My father said this gaily, but the General did not recollect the laugh, or even the smile, which courtesy exacts for a friend’s joke; on the contrary, he looked grave and even fierce, ruminating on a matter that stirred his anger and horror.

“Something very different,” he said, gruffly.  “I mean to unearth some of those fine people.  I hope, by God’s blessing, to accomplish a pious sacrilege here, which will relieve our earth of certain monsters, and enable honest people to sleep in their beds without being assailed by murderers.  I have strange things to tell you, my dear friend, such as I myself would have scouted as incredible a few months since.”

My father looked at him again, but this time not with a glance of suspicion—­with an eye, rather, of keen intelligence and alarm.

“The house of Karnstein,” he said, “has been long extinct:  a hundred years at least.  My dear wife was maternally descended from the Karnsteins.  But the name and title have long ceased to exist.  The castle is a ruin; the very village is deserted; it is fifty years since the smoke of a chimney was seen there; not a roof left.”

“Quite true.  I have heard a great deal about that since I last saw you; a great deal that will astonish you.  But I had better relate everything in the order in which it occurred,” said the General.  “You saw my dear ward—­my child, I may call her.  No creature could have been more beautiful, and only three months ago none more blooming.”

“Yes, poor thing! when I saw her last she certainly was quite lovely,” said my father.  “I was grieved and shocked more than I can tell you, my dear friend; I knew what a blow it was to you.”

He took the General’s hand, and they exchanged a kind pressure.  Tears gathered in the old soldier’s eyes.  He did not seek to conceal them.  He said: 

“We have been very old friends; I knew you would feel for me, childless as I am.  She had become an object of very near interest to me, and repaid my care by an affection that cheered my home and made my life happy.  That is all gone.  The years that remain to me on earth may not be very long; but by God’s mercy I hope to accomplish a service to mankind before I die, and to subserve the vengeance of Heaven upon the fiends who have murdered my poor child in the spring of her hopes and beauty!”

“You said, just now, that you intended relating everything as it occurred,” said my father.  “Pray do; I assure you that it is not mere curiosity that prompts me.”

By this time we had reached the point at which the Drunstall road, by which the General had come, diverges from the road which we were traveling to Karnstein.

“How far is it to the ruins?” inquired the General, looking anxiously forward.

“About half a league,” answered my father.  “Pray let us hear the story you were so good as to promise.”

XI