After witnessing the frightful death by which Jacques Ferrand atoned for the heinous offences of his past life, Rodolph had returned home deeply agitated and affected. After passing a long and sleepless night, he sent to summon Sir Walter Murphy, in order to relieve his overcharged heart by confiding to this tried and trusty friend the overwhelmingly painful discovery of the preceding evening relative to Fleur-de-Marie. The honest squire was speechless with astonishment; he could well understand the death-blow this must be to the prince's best affections, and as he contemplated the pale, careworn countenance of his unhappy friend, whose red, swollen eyes and convulsed features amply bespoke the agony of his mind, he ransacked his brain for some gleam of comfort, and his invention for words of hope and comfort.
"Take courage, my lord," said he at last, drying his eyes, which, spite of all his accustomed coolness, he had not been able to prevent from overflowing, "take courage; yours is indeed an infliction, one that mocks at all vain attempts at consolation; it is deep, lasting, and incurable!"
"You are right; what I felt yesterday seems as nothing to my sense of misery to-day."
"Yesterday, my lord, you were stunned by the blow that fell on you, but as your mind dwells more calmly on it, so does the future seem more dark and dispiriting. I can but say, rouse yourself, my lord, to bear it with courage, for it is beyond all attempts at consolation."
"Yesterday the contempt and horror I felt for that woman,—whom may the Great Being pardon, before whose tribunal she now stands,—mingled with surprise, disgust, and terror, occasioned by her hideous conduct, repressed those bursts of despairing tenderness I can no longer restrain in your sympathising presence, my faithful friend. I fear not to indulge the natural emotions of my heart, and my hitherto pent-up tears may now freely vent themselves. Forgive my weakness, and excuse my thus cowardly shrinking from the trial I am called upon to endure, but it seems to have riven my very heart-strings, and to have left me feeble as an infant! Oh, my child! My loved, my lost child! Long must these scalding tears flow ere I can forget you!"
"Ah, my lord, weep on, for your loss is indeed irreparable!"
"What joy to have atoned to her for all the wretchedness with which her young days have been clouded! What bliss to have unfolded to her the happy destiny that was to recompense her for all her past sorrows! And, then, I should have used so much care and precaution in opening her eyes to the brilliant lot that was to succeed her miserable youth, for the tale, if told too abruptly, might have been too much for her delicate nerves to sustain; but, no, I would by degrees have revealed to her the history of her birth, and prepared her to receive me as her father!"
Then, again bursting into an agony of despair, Rodolph continued: "But what avails all that I would have done, when I am tortured by the cruel reflection that, when I had my child all to myself during the ill-fated day I conducted her to the farm, when she so innocently displayed the rich treasures of her pure and heavenly nature, no secret voice whispered to me that in her I beheld my cherished and lamented daughter? I might have prevented this dreadful calamity by keeping her with me instead of sending her to Madame Georges. Oh, if I had, I should have been spared my present sufferings, and needed only to have opened my arms and folded her to my heart as my newly found treasure,—more really great and noble by the beauty of her heart and mind, and perhaps more worthy to fill the station to which I should raise her, than if she had always been reared in opulence and with a knowledge of her rank! I alone am to blame for her death; but mine is an accursed existence. I seem fated to trample on every duty,—a bad son and a bad father!"
Murphy felt that grief such as Rodolph's admitted of no ordinary consolation. He did not therefore attempt to interrupt its violence by any hackneyed phrases or promises of comfort he well knew could never be realised.
After a long silence, Rodolph resumed, in an agitated voice: