"The truth, though a strange one," replied Santa Cruz, "and this ruse de guerre of his was so artfully managed, that not a man in the Spanish cabinet is aware of the hand that gave the overthrow. Being one in all their secret counsels, he influenced the separate members, to certain exaggerated conduct; and playing the one off against the other, in their allegations against your father, managed that contradictions should occur in every hearing before the King. And, by himself accusing you to the Queen, in terms to awaken her vanity against your enemies, and to influence it with a belief in your personal loyalty to her; he gained your point there. With your personal enemies, and his political friends, he affected to wonder at the Marquis de Montemar's restitution to the royal favour; while with me, he rejoiced in private,—laughing at the absurdity of such grey-beards, as the frowning de Castellor, and that earthworm de Paz, making any tilt against the armed virtue of Æneas and his Achates.
"And his cloud is a bright one!" continued the Marquis, kindling with his subject. "It has absorbed the follies of his youth. And, gazing with wonder at his capacity, I beheld with admiration, the man I once despised. In short, his genius, with a sort of supernatural cognizance, darts into the views of men, and turns their devices to the side of justice and honour!"
Louis's deep groans burst upon the ear of Santa Cruz. His face, for some time, had been covered with his hands. An amazed inquiry, and an agonized reply, soon informed the Marquis of its cause. Wharton, that unalienable, that energetic friend, was then at the point of death, in the house of his uncle at Morewick! was dying, under an impression that Louis was estranged from him; nay, had united with his father in denouncing him as a traitor! He might now be dead!—And he, who loved him to the last, never be able to pour out his gratitude for such noble assertion of that father's fame!
This information astonished, and distressed Santa Cruz; and the greater the extremity of the Duke, the more he thought himself called upon, to relate every thing explicitly to his agonized friend. In the course of this protracted conversation, he gave a brief account of all he knew of Wharton's conduct throughout the whole transactions relative to the Duke de Ripperda.
Wharton frankly acknowledged, that from the period he was convinced no impressions in behalf of the Stuart or Bavarian interests, could be made on Spain, he determined to overthrow the political power of him, who avowed himself the root of this obstinacy. Ripperda had proclaimed his devotion to the House of Brunswick, more than once, at the great councils of Vienna. He had affirmed his implacability to both pretenders, at the table of the Cardinal Giovenozzi; and he did it, with circumstances of such personal insult to Wharton, that the English Duke, at once laid a comprehensive plan to make him feel his power.
Routemberg's conspiracy against the Spanish minister, did not originate with Wharton; but it was modified by him; he mounted the guns, and planted the circular batteries; and he did it, to bring Ripperda to a point, where none could preserve him but the man who held the springs of every movement in his own hands. This man was Wharton's self. Twice, at critical moments, in Vienna and at Madrid, he offered his terms:—to unmask every machination against Ripperda; and to maintain him in his seat against all the world; if he would at last oppose the house of Brunswick in the empire and in England. Both overtures were rejected with disdain; and events took their course. Ripperda's was a fall, not a descent, and the ruin was terrible. The new ministers of Spain, who had bought their elevation by embracing Wharton's views, triumphed in every way over their disgraced predecessor. But the English politician was of another spirit. His enemy, once down, his care might be to prevent his rising to the same adverse station; but he told his coadjutors, he was not of the herd to strike his heel against the fallen lion.
It did not, at this juncture, accord with the interests of his two royal friends, James Stuart, and Maria of Bavaria, to make a full disclosure in favour of the overthrown Duke; but he made secret visits to the King's confessor, and to the Queen's, not to incense, as was supposed, but to propitiate each sovereign against the cabinet ministers' rancorous persecution of their fallen rival. He denied all the circumstances which had been alleged by these men, to prove that Ripperda had negociated with him against the existing orders of Philip. He positively asserted, there had never been any amicable private meeting between them. He explained the adventure in the Carinthian post-house, where he returned the dispatches to the Duke; also another rencounter in the mountains of Genoa where he accidentally rescued him from a band of assassins, to whom he had been betrayed by a man who was a Spaniard; "and therefore," said Wharton, "I will not name him."
It were not possible to describe the varied anguish of Louis de Montemar, during this discourse, and the new discoveries it made at every sentence. He did not utter it, for he was on the rack. But when he found that it was Wharton's arm which had saved his father amongst the maritime Alps; that it was to him, though unknown, Ripperda had bequeathed the Gratitude of his son;—then Louis felt the iron enter his soul.
In short, Santa Cruz informed him, that Wharton proved to the King and Queen, that his enmity was against Ripperda's politics, not against himself; though he protested, there was not a man on earth who detested another with more determined hatred than the ex-minister detested him.
Things were in this state, when the Duke was summoned by the Chevalier St. George, to a conference at Rome, and the field being left open to Grimaldo and his colleagues, their violent proceedings ended in the flight of their proposed victim.