"We shall see!" rejoined the young man, coldly. "However, you need feel no concern. I may have some dangerous scheme in view, but it will affect me alone, and imperil only my own life."
"Do you speak of imperilling your life with an idea that this will console your mother?"
"Forgive me. I thought you would not care for my peril, now that you have lost your Leo."
The mother cast down her eyes. "From the hour of Leo's death you have made me feel myself indeed childless," she said.
"I?" ejaculated Waldemar. "Ought I to have insisted upon your sharing my home at Villica? I knew that you sought only to flee from my presence, that the sight of me was a torture you could not endure. Mother," he added, with deep emotion, "when you stood in such terrible agony by my brother's corpse, I did not venture to speak one word of consolation. I shall speak no such word to-day. Your heart has never found room for me; I have always been an alien and an outcast. I come to Radowicz because I could not live without seeing Wanda. I have sought you in this time of sorrow as little as you have sought me, but I shall not bear the blame of the estrangement between us; do not accuse me of deserting you in the bitterest hour of your life."
The mother had listened without interrupting her son, but now she answered, with quivering lips, "If I loved your brother more than I loved you, I have been forced to lose him, and to lose him in the most cruel manner. I sent him forth to battle for his country, and I could have borne his death if it had come at his post, or in the thick of the conflict, but to have him fall ingloriously--" Her voice faltered, she struggled for breath, and several moments passed ere she could go on:--
"I let my Leo go from me without one word of forgiveness, without that last farewell which he implored upon his knees, and that same day he was laid lifeless at my feet. His memory--all that remains to me of him--is linked eternally with that ill-fated deed which brought ruin upon my countrymen. My people's cause is lost, my brother goes forth to meet a destiny worse than death; Wanda is to accompany him, and I shall be left entirely alone. One would suppose, Waldemar, that you had been fully avenged."
The hollow voice and rigid glance of the woman were more touching than the most violent outburst of anguish. Waldemar could not resist their might; he bent over his mother, and said, significantly,--
"Mother, Count Morynski is still in his own country, and Wanda is also here. To-day she unwittingly showed me a way in which I may yet win her. I shall attempt it."
The princess was startled; she gazed anxiously at her son, and read his purpose in his face.