"At most, your life?" repeated the Princess. "And you can say that to reassure your mother!"
"Pardon me, but I think there has been small question with you of a mother's feelings since the day you lost your Leo."
The Princess gazed fixedly on the ground.
"From that hour you have let me feel that I am childless," she said in a low tone.
"I?" exclaimed Waldemar. "Was it for me to put obstacles in the way of your leaving Wilicza. I knew right well that you were hurrying away to escape from me, that the sight of me was intolerable to you. Mother"--he drew nearer her involuntarily, and, harsh and unsparing as were his words, they yet told of a secret rankling pain--"when all your self-control gave way, and you sank down weeping on my brother's corpse, I dared not say one comforting word--I dare not even now. I have always been a stranger, an alien from your heart; I never held a place in it. If, from time to time, I have come over here to Rakowicz, it was because I could not live without seeing Wanda. I have never thought of seeking you, any more than you have sought me in this time of mourning; but truly the blame of our estrangement does not lie at my door. Do not impute it to me as a crime that I left you alone in the bitterest hour of your life."
The Princess had listened in silence, not attempting to interrupt him; but as she answered, her lips moved convulsively, contracted, as it were, by some inward spasm.
"If I have loved your brother more than you, I have lost him--how have I lost him! I could have borne that he should fall, I myself sent him out to fight for his country--but that he should fall in such a way!" Her voice failed her, she struggled for breath, and there was a pause of some seconds before she could continue. "I let my Leo go without a word of pardon, without the last farewell for which he prayed on his knees, and that very day they laid him at my feet shot through the breast. All that is left to me of him--his memory--is indissolubly connected with that fatal act of his which brought destruction on our troops. My people's cause is lost; my brother is going to meet a doom worse by far than death. Wanda will follow him. I stand altogether alone. I think you may be satisfied, Waldemar, with the manner in which Fate has avenged you."
In the utter weariness of her voice, the dull rigidity of her features, there was something far more pathetic than in the wildest outbreak of sorrow. Waldemar himself could but be impressed by it; he bent down over her.
"Mother," said he, meaningly; "the Count is still in his own country, Wanda is still here. She has to-day unconsciously pointed out to me a way in which I may yet hope to win her. I shall take that way."
The Princess started up in alarm. Her look sought his anxiously, enquiringly; she read her answer in his eyes.