FATHER AND SON.
The first part of the letter was written in a much clearer chirography
than the latter, where it grew fainter and more irregular as it
proceeded, until at last, in the signature, it was so nearly illegible
as to baffle the ingenuity of the reader to decipher it; as if, in the
course of her task, the strength of the dying writer had grown weaker and
weaker, until at the end the pen must have fallen from her failing hand.
The Duke of Hereward, who could not make out the name at the bottom of
the letter, at once recognized the handwriting at the top, and knew that
his correspondent from the dead was his lost wife, Valerie de la Motte.
He grew cold with the chill of an anticipated horror; but with that
supreme power of self-control which was as much a matter of constitution
as of education with him, he suppressed all signs of emotion, and
courteously apologized to his visitor, saying:
"Excuse me, young sir; my eyes are not so good as they were some twenty
years ago, and I must turn to the light," and he deliberately wheeled his
chair around so as to bring his face entirely out of range of his
visitor's sharp vision, while he should read the fatal letter, which
was as follows:
"SAN VITO, ITALY, MARCH 1st, 18--
"DUKE OF HEREWARD: This paper will be handed you by
Archibald-Alexander-John Scott, my son and yours.
"This news will startle you, if you have not already been sufficiently
startled by the living likeness of the boy to yourself, and by the
electric chain of memory which will bring before you the weeks
immediately preceding our separation, when you yourself had suspicions
of my condition, and hopes of becoming a father. Those fond hopes were
destined to be fulfilled by me, but doomed to be ruined by you.
"Yes, Duke of Hereward, your son stands before you, strong, healthy,
beautiful, perfect as ever wife bore to her husband; yet denied,
delegalized, and defrauded by you, his father!
"If you are inclined still to deny him, turn and look upon him, as he
stands, and you can no longer do so. If you want further proof, find it
in these circumstances: That this letter is written, and these statements
are made by a dying woman, with the immediate prospect of eternity and
its retribution before her.
"But on one point be at ease before you read farther; the boy does not
know who his father is, and therefore does not know how grievously, how
irretrievably you wronged him by divorcing his mother and delegalizing
him before his birth. I would not put enmity between father and son by
telling him anything about it. _He_ thinks that his father is dead,
and I have never undeceived him. He has heard of you only as one who was
a friend of his mother, and who, for her sake, may become the friend of
her son. It must be for you to decide whether to leave him in this
ignorance or to tell him the truth.
"Perhaps you will ask why I have concealed your son's existence from you
up to this time. I will tell you; but in order to do so clearly, I must
refer to those last few weeks spent with you in Paris before our
separation.
"Remember the ball at the British Embassy, to which you persuaded me to
go, and where I met, unexpectedly the Count de Volaski, my secretly
married husband, supposed to be dead; remember my illness that followed!
and how earnestly I tried to avoid him, an effort that was totally
useless, because he, considering that he possessed the only rightful
claim to my society, constantly sought me, and you, ignorant of all his
antecedents, constantly helped him to see me.
"My position was degrading, agonizing, intolerable. I found myself,
though guiltless of any intentional wrong-doing, in the horrible dilemma
of a wife with two living husbands.
"Yes, by the laws of love and nature, justice and the church, I was the
wife of Waldemar de Volaski; by the laws of France and England, I was the
wife of the Duke of Hereward.
"The discovery shocked, confused, and, perhaps, unsettled my reason. At
first I knew not what to do. I prayed for death. I contemplated suicide.
At length, I thought I saw a way out of my dreadful dilemma. It was to
escape and to live apart from both forever.
"So also thought the Count de Volaski. I consulted with him. I dared not
confess to you the secret that my parents had compelled me to conceal so
long. Volaski would have told you, but I would not consent that he should
do so, until I should be safe out of the house; for I could not have
borne, after such confession, to have met you again; and again, under any
circumstances, I preferred that I myself should be your informant. I
determined to leave yon, and to live apart from both, as the only life of
peace and honor possible for me, and to write you a letter confessing the
whole truth, as an explanation of my course of conduct. I thought that
you would understand and pity me, and leave me to my fate.
"I did _not_ think that you would disbelieve my statement, publish my
flight, and blast my reputation by a divorce.
"I was never false to you in thought, word or deed.
"Volaski was not my lover; he was my sternest mentor. He came to the
house during your absence; not for the pleasure of seeing me, for he took
no pleasure in my society; he came to arrange with me the programme of my
departure; an angel of purity or a demon of malice might have been
present at our interviews, and seen nothing to grieve the first or please
the last.
"I was ill and nervous and fearful; I could not travel alone, and
therefore Volaski went with me, and took care of me; but it was the
care a pitiless gend'arme would have taken of a convicted criminal. It
was a care that only hurried me to my destination, my chosen place of
exile--San Vito--and which left me on the day of my arrival there. I have
never seen him since. And now let me say and swear on the Christian faith
and hope of a dying woman--that--from the moment I met Count Waldemar de
Volaski at the British embassy, to the moment I parted with him at San
Vito, he never once came so near me as even to kiss my hand--a courtesy
that any gentleman might have shown without blame. You may not believe me
now; that you did not believe me before was your great misfortune, and
mine, and our son's.
"A week after Volaski had left me you followed us and traced us to San
Vito. I heard of your visit and trembled; for, though really guiltless,
I felt that to meet your eye would seem worse than death. Fortunately
for us both, perhaps, you declined to see me and went away.
"The next news that I heard was of the duel in which you had killed
Volaski. I should scarcely have believed in his death this time, had not
a packet been forwarded to me, through his second. This packet contained
a letter that he had written to me on the eve of the duel, and with a
presentiment of death overshadowing him. In this letter he said that in
death he claimed me again as his wife, and bequeathed to me, as to his
widow, all that he had the power to leave, his personal property, and he
took a last solemn farewell of me.
"In the packet, besides, was his will and other documents necessary to
put me in possession of his bequest, and also a great number of valuable
jewels.
"These, together with my own small dower, have made me independent for
life.
"It will show how perfectly palsied was my heart when I tell you that
I could not feel either horror of crime, grief for Volaski's death, or
gratitude for his bequest.
"I could feel nothing.
"Days and weeks passed in this apathy of despair, from which I was at
length painfully aroused by a most shocking discovery.
"Madelena, my hostess, who tenderly watched over my health had her
suspicions aroused, and put some motherly questions to me, and when I had
answered them she startled me with the announcement that in a very few
months I should become a mother.
"This news, so joyful to most good women, only filled my soul with
sorrow and dismay. It seemed to complicate my difficulties beyond all
possibility of extrication.
"Lena, poor woman, who had never heard of my marriage with the Duke of
Hereward, but had known me as the wife of the Count de Volaski, believed
that all my distress was caused by the prospect of becoming the mother of
a fatherless child, and bent all her energies to try to comfort me with
the assurance that this motherhood would be the greatest blessing of my
lonely life.
"Ah! how willing would I have confided the whole truth to this good woman
if I had dared to do so! It will show how timid I had grown when I assure
you that I, a faithful daughter of the church, had not even ventured to
go to confession once since my arrival in Italy.
"Now, Duke of Hereward, attend to my words! Had you been less bitterly
incredulous of my statements, less cruel in your judgment of me, less
murderous in your vengeance upon one much more sinned against than
sinning, I should have ventured to write to you of my condition and my
prospect of giving you an heir to your dukedom, in time to prevent your
rash and fatal act by which you unconsciously delegalized your own
lawful son!
"But your murderous cruelty had left me in a state of stupor from which
I could not rally.
"Night after night I resolved to write to you. Day after day I tried to
carry my resolution into effect. Time after time I failed through fear
of you!
"At length I persuaded myself that there was no immediate necessity for
action on my part. I might defer writing to you until the arrival of my
child. That child might prove to be a girl, who could not be your heir,
and, therefore, could not be an object of momentous importance to you; or
it might die. Either of which circumstance would relieve me from the
painful duty of opening a correspondence with you; or I myself might
perish in the coming trial, when the duty of communicating the facts to
you would devolve upon some one whom I would appoint with my dying
breath.
"These were the causes of my fatal delay in writing to you.
"At length the time arrived. On the fifth of April, just five months
after our separation. I became the mother of a fine, healthy, beautiful
boy. He brought with him the mother-love that is Heaven's first gift to
the child. I loved my son as I never loved a human being before. I _had_
prayed for death; but as I clasped my first-born to my bosom, I asked
pardon for that sinful prayer, thanked the Lord that I had lived through
my trial, and besought him still to spare my life for my boy's sake. From
that day forth I was able to pray and to give thanks. I resolved that my
first act of recovery should be to go to the church and make my
confession to the good father there, gain my absolution, and then write
and inform you of the birth of your heir, the infant Earl of Arondelle,
for such I knew was even then the baby boy's title! With these fond hopes
I rapidly recovered. "Perfect love casteth out fear." Mother-love had
cast out from my soul all fear of you. I thought that you would feel so
rejoiced at the news of the birth of your son, your heir, and so fine a
boy, that even for his sake you would forgive his mother, supposing that
you should still think you had anything to forgive.
"In the midst of my vain dreaming a thunderbolt fell upon me!
"My boy was six weeks old. I had not yet left the house to carry out any
of my happy resolutions, when my good Madelena entered my room and
brought two large parcels of English papers, such as were sent me monthly
by my London correspondent. She told me that the first parcel had arrived
during my confinement to my bed, and that she had laid it away and
forgotten all about it until this day, when the arrival of the second
parcel had reminded her of it, and now she had brought them both, and
hoped I would excuse her negligence in not having remembered to bring the
first parcel sooner. I readily and even hastily excused her, for I was
anxious to get rid of my good hostess and read my files of papers.
"As any one else would have done under the like circumstances, I opened
the last parcel first, and selected the latest paper to begin with. It
was the London _Times_ of April 7th. As I opened it, a short, marked
paragraph caught my eyes.
"Judge of my consternation when I read the notice of your marriage with
the Lady Augusta McDugald!
"The letters ran together on my vision, the room whirled around with me,
all grew dark, and I lost consciousness. When I recovered my senses I
found myself in bed, with Madelena and several of her kind neighbors in
attendance upon me. Many days passed before I was able to look again at
the file of English newspapers.
"You had married again! you had married just one week before the birth of
my son! But under what circumstances had you married? Did you suppose me
to be dead, and that my death had set you free? Or--oh, horror! had you
dragged my name before a public tribunal, and by lying _facts_--for
facts do often lie--had you branded me with infidelity, and repudiated me
by divorce?
"Such were the questions that tormented me, until I was able to examine
the file of English newspapers, and find out from them; for, as before,
I would not have taken any one into my confidence by getting another to
read the papers for me, even if I could have found any one in that rural
Italian neighborhood capable of reading English.
"At length, one morning, I sent for the papers, and began to look them
over, and I found--merciful Heaven! what I feared to find--the full
report of our divorce trial! found myself held up to public scorn and
execration, the reproach of my own sex--the contempt of yours! Found
myself, in short, convicted and divorced from you, upon the foulest
charge that can be brought upon a woman! Guiltless as I was! wronged as
I had been! wishing only to live a pure and blameless life, as I did!
"Oh! the intolerable anguish of the days that followed! But for my baby
boy, I think I should have died, or maddened!
"In my worst paroxysms, good Madelena would come and take up my baby and
lay him on my bosom, and whisper, that no doubt, though his handsome
young father had gone to Heaven, it was all for the best; and we too,
if we were good, would one day meet him there, or words to that effect.
"Surely angels are with children, and their presence makes itself felt
in the comfort children bring to wounded hearts.
"One day, in a state bordering on idiocy, I think, I examined and
compared dates, in the sickening hope that my darling boy might have been
born before the decree of divorce had been pronounced, and thus be the
heir of his father's dukedom, notwithstanding all that followed.
"But, ah! that faint hope also was destined to die! The dates, compared,
stood thus:
"The decree of divorce was pronounced February 13th, 18--.
"The marriage between yourself and Lady Augusta McDugald was solemnized
April 1st, 18--.
"My boy was born April 15th, 18--.
"Yes, you divorced the guiltless mother two months, and married another
woman two weeks, before the birth of your innocent boy.
"You cruelly and unjustly disowned, disinherited, and even delegalized,
and degraded your son before he was born! So that your son was not born
in wedlock, could not bear your name, or inherit your title! And this
misfortune came upon him by no fault of his, or of his most unhappy
mother's but by the jealousy, vengeance, and fatal rashness of his
father! And now there was no help, either in law or equity, for the
dishonored boy.
"This, Duke of Hereward, is the ruin you have wrought in his life, in
mine, and in yours.
"Do you wonder that when I realized it all I fell into a state of despair
deeper than any I had ever yet known?--a despair that was characterized
by all who saw it as melancholy madness.
"My dear boy, who was at first such a comfort to me, was now only a
beloved sorrow! When I held him to my bosom, I thought of nothing but
his bitter, irreparable wrongs.
"I do not know how long I had continued to live in this despairing and
heathenish condition, when one day, in harvest time, Madelena brought
good Father Antonio to see me. This Father Antonio was the priest of the
chapel of Santa Maria, who had performed the marriage ceremony between
Waldemar de Volaski and myself.
"The father also naturally supposed that all my grief was for the death
of my child's father. He began in a gentle, admonitory way to rebuke me
for inordinate affection and sinful repining, and to remind me of the
comfort and strength to be found in the spirit of religion and the
ordinances of the Church.
"My heart opened to the good old priest as it had never opened to a
living man or even woman before.
"Then and there I told him the whole secret history of my life, including
every detail of my two unhappy marriages, and the fatal divorce preceding
the birth of my son. I concealed nothing from him. I told him all, and
felt infinitely relieved when I had done so.
"The gentle old man dropped tears of pity over me, and sat in silent
sympathy some time before he ventured to give me any words.
"At length he arose and said:
"'Child, I must go home and pray for wisdom before I can venture to
counsel you.'
"'Bless me, then, holy father.'
"He laid his venerable hands upon my bowed head, raised his eyes to
Heaven, and invoked upon me the divine benediction, of which I stood so
much in need.
"Then he silently passed from the room.
"That night I slept in peace.
"The next day the good old man came to me again.
"He told me that my first marriage with Waldemar de Volaski was my only
true marriage, indissoluble by anything but death, however invalid in law
it might be pronounced by those who were interested in breaking it.
"That my second marriage contracted with the Duke of Hereward during the
life of my first husband, was sacrilegious in the eyes of religion and
the church, however legal it might be considered by the laws of England
or of France, and pardonable in me only on account of my ignorance at the
time of the continued existence of my first husband.
"That the desperate step I had taken of leaving the Duke of Hereward,
upon the discovery of the existence of Waldemar de Volaski, was the right
and proper course for me to pursue; but that he regretted I had not
possessed the moral courage to tell the duke the whole story, for he had
that much right to my confidence.
"As for the divorce I so much lamented, it was to be regretted only for
the sake of the son whom it had outlawed, for he was the son of a lawful
marriage in the eyes of the world, if not a sacred one in the eyes of the
church.
"For the boy thus cruelly wronged there seemed no opening on earth. He
was disowned, disinherited, delegalized, deprived even of a name in this
world. All earth was closed against him.
"But all Heaven was open to him. The church, Heaven's servant, would open
her arms to receive the child the world had cast out. The church in
baptism would give him a name and a surname; would give him an education
and a mission. I must, like Hannah of old, devote my son, even from his
childhood up, to the service of the altar, and the church would do the
rest.
"How comforted I was! I had something still to live for! My outcast son
would be saved. He could not inherit his father's titles and estates; he
could not be a duke, but he would be a holy minister of the Lord; he
might live to be a prince of the church, an archbishop or a cardinal.
"Foolish ambition of a still worldly mother you may think. Yes! but he
was her only son, and she was worse than widowed.
"I agreed to all the good priest said. I promised to dedicate my son to
the service of the altar.
"The next Sunday I went to the chapel of Santa Maria and had my child
christened. I gave him in baptism the full name of his father. Beppo and
Madelena stood as his sponsors. They told me St. John would be his patron
saint.
"I rallied from my torpor. I built a roomy cottage in a mountain dell
near the chapel of Santa Maria, furnished it comfortably, and moved into
it, and engaged an Italian nurse and housekeeper, for I had resolved to
pass my life among the simple, kindly people who were the only friends
misfortune had left me.
"Another trial awaited me--a light one, however, in comparison to those
I had suffered and outlived.
"This trial came when my son was but little over a year old, and I had
been about six months in the "Hermitage," as I called my new home.
"One morning I received a file of English papers for the month of May
just preceding. In the papers of the first week in May I saw announced
the birth of your son, called the infant Marquis of Arondelle, and the
heir. I read of the great rejoicings in all your various seats throughout
the United Kingdom, and the congratulations of royalty itself, upon this
auspicious event. I clasped my disinherited son to my bosom and wept the
very bitterest tears I had ever shed in my life.
"Later on I read in the papers for the last of May a graphic account of
the grand pageantry of the christening, which took place at St. Peter's,
Euston Square, where an archbishop performed the sacred rites and a royal
duke stood sponsor, and of the great feastings and rejoicings in hall and
hut on every estate of yours throughout the kingdom. I thought of my
disowned boy's humble baptism in the village church by the country
priest, where two kind-hearted peasants stood sponsors for him, and I
wept myself nearly blind that night.
"The next day I went to the little church and told the good father there
all about it. He understood and sympathized with me, counselled and
comforted me as usual.
"He admonished me that to escape from the wounds of the world, I must not
only forsake the world, as I had done, but forget the world as I had not
done; to forget the world I must cease to search and inquire into its
sayings and doings; and he advised me to write and stop all my
newspapers, which only brought me news to disturb my peace of mind.
"I followed the direction of my wise guide. I wrote immediately and
stopped all my newspapers.
"After that I devoted myself to the nurture of my child, to the care
of my little household, to the relief of my poorer neighbors, and to the
performance of my religious duties; and time brought me resignation and
cheerfullness.
"From that day to this, Duke of Hereward, I have never once seen your
name printed or written, and never once heard it breathed. You may have
passed away from earth, for aught I know to the contrary; though I hope
and believe that you have not.
"My boy throve finely. The good priest of Santa Maria took charge of his
education for the first twelve years of the pupil's life, made of him,
even at that early age, a good Latin and Greek scholar, and a fair
mathematician; and would have prepared him to enter one of the German
Universities, had not the summons come that cut short the good father's
work on earth, and carried him to his eternal home.
"It was soon after the loss of this kind friend, who had been the strong
prop of my weakness, the wise counsellor of my ignorance, that my own
health began to fail. The seeds of pulmonary consumption, inherited from
my mother, began to develop, and nothing could arrest their progress. For
the last three years I have been an invalid, growing worse and worse
every year. Perhaps in no other climate, under no other treatment, could
I have lived so long as I have been permitted to live here by the help of
the pure air and the grape cure.
"My boy, now fifteen years of age, is everything that I could wish him to
be, except in one respect. He will not consent to enter the church. He
wants to be a soldier, poor lad! Well, we cannot coerce him into a life
of sanctity and self-denial. Such a life must always be a voluntary
sacrifice. Neither do I wish to cross him, now that I am on my death-bed
and doomed so soon to leave him.
"In these last days on earth, lying on my dying bed, travailing for his
good, it has come to me like an inspiration that I must send him to his
father. I must not leave him friendless in the world. And now that the
priest Antonio has long passed away, and I am so soon to follow, he will
have no friends except these poor, helpless Italian peasants among whom
he has been reared. Therefore I must send him, in the hope that you will
recognize him by his exact likeness to yourself, and prove his identity
as your son, by all the testimony you can be sure to gather in Paris and
at San Vito. I have written this long letter, in the intervals between
pain and fever, during the last few weeks.
"Yesterday, my faithful physician warned me that my days on earth had
dwindled down to hours; that I might pass away at any moment now, and
had therefore best attend to any necessary business that I might wish
to settle.
"This warning admonishes me to finish and close my letter. I end as I
began, by swearing to you, by all the hopes of salvation in a dying
woman, that Archibald Scott is your own son. You can prove this to your
own satisfaction by coming to San Vito and examining the church register
as to the dates of his birth, baptism, and so forth; by which you will
find that he was born just five months after I left your roof, and just
six months after our return from our long yachting cruise, and the
renewal of my acquaintance with Count de Volaski, at the British
minister's dinner. You see, by these circumstances, there cannot be
even the shadow of a doubt as to his true parentage.
"I repeat, that I have not told the boy the secret of his birth; to have
done so might have been to have embittered his mind against you, and I
would not on my death-bed do anything to sow enmity between father and
son.
"I leave to yourself to tell him, if you should ever think proper to do
so, and with what explanations you may please to add.
"I have constituted you his sole guardian, and trustee of the moderate
property I bequeath him. He wishes to enter the army, and he will have
money sufficient to purchase a commission and support himself respectably
in some good regiment. I hope that when the proper time comes you will
forward his ambition in this direction.
"And so I leave him in your hands, for my feeble strength fails, and I
can only add my name.