The curtains were closely drawn of the after cabin, even to shut out the first whisper of the young sea-breeze which was fluttering in from Port Royal; and there stood that noble officer, with his strong arm thrown around the gallant youth––the picture of abject woe––talking in his kind, feeling accents, trying to console him, painting the sky bright in the distance, and begging him, by all the love and affection he bore him through so many years, to be a man, and trust to his good conscience and his right arm to cleave his way through the clouds and gloom which surrounded him.
“There, Henry, you are calmer now. Sit down here in my stateroom, and while you think of that fond girl, give a thought to that poor bereaved mother, Madame Rosalie, who loves you for the resemblance she thinks you bear to her little boy, who was murdered by pirates just seventeen years ago off this very island.”
“What do you say, Cleveland?” said a voice behind him, with such deep, concentrated energy that the commodore fairly started. “What did you say about a lost child and a Madame Rosalie?”
Paul Darcantel stood there in the softened crimson light, with his sinewy, bony hands upraised, his gaunt breast heaving, with unshorn beard and tangled, grizzly locks, the iron jaw half open, and his dark, terrible eyes gleaming with unearthly fire.
“Speak, Harry Cleveland! For the wife you have lost, speak!”
“My dear, dearest friend, do be calm! Why have you been so long away from me? I wanted you here, but you did not come. 272 Our poor boy has had his first lesson in this world’s grief, and I have felt obliged to tell him all––yes, every thing! That the grave he has so often wept over, under the magnolia, does not contain his mother; and that––”
“Merciful God!” said Paul Darcantel, sinking down on his knees, with his hands clasped together, while the first tears for more than twenty years streamed from his agonized eyes. “There is a Providence in it all! That boy is not my son! I saved him from the pirate’s grasp, and that woman must be his mother!”
Lower and lower the lofty head bent till it touched the deck, the bony hands clasped tight together, and those eyes––ah! those parched eyes––no longer dry!
“Paul, Paul, what is this I hear? For the love of heaven and those angels who are waiting for us, speak again!”
“My father––my more than father, I am not illegitimate, then! No such shame may cause your boy to blush for his mother?”