The Chevalier's daughter

by Lucy Ellen Guernsey

Then my uncle in his turn, began to explain matters, as he said. I cannot, at this distance of time, recall what he said exactly, but he made it clearly appear that his conversion to the Romish Church was a matter of deep conviction, and an act of quite disinterested faith, which had brought upon him most unmerited obloquy and persecution. He told me he had been on his way to the Tour d'Antin to visit my father, when he had been met by the news of the demolition of the chateau.

"I hurried down at once," said he. "I had hoped to induce my dear brother, if not to conform, which indeed, knowing his disposition, I hardly dared to expect, at least to withdraw quietly and in safety either to Jersey or Geneva, from which places he could easily be recalled had it been desirable. Judge, my dear Genevieve, of my feelings when I found my brother dead, his house a mass of ruins, and his wife and child fled no one knew whither. It was believed that you had put to sea under the guidance of the young English gentleman, and that you had all perished together. A fisherman, who had been driven over to Jersey by the storm, reported seeing a boat bottom upward and some floating articles of female apparel which confirmed me in the idea, and I mourned you as dead till I met you last night. I was at once struck with your resemblance to our family, and on inquiry found that you were indeed my niece."

I need not repeat all that was said to me that day. Suffice it to say that I returned home at night completely bewitched by these new relatives. I found Aunt Jem a little out of humor at my staying away so long, but she was easily pacified by my excuses, and delighted by the boxes of gloves and of French comfits I had brought her from my Aunt Zenobie. French gloves were then, as they are now, very much better than any made in England.

This was the first of many succeeding visits, in the course of which Monsieur and Madame de Fayrolles gained more and more of my confidence and regard.

They were very attentive to Aunt Jem also, but she did not like them as well as I did. I well remember a remark of hers with which her husband was not at all pleased.

"They are fishing for you, Vevette. They mean to make a convert of you, and then what will the sailor say?"

"Nonsense, Jem," said my Uncle Charles sharply. "What interest have they in the matter? Why should you wish to set Vevette against her father's family?"

"I do not wish it," returned Aunt Jem, looking at once hurt and surprised, for Uncle Charles, though often moody, was seldom anything but kind to his wife, of whom he was both fond and proud. "I am sure it is but natural they should wish to bring the child to their own way of thinking. I am not sure but I should like to be of that way myself," she added, sighing a little. "It is a comfortable kind of faith after all. One puts one's self into the hands of a priest, and then one is sure of salvation."

I might have answered that this salvation was a thing that a devout Roman Catholic never could be sure of, since his salvation depends not alone upon the all-perfect Saviour, but upon the offices of a man like himself who may be altogether a sacrilegious person; but I had become very shy of speaking upon religious subjects. I still, it is true, kept up a form of devotion morning and evening, but with my conscience constantly burdened by unrepented sins which I would not even confess to be sins, my prayers could be only the emptiest of forms. My Bible lay unread day after day, and though I did indeed go to church once every Sunday, I did not greatly profit by that.

It was a time of great deadness in spiritual matters in the Church of England, though there were a few faithful preachers who shone as lights in a dark place. But our parish clergyman was not one of them. Sometimes he gave us a disquisition on the heresies of the first ages in the church, but his sermons in general were either upon the divine right of kings and the wickedness of those who ventured in anything to oppose them, or else dry lectures upon morals to the effect that vice was bad and virtue was good. I heard about the Theban legionaries till I wished they had been massacred long before they were, so that they might have been lost in the mists of antiquity.