"My son, mount your horse, take your wife on the crupper, and let us depart! We have escaped a double danger," said Salaun, who was just set free, and who led by the bridle both his own mount and Nominoë's. But Nominoë, instead of obeying his father, fixed upon Tina a look of utter distress, and cried in heartrending accents:
"Adieu! Adieu to you all! Never will you see me again!"
With these words Nominoë leaped upon his horse with a bound, turned its head in the opposite direction, and, belaboring its flanks with his spurs, dashed up the bank at a gallop. He cleared the hedge, reached the skirt of the forest of Mezlean with mad rapidity, and disappeared within the wood.
CHAPTER V.
THE MYSTERY AT PLOUERNEL.
The Castle of Plouernel is located not far from Nantes on one side nor from Rennes on the other, and is one of the most magnificent residential palaces of France. It dates back to the Renaissance period, and presents a finished specimen of that style of architecture, the fancy of which is infinite and charming. Here, cupolas, elegant as Oriental minarets, contrast vividly with the pointed angle of high roofs; yonder, wide-arched galleries, resembling aerial bridges thrown over space, join one set of buildings to another; here, balustraded terraces seem embroidered in the living stone. It is a mass of richness and diversity, a dazzling efflorescence of architectural ornamentation from the exterior of the chimneys, each of which is a masterpiece of execution, down to the chimerical gutter-spouts and the stone setting of the doors and windows, sculptured in human figures, flowers, birds and the heads of monstrous animals, real and fabulous. And yet, Oh! prodigy of art, the inexhaustible variety of details, the fantastic irregularity of the different parts of the edifice merge into a whole that is instinct with loftiness and grace. Finally, about half a league away from that dazzling fairy palace—the façade of which runs over with sculptured designs gilded by the slanting rays of the sun, and brilliantly harmonizes with the azure of the sky above and the verdure of the woods round about—the eye catches on the crest of an arid and rocky ridge that rises almost perpendicularly, the ruins of the ancient feudal manor of Plouernel, semi-hidden under a vast wrappage of ivy. The indestructible dungeon only has defied the tooth of time. Its square bulk, blackened by the ages, rises to a height of over a hundred and twenty feet, still crowned by its old crenelated battlements and machicolations, and flanked at either angle with a turret from which the men on watch kept an eye upon the road and the river, the former of which wound its way to the right, the other to the left of the foot of the rock, at the summit of which, perched like a vulture's nest, rose the seigniorial lair.
An avenue of centennarian elms, planted in four files, led up to the façade of the Castle of Plouernel, which rose from a wide and semi-circular "court of honor," surrounded by a colonnade surmounted by terraces. The elegant architectural hemicycle masked the stables, the kennels, the falcon cages and other out-buildings of the castle, and was, in turn, surmounted by an impost on which, woven into implements of war and of the chase artistically sculptured, was seen the coat-of-arms of Plouernel—three eagle's talons sable on a field gules—and, rising from among gracefully executed ornamentations, the lettering "Guy de Plouernel," the builder of the palace in the year 1559, according to the lapidary date graven above the armorial bearings.
On this day, the bustle among a large number of valets, grooms, cooks and huntsmen who scurried over the court of honor on their way to one or other of the out-buildings, announced that the seigneur of the place was in the castle. Several soldiers dressed in the red uniform, and two sentinels on guard at the foot of the winding staircase, further indicated that the Marquis of Chateauvieux, the colonel of the Crown Regiment, was the guest of the Count of Plouernel, the latter having offered to his friend the colonel to quarter two companies of his soldiers in the numerous dependencies of the castle. Finally, at a distance, stablemen were seen putting some horses through their paces upon the fine grass of a lawn, beyond which, and as far as the eye reached, extended the tree-covered park, dominated to the east by the rocky ridge, at the top of which the imposing ruins and black dungeon of the ancient manor of Plouernel contrasted strikingly against the blue of the sky.
The interior of this modern castle corresponded with its sumptuous exterior. Numerous servitors in livery crowded the marble-slabbed vestibule, to the left of which ran a gallery containing the portraits of the Seigneurs Neroweg of Plouernel. The oldest of these paintings, belonging to the Eighth Century, bearing unmistakable mark of Byzantine stiffness of execution, represented a Neroweg lady, Meroflede, the Abbess of Meriadek in Plouernel, of the days of Charles Martel. But seeing that the origin of this family harked back to the conquest of Gaul by the Franks, the father of the present Count, yielding to his pride of race, had supplied the lack of authentic portraits antedating the Eighth Century, by consulting his genealogy, and causing the lineaments of those of his ancestors, who lived during the first five centuries of the Frankish monarchy, to be retraced. Though not accurate portraits of their subjects, these paintings at least reproduced the several costumes of those past epochs. The first Neroweg, a leude of Clovis and count of the country of Auvergne by right of his sword, was represented in all the barbarism of the savage accoutrement of that Frankish warrior—hair of a coppery hue tied at the top of his head with a leather thong, and falling down loose over his back like the tail of a horse; long, red moustaches; clean shaven chin; and savage mien. The bust was half covered by a sort of dalmatica made of an animal's hide, and the warrior leaned his hand upon his "framee," or battle weapon. Among this long succession of portraits was one empty frame wrapped in black crepe. The absent picture was that of Colonel Plouernel, an honorable man, and one of the most valiant captains in the Protestant armies of the Sixteenth Century. But the colonel's great-grandson had struck him out of the family line, meaning thereby to brand in his person the Huguenot, a rebel to his King and to the Church of Rome. The portrait gallery led to a salon, on the other side of which was the apartment of Madam Tremblay, the aunt of the Count of Plouernel.
The Marchioness was still the woman of the court which she was at the time of her journey to The Hague. She was conversing confidentially with Abbot Boujaron, who seemed to be deeply preoccupied. The two had not yet wholly gotten over the experiences of what they called their "accursed journey to Holland," where they came near being torn to pieces, but where they had, they said, "at least the satisfaction of knowing at first hand of the massacre of the two republican heretics, those De Witt brothers."
It was a narrow escape, but the worthy pair succeeded in eluding the popular fury that exploded against the French party by leaving The Hague, again reaching the port of Delft—thanks to Serdan, who, nevertheless they held to be a fellow of felonious instincts—and there embarking on a neutral vessel bound for Havre, where they landed without further incident. From Havre the two went to Versailles, Mademoiselle Plouernel's flat refusal to accompany them to England having put an end to their project of a voyage to that country. Besides, the young lady's health was so much impaired that they would have been compelled to give up that journey even had she not opposed it. They took her along to Versailles.