“Andrew, count of Bathori.”
“Well, sir,” seeing I had finished the perusal, “and what have you now to allege? When I saw you simply as the favoured lover of Pandora, however treacherous and dishonourable I might deem your conduct towards me, I quitted the field. I did not trust myself to be a judge in my own cause. I did not confide in my estimate of your unworthiness, when I was myself wholly concerned. I had some time before received an invitation from the duke d’Aumale, who was collecting a number of generous and high-spirited nobles to accompany Mary queen of Scots to the barbarous fields of her native realm. I at first declined, I now accepted, the invitation; I set out for Paris to join him. I found that letter waiting my arrival at Fribourg, and I returned. Deeply as Pandora has sunk in my esteem, I determined I would never allow her to be thrown away upon the infamous Chatillon.
“You haunt my steps. I heard of you again and again on my route as I returned from Fribourg. I arrive at Presburg, and presently after you again make your appearance. What further villanies have you to act? What new treacheries have you devised against me? This morning I consented to the representations of count Bathori, and agreed that you should be delivered up to justice. Why then are you not in custody?
“When I consider the mystery and inscrutableness of your character, I am lost in conjecture. You are said to be a magician, a dealer in the unhallowed secrets of alchymy and the elixir vitæ. In cases like this, all the ordinary rules of human sagacity and prudence are superseded, the wisest man is a fool, and the noblest spirit feels the very ground he stood on struck from under his feet. How can I know that the seduction of Pandora’s affections is not owing to magical incantations, who in that case is rather an object for compassion than for censure? How can I tell that the fraternal resemblance borne by your features to my own, and the sudden and ardent partiality that rose in my breast when first I saw you, have not been produced by the most detested arts? Magic dissolves the whole principle and arrangement of human action, subverts all generous enthusiasm and dignity, and renders life itself loathsome and intolerable.
“This is to me the most painful of all subjects. I had a father whom I affectionately loved: he became the dupe of these infernal secrets. I had a mother, the paragon of the creation: that father murdered her. All the anguish I ever felt, has derived its source from alchymy and magic. While the infamous Chatillon thus stands before me, I feel all the long-forgotten wounds of my heart new opened, and the blood bursting afresh from every vein. I have rested, and been at peace; and now the red and venomed plague, that tarnished the years of my opening youth, returns to blast me. Begone, infamous, thrice-damned villain! and let me never see thee more!
“Wretch that you are!” continued Charles; for he saw me motioning to withdraw,—I felt that all further expostulation and discussion on my part was useless,—“wretch that you are! what is it that you are about to do? Think no to escape my vengeance! In the midst of all the tumultuous passions you waken in my breast, I still feel in myself the soldier and the man of honour. I am not a thief-taker or a bailiff. You are within my power, and that is your present protection. I will not now deliver you up to the justice of the state, but will hurl against you my personal defiance. I am willing to meet you man to man: I thirst to encounter you as my worst and most mortal foe, who has perpetrated against me the basest injuries, and excited in my bosom the most hateful sensations. Though you were fenced with all the legions of hell, I fear you not; and seeing that, after all that is past, you have once again intruded into my presence, I here bind myself by all that is sacred to pursue you to the death.”
What could I answer to such an attack? I saw at once that the case, as to all future harmony between me and my son was desperate and irremediable. What hope could I entertain further? What had hitherto been the result of our ill-fated intercourse? Every offence and prejudice that can gall the human mind had been brought forward in it in turn. I had wounded Damville in the most sensible point of private life, and had blasted his hopes there where he stored them all. I had offended his most rooted political prepossessions, by aiding the Turk, and feeding a nation that perished with hunger. I was an equivocal character, assuming different names, and wandering over the world with different pretences. Last of all, I had revived in his mind the images of his father and his mother,—all that had once been most dear, and now was most painful, to his recollection; and had tortured his fancy with nameless horrors. These sentiments could never be removed. All the explanations in the world could never reconcile me to his mind; and I felt that I had that within, which, in what was to come, as it had in what was past, must for ever annihilate all confidence between us. At once therefore I accepted his challenge, arranged with him the terms of a hostile encounter on the following morning, and immediately after bid adieu to Presburg, and to the sight of every soul contained within its walls, for ever.
This is, I powerfully feel, the last adventure that I shall ever have the courage to commit to writing. A few minutes more, and I will lay down my pen, and resolve in the most solemn and sacred manner never to compose another line. Indeed, all other adventures must necessarily be frigid and uninteresting, compared with that which I have now described. Great God, what a fate was mine! Anxious as I had been to prove myself in the most momentous respects the benefactor of my son, dismissing all other thoughts and cares from my mind, journeying with this sole object in view, from Presburg to Venice, and from Venice to Presburg, from Hungary to the banks of the Rhine, and from the banks of the Rhine back again to Hungary,—the whole scene was now terminated by a declaration on his part, that nothing could appease the animosity he cherished against me, short of rioting in the blood of his father’s heart. I was reduced to the necessity either of lifting my sword against my son, of running myself upon the point of his weapon, or of forfeiting the engagement between us, and suffering him to brand me as a coward in the face of Christendom. I mention not this, because the variety of objects of choice produced in me the slightest hesitation. Weary as I was of life, I could cheerfully have consented to die, but not to stain the sword of Charles de Damville with my vital blood. I prevented him from being the assassin of his father’s life; I could not prevent him from being the assassin of his father’s character. He was assiduous and indefatigable in spreading against me the blackest invectives, which he regarded as the most unerring truths. All Hungary has resounded for thirty years with the atrocities of the sieur de Chatillon; what is here recorded contains the whole and unvarnished truth on the subject. This narrative however shall never see the light, till the melancholy hour when Charles de Damville shall be no more.
Yet in the midst of the anguish, the disappointment of every cherished hope, which rends my soul, I have one consolation, and that an invaluable one, in the virtues, the glory, and the happiness of my son. I said I would forget every gratification and sentiment of my own in him; I am now more than ever instigated to do so. When I quitted Presburg, I left Cabriera behind me in that city, and I took care to obtain a parting interview with him. He afterwards gave me the meeting, as we then concerted, at Trieste in the duchy of Carniola. It happened, as I had flattered myself the event would prove, that, the visible source of umbrage being removed, Charles and Pandora in no long time came to a mutual understanding, and were finally made happy in each other. I had been the fortunate means of supplying to this excellent and incomparable creature the only defect under which she laboured, a want of fortune; her uncle, having no longer a pretence to oppose their mutual passion, united their hands; and, at the time of which I am speaking, they were regarded as the most graceful and accomplished couple in the whole Hungarian dominions. The chevalier de Damville is considered in that country as the great bulwark of the Christian frontier, and the most generous and illustrious pupil in the school of the Bayards and the Scanderbegs. Cabriera, worn out with years and fatigues, but still grasping and avaricious to his latest hour, expired in my arms in the city of Trieste; and by his death yielded me this contentment, that henceforth the only obvious means for detecting my beneficent fraud in securing the dower of Pandora was for ever removed.
That the reader may enter the more fully into my sentiment of congratulation upon the happiness of my son, and rise from the perusal of my narrative with a more soothing and pleasurable sensation, I will here shortly recapitulate the good qualities that had been unfolded in this truly extraordinary young man from his earliest infancy. He was a child, only nine years of age, at the period of the truly affecting and exemplary behaviour the reader may remember him to have displayed, while I was at Paris squandering the property of my family at the gaming-table. In the alienation of mind produced in me by that dreadful catastrophe, he was my constant attendant, my careful nurse, and my affectionate friend. When, twelve months after, we were driven by our calamities out of Switzerland, and I lay extended to all human appearance on the bed of death, Charles was the comforter of his mother, the friend of his sisters, and even, young as he was, contributed to the maintenance of my starving family by the labour of his infant hands. At Dresden, as yet no more than seventeen years of age, he was assailed by one of the severest trials with which the mind of man can in any case be beset. But he hesitated not a moment. Obliged to choose between poverty and innocence, with the sacrifice of all his habitudes, and the loss of every friend, on the one side, and wealth, new to his enjoyment, with ignominy or an equivocal character, on the other, his determination was instant and unalterable. Cast, at so immature an age, alone and portionless, upon the world, he almost immediately, by his gallantry, his winning qualities, and his virtues, gained to himself a friend in one of the greatest captains of the age. Unaided by the brilliancy of family or fortune, he acquired the character of the bravest soldier in Hungary, where all were brave. This last trial, to which I had been the undesigning means of subjecting him, was none of the least arduous. Love often entails imbecility on the noblest of mankind: but Charles surmounted the most perilous attacks of this all-conquering passion. When he thought Pandora unworthy, he tore himself from her, and would not admit a struggle. When he believed she loved another, he disdained to claim a heart that seemed alienated from him, and himself joined the hands of his mistress and his rival. He might have died; he could not disgrace himself. I was the hero’s father!—but no! I am not blinded by paternal partiality;—but no! he was indeed what I thought him, as near the climax of dignity and virtue as the frailty of our nature will admit. His virtue was at length crowned with the most enviable reward the earth has to boast,—the faithful attachment of a noble-minded and accomplished woman. I am happy to close my eventful and somewhat melancholy story with so pleasing a termination. Whatever may have been the result of my personal experience of human life, I can never recollect the fate of Charles and Pandora without confessing with exultation, that this busy and anxious world of ours yet contains something in its stores that is worth living for.