So saying, Rodolph left the lodge. The results of his visit to the house in the Rue du Temple were highly important, both as regarded the solution of the deep mystery he so ardently desired to unravel, and also as affording a wide field for the exercise of his earnest endeavours to do good and to prevent evil. After mature calculation, he considered himself to have achieved the following results:
First, he had ascertained that Mlle. Rigolette was in possession of the address of Germain, the Schoolmaster's son. Secondly, a young female, who, from appearances, might unhappily be the Marquise d'Harville, had made an appointment with the commandant for the morrow,—perhaps to her own utter ruin and disgrace; and Rodolph had (as we have before mentioned) numerous reasons for wishing to preserve the honour and peace of one for whom he felt so lively an interest as he took in all concerning M. d'Harville. An honest and industrious artisan, crushed by the deepest misery, was, with his whole family, about to be turned into the streets through the means of Bras Rouge. Further, Rodolph had undesignedly caught a glimpse of an adventure in which the charlatan César Bradamanti (possibly Polidori) and a female, evidently of rank and fashion, were the principal actors. And, finally, La Chouette, having lately quitted the hospital, where she had been since the affair in the Allée des Veuves, had reappeared on the stage, and was evidently engaged in some underhand proceedings with the fortune-teller and female money-lender who occupied the second floor of the house.
Having carefully noted down all these particulars, Rodolph returned to his house, Rue Plumet, deferring till the following day his visit to the notary, Jacques Ferrand.
It will be no doubt fresh in the memory of our readers, that on this same evening Rodolph was engaged to be present at a grand ball given by the ambassador of ——. Before following our hero in this new excursion, let us cast a retrospective glance on Tom and Sarah,—personages of the greatest importance in the development of this history.
CHAPTER XXV.
TOM AND SARAH.
Sarah Seyton, widow of Count Macgregor, and at this time thirty-six or thirty-seven years of age, was of an excellent Scotch family, daughter of a baronet, and a country gentleman. Beautiful and accomplished, an orphan at seventeen years old, she had left Scotland with her brother, Thomas Seyton of Halsbury. The absurd predictions of an old Highland nurse had excited almost to madness the two leading vices in Sarah's character,—pride and ambition; the destiny predicted for her, and in which she fully believed, was of the highest order,—in fact, sovereign rank. The prophecy had been so often repeated, that the young Scotch girl eventually fully credited its fulfilment; and she constantly repeated to herself, to bear out her ambitious dream, that a fortune-teller had thus promised a crown to the handsome and excellent creature who afterwards sat on the throne of France, and who was queen as much by her graces and her kind heart as others have been by their grandeur and majesty.
Strange to say, Thomas Seyton, as superstitious as his sister, encouraged her foolish hopes, and resolved on devoting his life to the realisation of Sarah's dream,—a dream as dazzling as it was deceptive. However, the brother and sister were not so blind as to believe implicitly in this Highland prophecy, and to look absolutely for a throne of the first rank in a splendid disdain of secondary royalties or reigning principalities; on the contrary, so that the handsome Scotch lassie should one day encircle her imperial forehead with a sovereign crown, the haughty pair agreed to condescend to shut their eyes to the importance of the throne they coveted. By the assistance of the Almanach de Gotha for the year of grace 1819, Seyton arranged, before he left Scotland, a sort of synopsis of the ages of all the kings and ruling powers in Europe then unmarried.