"No, my friend, no," replied Schomberg, "it were not better, for neither could you so best do honour to their name, neither would your death and sacrifice avail aught to the great cause of religious liberty. But there is more to be considered, Albert of Morseiul; you might not gain the fate you sought for. The perverse bullet and the unwilling steel often, too often, will not do their fatal mission upon him that courts them. How often do we see that the timid, the cowardly, or the man who has a thousand sweet inducements to seek long life, meets death in the first field he enters, while he who in despair or rage walks up to the flashing cannon's mouth escapes as by a miracle? Think; Morseiul, if such were to be your case, what would be the result: first to linger in imprisonment, next to see the exterminating sword of persecution busy amongst those that you had led on into revolt, to know that their hearths were made desolate, their children orphans, their patrimony given to others, their wives and daughters delivered to the brutal insolence of victorious soldiers; and then, knowing all this, to end your own days as a common criminal, stretched on a scaffold on the torturing wheel, amidst the shouts and derisions of superstitious bigots, with the fraudulent voice of monkish hypocrisy pouring into your dying ear insults to your religion and to your God. Think of all this! and think also, that, at that last moment, you would know that you yourself had brought it all to pass, without the chance of effecting one single benefit to yourself or others."
The Count put his hand before his eyes, but made no reply; and then, wringing Marshal Schomberg's hand, he mounted his horse and rode slowly away.
For a considerable distance he went on towards Poitiers at the same slow pace, filled with dark and gloomy thoughts, and with nothing but despair on every side. He felt that the words of Marshal Schomberg were true to their fullest extent, and a sort of presage of the coming events seemed to gather slowly upon his heart, like dark clouds upon the verge of the sky. His only hope reduced itself to the same narrow bounds which had long contained those of Schomberg; the result, namely, of the proposed petition to the King.
But there were one or two words which Schomberg had dropped accidentally, and which it would seem, from what we have told before, ought not to have produced such painful and bitter feelings in the breast of Albert of Morseiul as they did produce. They were those words which referred to the prohibition about to be decreed against the marriages of Protestants and Catholics. What was it to him, he asked himself, whether Catholics and Protestants might or might not marry? Was not his determination taken with regard to the only person whom he could have ever loved? and did it matter that another barrier was placed between them, when there were barriers impassable before. But still he felt the announcement deeply and painfully; reason had no power to check and overcome those sensations; and oppressed and overloaded as his mind then was, it wandered vaguely from misery to misery, and seemed to take a pleasure in calling up every thing that could increase its own pain and anguish.
When he had thus ridden along for somewhat more than two miles, he suddenly heard a horn winded lowly in the distance, and, as he fancied, the cry of dogs. It called to his mind his promise to Clémence de Marly. He felt that his frame of mind was in strange contrast with a gay hunting scene. Yet he had promised to go as soon as ever he was free, and he was not a man to break his promise, even when it was a light one. He turned his horse's head, then, in the direction of the spot from which the sound seemed to proceed, still going on slowly and gloomily.
A moment after he heard the sounds again. The memory of happy days, and of his old forest sports, came upon him, and he made a strong effort against the darker spirit in his bosom.
"I will drive these gloomy thoughts from me," he said, "if it be but for an hour; I will yet know one bright moment more. For this day I will be a boy again, and to-morrow I will cast all behind me, and plunge into the stream of care and strife!"
As he thus thought he touched his horse with the spur; the gallant beast bounded off like lightning; the cry of the hounds, the sound of the horns came nearer and nearer; and in a few moments more the Count came suddenly upon a relay of horses and dogs, established upon the side of a hill, as was then customary, for the purpose of giving fresh vigour to the chase when it had been abated by weariness.
"Is the deer expected to pass here?" demanded the Count, speaking to one of the veneurs, and judging instantly, by his own practised eye, that it would take another direction.
"The young Marquis Hericourt thought so," replied the man, "but he knows nothing about it."