private woes!
The meeting was indeed affectionate on both sides; and, as Lady Hester was in her most gracious of moods, Frank thought her the very type of amiability, and the old Count pronounced her manners fit for the high ordeal of Vienna itself. Perhaps our reader will be grateful if we leave to his imagination all the changeful moods of grief and joy, surprise, regret, and ecstasy, with which her Ladyship questioned and listened to Kate Dalton's stories; throwing out, from time to time, little reflections of her own, as though incidentally, to show how much wiser years had made her. There are people who ever regard the misfortunes of others as mere key-notes to elicit their own sufferings; and thus, when Kate spoke of Russia, Lady Hester quoted Ireland. Frank's sufferings reminded her of her own “nerves;” and poor Nelly's unknown fate was precisely “the condition of obscurity to which Sir Stafford's cruel will had consigned herself.”
Kate's mind was very far from being at ease, and yet it was with no mean pleasure she found herself seated beside Lady Hester, talking over the past with all that varying emotion which themes of pleasure and sadness call up. Who has not enjoyed the delight of such moments, when, living again bygone days, we laugh or sigh over incidents wherein once as actors we had moved and felt? If time has dimmed our perceptions of pleasure, it has also softened down resentments and allayed asperities. We can afford to forgive so much, and we feel, also, so confident of others' forgiveness, and if regrets do steal over us that these things have passed away forever, there yet lurks the flattering thought that we have grown wiser than we then were. So is it the autobiographies of the fireside are pleasant histories, whose vanities are all pardonable, and whose trifling is never ungraceful! Memory throws such a softened light on the picture, that even bores become sufferable, and we extract a passing laugh from the most tiresome of our quondam “afflictives.”
Had her Ladyship been less occupied with herself and her own emotions, she could not have failed to notice the agitation under which Kate suffered at many of her chance remarks. The levity, too, with which she discussed her betrothal to Midchekoff almost offended her. The truth was, Kate had half forgotten the reckless, unthinking style of her friend's conversation, and it required a little practice and training to grow accustomed to it again.
“Yes, my dear,” she went on, “I have had such trouble to persuade people that it was no marriage at all, but a kind of engagement; and when that horrid Emperor would n't give his consent, of course there was an end of it you may be sure, my sweet child, I never believed one syllable of that vile creature's story about George's picture; but somehow it has got abroad, and that odious Heidendorf goes about repeating it everywhere. I knew well that you never cared for poor dear George! Indeed, I told him as much when he was quite full of admiration for you. It is so stupid in men! their vanity makes them always believe that, if they persist—just persevere—in their attachment, the woman will at last succumb. Now, we have a better sense of these things, and actually adore the man that shows indifference to us,—at least, I am sure that I do. Such letters as the poor boy keeps writing about you! And about five months ago, when he was so badly wounded, and did not expect to recover, he actually made his will, and left you all he had in the world. Oh dear!” said she, with a heavy sigh, “they have generous moments, these men, but they never last; and, by the way, I must ask your advice—though I already guess what it will be—about a certain friend of ours, who has had what I really must call the presumption—for, after all, Kate, I think you 'll agree with me it is a very great presumption,——is it not, dear?”