"O Heaven!" cried she, catching his arm, and clinging to him, while the eagerness of his motion dragged her into the hall. "Tell me! Has anything happened to my guardian—to your friend—to Constantine?"
"No," replied he, looking at her with a face full of desperation; "but my father commands me to treat him like a villain."
She could hardly credit her senses at this confirmation that Constantine and Sobieski were one. Turning giddy with the tumultuous delight that rushed over her soul, she staggered back a few paces, and leaning against the open door, tried to recover breath to regain the room she had left.
Pembroke, having escaped from her grasp, ran furiously down the hill, mounted his horse, and forbidding any groom to attend him, galloped towards the high road with the impetuosity of a madman. All the powers of his soul were in arms, Wounded, dishonored, stigmatized with ingratitude and baseness, he believed himself to be the most degraded of men.
It appeared that Sir Robert Somerset had long cherished a hatred to the Poles, in consequence of some injury he affirmed he had received in early youth from one of that nation. In this instance his dislike was implacable; and when his son set out for the continent, he positively forbade him to enter Poland. Notwithstanding his remembrance of this violated injunction, when Pembroke joined the baronet in his library, he did it with confidence. With a bounding heart and animated countenance, he recapitulated how he had been wrought upon by his young Russian friends to take up arms in their cause and march into Poland. At these last words his father turned pale, and though he did not speak, the denunciation was on his brow.
Pembroke, who expected some marks of displeasure, hastened to obliterate his disobedience by narrating the event which had introduced not only the young Count Sobieski to his succor, but the consequent friendship of the whole of that princely family.
Sir Robert still made no verbal reply, but his countenance deepened in gloom; and when Pembroke, with all the pathos of a deep regret, attempted to describe the death of the palatine, the horrors which attended the last hours of the countess, and the succeeding misery of Thaddeus, who was now in England, no language can paint the frenzy which burst at once from the baronet. He stamped on the ground, he covered his face with his clenched hands; then turning on his son with a countenance no longer recognizable, he exclaimed with fury, "Pembroke! you have outraged my commands! Never will I pardon you if that young man ever blasts me with his sight."
"Merciful Heaven!" cried Pembroke, thunderstruck at a violence which he almost wished might proceed from real madness: "surely something has agitated my father! What can this mean?"
Sir Robert shook his head, whilst his teeth ground against each other. "Don't mistake me," replied he, in a firm voice "I am perfectly in my senses. It depends on you that I continue so. You know my oath against all of that nation! and I repeat again, if you ever bring that young man into my presence, you shall never see me more."
A cold dew overspread the body of Pembroke. He would have caught his father's hand, but he held it back. "O sir," said he, "you surely cannot intend that I shall treat with ingratitude the man who saved my life?"