A fortnight's tranquil residence at the pastorage drew the whole circle into that "sober certainty of waking bliss," which no language can describe, but happy are they who understand it by the knowledge of experience. Cornelia was, however, still steady to her virtuous resolution; and the Duke arranged with the Marquis Santa Cruz to relieve his English friends of his dangerous presence a few days before the celebration of their nuptials. He meant to sail direct from Lindisfarne to the nearest foreign port; thence proceed to Spain, and there enter on the probation which, he trusted, would end with the year, by the re-union of the whole party at Paris; where Santa Cruz was appointed ambassador, and his children had promised to rejoin him.
The Duke's wounds were healed, and a pause stood in every happy heart at the near prospect of his departure. He was trying his last entreaties, for a shorter term of separation, when a stranger was unguardedly introduced by one of the under-servants, and it proved to be a messenger from the Secretary of State. He was a younger brother of General Stanhope's, and brought communications of the utmost importance. Wharton was sitting in a distant recess with Cornelia, when he entered; and the instant bustle in the room, with some words that dropped from Mr. Athelstone, respecting the Duke, so alarmed her, that turning in agony towards him, she fainted on his breast.
The Duke was under the same impression with herself; and, relinquishing her in some agitation to her mother, walked calmly towards the group in the room, while the other ladies assisted Mrs. Coningsby to bear her insensible daughter from the expected trying scene.
But such was not the import of Mr. Stanhope's dispatches. Some were dictated by the King himself, and others by his ministers. Part informed the Marquis de Montemar, that His Majesty had received from the Empress of Germany, an exoneration of all that had been alleged against him at her court. A favourite mistress of Count Routemberg, in her dying moments, had declared the whole conspiracy of the Count and others against Ripperda and his son; and the Empress now made the only atonement in her power, to the memory of the one, and the honour of the other, by thus clearing the Marquis de Montemar in the eyes of his present Sovereign.
Her royal kinsman noticed also the accounts he had received from Gibraltar, of Louis's disinterested conduct as a son, and a Protestant, and a free born descendant of one of the most ancient families in England. These virtues, the gracious Monarch added, should have an adequate reward. Extraordinary disinterestedness could only be repaid by something of the same character!
By such a disinterestedness did this noble representative of the long line of British Kings, uniting the royal blood of Scotland and of England in the bosom of George of Brunswick, rivet the loyalty of Louis de Montemar to the country of his maternal ancestors! Certain wellinformed agents of the crown, had lodged private information with the Secretary of State, that Philip Duke of Wharton was secreted at Lindisfarne. But the same agents had also reported the calamitous circumstances which had thrown him under that protection; and the King, knowing the friendship which had subsisted between the Marquis de Montemar and the outlawed Duke; for the sake of de Montemar's virtues and approved loyalty, transmitted to him a free pardon to his friend,—an amnesty that re-invested him with his former rights, as a British Peer and Landholder!
"'Tis well!" answered the Duke, with a kindling cheek, when this part of the dispatch was read to him; "I accept the amnesty, that I may now witness the nuptials of my friend in the face of day; and, that hereafter, my Cornelia need not shrink from giving her hand to a man under sentence of the scaffold! But, for my rights as a British Peer, I derive them from the House of Stuart, and will not hold their possession by the sale of my honour. George of Brunswick may be the people's King;—James Stuart is mine! I give what I claim. And, while your Sovereign reigns in their hearts, I shall not dispute his possession. Meanwhile, Saint-Germains is my country;—though my sword may sleep in its scabbard!"
There was no voice in that room to expostulate against principle; and the messenger himself, who was a soldier and a man of honour, venerating the same, though it pointed differently from his own, merely answered:
"Permit me, Duke, to explain the mistake of those who suppose that the throne of Great Britain came to the House of Brunswick, not by the right of blood, but by virtue of an act of Parliament. George the First was descended from a daughter of James the First; and the act of settlement neither creates nor confers any new right, but only confirms that which was inherent in the House of Brunswick upon the exclusion of the Papist branch of the royal line. To assert the contrary, is to subvert the ancient constitution; and from an hereditary, to turn this into an elective monarchy."
The Duke smiled and bowed.