Burlesques Part 7

On the third day, however, as the sun was declining over the Vosges, and the shadows were lengthening over the plain where the warrior had obtained such triumphs;--after having overcome two hundred and thirteen knights of different nations, including the fiery Dunois, the intrepid Walter Manny, the spotless Bayard, and the undaunted Dugueselin, as the conqueror sat still erect on his charger, and the mult.i.tudes doubted whether ever another champion could be found to face him, three blasts of a trumpet were heard, faint at first, but at every moment ringing more clearly, until a knight in pink armor rode into the lists with his visor down, and riding a tremendous dun charger, which he managed to the admiration of all present.

The heralds asked him his name and quality.

"Call me," said he, in a hollow voice, "the Jilted Knight." What was it made the Lady of Barbazure tremble at his accents.

The knight refused to tell his name and qualities; but the companion who rode with him, the young and n.o.ble Philibert de Coquelicot, who was known and respected universally through the neighborhood, gave a warranty for the birth and n.o.ble degree of the Jilted Knight--and Raoul de Barbazure, yelling hoa.r.s.ely for a two-hundred-and-fourteenth lance, shook the huge weapon in the air as though it were a reed, and prepared to encounter the intruder.

According to the wont of chivalry, and to keep the point of the spear from harm, the top of the unknown knight's lance was s.h.i.+elded with a bung, which the warrior removed; and galloping up to Barbazure's pavilion, over which his s.h.i.+eld hung, touched that n.o.ble cognizance with the sharpened steel. A thrill of excitement ran through the a.s.sembly at this daring challenge to a combat a l'outrance. "Hast thou confessed, Sir Knight?" roared the Barbazure; "take thy ground, and look to thyself; for by heaven thy last hour is come!" "Poor youth, poor youth!"

sighed the spectators; "he has called down his own fate." The next minute the signal was given, and as the simoom across the desert, the cataract down the rock, the sh.e.l.l from the howitzer, each warrior rushed from his goal.

"Thou wilt not slay so good a champion?" said the Grand Duke, as at the end of that terrific combat the knight in rose armor stood over his prostrate foe, whose helmet had rolled off when he was at length unhorsed, and whose bloodshot eyes glared unutterable hate and ferocity on his conqueror.

"Take thy life," said he who had styled himself the Jilted Knight; "thou hast taken all that was dear to me." And the sun setting, and no other warrior appearing to do battle against him, he was proclaimed the conqueror, and rode up to the d.u.c.h.ess's balcony to receive the gold chain which was the reward of the victor. He raised his visor as the smiling princess guerdoned him--raised it, and gave ONE sad look towards the Lady Fatima at her side!

"Romane de Clos-Vougeot!" shrieked she, and fainted. The Baron of Barbazure heard the name as he writhed on the ground with his wound, and by his slighted honor, by his broken ribs, by his roused fury, he swore revenge; and the Lady Fatima, who had come to the tourney as a queen, returned to her castle as a prisoner.

(As it is impossible to give the whole of this remarkable novel, let it suffice to say briefly here, that in about a volume and a half, in which the descriptions of scenery, the account of the agonies of the baroness, kept on bread and water in her dungeon, and the general tone of morality, are all excellently worked out, the Baron de Barbazure resolves upon putting his wife to death by the hands of the public executioner.)

Two minutes before the clock struck noon, the savage baron was on the platform to inspect the preparation for the frightful ceremony of mid-day.

The block was laid forth--the hideous minister of vengeance, masked and in black, with the flaming glaive in his hand, was ready. The baron tried the edge of the blade with his finger, and asked the dreadful swordsman if his hand was sure? A nod was the reply of the man of blood.

The weeping garrison and domestics shuddered and shrank from him. There was not one there but loved and pitied the gentle lady.

Pale, pale as a stone, she was brought from her dungeon. To all her lord's savage interrogatories, her reply had been, "I am innocent." To his threats of death, her answer was, "You are my lord; my life is in your hands, to take or to give." How few are the wives, in our day, who show such angelic meekness! It touched all hearts around her, save that of the implacable Barbazure! Even the Lady Blanche, (Fatima's cousin), whom he had promised to marry upon his faithless wife's demise, besought for her kinswoman's life, and a divorce; but Barbazure had vowed her death.

"Is there no pity, sir?" asked the chaplain who had attended her.

"No pity?" echoed the weeping serving-maid.

"Did I not aye say I would die for my lord?" said the gentle lady, and placed herself at the block.

Sir Raoul de Barbazure seized up the long ringlets of her raven hair.

"Now!" shouted he to the executioner, with a stamp of his foot--"Now strike!"

The man (who knew his trade) advanced at once, and poised himself to deliver his blow: and making his flas.h.i.+ng sword sing in the air, with one irresistible, rapid stroke, it sheared clean off the head of the furious, the bloodthirsty, the implacable Baron de Barbazure!

Thus he fell a victim to his own jealousy: and the agitation of the Lady Fatima may be imagined, when the executioner, flinging off his mask, knelt gracefully at her feet, and revealed to her the well-known features of Romane de Clos-Vougeot.

LORDS AND LIVERIES.

BY THE AUTh.o.r.eSS OF "DUKES AND DEJEUNERS," "HEARTS AND DIAMONDS,"

"MARCHIONESSES AND MILLINERS," ETC. ETC.

I.

"CORBLEU! What a lovely creature that was in the Fitzbattleaxe box to-night," said one of a group of young dandies who were leaning over the velvet-cus.h.i.+oned balconies of the "Coventry Club," smoking their full-flavored Cubas (from Hudson's) after the opera.

Everybody stared at such an exclamation of enthusiasm from the lips of the young Earl of Bagnigge, who was never heard to admire anything except a coulis de dindonneau a la St. Menehould, or a supreme de cochon en torticolis a la Piffarde; such as Champollion, the chef of the "Traveller's," only knows how to dress; or the bouquet of a flask of Medoc, of Carbonell's best quality; or a goutte of Marasquin, from the cellars of Briggs and Hobson.

Alured de Pentonville, eighteenth Earl of Bagnigge, Viscount Paon of Islington, Baron Pancras, Kingscross, and a Baronet, was, like too many of our young men of ton, utterly blase, although only in his twenty-fourth year. Blest, luckily, with a mother of excellent principles (who had imbued his young mind with that Morality which is so superior to all the vain pomps of the world!) it had not been always the young earl's lot to wear the coronet for which he now in sooth cared so little. His father, a captain of Britain's navy, struck down by the side of the gallant Collingwood in the Bay of Fundy, left little but his sword and spotless name to his young, lovely, and inconsolable widow, who pa.s.sed the first years of her mourning in educating her child in an elegant though small cottage in one of the romantic marine villages of beautiful Devons.h.i.+re. Her child! What a gush of consolation filled the widow's heart as she pressed him to it! How faithfully did she instil into his young bosom those principles which had been the pole-star of the existence of his gallant father!

In this secluded retreat, rank and wealth almost boundless found the widow and her boy. The seventeenth Earl--gallant and ardent, and in the prime of youth--went forth one day from the Eternal City to a steeple-chase in the Campagna. A mutilated corpse was brought back to his hotel in the Piazza di Spagna. Death, alas! is no respecter of the n.o.bility. That shattered form was all that remained of the fiery, the haughty, the wild, but the generous Altamont de Pentonville! Such, such is fate!

The admirable Emily de Pentonville trembled with all a mother's solicitude at the distinctions and honors which thus suddenly descended on her boy. She engaged an excellent clergyman of the Church of England to superintend his studies; to accompany him on foreign travel when the proper season arrived; to ward from him those dangers which dissipation always throws in the way of the n.o.ble, the idle, and the wealthy. But the Reverend Cyril Delaval died of the measles at Naples, and henceforth the young Earl of Bagnigge was without a guardian.

What was the consequence? That, at three-and-twenty, he was a cynic and an epicure. He had drained the cup of pleasure till it had palled in his unnerved hand. He had looked at the Pyramids without awe, at the Alps without reverence. He was unmoved by the sandy solitudes of the Desert as by the placid depths of Mediterranean's sea of blue. Bitter, bitter tears did Emily de Pentonville weep, when, on Alured's return from the Continent, she beheld the awful change that dissipation had wrought in her beautiful, her blue-eyed, her perverted, her still beloved boy!

"Corpo di Bacco," he said, pitching the end of his cigar on to the red nose of the Countess of Delawaddymore's coachman--who, having deposited her fat ladys.h.i.+p at No. 236 Piccadilly, was driving the carriage to the stables, before commencing his evening at the "Fortune of War"

public-house--"what a lovely creature that was! What eyes! what hair!

Who knows her? Do you, mon cher prince?"

"E bellissima, certamente," said the Duca de Montepulciano, and stroked down his jetty moustache.

"Ein gar schones Madchen," said the Hereditary Grand Duke of Eulenschreckenstein, and turned up his carroty one.

"Elle n'est pas mal, ma foi!" said the Prince de Borodino, with a scowl on his darkling brows. "Mon Dieu, que ces cigarres sont mauvais!" he added as he too cast away his Cuba.

"Try one of my Pickwicks," said Franklin Fox, with a sneer, offering his gold etui to the young Frenchman; "they are some of Pontet's best, Prince. What, do you bear malice? Come, let us be friends," said the gay and careless young patrician; but a scowl on the part of the Frenchman was the only reply.

"Want to know who she is? Borodino knows who she is, Bagnigge," the wag went on.

Everybody crowded around Monsieur de Borodino thus apostrophized. The Marquis of Alicompayne, young De Boots of the Lifeguards, Tom Protocol of the Foreign Office; the gay young Peers, Farintosh, Poldoody, and the rest; and Bagnigge, for a wonder, not less eager than any one present.

"No, he will tell you nothing about her. Don't you see he has gone off in a fury!" Franklin Fox continued. "He has his reasons, ce cher prince: he will tell you nothing; but I will. You know that I am au mieux with the dear old d.u.c.h.ess."

"They say Frank and she are engaged after the duke's death," cried Poldoody.

"I always thought Fw.a.n.k was the duke's illicit gweatgwandson," drawled out De Boots.

"I heard that he doctored her Blenheim, and used to bring her wigs from Paris," cried that malicious Tom Protocol, whose mots are known in every diplomatic salon from Petersburg to Palermo.

"Burn her wigs and hang her poodle!" said Bagnigge. "Tell me about this girl, Franklin Fox."

"In the first place, she has five hundred thousand acres, in a ring fence in Norfolk; a county in Scotland, a castle in Wales, a villa at Richmond, a corner house in Belgrave Square, and eighty thousand a year in the three-per-cents."

"Apres?" said Bagnigge, still yawning.

"Secondly, Borodino lui fait la cour. They are cousins, her mother was an Armagnac of the emigration; the old Marshal, his father, married another sister. I believe he was footman in the family, before Napoleon princified him."