"I am no more inclined to sleep than you are," she said; "I would like not to leave you for an instant. And as the thought of the Piccinino still makes me tremble for your life, you shall remain with me until daylight, whatever the consequences. I will lie down on the bed, as you insist upon it; sit in this easy chair, with your hand in mine, and if I haven't the strength to talk to you, I can at all events listen to you; we have so many things to say to each other! I want to know about your life from the first day that you can remember down to this moment."
They passed in this way two hours, which seemed to them like two minutes; Michel told her the whole story of his life, and did not conceal even his recent emotions. The passionate attachment which he had felt for his mother before he knew her no longer raised in his mind any question too delicate to be translated by words befitting the sanctity of their new relations. The words he had used to himself had assumed a new meaning, and whatever impropriety there might have been in them had vanished like the incoherent words one utters in fever, which leave no trace when health and reason have returned.
Moreover, except for a few outbursts of vanity, Michel had had no thoughts for which he need blush now upon searching his conscience. He had believed that she loved him, and therein he was hardly in error! He had been assailed by an ardent passion, and he felt that he loved Agatha, now that she had become his mother, with no less warmth, gratitude, even jealousy, than an hour earlier. He could understand now why he had never seen her without feeling that his heart went out to her with irresistible force, without an all-powerful attraction, a secret thrill of pride which had its echo in himself. He remembered that, when he first saw her, it seemed to him that her face had always been familiar to him; and when he asked her to explain that miracle, she replied: "Look in the mirror, and you will see that my features placed your own image before you; this resemblance, which Pier-Angelo constantly observed with delight, and which filled my heart with pride, made me tremble for you. Luckily nobody has noticed it, unless possibly the cardinal, who ordered his bearers to stop so that he could look at you, on the day that you arrived in the neighborhood, and, as if guided by an invisible hand, paused at the gate of your ancestor's palace. My uncle was formerly the most suspicious and most keen-eyed of persecutors and despots. Certainly, if he had seen you before he was stricken with paralysis, he would have recognized you and have had you cast into prison, then exiled—perhaps assassinated!—without putting a single question to you. Enfeebled as he was ten days ago, he fastened upon you a glance which aroused the suspicions of Abbé Ninfo, and his memory revived so far as to lead him to inquire your age. Who knows what fatal light might have found its way into his brain, if Providence had not inspired you to answer that you were twenty-one years old instead of eighteen!"
"I am eighteen," said Michel, "and you, mother? You seem to me as young as I am."
"I am thirty-two," replied Agatha; "didn't you know?"
"No! if I had been told that you were my sister, I should have believed it when I saw you. Oh! what good fortune that you are still so young and so lovely! You will live as long as I do, won't you? I shall not have the misfortune to lose you! Lose you!—Ah! now that my life is bound to yours, the thought of death frightens me, I would like to die neither before nor after you. But is this the first time that we have ever been together? I am searching the vague memories of my infancy in the hope of finding some trace of you."
"My poor child," said the princess, "I never saw you before the day when, as I looked at you through a window of the gallery where you were sleeping, I could not restrain a cry of love and of agonizing joy, which woke you. Three months ago I did not even know of your existence. I believed that you died on the day you were born. Otherwise, do you suppose that I would not have come to Rome, in some disguise or other, to take you in my arms and rescue you from the dangers of a solitary life? On the day that Pier-Angelo told me that he had rescued you from the hands of a villainous midwife, who was about to put you in a hospital, by order of my parents, that he had fled with you to a foreign country, and had brought you up as his son, I insisted upon starting for Rome. I would have done it too, but for the prudence of Fra Angelo, who pointed out to me that your life would be in danger as long as the cardinal lived, and that it was better to await his death than to expose us all to suspicions and investigations. Ah! my son, how horribly I suffered while I lived alone with the ghastly memories of my youth! Branded from my girlhood, maltreated, secluded and persecuted by my family, because I would not disclose the name of the man whom I had consented to marry as soon as the first symptoms of pregnancy appeared; parted from my child, and cursed for the tears which his alleged death caused me to shed; threatened with the horror of seeing him killed before my eyes, when I yielded to the hope that they had deceived me—the best years of my life passed amid tears of despair and shudders of horror.
"I gave birth to you in this room, Michel on this very spot. It was then a sort of garret, long unused, which had been transformed into a prison, in order to conceal the shame of my condition. Nobody knew what had happened to me! I could hardly have described it, I had hardly understood it, I was so young and my imagination was so pure. I foresaw that the truth would bring fresh disasters upon the child I was carrying within me, and on his father. My governess had died on the day after our catastrophe, without saying a word, whether because she could not or did not choose to. No one could extort my secret from me, even during the pains of childbirth; and when my father and my uncle, standing by my bed, as pitiless as inquisitors, threatened me with death if I did not confess what they called my sin, I replied simply that I was innocent before God, and that it was for Him alone to punish or save the culprit. Whether or not they ever discovered that I was the wife of Castro-Reale, I could never find out; his name was never mentioned to me, I was never questioned concerning him. Nor do I know whether they procured his assassination, or whether Abbé Ninfo assisted them to surprise him; but unfortunately I do not think them incapable of it. I know only this, that at the time of his death, when I had barely recovered from my confinement, they tried to compel me to marry. Hitherto they had held up before me as an everlasting punishment, the impossibility of finding a husband. They took me from my prison, where I had been secluded so carefully that everyone supposed that I was in the convent at Palermo, and nothing had transpired out-of-doors. I was rich, fair, and of noble birth. Twenty suitors came forward. I repelled with horror the idea of deceiving an honest man, or of confessing my misfortune to a man who was mean-spirited enough to accept me because of my wealth. My resistance irritated my father to frenzy. He pretended to take me back to Palermo. But he brought me back to this room at night, and kept me imprisoned here for another whole year.
"It was a ghastly prison, as stifling as the leads of Venice; for the sun beat down upon a thin covering of metal, this part of the palace having never been finished and being roofed over temporarily. I endured thirst, mosquitoes, neglect, solitude, and lack of the fresh air and exercise which are so essential to the young. But I did not die, I contracted no disease, the vital principle was so strong within me. My father, unwilling to entrust the duty of guarding me to any other person, fearing that the compassion of his servants would lessen my sufferings, brought me my food himself; and when his political schemes kept him away from home for days at a time, I underwent the tortures of hunger. But I had acquired a stoical firmness of will, and I did not stoop to complain. I also acquired a certain amount of courage and of faith during that trial, and I do not rebuke God for having inflicted it on me. Consciousness of duty and regard for justice are great blessings for which one cannot pay too high a price!"
Agatha, as she spoke, was half reclining, and her voice, feeble at first, gradually became animated. She raised herself on her elbow, and, shaking her long black hair, and calling her son's attention with a gesture to the luxurious apartment in which they were, she continued: