Whether Don Juan had never fully comprehended the statement of Carlos that he was under sentence of death, or whether the tide of emotion caused by finding in him his own son had swept the terrible fact from his remembrance, it is impossible to say; but it certainly came to him, from the lips of the prior, as a dreadful, unexpected blow. So keen was his anguish that Fray Ricardo himself was moved; and the rather, because it was impossible to the aged and broken man to maintain the outward self-restraint a younger and stronger person might have done.
More touched, at the moment, by his father's condition than by all the horrors that menaced himself, Carlos came to his side, and gently tried to soothe him.
"Cease!" said the prior, sternly. "It is but mockery to pretend sympathy with the sorrow thine own obstinacy has caused. If in truth thou lovest him, save him this cruel pain. For three days still," he added, "the door of grace shall stand open to thee. After that term has expired, I dare not promise thy life." Then turning to the agitated father--"If you can make this unhappy youth hear the voice of divine and human compassion," he said, "you will save both his body and his soul alive. You know how to send me a message. God comfort you, and incline his heart to repentance." And with these words he departed, leaving Carlos to undergo the sharpest trial that had come upon him since his imprisonment.
All that day, and the greater part of the night that followed it, the two wills strove together. Prayers, tears, entreaties, seemed to the agonized father to fall on the strong heart of his son like drops of rain on the rock. He did not know that all the time they were falling on that heart like sparks of living fire; for Carlos, once so weak, had learned now to endure pain, both of mind and body, with brow and lip that "gave no sign." Passing tender was the love that had sprung up between those two, so strangely brought together. And now Carlos, by his own act, must sever that sweet bond--must leave his newly-found father in a solitude doubly terrible, where the feeble lamp of his life would soon go out in obscure darkness. Was not this bitterness enough, without the anguish of seeing that father bow his white head before him, and teach his aged lips words of broken, passionate entreaty that his son--his one earthly treasure--would not forsake him thus?
"My father," Carlos said at last, as they sat together in the moonlight, for their light had gone out unheeded--"my father, you have often told me that my face is like my mother's."
"Ay de mi!" moaned the penitent--"and truly it is. Is that why it must leave me as hers did? Ay de mi, Costanza mia! Ay de mi, my son!"
"Father, tell me, I pray you, to escape what anguish of mind or body would you set your seal to a falsehood told to her dishonour?"
"Boy, how can you ask? Never!--nothing could force me to that." And from the faded eye there shot a gleam almost like the fire of old days.
"Father, there is One I love better than ever you loved her. Not to save myself, not even to save you, from this bitter pain, can I deny him or dishonour his name. Father, I cannot!--Though this is worse than the torture," he added.
The anguish of the last words pierced to the very core of the old man's heart. He said no more; but he covered his face, and wept long and passionately, as a man weeps whose heart is broken, and who has no longer any power left him to struggle against his doom.