CHAPTER XX.

CHAPTER XX.

Once more we are in Vermont, in the little valley scooped in the side of the haunted hill. The rough stone cottage still stands in the middle of the clearing, but it is no longer lonely. Several horses are tied to the trees around, two of them jet-black, the rest caparisoned chargers, in the midst of which the dapple-gray steed of Adrian Schuyler is noticed. Several rangers were lounging about and in the hut, and the smoke curls up from the wide chimney, showing blue amid the silvery haze of Indian summer.

But a feature has been added to the scene since we were last there. It is not the vivid dyes of autumn alone. The mountain sides glow with crimson and gold, but that is not all.

The change consists in the fact that a lofty portal has been revealed, cut into the precipice that borders one side of the glade, while the cavern to which it gives entrance, instead of being dark, is illuminated from within, and shows as bright as day.

No rough, damp cavern is it either, but a lofty apartment, the rocks hidden with hangings of white and crimson cloth,while within, gathered around a table, are General Schuyler, the Count de Cavannes, Adrian, and Diana, at the close of a dinner, waited on by black servants.

The General holds up his glass to the light and addresses De Cavannes, saying, “Count, to your future life. May it be happier than the past. It is time to redeem your promise, and tell your children all.”

The count’s face was grave and sad as he replied:

“Philip, you say true, but you can not tell what it is to me to harrow up those recollections. Still, it must be done, for I have promised.”

Then turning to the young people, who were respectfully listening, he addressed them:

“Adrian Schuyler, I have trusted thee as I never have trusted living man since—since—something happened in my past life. What that was, thou shalt learn. I trusted thee, not alone for thine honest face, but for the name thou bearest. Thy cousin Philip and I were once fellow-students and travelers, and I never knew one of his blood that was a traitor. Diana, my daughter, thou hast, for many a year, held more fear than love to thy father. Now thou shalt learn the cause that drove me to the wilderness, and made of me, once as frank as the day, the gloomy hater of my kind that I was before Adrian came to us, to bring light from the outer world.”

Then, while his audience gathered round him, hanging with intense interest on his words, the count told them the story of his life, which we shall epitomize as briefly as possible.

Alphonse de Cavannes, count in France, baron in Germany, and even duke of a small Italian province, was, at thirty, an object of envy to half of Europe, for his riches and social position. Descended from a family which united the best bloods of three kingdoms, he inherited vast estates in all, greatest of all in France. Such was the frank generosity of his nature, that his parasites were numerous, but to none of them had he shown so much kindness as to a young English officer, a scion of the noble house of Oxford, Pierce Harley by name. This youth had been taken prisoner by the count in the famous battle of Fontenoy, thirty-two years before the date of our tale, and his captor, instead of leaving him, as hewell might have done, to the fate of an officer on parole, on scanty pay, had taken him into his own house in Paris, and treated him with the kindness of a brother. He had been induced to this course chiefly from the finding that Harley was a distant relation of the young Countess de Cavannes, who was, by birth, English, and whom her husband positively adored. Young Harley, then a handsome, athletic young fellow, had professed himself extremely grateful for this kindness. Being a younger son, without fortune, the friendship of the great French lord was of much value to him. When peace was concluded, moreover, instead of allowing Harley to go back to England, the generous count insisted on his resigning his commission, and remaining in France as steward of all De Cavannes’ estates, everywhere treated as the trusted friend of their owner. Harley accepted it, and for twelve years occupied the post, doing exactly as he pleased. It was during this period that Schuyler, then on a visit to Europe, met his old fellow-student, and witnessed, with amazement, the splendor of his establishment. The count was then deep in those expensive scientific experiments to which he owed all his subsequent resources as a conjuror and magician, in company with the celebrated or notorious Count Cagliostro. It was Schuyler who induced the count to pay a visit to America, and Harley managed all the details of the expedition, which was made in princely style. On arrival in America, De Cavannes was so much charmed with the beauty and grandeur of the scenery, that he decided that he would buy an estate near Albany, and spend at least a portion of his time there.

It was only then, after twelve years of apparently faithful service on the part of Harley, that De Cavannes discovered that all was not right in his affairs. Expecting to be able to raise money to purchase in America by a mortgage on his French estates, he found to his surprise and dismay, that every acre of land which he held in Europe was already heavily incumbered. Schuyler, whose keen, solid intellect had from the first led him to suspect maladministration on account of the reckless extravagance he had witnessed, persuaded his friend to go to Europe and make a secret investigation of his affairs in company with himself, leaving Harley in Americato put the Albany estate in condition. To do this, the generous American himself secretly advanced the purchase-money for the estate, and undertook the task of lulling Harley’s suspicions, which the open-hearted count was hardly capable of doing, in the first revulsion of suspicion. To be brief, the scheme was carried out. The countess was left in America under charge of the suspected agent, along with the baby Diana, who had been born a few days previous to the discovery of Harley’s monetary faithlessness. Of any thing worse than reckless incapacity the count never suspected him.

The friends went to Europe and found that the trusted friend and petted steward, Pierce Harley, had not only robbed his benefactor for his own benefit, but had actually forged his name to mortgages, so that two-thirds of the count’s income was swallowed up in paying interest on loans of which he had never reaped any benefit.

De Cavannes, once undeceived, was a changed man. With noble magnanimity he would not take advantage of the people who had been victimized by the forgeries. Neither would he continue to pay the interest. He took a middle course, conveying all his estates to a board of his creditors to apply the proceeds to the extinction of the principal of these sums that he had never received, and reserving to himself only enough to repay the generous Schuyler and to supply a year’s expenses for a small household in America. Then he took passage back, and arrived at Albany with Schuyler to find the country in a state of war, and Howe’s expedition to Ticonderoga on foot.

Full of fury at the recent discoveries, he summoned Harley to his presence, informed him in a few stinging words of his estimate of his character, then bid him draw and defend himself. To his surprise, Harley, usually a man of obstinate courage, turned pale, and without a word fled from his presence, while the count, too proud to pursue a wretch so sordid as he deemed him, contented himself with throwing a drinking-cup after him with a force that cut the villain’s head as he went. Then the disdainful noble went to seek his wife, whom he had not yet seen.

Then, and then only, did he sound the last depth of Harley’s perfidy. The false steward was discovered in the countess’chamber, and she was hanging on his neck, weeping bitterly while Harley rained kisses on her lips!

Here the count stopped, and his paleness became livid, while his voice sunk to a grating whisper.

“I killed Diana. Do you blame me? I would have killed him, but he left again. I could not letbothescape.”

There was a dead silence in the room as he paused. A moment later, he said, in a quiet almost indifferent tone:

“That night the Indians burned my house to the ground and scalped me, leaving me for dead, and I recognized Pierce Harley for their leader. He had the better of me at every point.”

Again there was a dead silence, again the count spoke.

“You found me, Philip, and nursed me to life. You do not wonder that when I recovered I vowed vengeance on Pierce Harley and all his crew of red devils. I have kept the vow well. Twenty long years have I hung on the trail of the Mohawks, now in one place, now in another. I found this cave first, and afterwards the one near Oriskany. The idea struck me that by keeping the secret of the caves and working on the superstition of the Indians, I might acquire a double power over them. I hid the entrance to this, and no one knew where the other was. It was your help, Philip, that supplied me with the means to personate the demon and frighten the savages with red fire. That and my own activity and caution, sharpened tenfold by woodcraft, taught me how to make myself dreaded and shunned by every warrior of this nation.

“But in all that time I never could find Pierce Harley, though I sought him everywhere. Diana shared my solitude after her fourteenth year, and no one in the convent-school at Montreal dreamed, when Mademoiselle De Cavannes left them a finished pupil, that she went to the woods to share the trials of a moody, misanthropical outcast, whose bidding she obeyed with fear and trembling, but whose secrets she kept with the true fidelity of a daughter. You little thought, Adrian Schuyler, when you met the simple-seeming girl in rustic tunic, that her innocent air was really a piece of consummate art, and that your cousin Philip knew the whole secret. The bear and the tame deer, the Spanish hounds, the voicesin the air, the supernatural figures, they were all very awful to you at first, were they not? But, now that you know all, you do not wonder that I would not trust you before Bennington. I sent you my horse on purpose to test your truth, and you proved a true Schuyler. May you be happy with Diana.”

The count had hardly finished his story when there was a noise without. He started up.

“I thought so,” he exclaimed, “the scouts have tracked him to earth, and are driving him hither.”

The next moment a horseman dashed up to the cave, leaped off his beast, and strode in, bearing a long rifle.

It was the dreaded Butler.

Behind him, at a distance, rode up a dozen rangers.

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