He obeyed ingenuously, till he came to the parts where her conduct might be translated into a direct wooing of himself. Ripperda saw him hesitate, and the generous colour that mounted to his down-cast eyes.
"Proceed," said he, "I can divine what your honour, or your delicacy inclines you to conceal. She played upon your open nature, to make you believe she loved you so passionately, she could not await your time of drawing the secret from her! I know the sex, Louis. For more than thirty years, I have been an object of their various practices. And, once for all, you may receive it as an unerring rule, that, when a woman runs before a man in the profession of her love, her love is nothing more than profession. Her views are something baser." Ripperda pursued the subject; and Louis was, at last, brought to acknowledge, that the Countess had given him reason to believe that she loved him devotedly,—too devotedly; and then, without with-holding a circumstance, he related the whole affair, from the commencement of their acquaintance, till the moment when he wished to close it for ever. But, he confessed that what had happened in the music-room, had roused all within him to rebellion, though his judgement was as stern as ever against the pleadings of his infatuated senses.
"Oh, Sir!" cried he, "I love, and I despise her. And yet, when I stood over her insensible form, which had become so, from the wound I had inflicted, I could not but ask myself,—Am I a god, that I should thus ruthlessly condemn human error, and break the heart that loves me?"
The Duke was a long time silent, after his son had ceased speaking. Then looking up, he abruptly said, "Louis de Montemar, you are the first man of your sort, with whom I ever came in contact. I see of what spirit you are; but it will not do in the station you fill, or in the times in which we live. The world is always changing, and you must go with it, or it will leave you. I ought not to have left you so long at Lindisfarne!"
Louis turned his eye on his father.
"I do not blame your instructor for educating you like himself. But the style is obsolete, Louis. Had you been intended for a desert island, it might have been well; but a citizen of the world requires other maxims. The fault is mine, that I did not bring you to me before. Now, you come into society, like an unarmed man into the midst of his enemies; and, instead of hastening to shelter, you expose yourself to their weapons, by acts of impotent hostility. You must content yourself in maintaining your own principles; to stretch another's virtue to your standard, you will always find a vain work of supererogation. In all that you have described, the Countess Altheim has only acted as any ambitious woman would have done; and ambition is not less rooted in the sex, than in ourselves. She must not, therefore, be contemned for that. Neither do I object to her, on account of her obscure birth. The blood of your family is too essentially illustrious, not to raise to its own elevation, whatever we mingle with its stream. But I wish to strengthen our hands in Spain, by a marriage between my heir and one of its native daughters. Besides, the Countess Altheim is dangerous in herself. Her haughty spirit would embroil you with this, and every court, to which you might conduct her; and persons might be inclined to disrespect the man who could suffer the weakness of passion to subject him to an union so universally despised."
During this discourse, the confidential warning of the Chancellor seemed to sound again in the ear of Louis. He recollected the hints which Wharton had dropped on the same subject; and, with sickening attention, listened to his father, who, in less reserved language, related every leading event of the life of the beautiful favourite. No word glanced at her honour, as a chaste woman; but, every sentence completed the portrait of mean-spirited, insatiable ambition. Shocked to the soul, by the description of Count Altheim, whose character was of such grossness, that it seemed impossible for a virtuous woman to consent to be his wife; Louis hastily exclaimed, as the Duke rose to depart. "I will never see her more! I will never trust myself again, with any of her betraying sex! Henceforth, my dearest father," cried he, with a feverish smile, "I will have no mistress but glory! Why, why, did I ever withdraw my eyes from her divine face?" "She always suffers, when woman disputes her rights," returned the Duke.
Louis kissed his father's hand, and retired to his own apartments. His spirit felt beaten and bruised. It cowered under a sense of self-degradation; and throwing himself on his bed, he passed a night of painful retrospection, on all that he had seen and heard of her, who was so lately the object of his untameable wishes.
"Cold, calculating, and unprincipled!" cried he, "and to such a woman, did I give the first flames of my heart! Did I light up the sacred altar to a fiend, in the form of the Queen of Heaven!—Wretch that I am, to have so debased what was most noble within me! To sigh for a piece of painted clay; to adore—and, even now, to weep over a creature, whose soul, if I could behold it divested of its beautiful garments, would disgust me by its sordid, earthward visage!" The morning found his agitated spirits subsided to a calm. The intemperance of passion was extinguished in his breast, and as he relinquished the desire of possessing her, who had now lost every grace in his eyes, he strengthened in the hope, that the killing words he had last pronounced to her, were final to her views on him.
Noon brought several animated visitors, to interrupt the studies which were his usual morning occupation, and generally, unfailing tranquillizers. These young Austrians came to invite him to share in various sorts of diversions for the day and the evening; and an hour passed gaily on, in the vivid conversations of versatile youth. A few of the Spaniards made their entrance, and disappeared again. De Patinos was not among them; he had reproached those who had shewn a wish to cultivate the kindness of Louis, with a mean submission to the minion of temporary fortune; they, therefore, merely made their bow, and without joining in the discourse, soon took their leave.