"That can only be done between man and man;" said the Countess, in a collected voice; though inwardly alarmed for the consequence of a duel between her lover and the Duke. "And here the provocation came from the opposite sex. Duke Wharton merely amused himself with my confusion, after the Electress had presumed to make her charge. But were it otherwise, a violent assertion of my honour is beyond your power. Your life, Chevalier," added she, raising her eyes to his face, "is your own to give! but not the safety of the Sieur Ignatius; not the honour of the Baron de Ripperda; not the future happiness, public and private, of the Empress Elizabeth! These, and the other momentous interests you are so well aware of, all depend upon keeping secret from the Electress of Bavaria and her counsellors, the purport of your visits to these apartments. You could be admitted but for one of two reasons: to me, or to the Empress. And when hardly pressed by Her Highness last night; to avoid the treason of betraying my mistress, I was obliged,——" she turned away her blushing face as she added, "not merely, not to deny, but to sanction the suspicion, which caused the tears in which you surprised me."
Louis stood paralyzed at this last disclosure. But when he saw that tears flowed afresh from her eyes, and streamed down her flushed cheeks, as she moved from him to leave the room; he flew towards her, and catching her by the gown, implored her, in an agitated voice, to stop and hear him. She turned on him with a look of gentle reproach, of dissolving tenderness, that bereft him at once of all consideration; and what he said, what he avowed, he knew not, till he found her hand clasped to his lips, and heard her say—"After this, I need not blush to turn my eyes on the only way that can now redeem my name!" She spoke with an enchanting smile, and added, "It will disprove the slanderous part of our adversary's accusation, without betraying our cause; or risking a life, perhaps too precious to me!"
Before he could reply, she heard the steps of Elizabeth in the adjoining chamber; and sliding her hand from his impassioned grasp, disappeared through the conservatory. He was in so much agitation when the Empress entered, that she perceived it; and guessing the cause, did not notice it; but, wishing her favourite full success in this her own peculiar affair, she dismissed that of politics in a very few words; and graciously received Louis's excuse for the unfinished minutes of the day before. As he proceeded to the Chateau, where he was to complete some transcripts before he returned to the College he tried to think on what had passed, but all within him was in tumult. The hours of his labour, and of his meditation, were the same; he could not tranquillize the strange whirlwind of emotions which raged in his mind. He recalled, again and again, before the tribunal of his judgment, the particulars of the scene which had just passed; but they appeared in such broken apparitions, that he could reduce nothing to certainty, nothing on which he could lay his hand, and say, "It is so."
At one moment, indignation fired him against the part Duke Wharton had taken in it; and, in the next, he arraigned the wayward fate, which had compelled him to merit all the Duke's resentment, by his own apparently insulting conduct in the palace gallery.—Then his imagination, all in a blaze, ran over the celestial charms of the exquisite creature, whose unreceding hand he had pressed to his lips—to his heart! He felt her eye-beams still agitating its inmost recesses; but he did not feel that heart quite consent to his often-repeated exclamation—"She loves me—and I am happy!" He did not feel that instant union of spirits; that ineffable communion of heart with heart, and soul with soul, which he had ever believed the pledge of mutual love:—That mystery of the soul, which, even in earth, asserts its immortal nature! The beautiful Otteline was still a beautiful surface to him; an idol to be adored. But he found not that sense of perfect sympathy, shooting from her dear presence through all his being, which would make him cry aloud, "I love her, and her alone!"
Dissatisfied with himself for this fastidiousness, when he ought to have been all transport, he turned to the hour of meeting the Sieur, with the feelings of a man in a dream, from which he was doubtful that he would not be glad to awake.
CHAP. VII.
When Louis entered the cloister which led to the Sieur's apartment, he met Martini hurrying towards him.
"Well arrived, Signor!" cried he, "I was coming to the Chateau in quest of you. There is a noble bustle in my master's chamber."