“Are you a Catholic also, my friend?” Christian asked.
Stenson shook his head in the negative, but without seeming offended by the question. Tears rolled slowly over his pallid cheeks.
“Stenson!” cried Christian, “my mother reposes here. This altar became her tomb!”
“Yes,” said the old man, almost suffocated by his sobs; “here it is that Karine and I buried her, in her white robe, and crowned with a cypress wreath, for it was not the season of flowers. We laid her in a coffin filled with aromatics, and the coffin we placed in this sepulchre, stainless as that of Christ. I sealed it up myself, and afterwards I walled up the room, so that the tomb of the victim should not be profaned. Your enemy never knew why I was so anxious to suppress the door. He thought I was afraid of ghosts. When the minister refused to bury a pagan with religious services, and in sacred ground, he thought I obeyed his orders, and threw the poor body into the bottom of the lake; but whatever Pastor Mickelson may have said, it was the body of a saint. Whatever her worship may have been, the baroness loved God, did good, and respected the faith of others. She is in heaven, and prays for us now, and her soul is happy in beholding her son where he is, and such as he is.”
“Ah!” said Christian, “happiness does not belong, then, to this world, for I should have made her happy, and she is dead.”
He kissed the tomb with respect and fervor, and having reinclosed it behind the curtain and the panel of the wainscot, he went down with Stenson into the bear-room.
“I do not know,” the old man resumed, “how much trouble and delay there may be before your rights are acknowledged; but I hope you will empower me to restore the partition before this chamber. When you are master here, we can carry the tomb to the chapel in the new chateau.”
“Place my mother’s tomb by that of Baron Olaus!” cried Christian. “Oh no, never! Since Sweden refused her a plot of ground to cover her bones, after having refused her air and liberty, I will carry off these precious remains, and deposit them under a more clement sky. Whether rich or poor, I will procure enough to bear this relic with me to the shore of the Italian lake, where sleeps my second mother; she who fulfilled the last prayer of her who gave me birth, and who, although herself most unhappy, had at least a son to close her eyes.”
“Act with calmness and prudence,” replied Stenson, “or your rights will be denied. Some day you will be free to do as you choose; for the present, do not allow even your best friends, even the worthy M. Goefle, to know that your mother was a dissenter. He will argue your cause with more hope and confidence, believing that she was not so; and if you yourself are a dissenter, do not acknowledge it, or you will not be able to triumph over your enemies.”
“Alas!” said Christian, “are riches worth the trouble I must take to acquire them? can they repay me for practising dissimulation and repressing my just indignation, as I am urged and forced to do? I had nothing, Stenson, not even an obole, when I came here three days ago, but my heart was light, my mind was free! I felt no hatred to any human being, no one hated me, and now—”