Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 59, No. 363, January, 1846. Various

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      "Would you be so base? Would you have me hate you?" cried the poor girl in despair, to her cousin.

      Many steps were now heard ascending the lower stair. The old woman, who trembled in every limb, stirred not from her chair; but, removing one hand from her face, she stretched it out towards a corner of the room.

      "Ah! I understand you, mother," exclaimed Jocelyne. "That secret closet where our books of religion are deposited, where our old priest, during the massacre, was hid!"

      "Whilst my son perished – a victim – a martyr!" groaned the old woman, fearfully agitated.

      "Come, come, Monseigneur," pursued the excited girl; and, in spite of the unwillingness of La Mole to profit by a hospitality thus bestowed, she dragged him to one corner of the room, and pushing back the spring of one of those secret recesses then so commonly constructed in all houses, as well of the bourgeois as the nobles, on account of the troubles and dangers of the times, she compelled him by her entreaties to enter a dark nook – then hastily closing the aperture, she exclaimed, "God shield him!" and sank down into the stool by her grandmother's side.

      "Alayn!" she said, in a low hurried tone, as the heavy steps still mounted the stairs, "you will be silent, will you not? You will not betray him, and see the poor girl, whom you profess to love, die at your feet!"

      The youth shook his head with a gesture of resignation, although the frown upon his brow showed how painful were the feelings that he suppressed.

      "Mother!" whispered Jocelyne once more to the old woman. "Calm your agitation – oh! let not a word, a gesture, betray our secret! Stay! I will read to you!" And she seized the Bible, then a dangerous book to produce thus openly before Catholic agents of the court, and took it on her lap.

      Perrotte answered not a word, but continued to rock herself with much agitation from side to side in her chair.

      The noise of the arquebuses of soldiery was now, in truth, heard on the landing-place. A heavy blow was given on the panels of the door; and, without waiting for permission to enter, a man in the military accoutrements of the period, whose head was crowned with a high hat, adorned with a short red feather, advanced into the room with an air which betrayed at once a strange mixture of effrontery and hypocrisy.

      "Landry!" exclaimed together both Jocelyne and Alayn.

      "Captain Landry, at your service," said the man; "or, if you will, at the service of her majesty the Queen-mother. Good-day, my gentle cousins both. Good-day to you, my good aunt Perrotte. How goes it with her now? Her head was somewhat ailing as I heard, since she had left the court." And he touched his forehead significantly with his finger.

      "She is well!" answered Jocelyne hastily, trembling in spite of her efforts to be calm.

      "But this is no visit of ceremony, my good friends," continued Captain Landry, with some haughtiness of manner. "I come upon state affairs. A criminal of rank, who has conspired against the life and person of the king, has escaped; and we are sent in his pursuit. We have contrived to track him of a surety to this neighbourhood; and, as I bethought me that this same delinquent was a friend of my fair cousin Jocelyne, who, although she has received my offers of affection with disdain, could look upon another with more favour, I doubted not that I should find news of him in her company. Know you of none such here, sweet cousin?"

      "I know not of whom you speak," said Jocelyne, her colour varying from the flush of emotion to the deadly paleness of fear.

      "And you, Alayn, boy, since our fair cousin's memory is so short, can doubtless tell me. Has no one entered here within the last half hour?"

      "No one!" answered Alayn sturdily; but he then turned and moved to the window to hide his confusion.

      The Queen's agent shrugged his shoulders.

      "And my good aunt has had no visitors?" he resumed, advancing towards the old woman.

      Perrotte lifted her head, and regarded the captain fixedly, and with a look of scorn, but said not a word.

      "Search!" said the officer, turning to the soldiers, who had waited without.

      The men entered; and in a few instants the scanty and small rooms attached to the principal apartment were examined. The captain was informed that no one could be found. For a moment he looked disappointed, and paused to reflect.

      "Their trouble is evident," he murmured to himself. "He may still be here. The reward for his capture is too great to be given up lightly; and, besides, I hate the fellow for the love she bears him – I will leave no stone unturned."

      "Dame Perrotte!" he said returning to the old woman, and speaking to her in a low tone of voice – "A criminal of state has escaped from the king's justice. In spite of the protestations of your grandchildren, I cannot doubt that he is concealed hereabouts; and you must know where. You will not fail, I am sure, to indicate the place of his retreat, when you know that, as the friend of those who have proved the bitterest enemies of your religion, he must also be your deadly enemy."

      "And is it Landry, the recreant, the apostate, the only seceder of our family from the just cause, who speaks thus?" said the old woman lifting her head with a haggard expression.

      "The necessary policy of the times," whispered the captain, sitting down on the stool by her side, and approaching himself confidentially nearer, "has compelled me, like many others, to be that in seeming which we are not in heart. Has not our chief, Henry of Navarre, yielded also to the pressure of the circumstances in which he lives? Judge me not so harshly, good aunt. But this criminal – he is one of those who have hunted and destroyed, who have cried – 'Down with them; down with the Huguenots – pursue and kill;' and you would withdraw him from the punishment he merits?"

      "He! he! Was it, so?" muttered Perrotte, with eyes staring at the vacancy before her.

      "Do you not fear to pass for the accomplice of his crimes?" continued Captain Landry in her ear. "Know you not that he has attainted the life of your nursling by deeds of sorcery, and that Charles IX., our king, now lies upon his death-bed."

      "Who speaks of Charles?" exclaimed the old woman with increasing wildness and excitement. "Charles and death! Yes, they go hand in hand!"

      "Landry! You shall not torture our poor mother thus," cried Jocelyne springing towards them, in order to interrupt a conversation which she had been witnessing in agony, although she could not hear it, and the effect of which upon her grandmother's unsettled mind became every moment more visible.

      "Fair cousin, with your leave!" replied the captain. "I am bound to do the duties of my office. I shall be grieved to use constraint." And, waving his hand to her to withdraw, he made a sign to the soldiers to approach both Jocelyne and Alayn, and prevent their interference.

      Jocelyne wrung her hands.

      "Do you not fear the reproaches of your murdered son?" continued Captain Landry, turning to Perrotte, with an expression of perfidious hypocrisy in his eyes, and again pouring his words lowly, but distinctly, into her ear. "Do you not fear that he should rise from his tomb, and, showing the bloody wounds of that fatal night, cry for vengeance on his murderers, and curse the weakness of that mother who would screen and shelter them? Do you not fear that Heaven should condemn you as a friend to the destroyers of the righteous? Think on your slaughtered kindred, woman!"

      "Mercy! mercy! my son!" cried the old woman, springing up with her hands outstretched, as if to repel a spectre. "Oh! hide that streaming blood! Look not so angry on me! Blood shall have blood, thou say'st; so be СКАЧАТЬ