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Updated: June 17, 2025
"Madame La Vigne," he said, rising ceremoniously, "permit me to introduce to you Miss Miriam Harz," reading the name slowly from the card again, which he took from the wall, "'a candidate for the position of instructress at Beauseincourt. Say, how do you like her looks?" I had come to the conclusion by this time that Mr.
"I think she called it the sweetest, too, in sound; but to me it is simply the most sorrowful, a knell of doom, and it fills my soul to-day to overflowing, for 'never, never more' shall I look on Beauseincourt!"
I found them intolerable in the mood in which I was, nothing so exhausting as the abstract! and closed the book desperately to resume my diary, neglected since the awful events of Beauseincourt, but always to me a resource in time of trouble and of solitude. Of pens, ink, paper, there was no lack, and I wrote one day, Penelope-wise, what I destroyed the next.
"I am sure I am glad I have no attributes of fascination, if a strange old work I met with at Beauseincourt may be considered responsible. Did you ever see it, Miss Lamarque, you who see every thing? This naïveté on the part of the old chronicler was simply impayable, as Major Favraud would say, with his characteristic shrug.
The heroine so far of my own story, I cannot yet voluntarily relinquish the privilege of sympathy, so dear to the narrator of adventure, though I did, indeed, for a time forget my own identity in the dark shadow, the mysterious crimes, the unprecedented and speedy retributions that followed quickly on the heels of guilt at Beauseincourt.
I had read the book at Beauseincourt, and it had powerfully impressed me; and this, I remember, was the passage that swept across my brain: "And thou whom I dare not name, wouldst thou mourn to see me preceding thee to a place where we can love one another without wrong where nothing will prevent our union where all pernicious prejudices, all arbitrary exclusions, all hateful passions, and all tyranny, are silent?
The occasion of this belligerent demonstration was afforded at the Christmas festival, held yearly at Beauseincourt, by Colonel and Mrs. La Vigne in the great, many-windowed drawing-room with its waxed parquet its ebony-framed mirrors, its pier consoles, and faded damask furniture.
We became engaged during his convalescence, simply, quietly, unostentatiously. In due time we made our troth-plight known to the household of Beauseincourt, all of whom, from its formal master to my best-beloved, brightest, and ever-tantalizing pupil, Bertie, accorded me their heart-felt congratulations.
All the persecution I had sustained since my father's death, at the hands of Evelyn and Basil Bainrothe all my wrongs, beginning at the heart-betrayal of Claude, and ending with the immurement I was suffering now at the hands of his father all my strange life at Beauseincourt, with its episode of horror, its one reality of perfect happiness too fair to last, its singular revelations, its warm and deep attachments, my fearful and nightmare-like experience on the burning ship, the level raft, with the green wares curling above it, the rescue, the snare into which I had inevitably fallen, the Inquisition-walls closing around me all were there in one vivid and overwhelming mental summary!
It was a calm and hazy morning of Southern summer that on which I turned my face seaward from the "keep" of Beauseincourt, never, I knew, to see its time-stained walls again, save through the mirage of memory.
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