"How," thought he, whilst walking up and down his solitary parlor, "could the noble nature of my mother love such a man? and how could he have held so long an empire over the pure heart he has just now broken."
He could nowhere discern, in the bloated visage and rageful gestures of the earl, any of that beauty of countenance or grace of manners which had alike charmed Therese Sobieski and the tender Acleliza.
Like those hideous chasms which are dug deep in the land by the impetuous sweep of a torrent, the course of violent passions leaves vast and irreparable traces on the features and in the soul. So it was with Lord Tinemouth.
"How legibly does vice or virtue," ejaculated Thaddeus, "write itself on the human face! The earl's might once have been fine, but the lineaments of selfishness and sin have degraded every part of him. Mysterious Providence! Can he be my father—can it be his blood that is now running in my veins? Can it be his blood that rises at this moment with detestation against him?"
Before the sun set, Sobieski was aroused from these painful soliloquies by still more painful feelings. He saw from his window a hearse driving at full speed up the road that ascended to the Abbey, and presently return at a slower pace, followed by a single black coach.
"Inhuman men!" exclaimed he, while pursuing with his eyes the tips of the sable plumes as the meagre cavalcade of mourners wound down the hill; "could you not allow this poor corse a little rest? Must her persecution be extended to the grave? Must her cold relics be insulted, be hurried to the tomb without reverence—without decency?"
The filial heart that uttered this thought also of his own injured mother, and shrunk with horror at this climax of the earl's barbarity. Dr. Cavendish entered with a flushed countenance. He spoke indignantly of the act he still saw from the window, which he denounced as a sacrilege against the dead. "Not four-and-twenty hours since," cried he, "she expired! and she is hurried into the cold bosom of the earth, like a criminal, or a creature whose ashes a moment above ground might spread a pestilence. Oh, how can that sweet victim, Lady Albin, share such peccant blood?"
Thaddeus, whose soul had just writhed under a similar question with regard to himself, could little bear the repetition and interrupted the good physician by tenderly inquiring how she had borne that so abrupt removal of her mother's remains.
"With mute anguish," returned Dr. Cavendish, in a responding, calmer voice of pity; "and though I had warned her father that the shock of so suddenly tearing his daughter from such beloved relics might peril her own life, he continued obdarate; and putting her into his travelling chariot in a state of insensibility, along with her maid, in a few minutes afterwards I saw him set off in a hired post-chaise, accompanied by his detestable son, loaded with more than one curse, muttered by the honest rustics. Only servants followed in that mourning coach."
In the midst of this depressing conversation a courier arrived from Stamford to Dr. Cavendish, recalling him immediately to return thither, the invalid there having sustained an alarming relapse. The good doctor, sincerely reluctant to quit Thaddeus (whom he still knew by no other name than Constantine), ordered the dispatch-chaise to the hotel door. When it was announced, he shook hands with the now lonely survivor of his departed friend in this stranger land, requested that he might hear from him before he left that part of the country for London again, and bidding him many cordial adieus, continued to look out of the back window of the carriage, until the faint light of the moon and the receding glimmer of the village candles finally hid the little spot that yet contained this young and sadly-stricken exile from his lingering eyes.