"Ha! now I see it! Oh, Jesu Maria! Thou art his very image! Mercy, mercy, mercy!" and, with a shriek wrung from a breaking heart, she fell, as if dead, upon the floor.
For a few moments he stood gazing upon her with the cool, decisive smile of a man for whom fate has done her worst, and who defies and laughs to scorn her farther triumphs over his soul. His fixed countenance was more fearful than phrensied agitation or tremendous wrath. It was the dark, still cloud that rests upon the crater ere the volcano bursts into flame. Gradually, as he gazed on that beloved countenance, pale and deathly in its aspect, he sunk on his knees beside her, took her insensible hands within his own, and kissed her unconscious brow, while fast and thick dropped the heavy tears upon her face.
"Mother, for mother thou art, indeed!" said he, feelingly, "I would not have struck this blow to thy heart; but I could not stand before thee a deceiver, an impostor! I could not encounter the affectionate glance of thy pure eyes, meet thy gaze of maternal love, and know they were not mine. Yet thou art my mother! all the mother I have ever known. Have I not drawn life from that breast? Has not my infant head been pillowed from the first on that maternal bosom? Didst thou not hear me when my infant lips first lisped thy maternal name? Hast thou ever known other son than me—I other parent? Thou art my mother! I am thy son, though the blood of strangers, whom I have never known, flows in my plebeian veins! Mother, we must part! The house of Lester may not have a baseborn lord! Would to God I could have turned aside this stroke from thee! But it is past! Henceforward thou art nothing to me—I nothing to thee. Farewell, farewell, my own, my beloved mother!"
He bent over her, and affectionately and passionately embraced her, pressing his lips to hers, and bathing her face with his hot tears. She seemed to be awakened to sudden consciousness by the act; and throwing her arms about him, she faintly articulated, "My son! my son!" and relapsed into insensibility. He clasped her unconscious form in one more long embrace, kissed her for the last time, and gently disengaged himself from her arms.
His movements became now direct and decided. He approached the escritoir, and hastily wrote on a leaf of her missal,
"Lady Lester—nay, mother—dearest MOTHER! I have just taken my last leave of you. I go forth into the world and commit my fortune to its currents. Baseborn—guilty-born—attainted by my father's crimes, I am unworthy your love or a place in your thoughts. Henceforward let me be nothing to thee! Forget that I have ever existed. Though I depart, yet is Lester not without an heir! you not without a son! Thy child thou wilt find with the fisherman Meredith, at Castle Cor. He is the perfect semblance of thy husband, Robert, Lord of Lester, as you have described him to me; and, when your eyes behold him, your heart will at once claim him. He is proud and high-spirited, and worthy of the name he is destined to bear. Seek him out; and may he fill the place in your heart from which I am for ever excluded. Farewell, my mother, for other mother than thee have I never known—will never know!
"Robert,
"Son of Hurtel of the Red-Hand."
He placed the paper open before the crucifix, where she was wont to pray, and was himself unconsciously in the act of kneeling to seek a blessing from Heaven, when he hastily recovered his erect attitude, saying, with a thrilling laugh of reckless hopelessness,
"Never more do I bend the knee to Heaven! What have I to do with prayer?"
He approached the door, and then turned back to gaze an instant with a melancholy look on the prostrate form of Lady Lester:
"Nay, I must not leave thee so!" he said: returning, he tenderly raised her up, and used means to restore her.