"Well, I doubt not I can find him; he is well known in France, in Spain, and in Italy, and if he goes to Germany he can be traced. But what was the other sad misfortune you spoke of?—something within the last few days, you said."
Inglesant had been looking fixedly before him since he had last spoken, with a steady blank expression, which, since his imprisonment, his face sometimes wore,—part of a certain wildness in his look which bespoke a mind ill at ease and a confused brain. He was following up his prey to the death.
He started at the Jesuit's question, and seemed to recollect with an effort; then he said,—
"Mary Collet died at the convent of the Nuns of the —— last week. I only found her out the night before;" and as he spoke, the contrast arose in his mind of the deathbed of the saint-like girl, and the Italian's bleeding body struck down by his revenge. The footsteps of the Saviour he had promised his friend to follow, surely could not lead him to such a scene as that. If this were the first-fruits of his refusal to follow Serenus de Cressy, surely he must also have turned his back on Christ Himself.
He covered his face with his hands, and the Jesuit saw that he wept. He supposed it was simply from grief at the death of his friend, and he was surprised at the strength of his attachment. Like others, he had thought Inglesant's love a rather cool and Platonic passion.
"I always thought him one of those nice and coy lovers," he said to himself, "who always observe some defect in the thing they love, which weakens their passion, and shows them that the reality is so much inferior to their idea, that they easily desist from their enterprize, and vanish as if they had not so much intention to love as to vanish, and had more shame to have begun their courtship than purpose to continue it. He must be much shaken by his suffering and by his brother's death."
He waited a few moments, and then spoke to Inglesant about his health, of his brother's death, and of his imprisonment. He spoke to him of the late King, and of his distress at the necessity under which he lay of denying Inglesant's commission; and he said many other things calculated to cheer his friend and please his self-regard.
Inglesant listened to him not without pleasure, but he said little. An idea had taken possession of his mind, which he carried with him into Italy and for long afterwards. He was more than half convinced that, in rejecting Cressy's advice, he had turned his back on Christ; and he was the more confirmed in this belief because never had the image of the Italian, nor the desire of revenge, taken so strong a hold upon his imagination as now. It occurred to his excited imagination that Christ had deserted him, and the Fiend taken possession, and that the course and intention of the latter would be to lure him on, by such images, to some terrible and lonely place, where the Italian and he together should be involved in one common ghastly deed of crime, one common and eternal ruin. The sense of having had a great act of self-denial placed before him and having refused it, no doubt weighed down and blunted his conscience; and once placed, as he half thought, upon the downward path, nothing seemed before him but the gradual descent, adorned at first by some poor show of gaudy flowers, but ending speedily—for there was no self-delusion to such a nature as his, which had tasted of the heavenly food—in miserable and filthy mire, where, loathing himself and despised by others, nothing awaited him but eternal death. He answered the Jesuit almost mechanically, and on parting from him at night promised indifferently to accompany him on the morrow to an audience with the Queen.
END OF VOL. I.
Printed by R. & R. CLARK, Edinburgh.