Part 53 (2/2)
”Ah, yes, worthy of twenty deaths!” cried Margaret, wringing her hands.
”Mademoiselle loves the brave man who was murdered?” insinuated the chevalier, in softest accents.
She grew white as death, and the great tears rushed from her eyes.
”What does it matter now?” she moaned. ”I do love him--ah, I do love him!”
Then did the little man rise and expand with warm enthusiasm--then did his handsome face glow with rapture and with pride.
He put on a smile of most gracious benevolence, he drank in the rich love-light upon her eloquent countenance, and then he cried, joyfully:
”Incomparable mademoiselle! you deserve good news. We shall hang the dog, and then resurrect the master; for, _Viola! Colonel Brand is not dead yet_!”
CHAPTER XXV.
OFF TO AMERICA.
The chevalier paused with dramatic _empress.e.m.e.nt_ to enjoy the effect of his announcement. But the pale woman who was sitting before him made little sign of her emotions.
With the tears still upon her cheeks, and hands clasped in her lap, she had gone a wild trip into fairyland, and its brilliant fantasies were whirling round her in all manner of rainbow tints presaging hopes of joy; and the little chevalier, glossy-bearded, pleased, and triumphant, seemed to dance round her in the many-tinted flare, like the good geni of the fairy tale.
Save the added wildness to these resistless gray eyes, and the sudden aurora gleam over brow and cheek, the demonstrative Frenchman might have doubted if she believed him.
”Admirable mademoiselle,” aspired he, after a due pause; ”she is brave as the Spartan boy with his more disagreeable burden, the wolf. She will not let the surprise show so much as the tip of his nose--ah, you British know how to shut the teeth. _Mais Voila_, you shall say, 'Go on, _mon ami_, and accept your thousand pounds,' or shall I say no more of my colonel, and let the naughty convict go hang?”
”He is alive--go on,” breathed Margaret to the pirouetting geni of her fairy-tale.
”What! and loose monsieur's neck-cloth, which was to strangle him?”
”Yes yes; tell me of St. Udo Brand, that we may bring him home to his own.”
”Mademoiselle is magnificent. She forgives like an angel, and pays like an empress. I bow before so grand a demoiselle, the effulgence of her nature dazzles me, and _Voila!_ I, also touched with enthusiasm, emulate her in magnificence. For the poor sum of one thousand pounds I give to mademoiselle the hero of her heart, and happiness, and to me darkness, after the blinding study of her perfection. Nay more, I have a turn for necromancy--I may not read man's destiny in the stars, but woman's future in her own _pet.i.te_ hand I have often seen, and I see this hand, which is a lovely hand, holding out the fortune of St. Udo, my fine colonel, to him, and being taken, fortune and all, for its own open kindness; and I behold myself (in the future of this _pet.i.te_ hand) placing by the revelation I am about to make, my n.o.ble heroine in the arms of another--for only one thousand pounds.
”Behold me, then, lift the cloud which has swallowed up the life of our gallant St. Udo Brand from the moment in which the renegade, Thoms, has stabbed him on the battle-field and lo! with the sweep of my magician's wand I place before you the succeeding picture, clear, truthful, and unshadowed.
”My fallen hero finds himself next--not in Heaven, where, by gar, his brave deeds have doubtless bought for him a seat in the dress-circle--but in a villainous ambulance, being jolted over an execrable wood-road in a rain-storm which kindly drenches him with sufficient moisture to keep his wounds flowing. Having ascertained as much, and doubtless feeling disgusted with the lack of courtesy which the jade Fortune has displayed, he absents his spirit once more from his body, going an experimental tour to his future quarters, and leaving that tenement to all appearances 'to let.'
”It is barely possible that his future quarters are not inviting, for the spirit comes back from a blind boxing for a place somewhere, and takes up with the poor, shattered body once more, and St. Udo wakes up to find himself a prisoner of the South, immured in Castle Thunder, Richmond.
”Mademoiselle, I have already narrated to you the trials which I, the foot-ball of the vixen Fortune, endured in Castle Thunder with my _camarade_. I pa.s.s the time of his deadly illness, when the breath flits forth like a puff, and seems gone forever--when the great wounds fever, and my friend in blue babbles at the charge, and the rally, and shouts of phantom soldiers, or turns to his pillow and whispers of woman's tender hands, when there are but the rough fingers of his faithful Ludovic. _Ma foi!_ but he is a British Napoleon! He triumphs over his desperate wounds, and stifling captivity, and one day my Brand sits up and knows me, whom last he had known as a foe, by the ungraceful _contretemps_ of war.
”_Mon Dieu!_ but I was glad, and I was sorry! There he is for you--so thin, and so patient--waiting to accept the life that G.o.d shall give.
”My heroine, you shall not weep. It is better than the death by treachery, is it not? And _Voila!_ he shall give you an English hand-grip yet--shall he not? And I shall be there to see and to bless, and to be the good _sorcier_. Ah, bravo! or what you call in England, 'Here, here!' we shall all be happy presently.
”But to resume: When I know better this man whom I have yet known as the brave soldier at the head of his company, when I see him in captivity, in trial, in sickness, eating with me the crust, drinking with me the muddy water, bearing cowardly usage from his jailers--all with that grand patience, I find in him a great man, and morally I see myself upon my knees before him to do honor and I whisper in my own ear, 'Ludovic Calembours, tell this, the only man whom you ever loved better than yourself the plot which was made by this wretch, Mortlake, to oust him from his Castle Brand!'
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