“I have seen you twenty times, mother. In the village, while playing with the other schoolboys, I have followed you as you flitted through the woods and pursued you with useless calls till you faded away. Crushed by fatigue I would drop on the spot, as if your presence alone had sustained me.”
This kind of second existence, this living dream, too much resembled what the medium herself experienced for her not to understand him.
“Poor darling,” she said as she pressed him more closely, “it was vainly that hate strove to part us. Heaven was bringing us together without my suspecting it. Less happy than you, I saw my dear child neither in dream nor reality. Still, when I passed through that Green Saloon I felt a shiver; when I heard your footsteps behind mine, giddiness thrilled my heart and brain; when you called me ‘Lady’ I all but stopped; when you called me ‘Mother!’ I nearly swooned; when I embraced you, I believed.”
“My mother,” repeated Sebastian, as if to console her for not having heard the welcome title for so long.
“Yes, your mother,” said the countess, with a transport of love impossible to describe.
“Now that we have found each other,” said the youth, “and as you are contented and happy at our union, we are not going to part any more, tell me?”
She shuddered: she was enjoying the present to the exclusion of the past and totally closing her eyes on the future.
“How I should bless you, my poor boy, if you could accomplish this miracle!” she sighingly murmured.
“Let me manage it; I will do it. I do not know the causes separating you from my father,”—Andrea turned pale—“but they will be effaced by my tears and entreaties, however serious they may be.”
“Never,” returned the countess, shaking her head.