“Dear Mamma!” replied the young lady playfully, “am not I descended lineally from Clemence Isaure, the patroness of song and chivalry? And I should be sorry to speak aught but my own langue d’oc—the tongue of the first knights and first poets of France.—— But hark! what is that noise in the wood?”
“Now help, for the love of God!” cried the Woodman, snatching forth his axe, and turning to the horsemen who accompanied the carriage; “murder is doing in the forest. Help, for the love of God!”
But as he spoke, the trampling of a horse’s feet was heard, and in a moment after, a stout black charger came down the road like lightning; the dust springing up under his feet, and the foam dropping from his bit.
Half falling from the saddle, half supported by the reins, appeared the form of a gallant young Cavalier; his naked sword still clasped in his hand, but now fallen powerless and dragging by the side of the horse; his head uncovered and thrown back, as if consciousness had almost left him, and the blood flowing from a deep wound in his forehead, and dripping amongst the thick curls of his dark brown hair.
The charger rushed furiously on; but the Woodman caught the bridle as he passed, and with some difficulty reined him in; while one of the footmen lifted the young gentleman to the ground, and placed him at the foot of a tree.
The two ladies had not beheld this scene unconcerned; and were descending from the carriage, when four or five servants in hunting livery were seen issuing from the wood at the turn of the road, contending with a very superior party of horsemen, whose rusty equipments and wild anomalous sort of apparel, bespoke them free of the forest by not the most honourable franchise.
“Ride on, ride on!” cried the young lady to those who had come with her: “Ride on and help them;” and she herself advanced to give aid to the wounded Cavalier, whose eyes seemed now closed for ever.
He was as handsome a youth as one might look upon: one of those forms which we are fond to bestow upon the knights and heroes that we read of in our early days, when unchecked fancy is always ready to give her bright conceptions “a local habitation and a name.” The young lady, whose heart had never been taught to regulate its beatings by the frigid rules of society, or the sharp scourge of disappointment, now took the wounded man’s head upon her knee, and gazed for an instant upon his countenance, the deadly paleness of which appeared still more ghastly from the red streams that trickled over it from the wound in his forehead. She then attempted to staunch the blood, but the trembling of her hands defeated her purpose, and rendered her assistance of but little avail.
The elder lady had hitherto been giving her directions to the footmen, who remained with the carriage, while those on horseback rode on towards the fray. “Stand to your arms, Michel!” cried she. “You take heed to the coach. You three, draw up across the road, each with his arquebuse ready to fire. Let none but the true men pass.—Fie! Pauline; I thought you had a firmer heart.” She continued, approaching the young lady, “Give me the handkerchief.—That is a bad cut in his head, truly; but here is a worse stab in his side.” And she proceeded to unloose the gold loops of his hunting-coat, that she might reach the wound. But that action seemed to recall, in a degree, the senses of the wounded Cavalier.
“Never! never!” he exclaimed, clasping his hand upon his side, and thrusting her fingers away from him, with no very ceremonious courtesy,—“never, while I have life.”