LITERATURE.

Globe, Volume VI, Issue 693, 8 September 1876, Page 3

LITERATURE.

THE BPJDAL OF LA GUILLOTIEKE.

Chapter I. (Continued.)

It was getting late, and the wedding guests, overpowered by fatigue, dropped off to bed. But Albert, restless, passionate, despairing, continued his anxious movements without a moment's rest. Moment by moment he started up to explore some sud-denly-remembered spot, some half-forgotten corner —to lift up, for the hundredth time, the heavy arras of the banqueting-rooin, and to utter cries of anguished longing as he passed up and down the passages like a spectral apparition. The night was wearing on : servants returned at intervals without tidings. The blank, cold dawn stole in on pale "faces unrefreshed by sleep and sharpened by anxiety. Morning came —no Athenais. The dreadful suspense grew almost unbearable as the long, slow morning came and went without tidings. The interminable clay dragged through its weary length. The ponds were searched ; the forest far 'and near explored ; the moat was reexamined ; the castle again pried into from garret to basement; not a nook remained into which jealous eyes had not made inquisition, and anxious feet explored. Words fail to describe the horrors of that unavailing seeking, as a.blank despair settled down to a deeply-rooted conviction that some frightful, unknown doom or mischance had overtaken the bride. Besides, many hours had now elapsed. If she were living, she must be exhausted with want of food. Madame de Brelancourt gave herself up to bursts of lamentation inexpressibly heartrending, for no comfort seemed at hand for such an unforeseen calamity ; while of Albert, who shall depict the despair ? Lost ! it seemed a doom too dreadful! People muttered together of the ill-omened fall of Raoul's picture; and gossips shook their heads over dark talcs of murder and misadventure, which, doubtless, seemed to them to have some special relation to the matter in hand. A silence chill as the grave, an apalling maze, in which imagination wandered and was lost, fell upon and surrounded the inhabitants of the castle, of which the darkeyed Athenais was never to be the mistress. Nor have we here space to relate how conviction slowly changed into certainty of absolute loss ; nor how the blithe and blooming youth of Albert withered and pined into haggard and premature old age. lie seemed alike unable to quit the scene of his calamity or divert his mind from what became at length a brooding mania, beneath the blight of which his mind gradually gave way. With what eyes, with what heart pangs his mother watched this slow decay, may better be imagined than described ! He died, not many years after, a haggard spectre of his once bright self, a restless shadow of his charming youth, a broken-hearted, haunted, miserable man,

His mother followed him to the grave. The mother of Athenais hid herself and her woea in the neighbouring convent of Our Lady of the Seven Sorrows. The castle, disused, and partly dismantled, was shut up. and fell into the hands of an ex-farmer-general, who, disturbed by the Revolution, never ventured either to survey or explore his new possession. The great towers were fired by the peasantry on a night which saw half the castles of Provence in a blaze. Nettles grew over the blackened ruins ; the moat was choked with the broken stones and beams which fell into it; bats and owls wheeled in solitary circles about the deserted battlements, or woke dreary echoes as they flapped against the broken casements, or nested in the ivy which grew dark and dense upon the time-worn walls. A bad mystery shrouded the house; an evil reputation clung around it. The story of Athenais—traditions of her beauty and her grace—lingered long about the hamlet. A figure resembling hers was said to haunt the battlements at night, attired in a robe of filmy white, and recognised by the diamond glitter on neck and brow—the marriage-gifts of Albert de St. Victor. By degrees even this tale died away, and a sombre blackness of decay enveloped all that remained of the mouldering turrets of La Guillotiere. The rusty doors seldom creaked upon their hinges to admit a visitant, and a wholesome dread of les rcvcnants scared the village youth from pilfering or overmuch prying about the dusty magnificence of the state-rooms, where the arras still clung to the walls (which had escaped the fires of the Revolution), and the goblinesque array of old portraits still looked down with portentous frown and stony gravity on any rash intruder upon their mouldering calm. Chapter. 11. My readers will, I forsee, instantly accuse me of re-writing the well-worn tale of the ' Misletoe Bough,' so exquisitely told, and as they hoppd for the last time, in Mr Roger's ' Italy.' I can only say in selfdefence that the present narrative is strictly founded on the real history of a French family—names and dates, of course, being altered—which some time ago reached my hands, and of which I saw no reason to doubt the authenticity. It was a bright spring day in the April of 18G- when a party of young travellers from Germany visited La Guillotiere. Bertha, a flaxen-haired and discreet maiden, Max and Fritz from the University of Bonn, an elderly and spectacled aunt, and little Hans, brother of Bertha—a gay and joyous company. They scattered themselves about the ruined walls, and sought to scare each other, as they went, by repeating the castle legend with that sort of vague belief which the scene of the occurrence never fails to inspire in the least imaginative of minds. 'Wert thou lost thus, Bertha mine,' says Max of the yellow moustache, looking tenderly into his cousin's blue eyes, ' I should have pulled the castle down stone by stone, but left it never till thou wert re-dis-covered.'

But Bertha responded with a merry laugh, and declined to place herself even in imagination in the place of the lost bride. ' Let us two play at hide-and-seek : 'tis the very place,' said little Hans. ' Perhaps we may find the white lady herself,' and the child's eyes grew wider at the supposition thus conjured up. ' Go hide, thou little fool,' said the grave Max, ' and in five minutes or so we will seek for thee.' And he drew his cousin's hand under his arm as he spoke. But little Hans stoutly declined to be the first victim, and Max himself, goaded thereto by the tongue of Bertha, was bidden himself to disappear. He vanished into the castle, and went up the somewhat dangerous staircase to the picture-gallery above. There, hidden behind some mouldering tapestry, he heard his companions pass the place of his concealment with loud exclamations of wonderment at not finding him. He came out again as they passed, and noticed in the corner of the room an acient worm eaten cabinet, curiously carved, but too perished to be worth removal. He pulled out a drawer or two with a young man's vague curiosity. They were empty, having, indeed, been many times ransacked by idlers as himself. He managed, prompted by a sudden impulse, to push it a little from the wall, and as he did so sounded the wainscot with his hand. A piece of the panel detached itself and fell dustily upon the ground, and behind—yes ; there could be no manner of doubt—was a door, so accurately made and fitted into the wall that nothing but a tiny metallic knob betrayed the secret so long unrevealed. This, then, so it suddenly nashed across him, must be the entry to the secret fchamber. He, Max, would be the first to enter—the first to discover whatever that chamber might reveal. He trembled with excitement, the dew stood in great beads on his brow. He pressed the steel spring with faltering hand. It yielded to his touch. He found himself in a tiny, narrow, dark passage leading into a vaulted apartment. A dusty and obscure atmosphere, foul and oppressive with the close air of centuries, stilled him as he entered and stood on the threshold in the doubtful light. Great heavens ! what was this ?—this, which petrified his gaze, and sent the blood from his heart as he shaded his eyes, and peered beneath their cover into the blinding atmosphere. At the table in the centre of the room, seated in a faded arm-chair, a figure confronted him—a figure blackened, ileahless, awful, but preserving enough of the semblance of humanity to convince hiin that the lost bride of La Guillotiere was she, whoso stiffened stare from ghastly orbits had almost turned him into stone. The bones were just held in some sort together by the remnants of the dress—once, evidently, white satin, but now darkly powdered with awful dust. Masses of rich dark hair'were tumbled iu splendid profusion over the withered fleshless frame. Diamonds Hashing and glittering with dreadful lustre from the neck, the wrists, the head of the apparition, added, if anything could add, to the intensity of the horror before him. He drew nearer, though his tongue, parched and dry, clave to his mouth, aud the dew burst out cm his forehead. On the skeleton hand a ring; on the table a morsel of paper—something in dim red characters scrawled ors it with a jewelled pin ; on the feet highpointed shoes with glittering buckles; round the withered throat, pearls, whose exquisite shimmer of soft beauty lent an indescribable touch of dismay to the sickening dread with which the young man faced the spectacle before him.

His first impulse was to rush in headlong hurry back along the Utt'e passage, to hud—-

that the door had sprung and locked, and that the fate of Athenais de Brelancourt had overtaken him! Imprisoned was he too truly, past mortal succour, in this living tomb, already tenanted by this ghastly remnant of mortality! It was evident that, in his impatient eagerness, he had allowed the door to close, which it had done on noiseless hinges, without attracting his observation ; and his mind woke to the conviction that he was lost as surely, as certainly, and as hopelessly as Athenais, whose stony stare seemed to wither him as he stood. To his excited imagination, suddenly overwrought by the dreadful discovery he had made, it seemed as if the tenant of the chair were bending forward as ifvto speak. What would she say? Should" he listen and become the depositary of a secret which something in the disposition of the wasted and shrivelled limbs had suggested to his mind, viz., that hunger and slow torments of starvation had caused her to gnaw her arm ? The blood surged madly in his brain as the new terror seized upon him, and Max, utterly unnerved, fell upon the floor in a swoon. When after an interval his senses returned, the closeness and oppression of the death-laden atmosphere, the smothering dust and stifling air, almost prevented his breathing. He again tried the door, shook, beat, and clamoured with all his remaining force. He bent his ear anxiously to the panel: no sound reached it. He became assured that in the great saloon the walls had been so constructed, by a fiendish ingenuity, that nothing should ever betray the existence of that dreary chamber to the rest of the castle. He again entered the chamber, and, becoming gradually accustomed to the uncertain light, began cautiously to grope about the apartment. It appeared furnished in some sort with a dim and faded magnificence ; carved chairs and tables of antique workmanship were ranged against the wall; some rare glass goblets, one or two of them broken; a bureau of ebony, from the drawers of which a few gold pieces fell chinking out j a rHm mirror, clouded with dust, which reflected, as he passed it, a face so haggard, peaked, and worn, that it gave him a fresh throb of apprehension. Like a spectral apparition he beheld it meet his gaze—could this be himself ?

(To be continued.)