Page:The New Monthly Magazine - Volume 096.djvu/74

64 suddenly deprived him of the wife he adored, and the child on whom all his hopes were centred. Yet he was the first—the only one who had sufficient energy and presence of mind to drag the lifeless remains of his wife and son from under the destroying weight of the heavy portrait.

It was a frightful event, and made a great sensation. A rotten rope, and the mouldering state of the wall which should have upheld the enormously heavy wooden frame, had done all the evil.

The naval officer passed over distant seas to many a foreign land—the world was all before him, but he never forgot what he had lost.

The picture of the awful ancestress met with little injury in its fall; but several years elapsed before it was hung up again in its former place. It was, however, at length restored to its old position, but fastened with new rope, and everything necessary to make it more secure. The dreadful occurrence was beginning to be forgotten, and the brotherly affection, which had somewhat cooled, seemed to have displayed itself sufficiently in having banished the lofty dame for some years to a lumber-room. She could not always be left there! So at length she hung in her old place again, as stern, as frowning as formerly. And the count, who had now become an old man, generally when he alluded to the terrible event, reasonably ascribed it to natural causes. But, once upon a time, when he observed his youngest daughter, a girl not much more than sixteen years of age, casting furtive and rather friendly glances at a young man, the son of a country parson, who, on account of bis handsome person and pleasant manners, was often received at the baronial castle,—when he saw this, by means of some sidelong looks with the corner of his eye, which were not perceived by the young couple, then he took his daughter by the hand, led her silently and solemnly into the picture-gallery, walked with her up to the replaced portrait of their great ancestress, and said, with the gravity of on anxious father, and the dignity of an aristocratic nobleman,

"Beware, my daughter! Remember the fate of your aunt!"

These words were all he uttered.

"And this happened in the nineteenth century, and here in our fatherland?" Such an inquiry will assuredly be made by one or other of our readers, But we will not answer it ourselves; we shall only advise the inquirer to address himself to the descendants of one of the mast ancient families in Scania, and ask them whether it be true or not.