Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 59, No. 363, January, 1846. Various
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open, and a man enveloped in a cloak, and with a jewelled hat sunk low upon his brow, entered hastily.
He closed the door, and then gazed with a rapid glance around him.
Jocelyne had sprung up with a suppressed cry.
"Ah! I am not mistaken," said the man advancing, and removing his hat. "Jocelyne! Dame Perrotte! I am a fugitive, and I seek a shelter at your hands. I could not trust myself to those who call themselves my friends; others who might have protected me, I know not where to find, but I bethought myself of you – of you, Jocelyne – and" —
"Philip! Monseigneur," stammered the astonished girl. "You – here – and a fugitive!"
"Do you not know me?" said the fugitive to Dame Perrotte, who had risen from her chair, and stood staring at him as if with a return of troubled intellect.
"Not know you?" exclaimed the old woman rising. "I know you well, Philip de la Mole! And is it you, the Catholic, who seek a shelter beneath the roof of the proscribed and outlawed Huguenot?"
"But it is in the cause of your religion that I have conspired, my good woman, and that I am now compelled to fly," replied La Mole; "it was for one, who, as chief of your party, would have espoused your quarrel, and re-established your influence in the land."
"Ay, for your master, the shallow Duke of Alençon," responded Perrotte coldly. "False, hollow ambition all! And ye call that the cause of religion – Mockery! Yes, I know you well, Philip de la Mole, who in the hour of bloodshed," she continued, growing more and more excited, "could approve the hellish deed, and who now can babble of sacrifice and self-offering in the cause of our religion."
"You belie me, woman," said La Mole proudly.
"Yes, I know you, Philip de la Mole," pursued the old woman with knitted brows and flashing eyes; "you, who, to amuse your hours of idleness, could talk of love to a poor trusting girl, heedless how you destroyed her peace of mind, had you but your pastime and your jest of it."
"Grandmother!" cried Jocelyne in the bitterest distress.
"It was he, then!" exclaimed Alayn, advancing upon the fugitive nobleman, with the gun-barrel raised in his arm.
"If you love me, forbear!" screamed his cousin, flinging herself before him.
"I had hoped to have found shelter among honest hearts, whom misfortune should have taught pity," said the fugitive proudly, and unmoved; "and I have erred – unjust hate, prejudice, inhospitality, are the only virtues practised beneath this roof. I will again brave the danger, and seek elsewhere that kindly feeling I find not here. Jocelyne, my sweet pretty Jocelyne, farewell!"
With these words La Mole moved towards the door. The old woman regarded him motionless, and with the same cloud of irritation on her brow. Alayn seemed equally inclined to prosecute his first hostile intention; but Jocelyne sprang after the retreating nobleman and caught him by the arm.
"Grandmother," she said, drawing herself up to her full height, and leaning fondly against La Mole – "if any one have erred, it is I, and I alone. It was I chose him forth as the noblest, the brightest, the best among those who glittered about the court, in which we humbly lived. I had given him my heart ere he had deigned to cast a look upon me. If I have loved him – if I love him still – it is because I alone have sought it should be so."
"Jocelyne! be still, sweet girl," said La Mole, affected, and moving towards the door.
"And were he our bitterest enemy," continued the excited girl, still clinging to his arm, "he is now a proscribed fugitive – no matter why – God sends him to us – and it is ours to save, not to condemn him."
"But it is said, that the enemy of the righteous shall perish from the earth," said her grandmother sternly; "it is not I condemn or kill him. If it be the will of God that his cause of error cease, let him go forth and die."
"If he die, mother," exclaimed Jocelyne with energy, "I shall die too. I have given him my heart, my life, my soul – punish me as you will – trample me at your feet. But I love him, mother; and, if you drive him forth to be hunted by his enemies to the death, your child will not survive it."
Alayn had turned away in bitterness of heart, and the old Huguenot woman, although giving way more and more to that excitement, which, at times, fully troubled her reason, only wrung her hands, as if moved by the address of the agitated girl.
"Stay! stay, Monseigneur," continued Jocelyne, as La Mole again pressed her hand and turned to depart. "She relents – she has a kind heart; and she would not, surely, deliver up the guest who begs shelter at her threshold, into the hands of those who seek to capture and to kill him."
"Let me go forth, Jocelyne! farewell!" repeated La Mole.
"Mother!" again commenced the unhappy girl, throwing herself down to clasp the knees of her grandmother, who, overcome by the violence of her feelings, had sunk back again into her chair. "Mother! would your husband, or your son, have driven even their deadliest enemy from their door?"
"Speak not of my son, girl; or you will drive me mad!" cried Perrotte, clasping her hands before her face.
Jocelyne sprang up with a look of despair, and returned to detain once more La Mole.
As they thus stood, and before the old woman had again stirred, or Alayn interfered, a rumour from the street formed by the bridge, caught the ear of the excited girl.
"What is that?" she exclaimed, starting in alarm.
"The agents of the Queen-mother sent in my pursuit, probably," replied La Mole coolly, and disengaging himself from the convulsive embrace of Jocelyne. "How they have tracked me, I know not. So be it, then. I had hoped for the sake of others to avoid their hands; but I am prepared to meet my fate."
"No, no," screamed Jocelyne. "It cannot be! Mother – mother, would you see him made a prisoner in your own house – murdered, perhaps, before your very face!"
Alayn moved towards the door; and the girl sprang to intercept him.
"Would you be so base? Would you have me hate you?" cried the poor girl in despair, to her cousin.
Many steps were now heard ascending the lower stair. The old woman, who trembled in every limb, stirred not from her chair; but, removing one hand from her face, she stretched it out towards a corner of the room.
"Ah! I understand you, mother," exclaimed Jocelyne. "That secret closet where our books of religion are deposited, where our old priest, during the massacre, was hid!"
"Whilst my son perished – a victim – a martyr!" groaned the old woman, fearfully agitated.
"Come, come, Monseigneur," pursued the excited girl; and, in spite of the unwillingness of La Mole to profit by a hospitality thus bestowed, she dragged him to one corner of the room, and pushing back the spring of one of those secret recesses then so commonly constructed in all houses, as well of the bourgeois as the nobles, on account of the troubles and dangers of the times, she compelled him by her entreaties to enter a dark nook – then hastily closing the aperture, she exclaimed, "God shield him!" and sank down into the stool by her grandmother's side.
"Alayn!" she said, in a low hurried tone, as the heavy steps still mounted the stairs, "you will be silent, will you not? You will not betray him, and see the poor girl, whom you profess to love, die at your feet!"
The youth shook his head with a gesture of resignation, although the frown upon his brow showed how painful were the feelings that he suppressed.
"Mother!" whispered Jocelyne once more to the old woman. "Calm your agitation – oh! let not a word, a gesture, betray our secret! Stay! I will read to you!" And she seized the Bible, then a dangerous book to produce thus openly before Catholic agents of the court, and took it on her lap.
Perrotte answered not a word, but continued to rock herself with much agitation from side to side in her chair.
The noise of the arquebuses of soldiery was now, in truth, heard on the landing-place. A heavy blow was given on the panels of the door; and, without waiting for permission to enter, a man in the military accoutrements of the period, whose head was crowned with a high hat, adorned with a short