Wharton left Vienna, the morning after his separation from Louis in the garden of the chateau. From that day, Louis moved through his duties like a man in a dream. He had dispatched a special courier to his father, with as much of the conspiracy, as he had collected from his now estranged friend; and he confessed how the whole might have been in his possession, could he have brought his conscience to accord with the condition.

Hoping that even this obscure intimation might be some beacon to his father; himself went perturbedly on; racked with suspence, and feeling alone and unarmed amidst a host of ambushed foes. Except when obliged to go abroad on business, he shut himself within the walls of his house; for he now doubted every man who approached him; and the specious courtesies of women were yet more intolerable.

The Empress did not condescend to intimate how she had considered his proposition respecting the ceremony of her daughter; but she sent her chamberlain to inform him, that the Emperor had fixed the day of her favourite's nuptials, when they should be solemnized in a private manner. Louis loathed the very characters of Otteline's name; and shuddered at any new bonds to a society, associated to him with every disastrous remembrance. His soul was stricken; and the evils which appeared in visionary approach before his father's path, and his own, seemed too big for conflict. He felt he could have sustained the fiercest fields of war; could have died with an upward eye, and an exulting spirit on its honourable bed. But to be a hero under the attacks of the coward breath of man; to stand before an obloquy that threatened the annihilation of his father's glory, and his own respected name; was more than he dared to contemplate: and in appalled expectation, he mechanically prepared to obey the unwelcome behests of Elizabeth.

He was giving his slow orders to a maitre d'hotel respecting some arrangements for his future bride, when a letter was put into his hands, which had come by a circuitous route from Sardinia; and which he ought to have received a month or two ago. It was from Don Ferdinand d'Osorio. Until the public reception of Ripperda at Vienna, Don Ferdinand was ignorant where to address the cousin of his beloved Alice; and to express, what he felt, his sense of the justice of her appeal against his extorted bonds; and to acknowledge the delicacy with which Louis had seconded her remonstrances. When he heard that the Marquis de Montemar was in Germany with his father, he lost no time in writing; and entrusted his letter to a Sardinian gentleman going to Vienna. But the traveller took a wide tour; and did not bring the letter to its destination until two months after its date.

Louis dismissed his servant, and breaking the seal, read as follows:—

"My dear de Montemar,

"I should be ashamed to confess the justice of all your remarks on my conduct with regard to your sweet cousin, my ever-beloved Alice, could I not at the same time assure you that I have obeyed her wishes to the fullest extent, and followed your advice implicitly. I have written to her, and to Mrs. Coningsby; and she is perfectly free: every bond is relinquished, but that of the heart. If her's be as firm as mine, we may confidently await the holy vows, which, I trust, will yet unite us.

"You must have seen enough of my excellent father, to know that he has one error amongst his many perfections; and that it is an irreconcileable abhorrence of the Protestant religion. However, though I should despair of ever bringing him to tolerate its tenets, I have a hope of compassing his consent to my marriage with its gentle professor. Marcella, my only, and very dear sister, (and who was intended from her cradle for a nunnery,) must assist me in this project. She loves me ardently; and her power with my father, except on one point, is almost omnipotent. It is this point, on which I ground my proceedings: she must obey him; and may gratify her enthusiastic nature, by serving me against herself. Her doom, poor girl! is rather a hard one, as it was absolutely fixed before she was born. My father's youthful passions, (which are now hushed to such monastic stillness!) were the cause of her dedication. I will tell you the story; and then you may judge of my chance of success through her means.

"When my father was a young man, his character was too much like my own, self-willed and impetuous; and in affairs of love, as you will see by the sequel, he was even more determined than his son. At an early age, he acquired a great reputation in the army; and at the conclusion of the war in Italy, went on a party of pleasure to Vienna; then the gayest city in the world.

"During the reign of the Austrian monarchs in Spain, many of our grandees intermarried with the German nobility. It so happened between our family and that of the Austrian Sinzendorff's. My father, then full of life and enterprize, went to the old Count Sinzendorff's. The present Chancellor of that name was then young and thoughtless; and boasted to his cousin, of the great beauty of his youngest sister; who his family had chosen to sacrifice to the fortunes of the elder branches, by consigning her to a nunnery at the age of nineteen.—My father accompanied Sinzendorff to the convent, where they passed some hours with the beautiful novice; for she had yet four months of probation, before she was to pronounce the irrevocable vows. Suffice it to say, a mutual passion was conceived between the two cousins, and my father persuaded her to elope with him.—They fled into Switzerland, where they were married. In the course of time, absolution for the sacrilege was obtained from the Pope; but my father could never obtain it from himself.—His wife's first and second children died in the birth. They were both daughters. He believed it a judgment on his crime, and tried to reconcile offended heaven, by making a vow, that should his next infant be spared, and of the same sex; and he live to the appointed period, he would dedicate it to a monastic life, at the same age in which he seduced her mother from the altar. The next child was myself. Two or three more infant deaths intervened before the birth of Marcella. But from the hour in which she saw the light, and continued to live, a golden crucifix was hung to her neck, and she was always addressed by the name of the little nun.

"As she grew in beauty and sweetness, my mother regretted the determined immolation of her child; but my father would listen to no pleadings, to spare such variety of excellence to the world. He demanded the sacrifice for the appeasing of his conscience; and poor Marcella, though educated with all the accomplishments of her sex, and full of as many graces as ever charmed in woman, silently awaited her gloomy destiny. I remember having often seen my father stand impenetrable to my mother's reproaches for consigning all this youth and loveliness to the cloister, and then he has calmly answered:—

"Antoinetta, I have covered the blameless offering with all these garlands, to render her a more costly sacrifice at my hands; to make my heart drop blood when she is led to the altar; and then, your sin and mine, my erring wife, may find a veil!

"My mother doated on my sister, and she could not see the justice of expiating her own offence, by the misery of her child.—In this spirit, she too, made a vow; and that was, never to be separated from her daughter, till her father's cruel dedication shut her from the world. By a most unhappy fatality, the governess my mother engaged for Marcella when a child, was the widow of one of the illustrious cavaliers who came to the continent, with your James II. She was a learned and a pious woman, and brought up my sister in all her own principles.—My father led too busy a life, to investigate deeper than the fruits; and those, he said were good. But a year ago, the English lady died; and on her death-bed, she declared herself a Protestant! In short, Marcella had been too long under her tuition, to become a willing devotee to the monastic rites of the Romish Church. A superstitious horror of this discovery prevented my father questioning her on the subject; but he proposed her immediate removal to a convent. My mother opposed her vow to his; not to suffer her child to leave her, till the time of her being professed.—Marcella cast herself on her knees, and implored, by every thing sacred in earth and heaven, that her father would not compel her to take vows against which her soul revolted. She engaged to live a life of celibacy; and never to see any persons but her own family; if he would spare her those dreadful oaths, and allow her to remain for ever with her mother. But in the essential point, my mother and sister pleaded in vain. He granted her continuance at home, till the year of her noviciate; but that year must come, and it will commence next January.

"Being aware, from my father's pertinacity on these subjects, that if my sister does not then resign herself to her fate, she will be dragged to meet it, (though he would rather purchase her free consent at any price;) I determined on trying to turn her sad destiny to my happiness. When I pledged my faith to your dear cousin, I did it under a belief that I could persuade Marcella to do that willingly, which she knows she must do, even under violence. I want her to make my father's sanction to my marriage with Alice, the condition of her performing all his vows, without further hesitation!

"On my return from Lindisfarne, (without then venturing to open my whole mind to her on the subject,) I prepared the way, by describing the dear family at the pastorage, in such colours as to excite her particular interest for the fair and tender Alice. My mother's gratitude was eloquent towards Mr. Athelstone and Mrs. Coningsby; and again and again she wished to see the latter and her daughters in Spain, that she might repay them in some sort, for their cares of her son.

"My father and I soon came to Sardinia on public affairs; but we return to Spain in the autumn. I shall then unbosom myself to Marcella; and, I doubt not, she will concede that to my happiness, which, should she withhold it, would only leave me to misery, without prolonging the time of her own liberty.

"At present she is leading an almost monastic life; and the difference cannot be great, whether it be past in a real cell amongst the Ursulines, and daily cheered by visits from her mother; or in a cloistered apartment at home, which is fitted up with every similar austerity, and has no advantage but the nominal distinction of being in her father's house. "I hope every thing from Marcella's free consent, and consequent influence with my father; and, when it is given, dear de Montemar, (if you are not too absorbed in politics and Imperial favour, to continue your interest in the happiness of faithful love!) you shall hear again, from your sincerely obliged friend,

"Sardinia. Ferdinand d'Osorio."

Louis closed the letter, with every warm wish for the happiness of his endeared Alice; but while he joined the man she loved, in the heartfelt orison, he could not but regret the strain of selfishness he saw throughout his character. He hardly pitied the amiable Marcella, in the destiny she appeared to deprecate, and to which her brother so coolly rivetted her reluctant hands, while he pretended to deplore her fate. In the state Louis was in, between man's perfidy and woman's wiles, any refuge from the world, seemed a heaven to him. The passions and opinions of youth are in extremes; all delight, or all misery; all virtues, or all crimes; no happiness but in rapture; no grief but in despair. But Louis's griefs were now heavy enough, not to need the overcharging of fancy; and when he thought of all that he had suffered since his last fearful meeting with Wharton in the garden, he could not but exclaim,

"Oh, that I had wings like a dove, for then would I fly away, and be at rest!"

He was scared from the world by its vices; and sometimes longed to repose his wearied spirit in the grave. But he was now only entered into the lists; the contest was only begun; and he must brace his sinews to continue the combat, for which his ambitious soul had panted while he lay in the peacefulness of his native home!

On the very morning, whose evening was to see him perform his extorted vows, to her who had once been the object of d'Osorio's passion, two couriers arrived from Spain. The one was Castanos, who came to Louis; the other was from the Marquis de Castellor, and went direct to Count Routemberg.

The volcano had burst; and all the power, and all the honours of Ripperda were swept away! De Castellor was now in his seat; and when Castanos came off; the Duke was stunned into stupor, overcome by the illimitable ruin.

Of the particulars of the catastrophe, Louis did not hear, till he could question Castanos; for the Spaniard, knowing the tidings of the packet he brought, had presented it in silence and withdrew. Louis opened it impatiently; and took out his father's letter. He could hardly expect it to be an answer to his warning epistle, for the time appeared too short for an interchange of messengers; but eager to know the complexion of things in Spain, he broke the seal. The letter was brief, and scarcely legible; but it was sufficient to announce the completion of his worst fears: that his father was no more the minister of Spain; that he was abandoned by the King; insulted by the nobles; and outraged with every species of ingratitude by the people he had served to his own overthrow!

The bolt was then fallen! And, every hand in which his father trusted, had assisted to launch it!

Louis was transfixed with the letter in his hand. Now it was, that he saw the world unmasked before him; now it was, that he saw the views of life unveiled; now it was, that all creation seemed to pass from before him with a frightful noise, and he stood alone in chaos. The smiling face of man was blotted out; gratitude, virtue, were annihilated; and life had no longer an object! What had his father been? All that was noble and disinterested. What had he done for Spain? Redeemed her from poverty, contempt, and suffering; to riches, honour, and happiness. And what was his reward? He was cast, like the reprobate angel from on high, and trampled upon by his conquerors, as though his actions had been like him he resembled in his fall!

How long he sat in motionless, sightless gaze, upon the fatal letter, he knew not; but he was aroused by the entrance of his secretary, who informed him Count Sinzendorff awaited him in the next chamber.

Louis saw he was now called upon to breast the first wave that was to break on him from the deluge which had overwhelmed his father. He rallied his mental strength; and, looking upwards, to implore the staying hand from above, he proceeded with the composure of inevitable ruin, to the presence of the Chancellor. The virtuous statesman advanced to meet him, while his countenance proclaimed that he knew all, and sympathized with its victim.

Their conference was short; but it implied to Louis, that his delegated reign, as well as that of his father, was at an end. Sinzendorff had been in the Imperial cabinet, when Routemberg laid his dispatches before the Emperor; and to spare the upright son of Ripperda, some rude disclosure of their contents, the Chancellor took upon himself to inform him, that he was to transfer his portfolio to the Count de Monteleone, who had just arrived at Vienna.

On Louis thanking the minister for his generous interference, Sinzendorff took his hand.

"I will always bear my testimony to the fair dealing of the son, and to the disinterested conduct of the father, though we should never meet again."

Even while the words were on the lips of the chancellor, a message arrived from the Empress to Louis, to hasten his attendance at the Altheim apartments.—He smiled gloomily, in answer to Sinzendorff's smile of dubious meaning.

"I had forgotten!" said the chancellor, "you have yet a fair bond to Vienna; and this need not be a parting day."

"It is a portentous day, of most unpropitious nuptials!" replied Louis, hardly knowing what he uttered; "but every day, and every where, I must be honoured in the approbation of Count Sinzendorff."

The hour was beyond the time in which he ought to have been in the imperial boudoir, to await the hand of his intended bride. What change in her wishes, his changed fortune might produce, he thought not of. In a postscript to his father's letter, he had found hastily written:

"Events prove that you have done right with regard to the Empress's friend, if she is now your wife." This approbation, was a new bond on the sacrifice; and he threw himself into his carriage, to obey the peremptory summons of Elizabeth!

All was solitude in the first three chambers of the Altheim apartments. As he hurried forward with the desperate step of a man, who had lost so much that the last surrender was a matter of no moment, he saw the Empress in the fourth; but she sat alone. Louis bowed at the entrance, and again as he drew near. She was pale as himself; and did not look up while she addressed him.

"You are come, thus tardily, to ratify your vows? To redeem your pledged honour?"

"I come to obey Your Majesty's commands," replied he.

"Your vows may be returned to you;" answered Elizabeth, "but the honour that was never your's, cannot be redeemed." "Dare I say," replied Louis, "that I do not understand Your Majesty?"

"And yet the words are plain," returned she, "they are to tell you, that low as Ripperda has fallen, he never can reach the depths of his son."

"Madam," exclaimed he, "I am now a ruined man! the malice of his enemies has cast my fortunes, with my father, to the ground; but he shall not be humbled in his son. Virtue is the soul of his being, virtue is my inheritance; and I implore of Your Majesty to say, of what I am accused? Who are my accusers?"

She looked up; and mistaking the ravages of anguish on his fine countenance, for those of guilt, she shuddered with a loathing sensation, and answered indignantly.

"How dare that false tongue profane the name of virtue, by connecting it with that of your father and yourself?—The world teems with your accusers; and he bears witness to their veracity, by not having ventured one line to me in his defence."

She then steadily ennumerated the Duke's imputed treacheries. That it was past a doubt, his clandestine coalition with the Duke of Wharton; that their secret meetings had been traced; that he had commenced a correspondence with James Stuart; and that, from what motives, his mad ambition could alone tell; it was well known he was playing in Madrid the counterpart of Wharton's political game at Vienna. In short, he covertly abetted every machination against the Empire, and the house of Brunswick:—"and," concluded the Empress, "I am constrained to believe, that, to me and mine, his overthrow is as timely, as it is irrevocable."

This charge on his father transported Louis beyond the forms of ceremony; and with all the eloquence of truth and filial piety, he burst forth into a defence of his integrity, which, to any other than the possessed ears of Elizabeth, must have carried resistless conviction; but with an impetuosity equal to his own, she interrupted him:—

"Cease!" cried she, "Hard, unblushing parricide of all thy father's fame! Dissembling, cozening de Montemar! In every word, and look, and gesture, I see the tempter of Ripperda's ruin! He was Honour's self, till he brought the serpent to his bosom, in the shape of his perfidious son. Shame to thee, young man, and think of the price for which you sold him to Duke Wharton."

Louis was confounded by this charge upon himself, as the instigator of his father's asserted treasons; but he did not shrink, or withdraw his assured eye from the face of the Empress.

"That Wharton was my friend," said he, "I did not withhold from Your Majesty; that my father was, and is, his implacable enemy, I have just affirmed: and that it is not in the power of Duke Wharton, or of any other man, to draw us from our allegiance to Spain, and our fidelity to you—name our accusers, and I am ready to maintain it with my blood."

Elizabeth had now restrained the feelings, which some pleading recollections of Ripperda had awakened, and with haughty composure, she replied:—

"You may revenge the discovery of your falsehood, by the lives of your accusers; but the times are past, when truth was proved by bloodshed. Yet, as you demand it, I shall not refuse you knowledge of your crimes. They are simple, but they are comprehensive.—First, your nightly visitations to the Electress of Bavaria, under the disguise of the Chevalier de Phaffenberg!—"

"It is false!" cried Louis, placing his hand on his heart, and looking up to heaven; "by the eternal judgment, I swear it is false!"

Elizabeth raised her hands in horror.

"Matchless villain!" cried she.

Then frowning terribly, with a redoubling detestation in every feature, she rapidly continued:—

"And have you the audacity to swear, you never visited her at all? That you did not steal from her house by a secret passage, on the night of the destruction of the opera-house? That you have not had clandestine meetings with the arch-counsellor of her treasons? And that this rebellious pair, have not stimulated your presumption, to draw my daughter to disgrace her rank by listening to a passion from you?"

Louis was too much appalled by the two leading charges, to shew any surprise at the third. Had Wharton then betrayed that they had met? That the preserver of his mistress, had once entered her palace?—The blood which mantled on his cheek at the accusation, faded before this direful suspicion; and his eyes, dropping under the indignant beams of the Empress, told her that in this instance at least, his face was honest.

"You do not dare repeat the perjury!" cried she; "leave my presence."

"Not as a guilty man!" cried he, looking up with the bold desperation of innocence; "I have now, nothing to gain or to lose with the Empress of Germany, but my honour; and again I affirm, that under no name but that of Louis de Montemar, did I ever enter the palace of the Electress of Bavaria. I never did enter it but once, and that was on the night Your Majesty mentions. I have also met the Duke of Wharton, by accident, in the courts of this palace, and in various assemblies; and by compulsive necessity, twice in the garden of the chateau:—but we never meet again!" Here Louis stopped. For these charges had so struck on his heart, (as he believed they could only have been inflicted by the threatened vengeance of his friend;) that he forgot the one respecting the Princess.

"You own that you have visited the Electress, and communed with her emissary!" cried Elizabeth, "avow your object, and it will answer to the point to which your effrontery has not yet spoken. Was it to dethrone my husband, and make my daughter a prisoner to the Bavarian Empress? It would have crowned the adventure, to have rewarded her champion with the hand of a captive Princess!"

Stung to the soul, Louis threw himself at her feet, to proclaim his innocence of all these inferences, before heaven and her. But she started back, as from a viper in her path.

"Base hypocrite!" cried she, "I am not to be moved by subtilty.—I know how you dedicated that attitude to the dishonour of your future sovereign. But she is now rescued from your arts—this foot crushed your pernicious resemblance, as the heaven you outrage, will one day do yourself. You may grovel in the dust, but I will hear no more."

Louis rose calmly from his knee.

"Empress," said he, "I solicit for justice no more; but I owe it to my honour, to declare, that my presence in the Bavarian palace was occasioned by a service I had accidentally performed to one of its inhabitants. My meetings with Duke Wharton were an attempt to penetrate into a conspiracy which I knew was forming against my father; but I failed in my purpose. The enemies of the Duke de Ripperda have annihilated his political life, and plunged his son into the same abyss of calumny; but I am not yet sunk to baseness, nor hypocrisy. It was not to the Empress of Germany I knelt, but to the power of justice in her person. But that is past; and I feel, that could birth give dignity, my ancestors of Nassau reigned in this very palace! And, if devotion to their successor, be a virtue in their posterity, mine have been faithful to the Emperor, to the last article in the treaty; and I have been devoted to Your Majesty, to the sacrifice of my happiness. This we have done! But, young as I am, I have lived to see, that when power is lost, birth is nothing; and virtue, nothing, but to the possessor's heart!"

The face of Elizabeth blazed with resentment.

"And this is your answer to your daring passion for my daughter?"

"The Emperor knows, I never dared to love the Princess," replied Louis, "and to the honour of his Imperial word, I refer Your Majesty."

Louis bowed with a backward step, as he was preparing to withdraw.

"Incomparable insolence!" exclaimed she; "stop, and know that he is your accuser!" Louis smiled with so insufferable an air of scornful superiority, that she was momentarily struck dumb; but violently extricating her powers of speech, she sternly replied:—

"Every aim of that towering spirit is known to him and to me; but every aim is crushed!"

"Human power cannot crush my aims!" rejoined Louis; "they are to uphold my father's honour and my own truth. And while he deserves the reverence of the world, what can prove that they are lost!"

The Empress's hand was on her beating forehead, but she turned, even fiercely to his question.

"The position in which he now lies, by the determined falsehoods of his son!" replied she, "return to him, covered with dishonour; return to him, bearing the curse of the friend of his virtue—of the mother of Maria Theresa! Return to him, spurned by the Countess Altheim; and abhorred and stigmatized by all honest men!"

Elizabeth left the blameless victim of all this wrath, standing in the middle of the floor. Every word she breathed, every anathema she denounced, seemed urged by the quick revenge of Duke Wharton! All justice, all fair inference was denied him! His father and himself were alike shut out from the bosom of friendship; were alike betrayed by them in whom they had most confidently trusted! The burthen was almost too much for him to bear. And rushing from the apartment; he knew no more of what he said or did, till he found himself thrown upon a chair, and alone, in his own chamber.