“To forsake your home!” muttered Raper.
“Ask himself; let him be as frank with you as he was half-an-hour ago with me, and you will know the truth.”
“Oh, Jasper, speak!—leave me not in this dreadful suspense!” cried my mother; “for in all my troubles I never pictured to my mind this calamity.”
“No, no!” said Raper; “the boy 's nature has no duplicity,—he never thought of this!”
“Ask him, I say,” cried the Count; “ask him if he wish not to accompany me to Paris.”
I could bear no longer the power of the gaze that I felt was fixed upon me, but, falling at her feet, I hid my face in her lap, and cried bitterly. My heart was actually bursting with the fulness of sorrow, and I sobbed myself to sleep, still weeping through my dreams, and shedding hot tears as I slumbered.
My dream is more graven on my memory than the events which followed my awaking. I could recount the strange and incoherent fancies which chased each other through my brain on that night, and yet not tell the actual occurrences of the following day.
I do remember something of sitting beside my mother, with my hand locked in hers, and feeling the wet cheek that from time to time was pressed against my own; of the soft hand as it parted the hair upon my forehead, and the burning kiss that seemed to sear it. Passages of intense emotion—how caused I know not—are graven in my mind; memories of a grief that seemed to wrench the heart with present suffering, and cast shadows of darkest meaning on the future. Oh, no, no!—the sorrows—if they be indeed sorrows—of childhood are not short-lived; they mould the affections, and dispose them in a fashion that endures for many a year to come.
While I recall to mind these afflictions, of the actual events of my last hours at Reichenau I can relate but the very slightest traits. I do remember poor Raper storing my little portmanteau with some of the last few volumes that remained to him of his little store of books; of my mother showing me a secret pocket of the trunk, not to be opened save when some emergency or difficulty had presented itself; of my astonishment at the number of things provided for my use, and the appliances of comfort and convenience which were placed at my disposal; and then, more forcibly than all else, of the contemptuous scorn with which the Count surveyed the preparation, and asked “if my ward robe contained nothing better than these rags?”
Of the last sad moment of parting,—the agony of my mother's grief as she clasped me in her arms, till I was torn away by force, and with my swimming faculties I thought to have seen her fall fainting to the ground,—of these I will not speak, for I dare not, even now!