Pagina-afbeeldingen
PDF
ePub

a vision of Truth to him whose bold hand should lift the veil, so did his own shrouded future seem to stand before Antoine, and upbraid him with irresolution for not making it his own.

per

Meanwhile the young man's altered demeanour had not altogether escaped the notice of the court. The more frivolous laughed as they observed his uncertain step and clouded brow, thinking it sufficiently explained by some such fancied or transient affection as often formed a theme for their light sarcasms, and wore the mask of a tragic despair till it ended in a jest, and was forgotten. Or chance his inexperience had been practised upon by some veteran gamester, and he had lost at one of the tables of hazard a larger sum than the heir of a not over-wealthy provincial noble could well dispense with. The graver sort, with whom politics formed the leading idea, looked at him with anxiety, as one whose loyalty might have been tampered with by the agents (and they were many and various) of the Fronde. That party had gained strength under the surface of a hollow and deceitful calm; several men of note had succumbed to one or other of the motives that allured them to its standard. A thirst for liberty, a restless desire of change, or a conviction that some uncompromising change was needed in order to break up an old corrupt system, and to distribute the general welfare more equitably, these and worse inducements were secretly swelling the ranks of a faction which was soon to become actively formidable. Antoine's affable disposition and love of inquiry had brought him more in contact with some members of the Fronde than was altogether approved of at the Palais Royal. He had more than once been present at assemblies frequented by members of the Cours Souveraines, parliamentary deputies, advocates, and members of the learned professions,-gens de la robe, as they were slightingly called by the court circles. From these men, and from the burghers, out of whose ranks they were chiefly recruited, De Bonneval had heard, with some amazement, but with an increasing interest, the same arguments which he had first encountered under the forest-trees during the night of his captivity. And though his de

voted loyalty remained unshaken, he was obliged to feel that more was to be said on the popular side than he had imagined possible. Corruptions, he could not deny, existed in all departments of the public service, and told balefully on the happiness of the subject. The court was indifferent to these things; and they who ought especially to have righted them were absorbed in their personal pleasures or ambition. The groanings of oppressed men became daily fiercer, if not louder, and assumed something of the tones of that righteous indignation which pours into the ear of Heaven its claim for retribution.

The casual expression of some such ideas on our hero's part had been reported in high quarters. His acquaintance with the Prince de Marsillac, and the influence which that brilliant talker seemed to have gained over him, had not diminished the apprehensions to which his conduct gave rise. And thus, when his thoughtfulness increased, and he was to be observed pacing up and down by himself with his arms folded on his bosom, they who did not set him down as crossed in affection or as ruined at play, more than half suspected him as tainted with the growing political heresy.

There were two, meanwhile, who watched the young man with a deeper insight into his mental struggle. He who represented the evil principle exulted with an unblest triumph at the effect of his suggestions. Vincent de Paul, on the other side, if he did not precisely fathom the temptation that was pressing upon him, seemed by a kind of intuitive perception, whenever they casually met, to give him, unasked, a fuller measure of his paternal sympathy. Something of more than common force was contending in the breast of the young soldier; that was evident. Whether it were the unlawful knowledge he hoped to gain from the sorcerer Lomelli, or any other of the manifold allurements to evil presented by the capital and the court that was now enticing him astray, Antoine's name, and the dangers he was running, lived in the daily prayers of the servant of God. Vincent whispered them in his Mass, he reverted to them as he

[ocr errors]

opened his breviary, he offered up for them his fasts and apostolic labours and penances. Earnestly he asked on the young man's behalf, and often; it remains to be seen whether in the end he obtained for him or no.

CHAPTER XXI.

DARKNESS VISIBLE.

"This town is full of cozenage―

As nimble jugglers, that deceive the eye;
Dark-working sorcerers, that change the mind;
Soul-killing witches, that deform the body;
Disguised cheaters, prating mountebanks,
And many such like liberties of sin."

Comedy of Errors.

BATTISTA LOMELLI, the professor of occult sciences whom Louis had mentioned to De Bonneval, had established himself some few months before in an obscure apartment overlooking one of the narrow streets that ran through an ancient unfrequented quarter of Paris. Yet, mean and even difficult as was the access to this chamber of mystery, the anteroom of the sorcerer was resorted to by many of the noble, the gay, and the influential of the period. So universal is the yearning of the human heart, racked with uncertainty and disappointment, to withdraw the impervious veil that hangs before the unknown future, that it cannot be surprising if, in an age such as our story is concerned about, when the injunctions of religion were openly set at naught by a great number who constituted society, and professed to belong to the Church, means were employed, though recognised as unlawful and impious, to obtain a transient glimpse into what was to

come.

In the dusky outer chamber, therefore, of the Florentine, hung with faded tapestry, and furnished with a few

[ocr errors]

seats ranged against the walls, might be seen, with more or less of disguise, according to the nature of their inquiries, or the degree of credence attached to the adept's pretensions, a various and strangely-assorted company. Hither came the cavalier, bent on ascertaining the success awaiting him in some pursuit of his frivolous or guilty life; hither, also, came the spendthrift and the gamester,-the one to discover some golden secret for repairing a wasted fortune, the other to acquire a lucky number that would rule the throws of his dice or the turning of his cards. Ladies, too, masked and concealed in large flowing mantles, not unfrequently stepped from unblazoned coaches, attended by valets in plain attire. Their rank might be that of the highest nobility of France, or they might belong to the families of the magistracy, or the burgher-class: are they attached to the court, or taking part with the Fronde? Or are they members of the almost effete party of the Importants, or neutrals, awaiting the issue of the struggle that is so evidently at hand? Such speculations passed through the minds of the cavaliers, who made way for them with a gesture of mute courtesy, or handed them, with ill-suppressed curiosity, to one of the seats in the waiting-room of this silent company, until their turn should arrive for passing into the consulting-chamber and the actual presence of the sorcerer. Meanwhile we are occupied only with our hero, and with the result of his own plunge into the dark waters of futurity.

Antoine, then, his heart still agitated with the emotions of the long conflict with himself that had ended in the triumph of the worser side, slowly paced the anteroom, absorbed in uneasy thought. It so chanced that at the moment he was its only occupant, and had leisure to debate with himself, unobserved, the errand on which he had come. That its object was an unlawful one, he could not attempt to hide from his convictions. He had been too well instructed in religion not to be aware that the dread inquiry on the threshold of which he stood was a direct tampering with the powers of evil, and a sin against the first of the commandments. The only remaining tribute he would pay to the supremacy of conscience was

a vain attempt to persuade himself that, once master of the tremendous secret of his destiny, he should be the better enabled to shape the course of his remaining time to the true end for which it had been bestowed.

"Yes," he half exclaimed, as his fevered imagination conjured up the various possible revelations of life or death which the sorcerer's experiment might make to him; "let me but solve this dread uncertainty, and know the worst, or at least that which is appointed-the inevitable. Conscious of all that is to come, I shall then brace myself to meet it undauntedly. If I am not now in my right sphere, the knowledge will enable me to gain an entrance into it; if I am, to pursue it without hesitation or selfreproach." It was a sophistry that the young man was attempting to palm upon himself; nor could he fully succeed in doing so. Alas! he was not the first, nor will he be the last, who " see the best, and yet the worst pursue;" who, unable to still the voice of conscience, or divest themselves of their sense of the right path and the wrong, at least close their ears to its pleadings, and plunge forward on a way which they know to end in death. Perdition will contain no more piercing remembrance than the knowledge which the lost possessed, even in the moment when they succumbed to evil, of the true nature of the acts that have wrought their condemnation.

From such absorbing reveries De Bonneval was roused by the movement of a dark red curtain of damask that hung before a door at the farther end of the apartment. Turning short in his walk, he confronted, though at some distance, a tall spare form, dressed in an ample zimarra of purple stuff, furred about the sinewy throat, which was left bare. A glance alone was needed to tell Antoine that he was in the presence of the mysterious person whose powers he had come to employ. But without allowing him time for observation, Lomelli made a rapid, and, as it appeared to the young guardsman, rather an imperious gesture, to indicate that he should follow him into the inner room. No sooner had he done so than he dropped the curtain again, and disappeared.

De Bonneval was naturally fearless; and moreover

« VorigeDoorgaan »