“Nay!” she cried, in a voice clear as the strain of a silver trumpet—“nay, thou shalt hear me out! And thou didst swear yesterday I should live in a cloister-cell for ever! and I replied to thy words then, ‘Not long!’ I have thought better now; and now I answer, ‘Never!’ Lo here! lo here! ye who have marked the doom of Armand—mark now the doom of Marguerite! Ye who have judged the treason, mark the doom of the traitress!”
And with the words, before any one could interfere, even had they suspected her intentions, she raised her right hand on high—and all then saw the quick twinkle of a weapon—and struck herself, as it seemed, a quick, slight blow immediately under the left bosom! It seemed a quick, slight blow! but it had been so accurately studied—so steadily aimed and fatally—that the keen blade, scarcely three inches long and very slender, of the best of Milan steel, with nearly a third of the hilt, was driven home into her very heart. She spoke no syllable again, nor uttered any cry!—nor did a single spasm contract her pallid features, a single convulsion distort her shapely limbs; but she leaped forward, and fell upon her face, quite dead, at the king’s feet!
Henry smiled not again for many a day thereafter. Charles de La-Hirè died very old, a Carthusian monk of the strictest order, having mourned sixty years and prayed in silence for the sorrows and the sins of that most hapless being.
THE VASSAL’S WIFE.
CHAPTER I.
The early sun was shining on as beautiful a morning of the merry month of May as ever lover dreamed or poet sang, over a gentle pastoral scene in the sunny land of France. It was a little winding dale between soft, sloping hills, covered with the tenderest spring verdure, and dotted with small brakes and thickets of hawthorn and sweet-brier; the former all powdered over, as if by a snowstorm, with their sweet, white blossoms, and the others exhaling their aromatic perfume from every dew-spangled bud and leaflet.
To the right hand the narrow dale widened gradually as it took its way—worn, doubtless, in past days by the waters of the noisy brooklet which flowed along its bottom over a bed of many-colored pebbles, among thickets of willow, alder, and hazel—toward a broad and beautiful valley, through which flowed the majestic volume of a great, navigable river. To the left it decreased in width, and ascended rapidly between steep banks to the spring-head of the rivulet, a clear, cold well, covered by a canopy of Gothic architecture rudely chiselled in red sandstone.
Above this the gorge of the ravine—for into such the dell here degenerated—was thickly overshadowed by a grove of old tufted oak-trees, which might well have rung to the brazen trumpets of the Roman legions, and echoed the wild war-whoops of the barbarous Gauls in the days of the first Cæsar. Sheltered and half-concealed by these, there stood a very small, old-fashioned chapel, in the earliest and rudest style of Norman architecture, exhibiting the short, massive, clustered columns and round-headed arches of that antique style. It had never spire or tower; but on the summit of the steep, peaked roof there was a little crypt or vaulted canopy, supported by four columns, and containing a bell proportioned to the dimensions of the humble village-chapel.
The larger valley presented all the usual beauties of rural landscape scenery at that remote and unscientific day, when lands were principally laid down in pasture, and husbandry consisted mainly in the tending of flocks and herds. There were wide expanses of common ground, dotted here and there with few arable fields now green as the pastures with their young crops of wheat and rye; there were woodlands bright in their new greenery, and apple-orchards, glowing with their fragrant blossoms. There were scattered farmhouses among the orchards; and an irregular hamlet scattered along a yellow road in the foreground, among shadowy elm-trees, all festooned with vines; and far off, on the farthest slope on the verge of the horizon, the towers and pinnacles of a tall, castellated building towered above the grand and solemn woods, which probably composed the chase of some feudal seigneur.