Louis looked up from his thorny pillow. He took her hand, and pressed it with grateful fervour to his lips.—
"You, you, holy Marcella!" cried he, "are the genial visitant I saw not,—are the messenger from heaven that speaks peace to my soul! Pray for me I beseech you; but, above all, pray for my misguided father. May he be redeemed; and for disgrace,—trampling, overwhelming disgrace, let it come!"
The speech was begun to her, but ended in an address to heaven, without farther consciousness of who were present.
Ferdinand and his sister comprehended that some person had betrayed to him the secret they had so carefully concealed; and both apprehended the effects of so sudden a blow upon a mind whose keen sense of honour seemed one with his being.
When the Marquis Santa Cruz learnt what had passed, he went to the couch of his young friend; and dismissing every person, discoursed with him alone, for more than an hour. The Marchioness met him in the room of her son, and with maternal anxiety, enquired the result of his visit.
"I found him," replied Santa Cruz, "in a silence, which he had never broken since my son and daughter left him; but when I spoke to him, he answered me firmly. And then I discovered that it was not so much the publication of his father's dishonour, which had so affected him, as the conviction that such public degradation, by still farther incensing the Duke, was the seal of his estrangement from his religion and his country." "He is now an outcast!" cried he, "and driven to despair, he will believe he is banished from the face of heaven and the Christian world for ever!"
"Oh, my father," cried Marcella, "is there not one who teaches us where all comfort is written? And in those sacred pages we are told, that he who was cast out into the desert for mocking the promise of his God, yet found an angel in the wilderness to save him from perishing."
"Louis de Montemar is no stranger to the volume which is your study, my child;" gently answered her father; "and I soon learnt, that though human nature shrunk under the stroke, there was a spirit within him that sustained and cheered him with a better hope."
"My father," said Marcella, laying her trembling hand on the arm of the Marquis, "can his faith be wrong, who is so supported?" Santa Cruz shook off that appealing touch. A deep thoughtfulness passed over his brow. It was troubled, but it was not severe; and he left the room without answering her.