THE meeting between my father and me was, on my side, full of respect, but coldness and ‘I have given you leisure, said he to me, to repent of your folly, and I am now come to give you the means to make me forget it; return this instance of my indulgence with obedience, and prepare to receive as you ought, the count of Foix, and mademoiselle de Foix his daughter, for whom I have destined you. The marriage shall be solemnized here; they will arrive to-morrow with your mother; I came before them only to give the necessary orders for their reception.’
‘I am sorry, Sir, replied I calmly, that I cannot comply with your wishes: I have too much honour to marry a person I can never love, therefore I intreat you will permit me to leave this place directly. Mademoiselle de Foix, however amiable she may be, cannot alter my resolution; and if I see her, the affront I shall give her by refusing her hand, will be more poignant to her.’
‘No, interrupted my father in a rage, thou shalt not see her, nor shalt thou be allowed to see the day; I will shut thee up in a dungeon, a fitter habitation. I swear by heaven, that thou shalt never be delivered from thy confinement, till I am convinced thy repentance is sincere, and thy change certain. I will punish thee for thy disobedience every way that is in my power; I will deprive thee of my estate, and settle it upon mademoiselle de Foix, to fulfil, in some degree, the promise I have given her.’
I made no opposition to my father’s tyrannical design; I suffered myself to be conducted to an old tower, where I was confined in a place at the bottom of it, which received no light but from a little grated window which looked into one of the courts of the castle. My father gave orders that food should be brought me twice a-day, but that I should not be suffered to see any person whatever.
I passed the first days of my confinement with tranquility enough, and even with some kind of pleasure. What I had so lately done for Adelaida employed all my thoughts, and left no room for reflection on the horrors of my condition; but when this sentiment began to lose its force, I resigned myself up to despair at being thus doomed to an absence of which I knew not the end. My busy imagination tortured me with the apprehension of a thousand other evils: Adelaida might be forced to enter into another engagement: I fancied her surrounded with rivals, all assiduous to please, while I had none to plead for me but my miseries; but to a mind so generous as Adelaida’s, was not this sufficient? I reproached myself for entertaining the least doubt; I asked her pardon for it, as for a crime, and my heart gathered new strength from the confidence I had in her fidelity.
My mother found means to convey a letter to my hands, in which she exhorted me to submit to my father, whose rage against me seemed to increase every day. She added, that she suffered a great deal herself; that her endeavours to procure a reconciliation between him and the family of Lussan had made him suspect that she acted in concert with me.
I was greatly affected at the uneasiness my mother suffered on my account; but as I could not accuse myself of having voluntarily caused her any part of it, all I could do was to lament her situation.
One day when I was, as usual, wholly taken up with reflections on my unhappy fate, something fell through the window into my dungeon, which immediately rouzed my attention. I saw a letter on the floor, I seized it with trembling haste; but what became of me when I read the contents! they were as follow: ‘Your father’s rage has instructed me what I ought to do. I know the terrible situation you are in, and I know but one method to extricate you from it, which will perhaps make you more miserable; but I shall be so as well as you, and that thought will give me resolution to do what is required of me. Our cruel parents, to make it impossible for me to be yours, insist upon my marrying another. This is the price your father has set upon your liberty; it will perhaps cost me my life, my quiet it too surely will, to pay it: but I am determined. Your sufferings and your prison are at present all that I can think of: in a few days I shall be the wife of the marquis de Benavides; his character is sufficient to acquaint me with all I have to suffer from him; but this sort of fidelity I owe you, at least that in the engagement I enter into, I should find nothing but misery. May you, on the contrary, be happy; your good fortune will be my consolation. I am sensible I ought not to tell you this: if I was truly generous I should suffer you to be ignorant of the part you have in my marriage; I should leave you in doubt of my constancy. I had formed a design to do so, but I was not able to execute it: in my sad situation I have need of being supported with the thought that the remembrance of me will not be hateful to you. Alas! soon, very soon it will not be permitted me to preserve yours.—I must forget you;—at least I must endeavour so to do.—Of all my miseries this is what I am most sensible of: you will increase it if you do not carefully avoid all opportunities of seeing and speaking to me. Reflect that you owe me this mark of your esteem, and oh! reflect how dear that esteem will be to me, since of all the sentiments you have profest for me, it is the only one that I am allowed to require of you.’
Of this fatal letter, which I have related at length, I was able to read no more than to these words: ‘Our cruel parents, to make it impossible for me to be yours, insist upon my marrying another.’Pierced to the heart with this cruel, this unexpected misfortune, I sunk upon the mattrass which composed my bed, and lay there several hours without sense or motion, and probably might never have recovered, but for the assistance of the person who brought me my provisions. If he was alarmed at the condition in which he found me, he was much more so at the excess of my despair, when my senses returned. The letter, which I held fast in my hand during my swoon, and which I at last read quite through, was wet with my tears, and I spoke and acted extravagancies which made him apprehensive for my reason.
This man, who till then had been inaccessible to pity, was melted all on a sudden: he blamed my father for his cruel treatment of me; he reproved himself for having executed his orders; he asked my pardon on his knees. His repentance inspired me with the thought of proposing to him to let me quit my prison for eight days only, promising him that, at the expiration of that time, I would return and put myself into his hands: I added every thing I could think of to oblige him to consent. Moved at the state he saw me in, excited by his own interest, and by the fear that I should one day take vengeance upon him for being the instrument of my father’s cruelty, he agreed to what I desired, upon the condition I had myself proposed to him.
I would have set out that moment from the castle, but there was a necessity for his going to seek for horses; and when he returned, he informed me that we could not get any till the next day. My design was to go to Adelaida, to tell her all my grief and despair, and to kill myself before her eyes, if she persisted in her resolution.
To execute this project, it was necessary that I should arrive before her fatal marriage, and every moment’s delay seemed to me an age of misery. I read over her letter a hundred times, as if I had expected to find still something more in it. I examined the date over and over; I flattered myself that the time might have been prolonged. ‘She will at least make an effort, said I; she will seize all pretences to defer it. But why should I flatter myself with so vain a hope, resumed I? Adelaida sacrificing herself for my liberty will hasten the dreadful moment. Alas! can she believe that liberty without her, can be a blessing to me? I shall every where find this prison she delivers me from; she has never known my heart; she judges of me by other men: it is to that I owe my ruin. I am still more miserable than I believed myself, since I have not the consolation to think that she knows how much I love her.’
I past the whole night in making these complaints, the most tedious night I had ever known, even in that place of misery. At length the day appeared; I mounted on horseback with my conductor. We travelled the whole day without stopping a moment, when, towards the evening, I perceived my mother in a chariot which took the road towards the castle. She knew me immediately, and, after having expressed her surprize at meeting me, she obliged me to come into the chariot to her. I durst not ask her the occasion of her journey in the situation I was in; I feared every thing, and my fear was but too well founded.
‘I come, my son, said she, by your father’s permission, to release you from your confinement.’ ‘Ah! cried I, then Adelaida is married.’ My mother answered only by silence. My misfortune which was then without remedy, presented itself to my mind with all its horrid aggravations. I fell into a kind of stupidity, and, by the force of grief, I seemed to have lost the sense of it. However, my body now sunk under the weakness of my mind: I was seized in the coach with a shivering like the cold fit of an ague. As soon as we arrived at the castle, my mother caused me to be put to bed. I lay two days without speaking or taking any nourishment; all the symptoms of a violent fever appeared, and, on the fourth, the physician despaired of my life. My mother who never left me, was inconceiveably afflicted; her tears, her prayers, and the name of Adelaida, by which she conjured me to live, made me resolve not to obstruct the endeavours of the physician to save me.
[To be continued.]