CHAPTER XX
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!