第159章

In poppa quella Che guidar gli dovea, fatal Donsella.

"Ger.Lib." cant.xv.3.

(By the prow was the fatal lady ordained to be the guide.)The Italian did not overrate that craft of simulation proverbial with her country and her sex.Not a word, not a look, that day revealed to Glyndon the deadly change that had converted devotion into hate.He himself, indeed, absorbed in his own schemes, and in reflections on his own strange destiny, was no nice observer.

But her manner, milder and more subdued than usual, produced a softening effect upon his meditations towards the evening; and he then began to converse with her on the certain hope of escape, and on the future that would await them in less unhallowed lands.

"And thy fair friend," said Fillide, with an averted eye and a false smile, "who was to be our companion?--thou hast resigned her, Nicot tells me, in favour of one in whom he is interested.

Is it so?"

"He told thee this!" returned Glyndon, evasively."Well! does the change content thee?""Traitor!" muttered Fillide; and she rose suddenly, approached him, parted the long hair from his forehead caressingly, and pressed her lips convulsively on his brow.

"This were too fair a head for the doomsman," said she, with a slight laugh, and, turning away, appeared occupied in preparations for their departure.

The next morning, when he rose, Glyndon did not see the Italian;she was absent from the house when he left it.It was necessary that he should once more visit C-- before his final Departure, not only to arrange for Nicot's participation in the flight, but lest any suspicion should have arisen to thwart or endanger the plan he had adopted.C--, though not one of the immediate coterie of Robespierre, and indeed secretly hostile to him, had possessed the art of keeping well with each faction as it rose to power.Sprung from the dregs of the populace, he had, nevertheless, the grace and vivacity so often found impartially amongst every class in France.He had contrived to enrich himself--none knew how--in the course of his rapid career.He became, indeed, ultimately one of the wealthiest proprietors of Paris, and at that time kept a splendid and hospitable mansion.

He was one of those whom, from various reasons, Robespierre deigned to favour; and he had often saved the proscribed and suspected, by procuring them passports under disguised names, and advising their method of escape.But C-- was a man who took this trouble only for the rich."The incorruptible Maximilien," who did not want the tyrant's faculty of penetration, probably saw through all his manoeuvres, and the avarice which he cloaked beneath his charity.But it was noticeable that Robespierre frequently seemed to wink at--nay, partially to encourage--such vice in men whom he meant hereafter to destroy, as would tend to lower them in the public estimation, and to contrast with his own austere and unassailable integrity and PURISM.And, doubtless, he often grimly smiled in his sleeve at the sumptuous mansion and the griping covetousness of the worthy Citizen C--.

To this personage, then, Glyndon musingly bent his way.It was true, as he had darkly said to Viola, that in proportion as he had resisted the spectre, its terrors had lost their influence.

The time had come at last, when, seeing crime and vice in all their hideousness, and in so vast a theatre, he had found that in vice and crime there are deadlier horrors than in the eyes of a phantom-fear.His native nobleness began to return to him.As he passed the streets, he revolved in his mind projects of future repentance and reformation.He even meditated, as a just return for Fillide's devotion, the sacrifice of all the reasonings of his birth and education.He would repair whatever errors he had committed against her, by the self-immolation of marriage with one little congenial with himself.He who had once revolted from marriage with the noble and gentle Viola!--he had learned in that world of wrong to know that right is right, and that Heaven did not make the one sex to be the victim of the other.The young visions of the Beautiful and the Good rose once more before him;and along the dark ocean of his mind lay the smile of reawakening virtue, as a path of moonlight.Never, perhaps, had the condition of his soul been so elevated and unselfish.

In the meanwhile Jean Nicot, equally absorbed in dreams of the future, and already in his own mind laying out to the best advantage the gold of the friend he was about to betray, took his way to the house honoured by the residence of Robespierre.He had no intention to comply with the relenting prayer of Fillide, that the life of Glyndon should be spared.He thought with Barrere, "Il n'y a que les morts qui ne revient pas." In all men who have devoted themselves to any study, or any art, with sufficient pains to attain a certain degree of excellence, there must be a fund of energy immeasurably above that of the ordinary herd.Usually this energy is concentrated on the objects of their professional ambition, and leaves them, therefore, apathetic to the other pursuits of men.But where those objects are denied, where the stream has not its legitimate vent, the energy, irritated and aroused, possesses the whole being, and if not wasted on desultory schemes, or if not purified by conscience and principle, becomes a dangerous and destructive element in the social system, through which it wanders in riot and disorder.