The sun had risen, when the equipage that contained Louis de Montemar,
ascended the mountainous heights of the Guadarama. From a rocky valley,
diverging down to the eastern horizon, and shaded with every umbrageous
tree and shrub of that luxuriant climate, a distant view of the
Escurial was visible. The rays of the ascending sun were bright upon
it: and the superb palace of the Spanish kings shone in its fullest
splendour.
Lorenzo looked round on Louis. His countenance was still the same as
when he entered the carriage; and the page did not venture to call his
attention to the magnificent view before him. League after league was
traversed. St. Ildefonso's gilded pinnacles next presented themselves
on the declivity of a beautiful hill. Its fountains and its ambrosial
vistas rivalled those of Versailles; in emulation of whose regal
elegancies, the grandson of Louis XIV. had caused it to be erected. But
here, again, Lorenzo was silent; and glittering domes, and sparkling
fountains, lowly cottages, and gliding rivulets; all were alike passed,
by the abstracted eye of Louis, without note or cognizance.
The chesnut woods of Antero de Herrares opened their enamelled glades
before the travellers. They crossed a marble bridge, whose pillared
arches and light ballustrades clasped the broadest arm of the river
Atayada, which here flowed in a deep and pellucid stream. A little
onward was a range of Ionic colonades of the same spotless material,
diverging on each side from a triple gate of gilded iron-work
surmounted by arches, whose classic architraves were wrought in Italy.
A golden eagle, the armorial ensign of the Ripperda family, crested the
centre arch. Within were the park and the deer, and the mansion rearing
its brilliant columns amidst the redundant groves of a Spanish autumn.
The orange, the citron, and the pomegranate, formed the luxuriant
avenue; and where fruit bloomed on the branches, the fragrance of the
blossom mingled with the breath of the countless flowers beneath, and
filled the air with perfume.
The same feeling which had chained the tongue of Lorenzo, while passing
indifferent objects, however note-worthy, now precipitated him to
speak, and he exclaimed:
"Here, my Lord, is the Duke's Segovian villa!--all the windows are shut
up; and not a soul stirring, where we were once so many, and so gay!"
Louis glanced on what might have been his home; and the flying horses
shot by those splendid gates, to find their owner in a prison! He did
not answer Lorenzo, not even with a sigh; but looked steadily forward,
till the dark towers of the Alcazar appeared over the intervening
woods. He read their name, in their blackness and their chains; but
he neither groaned nor shut his eyes on the dismal abode to which his
father was transferred.
After ascending a long and winding road, they passed through the oldest
quarter of the town of Segovia, still upon an ascent, till, on crossing
the rattling timbers of a draw-bridge, the carriage stopped beneath a
massy archway. Several sentinels drew around the vehicle, with demands
whence it came, and what was the object of the persons it contained.
Lorenzo, being most ready in the language of the questions, abruptly
answered:
"We bear an order from the Count Grimaldo to the warden of the
Alcazar, for admittance to the Duke de Ripperda."
An officer from the warden appeared, to receive and examine the
passport. Louis alighted, and presented the order. The deputy bowed
respectfully, when he read the name of the Marquis de Montemar, and
requested him to follow him "to the prison of the Duke."
"The prison of my father!" said he to himself.
"But what is in the sound of a word, when the fact is already present."
With unbreathing silence, and a heart into which all that was man
within him was summoned, he followed his conductor. They reached a
heavy door, studded with iron, and traversed with massy bars. The
deputy drew a huge key from his breast, and opened it.
As it grated horribly in the guards of the lock, and the damp and
dreariness of the passages struck on the shuddering senses of Lorenzo,
the affectionate youth exclaimed:
"Oh, my honoured Lord! Is it in such a place I find you!"
Louis turned at the exclamation, and looked on the faithful servant;
but no tear was in his eye, no sound on his lip.
The door was opened; and the deputy stood back, while the son of
the Duke entered the vestibule of the prison. The unoccupied pallet
of Martini lay in one corner of this miserable anti-room. Louis saw
nothing but the door that led to the interior apartment; and passing
through the vestibule with one step, though with an awful sense of his
father's fallen dignity, and of the dignity whose affliction even a son
must not break on too abruptly; he gently pushed forward the half-open
door, and found himself in a large and dripping dungeon. He started,
and gazed around; for all was horrible, but all was solitude. "Where
is my father?"
"In his bed," cried the deputy, who now entered, "He is ill."
Louis hastily, but with a light tread, passed across the pavement to
the mattrass, which lay behind a woollen curtain in a low vaulted
part of the cell. The officer, with less delicacy of attention to the
supposed slumbers of an invalid, followed him. Lorenzo glided in also;
and at the very moment in which the deputy had pressed before Louis,
to announce to the sleeping Ripperda, the arrival of his son, the
page's eye fell on a letter which lay on the table. In the instant the
officer's appalled ejaculation proclaimed that no Duke was in the bed,
Lorenzo saw it was directed to the Marquis de Montemar, and snatching
it up, put it in his breast.
"Then, where is he?" exclaimed Louis, throwing himself between the door
and the deputy, who was hastily moving towards it; "You pass not here,
till you tell me, to what deeper dungeon you have removed him; for no
power on earth shall keep me from my father."
The man stood still, and the consternation in his countenance, more
than his asseverations of total ignorance on the subject, convinced
Louis that whatever was become of his father, this person was innocent
of his fate. He therefore demanded to see the warden, declaring, while
he insisted on his demand, that the order he had presented, was from
the minister to admit him to the Duke where-ever he might be; and on
the authority of that order, he would force his way to his presence
against every opposition.
The officer affirmed, that the warden could know nothing of the Duke's
strange absence; for that he, the deputy, had himself secured the
doors on the prisoner and his servant the preceding night; and no one
else, not even the warden, possessed a duplicate key to that dungeon.
While he continued to speak with vehemence, and in manifest terror
of punishment for what had happened, the determined son of Ripperda
repeated his demands to have the warden summoned; for he would not
leave the spot till he was convinced that both officers were ignorant
of the cause of his father's disappearance.
The deputy being now suffered to go to the dungeon door, called a
sentinel from the end of the stone gallery, and briefly told the man to
remain with the Marquis till he should return. But as he withdrew, he
had the precaution to turn the key of the dungeon on those it contained.
The sentinel stood with fixed arms where his employer had left him, and
Lorenzo glided silently round the dismal apartment, prying into every
thing. Having found the letter, (which he yet kept carefully concealed,
till he could safely shew it to his master,) he thought he might
possibly discover some other memorandum from Martini to himself; and,
not doubting that the Duke and his brother had made their escape, he
left no nook or crevice unexplored.
Louis remained seated against the table, with his arms folded, and
gazing intently on the open window. But it was the gaze of concentrated
thought, not of observation. Indeed it could hardly have seemed
possible to him, that the Duke could have withdrawn himself through
that aperture. It was not only eighteen feet above the bottom of the
dungeon, but from the shadows in the depth of the wall, appeared a mere
crenille, too narrow for any man to pass through. These objections
would have occurred to Louis, against the supposition of this having
been the way of his father's escape; had the idea of an escape once
presented itself to his mind. But he repelled the first intimation
from the deputy of such a suspicion. "From what," said he, "should my
father fly? Justice must speak at last, and acquit him with honour!"
In his own person, he felt that he would sooner be condemned in the
face of day by an iniquitous sentence, than incur the stigma of
conscious guilt by flying from the trial it was his right to demand.
"No," cried he, "the Duke de Ripperda would not so desert himself!"
While he believed this, his heart died within him at the thought of his
father's endless captivity in some remote prison, where he might never
hear the voice of consolation, or see the face of a comforter; and
then the spectre of midnight murder suddenly presented itself. His eye
hastily scanned the flinty pavement, but there were no traces of blood;
all was clear, and all was orderly in the wretched apartment, without
any traces of struggle.
In the midst of these reflections, the throng of hurry and alarm was
heard in the gallery, the great key once more turned in its guards;
and the hinges grating roughly as the door was pushed open, a crowd
of soldiers, preceded by the warden and the deputy, poured into the
dungeon.
Louis stood to receive them. The warden, holding the order of the
Marquis de Montemar's admittance in his hand, in the disorder of his
consternation hastily advanced to him and exclaimed,
"Marquis, where is the Duke, your father?"
"That is my demand of you," replied Louis, pointing to the order; "the
Count Grimaldo expected I should find him here. Here he is not. And you
are answerable for his safety, and his appearance."
In glancing round the dungeon, from the floor to the cieling, the
warden's eye was quicker than the deputy's; and without attending to
the reply of Louis, he exclaimed, "He has escaped through the window!"
"Impossible!" cried the deputy, "he could not reach it."
"Who reached it to take out the bars?" returned his superior, "he is
gone, and by that way. Round, soldiers, to the ditch!"
Louis stood in wordless astonishment at this confirmation of what he
too had thought impossible, though the impossibility to him had rested
on the mind of the Duke, not on the means of escape: but when he saw
the men withdraw with fixed bayonets, to hunt his father's life, (for
he knew his resolution too well to believe, that after having once
chosen the alternative of flight, he would submit to be re-taken;) all
his father's danger rushed upon him; and conscious to no other impulse
than that of defending him, he turned impetuously to throw himself
before the soldiers.
The warden saw the movement, and guessed the intention. He was a man
of gigantic muscle, and seizing the arm of Louis, called aloud to bar
the egress.
"What violence is this?" demanded Louis, forcibly extricating himself
and rushing towards the door. But the sentinel without had thrust the
bolt into its guard.
"You must be my prisoner, Marquis," returned the warden, "until those
men have searched the neighbourhood.
"On your peril!" exclaimed Louis; "I demand to be released!--In the
name of your sovereign, and of your laws, I demand it!--You have no
right to imprison an unoffending man, who came hither under the safe
conduct of your minister's signet."
As he spoke, he heard the report of a carbine; and desperate with
apprehension for his father, he snatched his only remaining pistol
from his belt. "Open that door, warden," cried he, "or I will make a
passage through your heart!"
The wary Spaniard did not stop to answer, but striking aside the arm
that held the pistol, it went off; and the ball lodged in the opposite
wall. Louis then felt for his sword. His athletic opponent was on the
watch; and seizing him round the body.
"Marquis," cried he, "these outrages can only undo yourself. If the
Duke de Ripperda be found, he must be taken alive, at the risk of those
who seek him. Kill me, and you are no less a prisoner; for the door is
fastened, beyond your strength to burst."
Louis was alone with this powerful man; for Lorenzo, with the same
intentions as his master, had rushed out with the soldiers. While he
stood, apparently quiescent, in the clutch of his adversary, he still
held his hand on his sword. He discredited the pledge for Ripperda's
safety, and resolutely replied. "If my father have fallen, there shall
be life for life!"
And with the word, he suddenly wrenched himself from the warden's
grasp, and as suddenly drawing out his sword, stood with his back
against the door.--"I am here, till I know the issue of this search;
but I am not, a second time to be disarmed. Repeat to the sentinel
without, your command respecting my father's safety; and demand of him,
the cause of the firing of that carbine!"
The warden had no weapons, but his bodily strength; and finding that
the nerve of his young antagonist, when braced by despair, was equal
to his own; and seeing that desperation was in his eyes, and a sword
in his hand; he thought it prudent to comply; and he called to the
sentinel to dispatch a man round with the demands of the Marquis.
Never, since the hour of his birth, did Louis find himself in so
terrible a situation. He was hearkening to the distant voices of them,
he believed were his father's murderers, and he found it impossible
to get to his rescue! He was, himself, acting the part of a man of
violence, to one who was only performing his hard, but cruel duty! As
he stood, gloomily lost in the horror of the moment, another carbine
was fired, accompanied by shouts from the soldiers. He thought he heard
a groan follow the report, and that it issued from below the window.
Without a word, or almost a thought, he threw his sword from him, and
springing on the opposite wall, found that he had not climbed the
perpendicular cliffs of Lindisfarne in vain. The stones were rough;
and giving short but sufficient hold to his hand and foot, he gained
the deep recess of the window before he scarcely knew he had left the
ground. The act seemed but one spring, to the amazed warden. Louis had
no sooner reached the window, than he would have thrown himself from
the flinty butments upon the top of the precipice. Happily the voice of
Lorenzo, from the rock beneath, arrested him.
To descend on this side, by clambering, was impossible; the outer part
of the wall being worn inward in great and abrupt hollows, till that
part of the tower where the window was excavated, hung over the rock in
a shelving state.
"The Duke cannot be found!" cried Lorenzo.--"For his sake, and for
God's do not attempt quitting the dungeon by that window! The soldiers
have just shot away this rope-ladder, by which he must have escaped."
While he spoke, he lifted it from the ground. The soldiers had spied
it at a distance, hanging loose from the wall; and as they scrambled
through the matted brambles towards the point, one of them took aim,
and it fell. Lorenzo, had made his approach, before; to see what
farther evidence of Ripperda's flight might be found there; and while
the echoes rang with the men's shouts, at so poor an achievement; he
fortunately saved Louis further danger, by shewing him the trophy,
"But another carbine was fired?" demanded Louis.
"A soldier slipped his foot, and his piece went off," replied Lorenzo.
"Discard me, kill me; but believe me true!" cried the page, aware of
his master's surmises, and seeing his hand ready to leave its grasp;
"quit that perilous place, I conjure you. The pursuers are gone round,
to say the Duke has escaped beyond their recovery!"
Louis was satisfied; and turning towards the dungeon, the entering
soldiers doubly assured him; and dropping from the window, inward, he
sprung upon the floor.
The men gave a hurried account of their fruitless search.
"Marquis," said the warden, "you must excuse me, that I do not restore
a sword which has menaced an officer of the crown; but the door is
open, and you may now pass hence. My employers will properly notice the
violence of the son, when they have information of the flight of the
father."
"Sir," returned Louis, "if I have injured you, in my struggles for
the liberty that was my right, I regret it; and if you know either a
father's or a son's heart, you will not reject my apology."
"Soldiers, attend the Marquis de Montemar to the gates," coldly replied
the warden.
Louis doubted. He might yet be deceived. He knew not where to seek
his father. The enlargement that was now offered him, re-awakened
his suspicions; and without noticing the order of the warden, he
stood still. Lorenzo was more present to himself. He had entered
with a second groupe of soldiers; and putting his hand gently on his
master's arm, almost unconsciously drew him out of the dungeon. On the
threshold, he whispered:--
"If you are to succour the Duke, we must not linger here!"
The words were a talisman on the benumbed faculties of Louis; he
hastened forward, and threw himself into the carriage.
"Back to the British ambassador's," cried Lorenzo to the postilions.
The rapid vehicle once more passed over the draw-bridge and wheeled
down the declivity through the town. On a rising knoll, Louis caught
another glimpse of the dismal towers in which he had endured such
variety of mental agony, in the course of so few hours! He drew his
eyes from them, and the carriage plunged into the long avenue of aloes
which led to the wooded heights of Antero de Herrares.
Lorenzo pulled up the windows, and let drop the silken blinds. He then
put one hand in his bosom, and laid the other on his master's arm.
"My dear Lord," cried he, "here is a letter from your father!"
Louis started; "Lorenzo?" and snatched the letter that was held to him.
It was his father's hand-writing on the address! While he tore open
the seal, Lorenzo told him where he had found it. It was not necessary
to explain why he had concealed it until this moment. Louis read as
follows:--
"If my son have not abandoned me, he will probably visit my prison,
and find this. In such a case, he may go to the house of the noble
Spaniard who was his uncle's guest at Lindisfarne. He has a packet in
his possession, that will inform Louis de Montemar of the fate of his
father."
"William, Duke de Ripperda."
There was a thousand daggers in the few first words of this brief
epistle. _If my son have not abandoned me._ To be suspected by his
father of such parricide, was almost more than he could bear. He
clenched the letter against his bursting heart, and fell back in the
seat.
"My master! my dear master!" exclaimed the pitying Lorenzo, as he saw
the fearful changes in his countenance, and opened a window to give him
air. Louis unclosed his eye-lids; and those once cheering and radiant
eyes, which used to break from under them like the morning star from
the tender shades of night, turned on his faithful servant, bloodshot
and dimmed with bitterest anguish.
"What does my Lord say, in that cruel letter," demanded the
affectionate youth, "that can have affected you thus?"
Louis put the letter into his hands. It was not needful to point to
the lines which had barbed him so severely; and Lorenzo read them
with a bleeding heart, both for father and son. He remarked, that
outraged as the Duke had been by the ingratitude of all the world, the
extraordinary length of their voyage might have driven him to some
misconception regarding their detention.
"It is hard," continued he, "to be entirely just ourselves, when every
body about us treats us with injustice; and the Duke, though a great
and a good man, is yet a man; and must share some of our infirmities.
You, my Lord, will seek an opportunity to obey him immediately; and
then, all these too natural suspicions must be destroyed."
Louis looked at the affectionate speaker.
"Excellent Lorenzo!" said he, "my father has found one faithful in your
brother. If you too adhere to me, I shall not be quite alone in this
desert universe!--I may yet find my father," murmured he to himself,
"and die before him! My life, my life, is all I may now have, to prove
my soul's integrity!" Much of this, and more, of the sad wanderings of
a spirit overtasked, and wounded in its most susceptible nerve, passed
in the mind, and on the half-uttering lips of Louis.
"But where," asked Lorenzo, "are we to seek this friend of Lindisfarne?"
"It is the Marquis Santa Cruz," replied Louis; "General Stanhope will
probably tell me where to find him."
"The Marquis has a villa in the Val del Uzeda, between St. Ildefonso
and the Escurial," replied Lorenzo, "and there, I know, his family
usually resides, as the Marchioness is sometimes in attendance on the
Queen."
"Then," cried Louis, "direct the postillions to drive thither. If the
Marquis be there, I may yet see my father before another night englooms
me in this direful Spain!"