“I was right. She did not appear the next morning at breakfast, nor the entire day after. The following day the same; but in the evening came a few lines written with a pencil, saying she wished to see me. I went;—but I cannot tell you. My very heart is bursting as I think of her, as she sat up in her bed; her long, dark hair falling in heavy masses over her shoulders, and her darker eyes flashing with a brightness that seemed like wandering intellect. She fell upon my neck and cried; her tears ran down my cheek, and her sobs shook me. I know not what I said: but I remember that she agreed to everything I had arranged for her; she even smiled a sickly smile as I spoke of what an ornament she would be to the belle cour,—and we parted.
“That was the last good-night I ever wished her. The next day she was received at Court, and I was ordered to Normandy; thence I was sent to Boulogne, and soon after to Ireland.”
“But you have written to her,—you have heard from her?”
“Alas! no. I have written again and again; but either she has never received my letters, or she will not answer them.”
The tone of sorrow he concluded in left no room for any effort at consolation, and we were silent; at last he took my hand in his, and as his feverish fingers pressed it, he said,—“'T is a sad thing when we work the misery of those for whose happiness we would have shed our heart's blood.”
CHAPTER X. THE CHURCHYARD
The excitement caused by the mere narration of his sister's suffering weighed heavily on De Meudon's weak and exhausted frame. His thoughts would flow in no other channel; his reveries were of home and long past years; and a depression far greater than I had yet witnessed settled down upon his jaded spirits.
“Is not my present condition like a just retribution on my ambitious folly?” was his continued reflection. And so he felt it. With a Frenchman's belief in destiny, he regarded the failure of all his hopes, and the ruin of the cause he had embarked in, as the natural and inevitable consequences of his own ungenerous conduct; and even reproached himself for carrying his evil fortune into an enterprise which, without him, might have been successful. These gloomy forebodings, against which reason was of no avail, grew hourly upon him, and visibly influenced his chances of recovery.
It was a sad spectacle to look on one who possessed so much of good, so many fair and attractive qualities, thus wasting away without a single consolation he could lay to his bruised and wounded spirit. The very successes he once gloried to remember, now only added bitterness to his fallen state. To think of what he had been, and look on what he was, was his heaviest affliction; and he fell into deep, brooding melancholy, in which he scarcely spoke, but sat looking at vacancy, waiting as it were for death.