At last, when he felt that he could control his scattered senses, he
turned over the letters in the packet and found his mother's. How his
boyish heart thrilled at this message from the dead!--a message that he
had waited for, and that had been waiting for him, one-and-twenty years!
The letter began:
"Once, my baby, thy father--long before he was thy father--had a
presentiment that if he became my lover my life would find a tragic end.
"Once, likewise, I told thy father, before he became my lover, that the
price we might have to pay, if we permitted ourselves to love, would be
sorrow and death! For, my baby, these are so often the terrible cost of
such a love as ours. That he has been my lover--my beloved--heart of my
heart--thine own existence is the living proof; and something--an
intangible something--tells me that the rest of his prophecy will
likewise be fulfilled. We have known the sorrow--aye, as few others
have--and even now I feel that we shall also know death!
"It is because of this curious presentiment of mine that I write down
for thee, my baby--my baby Paul--this story of thy father and thy
mother, and the great love that gave thee to the world. It is but right,
before thou comest into thy kingdom, that thou shouldst know--thou and
thou alone--the secret of thy birth, that thou mayst carry with thee
into the big world thy birthright--the sweetness of a supreme love."
Then briefly, but as completely and vividly as the story could be
written, she pictured for him the beautiful idyl she and her lover had
lived, here in this very spot, two-and-twenty years ago; told him, in
her own quaint words, of the beautiful boy she had found in Lucerne,
that glorious May so long ago, and how it had been her caprice to waken
him, until the caprice had become her love, and afterwards her life;
told him how she had seen the danger, and had warned the boy to leave
Lucerne, while there was yet time, but that he had answered that he
would chance the hurt, because he wished to live, and he knew that only
she could teach him how--only she could prove to him the truth of her
own words, that _life was love!_
She told how weary and unhappy she had been, picturing with no light
fingers the misery of her life--married when a mere child to a vicious
husband--and all the insults and brutality she was forced to endure; and
then, for contrast, told him tenderly how she had been young again for
this boy she had found in Lucerne.
There was not one little detail of that idyllic dream of love omitted
from the picture she drew for him of these two--and their sublime three
weeks of life on the Bürgenstock with their final triumphant, but bitter
culmination in Venice. She told him of what they had been pleased to
call their wedding--the wedding of their souls--nor did she seek to
lessen the enormity of their sin.
She touched with the tenderest of fingers upon the first dawn in their
hearts of the hope of the coming of a child--a child who would hold
their souls together forever--a child who would immortalize their love
till it should live on, and on, and on, through countless generations
perhaps--till who could say how much the world might be benefited and
helped just because they two had loved!
And then she told him--sweetly, as a mother should--of all her dreams
for her son--all her hopes and ambitions that were centered around his
little life--the life of her son who was to redeem the land--told him
how ennobled and exalted she had felt that this strong, manly Englishman
was her lover, and how sure she had been that their child would have a
noble mind.
"Thou wilt think my thoughts, my baby Paul--thou wilt dream my
dreams, and know all my ambitions and longings. Thou canst not be
ignoble or base, for thou wert born of a love that makes all other
unions mean and low and sordid by comparison."
Then, after telling, as only she could tell it, of the bitterness of
that parting in Venice, when, because of the threatening danger, from
which there was no escape, she left her lover to save his life, she went
on:
"Dost thou know yet, when thou readest this, little Paul, with thy
father's eyes--dost thou know, I wonder, the meaning of that great
love which to the twain who realize it becomes a sacrament--dost
understand?--a sacrament holier even than a prayer. It was even so
with thy father and me--dost thou--canst thou understand? If not
yet, sometime thou wilt, and thou wilt then forgive thy mother for
her sin."
She told of the taunts and persecutions to which she was forced to
submit upon her return to her kingdom. The king and his friends had
vilely commended her for her "patriotism" in finding an heir to the
throne. "Napoleon would have felt honored," her husband had sneered, "if
Josephine had adopted thy method of finding him the heir he desired!"
But through it all, she said, she had not faltered. She had held the one
thought supreme in her heart and remembered that however guilty she
might be in the eyes of the world, there was a higher truth in the words
of Mrs. Browning, "God trusts me with a child," and had dared to pray.
"To pray for strength and grace and wisdom to give thee birth, my
baby, and to make thee all that thou shouldst be--to develop thee
into the man I and thy father would have thee become. I was not
only giving an heir to the throne of my realm. I was giving a son
to the husband of my soul. But the world did not know that.
Whatever it might suspect, it could actually know--nothing! The
secret was thy father's and mine--his and mine alone--and now it
is thine, as it needs must be! Guard it well, my baby, and let it
make thy life and thy manhood full of strength and power and
sweetness and glory and joy, and remember, as thou readest for the
first time this story of thy coming into the world, that thy mother
counted it her greatest, proudest glory to be the chosen love of
thy father, and the mother of his son."
She had touched as lightly as she could upon the dark hours of her
baby's coming, when she was doomed to pass through that Valley of the
Shadow far away from the protecting and comforting love of him whose
right it was by every law of Nature to have been, then of all times, by
her side; but the Boy felt the pathos of it, and his eyes filled with
tears. His mother--the mother of his dreams--his glorious
queen-mother--to suffer all this for him--for him!
And Father Paul!--his own father! What must this cross have been to him!
Surely he would love him all the rest of his life to make up for all
that suffering!
Then he thought of the other letters and he read them all, his heart
torn between grief and anger--for they told him all the appalling
details of the tragedy that had taken his mother from him, and left his
father and himself bereaved of all that made life dear and worth the
living to man and boy.
One of the letters was from Sir Paul, telling the story over again from
the man's point of view, and laying bare at last the great secret the
Boy had so often longed to hear. Nothing was kept back. Even every
note--every little scrap of his mother's writing--had been sacredly kept
and was now enclosed for the eyes of their son to read. The closed door
in Father Paul's life was unlocked now, and his son entered and
understood, wondering why he had been so blind that he had not seen it
all before. The writing on the wall had certainly been plain enough. And
he smiled to remember the readiness with which he had believed the
plausible story of Isabella Waring!
And that man--the husband of his mother--the king who had taken her dear
life from her with a curse upon his lips! Thank God he was not his
father! No, in all the world of men, there was no one but Paul
Verdayne--no one--to whom he would so willingly have given the
title--and to him he had given it in his heart long before.
He sat and read the letters through again, word by word, living in
imagination the life his mother had lived, feeling all she had felt.
God! the bliss, the agony of it all!
And Paul Zalenska, surrounded by the messages from the past that had
given him being, and looking at the ruin of his own life with eyes newly
awakened to the immensity of his loss, bowed his face in his hands and
wept like a heart-broken child over the falling of his house of cards.
Ah! his mother had understood--she had loved and suffered. She was older
than he, too, and had known her world as he could not possibly know it,
and yet she had bade him take the gifts of life when they came his way.
And--God help him!--he had not done so!