Having partaken of a slight refreshment, which the solitary domestic of the mansion set before him, Louis desired to be conducted to his bed-chamber. The man opened a door at the further extremity of the saloon, and the weary traveller followed into an apartment even more desolate than the one he had left. The dull cold light of a winter moon, shrouded in snow-clouds, gleamed through the mouldering remnants of what had once been damask curtains. These perishing relics of departed grandeur were all of furniture that presented itself to the eye of Louis, as he looked around for a place of rest. At last, in a distant recess deep in darkness, the candle he held in his hand shewed a mass of something heaped together. He approached, and found his own travelling palliasse on the floor, and his baggage so disposed, as to supply the place of chair and table.

In recognizing even these poor necessaries to the repose he needed, Louis cast not a thought on the comforts he did not see, but thanking God for the good provided, stretched himself upon his hard bed, and soon was wrapped in balmy slumber.

After a night of profound sleep, the bright smile of the awakened sun played on his eye-lids, and starting from his pallet, with his usual morning-spring of joy he hailed the brilliancy of the opened day. In an apartment close to his chamber he found that luxury of the continent (which even this deserted mansion retained), a bath, and having enjoyed its refreshment, with spirits ready for whatever task might be assigned him, he prepared to meet again his mysterious visitor.

On re-entering the saloon, the gloominess which had appalled him the preceding evening was no longer there; it had disappeared before the chaser of shadows, and he advanced to a window to see what evidence of neighbourhood would present itself without.

A view, as novel as it was gay and picturesque, burst upon his sight. Under the windows stretched a high balustraded terrace, with broad stone-steps leading down to a garden intersected with parterres and long vistas foliaged with glittering icicles. The ground was white with snow, which had been falling all night, and nothing having tracked the deserted walks, it lay in shining smoothness as far as the low wall which bounded the garden. Beyond the parapet, trees of loftier growth stretched their ample arms over a plain that banked the mighty waters of the Danube, now arrested by the mightier hand of winter into a vast substantial causeway.

At this early hour in the morning, and on that long line of ice, whose limits were lost in the horizon, all Vienna and its surrounding country seemed assembled. Carriages of various forms and colours elevated on sledges, and filled by their owners of as various quality and habits, swept along in every direction. Men and women mounted on scates, darted past each other with the velocity of light; some with baskets of merchandize on their heads, and others, simply wrapped in their bear-skins, speeded forward on errands of business or of pleasure. Many of the sledged carriages took the direction of a beautiful island in the midst of the river. It was crowned with cedars, and every tree of perpetual green; they parted their verdant ranks to give place to a sloping glade, on whose smooth bosom stood a splendid but fantastic mansion. A thousand strains of music pierced the distant air, while the gay traineaux advanced in succession before its gilded colonades. Louis gazed and listened. How different was this unexpected, this glittering scene, from the sombre-suited winters of Northumberland! There, the black and sterile rocks frowned horrible over the frozen stream, which lay in death-like stillness under their gloomy shade. But yet that awful pause of nature was dear to his contemplative and happy mind. It filled him with recollections of the gracious voice, which had spoken the world into existence from the sterner solitude of chaos! And then, when his mood for loneliness changed, he had only to quit his meditations amongst these caverns of cold and silence, to emerge at once into the warm, social circle of endearing kindred, and animating friends!

While, with a fixed eye, he was thus musing on the present and the past, Gerard entered the room, and placed a tray with breakfast on the table. Louis enquired for Senor Castanos. The man answered, he was engaged. "With whom?"

"I do not know."

"Then I am not to expect him at breakfast?"

"He went out at sun-rise."

Louis asked no more questions, seeing that all around him were under the same law of la Trappe.

His lonely meal was soon dispatched; and as he found it impossible to fasten his attention to a book, or even to writing to the friends he loved, until he knew when he was to be removed from his strange situation; he left the table, and returned to his contemplations at the window. He was standing with folded arms, his eyes rambling over the ever-varying scene on the river, and sometimes wishing to be one in the animated groupe; when, hearing a step on the floor, he turned round, and beheld his expected visitor.

He wore the same enveloping dress as before, and, as before, shook aside the overhanging plumes of his hat as he advanced into the room. Louis was recovered from the amazement into which the mystery of his new guardian's address had thrown him on their first interview; but he did not attempt to dispel the awe impressed by his deportment, and his relation as the Baron de Ripperda's friend; and, therefore, he greeted his re-appearance with a collected, but a profoundly respectful demeanor.

The Sieur Ignatius approached him.

"I need not enquire of your health this morning: you look well and cheerful; and these are signs of a constitution indispensable to the fulfilment of your future duties."

Louis answered with a grateful smile, that he had to thank Heaven for a vigorous frame, and for a destiny which, hitherto had not afforded him an excuse for being otherwise than cheerful.

"The cheerfulness of a life passed in retirement," observed Ignatius, "being the effect of active amusements rather than of active duties, is habit and not principle; and must be re-moulded with stouter materials, to stand the buffets of the world. Louis, you are called from the happiness of self-enjoyment to that of self-neglect. You are called upon to toil for mankind."

"Point but the way, Sir!" cried Louis, in a subdued but earnest voice; "and I trust, you shall not find me turn from it."

"It is in all respects different from the one you have left. Fond old age, and female partiality, have hitherto smoothed your path. In the midst of this effeminacy, I know you have meditated on a manly life, on the career of fame, its triumphs, and its crown. But between the starting point and the goal, there is a wide abyss. The imagination of visionary youth overleaps it: but, in fact, it must be trod with strong unwearied feet; with wariness, privation, and danger." The eyes of Louis, flashing the brave ardours of his heart, (and which he believed were now to be summoned into licenced exercise,) gave the only answer to the Sieur's remarks, but it was eloquent of the high expectations he had raised.

"Young man," continued his austere monitor, "I come to lay open this momentous pass to you; and, once entered, you are no longer your own. You belong to mankind: you are devoted to labour for them:—And, above all, to sacrifice the daintiness of a pampered body; the passions of your soul; the affections of your heart; to the service of the country, which was that of your ancestors, and to which your father is now restored."

"I am ready, Sir," exclaimed Louis, "to take my post, be it where it may, and I trust that I shall maintain it as becomes my father's son."

"At present," replied the Sieur, "it is within these walls." Louis looked aghast. The animation of hope springing forward to military distinction, faded from his countenance.—"Within these walls!—How?—What can be done here?—I believed—I thought the army—"

This incoherent reply was suddenly arrested by the steady fixture of Ignatius's eyes. A pause ensued, doubly painful to Louis, on account of the shock his expectations had received, and because he had so weakly betrayed it. With the tint of shame displacing the paleness of disappointment, he stood before his father's friend, looking on the ground; at last the Sieur spoke.

"What army do you speak of?"

With encreased embarrassment, Louis replied: "the Spanish army; that which the Marquis Santa Cruz gave my uncle to understand was soon to march against Austria, to compel the Emperor to fulfil his broken treaties."

"And to meet that army in the heart of the Austrian capital," said Ignatius, "you thought was the object of your present summons?"

Unable to speak, from a humiliating consciousness of absurdity, Louis coloured a deeper scarlet, and again cast his eyes to the ground.

"No," continued the Sieur, "there are ways of forcing sovereigns to do their duties, besides that which the sword commands. If it will sooth your disappointment, to think that you labour in one of these, believe what you wish, and rest satisfied."

"I am satisfied," returned Louis, "and ready to be confined within these walls, at whatever employment, and for whatever time, my father may chuse to dictate."

"Follow me."

As Ignatius pronounced this command, he opened the saloon door, and crossing the gallery, stopped before another door at its extremity. He unlocked it; and Louis, who had obeyed his peremptory summons, followed him into a room furnished with an escritoire, and a large table covered with implements for writing.

"This, Louis de Montemar, is your post," cried the Sieur, closing the door and bolting it. "Here you must labour for Spain and your own destiny; and here," added he, in a decisive voice; "you must take an oath of inviolable secrecy, that neither bribery of wealth, honours, nor beauty; nor threats of ruin, torments, nor of death; shall ever induce you to betray what may be confided to you in this chamber."

Appalled at this demand, Louis did not answer. The Sieur examined his changing countenance.

"You cannot hesitate to give me this pledge of honour!"

"Honour does not need such a pledge," replied Louis, turning on him the assured look of conscious worth; "trust me, and you shall find, that in no case where honour enjoins silence, death itself can compel me to speak."

Ignatius shook his head.—

"This will not do, in an affair like the present. When the interests of millions may hang upon a yea or nay; he, who has it in his power to pronounce either, must be bound on the perdition of his soul to utter that only which ensures the general safety."

He paused for an answer. But Louis remaining silent, as if still unconvinced, his stern monitor resumed with augmented asperity.

"I do not like this mincing nicety. It savours more of effeminate dreaming, than of manly intention to observe and to act. At a word, take the oath I proffer you; or, prepare to set out this night on your return to England; and to the absurd people who have taught you to pant for glory, and to start from its shadow." The Sieur turned haughtily away.—The reasoning faculties of his pupil became confused. Was he doing right or wrong in resisting this demand? It called on him to stake his salvation on the preservation of secrets, of the nature of which he was entirely ignorant. It seemed to him more than just, that a stranger, however sanctioned, should, at so early a stage of acquaintance, expect that perfect reliance on his virtue, as would warrant a man in so awful a venture as that of vowing to adopt all that stranger might propose. But the authority with which he pronounced the sentence which should follow persisted refusal, struck Louis with astonishment. Who was he, that durst so fearlessly take on himself the responsibility of banishing, without appeal, and with disgrace, the son of the Baron de Ripperda? As Louis looked up, with something of this question in his eyes, he met the searching glance of Ignatius. "Young man," said he, "you think your honour insulted, by the mention of an oath. Your honour, which is yet untried! Which has passed through no ordeal, but those presented by phantastic imagination! What must the Baron de Ripperda think, when he hears of a son who so insults his father's approved honour, as to doubt whether he ought to pledge his faith on that father's virtue? And, after all," added he, "what more is demanded of you, than the surety that is offered every hour by the rest of mankind, on the slightest requisition, and on the commonest occasions?"

"What is slightly assumed," returned Louis, "would be as slightly relinquished. And I trust that my father will not condemn, and that his friend will not continue to misjudge, a hesitation which springs from the inexpressible awe in which I hold the nature of an oath. By that most solemn of appeals, I have never yet called upon the presence of my Creator; and therefore I tremble to do it now. But," added he, "as it is the will of my father; who, through your agency, demands it of me; on the probity of his soul, I commit mine, and am ready to swear."

"Then," cried the Sieur, "subscribe that paper with your name."

Louis took it, and read a form of words in the Spanish language, which claimed his allegiance to Spain; by the privileges and pledges of his long line of ancestors born in that realm, by the reunion of his father to that realm; and by the restitution which the King and council had made to him of the Ripperda territories in Andalusia and Granada, forfeited to the crown in the year 1673, by the rebellious conduct of Don Juan de Montemar Duke de Ripperda. In just return for this grace from the land of his ancestors, William, the present Baron de Ripperda, had taken an oath of fealty to Philip and to Spain. And Louis de Montemar, his only son, and heir to all his possessions, honours, and civic duties, was called upon, by the same solemn rite to devote himself to Spain, as his country; and to Philip as his liege-lord. At the end of this official document, a postscript was written in the Baron's own hand, demanding of his son, to add to the signature required, on oath to perform all that might be appointed him by his father directly, or indirectly through the Sieur Ignatius, for the service of the King; and to hold all secrets confided to him for that purpose, inviolable as his Christian faith.

Louis saw nothing in bonds which his father's hand-writing had sanctified, to suggest further hesitation; and, without reluctance, he set his name to the paper, and pressed to his lips the sacred volume presented by the Sieur.

"Now Louis," said he, "your task is easy. Will, is a conquering sword!"—as he spoke, a smile played for a moment on his stern lip; but like a sun-beam on a dark cloud, it suddenly disappeared, and all was gloom again. He opened the escritoire, and took from the shelves two thick scrolls in strange characters. Louis continued to gaze on the face of this mysterious man, as he arranged the sheets on the table. The smile, which had just lit up those lurid features with the nameless splendors of mental beauty, was passed away; but the impression remained on his pupil's heart. Louis congratulated himself on the assurance that it gave him, and said inwardly, "I shall never forget that magic smile, so eloquent of every ineffable grace of mind and spirit! It is a pledge to me, that I may love, as well as reverence its possessor."

Ignatius placed the papers before his attentive pupil, telling him, they comprised his duty for the day; that he must copy them stroke by stroke, for the inaccuracy of a single curve, might produce consequences to burthen his soul for ever. The Sieur then sat down to give minute instruction respecting the execution of these momentous documents. The task was complicated, and of a nature totally different from any thing Louis had ever practised, or could possibly have anticipated. However, he cheerfully engaged in its performance; and his employer, having seen the precision of his commencement, rose to withdraw. Before he quitted the room, he turned and said, that he supposed it was hardly necessary to enjoin the propriety of always keeping that chamber locked, both when it was occupied and when it was vacant. On Louis's bowing to the implied command, he added, that Gerard would strike on the door, when dinner was served in the saloon; and that at midnight, he would himself return to the chateau, to inspect the papers, and affix his seal to their contents.

Louis continued from noon, till the gloom of twilight, at his laborious penmanship. He knew nothing of the particular purport of any one of the numerous sheets he was transcribing. The characters were unknown to him; but he was assured by Ignatius, all were directed to the service of Spain; and with alacrity and exactness he had completed half his task before the duskiness of the hour, and the promised stroke of Gerard, gave him a short respite.

Solitude was again at his temperate meal. He had heard enough from the Sieur, to warn him against the imprudence of putting unnecessary questions; and determined to allow all unimportant circumstances, at least, to pass by him unnoticed by oral remark; he said nothing to his taciturn attendant about the continued absence of Castanos. His dinner was dispatched in a few minutes, and taking the candles in his hands, he returned to the locked chamber to finish his work. At the appointed hour, Ignatius reappeared.

The several heaps of papers were arranged for his inspection, and, with a nod of approbation he examined them one by one. He approved what was done, and turning to the escritoire, sealed them, and affixed to each packet its appropriate address. What were the names on these superscriptions, Louis had no guess, though he did not doubt they were all to be consigned to the Baron de Ripperda; and, (as he observed by the proceedings of the Sieur, they were ready to be put into their last envelope,) he ventured to ask whether he might not add one packet more to his father. Ignatius remained silent. Though Louis saw no encouragement on his contracting brow, he would not be so repulsed, but steadily repeated his request, adding, that he was particularly anxious to dispatch this letter, as it was not only to assure his father of his devotedness to his commands, but to beg him to forward one on most urgent business, which he had inclosed for Don Ferdinand d'Osorio.

"Your father will have sufficient assurance of your obedience, in the execution of these papers," returned the Sieur, "and as to promoting a correspondence with Don Ferdinand d'Osorio;—in your situation, that is out of the question. Your residence here is unknown to any one, and must continue so, till the affair that commands your service, is made or marred. Burn your packet, therefore; it cannot go."

During this speech, he opened the leathern-bag that was to be the travelling case of the dispatches.

Louis sighed convulsively as he put his letter back into his bosom. Ignatius took no notice of this heart-struck sign of disappointment, but calmly continued packing the papers. Louis thought of the unhappy Alice; of the tears she shed on his neck at parting; of his vow to restore to her, her peace of mind; and he could not endure his own cowardice in having been over-awed to the appearance of giving up her cause, even for a moment. He resumed in a firmer voice.

"I seek no correspondence with Don Ferdinand, Sir, I never desire to hear from him in return for the letter I am so anxious he should receive. It is only to demand of him an act of justice to a lovely woman whose happiness he has destroyed. And to do this, I have solemnly engaged myself to her and to my own heart."

"Louis de Montemar," replied the Sieur, "you are entered on a course of life that will not admit of romantic trifling. There is but one direction for all your faculties:—the public good.—Private concerns must take care of themselves."

He closed the leathern-case over the dispatches, and covering its padlock with wax, stampt it with his seal. "I repeat, Sir," cried Louis impetuously, "I have pledged my honour, to the forwarding this letter to Don Ferdinand; and the public good will not deem it necessary to make me a private deceiver!"

Ignatius turned on him a look of haughty reproof.

"Young man, you know little of your duty towards the public good, if you can put its smallest tittle into competition with the adjustment of an amour between a weak girl and a profligate youth. Her folly must be her punishment."

The indignation of insulted virtue burnt upon the cheek of Louis.

"You mistake me, Sir! She for whom I am interested, is as pure from unchaste weakness, as my father's honour from stain. It is her soul that is enthralled, by a vow extorted from her by this ungenerous Spaniard; and to release her from the wretched load, is the sole purport of my letter to him." "You love the girl yourself," said the inflexible Ignatius, taking no visible notice of the encreasing agitation of his pupil.

"I do love her," returned he, "but not in the way your observation would imply. I love her, as becomes the son of the Baroness de Ripperda to love the daughter of her sister; that sister, who has been to him in the place of the mother heaven took from him at his birth! Alice Coningsby is the person to whom I have bound myself to release her conscience from the bonds of an artful man. And, after this explanation, I cannot believe that the friend of my father will longer withhold my letter!"

The Sieur listened with his eyes bent to the ground. He looked up when Louis ceased speaking; and saw, by his proud indignant air, that he rather expected occasion for further braving a refusal, than to receive the permission he affected to think could no longer be denied. "Louis," said he, "I see what is passing in your mind; but I will not be rigid to your present feelings. Your letter shall go to Don Ferdinand. But you must expunge from it all reference to where you are, and tell him, to send the acquittal of your imprudent cousin, direct to herself."

Surprised and thankful, Louis readily undertook to re-write the letter according to these injunctions; a few minutes put it into the form required, and inclosing the irresistible appeal of Alice herself, to her ungenerous lover, he sealed the packet, and delivered it to the Sieur. The dispatches being fastened up, it was to be committed to the particular charge of Castanos, who was to carry the bag to Madrid. Louis's grateful heart was again going to pour itself out, but Ignatius checked the ingenuous effusion, by turning severely round, as he moved to the door.

"This time," said he, "I have yielded to your request, in consideration of its pious motive. But you must fully understand me; and then you will not presume more on this indulgence, than the spirit of your recent oath will sanction. Here not only ends your correspondence with Don Ferdinand, but closes your communication with every person without these walls, until our affair is terminated. Not even the inhabitants of Lindisfarne must know of your being at Vienna."

"I lament my ignorance of the necessity for such precaution," replied Louis, "but the interdicted intimation is now beyond my recall. I wrote to both my uncles from Ostend; and twice during my journey to Vienna."

"Such an accident was provided against," answered Ignatius; "Castanos had the Baron de Ripperda's orders to destroy all such letters in their way to the post; so be at rest on that head. Your father himself will take care to let Mr. Athelstone and Sir Anthony know that you are well, and conducting yourself to his satisfaction."

"I am in his hands, and in your's," said Louis, bowing his head; while struck by so strange an act of precaution, he had not power to utter a word more. The Sieur drew his cloak over the dispatches, and without further observations, left the apartment.

END OF THE FIRST VOLUME.

Printed by A. Strahan,
New-Street-Square, London.