"Not by her mother's connivance," replied the marquis. "Her mother loves him as little as you do; and, even were he at the court of France to-morrow, her protest against the marriage would be sufficient to stop it. But, to guard against all danger, and, if possible, to put the mind of a suspicious man at ease, I will tell you that one great cause of my going hence is to prevent this Bernard de Rohan from setting foot within my walls. I know his coming: I know why he comes far better than you do. I have heard his motives and his views within this hour from one who is well acquainted with them, and, if he present himself at my gates, he will find a stern refusal till I return. Then I must see him, but I shall then be prepared. Will this satisfy you? If it do so, tell me at once; for it is high time that I should mount my horse, and quit this place without delay."
Though, in reality, anything but satisfied, the Count de Meyrand expressed his consent to the proposal, determined in his own mind to watch all the proceedings of a confederate whom he could so little trust, even in the dark and tortuous schemes in which their interests were combined. He tried, as he parted from the marquis, to conceal his doubts lest they should betray his purposes; but that worthy gentleman was far too practised a reader of the human heart and human countenance to be so deceived; and when they separated, it was with the full conviction that each would endeavour to deceive and circumvent the other, unless some strong necessity continued to bind them together.
"Now," thought the Marquis de Masseran, as he paused for a moment looking after the Count de Meyrand, "now for this priest. I must have more information from him: more full, more complete. Then what is to be done with him? It might be dangerous to confine him; and yet it were easy to say that he had held treasonable discourses. A fall from the walls might be as good as anything. I will speak with Geronimo about it."
He had been standing with his back towards the castle and his eyes fixed upon the ground while he thus held parley with himself. On the other side of the valley, which was there profound, rose up the mountain, with the road into Piedmont winding along it, at the distance of perhaps a quarter of a mile, to use the ordinary expression, as the crow flies, but fully a mile by the road; and, as he ended his murmuring soliloquy, the Marquis of Masseran looked up in that direction. To his utter surprise and consternation when he did so, he beheld the figure of the priest walking quietly along the highway towards the lower ground of Savoy.
He hastened back to the castle; but he was assured at the gates by all the several persons who were standing there that no one had passed. On examining the doors of the garden, every one of them was found to be closed; and the Marquis of Masseran came to a conclusion, which was not pleasant for a man engaged in his peculiar pursuits, namely, that he was deceived and betrayed by some one of his own household.
CHAPTER VII.
The observation may seem trite, that to every period of life is assigned by the Almighty and Munificent Being, who at our creation adapted to each part of our material form the functions that it was to execute and the labours it was to sustain, either peculiar powers of endurance or counterbalancing feelings, which render the inevitable cares and sorrows apportioned to every epoch of our being lighter and more easy to be borne. The woes of childhood are, in themselves, speedily forgotten. The pains are soon succeeded by pleasures, and care, gnawing care, the rack of after-life, is then unknown. Boyhood, eager, enthusiastic, hopeful boyhood, the age of acquisition and expectation, though it may know from time to time a bitter pang, scarcely less in its degree than those that afflict mature life, has so many compensating enjoyments, its own sunshine is so bright, the light that shines upon it from the future is so dazzling, that the griefs serve but as a preparation and a warning, too little remembered when once they are past. Old age, with its decay, with the extinction of earthly hopes, with the prospect of the tomb, has also dulled sensibilities that allow us not to feel many of the more painful things of early years. The blunted edge of appetite may not give so keen a zest to pleasure; but the apathy which accompanies it extends to griefs as well as joys, and, if wisely used, is one of the best preparations for a resignation of that state of being which we have tried in the balance of experience and have found wanting; wanting in all that can satisfy a high and ethereal spirit; wanting in all things but its grand purpose of trial for a life to come. But, besides all this, unto that period of old age, thus prepared and admonished for another state, God himself has also given comfort and consolation, a promise and a hope: a promise brighter than all the promises of youth, a hope brighter than all those that have withered away upon our path of life.
There is still another age, however; an age the most perilous, often the most full of pains; an age when the eager aspirations of youth reach out the hand towards fruition; when the great truths of disappointment break upon us; when we first learn the bitter lesson that hope has told us idle tales, that fortune is of fickle favour, that friendships are too often false, that our own hearts do ourselves wrong, that enjoyment itself is often a vanity and often a vision, that we must suffer, and grieve, and repent in the midst of a world which, shortly before, we fancied was composed of nothing but brightness, and beauty, and happiness. I speak of the time of life when we first put on manhood, and meet all its sorrows at the moment when we expect nothing but its joys. For that period, too, there is a bright compensation given, there is a sustaining principle implanted in our breast, common to the highest and the lowest, the savage and the civilized; a principle that furnishes a balm for many wounds, that surrounds us with an atmosphere of consolation, hope, and joy, and enables us to live on in one splendid dream, even in the midst of hard and dark realities.
That principle is love; and that principle was warm and strong in the bosom of Bernard de Rohan, as, on the day after that in which the conversations we have mentioned in our last chapter took place, he stood, a few minutes before the setting of the sun, under a group of tall fir-trees that had pitched themselves upon a pinnacle of the rock, about ten yards distant from the farther angle of the garden attached to the chateau of Masseran. The trees grew very close together; and, what between scanty soil and the mountain winds, their large trunks had contorted themselves into manifold strange shapes. From this group two or three rows of the same kind of firs ran down the side of the hill into the valley. One would have supposed that they were the remains of some old avenue had the lines been but a little more regular.