Chapter XXII

It was night again, nearly approaching to midnight, and the Earl of Danemore sat alone in the small dark wainscotted room immediately beneath the chamber which had been assigned to the prisoner. More than once he had called his attendants to ask impatiently if the lawyer had returned, and as the clock in the great hall struck eleven without his appearance, he ordered several of the servants to go out in different directions to seek him, forbidding them to return without bringing word of where he was, and what had been the result of his proceedings during the day.

Solitude, a quick imagination, violent passions, and dangerous designs, all combined to produce a state of anxiety and impatience bordering upon phrensy. Now he sat with his head leaning on his hand, gazing expectantly at the door; now he strode up and down with his arms crossed upon his chest, and his bosom full of deep but rapid thoughts; now he paused and listened either to the footsteps of the prisoner above, as with a calmer and less irregular stride, Langford paced up and down in the room above, or to the sighing of the strong wind as it whistled round and round the high tower in which both chambers were situated.

At length, after having listened to the steps for some time, and then gazed intently on the ground in deep meditation, he seemed to be seized by a sudden resolution, and advanced at once to the door which opened on the stairs leading to the apartments above.

"I will go up to him!" he said: "I will confront him boldly! I will speak over the whole theme! I will dare every painful subject! He shall not say that I feared to encounter anything, or to grapple with any enemy, amongst the living or the dead. He shall never say that I was a coward in thought, or word, or deed, or that I feared boldly to meet aught that could be urged against me. I will go, and brow to brow, tell him what he has brought upon his head."

His first steps up the stairs were rapid and vehement; those that followed were more slow; and at the door of Langford's room he paused once more and thought. As he did so pause, he could distinctly hear the prisoner cast himself somewhat heavily into a chair, hum a few words of an old ballad, and, as it were, seduced by the music, go on with the song in a louder tone, and with a clear, mellow, and not uncultivated voice. He sang one of the sweet and simple airs of Lulli, which had a touch of melancholy, mingling, one scarcely knew how or where, with the general cheerfulness of the strain; but the English words which were adapted to it were even more gay than the music.

Strange to say, however, Langford thought not at all of the words that he was singing; nay, nor of the music itself. While he did sing his thoughts were busy, deeply busy, upon other things; and the music was but a mechanical application of the animal part of his nature to the sweetest of all arts, in order to obtain some soothing and tranquillizing power to calm his spirit ere he lay down to rest.

SONG.

The dew is on each leaf and flower,
The sky is full of light;
Beauty and brightness mark the hour
That parts the day and night.
Wake up! wake up! my own sweet love!
Raise up those beaming eyes,
To find an answering look above--
An image in the skies.

The lark! the lark! thine own sweet lark.
Pours forth his thrilling lay;
And all that's cold, and all that's dark,
Fly from the porch of day.
Wake up! wake up! my own sweet love;
Raise up those beaming eyes,
To find an answering look above--
An image in the skies.

There's music ready for thine ear,
There's perfume on the breeze;
Wake up and add to all that's dear,
What's dearer than all these.
Wake up! wake up! my own sweet love!
Raise up those beaming eyes,
To find an answering look above--
An image in the skies.

According to the differences of our natures, there is for each man's heart a key, as it were, to be found in some one of the senses. With one man it is the grosser sense of the palate, and the things that he has tasted--the cup that he has drunk in particular lands and scenes, will, when again met with, carry back the mind to earlier days, and the feelings thereof, the affections, the hopes, the fears, will crowd upon him like phantoms from the grave, conjured up by objects that seem to have no apparent connexion with them.

To some, again, certain sweet odours, the perfume of a flower, or the mingled sweetness of the morning's breath, will have the same effect. While to a few, the sight of some peculiar effect of light and shade, and to others a strain of music, a tone of voice, the carol of a bird, or the living hum of morning, will call up scenes long past, reawaken memories and affections that have slumbered for years, and give us back the gentleness of our youth. But when the chord of association is thus struck, let the sensations produced be joyful or melancholy, there is something in the first bursting forth of the past upon the present--there is something in the rapid drawing back of the dim curtain of years from between our actual feelings and the feelings long lost, too thrilling to be experienced without deep emotion; and our natural impulse is to melt in tears.

The Earl stood and listened while Langford sang; and the deep mellow tone of his voice, the well-remembered air of Lulli--the words which, though he heard them not distinctly, he knew by heart--all served to unchain the long-fettered feelings of his better days; the stern heart was bent, the proud, impetuous, revengeful spirit was softened for the moment, and the old man's eyes glistened with unwonted dew. It lasted but for a moment. Habit and circumstance re-assumed their sway; and, with a slight stamp of the foot, he drew up his head, which had been bent down under the influence of manifold emotions, and entered the room in which the prisoner sat.

Langford turned in some surprise to discover who it was that came to visit him at so late an hour, and his astonishment was not diminished on perceiving the Earl, who advanced into the room with a brow contracted even more than usual, by the angry effort he had made to conquer what he believed to be the weakness of his own heart. He paused for a moment on the side of the table opposite to Langford, gazing at him sternly but silently, as if scarcely prepared to begin the explanation he had sought.

Langford returned his glance calmly and gently, flinching not the least beneath his eye, but gazing in return with a look expressive rather of inquiry than of any other feeling. At length, as the Earl still continued silent, he spoke, saying, "Your lordship, I conclude, has something to communicate to me, and I fear from your countenance that it is not of a pleasant nature. I am very glad, however, that you have come, as there is one subject on which it is necessary that I should speak to you, and I am led to believe that the moments in which I can do so are drawing to a close."

"You do well to believe so, sir," replied the Earl; "the moments in which any communication can take place between us are, as you say, drawing to a close; they are few and short. You are right also in supposing that I have something to tell you, otherwise I should not have sought you. What I have to tell, however, requires but few words; it is, _that I know you_."

"I am glad to hear it, my lord," replied Langford, with perfect calmness, "as, if you really do know me, you will know, as I believe you do know, that the charge brought against me is false, if not absurd. But in the first instance it will be better to show me that you really do know me."

The Earl gazed upon him with his keen large eyes full of meaning, and then demanded, "Before you ever entered these gates, have you not twice written to me?"

"I have," replied Langford.

"Twice," continued the Earl, "you have demanded that to which you have no right; and now the object of your coming hither is not less clearly known to me than all your former proceedings. But in a word, I ask you, is not your name of Langford a false one? Are you not he whom men call the Chevalier of Beaulieu?"

"I am," replied Langford; "but as your lordship has accused me of demanding that to which I have no right, let me reply at once that I have a right, the strongest and the greatest! Has not every member of a noble family a right, to demand that any unjust stain cast thereon should be removed? Have not I, especially, charged as I was by the dying breath of my noble relation, the Marquis of Beaulieu, never to cease my exertions to recover the means of taking a stain from our honour--have not I, especially, a right, I say, to demand those papers at your hands, which afford the only possible method of doing so?"

"I say no!" replied the Earl, sternly: "I say, no! Even if the papers whereof you speak existed, I say--"

But Langford interrupted him more vehemently than he had ever before spoken, "My lord," he said, "those papers do exist, or you have not only broken your most solemn vow, but your plighted word of honour as a gentleman. Your vow, my lord, you perhaps might break, for in one instance at least you did break it, and a noble heart along with it; but I would not believe you to be the being who would forfeit your plighted honour--no, not to gain a kingdom! Unsay those words which cast so foul a doubt, if not an imputation upon you! and let me know, that though in the current of your fiery passions you may not have scrupled to wring the hearts and destroy the hopes of others, do not leave me to believe that you have deliberately pledged your word and then have broken it. No, no! my lord, I know that those papers are not destroyed!"

The traces of contending passions came over the countenance of Lord Danemore like the shadows of dark clouds carried over the landscape by a rapid wind; and while Langford spoke, it seemed sometimes as if he felt inclined to strike him to the earth--sometimes as if a strange and unwilling admiration took possession of him, and restrained his anger. "You are a bold and daring man," he said, in reply; "but you have spoken the truth. The papers are not destroyed, though I do not admit their contents to be such as you may imagine."

"Thank you, my lord; thank you," replied Langford, earnestly; "thank you for clearing yourself from the painful doubt in which you involved your character. Though you may have bitterly wronged my family, still I take a deeper interest than you know in seeing your honour pure, in this respect at least. In regard to the papers," he continued, with a slight change of tone, "if they were not such as I believe, you could have no reasonable objection to give them to me. If they are such as I believe, they are necessary to the honour of my family; and, deputed as I am by every member of that family to claim them at your hands, I demand them--not as a concession, but as a right. But, at the same time, I offer now, as I offered before, to pledge myself, in order to remove all evil and dangerous consequences to yourself, that those papers shall never be made public in England--shall only be so far recorded in France as to clear the honour of our race, and then utterly destroyed."

A scornful and bitter smile came upon the lip of the Earl, as he whom we shall still call Langford, uttered these words. "You are mistaken," he replied, sternly; "you are altogether mistaken. I trust myself in the power of no one; and even the very words that you uttered yesterday have put between you and me a barrier which can never be passed."

"I know not to what words your lordship alludes," replied Langford. "Nothing that I have said, nothing that I have done, ought to put any such barrier between us. Most careful have I been, in no respect, either in conversation with yourself or others, to cast an imputation upon you."

"It may be so," replied the Earl; "it may be so; but nevertheless, clearly and distinctly, I refuse you those papers. Now, sir," he continued, with the same bitter smile; "now, sir, use your threats. Now, sir, let me know what tale you will tell if I do not accede to your demands. Now, sir, let me know whether you and yours will travel to Florida to seek for matter against me!"

"Your lordship is altogether wrong," replied Langford. "That I know your history well in every particular and in every point is true, but that I will divulge any part of it that might do you injury, except that part which it is necessary to the honour of our race should be divulged, is not only far from my intention, but never should take place, even if your lordship should continue your refusal to give up those papers, and to do the act of justice that is demanded at your hands."

"Indeed!" exclaimed the Earl, pondering; "indeed! then why did you refer to matters which should be buried in the deep silence of long-gone years?"

"Accident had some share in my so doing," replied Langford, "and a wish to lead your mind back to the past had also a part therein. But at once to show you, my lord, that I am inclined to take no advantage, and to pursue my course as uprightly and honourably as possible, let me now tell you that I not only know of the existence of those papers, but know also well where they are preserved, and could while here have made myself master of them at once, had I been inclined to take that by private means which I demand openly!"

As he spoke he pointed to the small carved door in the oak panelling, and the Earl's eyes followed the direction of his hand, but with no expression of surprise.

His lip, at the same time, curled with a bitter sneer, and he replied at once: "I am not inclined to believe in the communication of miraculous knowledge to any of us poor mortals now-a-days, and therefore doubt not that your information has been derived from some source less than supernatural. There is in this house, sir, a woman called Bertha, brought up by the family of Beaulieu from her youth, and retaining for them still a deep veneration and regard, although a quarrel with one of that race induced her to quit them and enter into my service. The attachment that she showed to myself and my family through many years have taught me to trust her deeply; but when I found that she placed, on the idle pretext of greater security, a stranger accused of dark crimes in a chamber reserved entirely for myself, I began to doubt her;--when, added to that, I found that she held frequent private conferences with him, my doubts increased: and when I found that she brought others to communicate with him contrary to my expressed will, my doubts grew into certainties."

"Under such circumstances," replied Langford, fixing his eyes inquiringly upon the Earl's countenance--"under such circumstances you have of course discharged that woman from your service?"

"Not so, sir," replied the Earl; "not so. It may be my purpose to punish as well as to dismiss; but ere I do either, I shall take care to learn in what degree she has betrayed me. But to turn, sir, from your idle affectation of insight into my secrets to your equally empty boast of power, let me tell you, that though you may have been placed in a room reserved for years to myself, and though in that room all my most private papers may be preserved, you are as impotent to get possession of them as a blind man to tell the hour by the sun-dial."

"My lord, you are mistaken," replied Langford, calmly; "I am not so powerless in that respect as you imagine. I have had them now for two days at my will and pleasure to take or to leave. I have them now at my disposal; but I had determined to use all gentle and reasonable means first, to urge you by every persuasion to do justice, and only in the end to do myself right in your presence, and before your face. You have come now most opportunely, and I will not suffer the occasion to pass; but in the first instance let me once more entreat you to do a tardy act of justice, ere you force me to things most unpleasant to me."

The Earl had gazed upon him as he spoke with an expression of some surprise and doubt; so tranquilly confident was the tone and manner of one whom he had believed to be entirely in his power. At the last words, however, his brow gathered again into a frown; and he replied, "I am not to be menaced sir; I tell you, you shall never have them; and such menace puts them further from your reach than ever."

"My lord, I use no menaces," replied Langford; "my wish, my only wish, is to persuade. Oh, consider, sir! Here you now stand at the verge of age, touching upon that cold season when the only consolation for declining years, the wintry sunshine of our being's close, is a clear conscience and the memory of good deeds. If, alas! you are deprived of the power of looking back upon many such actions--nay, hear me out. If there be in the past much that is painful, much that you would fain forget, much that can never be repaired, remember, oh remember! that what cannot be repaired may often be atoned. Thus, in one instance at least, the means of atonement are in your own power, and to seize upon them in every instance is the only way to bring back even a portion of that calm serenity of heart which once you knew in days of innocence, but which I feel too sure has long departed from your bosom."

"Sir, I never knew it," burst forth the Earl; "my life has been made up of passions and regrets; and as it began, so shall it close."

"Oh no, my lord! oh no!" cried Langford; "let it not be so! I must wring your heart, but I trust it may be in some degree to heal it. You lately had a son whom you loved deeply; for his sake, I believe you have persisted for years in a course of injustice which the nobler part of your nature, I am sure, disavowed. My lord, he has been taken from you. The inducement to remain in wrong has been removed by the will of God, who therein has at once punished and opened the way to atonement. Let me beseech you, let me entreat of you, not to suffer this opportunity to pass by unnoticed. Do tardy justice, and instead of hardening yourself to crush and to injure one who could love you well, and against whom you can never succeed, think of what a satisfaction it will be to you, when from your own death-bed you look back and see that you have done all to repair a great wrong that you committed."

"And do you make the assassination of my son," demanded the Earl, "a plea for my gratifying one who is accused of murdering him?"

"My lord, I have taken it for granted throughout," replied Langford, "that you know me to be perfectly innocent of that deed. What I demand of you also, I have a right to demand. I ask you not to gratify me, but to do an act of justice; I ask of you to do honour to yourself, by taking away a stain from an honourable house that you have wronged."

"Right!" exclaimed the Earl, with one of his dark sneers, as if the recollection of something he had before intended to say came suddenly back upon him; "in what consists your right? and how have you any connexion with the honour of the family of Beaulieu? Do you suppose that I am blind or stupid? Answer me! If you are so near and honourably akin to the dead Marquis of Beaulieu, how are you not the heir of his title and estates? What right has his bastard to prate of the honour of his family?"

The blood rushed rapidly into Langford's cheek; his eye flashed, and his brow contracted; but it was only for a moment. With what was evidently a great effort, he mastered his own passions immediately, and replied, "The coarse term you have used is inapplicable to me, Lord Danemore. Your other question, as to why I have not succeeded, I could answer by a single word if I so pleased; and, did I feel as much assured of your son's death as you do, I would so answer it."

"Doubtless, doubtless!" exclaimed the Earl, impatiently; "everything can doubtless be explained if certain _ifs_ and _buts_ be removed. But I tell you, sir, till they are removed, I shall listen to you no further, nor shall I detain you long, for I came to tell you what may be told in but few words. Mark me, young man! There are certain memories called up by your looks and by your voice which might have moved me to the weakness of sparing you, had you not been foolish enough to show me, that, like a winged insect which we are forced to crush, you can sting as well as buzz. You have yet to learn that I live in the fear of no man, and that when once any one has shown me that he may be dangerous to me, the struggle commences between us, which ends but with the life of the one or the other. There is already sufficient proof against you to bring you to the gibbet; more will not be wanting, or I am mistaken; but I would have you know that your fate is of your own seeking, and that when you and yours spied out and investigated the actions of my early life, you raised up the scaffold for yourself. To-morrow you will be taken hence; a gaol will then receive you. A public trial and public execution will be the end which you have obtained by measuring yourself against one who never yet failed in the accomplishment of that for which he strove."

As the Earl spoke he turned, as if to quit the apartment, but Langford, who had listened calmly and attentively, exclaimed, ere he laid his hand upon the door, "Stay yet one moment, my lord; our conference is not finished yet. With regard to your urging against me an accusation which you know to be false, either from motives of hatred, revenge, or fear, you will reconcile that to your own conscience as you can. You will fail in your attempt: but if you did succeed, you would pile upon your head coals of fire which would consume your very heart to ashes! The matter on which I now detain you is _these papers!_ I am not accustomed to say I will do what I cannot do; therefore when I told you that if you did not do justice I would with my own hand right myself and my family, I made no vain boast."

The Earl turned and gazed upon him, both in surprise and anger, but his rage and his astonishment were doubled when the prisoner took from His pocket the key, the easily-recognised key, which had been given to him by Franklin Gray upon the moor. Prompt, however, and decided in all his determinations, the Earl instantly raised his voice, and shouted in a tone of thunder to the servants whom he had that morning ordered to remain without.

"My lord," said Langford, "you raise your voice in vain. I have every reason to believe that the persons you placed there have been gone for more than an hour; and even if they were there still, those bolts and that lock would prevent them from entering. Of that I have taken care."

Even while he spoke, the Earl had strode across the room towards the outer door, muttering, "They will soon return;" but the key of the door between the two rooms, which had been left in the inside, was now gone, and after gazing upon lock and bolt with impotent rage for a moment, he turned fiercely towards the other door which led by the stairs in the turret down to his apartments below. Langford, however, had seized the moment, and casting himself in the way, was in the act of locking that door also, when the Earl turned towards it.

Lord Danemore instantly drew his sword; but Langford was not unarmed, as he had supposed. His own blade, which had been restored to him by the half-witted man, John Graves, was in his hand in a moment; but it was only to show himself prepared that he used it, for, waving the Earl back with his hand, he exclaimed, "My lord, do nothing rashly! Remember, you have to deal with a younger, stronger, more active man than yourself, and with one long accustomed to perils and dangers. Stand back, and answer me. Will you or will you not give up those papers by fair means, or must I take them myself?"

"I will never give them," replied the Earl; "I will never give them; though that vile and treacherous woman has not only betrayed my trust, but stolen from my private cabinet the key that you now hold; I will never give them; and if you take them, you shall take my blood first, and die for spilling it."

As he spoke, he placed himself, with his drawn sword still in his hand, between Langford and the small door in the wainscot.

Langford advanced upon him, but with the same degree of calm determination which, except during one brief moment, he had displayed throughout their whole conference. "My lord," he said, "you do the woman, Bertha, wrong. This key was not obtained from her. I beseech you to give way, for I am determined to use it."

"Not while you and I both live'" replied the Earl; and as he spoke, he made a sharp quick lunge at Langford's bosom. The other was prepared, however; his sword met that of the Earl in a moment, and parrying the lunge, he grappled with his adversary, and at the same moment wrenched the weapon from his grasp, and by an exertion of his great strength removed him from between himself and the door.

He had cast the sword he had mastered to the other side of the room, and the Earl seemed to hesitate for an instant as to whether he should spring forward to recover his weapon, or struggle with the prisoner to prevent him from obtaining the papers. He felt while he hesitated that the very hesitation was undignified. He felt too, perhaps, that either attempt would be vain; that he was in the presence of one superior to himself in bodily power, in activity, in energy; one equal to himself in courage, determination, promptitude; one who was what he had been when a youth, but with the grand superiority of mental dignity and conscious rectitude. He felt himself reproved and degraded but not humbled; and the natural movement proceeding from such sensations was to cross his arms on his broad chest, and stand with a look of dark defiance gleaming from beneath his long grey eyebrows; while Langford, taking the key in his right hand, and changing the sword into his left, stood, about to open the door which covered all those mysterious points of his history which he had so long concealed.

But, even then, his young companion paused. "Oh! my lord," he said, "I would fain have these papers with your own will and consent. Again, again, I ask you, now that you see I have the power to take them, will you give them to me? will you grant me that which is my right to demand? Oh! Lord Danemore, if you ever loved the race from which I spring--if ever human affection and natural tenderness affected your bosom--if ever you had sympathy with others--if ever the strongest passion of our nature touched your heart--I adjure you now, by the memory of the past, by the dark and awful circumstances of the present, by the frowning future, by the inevitable, interminable hereafter of weal or woe, to do that which you know to be right!--at this last, this fatal moment between you and me, to render justice to those whom you have wronged; to cast from your soul the burden of old guilt, and to make atonement for one out of the many dark deeds of the past!"

He gazed upon him sternly, fixedly, earnestly; and strong passion called up in the face of each a strange likeness of expression; but the whirlwind of their emotions was too strong for either to mark the clouds and shadows, the light, or the lightning, that passed over the countenance of the other. Urged into fury, thwarted, disappointed, foiled, the Earl had no longer any command over himself, and the only dignity that he could assume was that of disappointed scorn.

"Never, bastard!" he replied; "never! Take that which you can; secure that which is in your power! Fly, if you can fly! Use your advantage to the utmost, if it can be used; but I swear by Heaven and by Hell, by all that is sacred and by all that is accursed, to follow you henceforth and for ever, unto the gates of death; to devote life, and soul, and being, mind, and thought, and energy, corporeal power and worldly wealth and temporal influence, to your destruction; and never, never to cease, till the dark, dread, interminable gulf have swallowed up one or both."

Langford gazed at him with deep and intense earnestness; and while he did so, a thousand varied emotions, each painful but each different, flitted in expression across his countenance, and caused wavering irresolution to take the place of high and strong determination. As the Earl ended, however, the other looked at him for a moment fixedly, while the peer stood with his arms still crossed upon his chest, and a look of resolute, unchangeable purpose marked in every line of that dark but splendid countenance.

Emotions strong, but new and strange, overpowered his youthful adversary; and casting from him the sword which had successfully opposed him, and the key of all the treasured secrets of his opponent's eventful life, he sprang forward, as if with a sudden impulse which he could not resist, cast himself at the Earl's feet, and, looking up in his face, embraced his knees. The stern determination of the old man was shaken. Feelings equally new and strange took possession of his bosom also, and he strained his eyes upon the noble form of him who knelt before him, with sensations different from any that he had ever known in life.

At that moment, however, strange and unusual sounds made themselves heard from without. There were cries and screams, and the noise of many feet. Still kneeling, Langford gazed upon the Earl, and the Earl upon him; but ere one could ask the other what this meant, there was a violent rush against the outer door, as if by people propelled by terror. The bolts, the bars, the fastenings gave way, and half torn from the hinges, it burst into the room.