"And have the goodness to add, that I only regret my inability to repeat the same sentiments in his presence."
"Madame shall be obeyed."
So, with an air of affected defiance on the one side, and of sarcastic levity on the other, the two conspirators parted. Her protracted residence in the Chateau des Anges, gloomy and anxious before, had become absolutely terrifying since she had heard the dark and menacing insinuations used by Blassemare. The evening that followed that scene, the night, and the ensuing morning, seemed endless, filled with horrid images, and haunted by the hideous thought that the catastrophe might possibly anticipate the hour of escape, or that some one untoward chance might defeat the entire scheme, and leave her at the mercy of a more than ever exasperated tyrant.
As the day wore on, every incident appeared to her overstrained mind an omen of good or ill-success. Towards evening the sky became overcast, and finally an awful thunder-storm swept over the Chateau des Anges. Her heart sank within her at the inauspicious augury; but as the same tempest, an hour later, rolled over other regions, it left one trifling token of its passage, which, by a mysterious stroke of fate, was nearly connected with her destiny.
Poor Gabriel, his head full of chimeras, his heart of true love, was slowly walking through the woodlands of the Parcq de Charrebourg, towards that haunted spot, the cottage in which the beautiful demoiselle had passed her happiest days, when the storm began to mutter over the rising grounds, and before he had made much way, the thunder burst above his head with fury, and in a little time the rain descended with such tropical violence as to arrest his further progress, under the dense canopy of a chestnut-tree.
Here he waited until the thunder-clouds had quite passed away; and then, amid red glances of western sunshine, he resumed that pilgrimage, to him so full of melancholy, of ambition, and of tenderness.
"And now, dear, dear Mademoiselle de Charrebourg, I come into your presence, to learn how it fares with you."
He took off his hat, as if expecting to see her looking, as of old, from the window of her little room. From the plants that hung from the walls, and from the struggling bushes, the big rain-drops were trickling, in the merry sunlight, like tears of joy. His heart was full as he turned the corner of the cottage, and entered the little bowling-green. But, alas! what a sight awaited him! The rose-tree, the emblem of his adored mistress, was shivered: the casement, and the wall, and roof, were shattered, and reduced to a mass of rubbish, by a stroke of lightning.
Gabriel had never felt real desolation before. He rushed to the wide chasm which now admitted the winds and rains of heaven to the shrine which his adoration and reverence had consecrated with a tenderness so absorbing. Oh! what ruin—what profanation—what an irreparable havoc of all his treasure! And the tree, too—gone, blasted. Tears of passionate despair rained from his eyes: he wrung his hands, he stamped, raved, and "cursed his day."
In a little while, however, his thoughts took a different turn. From the material wreck they passed on to the dire significance which such portent might indicate.