The count’s face was grave and sad as he replied:
“Philip, you say true, but you can not tell what it is to me to harrow up those recollections. Still, it must be done, for I have promised.”
Then turning to the young people, who were respectfully listening, he addressed them:
“Adrian Schuyler, I have trusted thee as I never have trusted living man since—since—something happened in my past life. What that was, thou shalt learn. I trusted thee, not alone for thine honest face, but for the name thou bearest. Thy cousin Philip and I were once fellow-students and travelers, and I never knew one of his blood that was a traitor. Diana, my daughter, thou hast, for many a year, held more fear than love to thy father. Now thou shalt learn the cause that drove me to the wilderness, and made of me, once as frank as the day, the gloomy hater of my kind that I was before Adrian came to us, to bring light from the outer world.”
Then, while his audience gathered round him, hanging with intense interest on his words, the count told them the story of his life, which we shall epitomize as briefly as possible.
Alphonse de Cavannes, count in France, baron in Germany, and even duke of a small Italian province, was, at thirty, an object of envy to half of Europe, for his riches and social position. Descended from a family which united the best bloods of three kingdoms, he inherited vast estates in all, greatest of all in France. Such was the frank generosity of his nature, that his parasites were numerous, but to none of them had he shown so much kindness as to a young English officer, a scion of the noble house of Oxford, Pierce Harley by name. This youth had been taken prisoner by the count in the famous battle of Fontenoy, thirty-two years before the date of our tale, and his captor, instead of leaving him, as he well might have done, to the fate of an officer on parole, on scanty pay, had taken him into his own house in Paris, and treated him with the kindness of a brother. He had been induced to this course chiefly from the finding that Harley was a distant relation of the young Countess de Cavannes, who was, by birth, English, and whom her husband positively adored. Young Harley, then a handsome, athletic young fellow, had professed himself extremely grateful for this kindness. Being a younger son, without fortune, the friendship of the great French lord was of much value to him. When peace was concluded, moreover, instead of allowing Harley to go back to England, the generous count insisted on his resigning his commission, and remaining in France as steward of all De Cavannes’ estates, everywhere treated as the trusted friend of their owner. Harley accepted it, and for twelve years occupied the post, doing exactly as he pleased. It was during this period that Schuyler, then on a visit to Europe, met his old fellow-student, and witnessed, with amazement, the splendor of his establishment. The count was then deep in those expensive scientific experiments to which he owed all his subsequent resources as a conjuror and magician, in company with the celebrated or notorious Count Cagliostro. It was Schuyler who induced the count to pay a visit to America, and Harley managed all the details of the expedition, which was made in princely style. On arrival in America, De Cavannes was so much charmed with the beauty and grandeur of the scenery, that he decided that he would buy an estate near Albany, and spend at least a portion of his time there.
It was only then, after twelve years of apparently faithful service on the part of Harley, that De Cavannes discovered that all was not right in his affairs. Expecting to be able to raise money to purchase in America by a mortgage on his French estates, he found to his surprise and dismay, that every acre of land which he held in Europe was already heavily incumbered. Schuyler, whose keen, solid intellect had from the first led him to suspect maladministration on account of the reckless extravagance he had witnessed, persuaded his friend to go to Europe and make a secret investigation of his affairs in company with himself, leaving Harley in America to put the Albany estate in condition. To do this, the generous American himself secretly advanced the purchase-money for the estate, and undertook the task of lulling Harley’s suspicions, which the open-hearted count was hardly capable of doing, in the first revulsion of suspicion. To be brief, the scheme was carried out. The countess was left in America under charge of the suspected agent, along with the baby Diana, who had been born a few days previous to the discovery of Harley’s monetary faithlessness. Of any thing worse than reckless incapacity the count never suspected him.
The friends went to Europe and found that the trusted friend and petted steward, Pierce Harley, had not only robbed his benefactor for his own benefit, but had actually forged his name to mortgages, so that two-thirds of the count’s income was swallowed up in paying interest on loans of which he had never reaped any benefit.
De Cavannes, once undeceived, was a changed man. With noble magnanimity he would not take advantage of the people who had been victimized by the forgeries. Neither would he continue to pay the interest. He took a middle course, conveying all his estates to a board of his creditors to apply the proceeds to the extinction of the principal of these sums that he had never received, and reserving to himself only enough to repay the generous Schuyler and to supply a year’s expenses for a small household in America. Then he took passage back, and arrived at Albany with Schuyler to find the country in a state of war, and Howe’s expedition to Ticonderoga on foot.
Full of fury at the recent discoveries, he summoned Harley to his presence, informed him in a few stinging words of his estimate of his character, then bid him draw and defend himself. To his surprise, Harley, usually a man of obstinate courage, turned pale, and without a word fled from his presence, while the count, too proud to pursue a wretch so sordid as he deemed him, contented himself with throwing a drinking-cup after him with a force that cut the villain’s head as he went. Then the disdainful noble went to seek his wife, whom he had not yet seen.