"I know you are a man of mysteries," said the Count with a faint smile, "and therefore I suppose I must neither attempt to investigate this, nor to enquire how it is, that the gay and gallant Chevalier d'Evran is in one way insensible to charms which he is so sensible of in other respects."
"You are right, Albert, not to make any such attempt," replied the Chevalier. "With respect to love for Clémence, a thousand causes may have produced the peculiar feelings I entertain towards her. I may have loved and been cured."
The Count made no reply, but fell into a reverie; and after gazing on him for a minute or two the Chevalier added, "You, Albert, love her, and are not cured."
His friend, however, was still silent, and, changing the conversation, the Chevalier talked of indifferent things, and did not return to subjects of such painful interest, till midnight came, and he once more took his departure from the château of Morseiul.
CHAPTER IV.
[THE PREACHING IN THE DESERT.]
Again we must pass over a brief space of time, and also somewhat change the scene, but not very far. In the interval, the acts of a bigoted and despotic monarch had been guided by the advice of cruel and injudicious ministers, till the formal prohibition of the opening of any Protestant place of worship throughout France for the service of God, according to the consciences of the members of the reformed church, had been proclaimed throughout the land. Such had been the change, or rather the progress, made in that time; and the falling off of many leading Protestants, the disunion which existed amongst others, the overstrained loyalty of some, and the irresolution of many, had shown to even the calmer and the firmer spirits, who might still have conducted resistance against tyranny to a successful result, that though, perhaps, they might shed oceans of blood, the Protestant cause in France was lost, at least for the time.
The scene, too, we have said, was changed.
It was no longer the city of Poitiers, with its multitudes and its gay parties; it was no longer the château, with its lord and his attendants; it was no longer the country town, with its citizens and its artizans; but it was upon one of those dark brown moors of which so many are to be found on the borders of Brittany and Poitou, under the canopy of heaven alone, and with nothing but the bleakest objects in nature round about.
The moor had a gentle slope towards the westward. It was covered with gorse and heath, interspersed with old ragged hawthorns, stunted and partly withered, as we often see, some being brought up in poverty and neglect, never knowing care or shelter, stinted and sickly, and shrivelling with premature decay. Cast here and there amongst the thorns, too, were large masses of rock and cold grey stone, the appearance of which in that place was difficult to account for, as there was no higher ground around from which such masses could have fallen. A small wood of pines had been planted near the summit of the ground, but they, too, had decayed prematurely in that ungrateful soil; and though each tree presented here and there some scrubby tufts of dark green foliage, the principal branches stood out, white and blasted, skeleton fingers pointing in despairing mockery at the wind that withered them.