'There is good blood outside your Hof Kalender, dear mother mine.'
'Certainly,' said the Princess, 'he must surely be a branch of that family, though it would be more satisfactory if one found his record there. One can never know too much or too certainly of a person whom one admits to friendship.'
'Friendship is a very strong word,' said Wanda von Szalras, with a smile. 'This gentleman has only made a hostelry of Hohenszalras for a day or two, and even that was made against his will. But as you are so interested in him, meine Liebe, read this little record I have found.'
She gave the Princess an old leather-bound volume of memoirs, written and published at Lausanne, by an obscure noble in his exile, in the year 1798. She had opened the book at one of the pages that narrated the fates of many nobles of Brittany, relatives or comrades of the writer.
'And foremost amongst these,' said this little book, 'do I ever and unceasingly regret the loss of my beloved cousin and friend, Yvon Marquis de Sabran-Romaris. So beloved was he in his own province that even the Convention was afraid to touch him, and being poor, despite his high descent, as his father had ruined his fortunes in play and splendour at the court of Louis XV., he thought to escape the general proscription, and dwell peaceably on his rock-bound shores with his young children. But the blood madness of the time so grew upon the nation that even the love of his peasantry and his own poverty could not defend him, and one black, bitter day an armed mob from Vannes came over the heath, burning all they saw of ricks, or homesteads, or châteaux, or cots, that they might warm themselves by those leaping fires; and so they came on at last, yelling, and drunk, and furious, with torches flaming and pikes blood-stained, up through the gates of Romaris. Sabran went out to meet them, leading his eldest son by the hand, a child of eight years old. "What seek ye?" he said to them: "I am as poor as the poorest of you, and consciously have done no living creature wrong. What do you come for here?" The calm courage of him, and the glance of his eyes, which were very beautiful and proud, quelled the disordered, mouthing, blood-drunk multitude in a manner, and moved them to a sort of reverence, so that the leader of them, stepping forth, said roughly, 'Citizen, we come to slit your throat and burn your house; but if you will curse God and the King, and cry 'Long live the sovereign people!' we will leave you alone, for you have been the friend of the poor. Come, say it!—come, shout it with both lungs!—it is not much to ask? Sabran put his little boy behind him with a tender gesture, then kissed the hilt of his sword, which he held unsheathed in his hand: "I sorrow for the people," he said, "since they are misguided and mad. But I believe in my God and I love my King, and even so shall my children do after me;" and the words were scarce out of his mouth before a score of pikes ran him through the body, and the torches were tossed into his house, and he and his perished like so many gallant gentlemen of the time, a prey to the blind fury of an ingrate mob.'
The Princess Ottilie's tender eyes moistened as she read, and she closed the volume reverently, as though it were a sacred thing.
'I thank you for sending me such a history,' she said. 'It does one's soul good in these sad, bitter days of spiritless selfishness and utter lack of all impersonal devotion. This gentleman must, then, be a descendant of the child named in this narrative?'
'The story says that he and his perished,' replied her niece. 'But I suppose that child, or some other younger one, escaped the fire and the massacre. If ever we see him again, we will ask him. Such a tradition is as good as a page in the Almanac de Gotha.'
'It is,' accented the Princess. 'Where did you find it?'
'I read those memoirs when I was a child, with so many others of that time,' answered the Countess Wanda. 'When I heard the name of your new friend it seemed familiar to me, and thinking over it, I remembered these Breton narratives.'