"Then Leoline is French and of noble birth?" said Sir Norman, with

a thrill of pleasure. "I loved her for herself alone, and would have

wedded her had she been the child of a beggar; but I rejoice to hear

this nevertheless. Her father, then, bore a title?"

"Her father was the Marquis de Montmorenci, but Leoline's mother and

mine were not the same--had they been, the lives of all four might have

been very different; but it is too late to lament that now. My mother

had no gentle blood in her veins, as Leoline's had, for she was but a

fisherman's daughter, torn from her home, and married by force. Neither

did she love my father notwithstanding his youth, rank, and passionate

love for her, for she was betrothed to another bourgeois, like herself.

For his sake she refused even the title of marchioness, offered her in

the moment of youthful and ardent passion, and clung, with deathless

truth, to her fisher-lover. The blood of the Montmorencis is fierce

and hot, and brooks no opposition" (Sir Norman thought of Miranda, and

inwardly owned that that was a fact); "and the marquis, in his jealous

wrath, both hated and loved her at the same time, and vowed deadly

vengeance against her bourgeois lover. That vow he kept. The young

fisherman was found one morning at his lady-love's door without a head,

and the bleeding trunk told no tales.

"Of course, for a while, she was distracted and so on; but when the

first shock of her grief was over, my father carried her off, and

forcibly made her his wife. Fierce hatred, I told you, was mingled with

his fierce love, and before the honeymoon was over it began to break

out. One night, in a fit of jealous passion, to which he was addicted,

he led her into a room she had never before been permitted to enter;

showed her a grinning human skull, and told her it was her lover's!

In his cruel exultation, he confessed all; how he had caused him to be

murdered; his head severed from the body; and brought here to punish

her, some day, for her obstinate refusal to love him.

"Up to this time she had been quiet and passive, bearing her fate with

a sort of dumb resignation; but now a spirit of vengeance, fiercer and

more terrible than his own, began to kindle within her; and, kneeling

down before the ghastly thing, she breathed a wish--a prayer--to the

avenging Jehovah, so unutterably horrible, that even her husband had

to fly with curdling blood from the room. That dreadful prayer was

heard--that wish fulfilled in me; but long before I looked on the light

of day that frantic woman had repented of the awful deed she had done.

Repentance came too late the sin of the father was visited on the child,

and on the mother, too, for the moment her eyes fell upon me, she became

a raving maniac, and died before the first day of my life had ended.




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