Violante had informed him the preceding night, how so strange a party came together; and why they had intruded themselves on the hospitality of his uncle. She described, with satirical pleasantry, a week's visit, which she and her Thespian sisters had been making to a noble amateur in Teviotdale.—Lord Warwick was there; and soon after, Duke Wharton came in his way from the Highlands. At the time of his arrival, the whole company were on the eve of departure; but as he was coming southward, and they were to travel in the same direction, he complied with Warwick's entreaties to join the party.—The storm caught them on the moors; and as it was attended with thunder, the women became so frightened, it was necessary to take them to some place of shelter.—A minute's thought brought to Wharton's recollection that Bamborough was in the neighbourhood; and without hesitation he ordered the horses heads of half a dozen carriages to be turned towards the mansion of the convivial baronet.
As Louis ran over these circumstances in his mind, and recalled the lively indifference with which the Duke seemed to dally with all this youth and beauty, and female witchery; turning from one to the other with the gay caprice of the frolic butterfly, which flies from flower to flower, hovering and touching, and straight to flight again:—"Happy Wharton!" exclaimed he, "yours is indeed the spirit which skims the earth, and does not soil its wings! while mine, has only to approach its surface, and be made but too sensible, that dust I am, and would to dust return!"
In this mood he descended to the court yard; and gave orders for a boat to be ready at the castle-cove, to row him across to Lindisfarne as soon as the tide should serve. But in returning along the terrace, he encountered the object of his meditation and his envy; the object which still made his heart linger about the spot he was so determined to leave.
"Ha, de Montemar!" cried the Duke, "Well met; before the constellations of last night arise to put yon saucy, upbraiding sun out of countenance!—But how long have you been making morn hideous with those rueful looks?—Why, you are a different man, from the etherial son of joy, who moved amongst us last night like Ganymede dispensing the draughts of Olympus!"
Louis saw in this gay hyperbole, only the spectre of a folly he was ashamed of. His disturbed countenance spoke what was passing in his mind; but trying to smile, "Indeed, my Lord," said he, "you are right to laugh at my inebriated senses.—I assure you, I despise myself."
"For what, de Montemar? That you have eyes, and ears, and are a man?"
Louis coloured; "Perhaps, that I own too much of his worst part!"
"How?"
He did not answer, but quickened his steps. The Duke looked archly in his face, and laughed:—"I will answer myself. That fond little devil Violante has driven Saint Cuthbert out of your head, and you are hastening to exorcise the strange possession at the shrine of the holy woman-hater!"
Louis started at this insinuation: it offended him, though so lightly uttered. Perplexed, and every way displeased with himself and his companions, he however tried to answer composedly.—"Your Grace is mistaken. I carry away with me no image from last night's revelry, but that of my own weakness. I despise the facility with which I fell in with the fashion of the hour, to drink wine till I unsettled my reason; and I detest myself for feeling that I existed from that time until I awoke this morning, without other consciousness than that which my besotted senses afforded." He stopped, then raising his before bent head, smiled scornfully, and added, "The garden of the Hourii is not my paradise!"