"By the arrangement of his hair and dress I can see that he imagines he is to die as a nobleman, by the axe. May Heaven support him when he sees the disgraceful wheel."
"You seem to pity the wretch, Louis," cried the lady, who had not hitherto spoken, nor even looked toward the criminal as he was passing by the windows—"and yet he was assuredly a most atrocious criminal. A cool, deliberate, cold-blooded poisoner! Out upon it! out upon it! The wheel is fifty times too good for him!"
"He was all that you say, Marie," replied her husband gravely; "and yet I do pity him with all my heart, and grieve for him. I knew him well, though we have not met for many years, when we were both young, and there was no braver, nobler, better man within the limits of fair France. I know, too, how he loved that woman, how he trusted that man—and then to be so betrayed! It seems to me but yesterday that he led her to the altar, all tears of happiness, and soft maiden blushes. Poor Kerguelen! He was sorely tried."
"But still, my son, he was found wanting. Had he submitted him as a Christian to the punishment the good God laid upon him—"
"The world would have pronounced him a spiritless, dishonored slave, father," said the count, answering the ecclesiastic's speech before it was yet finished, "and gentlemen would have refused him the hand of fellowship."
"Was he justified then, my father?" asked the boy eagerly, who had been listening with eager attention to every word that had yet been spoken. "Do you think, then, that he was in the right; that he could not do otherwise than to slay her? I can understand that he was bound to kill the man who had basely wronged his honor—but a woman!—a woman whom he had once loved too!—that seems to me most horrible; and the mode, by a slow poison! living with her while it took effect! eating at the same board with her! sleeping by her side! that seems even more than horrible, it was cowardly!"
"God forbid, my son," replied the elder nobleman, "that I should say any man was justified who had murdered another in cold blood; especially, as you have said, a woman, and by a method so terrible as poison. I only mean exactly what I said, that he was tried very fearfully, and that under such trial the best and wisest of us here below cannot say how he would act himself. Moreover, it would seem that mistaken as he was perhaps in the course which he seems to have imagined that honor demanded at his hands, he was much mistaken in the mode which he took of accomplishing his scheme of vengeance. It was made very evident upon his trial that he did nothing, even to that wretched traitress, in rage or revenge, but all as he thought in honor. He chose a drug which consumed her by a mild and gradual decay, without suffering or spasm; he gave her time for repentance, nay, it is clearly proved that he convinced her of her sin, reconciled her to the part he had taken in her death, and exchanged forgiveness with her before she passed away. I do not think myself that to commit a crime himself can clear one from dishonor cast upon him by another's act, but at the same time I cannot look upon Kerguelen's guilt as of that brutal and felonious nature which calls for such a punishment as his—to be broken alive on the wheel, like a hired stabber—much less can I assent to the stigma which is attached to him on all sides, while that base, low-lived, treacherous, cogging miscreant, who fell too honorably by his honorable sword, meets pity—God defend us from such justice and sympathy!—and is entombed with tears and honors, while the avenger is crushed, living, out of the very shape of humanity by the hands of the common hangman."
The churchman's lips moved for a moment, as if he were about to speak in reply to the false doctrines which he heard enunciated by that upright and honorable man, and good father, but, ere he spoke, he reflected that those doctrines were held at that time, throughout Christian Europe, unquestioned, and confirmed by prejudice and pride beyond all the power of argument or of religion to set them aside, or invalidate them. The law of chivalry, sterner and more inflexible than that Mosaic code requiring an eye for an eye, and a tooth for a tooth, which demanded a human life as the sacrifice for every rash word, for every wrongful action, was the law paramount of every civilized land in that day, and in France perhaps most of all lands, as standing foremost in what was then deemed civilization. And the abbé well knew that discussion of this point would only tend to bring out the opinions of the Count de St. Renan, in favor of the sanguinary code of honor, more decidedly, and consequently to confirm the mind of the young man more effectually in what he believed himself to be a fatal error.
The young man, who was evidently very deeply interested in the matter of the conversation, had devoured every word of his father, as if he had been listening to the oracles of a God; and, when he ceased, after a pause of some seconds, during which he was pondering very deeply on that which he had heard, he raised his intelligent face and said in an earnest voice.
"I see, my father, all that you have alleged in palliation of the count's crime, and I fully understand you—though I still think it the most terrible thing I ever have heard tell of. But I do not perfectly comprehend wherefore you ransack our language of all its deepest terms of contempt which to heap upon the head of the Chevalier de la Rochederrien? He was the count's sworn friend, she was the count's wedded wife; they both were forsworn and false, and both betrayed him. But in what was the chevalier's fault the greater or the viler?"