"Go on," he said, in his teeth. "You called yourself her friend, I think?" The rebuke was bitter, yet it did not move the man it lashed. "Scarcely so much," he returned, quietly. “Her acquaintance—indeed, her associate in not a few political matters-but scarcely her friend. Miladi's friendships are too perilous. Look you; I had a friend once, an Austrian, though I bear Austria no love. We had been lads together in Venetia, and the war-lusts failed to divide us. I think he was the brightest and the bravest nature I have ever known. Well, in an evil hour he fell, as you have done, under the eyes of Idalia. He had a military secret in his keeping; a secret, granted, that was of import to Italy, so perhaps you will deem what she did was justified for Italy's sake. I might have done, had I not known him from his boyhood; I might have done;-who touches politics fast grows a knave. Simply, she made him worship her as she makes you; sunned him in her smiles, leant her lips on his, let him lie in Eden for a while, till sense and judgment were both gone as yours are gone. Then, while she promised him her beauty as its price, she stole his secret from him-bought it with those caresses you believe are only yours-and, when his honour was yielded up to her, turned him adrift with a laugh at his weakness. Ah! that is Miladi! So I saw him shot one sunny summer dawn; with the balls in his throat, fired by a volley of his own cuirassiers. Politically, we owed her much; personally, I never in my soul could trust the woman who betrayed Hugo. -- Erceldoune shook through all his limbs; the spasm not alone of rage but of a more cruel emotion. The tale had too close a likeness with her own self-accusing confession, her own keenness of remorse, not to bear a terrible burden of possibility with it—a hideous surface of truth which made it impossible it should be cast away as calumny. Yet through the dizzy misery that came upon him with the words he heard he grasped one thought still foremost of all—to defend her, and to cast back every aspersion thrown on her, as though no doubt could ever rest with him, as though she had never bade him believe the worst of her that the world could tell. "Is that all you stayed me to tell?" he said, briefly. worth your while. I have no heed for libels." "It was not "It is not all. I know well that my words are wasted, and that you think me a slanderer for them: that is a matter of course. Hugo thought me the same when I told him what the tenderness of his imperial mistress would prove worth. I never knew any man saved whom her smile once had doomed. I will not strain your patience longer; let us keep close to one fact—the attempt upon your life. You deny the association of Idalia with that crime?" "I deny it utterly." His voice had a harsh vibration in it like the tone of one who speaks under unbearable physical suffering. He denied it in her name; but whilst he did so there ate like fire into him the remembrance of that shame, that horror, that remorse, that passion, with which she had looked upon the Greek, and held him from his vengeance. With his last breath he would have declared her guiltless; with his last thought held her so; yet the shadow of guilt fell on her, and he could not drive from her the taint and the tarnish of its reproach. "You do? She is indebted for your chivalry," resumed the slow, sweet voice of his companion. "I see how little you must ever have heard of the finest mistress of intrigues that Europe holds, to yield it so unhesitatingly. Now bear with me a moment while I ask you why you are so certain that she had no share in the attack made on you?" "Ask yourself. You know her." "And you mean that none who do can doubt her being the proudest and the purest, as well as the fairest among women? Ah, but then I have passed by that stage; I knew her by repute long before I ever saw her face. Your reasons, then, for thinking her both innocent and ignorant of your attempted assassination are these: that she was on the spot at the time you were shot down; that she saved your life, and concealed the action even from yourself, allowing it to be believed that Moldavian herdsmen rescued you; that you chased the leader of the band as far as the gardens of her villa at Constantinople, and there lost sight of him, though the walls of the gardens were so disposed that he could only have been concealed within them, if not in the house itself; that she invited you to spend many hours alone with her in her Eastern hermitage, and so spent them that she found little difficulty in making you believe her all she would; that she then sought to throw you off by leaving you abruptly without any clue to her movements; and that when you persisted, against her wish, in seeking her, you found her, first the associate, and a little later the fellow-prisoner with the men of that very party of extreme liberalists to whom you have always attributed the murderous onslaught made on you. These are your reasons for holding her innocent of all treason to you; they would not be very weighty evidences in law and in logic." As the chain of circumstances uncoiled link by link in the terse, unadorned words, it seemed to tighten in bands of iron about the heart of the man who trusted not less than he loved her. His face changed terribly as all the force of meaning and of circumstance arrayed itself against her, and the vague doubts, that he had strangled in their birth as blasphemies against her, stood out in unveiled language. A dogged, savage, sullen darkness lowered on his features; it had never been on them before then; it was a ferocity wholly akin to his nature, hardened and embittered by the knowledge of his own powerlessness to repel or to refute the evidence arraigned. They were but facts which were quotedfacts not even distorted in the telling; the inference drawn from them was the inevitable one, however his loyalty to her disowned it. He felt driven to bay; he was fettered to inaction by the knowledge that on him alone her safety hung; he was weighted to silence by the memories which thronged on him of her own acts and words; of that poignant remorse which had sunk so deeply into her nature, of that self-condemnation which had so unsparingly condemned her. Yet amidst all he never hesitated in her defence, and his eyes fastened on her accuser with a steady unyielding gaze. "You "I am no casuist and no rhetorician," he said, in his teeth. are both. Once for all- -no more words. If you have been her friend, you are a traitor; if you have been her foe, you are a slanderer. Either way, one word more, and I will choke you like a dog." "An unworthy and a coarse threat. What falsehood have I told you yet? I named but facts." "Your outline might be fact. "I think not. I can prove to of your assassins." "And your motive in that?" It was your colour was the lie." The lion-like eyes of Erceldoune literally blazed their fire into those that met them with unchanged serenity. There were volumes in the three words; all of distrust, disbelief, hatred, and scorn that his heart held for the one who had turned counsellor to him. Their sting pierced deep; but the wound of it was covered. "My motive is this. A party with which I was to a great extent associated, yet from whose measures I very often dissented, implicated me by their extreme opinions in many courses that I utterly disapproved, and implicated my name still oftener unknown to me. I am entirely against all violence and all fraud—not from virtue-I do not affect virtue -but from common sense. Politically, much is permissible "I am not inclined to hear your creed. I make no doubt that it is an elastic one! Your motive ?" "You pass it in your haste. I endeavour to explain it. I became entangled in earliest youth with men whose association has been the greatest injury of my career. I have never been able wholly to free myself from their influence, but I have long ceased to countenance their more unscrupulous intrigues-not from virtue, I distinctly say, from policy. It is a lack of sagacity that produces all crimes; nothing else; except an excess of animalism, which produces the same results, because it amounts to the same thing." 66 Spare your ethics! Your motive?" Springs from the inability of my late associates to discern the kinship of crime and foolishness. When I first heard of your robbery, I had my suspicions; I was baffled in my inquiries; I believed that men with whom my name was connected were concerned in it, but they feared that I should learn their complicity, and for some time succeeded in concealing it. Recently-indeed, the day before the affair of Antina-I found my suspicions right. I am ashamed to say that I have traced that melodramatic villany to those who call themselves of my party, although I have fully and finally broken off all collusion with them. In a word, I have felt disgraced that men with whom I have been allied should have been capable of such an outrage, and so much reparation as can lie in the acknowledgment is of course your immediate due. I care little how you revenge yourself, so that your vengeance may be the executor of mine for the deception passed on me. Moreover, in learning the truth of the crime you suffered from, I learnt what you have a right to know, since you believe the Countess Vassalis worthy the surrender of your own life, which is probably the cost you will pay sooner or later for your loyal efforts to save her." ENMITY EVEN AFTER DEATH. A TALE. FROM THE DANISH OF THE LATE PROFESSOR B. S. INGEMANN. Ir was in the winter of 1813, in the year that the academic building of Sorö was burned down, which was afterwards rebuilt by King Frederick VI.; in one of the villas standing a little way back from the ruins of the academy a pleasant evening party was assembled. The conversation passed at last to the subject of ghosts, in which the old pensioner, Inspector X., was particularly strong, and which was his favourite topic. It was a disagreeable road homewards which he and the whole party had to traverse; they had to pass the ruins with the still standing cloisters, which supported the old monastery chapel, and through the dark alleys of the monastery close by the churchyard. This had given a somewhat superstitious turn to the conversation. Several very awful ghost-stories were told, and the inspector was quite in his element. As usual, people laughed at first, and no one was inclined to seem so weak as to evince the smallest disposition to admit the possibility of such deviations from the known laws of nature and the experience of the generality of human beings. I would venture to wager, however," said the inspector, "that there is not one person here present who, after hearing all these stories, will be willing to go alone past the chapel for the dead and through the alleys of the cloister when the clock is about to strike twelve." All the younger gentlemen laughed, and each of them asserted that he was willing to prove himself courageous enough to do it. "Do you know the story of the two singing spectres behind the railing of the chapel, and the terrible apparition of a watchman at the gate of the churchyard?" said the inspector, with a mysterious air and a peculiar smile. "No; do tell it to us-do tell it to us," cried all the young ladies. "Such a tale must be most dreadfully amusing." "May I ask if it is a tradition, or a composition in the shape of a romance ?" inquired an elderly gentleman, the quiet historian, Professor N., and wiped his spectacles in order to watch narrowly the old inspector's countenance, which appeared to him to be hovering between irony and extreme earnestness. "You will "I cannot give up my authority," said the old man. hardly suppose that I dreamt the story, and yet you will yourself perceive that there can be no actual historical grounds for it. That the ghost-story in question might have an admissible psychological foundation, I venture to maintain. Supposing the possibility of what are called apparitions, it seems to me a matter not out of the order of things, if I can find a clue to it in a spiritual condition continuing after death." He was asked to explain himself more clearly. "If I could think any disclosures respecting departed spirits possible," he said, "especially at fixed periods, and most frequently with repetitions of the same actions, I must seek the reason of this in a kind of mental derangement, or in some passion bordering on madness, which, as a fixed idea, is rooted in the unhappy soul of one departed, and exercises such influence over him that he has lost all power to seek for himself peace and salvation in a higher state of existence." "What! crazy spirits? Souls, that after death are deranged?" cried the historian, laughing. "Then you look upon our honoured planet as a madhouse for the spirit world!" "Yes, partly so. Why not ?" replied the inspector, with his ironical smile. "We might perhaps with reason so denominate our globe, if only in regard to our pretended wisdom, and the philosophical madness or folly under which we all labour more or less. But to keep to the exception from our every-day madness, which we call apparitions, the idea of their insanity, or state of furious passion, was entertained during our heathen ages. Do you remember the tradition mentioned by Saxo,* and given in the Sagas, about Hedin and Hogne, who every night were awoke from their sleep in the grave by Hilde's magic songs, to renew their frenzied strife, after death, through centuries? One truth even the pagan Scandinavians felt deeply-that it is only love which procures blessedness, but that as long as hatred and bitter enmity rule a spirit it has no peace, and cannot be at home in any higher and better world, but must be forced back to the proscribed sphere from which it was not able to raise itself on the wings of all-redeeming love." The old man had now entered upon his spiritual theory, and quoted the legends in the Edda about the dead Svafa's return to Helge, and the mother's return to her forsaken children, in the ballads of the middle ages, as a proof that "love itself, in its noblest form, can lead souls astray from their highest home when they lack resignation to the decrees of Omnipotent love, but would plan for themselves, and fall from God's everlasting kingdom in an insane craving after what they had loved upon earth." "But the story-the ghost-story!" cried one of the young ladies. 66 What you say about love is excellent; but we wish now to hear about something very frightful." "Well, I have mentioned ghosts," replied the inspector, "but I have really nothing to tell that is very circumstantial. What, according to my opinion, seems remarkable in the story to which I allude, is the sure enough unauthenticated but matter-of-fact occurrence which is placed in combination with it, and gives it what I call its marvellous probability. I will only tell it if you will all agree, for a moment, to admit with me the possibility of a passion or a strange madness which, as a fixed idea, can govern souls even after death, and drag them back to that place which they regard in the same complaining, sinful mood, wherein they had passed from one cloudy existence to another without any but a deeprooted bitter feeling" "Tell us the story-the story!" cried all the party, quite out of patience. "We shall believe enough; only go on." * Saxo Grammaticus, the celebrated ancient Danish historian, who died in A.D. 1204. |