"Then who else knew anything about this business?"
"If you must know, then," said he, "it is the English Countess who is staying here, and whom I have been attending for the last week. How she came to hear of this affair I cannot tell you, for I know it is a secret to the rest of the house; but she made me promise to come and see you, and if there was nothing in your wound to forbid it, to bring you over to her dressing-room, and present you to her. And now let me look at the injury."
I took off my coat, and, baring my arm, displayed a very ugly thrust, which, entering above the wrist, came out between the two bones of the arm.
"Now I call this the worst of the two," said he, examining it "Does it give you much pain?"
"Some uneasiness; nothing more. When may I see the Countess?" asked I; for an intense curiosity to meet her had now possessed me.
"If you like, you may go at once; not that I can accompany you, for I am off for a distant visit; but her rooms are at the end of this corridor, and you enter by the conservatory. Meanwhile I must bandage this arm in somewhat better fashion than you have done."
While he was engaged in dressing my wound, he rambled on about the reckless habits that made such _rencontres_ possible. "We are in the middle of the seventeenth century here, with all its barbarisms," said he. "These young fellows were vexed at seeing the notice you attracted; and that was to their thinking cause enough to send you off with a damaged lung or a maimed limb. It"s all well, however, as long as Graf Hunyadi does not hear of it. But if he should, he"ll turn them out, every man of them, for this treatment of an Englishman."
"Then we must take care, sir, that he does not hear of it," said I, half fiercely, and as though addressing my speech especially to himself.
"Not from me, certainly," said he. "My doctor"s instincts always save me from such indiscretions."
"Is our Countess young, doctor?" asked I, half jocularly.
"Young and pretty, though one might say, too, she has been younger and prettier. If you dine below stairs today, drink no wine, and get back to your sofa as soon as you can after dinner." With this caution he left me.
A heavy packet of letters had arrived from Fiume, containing, I surmised, some instructions for which I had written; but seeing that the address was in the cashier"s handwriting, I felt no impatience to break the seal.
I dressed myself with unusual care, though the pain of my arm made the process a very slow one; and at last set out to pay my visit. I pa.s.sed along the corridor, through the conservatory, and found myself at a door, at which I knocked twice. At last I turned the handle, and entered a small but handsomely furnished drawing-room, about which books and newspapers lay scattered; and a small embroidery-frame near the fire showed where she, who was engaged with that task, had lately been seated. As I bent down in some curiosity to examine a really clever copy of an altar-piece of Albert Durer, a door gently opened, and I heard the rustle of a silk dress. I had not got time to look round when, with a cry, she rushed towards me, and clasped me in her arms. It was Madame Cleremont!
"My own dear, dear Digby!" she cried, as she kissed me over face and forehead, smoothing back my hair to look at me, and then falling again on my neck. "I knew it could be no other when I heard of you, darling; and when they told me of your singing, I could have sworn it was yourself."
I tried to disengage myself from her embrace, and summoned what I could of sternness to repel her caresses. She dropped at my feet, and, clasping my hands, implored me, in accents broken with pa.s.sion, to forgive her. To see her who had once been all that a mother could have been to me in tenderness and care, who watched the long hours of the night beside my sick-bed,--to see her there before me, abject, self-accused, and yet entreating forgiveness, was more than I could bear. My nerves, besides, had been already too tensely strung; and I burst into a pa.s.sion of tears that totally overcame me. She sat with her arm round me, and wept.
With a wild hysterical rapidity she poured forth a sort of excuse of her own conduct. She recalled all that I had seen her suffer of insult and shame; the daily outrages pa.s.sed upon her; the slights which no woman can or ought to pardon. She spoke of her friendlessness, her misery; but, more than all, her consuming desire to be avenged on the man who had degraded her. "Your father, I knew, was the man to do me this justice," she cried; "he did not love me, nor did I love him; but we both hated this wretch, and it seemed little to me what became of me, if I could but compa.s.s his ruin."
I scarcely followed her. I bethought me of my poor mother, for whom none had a thought, neither of the wrongs done her, nor of the sufferings to which she was so remorselessly consigned.
"You do not listen to me. You do not hear me," cried she, pa.s.sionately; "and yet who has been your friend as I have? Who has implored your father to be just towards you as I have done? Who has hazarded her whole future in maintaining your rights,--who but I?" In a wild rhapsody of mingled pa.s.sion and appeal she went on to show how Sir Roger insisted on presenting her everywhere as his wife.
Even at courts she had been so presented, though all the terrible consequences of exposure were sure to ring over the whole of Europe. The personal danger of the step was-a temptation too strong to resist; and the altercation and vindication that must follow were ecstasy to him. He was-pitting himself against the world, and he would back himself on the issue.
"And, here, where we are now," cried I, "what is to happen if to-morrow some stranger should arrive from England who knows your story, and feels he owes it to his host to proclaim it?"
"Is it not too clear what is to happen?" shrieked she; "blood, more blood,--theirs or his, or both! Just as he struck a young prince at Baden with a glove across the face, because he stared at me too rudely, and shot him afterwards; his dearest tie to me is the peril that attaches to me. Do you not know him, Digby? Do you not know the insolent disdain with which he refuses to be bound by what other men submit to; and that when he has said, "I am ready to stake my life on it," he believes he has proved his conviction to be a just one?"
Of my father"s means, or what remained to him of fortune, she knew nothing. They had often been reduced to almost want, and at other times money would flow freely in, to be wasted and lavished with that careless munificence that no experiences of privation could ever teach prudence.
We now turned to speculate on what would happen when he came back from this shooting-party; how he would recognize me.
"I see," cried I: "you suspect he will disown me?"
"Not that, dear Digby," said she, in some confusion, "but he may require--that is, he may wish you to conform to some plan, some procedure of his own."
"If this should involve the smallest infraction of what is due to my mother, I "ll refuse," said I, firmly, "and reject as openly as he dares to make it."
"And are you ready to face what may follow?"
"If you mean as regards myself, I am quite ready. My father threw me off years ago, and I am better able to fight the battle of life now than I was then. I ask nothing of him,--not even his name. If you speak of other consequences,--of what may ensue when his hosts shall learn the fraud he has practised on them--" It was only as the fatal word fell from me that I felt how cruelly I had spoken, and I stopped and took her hand in mine, saying, "Do not be angry with me, dear friend, that I have spoken a bitter word; bear with me for _her_ sake, who has none to befriend her but myself."
She made me no answer, but looked out cold and stern into vacancy, her pale features motionless, not a line or lineament betraying what was pa.s.sing within her.
"Why remain here then to provoke a catastrophe?" cried she, suddenly.
"If you have come for pleasure, you see enough to be aware there is little more awaiting you."
"I have not come for pleasure. I am here to confer with Count Hunyadi on a matter of business."
"And will some paltry success in a little peddling contract for the Count"s wine or his olives or his Indian corn compensate you for the ruin you may bring on your father? Will it recompense you if his blood be shed?"
There was a tone of defiant sarcasm in the way she spoke these words that showed me, if I would not yield to her persuasions, she would not hesitate to employ other means of coercion. Perhaps she mistook the astonishment my face expressed for terror; for she went on: "It would be well that you thought twice over it ere you make your breach with your father irreparable. Remember, it is not a question of a pa.s.sing sentimentality or a sympathy, it is the whole story of your life is at issue,--if you be anything, or anybody, or a nameless creature, without belongings or kindred."
I sat for some minutes in deep thought. I was not sure whether I understood her words, and that she meant to say it lay entirely with my father to own or disown me, as he pleased. She seemed delighted at my embarra.s.sment, and her voice rung out with its own clear triumphant cadence, as she said, "You begin at last to see how near the precipice you have been straying."
"One moment, Madam," cried I. "If my mother be Lady Norcott, Sir Roger cannot disown me; not to say that already, in an open court, he has maintained his right over me and declared me his son."
"You are opening a question I will not touch, Digby," said she, gravely,--"your mother"s marriage. I will only say that the ablest lawyers your father has consulted p.r.o.nounce it more than questionable."
"And my father has then entertained the project of an attempt to break it."
"This is not fair," cried she, eagerly; "you lead me on from one admission to another, till I find myself revealing confidences to one who at any moment may avow himself my enemy."
I raised my eyes to her face, and she met my glance with a look cold, stern, and impa.s.sive, as though she would say, "Choose your path now, and accept me as friend or foe." All the winning softness of her manner, all those engaging coquetries of look and gesture, of which none was more mistress, were gone, and another and a very different nature had replaced them.
This, then, was one of those women all tenderness and softness and fascination, but who behind this mask have the fierce nature of the tigress. Could she be the same I had seen so submissive under all the insolence of her brutal husband, bearing his scoffs and his sarcasms without a word of reply? Was it that these cruelties had at last evoked this stern spirit, and that another temperament had been generated out of a nature broken down and demoralised by ill treatment?
"Shall I tell you what I think you ought to do?" asked she, calmly. I nodded a.s.sent. "Sit down there, then," continued she, "and write these few lines to your father, and let him have them before he returns here."
"First of all, I cannot write just now; I have had a slight accident to my right arm."
"I know," said she, smiling dubiously. "You hurt it in the riding-school; but it"s a mere nothing, is it not?"
I made a gesture of a.s.sent, not altogether pleased the while at the little sympathy she vouchsafed me, and the insignificance she ascribed to my wound.
"Shall I write for you, then? you can sign it afterwards.""
"Let me first know what you would have me say."
"Dear father--You always addressed him that way?"
"Yes."
"Dear father,--I have been here some days, awaiting Count Hunyadi"s return to transact some matters of business with him, and have by a mere accident learned that you are amongst his guests. As I do not know how, to what extent, or in what capacity it may be your pleasure to recognize me, or whether it might not chime better with your convenience to ignore me altogether, I write now to submit myself entirely to your will and guidance, being in this, as in all things, your dutiful and obedient son."
The words came from her pen as rapidly as her fingers could move across the paper; and as she finished, she pushed it towards me, saying,--