Relieved from immediate alarm for his father's personal safety, by knowing that his projected asylum was the one least likely to occur to his pursuers, Louis's agitated mind had sunk into a kind of torpid repose. He took the seat offered to him, by the Marchioness; and listened to her conversation with soothed attention. There was something in her figure and air, which so reminded him of the cherishing mother of his youth, Mrs. Coningsby, that his harassed soul seemed to have regained its home, while he drank in her sweet maternal comfortings. She appeared to know by intuition the fittest medicine for his spirit; but she only spoke from her own noble nature, and it mingled direct with his. She expatiated on his father's character; on the envy of his rivals; and dated his fall to their ambition alone. She dwelt on the high reverence in which he was held by the King and Queen; and affirmed, that justice must be done him, both by Sovereign and people, when experience should have taught them how they had cast away their benefactor.—
"Meanwhile," said she, "how glorious he is in suffering magnanimously for his virtues!"
"So to suffer, is the Cross that makes our virtues Christian!" observed Marcella in a low voice, hardly aware that she had uttered what was passing in her thoughts.
The remark was so like what he would have expected from the lips of his first christian teacher, that Louis turned towards the speaker. He turned to look on her; recollecting that she was not merely the daughter of the amiable woman who was so maternally solicitous about him; but the disinterested sister, whose self-sacrifice was to empower her brother to complete the happiness of Alice Coningsby. Though she had been the first to welcome him to this hospitable refuge, in most inhospitable Spain, he had noticed her so little, he could not have recognised her in any other garb. He now perused her pensive countenance. It was fair and meek, and touched with the tenderest sensibility. Her eyes were hidden with their downward lashes; and the shadow of her veil tempered the dazzling whiteness of her forehead, while the dark and glossy tresses that braided its arching brows, gave her the air of a youthful Madonna. Her soft white hand at that moment pressing the cross to her bosom, completed the picture. Unconscious of observation, she was then breathing an internal prayer for the Duke and his son; and continuing her meditations on their fate, did not raise her eyes from the floor.
Louis looked on her, but it was as he would have looked on a lovely image of the consecrated being she resembled; and again he turned to the voice of her mother.
The Marchioness finding him so composed, entered fully into all she knew of the rise and progress of the conspiracy which had ruined his father. She recounted the various perfidies of the inmates of the Palais d'Espagne; which had been confided to her, in the exultation of triumph, by Donna Laura. She narrated particulars in the correspondence between de Patinos and his father, the Marquis de Castellor; and gave instances of even deeper double-dealing in Baptista Orendayn, the nephew of the Count de Paz. Indeed, she hoped, the Marquis, her husband, would be able to prove, by what she could impart, that Orendayn was concerned with a subborned band of ruffians who attacked the Duke de Ripperda in the Appenines; and would certainly have destroyed him there, but for the fortunate intervention of a stranger.
This assassination was the device of his Spanish rivals. And it was as well known by the Marchioness's informants, that the attempt which was made on the Duke in the porch of the Jesuits' college, was the work of certain Austrians at the court of Vienna; and not at all arising from the partizans of the Electress. The Bavarians had never gone farther than to way-lay for the state papers; and under the leading of Count Stalhberg, they had taken the dispatches from Castanos; which, being examined by the party, were afterwards returned.
In recapitulating this host of jealous adversaries, she asserted that none were so actively hostile to Ripperda as the Austrian junto; at the head of which was Count Routemberg, whose darling policy was to place eternal barriers between any future junction of the empire and Spain. In his house the confederation was formed, that was to accomplish the destruction of Ripperda and his plans; and by a secret management it was supported and impelled by the Emperor himself.
While Louis listened to this information, which agreed so fatally with Wharton's last conference in the garden of the chateau, he became more and more bewildered on the motives of his false friend.
At last the Marchioness mentioned that name, which never could be heard by him with indifference; his confidence, or his detestation must rest upon it. He was thinking of the accumulated treachery of Wharton, when she pronounced his name. He started as if it took him by surprise. In her eagerness she did not observe his emotion, but dwelt on the English Duke's clandestine interviews with Grimaldo, de Paz, and the Queen; shewing their results in the King's inflexibility to Ripperda's demands to be heard; and his subsequent warrant, to silence the injured minister's appeal in the sealed dungeons of the Inquisition.