"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.